Politics in Popular Movies: Rhetorical Takes on Horror, War, Thriller, and Sci-Fi Films by John S. Nelson

Author:John S. Nelson [Nelson, John S.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Political Science, General
ISBN: 9781317253976
Google: o9TOCgAAQBAJ
Goodreads: 27435494
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2014-04-01T00:00:00+00:00

Thrillers and Settings

Republican politics have no monopoly on heroes; but of our six styles of politics, the republicans invest the most in these figures.47 Ideological politics such as liberalism, socialism, and conservatism promote modern, critical rationality so much that they find themselves debunking heroes as much as glorifying them. The same goes for anarchism. Perfectionists prize charisma rather than heroism. The masses will imitate and celebrate almost anyone who moves; and as a result, they get celebrities, not heroes. Republicanism accords honor to most heroes, even when they pursue other politics, like liberalism. (Since liberalism comes from ideologizing modern republicanism, this is nearly inevitable.) More than other sources of popular films, Hollywood relies heavily on thrillers to handle political terrorism. All but five—that is, forty-seven—of the pre-9/11 movie plots with political terrorism are thrillers. These are legal, military, noir, police, political, social, war, and especially spy thrillers. (Fight Club is multiply genred as a political thriller and a satirical noir; it, along with The Sum of All Fears, brings to fifty-two the cases available for classifying by subgenre in our fifty pre-9/11 films on political terrorism.)

Thrillers rely on heroism. They do not merely trace action in some setting; they thrill us with each deed and situation. They pump up the volume, vivify the events, and do this for the protagonists too. The use of thrillers for takes on terrorism is a strong reason to think that republicanism might dominate the overall politics of terrorism films. Duels to the death in plots that pit spy versus spy make this particularly easy to understand. These boil down to one-on-one contests between a terrorist and an antiterrorist. At stake are survival and glory for their causes and countries as well as the individual contestants. The scenes come straight from classical republicanism. It is easy to see how the preponderance of thrillers would favor republican politics in popular movies with acts of political terrorism.

As it happens, this is not fully right or wrong. Of our six styles, republican politics appear most often. Their twenty-eight films are just over half the total, even though ninety percent of our movies are thrillers. Notwithstanding the diffusely republican leanings of thrillers, liberal politics surface almost as strongly in terrorist thrillers. At fourteen of fifty-one plots, in the second column from the right in Table 8.3, more than a fourth of our films on terrorism turn out to be liberal in their politics.

These results make better sense when we take account of the settings that can be conventional for thrillers: military, police, political, and other settings indicated later in third column from the left within Table 8.3. This table enables us to relate thriller subgenres to the modes of terror, the film stances on terrorist grievances, and the sorts of villains in the focal films. Settings are so important to thrillers that they reproduce the genre’s usual components as subgenres. Spy- vs.-spy plots need not involve professional espionage in an international arena, but they typically do turn on iterated

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