'Why make something new with old code?'   

We loved The Matrix Resurrections - so why doesn't everybody? From the spectacular to the simulated; from gender transgression to the Lacanian lack at the heart of hollow contemporary blockbusters, we discuss why, in a culture of endless fan-service, The Matrix Resurrections is doing far more than having its cake and eating it. Let's see how deep the rabbit-hole goes...

"Just try to make it sound like you wrote it that way on purpose."

Wes Anderson: once the critical darling of the early twenty-first century, now slightly uncool to admit you still like. In the context of post-Trump America, the liberal penchant for gestural politics has led to Anderson's popular fall from grace; he is often accused of representing 'style over substance'. Does this accusation hold up? Does it matter if it does; might there be a place for the politics of the purely stylish? And how might these questions be answered differently with a look to the affective resonances of different films across Anderson's career?  From the paen to the mid-twentieth century novel represented by The Royal Tenenbaums (2001) to the unashamed essayism of The French Dispatch (2021), we take a trip to the playground of the twentieth century.

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"...maybe you're not supposed to be Spider-Man climbing those walls? That's why you keep falling."

The Marvel Cinematic Universe: a black hole exerting its inexorable, monolithic pull on culture, stifling creative flourishing and making cinema a marketable gallery of twee, collectible action-figures. But it didn’t have to be this way! It’s become cinephile’s dogma that Sam Raimi’s original Marvel Spider-Man films (2002, 2004, 2007) were the vulgar auteur’s answer to what mainstream superhero movies might have been: fun, tight, and with a lot of heart. Their unapologetic relishing of melodrama, and thematic development through action, forms an obvious contrast with the smug quippery and bland action sequences of, for example, Spider-Man Homecoming (2017). Peter Parker’s story is compelling because it illustrates a double-bind: if capitalism is inherently schizophrenic (as Deleuze and Guattari would argue), Spider-Man’s New York is populated with heroes and villains splintering under the pressure of the market. Doubles and alter-egos are a theme inherent to the superhero genre, and no-where are they more fully explored than in the thorny irreconcilabilities of this trilogy. Join us for an aerial thrill ride like no other!

(this was originally released in July 2021 but I accidentally deleted it so it has been re-uploaded)

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'This'll be the kind of thing to infect a generation! It'll be a Woodstock for the 80s!'   / 'If you want the ultimate, you've got to be willing to pay the ultimate price. It's not tragic to die doing what you love.'

What have a classic high school satire and a camp action film got in common? Sex and death, of course! We explore late 80s /early 90s ennui as the breeding ground of films that both examine and encapsulate postmodernist depthlessness, chasing the only high left at the end of history: the end of life. In Heathers, would-be school-shooters seek stimulation in callous suburbia, while Point Break positions the endless chasing of the next wave as a hedonistic alternative to the dull bureaucracy of a hollowed-out state. But thrill-seeking is a pastime with an expiration date...

Claustrophobic, paranoia and confrontations with mortality: the mental and material barriers on the enclosed settings of Luis Buñuel's The Exterminating Angel (1962) and M. Night Shyamalan's Old (2021) make them the ultimate lockdown movies. But what else might this surrealist classic and tonally weird mainstream horror have in common? How do their performances of intimate, domestic space map onto our own age of digital surveillance? And what have the rich learned (or not learnt) in their period of insular isolation?

'As if!'

Jane Austen once described the scope of her work as 'the little bit (two inches wide) of ivory, on which I work with so fine a brush', an ambiguous writerly modesty that has contributed to her critical and popular characterisation as an elegant, apolitical author, unconcerned with the world beyond her finely-drawn drawing room satires. But Austen is a writer of prickly discomfort, her humour governed by the material rigours of regency society. Adaptations that fail to understand that Austen is 'way harsh' (in the words of Cher from Clueless, a latter-day Emma) will flop; those that grasp her brittle subtlety will flourish. We're taking you from Ang Lee's Sense and Sensibility (1995) to Joe Wright's Pride and Prejudice (2005) to Autumn de Wilde's Emma (2020); from Amy Heckerling's Clueless (1995) to Whit Stillman's Love and Friendship (2016). How do these films deal with the complex currencies of Austen's world? And how might Austen herself be used as a currency?

'But it's impossible to fight just for an ideal. An ideal that just keeps changing. You know what I mean?'

Claire Denis's Beau Travail and Mark Jenkin's Bait are films which use the ocean as a central motif. Since Homer's Odyssey, the sea has represented both metaphysical freedom as well as harsh material constraint. Both are about people who are at odds with their times: their work is the sea and the sea is their life and they cannot reach it. We ask how work and the sea are linked in these films, and what they can reveal to us about human desire and self-worth. We compare the regimented lives of modern disenfranchised Cornish fishermen to those of the colonial French navy, and analyse how Denis and Jenkin film the sea in relation to them. We also relate these films to the relationship through history between work and the sea, a relationship which goes on obscured to this day...

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'It's only a dream!'

A Nightmare on Elm Street, and its iconic villain Freddy Kruger, has been a cultural staple since Wes Craven's original film in 1984. Since then, there have been six more films in the decade-long series, all the way up to the postmodern malaise of 1994. From the Freudian modernism of the 80s films, through the carbon-copy unoriginality in the middle of the series, up to the postmodern reflexivity of the last two films, the films trace a familiar pattern, and one which charts wider cultural shifts around this time. We ask how the first two films defy gender expectations and subvert already familiar slasher tropes. We delve into how these films represent dreams, and how far they can be understood as relating to Freud's Interpretation of Dreams. Is Freddy a phantom of the death drive, or a paradoxical creature of wish fulfilment? Finally, we analyse the nineties films' self-awareness, and what this means for our own dreams, desires and, indeed, nightmares.

'You're filming something. That's kind of the purpose, right?' 

From the dizzy heights of Borat (2006) and Jackass (2002), to the pandemic-inflected How to With John Wilson (2020), Bad Trip (2020) and slightly disappointing Borat 2 (2020), the twenty-first-century can't get enough of comedy that blends reality and the scripted. Perhaps the most successful of these productions is Nathan For You (2013-17), the show where Nathan Fielder uses his 'knowledge to help struggling small business owners make it in this competitive world', blending cringe-comedy and reality TV to create a light-hearted but prickly satire on American business and media culture. But with its final episode, 'Finding Frances' (2017), Nathan For You pulls us into a newly touching realm, where the line between construction and reality is thinner than ever. How does our fixation with the authentic reflect on our culture of constant performance, where social media makes us all into hidden-camera comedians? Is a 'New Sincerity' possible, in film as in literature, as the culmination of artifice? And if something moves us, perhaps even moves us to change our world, does its authenticity matter?

'They're after the place. They don't know why, they just remember. Remember that they want to be in here. They're us, that's all, when there's no more room in hell.'

What happens when our desires become zombies of themselves? In George Romero's Dawn of the Dead, the libidinal urge to consume and accrue play out in a radically altered landscape, in which capitalist modes of meaning-making have lost their value. We discuss how Romero subverts the traditional fantasy of the zombie film, of the apocalypse as a libertarian playground for a few individual survivors, by transforming consumers into the consumed. We imagine how the survivor of a zombie apocalypse, under siege in a mall, reflects the middle-class experience of lockdown listlessness, where individuals entrapped but surrounded by material comforts access the outside world exclusively through an increasingly surreal media. And finally, we consider how a more considered remake than Zach Snyder's 2004 film might have used a virtual landscape, rather than a physical one, as the playground of the posthumous desires of the twenty-first century...