Our series on the rapidly evolving politics of COVID-19 continues this week, with Justin Rogers-Cooper warning that the logic of finance capital may force a premature “re-opening” on the American public in the summer of 2020. In this conversation we talk about recent armed anti-lockdown protests, the movie Parasite as a window into the cultural zeitgeist around class inequality, and the potential for social violence as America plunges into an unprecedented depression.  

Arash Azizi is a writer and scholar currently completing a Ph.D. in History and Middle Eastern Studies at NYU; his work focuses on the left in Iran and in the wider Islamic world. In this conversation, making frequent reference to cinema and pop culture, he discusses the global dimensions of anti-capitalist and anti-imperialist movements, tracing a narrative from the Cold War to the 21st century.

Drew Morton is an Assistant Professor of Mass Communication at Texas A&M University-Texarkana. He is the co-editor and co-founder of [in]Transition: Journal of Videographic Film and Moving Image Studies, the first peer-reviewed academic journal focused on the visual essay, drawn from a wide range of scholars (including Drew himself). In this conversation he describes his education in film, both as a casual viewer and fan and later as a graduate student in Cinema and Media Studies at UCLA, as we explore how the central questions, ideas, and methodologies of the discipline are evolving in a hyper-accelerated media landscape. 

Yasmin Nair returns to the Trap for a deep dive into the film Rise of the Planet of the Apes (2011), a conversation that helps us frame ideas about prison abolition, animal rights, environmentalism, pandemics, and the tactical elements of a grassroots revolution. 

As we continue our series on the politics of COVID-19, Justin Rogers-Cooper takes aim at the absurd ideology of “sacrifice,” as we explore how American sentimental mythology allows us to justify capitalism’s indifference to deaths of its "essential" workers.