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The signature Scottish film Trainspotting (1996) and its continuation T2: Trainspotting (2017) vibrate with symptoms of the United Kingdom's post-1970s neoliberal economic program. Trainspotting channels neoliberal Thatcherite subjectivity in the relative eclipse of class consciousness and the ensemble of characters' concerns with (licit and illicit) consumption—albeit, with contradictory elements that implicate the film's highly stylized evocation of poverty and marginality. Twenty years later, in T2: Trainspotting, Edinburgh is constructed as transformed by neoliberalism's convulsions that also drive intensified globalization, manifested by the Bulgarian immigrant (quasi- femme fatale Veronika) and the film's tourism motif. T2 presents the ravages of the neoliberal regime on the ensemble of now middle-aged men (but not "phallically sufficient") men while also cross-examining the dead-end of Brexit populism. In its closing, T2 retreats from critique into traditionalism in answer to what troubles the U.K., 40 years after the launch of neoliberalism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This investigation draws on tropes of movement derived from Bauman to analyze recent “road movies” from prolific British director Michael Winterbottom, whose work is often characterized as confrontational toward the political and cinematic status quo. In addressing movement, the analysis also addresses the films’ contrasting postures toward globalization, where salient. Following a quick case study of Everyday (2012) that calls upon tropes of the tourist, traveler, and vagabond, In This World (2002) is interpreted as a quasi-fictional portrait of marginalized vagabonds that reveals the hard edges of an exclusionary global regime—as well as contradictions within that regime. By contrast, Genova (2008) is structured around privileged subjects’ extended travel experience as they partake of globalization’s benign opportunities for therapeutic discovery. Finally The Trip (2010) and The Trip to Italy (2014) stage tourism in largely affirmative, consumerist terms that reproduce male and class privilege, in a retreat toward conventionality in the filmmaker’s work. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines director Michael Winterbottom's film Code 46 within a tradition of social-political interpretation of film. Code 46 fits uneasily within the science-fiction genre as it is set in a near future of global integration and environmental catastrophe. The ferociously classist social order is governed by a panoptic corporation, The Sphinx, that also regulates gene-environment interactions. The author argues that Winterbottom's film engages with a cross-examination of the widely circulating "Narrative of Progress" as it intersects with globalization. In particular, the narrative and mise-en-scène presents some of the enabling and -- with greater emphasis the dystopic features implicit within liberalism that are channeled through capitalism with its concomitant class striation. Code 46 also engages with the Oedipal narrative that informs the critical gaze that film directs at the future/present and its implications for gender and the internalization of bureaucratic authority. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the first three films directed by Paul Thomas Anderson. One of the rising auteurs in the U.S. film industry, Anderson's films have generated passionate and mostly favorable responses from audiences and critics. In their narratives and visual style, Anderson's films are striking for their sympathetic portrayals of marginal figures and their audacious use of the film medium to tell stories. In examining the ideology that is inscribed within the three films, I will argue that they strain against the core ideologies of the market and patriarchal family. Although the strain is considerable, the films affirm the ideology of the patriarchal family in part by transposing it to the surrogate family. Similarly, the films present relations of dominance and submission within market relations; nonetheless, slippage occurs and market relations are recuperated as the optimal steering mechanism for society. In this manner, Anderson's films demonstrate how far a liberal critique may extend before closing ideological ruptures that it has opened. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Examines several articles in `The New York Times' newspaper from January 1 through November 18, 1993 that concern the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA). Description of the campaign to legitimize NAFTA; Discussion on the paper's treatment of the opposition; Implications of the NAFTA discourse for journalism and democracy.

Presents several approaches in analyzing the 1986 independent film of Alex Cox entitled `Sid & Nancy.' Tension between illusion and allusion featured in the aestheticized interpretation of the title figures of the film; Criticism of the punk era and the representations of Cox; Class-oriented politics of punks.