Notes
COM 534
Featuring Capitalism: A Rhetorical History of American Capitalism in Film
My background and relevant teaching and scholarship
My research focuses largely on the relationship between culture and capitalism, in particular the politics of consumerism. In my first book, OurSpace: Resisting the Corporate Control of Culture, I examined how social movements such as “culture jamming” and copyright infringement seek to undermine the rhetoric of multi-national corporations. Central to the analysis was my assessment of distinct rhetorical practices with an eye toward the ways they limit or enable democratic access to the tools of cultural content production. Whereas my first book focused on brand marketing and content production, my forthcoming book Things Worth Keeping: The Value of Attachment in a Disposable World, looks at our relationship with consumer objects themselves. In it, I explore practices that exacerbate or slow down consumer waste. The central question of this book is how can we manage the material excesses of consumer capitalism, with all of its attendant environmental waste, by building on, rather than repudiating, our desire and attraction to objects? Articles I have published extend these central themes, including studies of Personal Branding, Michael Moore’s documentary critiques of capitalism, Target’s version of “design democracy,” and the ways marketing and consumer values influence parenting.
I’ve taken the opportunity to explore these issues with my students over the years, in undergraduate classes and graduate seminars on topics such as the history and rhetoric of consumer culture, critical theories of capitalism and the commodity form, and popular culture as product.
Description of seminar (a work in progress!)
I am designing a graduate seminar that will explore the ways in which capitalism, a dominant rhetorical discourse in the U.S., has been both perpetuated and challenged throughout the history of Hollywood film. Each week, we will focus on one decade in recent American history. Our explorations will be two-fold. First, we will screen a film that illuminates a central political-economic debate of its time, reading historical context as well as academic and critical reviews of the film. Second, we will pair each film with a relevant critical theory that animated its cultural milieu. For example, we will analyze Charlie Chaplin’s 1936 film Modern Times by pairing it with readings from Karl Marx about the changes in human labor and social conditions under industrialization and factory production. My goal for coupling the films with (somewhat) contemporaneous critical theories of capitalism is to position both film and theory as rhetorical artifacts, or cultural symptoms that can tell us something about a particular moment in the evolution of American capitalism, allowing us to investigate the often-uneasy relationships between rhetoric, representation, democracy, community, consumerism, and labor.
Student Projects
I’m very open to your ideas on these. To be honest, I have historically been pretty traditional in my approach to graduate student work—shorter assignments that build toward a final article-length paper. I’d like to get more creative here, with an eye toward both public consumption and building some useful tools for teachers.
Film series participation: Rather than writing a traditional academic paper, students will each take responsibility for researching and introducing one film to a public audience, embedding it in its historical context and exploring its rhetorical and political significance through a particular critical lens. My plan is for my students to host a “Featuring Capitalism” film series either on campus or at a public venue in the University District. MOHAI is another possible venue. Each student would then serve an “emcee” for the screening, offering a short presentation of their analysis aimed at a general audience as well as hosting a post-screening discussion session.
Curriculum creation (high school-level?): So that these materials will continue to benefit the larger public after the series, I also plan to lead my students in creating a freely available curriculum website where our presentations, discussion questions, learning objectives, and film clips can serve as a teaching resource for other teachers and professors to use in their own courses.
Short critical video:
I could imagine some students would enjoy trying their hand at making a short film that itself analyzes a film or film genre vis-à-vis capitalism. These kinds of videos abound online and can make for great content for teachers exploring a particular topic. I wouldn’t expect all students would want to do this, but it would be great to have some of these as part of our online curriculum. Perhaps students could work together, playing to their own strengths and interests to build curriculum: One team could conduct the historical research and analysis, while others produce videos. I certainly don’t think we could create 10 videos in 10 weeks, but perhaps if we created a couple as models, we could invite future students (the high school students themselves, perhaps) to contribute their own.
Learning Objectives
My hope is that this seminar will offer a venue for graduate students to showcase the explicatory power of a rhetorical, interpretive perspective for an audience outside academia. They will take a popular culture artifact—a Hollywood film—and invite audiences to see it in a new way, challenging them to consider films not only as entertainment or art (although they are certainly both), but also as rhetorical artifacts that can help us to understand better the specific historical and contemporary social dynamics from which they emerge. Further, by subjecting Capitalism itself to rhetorical analysis, by treating it as a shifting and evolving discourse that is shaped, in part, by how it is represented in culture, students (and their audiences) will be engaging in a conversation that approaches Capitalism as a dynamic text, rather than a fait accompli. In my opinion, this is what the best of textual criticism does already. But too often its insights, however profound or useful, are limited to the pages of academic journals. This proposed course, film series, public curriculum and discussion website, (and possible edited collection?) provide another venue for scholars in the humanities to demonstrate the important contributions that can be made by this kind of work.
Questions for the Group
Does a linear, historical trajectory make the most sense for my goals for this seminar? I think a case could be made for organizing it thematically, but I lean toward a historical structure because I aim to tell the story of modern capitalism’s evolution through the lens of Hollywood film.
For the purpose of keeping things somewhat focused, I purposely limited the scope to American film. I recognize the limitations this creates in terms of the story we can tell about capitalism. But, given my own expertise, “going global” would be much more of a stretch and I fear losing focus. I welcome your feedback on this, though, and am very open to thinking about it differently. Also, by limiting it to feature films, I preclude all the amazing television that has had much to say about capitalism, labor, consumerism, etc. Not to mention music, graphic novels, literature, etc. I’ve made certain choices to keep it manageable, but I’m open to thoughts on this piece as well.
Slavery. My initial thought was to begin this course with Marx and Chaplin and their critique of industrialization and to end with Sorry to bother you and (maybe) Cloud Atlas, (using my colleague LeiLani Nishime’s work on the way sci-fi films imagine Asian women’s labor), as vehicles to explore the ways the unjust exploitation of both African American and Asian labor is still a central engine to the growth and expansion of Capitalism. Given this trajectory, though, I think also beginning with slavery, and its obvious role in the foundation of American wealth, is important. However, I’m struggling to think of a film that showcases this that isn’t a contemporary film looking back on the terrors of slavery. There are many of those, of course, but they do so through a lens of today and wouldn’t quite do the work I hope in terms of serving as text of their time. Obviously, we don’t have films from the time of slavery, but we do have the original Birth of a Nation (D.W. Griffith, 1915). As you likely know, the film is celebrated as groundbreaking in terms of its sophisticated filmmaking, but its racial politics are repugnant, to say the least. I’m reluctant to use that film not because of its politics (as a rhetorical artifact, it would give us a lot to say about early 20th century racism) but because it doesn’t foreground economics and labor as explicitly as the other films I’m considering. It’s been years since I’ve seen it, so perhaps I’m mistaken about that. Anyway, I’m hoping for suggestions for how to situate the emergence of industrialization as deeply rooted in slavery (as well as the theft of indigenous lands), while still focusing on Hollywood film as the central body of artifacts. I hope this makes sense. I’d love any thoughts, ideas, or suggestions you have on this score.
Syllabus, weekly agenda
Note: The Films and Readings are not at all set in stone. This will be my central work for the year on this: choosing films and pairing them with relevant theories. But the following should give you a rough sketch of what I’m thinking. Recommendations are most welcome!!
A second note: I am not a film scholar, though I have written about film from a rhetorical perspective and teach courses that include analyses of films. I have not chosen films based on their quality (they are not necessarily auteur films, nor do they necessarily meet some artistic standard). Instead, I am choosing films that I see as symptoms that can help us diagnose a particular historical/cultural moment in modern U.S. history. Some explicitly critique capitalism, some perpetuate it, others merely demonstrate or exemplify the mode of capitalism from which they emerge.
Week One: The factory and the mechanization of labor
FILM: Charlie Chaplin, Modern Times (1936)
THEORY: Karl Marx, Capital Volume I: the Process and Production of Capital, excerpts
Week Two: Values and Value: Currency, Power, Community
FILM: Frank Capra, It’s a Wonderful Life (1946)
THEORY: I.I. Rubin, Essays on Marx’s Theory of Value
Week Three: Fear of the Masses
FILM: Robert Wise, The Day the Earth Stood Still (1951) OR Don Siegel, Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956)
THEORY: Susan Buck-Morss, Dreamworld and Catastrophe: The Passing of Mass Utopia in East and West
Week Four: Society of the Spectacle
FILM: UNDECIDED—the 60s. Obviously the 60s featured a lot of cold war themed films, but I intend to cover that explicitly in week 3. Here, I’m thinking a late 60s counter-culture film that at least implicitly critiques the emerging consumer culture would be good here. Most likely Easy Rider, or Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange.
THEORY: Guy Debord, Society of the Spectacle
Week Five: A Woman’s Labor: Workers’ rights and class consciousness
FILM: Martin Ritt, Norma Rae (1979)
THEORY: Most likely Jean Baudrillard, The Mirror of Production (there’s a lot of labor theory from the 70s I could pull from)
Week Six: Trump Era 1.0: American Excess in an Age of Globalization
FILM: Most likely Oliver Stone’s Wall Street (1987)
Other films under consideration: 9 to 5, Working Girl, Gung Ho
THEORY: Doug Henwood, Wall Street: How it Works and for Whom
Week Seven: Gen X comes of age: Postmodernism and the Critique of Consumer Culture
FILM: Danny Boyle’s Trainspotting (1996) OR David Fincher’s Fight Club (1999) (or Office Space?)
THEORY: Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism
Week Eight: (Early 2000s) The Boom: Wall Street reasserts itself
FILM: Under consideration: In Good Company, Boiler Room (compare to Wall Street)
Pursuit of Happyness
Thought: Perhaps addressing Silicon Valley, tech culture would be better, here.
Week Nine: (post-2008) The Bust: Wall Street apologizes
FILM: Under consideration: The Big Short, Scorsese’s, Wolf of Wall Street
Week Ten: Race and a Globalized Workforce
FILM: Boots Riley, Sorry to Bother You (2018)
THEORY: Under consideration: Racial Capitalism
Week Eleven: Future forward?: Race, Gender, and (d)evolution of technology
-I know there’s not a week 11! So, I may merge weeks 8 and 9
FILM: Cloud Atlas OR ex Machina
THEORY: LeiLani Nishime, “Whitewashing Yellow Futures in Ex Machina, Cloud Atlas, and Advantageous: Gender, Labor, and Technology in Sci-fi Film,” among others