This article analyses the Jurassic Park and Jurassic World franchises through Erich Fromm’s Escape from Freedom , arguing that the films dramatize a recurring dialectic in which technological freedom generates new forms of domination. Fromm contends that freedom, when experienced as anxiety and insecurity, produces a desire for submission to authority. Reading the two trilogies as distinct cultural formations, the article shows how this dynamic shifts from late-twentieth-century techno-scientific optimism to post-financial crisis anxieties about corporate power and technocratic governance. It argues that the franchise organizes this dialectic through three interrelated mechanisms: commodification, engineered autonomy and structured domination. Dinosaurs are transformed from ecological beings into market assets, then granted limited agency so that responsibility, violence and control can be displaced onto them. Drawing on political theory, critical theory and animal studies, the article situates Fromm’s framework as historically and culturally specific, demonstrating how popular cinema offers crucial insight into contemporary ideologies of freedom, authority and power.
Indigenous women’s filmmaking in Aotearoa is shaped by screen policy frameworks that continue to reflect settler-colonial assumptions about value, authorship and creative legitimacy. Although the New Zealand Film Commission (NZFC) now offers a commitment to equity through strategies such as Te Rautaki Māori (2018–present), these initiatives frequently operate at a level of symbolic inclusion rather than structural change. Wāhine Māori remain responsible for navigating institutional hierarchies while upholding cultural obligations to community, producing conditions in which participation is permitted but sovereignty is constrained. Waru (2017), the first wāhine Māori written and directed feature fiction film since Mauri (1988), offers a critical intervention into these dynamics. Drawing on mana wāhine scholarship and Indigenous feminist praxis, the analysis examines how Waru ’s collaborative production model of eight single-take segments directed by different Māori women mobilizes relational accountability, collective authorship and care-based leadership. This approach resists market-driven, individualized production norms embedded within the NZFC’s institutional logic and foregrounds storytelling as a culturally located, community-held responsibility. Close analysis of the film’s structure and aesthetics helps to reveal the gap between policy rhetoric and lived creative realities, particularly the ongoing cultural load felt by wāhine Māori. Positioning Waru within wider discussions of popular culture, visual sovereignty and everyday Indigenous resistance, the article argues that Indigenous women are reshaping national cinema through practices that privilege tino rangatiratanga , cultural protocol and community accountability. The findings suggest that meaningful transformation in screen policy requires a redistribution of decision-making power and recognition of Indigenous feminist methodologies as central to the future of Aotearoa’s screen industries.
This article explores how Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (1865) and Tim Burton’s Alice in Wonderland (2010) reinterpret madness, trauma and imagination as evolving forms of cultural resistance. It argues that Carroll’s Victorian text anticipates the medicalization of the mind that culminated in the diagnosis of hysteria, transforming the era’s anxieties over moral control and female imagination into acts of creative defiance. Through an examination of nineteenth-century psychological discourse including the works of Bain, Spencer and Sully, this study situates Alice within the intellectual climate that sought to regulate emotion and imagination. It then traces how these discourses re-emerge in Burton’s adaptation, where madness is reframed through a post-traumatic lens. Burton’s Alice returns to Wonderland not as a dreamer but as a survivor, confronting grief, repression and patriarchal expectation through a symbolic psychodrama of integration. By combining feminist theory, trauma studies and adaptation theory, this article argues that both Carroll and Burton construct madness as a language of protest that transforms pathology into empowerment. In doing so, Alice in Wonderland becomes a cultural continuum that charts the shifting boundaries between imagination and insanity, resistance and recovery, from the nineteenth century to the present.
Murdoch Mysteries provides audiences with a spectatorial opportunity to experience crime, corpses and forensic science within a historical setting. Murdoch Mysteries originally began as a book series written by Maureen Jennings spanning 1997–2017. In 2004 the first three books debuted as television movies, and their immediate popularity resulted in the production of a serialized television show in 2008 and is now in its nineteenth season in 2026. While both the books and television forays offer insight into early policing practices, social structures and concepts of deviance, morality and crime, the television series adapts a ‘modern’ approach to hook viewers. For example, Murdoch Mysteries draws on the two ‘stars’ of popular culture – corpses and forensic science – as well as a wide-range of intertextual references to immerse viewers into a fictional historical criminal justice setting. Unlike other crime dramas, Murdoch Mysteries asks audiences to reflect on the power imbalances embedded within the legal, social and political structures present in the late nineteenth, and early twentieth centuries British colonial society and encourages viewers to reflect on whether these imbalances are still evident. This paper explores the Murdoch Mysteries universe to critically explore how crime, criminals, deviance and law enforcement are being portrayed, and thus potentially impacting people’s understandings of these terms.
This article examines food culture in gaming fandoms through the latest two instalments of The Legend of Zelda video game series and its fans and players. Specifically, it explores how food has been integrated into the games, how Zelda players engage with the various food-related features, and how these mediate their gaming, everyday life and fandom experiences. Additionally, the commercialization of Zelda foods is examined to showcase the potential that video game foods have for generating increased revenue and exposure for businesses. Relying on conceptual frameworks of resonance theory, affordances, immersion, projective character, participatory culture and the food meaning diagram (FMD) and drawing on participant observation on social media platforms (Reddit, Instagram, X, Facebook, YouTube), media interviews with game developers and in-depth exploration of the game and its content, I demonstrate how video game foods support players’ passions for gaming, creativity, cultural exchange, self-expression and cooking. Exploring fan experiences both in-game and on social media I describe how they are shaped by the prominent presence of food in the latest Zelda games. The key findings reveal a new and complex kind of a relationship emerging between players and the Zelda franchise grounded in the in-game food cultures and implementation of immersive food-related features.
