Abstract: Hollywood histories have historically presented a binary between the classical studio system and the post-studio era, suggesting that the latter ushered in a period of creative autonomy for its stars, who gained greater control over their career and image. While there is much work that complicates the narrative of control exerted in the classical period, work that offers a similarly complex view of the post-studio era is scant. Using Sylvester Stallone as a case study, this article explores the issues of agency and studio control in the post-studio period. It considers how the narrative of disadvantage and determination that was fabricated by United Artists would go on to become a central part of the star’s biography, contributing to a brand whose foregrounding of ideas of self-reliance and dedication retains cultural and economic value for the studio, who developed the biography, and for Stallone, who has lived and performed it for almost fifty years.
Abstract: Ever since Harvey Weinstein was exposed as a sexual predator in October 2017, Hollywood has attempted to reckon with its history of sexual violence through a series of what have been termed “#MeToo movies.” Yet the films that reflect on the #MeToo movement directly by representing sexual violence in the context of media industries have yet to garner significant box office success. This article addresses the affordances of the horror genre in the wake of the #MeToo movement. I argue that the film Barbarian (2022) allows Hollywood to productively self-reflect on the #MeToo movement removed from literal discourse. The film accomplishes this by reworking three horror genre conventions: the monstrous feminine, the final girl, and the terrible place. Rather than operating as a bait and switch that tricks audiences into seeing a #MeToo movie when they expect a horror film, Barbarian instead provides nuanced ways of exploring complex issues related to sexual violence through an appropriation of familiar patterns.
Abstract: Processes of displacement and gentrification, often framed as projects of urban renewal and preservation, have long shaped the demographics of San Francisco in often drastic and inequitable ways. Once known as the Harlem of the West and today commemorated as the city’s historic Jazz Preservation District, the city’s Fillmore neighborhood has long been saddled with racialized narratives of blight and poverty related to its palimpsestic histories of primarily Japanese and Black communities, even as it continues to hold space for specifically coalitional institutions and services. This article examines two of those bodies, the Saint John Will-I-Am Coltrane African Orthodox Church and the community radio station KPOO, as interconnected mediative nodes in a network of sound, place, and personhood that work together in the generation of aural imaginaries that make possible anti-hegemonic reinterpretations of what it means to belong in San Francisco. Working with sources in human geography, cultural studies, sound studies, and public history, I contextualize and analyze a broadcast of the devotional program Uplift to better understand the existential value of these nonprofit organizations for San Franciscans facing large-scale erasure and their capabilities to generate new geographic possibilities that counter reductive, top-down narratives of local identity.
