MONDAY NIGHT LECTURE SERIES | HOPE AND HOPELESSNESS

Movies and Entertaining Social Change: On Popularizing Strategies, the Hope Industry, and the Uses of Soft Capitalism

DECEMBER 5 @ 6 P.M. | Daniel Family Commons, Usdan University Center

What might we learn from cultural productions (in some cases ideologically mixed cultural productions) that have sought to popularize ways of thinking, seeing, feeling, valuing, and hoping that promote progressive social consciousness and systemic change? My thoughts on this will focus mostly on American movies from the Depression to the present that offer insights into ideological and "entertainment” concerns that progressive popularizing might entertain to "entertain” (win attention). In 2014 Michael Moore exhorted "documentarians” not to conceive of themselves as "documentarians” but as moviemakers whose primary goal is to "entertain” and use "sugar” (he left out "spice”) to make the "medicine” go down. Making critique consumable is intriguing, though I think the insights movies provide into how to popularize can be more expansive, subtle, and tangled than what the tropes of "sugar” and "spice” suggest. Movies that self-critically make popularizing their theme may tell us even more about the uses of hope, coping, laughter, anger, sarcasm, irreverence, gender representations, sex, violence, individualism, and organizing in winning attention and swaying hearts and minds within what I will conceptualize as soft capitalism. In considering this I will draw not only on docu-movies such as Capitalism: A Love Story, Where to Invade Next, and Inequality for All, but also movies such as Sullivan’s Travels, Meet John Doe, Face in the Crowd, Network, Norma Rae, Pennies from Heaven, Do the Right Thing, Bulworth, and No.