Journal of Communication Inquiry

Popular films continue to replace history courses as the source of truth with regard to important events or eras. 300, in its interpretation of the Battle of Thermopylae, based on the graphic novel by Frank Miller, is an example of this trend. Rather than adhering to the presented historical facts of the event, 300 offers a hyperreal interpretation of the battle and the societies that surrounded it, infusing contemporary hegemonic ideologies regarding sexuality, classism, and race into a mediated discourse that presents the spectacle of the film as reality. This essay examines the narratives that are presented within the film, paying particular attention to how each narrative moves away from historical documentation and toward a hyperreality that glorifies violence, misogyny, and domination. How these narratives can potentially become the historical reality that individuals internalize is of particular concern here.

This article explores the politics of global connectivity in Alex Rivera’s film Sleep Dealer (2008), focusing on this science fic\tion film’s critical engagement with the problems and possibilities of connectivity in digital capitalism. Through its depiction of an imaginable, near-future world governed by digital connectivity, the film reflects back on contemporary global connectivity as a terrain of proliferating antagonisms. In so doing, Sleep Dealer dispatches celebratory technological fetishism and totalizing technological pessimism alike by evoking the political possibilities offered by emergent transnational networks of social cooperation amid an increasingly clenched and contested infrastructure of digital connectivity.

The present study primarily intends to document how textbooks and reference textbooks on film studies written by Western and diaspora authors either belittled Indian cinema as masala genre or glorified the moniker Bollywood as a signifier of pan-Indianness, overlooking the significant contributions of the Telugu film industry, which is the twin brother of the Hindi film industry both in genesis and growth (since 1931) and even today runs neck to neck with Hindi cinema in the production of films and film remakes. The study argues that Indian cinema has never been examined at the modernist (foundation) level of its structural perspectives comprising innovations of production, cultural flows in the delineation of regional variations, and fine arts including aesthetics consisting of six arts and genres that are native, distinct, and unique. Drawing its support from de-Westernizing media studies, the article posits that lack of familiarity with the Indian cultural and linguistic traditions, together with its complex structure and semiotics rooted in religious classics, which are portrayed more effectively in Telugu cinema than in Hindi cinema, is the reason for the failure of Western academia to negotiate the complex meaning processes of these filmic communications.

This study uses discourse analysis to examine the arc of cable news media coverage of the so-called “Ground Zero Mosque”, a proposed Islamic community center in lower Manhattan that sparked widespread controversy. This article analyzes both the nature and duration of mainstream cable news coverage of the controversy and the major arguments put forth by those both supporting and opposing the center in the politically charged post-September 11 media environment. Google Trends data were employed to examine the duration of the controversy both in terms of broader media coverage and search volume for the term “Ground Zero Mosque” online. This study found several consistent trends in terms of the sources present in cable coverage opposing the center, as well as a very narrow set of talking points that underline the presence of what other researchers have identified as an Islamophobic network of individuals and organizations present in American mass media discourse.

This article considers the ways in which lifestyle media during the 1980s expressed a longing for a particular form of social life that was passing as neoliberalism presented increasingly consumer-oriented and individualistic modes of life. It frames Martha Stewart’s lifestyle books, and other lifestyle television programs in the 1980s, as predecessors of the logic of the makeover and reality programming discussed by current media scholars. In particular, Stewart’s first two books, Entertaining (1982) and Quick Cook (1983), substituted displays of laborious domesticity and material abundance for lived social relations. The article, therefore, anchors contemporary discussions of lifestyle television and neoliberalism with a historical investigation of how neoliberalism was articulated to lifestyle and came to dominate media texts, and relatedly social life, in the 1980s.