In episode 12 of (Pop) Cultural Marxism, Ajay and Isi tackle Francis Ford Coppola’s Megalopolis (2024). Kicking off with a review of a few recent pop-cultural engagements—including an assemblage of classic vampire films (Coppola’s Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1992), among them), Mubi’s restoration of The Fall (2006), Elden Ring: Shadow of the Erdtree, and a pair of streaming series about professional wrestling—the conversation turns to Coppola’s reactionary would-be summa about an architect attempting to construct a techno-futuristic utopia on a plot of land in “New Rome,” an alternate-world New York City as played against Roman and early American history. Along the way, Ajay and Isi discuss Neri Oxman’s faux-ecological contributions to the film’s central animating macguffin, the mysterious “megalon;” the film’s antipathy for the marginalized masses; its protagonist as synthesis of Caesar, Robert Moses, Walter Gropius, and The Fountainhead’s Howard Roark; accidentally timely narratives of the “good guy” billionaire pitted against the “bad-guy” billionaire; and the ecofascist inclination to marry the romanticization of nature with authoritarian techno-optimism. Among the topics at hand are Coppola’s disturbing, “secretly autobiographical” efforts to reaffirm himself as auteur, his baffling postmodern pastiche, the classic right-wing themes of patriarchy as a sign of order and non-normative sexual expression as a sign of decline and decadence, the film’s shocking ugliness, and how Megalopolis’s strange incorporation of current events betrays “a baby boomer [having read] a bunch of airport history books.”

In episode 82 of the Podcast for Social Research, Patrick Blanchfield and Ajay Singh Chaudhary take up the dismal U.S. election results, what brought us here, what comes next, and more. With the excellent Nara Roberta Silva and Isi Litke unfortunately both out sick but present in spirit and mind Patrick and Ajay reflect on how themes of depletion, exhaustion, and illness offer a perfect point of departure for processing the general morass of our moment’s florid pathologies and generally grim vibes. Their conversation proceeds by unpacking psychoanalytic theories of libidinal economy in terms of trauma response, repression, and “pathic projection” alongside a materialist interrogation of the structural, political-economic conditions of misery in a crumbling and violently flailing U.S. empire. How did the two campaigns appeal to the anxieties and antipathies of voters by ratifying or disavowing their feelings, and by offering them competing accounts of whom to blame? What is or isn't negotiable for the U.S. imperial project abroad and for social reproduction at home, and how does that relate to what is or isn't sayable, or even thinkable, in domestic US discourse? How should we understand “Trumpism” in relation not just to terminological debates over fascism, but in the context of global political trends? How does Trump’s brand of nativism, theocratic Christianity, and patriarchy mesh with longstanding features of the American project, where does it depart from them, and how does it resonate with other nationalisms abroad? And how do the Biden presidency, the Harris campaign, and initial responses from media and political figures demonstrate the increasing hegemony of such positions among elites? Against a backdrop of genocidal violence, mounting climate crisis, and ever-shrill chauvinism, this episode is the first in a series of confrontations with the starkly bleak conditions of current American politics. 

In this episode of Faculty Spotlight, hosts Mark DeLucas and Lauren K. Wolfe sit down with Jude Webre, cultural historian and practicing musician, to discuss the life and legacy of Dawn Powell, the urbane, acerbic, and woefully undercelebrated “lady wit” of Greenwich Village in its mid-century heyday. Attracted, as many of her generation were, by the allure of bohemia, its promise of liberation and self-realization, Powell exchanged her native midwest environs for an artist’s life in the city. Known, if not unremittingly beloved, by nearly all the literary lights of 1940s New York City—Edmund Wilson, Ernest Hemingway, Diana Trilling, Dorothy Parker, John Dos Passos, e.e. Cummings, and Jean Stafford to name just a few—it is hard to reconcile Powell’s social acumen, bracing wit, and the vitality of her literary output with the obscurity into which her life’s work has fallen in the six decades since her burial in a pauper’s grave. What were the manners, mores, and moods of mid-20th-century American bohemia? And how did Powell both share in and depart from them, both capture and censure them? What is it to follow a moral judgment and an aesthetic conviction, be they ever so slightly out of step with prevailing tastes? And what, finally, accounts for lasting literary fame?  The Podcast for Social Research is produced by Ryan Lentini.

In this shortcast edition of the Podcast for Social Research, recorded live at BISR Central, BISR’s Rebecca Ariel Porte, Isi Litke, and Ajay Singh Chaudhary discuss Baz Luhrmann’s sensational 1996 film adaptation of Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet (or, in this case, Romeo + Juliet). Beginning with a brief literary and theatrical history of the play, Rebecca provides the conversation’s opening gambit: Shakespeare has never not been pop. The trio then, with a keen eye for detail, observes the many ways in which Luhrmann translates Shakespeare’s own pop-cultural tendencies into a medium and a style apropos of Venice Beach at the close of the millennium. Topics touched on include passions that threaten the social order, textual instability as adaptive possibility, intertextuality as production design strategy, teen drama as genre, teen-age as a time of emotional freedom, My So-Called Life, The O.C., Euphoria, spaghetti Westerns, police procedurals, Fredric Jameson on blank parody and endless pastiche, and much else besides.  The Podcast for Social Research is produced by Ryan Lentini.

Episode 81 of the Podcast for Social Research is a discussion Haskell Wexler's 1969 classic of cinéma verité Medium Cool, a film whose exploration of violence, spectacle, and the politics and power of media render it as fresh and powerful today as it was on its controversial release. BISR's Rebecca Ariel Porte, Andy Battle, and Mark DeLucas and journalist Natasha Lennard dissect the film's context, formal innovations, and themes, from its integration of narrative and documentary to its treatment of the ethics of journalism in the face of social and political upheaval, violence, and repression. How did Medium Cool emerge out of the specific context of the "New Hollywood"? What exactly was Wexler, cinematographer and first-time director, trying to do? And how does Medium Cool push us to think about media objectivity, and the substance, value, and intentions of "news"? Is media ever genuinely critical, or is it always a kind of "soft power"? How do we tell stories that don't exploit, but instead explain? 

What does literary realism look like in the 21st century—and what can it do? In episode 80 of the Podcast for Social Research, recorded live at Liz’s Book Bar in Brooklyn, BISR faculty Paige Sweet sat down with fellow faculty and debut novelist Joseph Earl Thomas plus special guests, writers Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah and Vinson Cunningham, to talk about what it means, what it takes, and what it feels like to represent social reality in contemporary fiction. In novels that test the boundaries of realism, traditionally conceived—borrowing techniques from autofiction, speculative fiction, dystopia, satire, and academic non-fiction—Thomas (God Bless You, Otis Spunkmeyer), Adjei-Brenyah (Chain-Gang All-Stars), and Cunningham (Great Expectations) get beneath the detailed depiction of everyday life to discuss, among other things, the world-building that happens in every act of writing; how fiction can serve as a testing ground for theoretical commitments; the carceral nature of our social institutions and their ripple effects through our intimate lives; the violence that goes on under the guise of pleasure; and how to feel and depict life as precious in even the most devastating and dehumanizing conditions. Persons and things touched upon include: the US Constitution, bell hooks, Gayatri Spivak, Ruth Wilson Gilmore, Henry James, Solmaz Sharif, Saidiya Hartman, Goodreads, love, looking, “boundaries,” and beauty.  This episode was produced by Ryan Lentini.

In episode nine of Faculty Spotlight, hosts Lauren K. Wolfe and Mark DeLucas sit down with Jenny Logan, Associate faculty (legal studies) and plaintiff's attorney, at the District Court level, in the case of Johnson v. Grant's Pass, on which the Supreme Court recently ruled. Speaking from London, Jenny discusses the origins of the case—in which a class of unhoused people sued the city of Grants Pass, Oregon, for imposing criminal penalties on people sleeping in public parks—and explains the reasoning behind the Supreme Court's 6-3 ruling upholding the constitutionality of Grants Pass's anti-homeless statutes. What were the stakes of Johnson v. Grant's Pass; and why, as critics argue, does the Court's ruling effectively enable the criminalization of homelessness? Why have cities responded to homelessness with largely punitive measures? And how can the case of Grant's Pass, whose only shelter is a religious mission, be situated within the wider history of the evangelical-neoliberal alliance to undermine the New Deal social contract and welfare state? What is the future of "poverty governance" in the United States? 

In this shortcast edition of the Podcast for Social Research, recorded live at BISR Central, BISR’s Rebecca Ariel Porte and Isi Litke discuss Stephen Frears's 1985 classic of queer cinema, My Beautiful Laundrette. Conversation ranges over the film's Thatcherite backdrop; its depiction of queer, and cross-racial, love; and its inimitable mix of gritty social realism and dreamlike sensuality. What's unique, in the queer cinematic canon, about a film made just before the AIDS crisis emerged in British public consciousness—that is, just prior to the inceasing identification of queerness with disease? How does it weave elements of the fairy tale into its story of cross-class, cross-racial love? And how does the film, with its "qualified utopian hope," contrast with later, more pessimistic classics of the New Queer Cinema? Why, in a film set in a laundromat, is it a source of optimism that some things don't stay clean? 

Practical Criticism is back with its first episode of 2024—on Beyoncé’s Cowboy Carter. In it, Rebecca Ariel Porte plays the opening track of the album, “American Requiem,” for Ajay Singh Chaudhary, who, as usual, doesn’t know what the object will be. Their conversation then commences with a question: Beyoncé is far from the first to undertake the ambitious task of deconstructing country music’s many musical debts—but does she actually succeed in doing so? Along the way, they discuss the history of Black country music (and listen to Linda Martell), the convergence of aesthetic and commodity forms (is the album so slick as to slide over into parody?), conflictual aspirations to iconicity and iconoclasm, and the courage of conviction it takes to betray an older version of one’s own aesthetic commitments.  

In episode 11 of (Pop) Cultural Marxism, Ajay and Isi examine Alex Garland’s Civil War (2024). Kicking off with a handful of pop culture news items—including the Met Gala, the death of Steve Albini, A24’s Stop Making Sense tribute album, and Apple's alarming iPad Pro commercial—the conversation turns to Garland’s provocative and uneven drama about a group of photojournalists traveling through a war-torn United States. Ajay and Isi discuss the perils of directors commenting on their own works, the film’s inadvertent critique of combat photographers, “Portland Maoists,” Garland’s allusions to significant 20th century photojournalists (Robert Capa, Lee Miller, Gerda Taro, the Bang Bang Club), reactionary aesthetics, and the vernacular of American violence. Central to the conversation are perennial questions about the mediation of war through film and photography; the circulation and reception of images of violence; and how to make a film about war that neither glamorizes nor sentimentalizes it.