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Accumulation and Enjoyment on Mulholland Drive

Accumulation and Enjoyment on Mulholland Drive Todd McGowan Hollywood conTra capiTalisM When Hollywood addresses itself explicitly to the critique of capitalism, the results are often baleful. Rather than exploring either the inherent contradictions of the capitalist system or its psychic costs, films tend to provide either mystifying analyses or anodyne solutions. One need look no further than The Company Men (John Wells, 2011) or Larry Crowne (Tom Hanks, 2011), two responses to the 2008 economic crisis, to find lamentable confirmations of this maxim. The Company Men preaches an earlier version of capitalism as the solution to the contemporary crisis and Larry Crowne advocates going to a community college for worker retraining. These liberal remedies to a crisis within capitalism appear less noxious than the austerity measures proposed and enacted by conservative governments around the world, but they in no way present a serious response to the failures of the capitalist mode of production. The spate of documentaries probing the economic collapse confronts these failures more directly. They take up an entirely critical attitude toward the immorality prominent among those arch-capitalists who created the crisis. The most famous of these documentaries is Charles Ferguson's Inside Job (2010). Ferguson shows how many bankers on Wall Street http://www.deepdyve.com/assets/images/DeepDyve-Logo-lg.png The Comparatist University of North Carolina Press

Accumulation and Enjoyment on Mulholland Drive

McGowan, Todd
The Comparatist , Volume 39 (1) – Nov 20, 2015
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Publisher
University of North Carolina Press
Copyright
Copyright © Southern Comparative Literature Association.
ISSN
1559-0887
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Abstract

Todd McGowan Hollywood conTra capiTalisM When Hollywood addresses itself explicitly to the critique of capitalism, the results are often baleful. Rather than exploring either the inherent contradictions of the capitalist system or its psychic costs, films tend to provide either mystifying analyses or anodyne solutions. One need look no further than The Company Men (John Wells, 2011) or Larry Crowne (Tom Hanks, 2011), two responses to the 2008 economic crisis, to find lamentable confirmations of this maxim. The Company Men preaches an earlier version of capitalism as the solution to the contemporary crisis and Larry Crowne advocates going to a community college for worker retraining. These liberal remedies to a crisis within capitalism appear less noxious than the austerity measures proposed and enacted by conservative governments around the world, but they in no way present a serious response to the failures of the capitalist mode of production. The spate of documentaries probing the economic collapse confronts these failures more directly. They take up an entirely critical attitude toward the immorality prominent among those arch-capitalists who created the crisis. The most famous of these documentaries is Charles Ferguson's Inside Job (2010). Ferguson shows how many bankers on Wall Street

Journal

The Comparatist – University of North Carolina Press

Published: Nov 20, 2015

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