Class Dreaming
Paper by Thomas Borias.
United States, 2024; in a country supposedly founded on principles of equality and freedom, the richest 1% of households hold 30.9% of the country’s wealth, while the poorest 50% hold only 2.5%. Beyond this mathematical incoherence, it demonstrates that the United States is a country deeply rooted in a class hierarchy, where the rich occupy the top, and have access to privileges, while the poor struggle to survive with the resources left by the wealthy. Throughout history, cinema has explored this problem, and films critiquing classism are frequent. James Cameron’s Titanic (Cameron 1997), one of the highest-grossing films of all time, discusses class struggles in 1900s America. Parasite (Bong 2019), a Korean film directed by Bong Joon-Ho, which became the first non-English-language film to win the Academy Awards for best picture, focuses on class division in modern South Korea. Finally, The Hunger Games (Ross 2012), set in dystopian America, opens the debate on the future of class oppression. Thus, through the study of three films set in three different eras – Titanic (the past), Parasite (the present), and The Hunger Games (the future) – this paper
Deviant sexuality or masculinity in crisis – again?
Paper by Larry Gleeson.
I have chosen the three films, Boogie Nights (1997), The Handmaiden (2016), and Boys Don’t Cry (1999), to compare and contrast their representations of sexuality. I intend to reveal these three films’ depictions (socially, politically, psychologically) of heterosexism and homophobia and show how the films accept, critique, celebrate, and/or blindly accept heterosexist values in juxtaposition to how the films illustrate the problematics of sexuality and sexual ‘identity,’ Boogie Nights, set in the rawness of the 1970’s is about the revival and assertion of male sexuality following the AIDS epidemic. The Handmaiden depicts explicitly erotic content and is open about its sexuality while questioning what is art and what is not. In Boys Don’t Cry the boundaries of masculinity and homophobia and attempts to address the resultant complications in defining what is homosexual and what is heterosexual are blurred.
In the quasi-high concept, Hollywood film, Boogie Nights, Director Paul Thomas Anderson reveals two aspects of heterosexism. The more visible one is the low art, 1970’s adult film industry where Anderson sets Boogie Nights. The other aspect is why Thomas made Boogie Nights. Much like
