The Invisible Hand in Popular Culture: Liberty vs. Authority in American Film and TV

by Paul A. Cantor

Overview

Popular culture often champions freedom as the fundamentally American way of life and celebrates the virtues of independence and self-reliance. But film and television have also explored the tension between freedom and other core values, such as order and political stability. What may look like healthy, productive, and creative freedom from one point of view may look like chaos, anarchy, and a source of destructive conflict from another. Film and television continually pose the question: Can Ame

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780813140827
Publisher:	University Press of Kentucky
Publication date:	11/30/2012
Pages:	488
Product dimensions:	6.40(w) x 9.00(h) x 1.50(d)
Age Range:	18 Years

About the Author

Paul A. Cantor is Clifton Waller Barrett Professor of English at the University of Virginia. Among his wide-ranging and acclaimed writings on film and television, Gilligan Unbound: Pop Culture in the Age of Globalization was named one of the best nonfiction books of 2001 by the Los Angeles Times.

Table of Contents

Preface ix

Introduction: Popular Culture and Spontaneous Order, or, How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Tube 1

Part 1 Freedom and Order in the Western

Introduction to Part One 25

1 The Western and Western Drama: John Fords The Searchers and the Oresteia 31

2 The Original Frontier: Gene Roddenberry s Apprenticeship for Star Trek in Have Gun-Will Travel 59

3 Order Out of the Mud: Deadwood and the State of Nature 97

Part 2 Maverick Creators and Maverick Heroes

Introduction to Part Two 131

4 Mars Attacks!: Tim Burton and the Ideology of the Flying Saucer Movie 137

5 Flying Solo: The Aviator and Entrepreneurial Vision 167

6 Cartman Shrugged: The Invisible Gnomes and the Invisible Hand in South Park 189

Part 3 Edgar G. Ulmer: The Aesthete from the Alps Meets the King of the B's

Introduction to Part Three 215

7 The Fall of the House of Ulmer: Europe versus America in the Gothic Vision of The Black Cat 223

8 America as Wasteland in Detour: Film Noir and the Frankfurt School 243

Part 4 9/11, Globalization, and New Challenges to Freedom

Introduction to Part Four 271

9 The Truth Is Still Out There: The X-Files and 9/11 277

10 Un-American Gothic: The Alien Invasion Narrative and Global Modernity 299

Acknowledgments 349

Notes 353

Index 435

Editorial Reviews

By dipping into pop-culture portrayals of 'both top-down and bottom-up models of order,' the author makes it easier and more enjoyable for today's readers to relate to the ideas he discusses, including Marxist ' culture industry' notions and absolute state control a la Hobbes.

Pittsburgh Tribune-Review

Written in clear language for the curious layman, but carefully footnoted for the scholar, Invisible Hand helps us look in a new way at the images on the screen that undeniably have an enormous effect on the viewer's notions of history, government, freedom, and the human experience.

LewRockwell.com

This sweeping, inclusive survey of American popular culture in the 20th and 21st centuries is a masterwork. Cantor offers thoughtful readings, detailed analyses of the works in question, and an authoritative overview of the ways in which pop and classical culture mesh to create the fabric of contemporary American consciousness.

Choice Magazine

Political theorists have much to gain from reading The Invisible Hand in Popular Culture.

Review of Politics

The incomparable Cantor has blessed the libertarian movement with a literary voice. Would that we ahd more Cantors to show us how literature flowers when freedom flourishes.

Independent Review

Analyses how ideas about economics and political philosophy find their way into everything from Star Trek to Malcolm in the Middle.

Wall Street Journal

Cantor demonstrates, often in new and surprising ways, what popular culture has to say about America's most significant political and social issues. Cantor's book is remarkably wide-ranging and well informed, with important insights on everything from South Park to Have Gun—Will Travel. In this book there is something of interest for everyone who either loves or hates pop culture, or simply wonders what one should think of it. There are provocative comments on every page, firmly supported by Cantor's immense knowledge of cultural and intellectual history. The book is brilliantly written—smart, sharp, completely free of jargon, and, frankly, a lot of fun.

Stephen Cox

Cantor knows all the words to the songs in the South Park movie, speaks fluent Klingon, and has forgotten more about the X-Files than Fox Mulder ever knew. Finally, pop-culture nerds have an intellectual to call their own.

Jonathan V. Last

The cause of freedom has rarely had as creative a defender as Paul Cantor. To follow his thinking and writing is to be changed by them. His outlook is romantic, intellectually robust, and new. With this outlook, he finds the idea of freedom in the most inauspicious places, not only in Shakespeare (his specialization) but also in popular culture, of which he is an incredibly trenchant observer. The Invisible Hand in Popular Culture is as astute an examination of the idea of liberty as you will find anywhere in the history of liberal literature, and one that resonates especially in our time.

Jeffrey Tucker

"Cantor is undoubtedly one of the most original scholars in the field, and it will be welcome to have a collection of his essays in a single volume."

William Irwin

Cantor's latest book is a collection of wide-ranging essays that brims with brilliant insights on particular movies and TV shows.

National Review

With a deep knowledge of literature and philosophy as well as film and TV, Cantor brings scholarship together with entertainment. He's fun to read, and you can learn a few things, too.

Milwaukee Express

Cantor can take pretty much any television show, such as Gilligan's Isalnd, and dissect it using everything from Homer to Shakespeare to Marshall McLuhan, and entertain you while doing it.

LRC Blog

This is an exceptional romp through television and film from the past seveal decades, and serves to entertain as much as to instruct us that the world of entertainment contains many valuable lessons in economics, liberty, and morality.

Weekly Standard

"Cantor is undoubtedly one of the most original scholars in the field, and it will be welcome to have a collection of his essays in a single volume." — William Irwin, Series Editor, Blackwell Philosophy and Pop Culture

From the Publisher