The Politics of Hollywood Cinema: Popular Film and Contemporary Political Theory

The driving ambition of this important book is to combat the argument, deeply ingrained in the discipline of film studies, that Hollywood films are ‘politically naïve or backward’ and ‘of a conservative, reactionary kind’ (p. 1). Instead, Rushton proposes that ‘some examples of classical Hollywood tackle politics and issues relating to democracy in ways that deserve to be explored’ and that can be considered as genuinely ‘democratic art’ (p. 2). The opening section of the book consists of a sceptical account of political modernist film theory, while the remainder is composed of a series of staged engagements between the ideas of certain post-Marxist political philosophers (Chantal Mouffe, Jacques Rancière, Claude Lefort, Étienne Balibar and Ernesto Laclau), or ‘theorists of democratic politics’, as Rushton labels them, and redemptive readings of a number of carefully selected classical Hollywood films. These engagements seek to answer two complex and important questions, which run in parallel: what is democracy, and what is cinema?