Panel Event: Trump, the Media and US Culture
Join us in person or online for a timely pre-election panel on ‘Trump, the Media and US Culture’ supported by the Interdisciplinary Research Group and Global Diversities and Inequalities Research Centre at London Metropolitan University. Presentations by the panelists will be followed by a Q&A.
Date: Wednesday 23 October, 6.00-7.30 pm, London Metropolitan University, Holloway Road Campus (hybrid)
Professor Mark Wheeler, London Metropolitan University
The Celebritization of American Politics and Hybrid Campaigning in the Modern US Polity
Pierre Bourdieu’s ‘Field’ theory may be used to explain how celebrities’ attributes in an original field or “Habitus” (e.g. the entertainment world, journalism, business etc.) can be converted into another public arena (e.g. the sphere of politics, public relations, etc.) to create a surplus value of connectivity (Bourdieu, 1983). To track these developments, this study will deploy Ervin Goffman’s concept of ‘dramatic realisation’ in which an actor to become meaningful to others ‘must mobilise his activity so that it will express during the interaction what he wishes to convey’ (1959: 30) Moreover, Martin Murray (2022) has shown how Donald Trump translated his role as the social Darwinist boss in his reality television show The Apprentice into the endless circus of his (social) media presidency. Therefore, this paper investigates how and why celebrity politicians like Barack Obama and Trump command credibility with their political (fan) bases by establishing themselves and translating their worth from one field to another through a conjunction of online and legacy media deinstitutionalization, personalisation and parasocial familiarity.
Professor Mark Wheeler is a Professor of Political Communications at London Metropolitan University. He has authored several monographs including Politics and the Mass Media (Blackwells, 1997), Hollywood: Politics and Society (BFI, 2006), Celebrity Politics (Polity, 2013) and Sorcerer: William Friedkin and the New Hollywood (Rowman and Littlefield, 2022). He has written numerous journal articles and book chapters concerning media policy, social media and political communications, globalisation and information technologies, celebrity politics and public diplomacy, and the politics of Hollywood.
Professor Karen McNally, London Metropolitan University
Nixon, Trump and Prescience in the Historical Miniseries Washington Behind Closed Doors
Examining the blurred boundaries of fact and fiction that circulated within and without the 1977 ABC miniseries Washington Behind Closed Doors, this presentation looks at the ways that television’s historicization of Richard Nixon and Watergate set the tone for this fictional drama’s depiction of the corrupt administration of an unruly US president. This ground-breaking show was contextualized by an American televisual trend that sought to promote audience understanding of the nation’s history through both emotional engagement and strategies to connect history to current events (Rymsza-Pawlowska, 2014). Moreover, re-reading the miniseries through the lens of Trump-era politics, this paper contends, enables us to view historical drama as not only a vehicle through which to revisit, evaluate and revise a nation’s past but as a textual imagining of the possibilities laid out for its future.
Professor Karen McNally is Professor of American Film, Television and Cultural History at London Metropolitan University. She has published widely, including her books American Television during a Television Presidency (Wayne State, 2022), The Stardom Film (Columbia, 2020), The Legacy of Mad Men (Palgrave Macmillan, 2019), Billy Wilder, Movie-Maker (McFarland, 2011) and When Frankie Went to Hollywood (Illinois, 2008). Karen is currently conducting research for a historical biography of Lana Turner supported by a Leverhulme Major Research Fellowship and is editing a volume of essays for University of Illinois Press that examine historical and screen narratives of inequality and abuse experienced by women in Hollywood.
Victoria K. Pistivsek, King’s College London
Who’s Laughing Now? Unfunny Comedy and Carnivalesque Politics in the Trump Era
In the run-up to the 2016 US presidential election, Donald Trump was readily dismissed by mainstream media, from pundits in the news to late-night TV hosts, as a joke (Hennefeld, 2016; Dyer, 2018). In the eight years since, the American public has had to consolidate and contend both with the serious consequences and dangers of Trump’s regressive macho-populism, as well as with his well-documented laughable rhetoric, actions, and embodiment, which together help foster an intensified climate of “shellshock” (Honig, 2021) and “permanent carnival” (Ngai and Berlant, 2017). This paper explores how these contradictory, Trumpian cultural tensions around laughter and politics are reflected in contemporary Hollywood, particularly how comedic and ideological instabilities in, and in mediated discourses about, recent popular film and television such as Joker (2019) and The Bear (FX on Hulu, 2022-) shore up and reaffirm mounting political uncertainties and divisions in the US at large.
Victoria K. Pistivsek is a PhD Researcher and Graduate Teaching Assistant in the Department of Film Studies at King’s College London. Her doctoral project explores hegemonic masculinity, divisive politics and abject laughter in post-2016 American popular culture.
This event will take place at London Metropolitan University (Holloway Road campus) and online.
Registration is via Eventbrite: https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/interdisciplinary-research-forum-trump-the-media-and-us-culture-registration-1038775865577?aff=oddtdtcreator. If you are a London Met member of staff or student, please use your London Met email address to register.
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