Synopses & Reviews
Synopsis
Hollywood Math and Aftermath begins by exploring Hollywood's fictional numbers in normal circumstances - the period stretching from about 1970 until the onset of the Great Recession in 2008 - and then traces some of the consequences of economic collapse. The first half of this book explains the math and the second half traces the aftermath.
Introducing each section with a case study, J.D. Connor first justifies his hyperattention to Hollywood finances through films when the studio was most intensively reimagining its place within the changed macroeconomy of the Nixon and Carter years with four crucial examples-Performance, The Exorcist, All the President's Men, and The In-Laws-each revolving around a particular economic phenomenon: extortion, renting, forensic accounting, and counterfeiting. Connor then details the industry and the representation of the industry after the recession, providing new cinematic themes to pursue-the financial crisis in Arbitrage and the housing bubble in Magic Mike. After years of stalled recovery and grinding austerity, the question these films ask is: how is any society possible at all? J.D. Connor's Hollywood Math and Aftermath proves a stimulating and original take on the relationship between economics and the Hollywood film industry since the 1970s.
Synopsis
Money is Hollywood's great theme-but money laundered into something else, something more. Money can be given a particular occasion and career, as box office receipts, casino winnings, tax credits, stock prices, lotteries, inheritances. Or money can become number, and numbers can be anything: pixels, batting averages, votes, likes. Through explorations of all these and more, J.D. Connor's Hollywood Math and Aftermath provides a stimulating and original take on "the equation of pictures," the relationship between Hollywood and economics since the 1970s.
Touched off by an engagement with the work of Gilles Deleuze, Connor demonstrates the centrality of the economic image to Hollywood narrative. More than just a thematic study, this is a conceptual history of the industry that stretches from the dawn of the neoclassical era through the Great Recession and beyond. Along the way, Connor explores new concepts for cinema studies: precession and recession, pervasion and staking, ostension and deritualization.
Enlivened by a wealth of case studies-from The Big Short and The Wolf of Wall Street to Equity and Blackhat, from Moneyball to 12 Years a Slave, Titanic to Lost, The Exorcist to WALLE, D j Vu to Upstream Color, Contagion to The Untouchables, Ferris Bueller to Pacific Rim, The Avengers to The Village-Hollywood Math and Aftermath is a bravura portrait of the industry coming to terms with its own numerical underpinnings.