Politics of Hollywood Cinema

The Politics of Hollywood Cinema radically transforms our understanding of cinema's potential to be politically engaging and challenging. Examining several films from Hollywood's classical era, including Marked Woman, Mr Smith Goes to Washington, Born Yesterday, On the Waterfront and It Should Happen to You, alongside contemporary theories of democracy advanced by Ernesto Laclau, Chantal Mouffe, Claude Lefort, Étienne Balibar and Jacques Rancière, Richard Rushton argues that popular films can offer complex subtle, relevant and controversial approaches to democracy and politics.

“The Politics of Hollywood Cinema is an appropriately researched and engaging book. Using mainstream Hollywood cinema as his primary focus point, Rushton creates a work of scholarship that is both effective in its arguments and intellectually challenging. For audiences and readers engaged in scholarly debates regarding the nature of American politics in popular cinema (or even if there is such a thing as a political form of Hollywood cinema), this publication makes for particularly relevant and stimulating reading.” (Sean Campbell, Film Matters, Vol. 6 (3), 2015)"This book will make a valuable contribution to current debates on the relationship between cinema and politics. It has a coherent argument throughout around the Ego and group formation, democracy and realism and expresses it with admirable clarity. The book is an enjoyable read, and the individual film analyses are sensitively handled. It will find a ready audience among film scholars, both students and academics." - Bill Marshall, University of Stirling/Institute of Germanic and Romance Studies, UK "In The Politics of Hollywood Cinema, Richard Rushton has written a compelling, thoughtful and strikingly original account of the status of the 'political' in cinema, a category he refines and works through with great subtlety throughout his book. It is full of good sense, new ideas, and great insight, both philosophically interesting and hermeneutically sensitive to the often neglected sophistication of classic Hollywood films. It is a book that anyone with a serious interest in film will want to read." - Robert Pippin, University of Chicago, USA 'What works so brilliantly in Rushton's book is its openness to continuing dialogues about the politics of cinema in the way that he anticipates his critics and in the way he presents open-ended questions and contentious refutations as challenges, perhaps, to the reader. Just as Rushton asserts Hollywood film can offer access routes to political ideas, his book is an excellent doorway for film scholars and students to consider the insights that political theorists offer in an analysis of the cinema.' - Lindsay Steenberg, New Review of Film and Television Studies 'Rushton provides scrupulous accounts of his opponents' positions, while his own readings, supported by political theorists such as Ernesto Laclau and Claude Lefort, are highly credible.' - S. C. Dillon, Choice, June 2014

Richard Rushton is Senior Lecturer in Film Studies at Lancaster University, UK. He is the author of The Reality of Film (2011), Cinema After Deleuze (2012) and, with Gary Bettinson, What is Film Theory? (2010).