Screen Captures: Film in the Age of Emergency

A spirited, far-sighted guide to politics, Star Wars, the Avengers, David Lynch, and the lost highways between them, for today's capitalist-realist age.

“We've met before, haven't we?” The grand illusion of our era is that we're at the end of history and cinema is now no more than tranquilizing entertainment. What we've lost sight of is the political undercurrent running through movies and their potentially redemptive power, whether they're Hollywood mega blockbusters like Star Wars or off-kilter indies and art films like Blue Velvet.

This is the premise and the challenge of the wide-ranging essays that make up Screen Captures, in which Dennis Hopper, Nicholas Cage, Valerie Solanas, and even Donald Trump all have a starring role. The book tells, as much as it shows, what lies just out of frame: the impacts of COVID on theatres, the class war of the 1% upon the rest, the climate crisis, the ongoing Disney-fication of franchises, and the audience's active participation in the rewriting and reproduction of their capture by screens. Throughout, subliminally, Stephen Lee Naish rings his urgent call: occupy the screen!