Geopolitics

Dittmer (2010), popular geopolitics

“The geopolitical discourse that citizens are immersed in every day.” Shows how common-sense views of world politics are produced through films, TV, books and magazines.

Ó Tuathail & Dalby (1998), three branches

Formal (think tanks), practical (state actors and actions), popular (media and culture).

Anderson, Said, Billig

Anderson: the nation is an imagined community. Said: Orientalism, an East/West divide that homogenises. Billig: banal nationalism, everyday reminders such as flags.

Power & Crampton (2005)

After WWII film was a battleground over Cold War boundaries. Cinema was a site of contestation, not crude propaganda. HUAC “Reds under the beds” films.

Reagan and Bush as film performers

Reagan’s “evil empire” (1983) and Star Wars nickname, plus Rambo jokes. Bush’s 2003 Iraq announcement mirrored Top Gun (Rich 2007).

Carter & McCormack (2006)

Film amplifies affect and performative logics. Geopolitics works through emotion and bodily response, not just discourse.

Representational logics (Dodds 2015, Dittmer 2011)

Recurring ways of depicting places and people as safe, dangerous or deviant. They matter because patterns shape belief. Example: the post-9/11 superhero boom.

Intertextuality

A film’s meaning is shaped by other films and its context (Bond tropes; presidential speeches borrowing film). Dodds (2015) applies it to speeches about terrorism and war.

Censorship (Viernes 2022; SARFT; Barbie)

Censorship “screens the nation as a way of seeing”. China reviews scripts before production, and Barbie was banned in Vietnam over the nine-dash line

Dittmer & Gray (2010), active audiences

Audiences create their own meanings, so power shifts from producers to consumers. Limits: reception is hard to measure.