Pop Junctions: Reflections on Entertainment, Pop Culture, Activism, Media Literacy, Fandom and More.
Reflections on Entertainment, Pop Culture, Activism, Media Literacy, Fandom and More
This post is part of a series of critical responses to the shows nominated for Outstanding Drama Series and Outstanding Comedy Series at the 76th Emmy Awards. This piece frames Larry David's role in Curb Your Enthusiasm to that of the Shakespearean fool, and ponders his ability to remain positive in the court of public opinion despite his irreverent scripts.
Read MoreThis piece is part of a series of critical responses to the shows nominated for Outstanding Drama Series and Outstanding Comedy Series at the 76th Emmy Awards. Here, film critic Megan Robinson argues that The Bear is—in fact—a comedy precisely because it's so traumatic for the characters involved.
Read MoreThis piece is part of a series of critical responses to the series nominated for Outstanding Drama Series and Outstanding Comedy Series at the 76th Emmy Awards. Here, Henry Jenkins interviews Frederik Cryns, historical consultant for Shogun and a professor of Japanese History at the International Research Center for Japanese Studies in Kyoto, Japan.
Read MoreThis piece is part of a series of critical responses to the series nominated for Outstanding Drama Series and Outstanding Comedy Series at the 76th Emmy Awards. The final season of the Netflix series The Crown concludes a series spanning sixty years in the lives of the British royal family, the Windsors. From the death of Diana, Princess of Wales, to Queen Elizabeth II’s Golden Jubilee, this season repeatedly engages with stories about how fans impact the lives of the royal family, for good or for bad. The series itself blurs the lines between history and fan fiction. Though considered prestige television, often nominated for awards and celebrated by critics, The Crown is at heart a culturally sanctioned form of royal fandom that contributes to the ongoing fascination with the British monarchy.
Read MoreIn the fourth of a series of blogs on screen tourism, Bethan Jones takes a look at Heartbeat and the role that fans play in encouraging visits to filming locations.
Read MoreIn the third of a series of blogs on screen tourism, Bethan Jones takes a look at the world’s longest-running sitcom, Last of The Summer Wine and the Yorkshire town that’s embraced its legacy.
Read MoreIn the second of a series of blogs on screen tourism, Bethan Jones reflects on the role that identity plays in fans’ decisions to travel to sites of filming locations by taking a look at Halifax and Gentleman Jack.
Read MoreIn the first of a series of blog posts on screen tourism, Bethan Jones reflects on the impact fan tourism has had in Northern Ireland thanks to Game of Thrones – not only for fans or the tourism industry, but for film and television production and perceptions of the country itself.
Read MoreThis is the third of three parts on the recent WrestleMania XL and the current revival of WWE. It reviews the interconnected and multistrand storytelling that unfolded over two years leading into the recent event and highlights opportunities for further appraisal. This part explores the blurring of reality and fiction that drives pro wrestling storytelling and the role it played in the lead up to WrestleMania XL. Readers who might be interested in this piece include those new to pro wrestling within the context of popular culture and entertainment studies and those curious about WWE’s revival.
Read MoreThis is the second of three parts on the recent WrestleMania XL and the current revival of WWE. It reviews the interconnected and multistrand storytelling that unfolded over two years leading into the recent event and highlights opportunities for further appraisal. This part introduces the story of Cody Rhodes and reflects on long form serialized storytelling in WWE leading into WrestleMania XL. Readers who might be interested in this piece include those new to pro wrestling within the context of popular culture and entertainment studies and those curious about WWE’s revival.
Read MoreThis is the first of three parts on the recent WrestleMania XL and the current revival of WWE. It reviews the interconnected and multistrand storytelling that unfolded over two years leading into the recent event and highlights opportunities for further appraisal. This part establishes the important role of audience and character in pro wrestling, and overviews key moments for Roman Reigns leading into WrestleMania XL. Readers who might be interested in this piece include those new to pro wrestling within the context of popular culture and entertainment studies and those curious about WWE’s revival.
Read MoreThis post is part of a series written by contributors to Imagining Transmedia, a new book of essays published by the MIT Press. The book explores how transmedia techniques are being used in a wide range of settings, from entertainment and education to health care, journalism, politics, urban planning, and more. In this post, Zoyander Street discusses their chapter “Cis Penance: Transmedia Database Narratives,” which explores their own interactive documentary work about transgender people in terms of concepts that come from Japanese media studies scholarship: database narratives and sekaikan (worldview).
Read MoreThis post is part of a series written by contributors to Imagining Transmedia, a new book of essays published by the MIT Press. The book explores how transmedia techniques are being used in a wide range of settings, from entertainment and education to health care, journalism, politics, urban planning, and more.
How do we think about stories and what it means to imagine a world together when the pathways for telling, sharing, and reacting to those stories are constantly shifting and bleeding into one another? When that shared narrative universe is massively distributed, debated, and collectively infused with the energy and attention of thousands or millions of people? These are the questions at the heart of our new book Imagining Transmedia, the culmination of over a decade of intensive mucking about in transmedia storytelling at the Center for Science and the Imagination at Arizona State University. I’d like to tell you a story about how we got here.
Read MoreBeyond K-pop, female talents’ careers and “strong,” “independent” women personae are becoming more recognized and celebrated in the broader South Korean media industry. Kim Sook, has gained nicknames like “Sook-crush (drawing on “Girl Crush”),” “Furiosook (parody of Mad Max’s Furiosa)” and “Matriarch-sook” from her famous gender role-flipped humor and non-subservient image that she built over ~25 years of her career, became the second woman to ever win Korea’s national broadcasting station’s (KBS) Grand Prize in Entertainment in 2020 since Lee Young-ja’s first win in 2018. Female street dancer crew reality competition series Street Women Fighter (Mnet; 2021-2023) and many of the featured dancers have become sensational hits. As the series’ name suggests, the “Girl Crush” dancers boasted “strong” physiques, personalities, and styles but with comradery and professionalism that matched their (formerly underrecognized) diverse and impressive career backgrounds, rather than one-dimensional “catty” competitiveness.
Read MoreBeyond K-pop, female talents’ careers and “strong,” “independent” women personae are becoming more recognized and celebrated in the broader South Korean media industry. Kim Sook, has gained nicknames like “Sook-crush (drawing on “Girl Crush”),” “Furiosook (parody of Mad Max’s Furiosa)” and “Matriarch-sook” from her famous gender role-flipped humor and non-subservient image that she built over ~25 years of her career, became the second woman to ever win Korea’s national broadcasting station’s (KBS) Grand Prize in Entertainment in 2020 since Lee Young-ja’s first win in 2018. Female street dancer crew reality competition series Street Women Fighter (Mnet; 2021-2023) and many of the featured dancers have become sensational hits. As the series’ name suggests, the “Girl Crush” dancers boasted “strong” physiques, personalities, and styles but with comradery and professionalism that matched their (formerly underrecognized) diverse and impressive career backgrounds, rather than one-dimensional “catty” competitiveness.
Read MoreThis piece is part of a series of critical responses to the films nominated for Best Picture at the 96th Academy Awards. This post features two video essays responding to Oppenheimer, one by Kai after Kai and one by Ella Wright. Both focus in on the film's depiction of character, asking how we are meant to understand them in moral terms. I encourage you to pay particular attention to the sound in each piece, the careful dichotomies between loudness and silence in “Fission, Fusion, and Character in Oppeneheimer” and the menacing yet also space age-y melodies of Kai after Kai’s original music in “The Guilt of Oppenheimer.” Both essays use sound to reinforce their critical points, rather than simply to ground their audiovisual timelines--an example of the sophisticated analysis going on in the world of video essays and videographic criticism.
Read MoreThis piece is part of a series of critical responses to the films nominated for Best Picture at the 96th Academy Awards. In this dialogic post, Henry Jenkins and Kris Longfield dissect three recent feminist re-tellings of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein: Lisa Frankenstein, The Angry Black Girl and Her Monster, and Poor Things. By centering women in traditionally male roles, these newer Frankenstein films ask different kinds of questions, renewing the story by mapping alternative meanings onto its core figures.They're continually asking “what are we taking from the past and what are we taking from the present?” so their leading ladies can solve problems.
Read MoreThis piece is part of a series of critical responses to the films nominated for Best Picture at the 96th Academy Awards. Barbie is nominated in eight categories in the 2024 Oscars, including Best Picture and Best Adapted Screenplay. This critical response has been provoked by the discourse surrounding its eligibility in the Adapted Screenplay category, rather than Original Screenplay, and explores questions of adaptation and franchising in Barbie. The Barbie doll’s perceived lack of story or character suggests that Barbie is an original screenplay, but it is still based on a pre-existing intellectual property and an opening title card recognizes that Barbie is “Based on ‘Barbie’ by Mattel”. As an adaptation and a franchise Barbie draws from a material, industrial and historical story that works in concert with the polysemic, ambiguous and open nature of Barbie as a toy. Barbie is therefore shaped by the creative interpretation of Barbie as a culturally iconic toy and ‘Barbie’ as a franchise property owned by Mattel.
Read MoreThis is the latest in a series of critical responses to the films nominated for Best Picture at the 96th Academy Awards. It is unbelievably easy for a film to come across as corny when attempting to put on the vintage aesthetic—also known in some fan circles as nostalgiacore. The term “nostalgia bait” has even been coined in recent years to signify works of new media that maraud retro sensibilities for the sheer sake of suckering audiences into a hollow experience. As frustrating and soulless as instances of nostalgia bait are, films that pull off the vintage look with purpose have the potential to be something quite special. Alexander Payne’s new witty coming-of-age drama, The Holdovers (2023), serves as a crash course in how to answer the crucial question every nostalgically aestheticized film must be asked: what’s the point?
Read MoreThis is the latest in a series of critical responses to the films nominated for Best Picture at the 96th Academy Awards. It often felt to me as though Killers of the Flower Moon was being treated in press coverage like a referendum on the history of Indigenous representation in Hollywood cinema. Can a filmmaker with Martin Scorsese’s clout return to traditionally the most fraught genre vis-à-vis Indigenous representation (the western), tell a particularly devastating true story in the history of Indigenous-settler relations, and finally get it right? And, even if the film did “get it right” (which is destined to be a contentious claim no matter the outcome), would the industry at large recognize and celebrate it? Either way, the impending ceremony feels like an auspicious occasion to revisit precisely the way in which Killers of the Flower Moon actually structures its own approach to representation. Because, quite frankly, that might be the most interesting aspect of the film.
Read More
Recent Posts
Publications
Powered by Squarespace.
