Performance anxiety: the competitive self and Hollywood’s post-crash films of cruelty
Performance anxiety: the competitive self and Hollywood’s post-crash films of cruelty
This essay identifies a trend present since 2013 in Hollywood, exemplified by Gone Girl (2014), Foxcatcher (2014), Whiplash (2014), Birdman (2014), Nightcrawler (2014), and I, Tonya (2017). Amongst the various things these films have in common, I give special attention to how each features a protagonist engaged in competitive performance, and also in an abusive relationship. This coupling that drives each of the films allows us to make a critical reflection upon neoliberalism, which is distinguished by the objective to expand competition into all spheres of life. Lingering on both the cruelty and the performance that competition can involve, these films dramatize certain ways of feeling that register a series of changes from the humanist individualism that informed classical Hollywood. This essay seeks to show how neoliberalism fosters these changes, and how much they alter previously common distinctions between work and intimacy, the notion of an authenticating, indivisible self, and belief in progress and objective reality.
Performance, Neoliberalism, Contemporary Hollywood, Work ethos
278-297
Bayman, Louis
4ac4c78c-a62e-43a4-aa70-497ab56dcad4
9 June 2019
Bayman, Louis
4ac4c78c-a62e-43a4-aa70-497ab56dcad4
Bayman, Louis
(2019)
Performance anxiety: the competitive self and Hollywood’s post-crash films of cruelty.
New Review of Film and Television Studies, 17 (3), .
(doi:10.1080/17400309.2019.1622878).
Abstract
This essay identifies a trend present since 2013 in Hollywood, exemplified by Gone Girl (2014), Foxcatcher (2014), Whiplash (2014), Birdman (2014), Nightcrawler (2014), and I, Tonya (2017). Amongst the various things these films have in common, I give special attention to how each features a protagonist engaged in competitive performance, and also in an abusive relationship. This coupling that drives each of the films allows us to make a critical reflection upon neoliberalism, which is distinguished by the objective to expand competition into all spheres of life. Lingering on both the cruelty and the performance that competition can involve, these films dramatize certain ways of feeling that register a series of changes from the humanist individualism that informed classical Hollywood. This essay seeks to show how neoliberalism fosters these changes, and how much they alter previously common distinctions between work and intimacy, the notion of an authenticating, indivisible self, and belief in progress and objective reality.
Text
Bayman March 2019
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More information
In preparation date: 2018
Accepted/In Press date: 29 March 2019
e-pub ahead of print date: 9 June 2019
Published date: 9 June 2019
Venue - Dates:
CIFR Performing Film, Cinema Museum, London, United Kingdom, 2017-06-17
Keywords:
Performance, Neoliberalism, Contemporary Hollywood, Work ethos
Identifiers
Local EPrints ID: 420013
URI: http://eprints.soton.ac.uk/id/eprint/420013
ISSN: 1740-0309
PURE UUID: 5b0109a2-c9a7-4154-8063-a1dbc7ad1547
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Date deposited: 25 Apr 2018 16:30
Last modified: 16 Mar 2024 04:23
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