Reading Time

Over the past few days I've started my research with the book "Cinema Wars: Hollywood Film and Politics in the Bush-Cheney Era", mentioned in my last post. The book has some very good insight on the Post-9/11 cinematic/television landscape, pointing out some interesting trends that feed on and appeal to American anxieties since 2001. Some of them are direct and explicit (terrorism coming to the forefront as conflict in some popular movies and TV series, namely 24, and two movies that tell the story of September 11th - United 93 and World Trade Center) and some masquerading as genre stories with terrorist stand-ins as villains, like 2005's War of the Worlds and other movies dealing with alien invasions. The reading inspired me to seek out box office numbers since 2001, to look for trends and maybe draw my own conclusions on how they might relate to my topic. I spent some time on Box Office Mojo and found some interesting trends over the past decade in high-grossing movies. I'm still in a pretty early stage of this part of my research so I'll probably expand on it in my next few posts.


I also emailed a faculty member of Western's film studies department, who provided me with some more sources but unfortunately nothing "original" from her own point of view. But that's ok. One of the sources that she gave me included an infographic on how certain genres have done at the Oscars since they began. Which decades were big for sci-fi, for example, or Westerns? I don't know how useful this is going to be, but the Oscar angle is something I didn't really consider. I'll look into it a little bit more over the next week to see if it's a useful avenue to explore.