The Hidden Grief of American Musicals
Musicology professor Jake Johnson argues that beneath the bright songs and happy endings of midcentury musicals lay the grief and anxieties of postwar America.
Why Does Music in Science Fiction Sound Like That?
Imagining the sound of other worlds has a long past—and persistent creative limits.
Malibu in Matchbooks: Clues to a Lost Coast
A collection of matchbooks from Southern California maps a vanished mid-century commercial corridor, long displaced by fire and time.
Why Lacan Loved Harpo Marx
A surprising encounter between high theory and Hollywood farce reshapes how we think about laughter and desire.
In the Film Death in Venice, Music Is the Narrator
A haunting score shapes the rise and fall of a writer consumed by infatuation.
A History of Fakery on Film
Concerns about AI-made images have deep roots in the earliest years of filmmaking.
Tod Browning’s Freaks
Freaks asked audiences to think about the exploitative display of human difference while also demonstrating that the sideshow was a locus of community.
Power Posing in the Taiwan Photo Studio
As photography became more popular in occupied Taiwan, the camera subtly captured the shifting boundaries between Japanese colonizers and their Taiwanese subjects.
Mad Men and Its Obsession with Frenchness
Mad Men’s in-universe fascination with Frenchness was so frequent and important to the plot(s) that it might as well have been a main character.
Queer Representation in Pre-Code Hollywood
Before the establishment of the Hollywood Production Code in the 1930s, filmmakers deployed gender and sexuality stereotypes for glamour, humor, and drama alike.