Activity

This moralistic framing was at work in Benefits Street. It did almost nothing to contextualise what it showed. There was barely any discussion of why the participants had ended up on benefits, and no mention of the social causes of unemployment, just as there was no interrogation of the political a…

The success of the show outside the US has provoked some amusing parodies. Imagine Breaking Bad set in the UK and Canada. Opening scene. Doctor tells Walt he has cancer – the treatment starts next week. End of series. What this points out is an opposition that was crucial to the drama: between the …

The personal is political because there is no personal.

There is no private realm to retreat into.

[...]

There are no woods to run into where the Capitol won’t follow. If you escape, they can always get your family.

There are no temporary autonomous zones that they won’t shut down. It’s…

[...] The only alternative is death.

But what if you choose death? This is the crux of the first film, and I turned to Bifo when I tried to write about it. “Suicide is the decisive political act of our times”, Bifo wrote in Precarious Rhapsody: Semiocapitalism and the Pathologies of the Post-alp…

I over-use the word ‘delirium’, but watching Catching Fire last week was a genuinely delirious experience. More than once I thought: How can I be watching this? How can this be allowed? One of the services Suzanne Collins has performed is to reveal the poverty, narrowness, and decadence of the ‘…