In her film, Desperately Seeking Susan, Susan Seidelman continues her inquiry into the relations between the “center” and the “margin” in contemporary culture. The ideology of the film represents the center — the status quo — as the site for mature negotiations of communal values, whereas it constructs the margin — the locus of opposition — as an instance of self-indulgence, transgression, and extremity. This is the same theme in her first film, Smithereens. This fascination with the tension between the (...) center and the margin is interesting in that it enacts the “politics of reluctance” of fairly successful upper bourgeois who in their youth learned a political language and a set of attitudes now being tested in their middle years by new political “realities.”. (shrink)

Brooks' Lost in America is a somewhat parodic and amused exploration of the fantasy of freedom. But it is also an ideological maneuver to reinscribe, albeit humorously, the existing economic order by “showing” all oppostition as impractical. In spite of itself, the film is more a discourse on history and the need for a homogenized “tradition” in a consumer society than what it professes to be: an account of self-origination. 11 thus demonstrates that the fate of individuals cannot be scrutinized (...) outside history. The relation between contemporary American culture and the past is fraught with contradictions engendered by American society's view of social “change.”. (shrink)