UCLA

This dissertation examines American films, miniseries, and television shows that center on the democratic process, mobilizing it in the service of stories that both provide intense narrative and visual pleasures, and offer satisfaction in the form of apparent knowledge gained about the inner workings of electoral politics in the United States; these media texts are here theorized as “democracy porn.” Significantly, democracy porn emerges alongside neoliberalism, and its proliferation mirrors that ideology’s meteoric rise to prominence. As such, the dissertation considers texts made since the advent of neoliberalism in 1973, and up to the US presidential election of 2016, which marks a major shift in the meanings and values associated with democracy porn. Through historical, textual, and discourse analysis drawing on critical theories of affect, citizenship, and neoliberalism, the dissertation interrogates the complex ways in which democracy porn is constructed and functions within and surrounding moving image texts. The project thus tracks the ways neoliberal ideology manifests in the media texts in question, as well as how the consumption of these texts impacts viewers’ understandings of their own citizenship within a democracy increasingly steered by neoliberal principles. The project brings cultural critiques of neoliberalism—particularly of its impact on democracy and citizenship in the United States—into the disciplinary realm of cinema and media studies. This approach constitutes an intervention for the field, as analyses of neoliberalism within cinema and media studies have tended to approach the topic from an industrial standpoint. Ultimately, the dissertation seeks to begin answering the question: How is democracy porn symptomatic of the erosion of possibilities for democracy within the context of neoliberalism?