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Treme (2010–2013)
Mikkel Jensen

This chapter examines Treme’s more uplifting take on the American city compared to the one The Wire offered. Taking issue with the bad press New Orleans faced after Hurricane Katrina, Treme’s celebration of New Orleans is a very specific historical comment but it also counters a longer tradition of anti-urbanism in American cultural history that extends back to the eighteenth century. Though Treme shows New Orleans to face severe problems in the 2000s, the show emphasizes the importance and vitality of the city. Its depiction of New Orleans charts the city’s numerous challenges in the wake of Hurricane Katrina but the tone never becomes despondent and Treme remains an homage to New Orleans in particular and the American city more broadly. Exploring Treme’s response to the negative discourses that persisted after Katrina, the chapter discusses how the serial explores a dynamics of insiderhood and outsiderhood. Through different characters and storylines, the serial tries to show how a struggling city – like New Orleans at this point in history – needs outsiders to take an interest in a city’s culture and survival. But the serial emphasizes that the nature of this interest is of crucial importance, warning of the dangers related to pigeonholing and disaster tourism.

in David Simon’s American City
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Mikkel Jensen

The conclusion drives home the argument that the city is the central through-line in Simon’s serials and also analyzes Simon’s two miniseries that do not focus on the American city: Generation Kill (2008) and The Plot Against America (2020). By calling back to several analytical arguments about each individual serial, the conclusion outlines how Simon’s oeuvre coheres as a whole. The conclusion shows that while Simon embraces a progressive representational politics when it comes to race and gender, the politics in his serials do not center on representation. Simon focuses more on social-historical issues like the crack epidemic (The Corner), deindustrialization (The Wire), Hurricane Katrina (Treme), residential segregation (Show Me a Hero), and economic marginalization (The Deuce). These are the central issues in Simon’s depiction of the American city.

in David Simon’s American City
Author:

David Simon’s American City is the first comprehensive study of showrunner David Simon’s productions, devoting a full chapter to each of Simon’s series. The book examines the much studied The Wire but, crucially, also looks beyond this serial in order to explore the other aspects of urban America that Simon has presented in serials like Show Me a Hero and The Deuce. Zooming in on Simon’s depiction of urban realities in contemporary American society, the book explores how each of his serials offers distinct takes on the American city but the book also shows how Simon’s works articulate a sustained and intricate exploration of urban problems in America. This volume traces the urban through-line in Simon’s work and shows how his oeuvre coheres as a whole in its exploration of current social issues in the American city.

The Corner (2000)
Mikkel Jensen

This chapter explores how Simon’s first miniseries, The Corner, humanizes drug-addicted inner-city residents. Invoking certain discourses about urban issues in order to counter them, The Corner employs both realist and melodramatic impulses in its depiction of marginalized Baltimoreans. The chapter examines this aesthetic while also uncovering how the miniseries uses elements of self-reflexivity to preempt potential allegations of it being melodramatic in a pejorative sense. The chapter also discusses how The Corner’s depiction of the inner-city underclass evades long-standing arguments between conservatives and liberals in America. Contextualizing this aspect in relation to political disagreements about issues regarding structural causes of social maladies and the role of individual responsibility, the chapter shows The Corner to emphasize the importance of understanding social ills in a broad societal context but it also discusses the negative cultural effects that sometimes arise in certain areas that house large portions of a society’s most marginalized citizens.

in David Simon’s American City
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Mikkel Jensen

The introduction establishes the book’s main argument, namely that the central through-line in David Simon’s oeuvre as a showrunner is the American city. The introduction also outlines the book’s contextualist approach, which emphasizes the fruitfulness of seeing Simon’s serials in relation to each other while also uncovering how Simon’s productions speak to current themes in American society and culture. This contextualist approach is informed by the methodological writings of intellectual historian Quentin Skinner.

in David Simon’s American City
Show Me a Hero (2015)
Mikkel Jensen

This chapter examines how Show Me a Hero uncovers some of the historical background that remains implicit in The Wire. While The Wire shows the interconnectedness of different social issues (e.g. the war on drugs and the state of inner-city schools), it does not dramatize how the situation it portrays came into existence. Show Me a Hero historicizes Simon’s depiction of the American city by looking at the historical roots of residential segregation. Focusing on the real-life case of Yonkers, New York in the late 1980s and early 1990s, this miniseries reimagines how the history of the civil rights movement can be expanded beyond the classical civil rights narrative that is usually set in the South in the 1950–1960s. Drawing on current historical scholarship that extends the civil rights narrative into the period after the 1960s, the chapter explores how Show Me a Hero offers a televisual intervention in an ongoing debate about racial realities in America with a specific focus on housing.

in David Simon’s American City
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The Deuce (2017–2019)
Mikkel Jensen

This chapter examines how The Deuce extends Simon’s interest in the historical roots of the American city. Showing how The Deuce explicitly tells a story of gender inequalities, prostitution, and the emergence of the pornographic industry in the 1970s, the chapter explores how the serial more broadly chronicles New York City’s transformation since the 1970s. The Deuce portrays a pornographic industry in which female directors are able to make a name for themselves, but the serial consistently emphasizes the road blocks they encounter when trying to establish themselves. The chapter explores how the serial’s portrayal of gender issues is tied into economics realities and how The Deuce contextualizes these issues in the urban reality of 1970s New York. The chapter makes a central contextualist argument by situating The Deuce in relation to two major shifts in the 1970s that still frame American society today. Economic policies shifted to the right, abandoning Keynesian economics in favor of more fiscally conservative economics, all while politics regarding gender, race, and sexuality gained a stronger hold in terms of setting the agenda for America’s views on many cultural issues. The Deuce’s exploration of gender issues (as a form of ‘cultural politics’) and its relationship to the economic exploitation of the women in the porn and sex trade industry (economics) represents Simon’s and George Pelecanos’s way of exploring this paradigmatic shift in American history.

in David Simon’s American City
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Social, political and cultural influences on British folk horror, urban wyrd and backwoods cinema
Andy Paciorek

The term ‘folk horror’ has been used to refer to horror that most frequently has strong rural, occult and sometimes folkloric elements. Whilst discussion has unearthed examples of ‘folk horror’ from numerous different nations, the designation is most strongly associated with a limited number of British films and other media in the late 1960s to mid-1970s. The aim of this chapter is to discuss the socio-political and wider cultural factors of this period within the UK and explore how they may have influenced and/or inspired this particular mode of cinema. From there we look at the revival of ‘folk horror’ and its growth in stature and status within the 21st century and again consider the influence that the contemporary social, political, cultural and perhaps environmental situation has had upon its resurgence. In this exploration we pay strong attention to films of both the psychedelic era and of the current folk horror revival but also consider folk horror in relation to sub-genres or modes like hauntology, urban wyrd and backwoods horror. We explore the cultural climate that the first wave of British folk horror arose in and question why it has again taken root and grown more vigorously now.

in Folk horror on film
Beth Carroll

This chapter explores the regionality of folk horror and argues that the Celtic looms large in the English imaginary as a location for the rural. The chapter examines how folk horror evokes an ambiguous Celtic-ness, culturally, religiously, and aesthetically, to make strange what was once more prevalent across the British Isles more generally. In doing so, it highlights the dominance of an English lens both textually and extra-textually and questions the notion and usefulness of ‘Britishness’ and ‘Celtic’. Folk horror has an established history of exploring the rural through an urban lens. The rural becomes a site of difference, of fear, but also of hope and deliverance for the those entering its limits. But for the rural to be a site of contrast, those that enter both textually and extra textually, must be from elsewhere. With the creep of English suburbia, the rural is being forced further and further into other regions of the British Isles. Films such as Apostle illustrate the importance of the representation of Wales for maintaining these folk spaces in the face of Anglo imperialism, an imperialism shown to be deleterious to all. Apostle is demonstrative of an English protagonist marked by English religious proselytising as he enters a Welsh space of cultural and religious difference. Initially, this space is shown as oppositional to its English counterpart, offering escape and redemption for as long as Anglo creep can be prevented. Does the introduction of the English protagonist make clear underlying issues with these rural spaces, or is he the catalyst for them?

in Folk horror on film
Ronald Hutton

Lion Productions’ The Wicker Man can claim to be the archetypal folk horror film, with a considerable influence on the whole genre. This essay examines its inspiration, consisting of an image, a book, and a literary tradition. The image is that of the giant wickerwork figure in which ancient Roman writers accused the Druids of burning human sacrifices. This provided the main motif of the film. The book was Sir James Frazer’s Edwardian classic The Golden Bough, a massive compendium of real and alleged human belief and custom. This provided most of the folk rites in the screenplay. The literary tradition was the British one of a modern rural community secretly preserving an ancient (and usually orgiastic and malign) pagan religion. This furnished the setting for the story. This essay explains how each developed, and how the film itself both transcended and reinforced each.

in Folk horror on film