Carpenter’s The Thing and Politics of Paranoia

In the thirty-fifth episode of The Pop Culture Lens podcast, Christopher Olson and I welcome friend of the podcast, and unofficial third host, Joe Belfeuil to discuss the influential horror film that is John Carpenter’s The Thing (1982). https://ThePopCultureLens.podbean.com/mf/web/93ft23/Ep35_The_Thing.mp3 In this episode, the three discuss how the narrative and craft of the film has inspired […]

The Pop Culture Lens on Frank Sinatra

In the twenty-eighth episode of The Pop Culture Lens podcast, Christopher Olson and I welcome back friend of the podcast and unofficial fourth co-host Clelia Sweeney to discuss the classic iconography of Frank Sinatra. In this episode, the conversation considers how Sinatra’s identity changed through the various stages of his career, but also how those changes […]

The Pop Culture Lens on Yojimbo (1961)

In the twenty-seventh episode of The Pop Culture Lens podcast, Christopher Olson and I welcome back friend of the podcast Joe Belfeuil to discuss Akira Kurosawa’s samurai classic Yojimbo (1961). In this episode, the conversation focuses on the film’s position as a transnational and transcultural pop culture text that acts as a link in a […]

The Pop Culture Lens on Wes Anderson

In the twenty-first episode of The Pop Culture Lens podcast, Christopher and I welcome friend of the podcast Shane Tilton, an assistant professor of multimedia journalism at Ohio Northern University, to discuss filmmaker Wes Anderson by focusing on his films Rushmore and Moonrise Kingdom. In this episode, our conversation focuses on whether or not to […]

Pop Culture Lens Episode 10: Mad Max (1979)

In the latest episode of our podcast, Christoper and I welcome two of our friends, and friends of the podcast, Joe Belfeuil and Clelia Sweeney, to discuss George Miller’s feature debut, Mad Max (1979). But we don’t stop there, weaving into our discussion all of the franchise, including the most recent one, Mad Max: Fury Road (2015). […]

Podcast Episode #5: Planet of the Apes

In the fifth episode of The Pop Culture Lens podcast, Christopher Olson and I discuss one of my all time favorite pop culture texts: Planet of the Apes. I fell in love with this movie, this franchise — as dorky as it got in the 1970s — because of how many layers of meaning I […]

An Encoding-Decoding-Recoding Model of Media Studies

This blog posts continues the dissection of my dissertation that I began by introducing the topic of gendered media engagings earlier this year. This post focuses on a model I used in my dissertation to understand the array of media studies conducted to investigate the ways in which gender is involved in how people engage […]

A Judaic Take on Exorcism in The Possession

One of the first movies we could qualify as being exorcism cinema was not concerned with the Catholic approach to possession and exorcism. Instead, it showed us this conflict from an older religious perspective, Judaism. In 1937, a Polish movie called Der Dibuk or The Dybbuk was released as one of the first movies filmed […]

Sexist Tensions in Geekdom: Why? Just, Why?

The title of this blog post could well have been “______ Tensions in Geekdom: Why? Just, Why?”, but I think that would’ve messed with the URL and broken the WWW. Honestly, tho, “sexist” could just as well be “racist” or “ageist” or “homophobic” or any other “-ism” relevant in our divided and catalogued world. It […]

Nicolas Winding Refn and the Construction of a Stable Masculinity: Part IV

Christopher Olson continues his discussion of the construction of masculinity in the films of Nicolas Winding Refn by analyzing the violent portrayal of the main characters. Does this type of portrayal glorify or condemn such violence? Stay tuned for Olson’s thoughts on just that issue. Nicolas Winding Refn and the Construction of a Stable Masculinity: […]