For the fifty-third episode of The Pop Culture Lens podcast, Christopher Olson and I are joined by friend and Ph.D. candidate Anis Rahman to consider one of the most important creators in Indian cinema: Satyajit Ray. Thanks to his Bangladeshi heritage, Anis provides important insights into the life and work of Ray. Along with these…
Tag: masculinity
Pop Culture Lens Returns with Arnold!
To start the new season, in the forty-first episode of The Pop Culture Lens podcast, Christopher Olson and CarrieLynn Reinhard are joined by unofficial third co-host Joe Belfeuil to discuss the star, screen, and political persona of Arnold Schwarzenegger. In this episode, the co-hosts review Schwarzenegger’s biography to understand where he came from and how…
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). In this episode, the three discuss how the narrative and craft of the film has inspired a…
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…
