‘No Going Back to Normal:’ Spectacle and Premediation in Contemporary Hollywood Cinema

Abstract

This work examines three recent films, Garland’s Civil War, Esmail’s Leave the World Behind, and Bigelow’s House of Dynamite as expressions of contemporary political anxiety in the Trump era, with each staging a crisis of indeterminate cause within a distinct dramatic space: journalistic, domestic, and governmental. The aim is to investigate how Hollywood cinema has internalized the epistemological chaos and destabilized informational landscape of the current moment from the perspective of Kellner’s theory of spectacle and Grusin’s concept, “premediation.”