{"title":"Haunting Lost Futures: The Crises of Space and Time under Neoliberalism in Support The Girls","authors":"Victoria Fleming","doi":"10.24140/ijfma.v8.n2.04","DOIUrl":null,"url":null,"abstract":"Andrew Bujalski’s film, Support the Girls, offers insight into the frayed social bonds shaped by neoliberalist ethos over the last forty years. These frayed bonds are indicative of the spatial-temporal suspension that have come to shape our lives under neoliberalism. Trapped in the precarious yet perpetual present, haunted by the stabilizing dreams of the past, we concurrently mourn for our lost futures. Despite feeling anchored within our ostensibly immovable present, we nonetheless remain affectively bound to the belief that, perhaps, things will change this time as we continue engaging with the very objects and systems perpetuating our malaise, alienation, and precarity. In this article, I argue that Support the Girls represents the temporal and spatial disjuncture characterizing post-modernism and the age of neoliberalism. Support the Girls reflects the impasse marred by affective relations of cruel optimism as conceptualized by theorist Lauren Berlant that marks our temporal present, while the characters continue occupying the non-places defining Mark Fisher’s notion of hauntology and the slow cancellation of the future. As illustrated in Support the Girls, this temporal and spatial dispossession defining late capitalism has stripped Lisa (played by Regina Hall), the general manager of a local Hootersesque restaurant and sports bar called Double Whammies, and the cabal of young women she manages, of any material relations of collective solidarity, replacing these collective bonds with empathy as a form of conflict resolution.","PeriodicalId":36220,"journal":{"name":"International Journal of Film and Media Arts","volume":"29 17","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0000,"publicationDate":"2023-11-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":"0","resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":null,"PeriodicalName":"International Journal of Film and Media Arts","FirstCategoryId":"1085","ListUrlMain":"https://doi.org/10.24140/ijfma.v8.n2.04","RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":null,"ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":null,"EPubDate":"","PubModel":"","JCR":"Q3","JCRName":"Arts and Humanities","Score":null,"Total":0}
引用次数: 0
Abstract
Andrew Bujalski’s film, Support the Girls, offers insight into the frayed social bonds shaped by neoliberalist ethos over the last forty years. These frayed bonds are indicative of the spatial-temporal suspension that have come to shape our lives under neoliberalism. Trapped in the precarious yet perpetual present, haunted by the stabilizing dreams of the past, we concurrently mourn for our lost futures. Despite feeling anchored within our ostensibly immovable present, we nonetheless remain affectively bound to the belief that, perhaps, things will change this time as we continue engaging with the very objects and systems perpetuating our malaise, alienation, and precarity. In this article, I argue that Support the Girls represents the temporal and spatial disjuncture characterizing post-modernism and the age of neoliberalism. Support the Girls reflects the impasse marred by affective relations of cruel optimism as conceptualized by theorist Lauren Berlant that marks our temporal present, while the characters continue occupying the non-places defining Mark Fisher’s notion of hauntology and the slow cancellation of the future. As illustrated in Support the Girls, this temporal and spatial dispossession defining late capitalism has stripped Lisa (played by Regina Hall), the general manager of a local Hootersesque restaurant and sports bar called Double Whammies, and the cabal of young women she manages, of any material relations of collective solidarity, replacing these collective bonds with empathy as a form of conflict resolution.
安德鲁·布贾斯基的电影《支持女孩们》深入剖析了过去四十年来新自由主义思潮塑造的支离破碎的社会纽带。这些磨损的纽带表明了在新自由主义下塑造我们生活的时空悬浮。被困在不稳定但永恒的现在,被过去稳定的梦想所困扰,我们同时哀悼我们失去的未来。尽管感觉自己被固定在表面上不可移动的当下,但我们仍然强烈地相信,也许,随着我们继续与那些使我们萎靡不振、疏离和不稳定的物体和系统接触,事情会发生变化。在这篇文章中,我认为支持女孩代表了后现代主义和新自由主义时代的时空脱节。《支持女孩》反映了被残酷乐观主义的情感关系所破坏的僵局,正如理论家劳伦·伯兰特所定义的那样,这标志着我们现在的时间,而角色继续占据着非地方,定义了马克·费舍尔的鬼魅学概念,以及未来的缓慢取消。正如《支持女孩》(Support the Girls)中所描述的那样,这种定义晚期资本主义的时空剥夺剥夺了当地一家名为Double Whammies的Hootersesque餐厅和运动酒吧的总经理丽莎(由雷吉娜·霍尔(Regina Hall)饰演)和她管理的一群年轻女性,剥夺了集体团结的任何物质关系,用同理心取代了这些集体纽带,作为一种解决冲突的形式。