The Treatment of Neoliberalism by the films "Cosmopolis" and "Nightcrawler"

What is it about?

These films about capitalists in cars function as symbolic bookends of the neoliberal era, with the more recent film representing its ascendance and the earlier film depicting its potential demise. I claim that Cronenberg and Gilroy employ three dialectically interconnected tropes to film this era: capital as masquerade, capital as urban traffic, and capital as class warfare. In the final analysis, Cosmopolis and Nightcrawler, while more middlebrow that agitprop, exemplify Hollywood Left productions that attempt to cognitively map capital in the twenty-first century, and their successes and failures should be enlightening to those film and video creators trying to imagine a post-neoliberal era.

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