Fade to black : picturing mortality in contemporary popular film /

Abstract

This thesis attempts to understand representations of death in contemporary popular film within a framework that posits mortality as a category of particular social and political importance for the way we understand both individual subjectivity and social responsibility in the postmodern cultural moment. It addresses concerns over the social organizing categories of time and space, and performs a sustained consideration of predominant themes related to the popular representation of death, such as contingency, existential.meaning, and temporal finitude. Death consciousness and social consciousness are shown to be not just intertwined, but also vitally dependent on one another, and the analyses undertaken are ultimately aimed at making these intersections explicit in order • l to think through their potential implications for challenging consumer capitalist hegemony and envisioning the possibility of progressive social change through the lens of our mortality.