Hollywood, Bike Messengers, and the New Economy

Abstract

The sociological study of popular cinema provides an analytic entry point for exploring how economic realities are given meaning through cultural products. In this paper, I compare how two Hollywood movies about bike messengers, Quicksilver and Premium Rush, position their main characters in relationship to the new economy. Both films provide commentaries on work and social class, but, as products of unique socio-historical periods, I argue that their commentaries differ significantly. Produced in the 1980s, Quicksilver uses messengering as a form of middle-class redemption, allowing the protagonist to return to the world of capitalist finance. By contrast, as a product of the Great Recession, Premium Rush offers a utopian vision of self-determination for low-wage service workers at the same time that it reifies the uncertainty, unpredictability, and riskiness that increasingly characterize American labor. I also show that both films converge in their portrayal of women and working-class blacks

Recessionary games: Video games and the social imaginary of the Great Recession (2009–2015)

“…The dystopian component of these video games is combined with a component that romanticizes (post-apocalyptic) precariousness and downward mobility, in line with the analyses by Kidder (2016) and Sugg (2015) mentioned above: just like mass fiction, they are ‘commodifying’ the decline into precariousness and austerity via stories in which the hero finds the crisis to be an opportunity to redeem or regenerate himself, and sometimes to recover traits of traditional masculinity (Negra and Tasker, 2013). This is often associated with a rhetoric of regaining freedom and an epic sense of life, the imaginary of the Western and the conquest of the new ‘frontier’.…”

“…On the other hand, in the article ‘Hollywood, bike messengers and the new economy’, Kidder (2016) compares two films featuring young urban bike messengers, Quicksilver and Premium Rush , the former pre-recession and the latter post-recession. The former shows the stint as a bike messenger as a stage in the character’s life which, though romanticized, is nonetheless depicted as a phase to be overcome until he achieves upward social mobility.…”

“…Beyond the political discourses and messages from the press and ‘serious’ news genres, representations from popular media and popular digital culture also play a substantial role in these issues. Indeed, in recent years, there has been a surging interest in analysing the representations of the Great Recession in fields like film, television series, reality shows and audiovisual advertising (Banet-Weiser, 2014; Boyle and Mrozowsky, 2014; Kidder, 2016; Negra and Tasker, 2013; Vanderwees, 2013). In the case of video games, this issue has only been addressed tangentially until now (Aarseth and Backe, 2013; Oliva et al, 2016); however, it merits more in-depth research.…”

Labor Precarization: Russian Empirical Evidence

“…In Germany, about a fifth of all employees are involved in precarious work, and about a quarter of the able-bodied population -in France, Holland and Greece (Gasyukova 2015; Gialis, Tsampra 2015). Rise in uncertainty and risk are increasingly characterizing the American labor market (Kidder 2016). The processes of the employment structure deformation were manifested in Japan, South Korea, where 40% to 50% of economically employed people work on unstable employment conditions (Standing 2014; Pilling 2014).…”

Gender aspects of precarization of labour in Russian society

“…[Гасюкова, 2015;Gialis, Tsampra, 2015]. Неопределенность, непредсказуе-мость и рискованность все больше характеризуют труд американской рабочей си-лы [Kidder, 2016]. Очень ярко процессы деформации структуры занятости прояви-лись в Японии, Южной Корее, где на условиях нестабильной занятости трудятся от 40 до 50 % экономически занятых [Стэндинг, 2014;Pilling, 2014].…”