Politics Go to the Movies

Movies and television series are excellent tools for teaching political science and international relations. Understanding how stories in various film and television genres illustrate political ideas can better assist students and fans understand and appreciate the political subtext of these media products. This book will examine five genres and their variants. The first is gangster movies, focusing on American and other organized crime, which reached its zenith in the films of Francis Ford Coppola and Martin Scorsese. Second are political thriller and action movies and television series. Superhero films and TV deal more with modern characters who seek to serve society as they deal with personal struggles and their individual identities. Fourth are war movies, which tend to promote positive images of wars when wars are perceived as successful, but can include antiwar messages when wars turn badly. Fifth are Western movies, which fell out of favor in the 1970s and 1980s, but have undergone a renaissance since the 1990s. Westerns can be taken as either political parables, or as meditations on policing, anarchy, community organization and informal leadership. These genres all offer escape, but can also offer political lessons.