Cosmopolitan Aspirations in Contemporary Cinema

María del Mar Azcona teaches English and Film Studies at the University of Zaragoza. She is the author of The Multi-Protagonist Film (2010), Alejandro González Iñárritu, co-written with Celestino Deleyto (2010) and Before Sunrise (2023), also co-written with Celestino Deleyto. Among her articles are “Matt Damon: A Cosmopolitan Hero for the Mainstream” (Celebrity Studies 2018) and “The Trickster and the Fool: Matt Damon and Comedy” (Quarterly Review of Film and Video 2021). Julia Echeverría is Lecturer in English and Film Studies at the University of Zaragoza. Her research focuses on film genre theory, specifically digital cinema, virality and the representation of space. She is the author of Epidemic Cinema: The Rise of a Genre (2024). Pablo Gómez-Muñoz is Lecturer in English and Film at the University of Zaragoza (Spain). His research interests are transnational cinema, science fiction, space, borders, cosmopolitanism and precarity. He is the author of Science Fiction Cinema in the Twenty-First Century: Transnational Futures, Cosmopolitan Concerns (2023).

Introduction

The Good, the Bad and the Real: The Many Faces of the Cosmopolitan

Utopian Cosmopolitanism

1. Towards Maturity through Cosmopolitan Attempts in Party Girl (1995) and God’s Own Country (2017)

2. Seeing from the Border: Cosmopolitan Solidarity in Terminator: Dark Fate (2019)

3. Africanisms and the Western Worldview: The Cosmopolitics of Marvel’s Black Panther (2018)

Critical Cosmopolitanism

4. Metropolis as Cosmopolis in Blade Runner (1982) and Blade Runner 2049 (2017)

5. A Cosmopolitan Hero? Agent 007, Black Cosmopolitan Voodoo-Practitioners and the Globalisation of Western Cultural Images in Live and Let Die (1973)

6. Cosmopolitanism or Carnage (2011)

7. Wes Anderson’s The Darjeeling Limited (2007) through a Cosmopolitan Lens: India with A French Flavour

Everyday Cosmopolitanism

8. Aspirationally Cosmopolitan: Singapore as Cultural Imaginary in 7 Letters (2015) and Crazy Rich Asians (2018)

9. Different Ways of Being No One: Cosmopolitanisms in Manu Riche’s Problemski Hotel (2015)

10. Cosmopolitan (Non-)Cinema: Impurity, Recognition and Hospitality in The Cambridge Squatter (2016)