Stankomir Nicieja
(Department of Anglophone Cultures, University of Opole)
Abstract:
In the contemporary job market characterized by stagnant wages and precarious work, vast social groups are forced into an increasingly desperate struggle to maintain their livelihood and status. Assuming that one of the chief attractions of fiction films is their ability to provide imaginary solutions to pressing social problems, in my paper I want to investigate some popular contemporary cinematic representations of the post-digital life and work. I will base my presentation on close readings of three films: The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel (2012, dir. by John Madden), Ex Machina (2015, dir. by Alex Garland) and Downsizing (2017, dir. by Alexander Payne). As I will attempt to show, they may be treated as highly symptomatic expressions of the current attitudes concerning work, leisure and consumption. Moreover, the films present revealing dramatizations as well as diagnoses of the changing character of employment in the post-digital world. My analysis will focus primarily on the ideological implications of the solutions to the characters’ problems portrayed in the film. The core of my argument is that despite the ostensible triviality and absurdity of the plots, the films offer useful vantage points from which various dysfunctions of the neoliberal workplace may be examined and the mechanism sustaining them exposed.
Stankomir Nicieja is an assistant professor at the Department of Anglophone Cultures, and vice-director for research and cooperation at the Institute of English Studies, University of Opole. He has published on various aspects of the relations between literature, film and politics as well as utopian studies and film theory. He is the author of the monograph In the Shadow of the Iron Lady: Thatcherism as a Cultural Phenomenon and Its Representation in the Contemporary British Novel (published by the University of Opole Press in 2011). He also co-edited a number of volumes including Evil and Ugliness Across Literatures and Cultures (2012), Faces and Masks of Ugliness in Literary Narrative (2013), Poisoned Cornucopia: Excess, Intemperance and Overabundance Across Cultures and Literatures (2014) and The Outlandish, Uncanny, Bizarre: Culture, Literature, Philosophy (2016). His academic interests include cinema, contemporary British and American fiction and utopian studies. His latest book, Lessons from the East: Representations of China and East Asia in Contemporary Anglophone Films and Novels, was published by Peter Lang in 2018.