Current issue
No. 63, summer 2025

Editor's introduction

Media and the police state. Part 2.

U.S. ideology

A patriarchal capitalist vision of justice as presented on FX’s The Shield
by Laura Langlade

Representation will not protect you: Only Murders in the Building
and the terms of our own consumption
by Nyrema Baptiste
Through cozy crime and carceral charm, the author exposes how Only Murders in the Building teaches us to love our surveillance and call it care.

Black transmasculinity joins the force:
Police-affiliated TV roles of Brian Michael Smith
by Adrian King
Examining the acting career of Black trans man Brian Michael Smith, King explores his successful strategy to be typecast as a cop in order to find regular work in Hollywood in an anti-Black and transphobic industry.

“You’ll keep us safe/That’s who you are.”
Police representations in children’s shows
by Shayna Maskell
Using social learning theory (Bandura, 1971), this study unpacks representations of police and policing in children’s (ages 2-5) cartoons, ultimately finding they reinforce the dominant ideology of neoliberalism and capitalism that undergirds inequalities.

Subjective experience, transcendence and narratives, and repressive institutions: a phenomenological approach for Werner Herzog’s Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans (2009) and Luca Guadagnino’s Suspiria (2018)
by Yannis Mitsou
The concept of transcendence is linked to a revolt of the human body, as depicted in two iconic films that, each in their own way, explore violence, eroticism, the necessity of art, and the power structures upheld by police states.

Media and law enforcement worldwide

Identity, encounters and representation: understanding the masala hero-cops of New Bollywood 
by Ajay Pateer and Soumik Hazra
The Masala Supercop sub-genre of New Bollywood is principally based upon the narrative logic of the Brahmanical Myths, thereby evoking religious icons to normalise extrajudicial police violence committed by oppressor caste cops 

Khakee encounters:
New Bollywood’s cop-films and political agency in the age of precarity
by Megha Anwer and Anupama Arora
Two films in Rohit Shetty’s “cop universe” illustrate the new emergent interlink between the police and politics yielded by post-millennial neoliberal Hindutva. In this political economy, cops act on behalf of the state and the people as a conduit for new structures of consent formation that normalize ethnocentric, misogynistic fantasies.

Interrogating masculinities in khaki: the new male cop in Indian web series
by Rituparna Sengupta
How does the new male cop in Indian web shows challenge the violent and masculinist authority of self, society, and state and call for newer understandings of innocence, guilt, and punishment?

A dubious state:
police power and cinematic resistance in Bangladeshi popular films of the 1990s
by Md Hasan Ashik Rahman
Widely seen as commercially driven and catering to 'crude' entertainment tastes, popular Bangladeshi cinema can also be interpreted as a form of resistance, giving voice to precarious working-class audiences amid neoliberal transformations within the authoritarian state.

Underdogs in uniform: downplaying power hierarchy in a police state —
a realistic take on Visaranai and Nayattu
by Rakshit Kweera and Tushara Melepattu
We cull out the real-life ordeals of low-ranked police officers through a cinematic lens where hierarchy, political influence, gender, class, and caste struggles become prominent themes in Visaranai and Nayattu.

Cop violence and systemic oppression in
Vetrimaaran’s Visaranai and Viduthalai 1 & 2
by Swarnavel Eswaran
Vetrimaaran’s films Visaranai and Viduthalai 1 & 2 reveal striking parallels between caste-based police oppression in India and race-based brutality in the United States, where state-sanctioned violence maintains social control. This theme positions Vetrimaaran’s cinema as contributing to a global conversation on resisting institutional injustice.

Counter-hegemonic representations against police brutality and media indoctrination: The People’s Account (1986) and Racism: a Response (1990) by Ceddo Film and Video Collective
by María Piqueras-Pérez
Reconsidering the role of the media and the police in the works The People’s Account and Racism: a Response by the London-based film and video collective Ceddo.

Police, Adjective (2009), malicious compliance, and the potential of a good cop
by Christian Long
Police, Adjective reveals how, in spite of its formal and bureaucratic ingenuity, a work-to-rule approach to police work that feigns meticulous attention to evidence as an institutionally-approved way to avoid enforcing unjust laws, can at best only generate delays, exposing how working from within the policing system presents a dead end.

Surveillance, internationally. Special section

Perspectives on global surveillance: introduction to special section
by Gary Kafer
This special dossier of Jump Cut explores the global as a fraught, if not necessary, framework that brackets how media studies can produce knowledge about surveillance in ways that can foster liberatory politics across local, regional, and transnational scales of analysis.

It takes a village to raise a child (and write a book).
Mothering in the surveillance state.
review by Cara Dickason
Review of Supervision: On Motherhood and Surveillance, eds. Sophie Hamacher and Jessica Hankey. This collection of interviews, essays, poetry, and visual art explores the gendered and racialized dimensions of state, corporate, and social surveillance and their material effects on mothers, motherhood, and the act of mothering.

Dataveillance through caring for children:
motherhood, kids’ smartwatches, and everyday surveillance in China
by Jingyi Guo
The dataveillance of children gets justified in ways that become visible by studying the advertising discourse of kids’ smartwatches in China from the perspective of feminist surveillance studies.

Late-stage capitalism and the ongoing colonization of biopower
by Nick Brandt
Exploring the intentionality of Western surveillance practices and contextualizing surveillance as a biopolitical process of ongoing colonialism enacted through platform capitalism.

Mass surveillance and the crisis of dissent in Indian-occupied Kashmir
by M. Rather
Neo-colonial occupation in the twenty-first century pivots upon visual occupation of the people where the images and narratives of the colonized people are controlled and manipulated by the occupying forces. Mass surveillance (both digital and on-ground) within this context forms an integral part of the colonization of the land and people of Kashmir.

Surveillance, policing, and political prisoners then and now: an introduction to the prison world through freedom papers in 21st century Kenya
by Amed Galo Lopez
The lives of police-targeted communities and prisoners in twentieth century Kenya and beyond can be historicized through understanding their environment, interactions, and creative expressions with police, guards, other prisoners, and the outside world.

Against the [surveillance] image and Mexican perfection:
state intelligence in Plinio Avila’s visual art
by Mariel García-Montes
Surveillance art in Mexico is rooted in the visual cultures of Cold War bureaucracy: typewriter files, black and white photographs, endless photocopies.

Dizi and Turkish culture. Part 2

Introduction: new directions in Turkish television dramas
by Baran Germen
From the Special Section editor. A brief introduction to the sequel to the special section, “New Directions in Turkish Television Dramas.”

A brief look at Turkish television series
by Savaş Arslan
There is a split in Turkish TV between action-packed male-driven stories and emotional female-centered dramas. The author traces the global appeal and economic success of these dizis and the historical episodes of Turkish television history.

Televisual repatriation: an analysis of Börü (2018).
0r how to repatriate your military post-coup
by Sasha Krugman
Alper Çağlar’s 2018 limited-series Börü, following in the footsteps of its previous dizi counterparts, works openly alongside state rhetoric to repatriate the military into societal consciousness in the aftermath of the July 15th crisis. 

Families in constant crisis: Ömer’s nostalgia, critical affordances of tv genres, and shifting politics of intimacy in “New Türkiye”
by Zeynep Serinkaya Winter and Cüneyt Çakırlar
We provide a critical account of Turkish primetime TV dramas and their depictions of families-in-crisis, by locating these productions in the national context of post-state-of-emergency authoritarianism and politics of intimacy.

Political adaptation: from novel to TV series

Genre, history, and adaptation:
Sacred Games (2006/2018-19) and the Indian liberalization experience
by Feroz Hassan
Vikram Chandra's 2006 novel Sacred Games and its Netflix adaptation two decades later both allegorize Indian liberalization's entanglement with identitarian politics using tropes from the gangster film genre. But they differ in the agency they accord the Indian liberal subject in its own failure.

For decolonizing the U.S. cultural empire: The Sympathizer, novel into tv series
by Mike Budd
The Sympathizer—both the 2024 HBO series and its 2015 source novel—develop an extraordinary decolonization of the U.S. cultural and military empire and a deconstruction of Hollywood representations of the American War on Vietnam. This two-part essay combines close analysis of the TV series’ style, narrative and politics with a critical  analysis of the historical moment in which the novel and series were produced and received, especially on changing U.S. public constructions of the meaning of military service and the post-traumatic stress disorder and moral injury resulting from endless U.S. wars.

Independents

Homeland insecurity: revisiting Su Friedrich’s The Ties That Bind (1985)
by Miranda Wilson
Friedrich's innovative, intimate documentary sheds light on the current moment in U.S. politics, making evident the very ordinary ways through which authoritarianism can establish itself.

Queer ga(y)ze and desire in Flesh and Pink Narcissus
by Kel R. Karpinski
Through their portrayals of gay-for-pay hustlers, the films Flesh and Pink Narcissus, offer an expansive view of queerness and illuminate the queer history of Times Square.

Hunger for useless art in Cuba
by Miguel Coyula, translated by Cristina Venegas
Fiercely independent Cuban filmmaker and novelist Miguel Coyula reflects on the influence on his filmmaking eschewing easy labels while pursuing a deeply personal radical artistic response to the contemporary world.

Eternal Darkness as metacommentary: direct address in video games
by Ryan Banfi
Viktor Shklovsky’s concept of defamiliarization and Russian formalism are productive strategies to examine video games’ direct address rather than using Bertolt Brecht’s concept of a distancing effect (or Verfremdungseffekt or V-effect) or Augusto Boal’s Theater of the Oppressed.

Political perspectives, metaphorical and overt

First as farce, then as tragedy: mirrors of Trumpism in The Oath and Civil War
by Milo Sweedler
While The Oath (2018) refracts Trump’s farcical first term, Civil War (2024) envisions the calamitous future of Trumpism.

White sight, white strikes. Review of Nicholas Mirzoeff, White Sight: Visual Politics and Practices of Whiteness
Review by Erica Tortolani
White sight is a pervasive mechanism for control in Western society, one that seems impenetrable in today’s socio-political climate.  How did this all start?  What can we do to decolonize vision?  Nicholas Mirzoeff explains in his innovative monograph.

Postcolonial disgust — a critical reading of Spike Lee’s Bamboozled
by Kevin Rønaas
Bamboozled weaponizes postcolonial disgust to challenge the legacy of racialized entertainment, revealing how aesthetic revulsion can expose and resist the ongoing commodification of marginalized identities in a neoliberal world.

Beyond an Asian settler cinema:
Asian American media, PBS, and the settler colonial state
by Carson Wang
PBS and Asian American media exist in a sometimes-contentious symbiosis where PBS pushes a nationalist version of multiculturalism while Asian American media makers and organizations rely on PBS for funding and distribution. Conceptualizing Asian American media as settler colonial reveals underlying colonial politics.

Climate catastrophe and (post) apocalyptic TV: Don’t worry, be glum.
by Dennis Broe
As conditions worsen and crises (financial, natural, nuclear) deepen, the general trend in TV series science fiction is toward figuring not a world on the edge of collapse but rather presupposing the collapse is inevitable. These TV series instead envision the post-apocalypse such that the hurt of losing the world is replaced by the “smirk” of an ironic post-world, which nevertheless also contains the seeds of both its destruction and its remaking.

Media and affect in Asia

“In Praise of Bad Women.” Review of Darshana Sreedhar Mini, Rated A: Soft-Porn Cinema and Mediations of Desire in India
Review by Thomas Waugh
A personal and admiring review of an adventurous, brilliant and engaged book on India's soft-core porn film industry that thrived from the 1980s into the start of the twenty-first century, Rated A: Soft-Porn Cinema and Mediations of Desire in India, by the leading expert in the field Darshana Mini.

Streaming the alter-ego:
ALTBalaji, between saas-bahu sagas and fast-fashion erotica
by Akshaya Kumar and Mahima Singh
Balaji Telefilms' ideological project on television is inverted by what its digital avatar, ALTBalaji, began to deliver on its streaming platform. The journey takes us through questions of censorship and data, two central concerns at the heart of the shifts underway in the Indian media industry..

Hong Kong in transition and “aesthetic anxiety”
in the millennium films of Wong Kar-Wai
by Eriko Ong  and David Christopher
Building on the notion of “sensual aesthetics,” this essay introduces the idea of an “aesthetic of tension” that permeates Wong’s millennium films and codes them as allegorical of the Hong Kong subject’s anxiety surrounding the 1997 political hand-over.

“Wow, this is homemade.”
The cycle of main melody blockbusters and the modernizing passion
by Tingyu Chen
Contrary to the common assumption that the two aspects of “main melody” and “blockbuster” are contradictory, a pragmatic approach to investigate the aesthetics and affect of the recent cycle of main melody blockbusters argues that it indeed exploits a Hollywoodesque effects-heavy imagery to mobilize a sensory experience of national modernity.

The last word
More conversations about AI
by Julia Lesage