Hollywood Math and Aftermath

Money is Hollywood's great theme-but money laundered into something else something more. Money can be given a particular occasion and career as box office receipts casino winnings tax credits stock prices lotteries inheritances. Or money can become number and numbers can be anything: pixels batting averages votes likes. Through explorations of all these and more J.D. Connor's Hollywood Math and Aftermath provides a stimulating and original take on the equation of pictures the relationship between Hollywood and economics since the 1970s. <br/><br/>Touched off by an engagement with the work of Gilles Deleuze Connor demonstrates the centrality of the economic image to Hollywood narrative. More than just a thematic study this is a conceptual history of the industry that stretches from the dawn of the neoclassical era through the Great Recession and beyond. Along the way Connor explores new concepts for cinema studies: precession and recession pervasion and staking ostension and deritualization.<br/><br/>Enlivened by a wealth of case studies-from <i>The Big Short</i> and <i>The Wolf of Wall Street</i> to <i>Equity</i> and <i>Blackhat</i> from <i>Moneyball</i> to<i> 12 Years a Slave</i> <i>Titanic</i> to <i>Lost</i> <i>The Exorcist</i> to <i>WALLE</i> <i>Déjà Vu</i>to <i>Upstream Color Contagion</i> to <i>The Untouchables</i> <i>Ferris Bueller</i>to <i>Pacific Rim</i> <i>The Avengers</i> to <i>The Village</i>-<i>Hollywood Math and Aftermath</i> is a bravura portrait of the industry coming to terms with its own numerical underpinnings.