Allegories of Industry and the Limits of Reflexivity in the New Hollywood

Eruk Watschke
Visual Studies
UC Irvine

“Allegories of Industry and the Limits of Reflexivity in the New Hollywood” focused on discourses of reflexivity in recent Hollywood Cinema by tracing anxieties about the Southern California-based film industry as they arise within films and industrial rhetoric from the late 1980s to 2000s. This project associated this period with historically-specific industrial crises characterized by fundamental shifts in the deployment of new technologies, systems of marketing and distribution, and narrative paradigms. The dissertation explored the intersection between allegory and reflexivity; specifically, how allegory as an avenue of interpretation is opened up by historical modes of reflexivity in this period. This project explored the equally important archival study on-site in California studios and libraries. Investigation of trade publications, popular press, and filmmaker journals and correspondence—along with personal interviews and empirical study of audience data—are crucial to uncovering how shifting imperatives determine the ability of Hollywood to represent itself.