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Introduction
In this paper I want to argue for a notion of cinema as political critique. In order to make sense of this idea and render it more concrete, I will draw on fragments of the political theory of Jürgen Habermas and will discuss and give an analysis of a popular and relatively recent Hollywood film: Gary Ross's Pleasantville (1998). Reading Habermasian themes in and through Pleasantville , I will argue that this text can be seen as a concrete instance of political critique, and, more particularly, as a form of political critique that ethically implies a certain conception of freedom. Now, although I have try to do this elsewhere, my objective here is not to engage in a critical analysis of the concept of ethico-political autonomy found in Habermas, nor is it to simply illustrate or popularize aspects of Habermasian political theory (Porter and Porter, 2003; Porter, 2005, 2006). Rather, the aim of the following is to begin to provide a sense of how cinema can cinematically express or engender political concepts and engage in forms of political critique.
In the first part of the chapter, I will engage in a Habermasian reading of Pleasantville . More particularly, I will suggest that Pleasantville tracks a discernible and palpable tension between, what Habermas would call, 'ethical freedom' and 'ethical life', expressing a critical sensitivity with regard to how the latter may be anchored in, and governed by, traditional forms of the 'good' that necessarily curtail the autonomy of the subject. Off the back of this reading, I will attempt, in the second part, to make sense of the claim that cinema can cinematically engender political thought and critique. More particularly, I will suggest that a cinematic text such as Pleasantville has the capacity not only to, for example, illustrate a Habermasian concept of autonomy, but also, and this is vital, to reconstruct, reshape or make it different to the degree that the concept is expressed cinematically, or in accordance with a cinematic or visual form. Indeed, pressing the point even further, it could be argued that this cinematic reshaping of a concept such as autonomy is an expression of autonomy, of the autonomy of cinema itself to engender political thought and critique. This, indeed,...