Tim Jones
I like punk rock, comic books, and giant robots. I have a Bachelor's in English from Louisiana State University, a Master's in Popular Culture from Bowling Green State University, and am returning to LSU for a Ph.D in English. I mostly write about comics, but sometimes about music and tv.
Supervisors: Jeremy Wallach and Brannon Costello
Address: Baton Rouge, Louisiana, United States
Supervisors: Jeremy Wallach and Brannon Costello
Address: Baton Rouge, Louisiana, United States
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Papers by Tim Jones
The Western neoliberal cool of the previous sentence is easily summarized by an enduring descriptive epithet: “hipster.” In the twenty-first century, hipster tends to be a pejorative to describe someone or something who appears unnecessarily concerned with asserting their individual coolness against popular acceptance; one popular joke goes “Why did their hipster burn their mouth? They started eating before it was cool.” For this reason I prefer to describe what is for some “hipster culture” as “indie,” as hipster seems to me to be a bad-faith dismissal of aesthetic pursuit that comes dangerously close to anti-intellectualism. Hipsters are indie, but to be indie is not necessarily to be hipster. Indie is a sort of loose generic term that comes from a by-now vestigial association with indie rock. For example, the platinum selling major label band Fun. is described as an “indie-pop” band by both Allmusic and Wikipedia, likely because their music reflects a melancholy, intellectual sensibility with spare instrumentation while still devoted to primarily to the catchiness of the vocal melody. The melancholy, intellectual sensibility is the pervading aspect of indie-ness, in music as well as the fashion of brands like Urban Outfitters and the fiction of Dave Eggers. This paper deals with the political economy of indie as it is expressed in film, drawing on the semiotic system developed over time that has led to its aesthetic.
That these films express anxieties about threats to civilization is obvious; but what is truly significant about them is their syllogisms between the bleak, grounded representation of fantasy heroes and the “real,” which in this configuration is necessarily a vision of a world in constant danger that, by the nature of the perpetual-sequel production of these films, can only be granted a temporary reprieve from catastrophe even by superhuman effort. This paper addresses the aesthetics and ethos of comic book realism in The Dark Knight and the genre’s mutations in its spiritual progeny Skyfall and Captain America 2: The Winter Soldier as an expression of a desire both to experience and avoid the post-9/11 decay of American stability.
The Western neoliberal cool of the previous sentence is easily summarized by an enduring descriptive epithet: “hipster.” In the twenty-first century, hipster tends to be a pejorative to describe someone or something who appears unnecessarily concerned with asserting their individual coolness against popular acceptance; one popular joke goes “Why did their hipster burn their mouth? They started eating before it was cool.” For this reason I prefer to describe what is for some “hipster culture” as “indie,” as hipster seems to me to be a bad-faith dismissal of aesthetic pursuit that comes dangerously close to anti-intellectualism. Hipsters are indie, but to be indie is not necessarily to be hipster. Indie is a sort of loose generic term that comes from a by-now vestigial association with indie rock. For example, the platinum selling major label band Fun. is described as an “indie-pop” band by both Allmusic and Wikipedia, likely because their music reflects a melancholy, intellectual sensibility with spare instrumentation while still devoted to primarily to the catchiness of the vocal melody. The melancholy, intellectual sensibility is the pervading aspect of indie-ness, in music as well as the fashion of brands like Urban Outfitters and the fiction of Dave Eggers. This paper deals with the political economy of indie as it is expressed in film, drawing on the semiotic system developed over time that has led to its aesthetic.
That these films express anxieties about threats to civilization is obvious; but what is truly significant about them is their syllogisms between the bleak, grounded representation of fantasy heroes and the “real,” which in this configuration is necessarily a vision of a world in constant danger that, by the nature of the perpetual-sequel production of these films, can only be granted a temporary reprieve from catastrophe even by superhuman effort. This paper addresses the aesthetics and ethos of comic book realism in The Dark Knight and the genre’s mutations in its spiritual progeny Skyfall and Captain America 2: The Winter Soldier as an expression of a desire both to experience and avoid the post-9/11 decay of American stability.