VIRTUAL: Livable Cities – New York

Abstract

The paper explores the representation of American cities in two Hollywood indie films, Little
Miss Sunshine (2006) and The Florida Project (2017), through the perspectival gaze of their child protagonists. Both films map the lived experience in great American cities, California and Florida respectively, and comment on their rampant consumer culture, which in turn, is juxtaposed against the thwarted hopes and aspirations of those who are at the margins. The child figures in these films engage with the urban spaces and cityscapes, negotiate their ‘selves’ and point toward those issues that need our collective attention. Through their distinctive aesthetics and mise en scene, these films reimagine cities as hybrid sites where identities intersect with media-driven consumerist culture, resulting in the urban experience which is near-saturated with digital images and technology. Little Miss Sunshine blends the popular American sub-genres of the dysfunctional family, road movie, and the all-too-familiar theme of the American Dream. Similarly, The Florida Project provides us with a glimpse into the underbelly of the darker side of Florida, tracing the lives of the disenfranchised and how their subsidised housing development ‘projects’ pose a stark contrast to the ‘Disneyfied’ vacation resorts, shopping boulevards and palatial mansions of the urban rich. Both films render the imageries of contemporary American cities while offering a critique of the ever-widening chasm between social groups in America. In the global tradition of Iranian New Wave cinema, the above two films focus on the figure of the child, who embodies contemporary anxieties in an increasingly skewed urban society. The worldview of the child protagonists reveals the visual saturation of consumer media culture expressed in the cinematic construction of sensory dimensions of the city. The paper will employ the theories of habitus (Bourdieu) and the postmodern theories of Jean Baudrillard and Fredric Jameson