Class contexts in popular drama and horror cinema and TV

This study aims to critically approach representations of class in specific recent popular drama/horror films and TV series, notably Parasite, Joker, Squid Games (Season 1) and The Menu, which achieved worldwide popularity and success over the last few years. Produced in times of various global crises, such as economic recession, environmental catastrophes, pandemics, and war, these productions reflect the current, critical historical conjuncture. Class is a central denominator of crisis symptomatic of late capitalist reproduction processes. Drawing on narrative analysis, class constructions are theorised through the psychoanalytical notion of the abject (Kristeva 1982). The ridiculed, feared, and loathed working-class is abjected; simultaneously though, the upper class also emerges as abject, demystified and represented as mediocre, and sinister. A political understanding of class struggle, however, remains absent in these productions. This is connected to the material and structural limitations of popular culture.