Includes bibliographical references (p. 265-294).

The new Hollywood / Thomas Schatz -- Reclaiming the social : pedagogy, resistance, and politics in celluloid culture / Henry A. Giroux -- Pretty is as pretty does : free enterprise and the marriage plot / Hilary Radner -- The unauthorized auteur today / Dudley Andrew -- Loose canons : constructing cultural traditions inside and outside the academy / Ava Preacher Collins -- Spectacles of death : identification, reflexivity, and contemporary horror / Jeffrey Sconce -- Hardware and hardbodies, what do women want? : a reading of Thelma and Louise / Sharon Willis -- Thelma and Louise and the cultural generation of the new butch-femme / Cathy Griggers -- Taboos and totems : cultural meanings of The silence of the lambs / Janet Staiger -- The powers of seeing and being seen : Truth or dare and Paris is burning / Ann Cvetkovich -- Spike Lee and the fever in the racial jungle / Ed Guerrero.

Split skins : female agency and bodily mutilation in The little mermaid / Susan White -- The big switch : Hollywood masculinity in the nineties / Susan Jeffords -- Between apocalypse and redemption : John Singleton's Boyz n the hood / Michael Eric Dyson -- Making cyborgs, making humans : of terminators and blade runners / Forest Pyle -- Genericity in the nineties : eclectic irony and the new sincerity / Jim Collins.