Sara Reilly – författare

Surveying disaster films from a Lacanian psychoanalytic perspective, this book explores the disaster film genre from its initial appearance in 1933 (The Grapes of Wrath, 1933) to its present-day form (Don’t Look Up!, 2021), laying bare the ideological unconscious at work within the genre.The Disaster Film as Social Practice examines environmental science, history, film and literature in its interdisciplinary analysis of the disaster film genre. It explores the interplay, and the dichotomy, of “restorative” and “reflective” disaster narratives. An analysis of cinema's role in symbolizing and managing collective anxiety around disaster and death narratives examines how disaster films, through their narrative structures and symbolic elements, contribute to the public's understanding and emotional processing of real-world threats, and how cinematic narratives shape and are shaped by public and private ideological discourses, reflecting deeper psychological and environmental truths. Finally, the book offers an overview of how the transformation of the disaster film genre over time tells a history through imagining the worst. Providing a nuanced understanding of the disaster film genre and its significance in contemporary culture and thought, this book will be of interest to scholars and students of film studies, cultural studies, media studies, and environmental studies.

Surveying disaster films from a Lacanian psychoanalytic perspective, this book explores the disaster film genre from its initial appearance in 1933 (The Grapes of Wrath, 1933) to its present-day form (Don’t Look Up!, 2021), laying bare the ideological unconscious at work within the genre.The Disaster Film as Social Practice examines environmental science, history, film and literature in its interdisciplinary analysis of the disaster film genre. It explores the interplay, and the dichotomy, of “restorative” and “reflective” disaster narratives. An analysis of cinema's role in symbolizing and managing collective anxiety around disaster and death narratives examines how disaster films, through their narrative structures and symbolic elements, contribute to the public's understanding and emotional processing of real-world threats, and how cinematic narratives shape and are shaped by public and private ideological discourses, reflecting deeper psychological and environmental truths. Finally, the book offers an overview of how the transformation of the disaster film genre over time tells a history through imagining the worst. Providing a nuanced understanding of the disaster film genre and its significance in contemporary culture and thought, this book will be of interest to scholars and students of film studies, cultural studies, media studies, and environmental studies.

Cinema and the Dream of the Living Machine offers a comprehensive critical history of artificial intelligence (AI) in Western cinema, tracing how films from Metropolis to contemporary science fiction transform technological anxiety into cultural fantasy.Drawing on Lacanian psychoanalysis, ideological critique, and close film analysis, the book examines how AI repeatedly appears as servant, authority, lover, weapon, and mirror of human desire. Across nine chapters, Zornado and Reilly map recurring tropes, from disembodied systems of control to intimate companion machines that shows how cinematic AI reflects capitalism, power, alienation, and the crisis of subjectivity. By treating AI not as speculative technology but as a symbolic formation, the book enables readers to understand how popular cinema diagnoses social contradictions and ethical failures, equipping students and researchers with conceptual resources to analyze contemporary AI culture with greater historical awareness, theoretical rigor, and critical clarity. Designed for scholars, graduate students, and advanced undergraduates in film studies, media studies, cultural theory, and science and technology studies, the book combines historical depth with a distinctive theoretical framework. An original “Cinematic AI Fantasy Matrix” provides readers with a practical analytical tool for comparative study in the appendix.

The book concludes with Logan, Wonder Woman 1984, and Amazon Prime’sThe Boys as distinctly reflective fantasy narratives critical of the superhero fantasy phenomenon.