New Books in Film

In this episode, J. M. Tyree, the editor of Film Quarterly discusses a dossier of articles about David’s Lynch’s 2001 Mulholland Drive on its 25th anniversary with dossier editor Eileen G’Sell.

Film Quarterly (FQ) is published four times a year by the University of California Press. For more information about the journal, including subscription and submission information, please visit FQ’s website.

If you are interested in supporting the work of UC Press and its Journals Program, please consider making a charitable donation to the UC Press Foundation. To learn more about the UC Press Foundation and how to contribute, please visit UC Press’s Support Us page.

Articles mentioned:

“Uncanny Intimacies, Abject Desires,” by Eileen G’Sell (Film Quarterly 80 no. 1, Fall 2026)

“The Radical Intimacy of Rot: Mulholland Drive's Queer Proliferations,” by Laura Westengard (Film Quarterly 80 no. 1, Fall 2026)

“Sweet Dreams (Are Made of This): David Lynch, Simone de Beauvoir, and ‘Feeling Like a Feminist’,” by Lori Jo Marso (Film Quarterly 80 no. 1, Fall 2026)

“‘That’s Not My Voice’: Telephonic Logics and Paranoid Listening in Mulholland Drive,” by Temperance Aghamohammadi (Film Quarterly 80 no. 1, Fall 2026)

“‘This Is the Girl’: Mulholland Drive, Naomi Watts, and the Double Abjection of the Hollywood Starlet(s),” by Eileen G’Sell (Film Quarterly 80 no. 1, Fall 2026)

A complete list of University of California Press journals is available at UC Press Journals.

J. M. Tyree is the editor-in-chief of Film Quarterly and an associate professor in the Cinema Program at VCUarts.

A Rabkin winner for arts journalism, Eileen G'Sell is a film critic and teaching professor at Washington University in St. Louis.
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/film

Since its debut in 1984, Dragon Ball has become one of the most popular, influential, and lucrative media franchises in the world. In Next Time on Dragon Ball: Playing with a Manga and Anime Franchise (U Minnesota Press, 2026), Dr. Vincent Haddad investigates how the franchise has maintained huge global demand despite its formulaic plotlines. Examining its exhaustive repetition of storytelling forms across comics, TV series, games, and merchandise, Haddad argues that the convergence of play, fandom, and narrative made Dragon Ball an unlikely success—and a harbinger of broader shifts in the media landscape of franchises from the 1980s to the present.

Dr. Haddad conceives of Dragon Ball as a “franchise toy,” a corporate media property that is constantly remixed by its fans in ways that its owners resist but also ultimately embrace: appropriation is essential to the franchise’s popularity. Over the past forty years, Dr. Haddad argues, Dragon Ball’s deployment of familiar tropes, cultural references, and narrative forms—from classical Chinese stories and the films of Bruce Lee and Jackie Chan to American franchises like Superman and Star Wars—has invited unique transcultural play. Through diverse examples of how fans use its characters as “playthings,” Dr. Haddad shows how Dragon Ball travels across international networked fandoms, highlighting the queer, gendered, and racialized dimensions of this play.

Parsing the dynamics of “sites of conflict” between authorized media and fan content, Next Time on Dragon Ball illuminates how fan engagement across the Americas changes the parameters of what a manga and anime franchise is and can be.

This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. You can find Miranda’s interviews on New Books with Miranda Melcher, wherever you get your podcasts.
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/film

Tod Field’s Tár (2022) is one of the best ghost stories we’ve discussed on the show. The story of a troiubled genius, the film is also a wonderfully ambiguous portrat of a person persued by her past in the form of an unseen and vengerful force. Lydia Tár is by turns charismatic, repulsive, fascinating, and frightening. She’s a real person and demands a compicated response, just like the film as a whole. Part Amadeus and part Lolita, Tár is a high-water mark for anyone intrested in a portrat of the artist.

Bumper music: Gustav Mahler’s Symphony No. 5 - Trauermarsch by Jason Weinberger & WCF Symphony. Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0

If, like Lydia Tár, you’re fascinated by Mahler, check out Stephen Downes’ 2025 biography.

Please subscribe to the show and consider leaving us a rating or review. You can find over three hundred episodes wherever you get your podcasts. Follow the show on Letterboxd and email us any time at fifteenminutefilm@gmail.com with requests and recommendations. Check out Dan Moran’s substack, Pages and Frames, where he writes about books and movies, as well as his many film-related author interviews on The New Books Network. Mike Takla is on substack at The Grumbler’s Almanac.
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/film

The centerpiece of Melodrama as Provocateur (Duke UP, 2026) is an essay by Linda Williams (1946–2025). Williams was Professor of Film Studies and Rhetoric at the University of California, Berkeley. Her highly influential work reframed some of cinema’s most neglected or denigrated genres from a feminist perspective, including documentary, pornography, horror, and melodrama.

Melodrama is the focus of what would become Williams’s final project. In the last few years of her life, she was working on a project that traced melodrama’s divergent fortunes in France and the US—and argued for its enduring relevance in contemporary life and culture.

Williams's work on this project was curtailed when she suffered a stroke, the complications of which led to her death in 2025. In the wake of her passing, some of her friends, collaborators, and admirers joined together to make a book that honors and memorializes her. Not only sharing Williams’s unfinished work with the world, Melodrama as Provocateur also expands on that work through a series of essays by scholars working in melodrama studies across time, place, and media.

For New Books in Film, Alix Beeston sits down with the three editors of Melodrama as Provocateur: Christine Gledhill, an esteemed scholar of film and feminism who is presently a Visiting Professor of Cinema Studies at the University of Leeds; Laura Horak, Professor of Film Studies at Carleton University; and Elisabeth R. Anker, Professor of American Studies and Political Science and Director of Film Studies at the George Washington University.

Celebrating the model of incisive and generous research, teaching, mentorship, and collaboration Williams provided, the editors of Melodrama as Provocateur discuss the unique shape of a scholarly book generated in response to a colleague’s unfinished labor. They also take up some of Williams's provocations, including the political possibilities of melodrama in contemporary culture—from Trumpian discourse to trans cinema and beyond—and explore the kinds of labor, thought, and feeling necessary for studying melodrama as a form that moves or provokes us.

Like their book, a work forged in grief and loss, Gledhill, Horak, and Anker's conversation casts film and media scholarship as an act of collectivity and love: a bid for a better kind of world.
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/film

Cultural studies of the nineteenth century often categorize their subjects as being motivated by one of two opposing notions: a wholehearted embrace of progress or an antimodernist nostalgia. A Perfectionist Impulse: The Art of Stopping Time in the Nineteenth Century (U Minnesota Press, 2026) centers a different kind of response to the period’s newly intensified awareness of temporality and history: an obsession with preserving perfection. Engaging a diverse set of case studies, Dr. Ellery E. Foutch explores the era’s desire to forestall the march of time and immortalize the fleeting moment through art and technology.

Beginning with an investigation of artist and naturalist Titian Peale’s butterfly illustrations and specimen boxes, Dr. Foutch assesses the implications of attempts to fix animal life in the “perfect state.” She then turns to Harvard’s Ware Collection of Glass Flowers, botanical models meticulously crafted to serve as instructional tools but most famous internationally as a spectacle for tourists. Finally, she scrutinizes the period’s preoccupation with the fragility of the human body, examining artistic representations of the legendary bodybuilder Eugen Sandow, widely known during his time as the “Perfect Man.” Highlighting the paradoxical way in which these attempts at preservation ultimately sap the vitality from the organic processes they seek to arrest, Dr. Foutch uses these curious objects to unpack a deep set of cultural anxieties around decay and death.

By analyzing objects of mass culture and natural history using methods typically reserved for works of art, A Perfectionist Impulse provides a unique window into how nineteenth-century scientists, technologists, artists, and entertainers rendered a common desire for perfection and immortality. Itself a wondrous collection of attempts to capture the idealized moment, this extensively illustrated book serves as a shining example of our enduring fascination with the ephemeral.

This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. You can find Miranda’s interviews on New Books with Miranda Melcher, wherever you get your podcasts.
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/film