High Anxiety Catastrophe, Scandal, Age, and Comedy [Paperback]

... acute look at the state of contemporary culture... A humorous... book, it yields rewarding advice for our perception of reality and fiction. Back Stage / Shoot

Mellencamps ease of movement between the conceptual and the commonplace is the great strength of this work.... High Anxiety is an invaluable contribution to the cultural studies debate... Art + Text

Written with wit and flair, High Anxiety is a critique of the temporality of U.S. television, a narrative journey between Freuds texts on obsession and the cult of anxiety pervading contemporary culture. Operation Desert Storm, I Love Lucy, Anita Hill, Twin Peaks, and Oprah are a few of the subjects which form this anxious mosaic of popular culture.

PATRICIA MELLENCAMP is Professor of Art History at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. She is the author of Indiscretions: Avant-garde Film, Video, and Feminism and editor of Logics of Television and three American Film Institute monographs.

Preface

Acknowledgments

Part I: Packaging the Difference: Franchise Culture

The Search For Signs of Intelligent Life in the Universe
High Anxiety
A Method to the Madness

I. Differentiation
Passionate Consumption
Betcha Cant Eat Just One
Death and the Market

II. Obsession (Not Just a Perfume)
Rat Man
Money and Culture

III. Deregulation
Econologic: The Luster of Capital
TV and the FCC
The Global Village or the New World Information Order?

IV. Representing Difference(s)
Egad, Its Plaid
Not a Pretty Picture
Critical Differences
Anita Hill

Part II: Beyond the Pleasure Principle of Television: TV Time, History, and Catastrophe
V. Shocking Thoughts
Jump Behavior : Rene Thom
From Libido to Anxiety : Sigmund Freud

VI. Disastrous Events
Before the Fall, After the Fall: Baby Jessica and Black Monday
Death, Shock, Art: Kennedy, Walter Benjamin, and Eternal Frame
Sublime Visionló0