Assoc. Professor, Assoc. Chair

Film & Media Studies

Scott’s areas of teaching and research concern psychoanalytic theory, film theory, popular culture, and political media.

His first book, Beyond Bias: Conservative Media, Documentary Form, and the Politics of Hysteria, offers the first book-length study of contemporary right-wing documentaries, identifying in the films an acute strand of hysterical posturing endemic to U.S. conservativism more broadly. In its hysterical mode, conservative media emphasizes form over content, relies on the spectacle of debate to avoid substantive dialogue, mimics the aesthetic devices of its opponents, reduces complex political issues to moral dichotomies, and relies on excessive displays of opinion to produce so much mediated "noise" as to drown out alternative perspectives or viewpoints. Though often derided for its reliance on nonsense or hyperbole, Scott argues, conservative media marshals incoherence as an aesthetic and rhetorical weapon meant to bolster the political status quo by confusing those audiences who come into its orbit.

His next book project examines issues of racial capitalism, financial speculation, realism, and psychoanalytic theory, and is tentatively titled, Derivative Desires: Cinema and Psychoanalysis in the Financial Era.

Along with Todd McGowan, Scott co-organized and hosted the first two meetings of the LACK conference.

Selected Publications

Book

Beyond Bias: Documentary Form, Conservative Media, and the Politics of Hysteria (Oxford University Press, 2021).

Articles

"I'm not a racist...but": Conservative media and the plasticities of color-blind racism." NECSUS: European Network for Cinema and Media Studies (Spring 2022).

 

"“There is no pandemic”: On Memes, Algorithms and other Interpassive Forms of Right-wing Disbelief." CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture 24.4 (2022).

 

“Circumstantial Sublimation and Steven Soderbergh’s Ordinary Objects.” Psychoanalysis, Culture & Society 23.2 (June 2018): 123-40.

 

"Alternating Influences: Sublimation in Time-Travel Cinema." World Picture 13 (Spring 2018) 1-28.

 

"'The Things You Don't Choose': Ethics, Singularity, and Gone Baby Gone (2007)." Discourse: Journal for Theoretical Studies in Media and Culture 39.1 (Winter 2017): 117-39.

 

“Improvisational Ethics and Moral Interfaces in Déjà Vu (2006).” Cultural Critique 97 (Fall 2017): 105-27.

 

"Seeing, Sensing, Saying: Holding Patterns in The Homesman (2014)," Intertexts 21.1-2 (Spring-Fall 2017): 67-88.

 

“Beyond Bias: Stock Imagery and Paradigmatic Politics in Citizens United Documentaries.” Jump Cut 56 (Fall 2016).

 

“The Price of Knowledge: Hysterical Discourse in Anti-Michael Moore Documentaries.” The Comparatist 39 (October 2015): 80-100.

 

Guest Editor and Introduction, “The Digital Subject.” Psychoanalysis, Culture & Society 18.1 (Spring 2013): 56-62.

 

“Auto-Motivations: Digital Cinema and Kiarostami’s Relational Aesthetics.” The Velvet Light Trap 66 (Fall 2010): 26-35.

 

“Phatic Touch, or, The Instance of the Gadget in the Unconscious.” Paragraph 33.3 (Fall 2010): 374-89.

Regular Classes

FM101 Introduction to Film Studies

FM200 Psychoanalysis, Culture and Society (Block Away in Los Angeles, CA)

FM203 Media and Psychoanalysis

FM300 Film History and Theory

FM401 Senior Thesis (Critical)