Michael Shapiro begins his Cinematic Political Thought: Narrating Race, Nation and Gender thus:

The second stock rule of screenwriting is that plot and dialogue should adhere to Aristotle's Poetics. Rewrite coaches often cite Aristotle's line: “Character and thought are merely obscured by a diction that is overbrilliant” (Poetics 25). Applying that advice to the above passage, I would have blue-lined at least anti-diegetic.

To be fair, perhaps Shapiro's text should not be assessed as a potential script, but he invites such a direct comparison by stating explicitly that he is attempting to write much of the book cinematically (pp. 6–7). Gilles Deleuze, moreover, served as Shapiro's Muse (his “sustained inspiration”) for this project:

By “cinematic” writing Shapiro means poststructuralism by other means. He wants to deploy jump-cuts, flash-backs, montages, and voice-overs in order to disrupt a more linear or bounded narrative and exemplify an alternative politics of shifting and unsettled identities. Cinematic presentations both show and tell, but the former can undercut the latter. The question we might pose about Shapiro's overall aspiration toward filmic creativity is: Should we regard this particular production, departing as it does from industry standards, as an indie flick, an art-house experiment, or a mockumentary?

Shapiro assembles and directs an ensemble cast of Deleuze, Derrida, Foucault, Lyotard, Guattari, Benjamin—and even Carl Schmitt makes an important cameo appearance—but Kant is the star of the show. Some might question booking Kant as a headliner (hardly the show-stopper with his humorless penchant for talking-head monologue), but Shapiro insists that Kant has been unfairly typecast as a mere method actor posing as high-minded aesthete. Indeed, that is the high concept for the book as a whole: Kant, whose dramatic range allegedly extends from cognitive philosophizing to proto-poststructuralist performativity, can be enlisted to illuminate the real-world effects of several off-beat and low-budget films, which in turn allegedly confirm his cross-over appeal. Does the stretch work? Will Shapiro be able to attract financial backing to get the idea off the ground? If not, what is the point? Why not call a book a book and title it simply and aptly, Kantian Political Thought? (The third time-tested rule of screenwriting is, know your genre; keep within it; avoid oddball mixes.)

As a work of political theory, Cinematic Political Thought makes many bold, intelligent, and impressive moves. It is not the first book to move toward a confluence of political theory and film studies; one recalls Stanley Cavell's landmark The World Viewed (1980) or, more recently, Michael Rogin's Blackface, White Noise (1998), Mary Nichols's Reconstructing Woody (1998), Hanna Pitkin's The Attack of the Blob (1998), and others. Shapiro's eclectic appropriation of Kant, on reflection, makes perfectly good sense, even if the presentation is polemically pushed and rushed. Shapiro contends that Kant's legacy ought to be understood not only in philosophically stabilizing terms but also in critically political, even radical ways. Kant constructed personhood not just as an apprehending structure of cognition but as a judging intellect that emerges in a political context.

Scratch at the transcendentalist overlay and right below the surface you will always find a Kantian acknowledgment of untamed contingency. Kant moves toward enlightenment neither initially nor even ultimately to introduce unquestionable universalist truths but, rather, to resist ongoing closed-mindedness. He mobilizes a global citizenship that opposes parochial allegiances. In the Kantian scheme of things, the world cannot be understood and experienced without mediation, and any mediating structure betrays some kind of productive human intervention. Shapiro is ambivalent about many of Kant's contributions but finally views him as a critical healer, not as a polarizing dogmatist, which is why he deserves star billing.

The purported connection between Kant and cinema is that both produce an enlarged subject that assumes communicability to a wide audience. The unspoken trick is that such a hyperbolic fantasy can in turn condition and shape further experience, which is to say that in the modern mass-mediated world, the mass media are not simply reflective but also implicitly productive of our cultural meta-narratives; and those backlighted productions often provide arrested, entrenched, occluded, and invidious forms of identity. Kant's formal critique of modernity, invoking a sensus communis, is instructive, according to Shapiro, but at the same time is insufficient to resist institutionalized forms of intelligibility.

To decode even further the circulatory politics informing modern movies and vice versa, Shapiro turns from Kant to post-Kantian Nietzscheans Foucault and Deleuze. In order to exhibit rival notions of time (á la Deleuze) in order to expose racialized narratives involving sports disciplines (á la Foucault), Shapiro compares two movies, Hoop Dreams and Barry Lyndon. In short, one is frenetically fast, and the other is painfully slow (trust me, do not assign Barry Lyndon to undergraduates as much as you might respect Shapiro's viewer picks); and the separate pacing evinces and reinforces separate epistemes of temporality.

Subsequent chapters take on globalization (and its discontents) and masculinity (and its discontents), respectively. According to Shapiro, many of our nationalist and globalist narratives are based on identity stories that become fix-framed in a collective imaginary. Puritans, Zionists, CPAs, Christian ecumenicals, and security analysts such as Sam Huntington are all prone to such exclusionary conjurations. Shapiro draws upon the movies Father of the Bride II and Lone Star to make his case. Anxiously heteronormative notions of masculinity and whiteness, prominent in the 1980s and 1990s and bound up with statist and capitalist concerns, can be teased out through a close screening of To Live and Die in LA, aided by Shapiro's astute commentary. Since a copy of this film may not be available in your neighborhood Blockbuster, one has to wonder about it, Father of the Bride II, and some of Shapiro's other citations: How representative or influentially performative have such films been?

The erudite is situated right next to the kitschy, and Shapiro foregrounds his jarring juxtapositions by calling them cinematic. I see them instead as elegiac, or as another kind of jeremiad, in either case symptomatic of another possible anxiety, namely, that bookish political theory increasingly is being displaced by multimedial modalities in the late-modern world. Our filmic eye candy probably stands in some need of heavy-handed contestation, but somehow I doubt that many movie-goers will be running out of the theaters to pick up a copy of Kant's Third Critique as a result of this book. From my armchair perspective, I give Cinematic Political Theory a thumbs up for learned decency, a thumbs down for prolixity, and a “PG” rating overall (recommended for postgraduates only).