The sociologist Michael Goldman argues that “the 2008 global financial crisis did not bring down a system; it helped to create one,” a system where, as Fredric Jameson suggested in 2016, “today, all politics is about real estate.” Drawing on research from her book project on real estate and American film and television after 2008, Martha Shearer’s talk focuses on Inherent Vice (Paul Thomas Anderson, 2014) and A Ghost Story (David Lowery, 2017) as two examples of film/television texts produced since the global financial crisis that work through genre (the conspiracy film, the haunted house film) to critically reflect on real estate as a formal and representational problem.

Dr Martha Shearer is Lecturer/Assistant Professor in Film Studies at University College Dublin. She is the author of New York City and the Hollywood Musical: Dancing in the Streets (Palgrave Macmillan, 2016) and co-editor of two books: with Julie Lobalzo Wright, Musicals at the Margins: Genre, Boundaries, Canons (Bloomsbury, 2021) and with Aaron Hunter, Women and New Hollywood: Gender, Creative Labor, and 1970s American Cinema (Rutgers University Press, 2023). She is currently writing a book on real estate and American film and television after 2008. 

By: Lawrence Webb
Last updated: Thursday, 9 October 2025