"My Favorite Movie Is Fight Club": Film Bros, Cult Taste, and the Performance of Cinephilia (South Atlantic Modern Language Association: SAMLA)
Atlanta, GA
Organization: South Atlantic Modern Language Association: SAMLA
Event: South Atlantic Modern Language Association: SAMLA
This panel invites papers that critically engage the figure of the film bro—not merely as a consumer of cinema, but as an aesthetic persona, cultural project, and identity performance. Part philosopher, part unintentional performance artist, the film bro is committed to the gospel of “real cinema”—a belief system forged through dorm room posters, Letterboxd screeds, and unwavering devotion to a canon of edgy, auteur-driven films (yes, Drive).
We seek explorations of how cinematic taste functions as a gendered, racialized, and classed performance of cultural capital. What does it mean to “like Fight Club too much,” and why has that become both a meme and a red flag? How do irony, sincerity, and self-stylization blur in digital cinephile culture? With the rise of algorithmic recommendation systems and TikTok/Letterboxd cinephilia, the film bro is no longer just a gatekeeper—he’s a tragicomic protagonist in an ongoing drama of taste, masculinity, and aesthetic overcommitment.
This panel welcomes papers that:
Critique the masculinist infrastructures of film canon formation
Examine cult taste as cultural performance or social currency
Explore queer interventions in cinephilia and bro-coded viewership
Interrogate the memeification of bad taste and cringe masculinity
Reflect on auteur worship, cinephilic seriousness, and aesthetic posturing
Drawing from theorists like Bourdieu, Sianne Ngai, Richard Dyer, and new media/meme studies, we invite both close readings and theoretical provocations that illuminate how cinematic taste becomes a site of affective attachment, performative identity, and cultural cringe.
Submission deadline: 1September 2025
Contact: marambele.docx@gmail.com'
Submission guidelines: 300-500 word abstract submited on the portral limnk directly.
https://samla.ballastacademic.com/Home/S/19394
Mara Mbele