From the asylum detention camps of Years and Years (2019) to the ICE raids of One Battle After Another (2025) to the quietly devastating Fourth of July plotline of The Pitt (2025), screen culture has emerged as one of the most urgent sites for representing — and in some cases anticipating — the treatment of immigrants in the contemporary United States and Europe. This paper examines how recent television and film navigate the fine line between political foreshadowing and real-time reflection, tracing a through-line from Russell T Davies's near-future dystopia to Paul Thomas Anderson's Pynchon adaptation to the procedural realism of The Pitt's emergency room, where a Haitian boy's blown-off fingers become a quiet indictment of a deportation regime that has left him and his sister entirely alone. Drawing on Stuart Hall's encoding/decoding framework and Raymond Williams's concept of "structures of feeling," the paper argues that these texts operate across a spectrum: some, like Years and Years, project present anxieties into speculative futures; others, like One Battle After Another, arrive already overtaken by the reality they depict; while still others, like The Pitt, embed immigration's human costs within the procedural rhythms of everyday institutional life, rendering them visible precisely because they are not foregrounded. Together, these works suggest that dystopia is no longer a genre of warning but of documentation — and that the screen has become, for many viewers, the primary space in which the human consequences of border policy are made legible.

Authors:
Margaret Tally, Empire State University, United States

About the Presenter(s)
Margaret Tally is Full Professor of Social and Public Policy at the School for Graduate Studies of the State University of New York, Empire State College. She is the author of Television Culture and Women’s Lives: Thirtysomething and the Contradictions of Gender(1995). She has also edited three book collections with Betty Kaklamanidou, HBO's Girls: Questions of Gender, Politics, and Millennial Angst(2014), The Millennials on Film and Television: Essays on the Politics of Popular Culture (2014), and Politics and Politicians in Contemporary US Television(2016), The Rise of the Anti-Heroine in TV’s Third Golden Age(2016) and The Limits of #Metoo in Hollywood: Gender and Power in the Entertainment Industry (2021, McFarland Press).

See this presentation on the full schedule – On Demand Schedule

Bookmark