Fear and loathing at the multiplex: everyday anxiety in the post-industrial city

Abstract

The adoption of risk as a common part of contemporary societal construction has been tied to an environment of proliferation, multiplication, specialism, counterfactual guess-work, and, above all, anxiety. Deliberations on the growth of anxiety and fear have concentrated largely upon the impact of globalisation and the advent of new technological regimes. However, as discussed here ‘ambient fears' and anxieties can saturate the social spaces of everyday life. Hence, this paper examines a mundane and routine social activity—cinema-going—to demonstrate that fear, risk and anxiety are deeply embedded in the fabric of contemporary capitalist cities, shaping all manner of social practices. A central argument within this paper is that fear is inescapably caught up in the fabrication of social difference, with the strategies of risk avoidance that people practice in their everyday lives reinforcing boundaries between Self and Other.