Soraya Murray, "Technothriller: Film and the American Imagination" (MIT Press, 2026)
About this episode
Soraya Murray discusses her book on technothrillers and their reflection of societal anxieties about technology in American cinema.
Technothriller: Film and the American Imagination (MIT Press, 2026) is the first dedicated examination of popular movies classified as “thrillers” that channel societal anxiety or dread about advanced technologies like supercomputers, robotics, AI, biotech, military weaponry, and surveillance culture. Technothriller is about the changing imagination of technology within an American context and its role in engineering some of the most profound ideologies of modern life. Soraya Murray is a Professor in the Film and Digital Media Department at the University of California, Santa Cruz. Her work explores the visual culture of innovation, advanced computation, and its imaginaries as imaged in popular American films, for which technology assumes a central role. Murray’s first book, On Video Games: The Visual Politics of Race, Gender and Space (I.B. Tauris, 2018, paperback 2021), examines popular video games like Assassin’s Creed, Spec Ops: The Line, Metal Gear Solid, and Grand Theft Auto as visual culture. She currently serves as Provost of Porter College, UCSC.
People in this episode
Guest: Soraya Murray
Topics covered
- technothrillers
- American imagination
- advanced technologies
- societal anxiety
- visual culture
- film studies
Keywords
- technothriller
- film
- American imagination
- technology
- societal anxiety
- visual culture
- advanced computation
Mentioned in this episode
Organizations: University of California, Santa Cruz
Books & works: Technothriller: Film and the American Imagination, On Video Games: The Visual Politics of Race, Gender and Space, Assassin’s Creed, Spec Ops: The Line, Metal Gear Solid, Grand Theft Auto
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