Resumen

GARZO CAMON, Tiffany. Fear, apathy, and social control: An analysis of the film My Dinner with André. Índex [online]. 2025, n.20, pp.5-19. ISSN 2477-9199.  https://doi.org/10.26807/cav.v10i20.649v10i20.653.

This research aims to conduct a film analysis of My Dinner with André (Louis Malle, 1981) based on a close reading of both the dialogue and the cinematic device: composition, framing, rhythm, lighting, and sound. Applying a close reading methodology of key scenes (timestamps are indicated), these readings are compared with the theoretical frameworks of Michel Foucault (discipline/biopolitics), Gilles Deleuze (societies of control), Angela Davis (critique of the prison-industrial complex), and Gilles Lipovetsky (emptiness and hyperindividualism). It is argued that the film, even in its economy of means, visually and sonically articulates contemporary forms of normalization and surveillance, showing how fear and precarity are incorporated as technologies of governance. Finally, it discusses possibilities of resistance that emerge in the film’s micropolitical interstices and points out interpretive limits that should be problematized.

Palabras clave : biopolitics; discipline; control society; surveillance; precarization; subjectivity; hyperindividualism.