The early Social Text collective turned to film analysis and mass culture critique as a way of exploring, in Fredric Jameson's words, new "interpretive possibilities" for Marxism. It is clear from the journal's "Prospectus," published in the first issue, that the ultimate object of such interpretation was not, in fact, cinematic. It was, rather, the problematic bounded by the question of culture's relationship to economy and state, a problematic the collective initially characterized in terms of ideology and narrative and  

the avant-garde's dialectical engagement with mass culture. Social Text, the "Prospectus" proposed, would probe "the interaction between the emancipatory and repressive, critical and reproductive, utopian and integrative tendencies" in forms routinely polarized along axes of "high" and "mass" art (ST 1, 1979). Jameson's film essays explored these questions directly, not only the first issue's well-known "Reification and Utopia in Mass Culture," which examined Jaws and the Godfather movies, but also short pieces on films such as The Shining and Diva. They were not 

intended as works of criticism as much as heuristic examples of what a renewed practice of leftist cultural critique within the humanities might look like, a practice that pushed beyond paranoid models of manipulation, populist anti-intellectualisms, and the "unsatisfactory" elements of Frankfurt School aesthetic hierarchies. "It was my contribution to problems that we were all working on," Jameson explains today. Stanley Aronowitz, whose essay "Film: The Art Form of Late Capitalism" also appeared in the first issue of the journal, puts it more baldly. "You're just supposed to aestheticize everything," he recalled recently, referring to existing paradigms for film studies at the time. "And that I refused to do." Like Spielberg's shark, film emerges from the pages of Social Text as a polysemic object, capable of organizing social anxieties and uniting disparate, conflictual positions. Both are behemoths that demand to be attacked and that promise, in the ensuing chase, the thrill of discovering utopian pathways to new forms of social integration. Of course, in the case of Jaws, this integration turns out to be, to quote Jameson, a "new and spurious kind of fraternity," one that excludes and disempowers even as it raises the faint possibility of alternative forms of social organization. For the early Social Text collective, however, writing and thinking about film, or television, or avant-garde theater (all represented in the first issue's dossier on mass culture) was integral to the effort to reimagine what a journal could do -- how it could awaken "the ineradicable drive toward collectivity," identifying bonds across previously polarized cultural realms that might jog intellectuals into creating new kinds of alliances with each other and with leftists outside the university.