Waiting for Louis Prima: On the possibility of a sociology of film

This article discusses the difficulties inherent in teaching a sociology co urse through use of feature-length film. Despite these difficulties, I argu e that contemporary Hollywood movies are useful tools to illustrate some of our discipline's central concepts and to serve as an exercise in the appli cation of the sociological imagination. Films, however, come prepackaged wi th a particular worldview or theoretical perspective. Thus, they require th e sociologist to consider the theory-laden nature of movies as part of the analysis of social life that they depict. in order to do this, I analyze th ree groups of movies through the use of sociological concepts such as Grisw old's "cultural diamond" and Jameson's ideology/utiopa distinction.