In Popular Culture
In Neal Stephenson's historical fiction novel Quicksilver one of the book's chief figures, Puritan Daniel Waterhouse, appears before an illegally reconstituted Star Chamber tribunal.
In the 1983 movie The Star Chamber, Michael Douglas, playing an idealistic Los Angeles Superior Court judge frustrated about having to free obviously guilty criminals merely because of legal technicalities, learns from his mentor about a secret cabal of judges—a Star Chamber—that metes out its own brand of justice against those it determines have wrongly been set free.
In the Discworld books by Terry Pratchett, the Patrician's Palace contains the Rats Chamber, an anagrammatical equivalent to the actual Star Chamber. One of the differences is that the room is decorated with a unique fresco of dancing rats on the ceiling, rat wall paper, rat carpet, and so on, which is stated to have the effect of making people "feel as if they need a wash" after a few minutes.
In the 2006 Battlestar Galactica episode "Collaborators", the acting president of the Twelve Colonies authorized a Star Chamber which was known as 'The Circle'. They secretly tried and convicted collaborators during the Cylon Occupation and executed them.
Read more about this topic: Star Chamber
Famous quotes containing the words popular culture, popular and/or culture:
“Like other secret lovers, many speak mockingly about popular culture to conceal their passion for it.”
—Mason Cooley (b. 1927)
“It is among the ranks of school-age children, those six- to twelve-year-olds who once avidly filled their free moments with childhood play, that the greatest change is evident. In the place of traditional, sometimes ancient childhood games that were still popular a generation ago, in the place of fantasy and make- believe play . . . today’s children have substituted television viewing and, most recently, video games.”
—Marie Winn (20th century)
“I am writing to resist the view that Europe and civilization are going to Hell. If I am being “crucified for an idea”Mthat is, the coherent idea around which my muddles accumulated—it is probably the idea that European culture ought to survive, that the best qualities of it ought to survive along with whatever cultures, in whatever universality. Against the propaganda of terror and the propaganda of luxury, have you a nice simple answer?”
—Ezra Pound (1885–1972)