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 and/or culture:
“Just try to prove you’re not a camel!”
—Russian saying popular in the Soviet period, trans. by Vladimir Ivanovich Shlyakov (1993)
“If mass communications blend together harmoniously, and often unnoticeably, art, politics, religion, and philosophy with commercials, they bring these realms of culture to their common denominator—the commodity form. The music of the soul is also the music of salesmanship. Exchange value, not truth value, counts.”
—Herbert Marcuse (1898–1979)