Benjamin A. Railton's Blog, page 115

February 16, 2022: Podcasts I Love: Drinking with Historians and Uncorked History

[For this year’s Valentine’s Day series, I wanted to highlight some of the wonderful podcasts on which I’ve been honored to be interviewed. Leading up to a weekend post highlighting a handful of other great podcasts—share ones you love as well, please!]

As the world of scholarly podcasts has grown exponentially in recent years, one challenge has been for new podcasters to find their particular niche and angle in that wonderfully rich field. Two of my favorites, and two of the best conversations I’ve been part of, are video podcasts that have connected public scholarship to potent potables: Matt Gabriele and Varsha Venkatasubramanian’s Drinking with Historians (now sadly done releasing new episodes, but they’re all still on YouTube) and Jamie Goodall and Kelly Therese Pollock’s Uncorked History(still in its podcast infancy but already doing phenomenal work). I enjoyed being part of those multi-vocal recordings and videos for lots of reasons, but I would say especially that they really exemplify the conversation goal, creating a feel less like an interview and more like a informal but compelling shared discussion. Love that!

Next podcast tomorrow,

Ben

PS. Podcasts you love?

February 15, 2022: Podcasts I Love: Axelbank Reports History & Today

[For this year’s Valentine’s Day series, I wanted to highlight some of the wonderful podcasts on which I’ve been honored to be interviewed. Leading up to a weekend post highlighting a handful of other great podcasts—share ones you love as well, please!]

If my experience with podcasts after that initial No Jargon conversation was for the next few years a bit of a gradual development, over the last year and a half I’ve had the chance to connect with a lot more, talking in particular about my most recent book Of Thee I Sing. That’s mostly because I’ve worked hard to make such connections, but it’s also because a ton of great new public scholarly podcasts have emerged in recent years. One of my favorites is journalist Evan Axelbank’s Axelbank Reports History and Today, on episode 13 of which I appeared in the fall of 2020. Evan is a true champion of public scholarly work and voices, and uses his podcast to share and promote such writing, while (as his title suggests) consistently connecting it to our contemporary moment and issues. I love both those goals!

Next podcast tomorrow,

Ben

PS. Podcasts you love?

February 14, 2022: Podcasts I Love: No Jargon

[For this year’s Valentine’s Day series, I wanted to highlight some of the wonderful podcasts on which I’ve been honored to be interviewed. Leading up to a weekend post highlighting a handful of other great podcasts—share ones you love as well, please!]

I know podcasts have been around for longer than this, but my first real experience with them was in late 2015, through the Scholar Strategy Network’s excellent (and still going!) No Jargon podcast. I appeared on No Jargon’s 10th episode (it’s now well into the 200s!), interviewed by SSN’s then-Executive Director Avi Green, to discuss the histories, myths, and realities of immigration and immigration law in the U.S. I haven’t been able to bring myself to listen to the episode before writing this post, as I’m quite sure I’ve gotten a lot better at such interviews and conversations in the 6+ years since. But I love No Jargon as my introduction to this vital medium, and as a model for talking about complex histories and issues with, you guessed it, no academic jargon.

Next podcast tomorrow,

Ben

PS. Podcasts you love?

February 12-13, 2022: Kurtis Kendall’s Guest Post on Athlete Activism

[For this year’s Super Bowl week series, I wanted to write about some of our great works of sports literature. Leading up to this special Guest Post from an FSU English Studies alum & budding sports journalist!]

[Kurtis is a freelance writerspecializing in blog writing, article writing and editing services. His prominent topics include pieces on sports and eSports. When not writing you can find him hiking throughout the New England wilderness or chilling with his girlfriend’s Saint Bernards.]

                   If Athletes Must “Shut up and dribble,” Then Who is Allowed to Speak on Social Issues?

In the wake of the murder of George Floyd last summer, a noticeable shift occurred nationwide in the perception of professional athletes voicing their opinions on social issues. The NBA displayed “Black Lives Matter” on their court throughout the 2020 playoffs in the bubble. NFL commissioner Roger Goodell finally embraced Colin Kaepernick after years of leading a league that black balled him. The MLB gave their blessing for players to kneel before the first pitch of games, and for “Black Lives Matter” statements to be present on shirts and the pitching mound. The WNBA partnered with its player's association to form a Social Justice Council to advance social issues. Even the NCAA allowed student-athletes to wear patches on their uniforms in support of social issues.

Before this shift, and still in many circles around the country today, some people believed athletes should remain silent on these problems and focus solely on their sport and nothing else. Not only is this a dehumanizing stance, but ignores the obvious fact that athletes, like all of us, are more than performers.

The claim has been made over and over again, that athletes should stick to their domain and leave politics and social issues aside. But if that is the case, then who is allowed to discuss issues that affect people from all different walks of life? Can a grocery store worker? A custodian? A 7th-grade math teacher? An artist? Or do these individuals also have to ‘shut up and work?’ Can they only have opinions and comments on the duties they perform and nothing else?

Should only politicians talk about politics? Why does an individual’s employment dictate the topics they are allowed to discuss? These athletes are people too, and many of them are American citizens. Not to say you have to be an American citizen to speak on these issues, but by being one, they have a right to vote, to protest, to voice what direction they think our country should be headed. These individuals have a platform due to their abilities, yet they are decried as problematic when they use that platform to speak on issues that matter for millions around the country.

Michael Jordan famously once said “Republicans wear sneakers, too,” during his playing days. He knowingly avoided being an activist on social issues, even though he had the platform to bring attention to or make change on any topic he wanted to discuss. Whether he did this for monetary purposes or to avoid scrutiny or something else entirely is only truly known to him. He has said he always saw himself as a basketball player, not a role model. But Jordan shouldn’t be pointed out as a figure to say “see, that’s how an athlete should act.” Jordan has every right not to speak out on issues if he wants to strictly focus on his playing career or his business ventures. But in the same vein, he and every other person also have a right to speak out on issues they deem important enough to voice.

To the detractors, it's not as if this is a new phenomenon in the world of professional sports. Bill Russell, the architect of the original Celtics dynasty was known as much for his activism as for his play on the court. He, along with boxing legend Muhammed Ali, NFL superstar Jim Brown and collegiate athlete at the time Lew Alcindor (Kareem Abdul-Jabar) spoke on these issues during a summit meeting in 1967 where the black athletes came to support Ali and his stance on the Vietnam War.

And these athletes did so during the turbulent 1960s when protesting for civil rights might risk your life and livelihood. They helped to push the nation forward, to advance the conversation, to make progress on issues involving race and equality. For any individual who says athletes should only focus on sports, they also seem to be suggesting that movements athletes have previously helped advance should be disregarded as well.

A few athletes themselves have even stated they should stick to their sport, notably professional footballer Zlatan Ibrahimovic to LeBron James himself. Ibrahimovic said athletes should stick to “what they do best” and leave politics to politicians. In response, James pointed to the fact that many of the fans who watch sports are the people who face these social issues every day, yet lack a platform to bring awareness or create change.

“I will never shut up about things that are wrong. I preach about my people and I preach about equality, social justice, racism, voter suppression – things that go on in our community.

“Because I was a part of my community at one point and saw the things that were going on, and I know what’s still going on because I have a group of 300-plus kids at my school that are going through the same thing and they need a voice.”

Change and progress is created through continually speaking about issues, through avenues like civil disobedience. By talking about an issue and bringing awareness to it, and talking about it some more, and coming up with concrete solutions and actions to address it. Progress is not made by criticizing those who bring to our attention a less than perfect reality.

If the argument is athletes should stick to their domain, then you must apply that across the board, to everyone in their respective job. Construction workers can only talk about construction, lawyers can only discuss the law, factory workers can only talk machinery. In other words, no one, other than those already in charge, can debate the hurdles we must overcome as a society. This isn’t how the world works. We, every single one of us, are more than our profession. A person has a right to voice their concerns on any issue that is affecting the world they live in.

So, the next time you hear someone complain that an athlete has no right to speak out on social issues, simply ask them, then who does?

[Valentine’s Series starts Monday,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Other sports literature or writing you’d highlight?]

February 11, 2022: SportsLiteratureStudying: Nine Innings

[For this year’s Super Bowl week series, I wanted to write about some of our great works of sports literature. Leading up to a special Guest Post from an FSU English Studies alum & budding sports journalist!]

On the baseball book that serves as a professional inspiration for this AmericanStudier.

I first read Daniel Okrent’s Nine Innings: The Anatomy of a Baseball Game (1985) as a kid, and the book—in which Okrent uses a single June 1982 game between the Milwaukee Brewers and the Baltimore Orioles to tell literally hundreds of different baseball stories—has stuck with me ever since. Partly that’s because I love baseball, and in particular the way in which the game’s slower pace allows for an awareness of all the stories and histories and statistics (among other things) that are in play in every moment; I don’t know of any work that captures that side to the sport as well as Okrent’s book, and so I’d say it’s a must-read for any baseball fan. But it’s also because Okrent’s book serves as a model for what I’d call two central goals of all public scholarship and writing, and certainly of mine (here and elsewhere).

For one thing, Okrent knows that the best histories, however much they connect to huge communal and social and cultural issues, are made most compelling when they’re also and centrally connected to individual stories. That’s one main reason why I focused on individual lives and personal narratives in my second book; why my third included at length the stories of Yung Wing and his Chinese Educational Mission students; and why even as my subsequent books have focused more on overarching ideas and histories, I’ve tried to ground each in such stories. Each time Okrent pauses in the game’s action to narrate another individual story and identity (I particularly remember the one about Baltimore’s Lenn Sakata, but they’re all compelling), I suppose it might seem digressive or like delayed gratification; but to me, those individual stories not only complement the unfolding communal drama but greatly enhance it, making clear all of the lives and histories on which each and every such moment depend.

And for another thing, Okrent creates that sense of drama. Granted, a baseball game, like any sporting event with a winner and loser, is inherently dramatic (although some might disagree about baseball!). But I think there’s still a broader lesson for public scholars, particularly after a few decades in which the idea of writing as narrative or story has tended to be supplanted by theoretical and academic modes that entirely resist those goals. What Okrent demonstrates, on the other hand, is that writers can be nuanced and analytical and yet still create narratives and stories, and deeply dramatic and compelling ones at that. American history is full of such stories (Yung Wing’s and the CEM students’ being two of my personal favorites, which is why I’ll be returning to them again in my next book; but of course they are two of many), waiting to be re-told and communicated to American audiences. They’re not simple, and our work with them shouldn’t be. But if they’re worth telling ,they’re worth telling to as broad and deep an audience as possible—and Okrent gives us great guidance in how to do so.

Guest Post this weekend,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Other sports literature or writing you’d highlight?

February 10, 2022: SportsLiteratureStudying: South Street

[For this year’s Super Bowl week series, I wanted to write about some of our great works of sports literature. Leading up to a special Guest Post from an FSU English Studies alum & budding sports journalist!]

On pessimism, optimism, realism, and baseball.

David Bradley’s debut novel South Street (1975) is many things, often at the same time: a tragicomic farce of urban life; a romance; a crime novel; a biting satire; a raucous celebration. It opens with one of the most well-executed set-pieces you’ll ever read, features numerous unique and memorable characters, portrays its slice of Philadelphia with hyperbole and yet (to my mind) authenticity, and made me laugh out loud on more than a few occasions while keeping me in genuine suspense about the resolution of its central plotlines. Which is to say, there are lots of very good reasons to read this under-rated American novel, and lots of concurrent ways to AmericanStudy it. But among them is the unique and telling use to which it puts the Philadelphia Phillies games that serve as a near-constant backdrop in the South Street bar that’s the novel’s central setting.

On one level, the baseball games are literally and figuratively another of the novel’s jokes—the Phillies are always losing, and every new arrival to the bar simply inquires by how much they happen to be losing on this particular night. On the one night when they’re actually, miraculously ahead, the heavens refuse to cooperate, the game gets rained out, and the prospective victory is lost. Yet if these perennial losers would seem to validate the characters’ (and novel’s) most cynical and pessimistic views of their world and future, there’s a complication: the bar owner, Leo, keeps turning the games on, optimistically insistent that this time might be different. That dance, between pessimism and optimism, no joy in Mudville and Mighty Casey’s eternal possibilities, “dem bums” and “there’s always next year!,” is at the heart of much sports fandom, it seems to me—and much of American history, culture, and identity besides.

So does Bradley’s novel simply vacillate between the poles, just as it does between comedy and tragedy, humor and pathos, farce and slice of life? Not exactly, although it does make all those moves and more. I would also argue that in his portrayal of those hapless yet somehow still hopeful Phillies, Bradley has created a powerfully realistic image—not just of sports fandom, or of human nature, but of the African American community and its conflicted, contradictory, but sustained and crucial relationship to the nation. Ta-Nehisi Coates has written frequently and eloquently about the defining presence of racism and white supremacy in the American story, and how much such forces have made America a losing game for its African American citizens. Yet, undeniably and inspiringly, the vast majority of African Americans have long refused—and continue to refuse—to give in to the pessimism, have found ways to maintain an optimism about America and the future that is mirrored in Leo’s nightly return to the Phillies. There’s always next year, indeed.

Last SportsLitStudying tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Other sports literature or writing you’d highlight?

February 9, 2022: SportsLiteratureStudying: The Given Day

[For this year’s Super Bowl week series, I wanted to write about some of our great works of sports literature. Leading up to a special Guest Post from an FSU English Studies alum & budding sports journalist!]

On Babe Ruth, symbolism, and race in America.

There’s no doubt that sports can bring out the worst as well as the best in us, and that sports fandom does so with particular force. But even those of us who have experienced hateful sports rivalries are likely to be shocked when we read about the death threats (among other horrific attacks) that Hank Aaron faced as he approached and then passed Babe Ruth’s all-time home run record. This wasn’t Jackie Robinson, breaking baseball’s color barrier and changing a still-segregated society nearly thirty years earlier; this was simply a very talented baseball player finishing a very succesful baseball career, one that had landed him at the top of the record books. And yet something about the combination of his race and identity with those of the iconic legend he was eclipsing led to some of the ugliest expressions of which we Americans and humans are capable.

The moment and those expressions tell us a great deal about racism in America, and it would likely be a mistake to focus our analyses on any other side to those histories. But at the same time, I do believe that if Aaron had been approaching a Lou Gehrig record, or a Joe DiMaggio record, or a Ty Cobb record, or any other legendary player, the responses might not have been quite so vitriolic. There’s just something about the Babe in the collective consciousness of a number of American sports fans, or rather a few related somethings: his literally and figuratively larger than life status, the way in which he was already a myth of sorts before he became one after his career was done; his concurrent representation of an earlier era in baseball and sports and America, one that likely couldn’t help but feel to many fans contrasted with the world of professional sports in Aaron’s 1970s; and, yes, the way in which each of those histories was made possible in large part because Ruth played in a segregated league, competing with only a portion of his era’s best ballplayers.

It’s with all of those different sides to Ruth, his era, and history in play that Dennis Lehane creates a series of bravura sequences interspersed with the main narratives througout his early 20th century historical novel The Given Day (2008). One of Lehane’s two co-protagonists is an African American ballplayer named Luther Laurence, and Lehane opens his novel with a set-piece in which Ruth and some of his fellow professional players (en route from one 1918 World Series site to the other) encounter Luther and other African American players, leading to a pickup game that is at once color-blind and yet ultimately as segregated as the rest of society. Ruth reappears in a few additional set-pieces later in the novel, always bringing with him the same uneasy combination of baseball and society, mythic ideals and gritty realities. Some reviewers critiqued the Ruth sections as tangential to the book’s main narratives, which is true enough—but they make great use of the Ruth mythos, illustrating one more time how much this larger than life figure can say and do in our national conversations and stories.

Next SportsLitStudying tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Other sports literature or writing you’d highlight?

February 8, 2022: SportsLiteratureStudying: Play for a Kingdom

[For this year’s Super Bowl week series, I wanted to write about some of our great works of sports literature. Leading up to a special Guest Post from an FSU English Studies alum & budding sports journalist!]

On baseball, America, and the Civil War.

Far more knowledgeable baseball historians than I have long debated the sport’s origins, and specifically the role that famous “inventor” Abner Doubleday did or did not play in creating our national pasttime (or even whether said national pasttime was in fact invented in a different nation, one from which we had recently declared independence no less!). It’s an interesting and important debate, one that touches on not only 19th century history, the development of mythological narratives in communities and nations, and how culture moves and changes across international borders, but also on the ongoing role that sports plays in our collective consciousness and imaginations. But to my mind, it’s also deeply meaningful that the invention of baseball has long been tied to Doubleday, a man otherwise most famous as a decorated Union officer during the Civil War.

Doubleday’s supposed and contested invention of the sport took place well before the war, in Cooperstown (NY) in 1839. But I would argue that many of our collective narratives of baseball’s earliest days are closely tied to the Civil War, to images of soldiers playing sandlot games during the downtime between battles and campaigns. In part remembering the war in that way offers a peaceful alternative to the war’s most dominant images, a way to imagine and contemplate Civil War soldiers that doesn’t focus solely on the conflict and violence and loss that so defined the war years. But on the other hand, the images of Civil War baseball games could be read as a direct (if of course bloodless) complement to the war’s battles—in which, similarly, “teams” that might well have been friendly or even related off of the diamond became bitter adversaries once they stepped onto that field, one from which only one side could emerge victorious (there are no ties in baseball, as the saying famously goes).

Both sides to baseball and the Civil War are captured in the best historical novel about that subject (and one of the best baseball novels period), Thomas Dyja’s Play for a Kingdom (1998). Dyja’s novel imagines a chance 1864 encounter between Union and Confederate soldiers engaged in the bloody battle of Spotsylvania, an encounter that turns into a series of baseball games contested alongside (and, gradually, intertwined with) the battle itself. Dyja nicely illustrates how the games serve not only as a distraction from the battle, but also and just as crucially as a parallel to it, one in which shifting relationships and allegiances, as well as the soldier’s individual personalities and perspectives, cannot ultimately lessen the harder and more absolute truths of war. Whatever its other starting points, baseball—like America—was created anew during the Civil War, and Dyja’s novel helps us contemplate those complex and vital points of origin.

Next SportsLitStudying tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Other sports literature or writing you’d highlight?

February 7, 2022: SportsLiteratureStudying: YA Lit

[For this year’s Super Bowl week series, I wanted to write about some of our great works of sports literature. Leading up to a special Guest Post from an FSU English Studies alum & budding sports journalist!]

How three very different but equally talented American authors can reveal the stages of a youthful AmericanStudier’s perspectives on sports, America, and life.

When I was a kid, my growing interest in the stories and dramas of sports, and especially baseball, found literary expression in the novels of Matt Christopher. Christopher’s novels focus on very believable and universal conflicts as faced, and eventually overcome, by their youthful protagonists; as illustrated by my favorite baseball book of his, Catcher with a Glass Arm (1985), such conflicts include the psychological effects of being beaned and peer teasing over an athletic weakness. While there may have been occasional details that revealed the particular setting or time period of the books, I don’t remember any, and my instinct is not: Christopher’s explicit goal was to create books that spanned places and times, to which any reader could connect with equal interest and meaning.

As I started to develop into a teenage AmericanStudier (kind of like a teenage werewolf, but more consistent and less scary), I started to want sports and baseball novels that engaged more overtly with those historical and social questions, that felt as if they were a part of our national narratives and stories. A book like Philip Roth’s The Great American Novel(1973) was funny and over-the-top and compelling, but the baseball was a bit too metaphorical for it to qualify as a sports novel; Ring Lardner’s You Know Me, Al (1916) was extremely realistic and biting but a bit too cynical for my young taste. For me, as apparently for many teenage AmericanStudiers, the pinnacle of these contextualized, real world baseball novels were the works of John Tunis, and specifically his classic The Kid From Tomkinsville (1940). Tunis’s novel exists in, and more exactly captures, its Depression-era America quite fully without losing a bit of its narrative excitement; indeed, by the end the Kid’s baseball story and the story of a damaged but resilient America seem very much to have merged.

I haven’t outgrown my love for Tunis—writing this post makes me want to reread Kid right now, actually—but I have to admit that I have in the years since discovered an author and novel that even more impressively exemplify what an American baseball story can be and do. David James Duncan’s The Brothers K (1992)might seem to be about much more than baseball—it’s a rewriting of The Brothers Karamazov that’s also a multigenerational family saga of the 1950s and 60s, Vietnam, the counter-culture, religion, writing, Eastern spirituality, sibling rivalries and bonds, humor, love, and more—yet at the same time it’s entirelyabout baseball, not as metaphor so much as metonym, as a representation of the worst and best of American dreams and identities and histories and possibilities. It might be both the great American novel (it’s definitely one of the greatest under-read ones) and the greatest baseball novel, and for this AmericanStudier that combination is most definitely, yes, a grand slam.

Next SportsLitStudying tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Other sports literature or writing you’d highlight?

February 5-6, 2022: Crowd-sourced Bill MurrayStudying

[To celebrate one of our strangest holidays, Groundhog Day, this week I’ve AmericanStudied that film as well as four others in the long and unique career of Bill Murray. Leading up to this crowd-sourced post featuring more MurrayStudying takes—add yours in comments, please!]

To start with a great overall take on Murray, Jeremy Ruby tweets, “Bill Murray is a rarity in American films. He’s gone from likable sarcastic slacker to serious actor, Lost in Translation and Hyde Park on Hudson are examples of his serious work. He’s done some problematic work & he’s done some amazing work. Time periods define much of his work.” He follows up the Lost post later in the week, adding, “Lost in Translation is his magnum opus. He’s a burnt-out movie star who goes to Japan for a marketing campaing. Along the way he discovers himself and slowly absorbs a culture much different to his own. Murray has moved into the cool older guy persona that Chive has tapped into.”

And on a different introductory note, Kait Tontishares, “My favorite thing Bill Murray was when he used to show up at the Prudential Center or Madison Square Garden when Seton Hall played Xavier—because his son was the Assistant Coach for Xavier men's BB.”

In response to Monday’s Tootsie post, Candy Thomsonwrites, “I never thought of Les’s comment as vicious, more like the blustery blurting of a man born in the late 1930s/early 1940s bewildered by a unfathomable situation caused by his desire for companionship. I could hear my dad saying it. And you are right about the movie’s final lines. I walked out of the theater in 1982 feeling optimistic about man/woman relationships, which is saying a lot for a rom-com.”

And Paige Wallace shares, “I’m actually seeing Tootsie on Broadway (in Sacramento) in May!”

In response to Wednesday’s Groundhog Day post, some great conversations about that film in this thread.

Lydia Currie writes, “My mom feels that the existential horror of living the same day over and over again with no means of escape is WAY played down. I have heard that the original cut of the movie was much darker.” And on that note, Jeff Renye shares this unique take on Groundhog Day as a horror film from The Atlantic.

And , one of the most passionate and thoughtful FilmStudiers I know, writes, “At risk of sounding like a two-cent phil-osopher (see what I did there?), I honestly consider Groundhog Day to be ESSENTIAL film viewing for anyone—and especially for those of us who find ourselves in an ongoing battle against depression, inner demons, and our ‘lesser’ natures and aspects of ourselves. To me, the film is a beautiful, hilarious, heartwarming, and sometimes heartbreaking (I dare anyone to challenge my saying that the visuals and music in the scene with Murray ‘letting go’ and falling from the tower isn't one of the most devastatingly-beautiful scenes in any film from that era) examination of what it means to be human—the daily struggles, the battle for self and identity, the wonder and beauty of common and everyday moments, the need to be there for our fellow man, and the importance of trying to be the best version of ourselves possible. I find it to be Ramis' best film, one of Murray's finest, most-nuanced and hysterical performances, and accessible to just about anyone and everyone, at any age, and every year. It's easily one of my favorite films of all time and one I return to, like clockwork, every February 2nd—not just for the entertainment, but for the reminders and wisdom it imparts upon me every single time I watch.”

 

On Lost in Translation, Lito adds, “That's another one of my favorite films- and most definitely one of my faves from the early 2000s. It has such a quiet, bewitching, beautiful power to it that always leaves me quaking with tears at the end. That haunting feeling of loss, disconnect, and loneliness that lies beneath the moments and performances is just breathtaking. How we can be WITH people in the midst of such a busy setting and yet also feel so totally abandoned by those same people and our lives themselves... powerful, moving stuff. And Murray and Scarlett are both at the top of their games in that film, in my opinion, conveying what the script and film needs with such exquisite, subtle perfection.” He adds, “And, just to be sure I'm not misrepresenting the film: I should also mention that I adore the journey of self-discovery on the part of the two leads, but...there's something about that discovery that also brings with it this sense of loss, which I suppose is inherent in many sorts of evolutions.”

For a different take on Scrooged from that in my Groundhog Day post, here’s our best ChristmasFilmStudier, Gracie Vaughn Joy: “Scrooged is excessively violent to the point of absurdism. And you (and Roger Ebert) are right that it's unsettling, but contextually I think it's a brilliant use of slapstick. Slapstick meets the moment in every era it's used appropriately in, and Scrooged employs extreme violent slapstick in the 1980s which are an absolutely absurd decade. Politically, the domestic messaging is a false assertion of calm, serene status quo while foreign affairs are rapidly modernising and global threats are consistently rising from places that have never been global-powers before. It's absurd. Reagan's entire administration and 8-year term are absurd contradictions to the actual lived experience of many Americans in the 80s. That's why so many of the prominent comedians in the 80s are SNL alumni who relied on quick slapstick satirical routines that embraced absurdity. And it's why Scrooged conceptually makes sense as a grotesque caricature of slapstick. And that absurdity in the slapstick is precisely why I think the abrupt and excessively saccharine redemption speech works so well because it embraces the absurd atmosphere while telling the audience absurd isn't normal but we can find normality in absurdity and make it work for us. Slapstick is used in moments of political uncertainty and I think Scrooged is a perfect example of using slapstick to counter a rapidly changing world that the dominant political narrative refuses to engage with by presenting the status quo of the film as absurdist and then undercutting it all with a cloyingly sweet speech. And the speech itself I think is more effective than Scrooge's redemption. Scrooge changes on an individual level and it impacts his immediate contacts, but, as far as we are told, he never shares the message of his new philosophy. He never details why he has changed or how. He internalises the message of goodwill and generosity, which is great for the individual but is still selfish to a degree. He doesn't fulfill the other unspoken ask of Marley which is to cultivate the same generosity in others and pay his experience forward. He donates money and raises Bob's salary but he never apologises for how he has treated Bob. Frank, on the other hand, externalises his experience and shares his new philosophy with others in a plea for more people to join him in embracing compassion and the ‘miracle’ of generosity. Sure he has access to a live broadcast nationwide while Scrooge lives in Victorian England, but Scrooge doesn't even attempt to explain his change of heart.”

Other BillMurrayStudying:

One of our best young filmmakers, Melanie Mazzarini, writes, “My bf had the chance to work with him on Moonrise Kingdom and only has positive memories of him. As a child, for some reason Meatballsdefined my life. He’s just a master of comedy while also pulling off such serious roles—just a darling actor.”

Dave Grubb notes, “Can’t say much about Groundhog Day, but Bill Murray single-handedly changed the course of the NBA, specifically the re-emergence and freedom of Michael Jordan. He is a hero.”

On Twitter, John Webb writes, “Big fan of his ventriloquist in Cradle Will Rock… more parallels with ‘Economic Anxiety’-inspired thoughts that came out of all those diners than I’m comfortable with yet remained human and frail. Because Murray always finds the humanity. And there’s something in that here.”

Nathaniel C. Greentweets nominations for Scrooged and Caddyshack, and adds, “Maybe an unpopular opinion, but I think Groundhog Day is waaay overrated.” (See the above thread for his further threads and other voices including mine!)

Jeff Renyenominates the criminally under-remembered What about Bob? And Melissa Kujala adds, “What about Bob? is one of my favorite movies!”

Anne Bean writes, “Quick Change is the funniest, most-underrated, Bill Murray movie.”

Anne Holub goes with Stripes!

Andrew DaSilva highlights “Bill Murray in serious roles, such as Maugham's The Razor's Edge. Or my personal favorite Lost in Translation. One done at the start of his career, the other done in his later career, both wonderful movies. Show he can do much more than just laughs. And of course who could forget his FDR in Hyde Park on Hudson I saw that 4 times at the cinema.”

Lara Schwartz writes, “Zombieland is a meta Bill Murray movie and so American.”

Francesca Lewis adds, “I know it’s only a small part, but Bill Murray in Zombieland cracks me up every time I watch that movie. His dramatic death and guilt tripping gets me every time.”

AnneMarie Donahue shares the documentary The Bill Murray Stories, calling it “freaking HILARIOUS and brilliant”!

And to end with an interesting context for the Groundhog Day part of the series, Ezekiel Healyshares, “‘America’s weirdest holiday’ brought to mind that Ireland celebrates right now; it’s called Imbolc/St. Brigid’s day. It’s a celebration of Spring, marked when Winter is half over. It was curious to me when I first learned about it, because our version of the seasons is marked pretty distinctly at the solstice and equinox. Halloween (our second weirdest holiday?) also lines up with a Celtic/pagan holiday (Samhain), which suggests that Groundhog Day has deeper roots than just the Pennsylvania Tourism Board. It’s a tentative celebration of the imminent arrival of Spring, which is finally inevitable if still unpredictable.”

Super Bowl series starts Monday,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Takes on other Murray films?