Benjamin A. Railton's Blog, page 116

February 4, 2022: Bill MurrayStudying: Hyde Park on Hudson

[To celebrate one of our strangest holidays, Groundhog Day, I’ll be AmericanStudying that film as well as four others in the long and unique career of Bill Murray. Leading up to a crowd-sourced post featuring your takes on these and other Murray classics!]

On what we can learn from three of the best dramatic portrayals of presidents on screen.

1)      Amistad(1997): I haven’t written much in this space about Steven Spielberg’s 1997 historical epic, other than this brief and complimentary reference. It’s fair to say that in the decades since, as we’ve finally started to see more historical films featuring Americans of color in central rather than supporting roles, even the better “white savior” stories (and Amistad is that to be sure) have come to feel less important as a result. But Amistadstill has a great deal to recommend it, and high on that list has to be Anthony Hopkins as former President John Quincy Adams, who comes out of retirement more than a decade after losing his reelection bid to help the film’s Freedom Seekers successfully argue their case before the Supreme Court. What Hopkins’ Adams reminds us is that the arcs of presidents’ lives continue long after their time in office, and, in the best of cases, can evolve and deepen as a result.

2)      Lincoln(2012): As that hyperlinked post illustrates, I have dedicated multiple posts to Spielberg’s more recent and more successful historical film. Other than a very unnecessary ending (a hallmark of Spielberg’s best films, I’d argue), I think Lincoln is pretty perfect, and much of that is due to Daniel Day-Lewis’s truly stunning performance. And while the moments that endure in our collective memories of the film are likely the big ones like that “Now!” speech, I believe what makes Day-Lewis’s performance so great and so important are the many layers of humanity he brings to his Lincoln, including (nay, especially, says this DadAmericanStudier) his delight in Dad Jokes. This is a mythic figure brought back to earth in the best ways.

3)      Hyde Park on Hudson(2012): The misfortune of being released in the same year as Spielberg’s film is one of a few reasons why Roger Michell’s historical biopic of Franklin Delano Roosevelt (Bill Murray) and his 1939 relationship with his cousin Daisy Suckley (Laura Linney) didn’t make much of a splash and isn’t well-remembered today. I’m not here to challenge those trends, as I don’t think the film ultimately adds up to much and too often feels like salacious gossip about FDR’s rumored extramarital affairs. But it is a shame that Murray’s performance has been likewise overlooked, as I think it’s one of his best, capturing so much of the wisdom, humor, frailty, and humanity of a president and man dealing with countless challenges (internal as well as external). In particular, Murray quite literally embodies the toll of FDR’s long and ongoing battlewith the polio-caused paralysis that afflicted him for the final few decades of his life. Another highlight in Murray’s long and profoundly impressive career.

Crowd-sourced post this weekend,

Ben

PS. So one more time: What do you think? Takes on other Murray films? 

February 3, 2022: Bill MurrayStudying: Lost in Translation

[To celebrate one of our strangest holidays, Groundhog Day, I’ll be AmericanStudying that film as well as four others in the long and unique career of Bill Murray. Leading up to a crowd-sourced post featuring your takes on these and other Murray classics!]

On a beloved character who both embodies and challenges the “ugly American abroad” stereotype.

When an actor has worked for as long and as well as Bill Murray, the list of most famous and beloved scenes is of course quite competitive, and I’m sure every fan would have their own choices. But I’d say high on that list for most viewers would have to be the sequence in Sofia Coppola’s Lost in Translation (2003) where Murray’s fading movie star Bob Harris is doing his best to record a TV commercial for Japanese whisky Suntory (a real product, which I wouldn’t have expected until researching this post) with sincerity. Well, maybe not his best, but perhaps the best he can do at that moment—which is what makes the scene and performance so iconic, as Murray truly captures the falling star’s bitterness and self-loathing (and barely contained sarcasm) through the smallest of choices as he struggles to record the ad and its famous catchphrase.

Much of that might be the same if the scene were set in Harris’s native United States—the timing of this stage of his career would be the same anywhere, after all—but I’d say it’s all amplified by the fact that he’s recording the commercial in a foreign country, for a product with which he assume he’s much less familiar, working with a director and crew who speak a different language than he, and so on. Some of that is specific to the acting profession, and specifically the longstanding image of actors who need money (or just work) performing in ads in other countries (or, in one recent famous headline, turning down a stunningly large such paycheck for ethical reasons). But it also plays into another longstanding image and narrative: the “ugly American abroad,” the way in which American travelers or tourists can treat everything about the countries they’re visiting—including their whiskeys, presumably—as at best a step down from what they’re used to in their “exceptional” home country, and at worst deserving of thinly disguised scorn.

As I mentioned above, however, the true object of Bob Harris’s scorn is clearly himself, a fact which differentiates him from the unwavering and undeserved self-confidence that’s typically part of the ugly American’s attitude. And while there are various ways to interpret the movie’s central, deeply ambiguous relationship and arc between Harris and Scarlett Johansson’s young newlywed Charlotte, I would say that one layer to their dynamic is the way in which both Charlotte and Japan offer Harris a chance to reflect on where he’s come in his career and life and, potentially, chart a new course from this moment forward. It’s quite telling, after all, that the movie’s other, far more serious and moving most famous scene takes place at that most Japanese of institutions, a karaoke bar. Harris’s performance there of Roxy Music’s “More Than This” (to my mind one of Murray’s single best moments as an actor) starts as another moment of silliness and self-parody but turns into something quite different and far more sincere, which could describe his entire experience of Japan (thanks in no small measure to Charlotte, of course).

Last MurrayStudying tomorrow,

Ben

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

February 2, 2022: Bill MurrayStudying: Groundhog Day

[To celebrate one of our strangest holidays, Groundhog Day, I’ll be AmericanStudying that film as well as four others in the long and unique career of Bill Murray. Leading up to a crowd-sourced post featuring your takes on these and other Murray classics!]

On two layers to the crucial lesson at the heart of a unique cinematic comedy.

One of the more divisive films in Bill Murray’s long and multi-stage career has to be 1988’s Scrooged, a darkly comic modern retelling of Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol. I tend to agree with Roger Ebert’s highly critical review, where he called the film “one of the most disquieting, unsettling films to come along in quite some time”; like Ebert I find that the film’s comedy is rooted in a consistently aggressive and angry tone (Carol Kane’s Ghost of Christmas Present abuses Murray’s Frank Cross relentlessly, for example), and don’t find the saccharine ending sufficient to counter that feel. But over the years Scrooged has become not just a cult holiday classic (which it definitely is), but also a critically praised one, with Empire magazine calling it the 7th-best Christmas film and Time Outlisting it as the 13th-best, among other such accolades.

I’m dedicating a paragraph in this post to Scroogedfor a very particular reason: whatever you think of that film, it’s at least ironic that another and far more universally acclaimed and beloved Murray movie, 1993’s Groundhog Day, presents a very similar central lesson to A Christmas Carol in all its many iterations and adaptations over the centuries: that a successful and happy life is defined first and foremost by doing good for others. Moreover, Groundhog Day’s initially and profoundly self-centered protagonist Phil Connors (he’s not as overtly greedy nor as mean-spirited as Scrooge, but they share a fundamental selfishness at the outset of their stories to be sure) learns that lesson through a supernatural conceit that is at least as unique and compelling as Dickens’ three Spirits—and perhaps even more so, since Groundhog Daymakes it impossible for Phil to escape his endlessly repeating day, to move on with his life, until he truly learns and exemplifies that lesson. As that clip illustrates, the Phil at the end of the film is one of the most genuinely selfless and civic-minded characters in any cultural work (much less any comedy), one for whose happiness we are truly able to root.

Thinking through that lesson for this post has also helped me finally come to an interpretation of what has always been for me the film’s most ambiguous and confusing section: the sequence around the midpoint where Phil repeatedly tries (and fails) to save the life of a dying homeless man. Phil calls the man “father” multiple times, so my general take has been that it’s about making some sort of peace with his parents and past (about which we hear nothing otherwise). But seen through the lens of the film’s overarching lesson, this complex sequence can be read as offering two interconnected epiphanies: that even when we selflessly do for others, we can’t always save them from the worst of the world (I’m glad Tiny Tim lives at the end of Christmas Carol, but Scrooge’s change of heart would never be enough to guarantee that outcome); but also and even more importantly that, even or perhaps especially in those moments, the doing itself comprises a powerful and vital act. Indeed, I can think of few more powerful embodiments of hope and optimism than taking actions toward a more ideal future even when there’s no reason to think that they’ll succeed.

Next MurrayStudying tomorrow,

Ben

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

February 1, 2022: Bill MurrayStudying: Ghostbusters

[To celebrate one of our strangest holidays, Groundhog Day, I’ll be AmericanStudying that film as well as four others in the long and unique career of Bill Murray. Leading up to a crowd-sourced post featuring your takes on these and other Murray classics!]

On two distinct ways to analyze science and the supernatural in the classic scary comedy.

First things first: Ghostbusters (1984) is a really fun, funny, scary, entirely successful film, full of great performances, great music, and lines and moments that have stuck with me to this day, and that seemed to hit my sons equally hard when we watched it for the first time a couple years back. (The less said about Ghostbusters II [1989], the better; I’m not even gonna hyperlink that one.) It’s important, in the course of these kinds of analytical series, not to lose sight of the fact that both comic films and summer blockbusters are designed and intended, first and foremost, to entertain—that doesn’t mean that they can’t or shouldn’t also be smart or interesting (none of that “It’s not supposed to be Shakespeare” crap here, bud), just that we can’t overlook the qualities that make them fun and make them endure. And Ghostbusters has endured as well as any summer blockbuster I know, and indeed largely created (and certainly popularized) a new genre—the horror comedy—that to my mind has never been done any better than it was done here.

But if you think that means we can’t also analyze Ghostbusters—well, you clearly didn’t read my post on Baywatch! And when we start to turn our analytical attention to the film, it seems to clearly take a side within the longstanding and ongoing debate between science and the supernatural (or spiritual). The film opens with our heroes getting fired from their university research job because of their focus on the supernatural. Its main antagonist (yes, Zuul is the climactic villain, but this guy’s hostility drives much of the film) is William Atherton’s incredibly annoying EPA agent Walter Peck. And when the Ghostbusters convince the Mayor to side with them over that EPA agent, they do so by arguing that what’s going to happen to New York is “a disaster of Biblical proportions… Old Testament, real Wrath of God type stuff.” Just as Weird Tales did in their own era, the film suggests that all our modern science isn’t sufficient to engage with another side of the world, an older and perhaps more primal supernatural side that demands its own understanding—and its own heroes to combat it.

Yet at the same time, the way those heroes combat the supernatural is precisely through science: their energy streams and containment units, all that they had been working on in that university research role and brought with them to their “private sector” alternative. That is, we could read the film’s attitudes as divided not between science and the supernatural, but rather traditional vs. experimental science, cautious and bureaucractic perspectives such as those of staid academics and the buttoned-up EPA vs. the more liberated and forward-thinking ideas of Egon and his partners. Those latter perspectives are certainly willing and able to engage with the world’s oldest and deepest spiritual truths, but they are also much better equipped to come up with modern answers for those supernatural threats. In that way, we could see Ghostbustersas an example of a modern American Gothic—recognizing a world full of darkness and the supernatural, but ready to push back with courage and rationality. Who else you gonna call?!

Next MurrayStudying tomorrow,

Ben

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

January 31, 2022: Bill MurrayStudying: Tootsie

[To celebrate one of our strangest holidays, Groundhog Day, I’ll be AmericanStudying that film as well as four others in the long and unique career of Bill Murray. Leading up to a crowd-sourced post featuring your takes on these and other Murray classics!]

On the challenges and benefits of re-viewing complicated classics.

Although by 1982 Bill Murray had already transitioned from his breakout role on Saturday Night Live to movies and had begun to enter the comic actor A-list with films like Caddyshack (1980) and Stripes (1981), he has a relatively small supporting role in Sydney Pollack’s romantic comedy Tootsie (1982), playing Jeff Slater, a playwright and the roommate of protagonist Michael Dorsey (Dustin Hoffman). But he has one of the film’s most famous lines (as Murray so often does; I don’t know any actor who delivers comic lines more pitch-perfectly than he has for more than four decades now), as well as one that gets at the problem I’m highlighting in this post: struggling actor Dorsey has begun cross-dressing as a woman, imaginary actress Dorothy Michaels, in order to secure a part on a daytime soap opera; he and Slater are trying to choose an outfit for a particularly important scene, and as Dorsey talks about clothes and how they do or don’t flatter his “female” body, Murray’s Slater notes, “I think we’re getting into a weird area here.”

It’s understandable that Slater would find his roommate and friend’s newfound “female” perspective to be weird, but it’s also clearly (and perhaps inevitably in a movie released 40 years ago) the case that the film overall presents Dorsey’s cross-dressing as both strange and silly (as well as driven by purely professional goals, rather than any psychological or emotional needs). The situation also leads to some casual violent homophobia that’s largely played for laughs: Charles Durning’s Les Nichols, the father of Dorsey’s soap opera co-star and eventual love interest Julie Nichols (Jessica Lange), falls in love with and even proposes marriage to Dorothy; when he finds out that Dorothy was really a man, he tells Dorsey, “The only reason you’re still living is because I never kissed you.” While the film doesn’t endorse that violent homophobia by any means, it also continues to present Les as sympathetic after he expresses it; indeed, Dorsey buys him a beer shortly thereafter and it seems that the two men will be friends. All of that might make sense and work within this 1982 film, but it looks very different and far more problematic on a 2022 viewing.  

That doesn’t mean we shouldn’t view Tootsie today, however, nor that there aren’t contemporary benefits to doing so (besides enjoying a successful romantic comedy, which it remains). For one thing, there are few ways to engage with historical attitudes and narratives better than seeing how they were represented in popular culture—obviously some cultural works express and endorse such blatantly hateful attitudes that it might be more destructive to engage them; but many others, like this film, simply reflect some of the problematic narratives of their era and allow us to better understand them as a result. And for another thing, almost all cultural works also include other perspectives, including surprisingly progressive ones—such as one of Tootsie’s final lines, when Dorsey apologizes to Julie by saying, “I was a better man with you as a woman than I ever was with a woman as a man…I just gotta learn to do it without the dress.” I’d call that a pretty thoughtful rejection of toxic masculinity, in romantic relationships and overall, and that’s a theme that’s even more important in 2022 than it was in 1982.

Next MurrayStudying tomorrow,

Ben

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

January 29-30, 2022: January 2022 Recap

[A Recap of the month that was in AmericanStudying.]

January 3: 2022 Anniversaries: 1772 and the Revolution: A New Year’s series kicks off with three important pre-Revolutionary moments from 250 years ago.

January 4: 2022 Anniversaries: 1822 and Monrovia: The series continues with a few layers to the fraught founding of a West African settlement and nation 200 years ago.

January 5: 2022 Anniversaries: 1872 and Henry Wilson: Why becoming the Vice President was only the second most important thing Henry Wilson did 150 years ago, as the series rolls on.

January 6: 2022 Anniversaries: 1922 and “The Waste Land”: Two AmericanStudies contexts for a decidedly non-American masterpiece published 100 years ago.

January 7: 2022 Anniversaries: 1972 Films: The series concludes with the telling visions of violence in three films celebrating their 50th anniversary this year.

January 8-9: 2022 Predictions: A special weekend post sharing a few predictions for the year to come in American politics, society, and solidarity!

January 10: Women in Politics: Victoria Woodhull’s Campaign: In honor of the first woman elected to the Senate, a series on women in American politics kicks off with the controversial and compelling story of the first woman to run for president.

January 11: Women in Politics: Jeannette Rankin’s Pacifism: The series continues with the historical anti-war activists who were the real wonder women.

January 12: Women in Politics: Hattie Caraway’s Elections: On the 90thanniversary of her groundbreaking election, one interesting detail from each of Caraway’s three Senate campaigns.

January 13: Women in Politics: Eleanor Roosevelt’s Flight: One of the most famous American flights and one that really should be, as the series rolls on.

January 14: Women in Politics: Shirley Chisholm’s Campaigns: The series concludes with two telling political efforts beyond Chisholm’s groundbreaking presidential campaign.

January 15-16: Crowd-sourced Women in Politics: My latest great crowd-sourced post, featuring the responses and thoughts of fellow AmericanStudiers—add yours in comments, please!

January 17: Spring Semester Previews: Major Authors: W.E.B. Du Bois: My annual Spring semester previews kick off with three of the many Du Bois texts that speak to our current moment.

January 18: Spring Semester Previews: 19th Century Women Writers: The series continues with three of the many reasons why I’m requiring my Grad class students to purchase one book.

January 19: Spring Semester Previews: First Year Writing II: Three genres of papers that I’m excited to get and read from my First Year Writing students, as the series teaches on.

January 20: Spring Semester Previews: American Lit II: The three books I’m requiring my survey students to purchase (for the first time in a few years), and why.

January 21: Spring Semester Previews: The Short Story Online: The series concludes with three stimulating story pairings from my accelerated online course.

January 22-23: Spring Semester Previews: Two Sandlots: A brief weekend update on the book project that I’ll also be working on this Spring!

January 24: American Gangsters: The Godfather Part II: For the 75thanniversary of Al Capone’s death, a GangsterStudying series kicks off with the profoundly American layers to our greatest gangster story.

January 25: American Gangsters: Capturing Capone: The series continues with three pop culture representations of Capone on the anniversary of his death.

January 26: American Gangsters: Gangster Rap: Three telling stages in the evolution of an American musical genre, as the series rolls on.

January 27: American Gangsters: Aaron Hernandez: A tragic sports scandal and the allure and illusions of the gangster life.

January 28: American Gangsters: The Sopranos: The series concludes with the minor Season 1 characters who embody the real strengths of the troubling TV show.

Next series starts Monday,

Ben

PS. Topics you’d like to see covered in this space? Guest Posts you’d like to contribute? Lemme know!

January 28, 2022: American Gangsters: The Sopranos

[On January 25th, 1947 Al Capone died at the age of 48. So for the 75thanniversary of the end of that notorious life, I’ll AmericanStudy different cultural contexts for American gangsters & organized crime!]

On the minor characters who exemplify the real strengths of the troubling Golden Age TV show.

Full disclosure first—up until a couple years ago I had only ever seen bits and pieces of David Chase’s groundbreaking turn of the 21st century HBO show The Sopranos. It was during the lockdowns of 2020 that I, like apparently so many of my fellow Americans, finally got around to streaming the show—and even then, I only got into somewhere in the middle of the second season before stopping. I fully recognized and agreed with how well the show was made on every level, starting with a truly titanic (and apparently quite taxing) central performance from James Gandolfini as the conflicted mob boss and family patriarch Tony Soprano. But at the end of the day, I couldn’t help feeling that it was the latest in a long line of cultural glorifications of such gangsters, and I simply wasn’t interested in making my way through six seasons/86 episodes of that familiar narrative (between this and my non-favorites post on Breaking Bad, maybe I need to turn in my AmericanTVStudier Card, I dunno).

I need to say a bit more about what I mean by “glorification” in this case, though. I’m not thinking of the humanization of Tony, which was probably inevitable the second that such a brilliant actor was cast and which is fine in any case (TV characters should be multi-dimensional humans!). I don’t even really mean the way that the show pushes its audience to root for Tony, although that was the case and is deeply problematic—not just because he’s a murderous mob boss, but also and especially because he’s a terrible husband and father, a racist who abuses women, etc. (and no, having a truly awful mother doesn’t make any of those things much better). No, my biggest problem with The Sopranos’ portrayal of its gangster protagonist is that one of the show’s central themes—the ways in which turn of the 21st century America is a culture in decline—directly supports Tony’s consistent nostalgia about the good old days of mob and criminal life (as well as white supremacy, toxic masculinity, and a good deal more besides). Those narratives gave us our gangster in chief, full stop.

So clearly I’m not much of a Tony fan—but in the portions of the show I watched (and of course I’m open to pushback on any of this from folks who’ve seen it all, along with anyone else as ever!), I did find its portrayal of many different layers of the criminal worlds of turn of the century New Jersey and America consistently compelling. Particularly exemplary of that element of the show was the brief season one plotline (in episode three, “Denial, Anger, Acceptance”) involved a Jewish American hotelier(Chuck Low) who was having problems with his son-in-law (Ned Eisenberg) and came to Tony and the mob for help. Eisenberg’s character in particular worked within the world of the show—he was a stubborn badass who impressed Tony and his men despite their intent of intimidating him—but also, in his brief screentime, opened up interesting themes of multi-generational familial and cultural identities, the roles of faith and tradition in modern American society, and the similarities and differences between Jewish and Italian American organizations. The Sopranos wasn’t the kind of show that would follow these multiple characters and families, but even in brief glimpses they were to my mind the best of its stories and world.

January Recap this weekend,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Other gangster stories or contexts you’d share?

January 27, 2022: American Gangsters: Aaron Hernandez

[On January 25th, 1947 Al Capone died at the age of 48. So for the 75thanniversary of the end of that notorious life, I’ll AmericanStudy different cultural contexts for American gangsters & organized crime!]

On a sports scandal and the allure and the illusion of gangsters.

As this week’s series has amply illustrated, from Jesse James to Al Capone, Scarface to, well, Scarface, Bonnie and Clyde to Mickey and Mallory, there’s certainly nothing new about our American love affair with outlaws and gangsters, with those who make the wrong side of the law seem like the right response to our crazy country and world. In fact, you could say that self-made criminals have been idealized in our narratives for about as long as the self-made man has. So anybody who critiques one of the more recent cultural representations of that fascination (and yesterday’s subject), gangster rap, as something particularly new or disturbing is either unaware of these longstanding histories and narratives or (more likely, to my mind) trying to mask racial or cultural attitudes toward that particular genre behind these more general, moralizing critiques.

But on the other hand, just because gangster rap isn’t new doesn’t mean there aren’t ways to critique it, or at least its most excessive versions; and a few years back I experienced a striking contrast that led me to one such critique. I had been re-watching all five seasons of The Wireand came to my favorite, Season 4, with its focus on four middle school boys struggling with childhood and adult realities in West Baltimore. Each of the four is, in his own catastrophic way, directly impacted by the culture of the corners, of the drug trade—a culture that traffics (pun intended) heavily in the gangster mythos (it’s no accident that the professional killer Snoop wears a Scarface shirt in one episode). And while I watched these four young men (fictional characters, but no less real because of it) experience the darkest realities of those myths, I happened at the same time to hear numerous gangster rap tracks on the local rap and hip hop radio station, including (to cite only one example) Snoop Dogg’s “Drop It Like It’s Hot,” in which he raps “Oh you got a gun so now you wanna pop back?/AK47 now nigga, stop that!/Cement shoes, now I’m on the move/Your family’s crying, now you on the news.”

Again, the gap between the image and the reality of gangsters has been part of our narratives for centuries—but I can’t help but feel that the gap is particularly destructive when it impacts young men for whom gangster life is a very real possibility, rather than simply the briefly attractive fantasy it offers so many of us. One young man for whom it seems to have been an all-too-real possibility is Aaron Hernandez, the professional football player who was convicted of murder and committed suicide in prison in one of the more shocking and horrific sports scandals in history; another was Odin Lloyd, the local Boston man Hernandez was convicted of murdering. Whatever precisely happened on the June night that was Lloyd’s last, it seems clear (to me, at least) that both Lloyd and Hernandez were caught up in the pursuit of a gangster life, of the guns and the crew and the respect and all the myths that come with it. And when the realities caught up with the myths, their American stories—like all those I’ve mentioned in this post—ended tragically.

Last GangsterStudying tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Other gangster stories or contexts you’d share?

January 26, 2022: American Gangsters: Gangster Rap

[On January 25th, 1947 Al Capone died at the age of 48. So for the 75thanniversary of the end of that notorious life, I’ll AmericanStudy different cultural contexts for American gangsters & organized crime!]

On three telling stages in the evolution of the influential musical genre.

1)      Schoolly D (1985): Defining a genre or subgenre’s origin point is never simple nor straightforward, but no less an authority than Ice-T has defined Philadelphia rapper Schoolly D’s self-titled debut album as one such key starting point for the genre that would become known as gangster rap. And to elucidate that foundational definition I would highlight in particular one section of the final verse of that album’s most famous song, “P.S.K. What Does It Mean?”: “Got to the place and who did I see/A sucker-ass nigga trying to sound like me/Put my pistol up against his head/And said, ‘You sucker-ass nigga I should shoot you dead’/A thought ran across my educated mind/Said, man, Schoolly D ain’t doing no time/Grabbed the microphone and I started to talk/Sucker-ass nigga, man, he started to walk.”

2)      “Fuck tha Police” (1988) and “Cop Killer” (1992): As the shift from “Put my pistol up against his head” to “Schoolly D ain’t doing no time” indicates, gangster rap’s origins lay in a complex combination of genuine criminal threats and practiced performative poses. That combination has remained part of the genre ever since, but the balance between the two sides has shifted over time, and I would argue that with the rise of artists like N.W.A. and Ice-T it shifted more toward stories (and perhaps realities) of actual gangsters and criminal actions. Or at least, as these two successful and controversial songs illustrate, of the longstanding pop culture antagonismbetween such iconic gangsters and law enforcement. As Ice-T correctly noted in defending “Cop Killer,” pop culture has featured countless portrayals of such clashes, so much of the controversy was rooted in racism. But nonetheless, these songs did represent an evolution of the genre and its visions of gangsters.

3)      The “Bling Era”: There are various ways to contextualize one of the next main such evolutions, back toward more performative posing (this time frequently tied to celebrations of the success and wealth that the rappers had achieved). But I would argue that two tragic (and perhaps interconnected) murders within six months—the September 1996 killing of Tupac Shakur and the March 1997 killing of Christopher “Notorious B.I.G.” Smalls—played a significant role in this shift. After all, jail time is far from the worst possible consequence of the kinds of actions and stories gangster rappers had been highlighting since Schoolly D; I’m not for a second arguing that Tupac and Biggie’s songs caused their murders, but rather noting that violence and death are intrinsic elements to the worlds of gangsters. They’ve certainly remained core elements of gangster rap into the 21st century as well, but with ongoing shifts in how they’re portrayed as well as the realities of the artists portraying them.

Next GangsterStudying tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Other gangster stories or contexts you’d share?

January 25, 2022: American Gangsters: Capturing Capone

[On January 25th, 1947 Al Capone died at the age of 48. So for the 75thanniversary of the end of that notorious life, I’ll AmericanStudy different cultural contexts for American gangsters & organized crime!]

On takeaways from three pop culture representations of the iconic gangster.

1)      The Untouchables (1987): That hyperlinked clip sums up much of what I’d say about the single most famous pop culture portrayal of Capone: exactly what you would expect, both in satisfying ways (De Nirois never less than riveting) and in somewhat frustrating ways. As its title suggests, Brian De Palma’s film is much more focused on the men who took down Capone, and I’m fine with that; as I’ve written elsewhere, I’m no fan of films that glamorize despicable men like Capone. But De Niro’s depiction is so clichéd that, while it’s a fun over-the-top villain against whom we enjoy rooting, I would argue we learn nothing new about Capone, nor about gangsters overall, through this version of the character.

2)      Boardwalk Empire(2010-14): A TV show that ran for 57 episodes across five seasons is of course an entirely different animal than a single feature film, and while the show’s main gangster character was Steve Buscemi’s Nucky Thompson, Stephen Graham’s Al Capone appeared (or at least was credited—I’m confess to not having watched every episode) in all 57 of those episodes as well. That sentence alone reflects a key difference in this portrayal of Capone (and of gangsters overall)—depicting him as part of larger communities and networks, as one gangster working with and alongside, as well as against, much larger organizations and conspiracies. While the show wasn’t immune to those aforementioned clichés, I’d say it broke significant new ground in depicting such iconic individuals and types, particularly as part of their historical and cultural moments and worlds.

3)      Tintin in America(1932): Having never read the now-infamous Tintin in the Congo(1931; my younger son has read it and reports it’s as racist as you would expect), I didn’t realize until researching this post that Hergé had introduced Al Capone as a villain in that book before making him a chief antagonist of this 1932 sequel. Tintin’s Capone is one of two particularly mythic elements in a book full of them, with the other being Hergé’s sympathetic but still stereotypical depiction of Native Americans. The author had never traveled to America, so it stands to reason his representation would be based on iconic images; he did apparently do some research of his own, however, relying especially on a magazine article by journalist Claude Blanchard entitled “America and the Americans.” That makes the book’s Capone a combination of clichéd myth and actual contemporary figure, which sounds about right for this most iconic of American gangsters.

Next GangsterStudying tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Other gangster stories or contexts you’d share?