Benjamin A. Railton's Blog, page 123

November 8-12, 2021: 11 Years of AmericanStudying!

Just over 11 years ago, I shared my first post on this blog. I could take advantage of the occasion to think about how old I was on that day (sigh), or how young my sons were (sob), but instead I wanted to take this chance to share in this weeklong post a few of the many reasons why I’ve kept AmericanStudier going all these long years. Leading up to another anniversary tribute post on the weekend!

1)      It’s fun!: As I’ll indicate in a moment, over time this blog has become hugely helpful and important to my career on multiple levels. But those things took a while to really get going, and I never would have kept it going until then—nor, I hope and believe, kept at it overall for these 11 years and nearly 3400 posts—if I weren’t really enjoying it. And man, I really have! At first I tended to write especially about topics I already knew well and loved, as illustrated by that first post on my favorite American novel, The Marrow of Tradition. But over the years, I’d say the majority of the time I’ve written about topics that I would never have engaged (at least not in writing and not at length) if it weren’t for the very happy demands of a daily blog. American Studies and interdisciplinary approaches allow for that breadth and range of interests—but it’s been this blog which has really given me the space and occasion to think about them, and that’s been, simply, damn fun.

2)      Productivity: It’s also, and I have to admit surprisingly, been really productive for my writing and publishing career overall. When I make the case for online writing to students and fellow scholars, as I do quite frequently in all sorts of settings, I like to highlight a simple and crucial stat: in my first 5 years at FSU, before I started blogging, I published one book, which was based on my dissertation; in the subsequent 11 years, since I started blogging, I’ve published five books. There are of course multiple factors in that shift, but I believe that blogging (and through it online writing more broadly) has been by far the most significant factor: because it’s helped me practice writing more quickly and with audience directly in mind; because it has refined and strengthened my style and voice; because it’s allowed me to write (or at least read my writing) day in and day out, even during my busy FSU semesters; and more. This blog isn’t just (by far) the longest thing I’ll ever write—it’s also the most influential on every other part of my writing and work.

3)      Networking: An individual blog is, by nature, individual; I’ve done my best, through things like the Guest Posts and crowd-sourced posts I’ve paid tribute to in past anniversary posts, to add other voices into the mix more and more fully, but this blog will nonetheless always be fundamentally mine. Yet at the same time, it has connected me to so many other scholars, communities, conversations, opportunities—through those aforementioned posts, but also through readers and responses, through other writing connections the blog has helped create, through sharing the blog on social media, through all the ways that academic and scholarly networking can take place. We can’t control networking and connections, but we can (as I talk about with my English Studies Capstone class all the time) do everything we can to put ourselves out there in authentic and purposeful ways, and see what happens. This blog has been by far my most consistent way to do that, and has not coincidentally yielded the most meaningful results.

4)      It’s fun!: As I say in class all the time: I love repetition, and I also love saying the same thing more than once. So I’ll say again: blogging is fun! As long as I’m still having fun here, I’ll still be here, doing my AmericanStudying thing and hoping to hear from y’all, for all the reasons mentioned above and so many more.

Anniversary tribute post this weekend,

Ben

PS. So again, and as ever, I’d love to hear from y’all about what has brought and kept you here, whether in comments or by email. Thanks!

November 6-7, 2021: Crowd-sourced Action Figures

[Wednesday would have been Charles Bronson’s 100th birthday. So this week I’ve AmericanStudied Bronson and other action film stars and characters. Leading up to this blockbuster crowd-sourced post drawn from the responses and thoughts of fellow AmericanActionStudiers—add yours in comments, please!]

In response to Monday’s post, Mark Lawton writes, “Stewart is my all-time favorite actor! I believe he is the highest decorated actor to ever serve in the armed forces as well. (Air Force) His bio was an interesting read—especially the parts about his friendship to fellow actor/war hero, Henry Fonda. I love that you included Mr. Smith in this action hero dive, despite him being the author of this book.”

In honor of Bronson’s bday, here’s a threadfrom my favorite film reviewer, Outlaw Vern.

Other action film nominees:

On Twitter, Christopher J. Smithshares another Bronson film, writing, “Can I put in a plug for Mr. Majestyk? Maybe the best Elmore Leonard adaptation until (arguably) Justified.”

Justin Mason writes, “I have reviewed several different action movies on my YouTube channel including vigilante action films as well as just shoot ‘em up style films and nearly every other subgenre of action films and each offers something different…Obviously most Schwarzenegger films you go in with zero expectations and it’s more of an opportunity to just shut your brain off and enjoy the chaos (albeit movies like The Terminatorand True Lies offer more richness in its storytelling.) As for Bronson(and really anything Tom Hardy does) he dives head first into the character which brings a more dynamic perspective to the story itself. You look at many of his roles (Eddie Brock, Eames from Inception, Bane, Mad Max, The Kray twins in Legend, etc.) and each are vastly different characters that he makes his own and is often amongst the most well developed characters in each movie. Despite this trait I wouldn’t consider him to be a character actor along the lines of a Christian Bale I just think he is incredibly diverse.”

Lisa Moison writes, “I am giving a shout out to the entire Kill Bill series, its feminist ideology, as well as what Uma Thurman went through to make that film with Tarantino. His on-set misogyny toward her is well documented. The Bride's survival story and Uma's off-set survival story eerily mirror one another.”

Paul Daley adds, “Kill Bill is a good one. Also would like to suggest the Netflix series The Punisher. It ended a few years back and there are rights issues with Disney so I’m not sure if it still is up there, but if it is, it’s fantastic and fits the genre to a T. If you want something that is unique and blends Dystopian with Revenge plot, try Handmaid’s Tale on Hulu. Opens up a lot of big conversations surrounding civil rights too.”

AnneMarie Donahue shares, “Gonna go with a classic Thriller: A Cruel Picture which was the inspiration for Elle from Kill Bill. One of the great early exploitation films. And you can't forget the epic career of Pam Grier! Coffey, Women in Cages, Black Mama White Mama. I know these movies are now problematic but they exist and should be discussed.” She adds, “Thriller: A Cruel Picture is an interesting example of a revenge film. The protagonist is a woman, human trafficked and forced in sex work (not the best term but IDK what would be). She's also eventually addicted to heroin and loses an eye (thus created the image for Elle from Kill Bill). However, she uses the money she "earns" from her captor to learn self-defense, weaponry, car driving, and warfare techniques. She then employs them on her captor, rapists, and others. It's a confusing movie because she's given a great deal of freedom of movement. However, when she is allowed to leave she initially returns to her parents only to learn they had believed she abandoned them. Feeling shamed by what has happened to her she returns to her captor without contacting her parents again. I like this film because while it's problematic there are interesting thoughts going on. She's a victim, raped as a child that leaves her nonverbal (mental not physical) for life, that is again victimized but then motivated to take a violent revenge with her own means. To quote Beatrix "I'll have my bloody revenge." It reminds me that justice for victims of human traffic and assault seldom exists and that there's no reason to assume that a woman wouldn't want to destroy her attackers. Anyway, that's my TED talk. I just liked that it was a female lead with a female narrative (do men worry about human trafficking? Do they make movies in which men are human trafficked for sex work? I'm certain this happens but there's not a great deal of media out there discussing it) about surviving assault and getting revenge.”

Derek Tang shares, “Have you ever seen Denzel Washington in Man on Fire? It's one of the darkest vigilante action films I have ever watched. It's a fine balancing act between his semi-paternal rage and the cultural clash.”

Lara Schwarzwrites, “So can we talk about Midnight Run, in which there is gorgeous slippage between the roles of law enforcement, criminals, and seekers of justice?” And she adds, “In addition to subverting the artificial distinction between law and order and lawlessness, it's also pretty groundbreaking in the way it portrays a vigilante friendship between two men.”

Special anniversary series starts Monday,

Ben

PS. What do you think?

November 5, 2021: Action Figures: Black Widow

[Wednesday would have been Charles Bronson’s 100th birthday. So this week I’ll AmericanStudy Bronson and other action film stars and characters. Share your own thoughts on these and all other action figures and films for a popcorn-popping crowd-sourced weekend blockbuster!]

On how the recent Marvel film echoes a frustrating longstanding trope, and two ways it revises it.

Perhaps more than any other cinematic genre (although horror films are in the conversation), action movies often depend for their success on audience awareness of established tropes. There are thus lots of such tropes, from what Roger Ebert named the “Fallacy of the Talking Villain” to what my favorite current film critic Outlaw Vern has called his “Theory of Badass Juxtaposition.” But one of the most strikingly consistent across decades of action films and multiple cultures/cinema traditions involves female action heroes in particular: the trope of a young girl raised from childhood by an older (almost always male) mentor to become an assassin and/or spy. That hyperlinked list isn’t even overtly about characters who fit that trope (it focuses on female assassin characters overall), yet I would argue that every character on the list does so, whether overtly (ie, we see them as children in the course of the film) or implicitly (ie, we hear about those origins and/or meet older male characterswho clearly served as their mentors). Out in theaters as I draft this post is another film that follows this trope closely, The Protégé, starring Maggie Q as the assassin and Samuel L. Jackson as the mentor.

One of the biggest films of the year to date, the Marvel superhero action thriller Black Widow, likewise used and indeed amplified this longstanding trope. Natasha Romanoff, the Russian spy turned Avenger known as Black Widow and played pitch-perfectly in the MCU films by Scarlett Johansson, wasn’t (at least in this cinematic adaptation—I haven’t read any Black Widow comics so can’t speak to them) just raised from childhood to be an individual assassin. She was part of a huge cohort of such youthful female assassins (all apparently known as Widows), raised in a mysterious environment known as the Red Room to become a fearful and formidable fighting force the world over. Even before that period, as we see in the film’s flashback prologue (another scene set when its female action hero is a small child), she was part of a fake family designed to begin her training, this time one featuring not only a male mentor (David Harbour’s Alexei, himself a superhero known as the Red Guardian) but a female one as well (Rachel Weisz’s Melina). That two-part childhood seems only to double down on this well-established trope of the youthful female assassin in training.

But at the same time, it’s possible to see this amplification as a way to comment upon the trope itself, and I’d say that particular details of both those threads in Black Widow (SPOILERS in this paragraph in particular) do serve to critique and ultimately revise the trope. More overtly and centrally, while the mentor characters in these stories and films are generally portrayed as good guys (if complicated ones to be sure), the Red Room’s most explicit mentor figure, Ray Winstone’s Dreykov, is the film’s villain and a truly despicable person, and his role in the lives of the Widows is blatantly portrayed as both child abuse and a form of sexual violence. I’m not suggesting that this shift forces to revisit all the prior mentor figures and consider them in the same way, necessarily—but it makes us ask the question at the very least. Secondly, and more complicatedly, Romanoff’s fake family, including Alexei and Melina but also her faux-sister Yelena (played wonderfully by Florence Pugh), becomes not only the closest thing she has to an actual family, but a unit that by the film’s end functions directly to oppose and take down the Red Room and short-circuit any plans for future child assassins. Natasha and Yelena are still badass assassins at the film’s end to be sure—but ones who operate quite literally counter to the narratives at the heart of this longstanding trope.

Crowd-sourced post this weekend,

Ben

PS. So one more time: what do you think? Thoughts on these figures and films, or others you’d add to the mix?

November 4, 2021: Action Figures: Arnie and Sly

[Wednesday would have been Charles Bronson’s 100th birthday. So this week I’ll AmericanStudy Bronson and other action film stars and characters. Share your own thoughts on these and all other action figures and films for a popcorn-popping crowd-sourced weekend blockbuster!]

On what differentiated the two 80s action superstars, and one important parallel.

I’ve written about ‘80s action movies a few times on this blog, most notably in response to contemporary events like the invasion of Granada or the war in Afghanistan. But while the decade’s over-the-top cinematic action was indeed often related to (I was going to say “in response to,” but that might be pushing things a bit) real-world events and issues, it was also, well, ridiculously over-the-top (emphasis on ridiculous). I’m not suggesting that the prior decade’s action heroes like the subjects of my last two posts, John Shaft and Paul Kersey, were purely grounded in realism; but those characters and films were cinema verité compared to the ‘80s action oeuvre. There were lots of action stars who contributed to that ‘80s craze and craziness, from Chuck Norris to Dolph Lundgren to Jean-Claude Van Damme (and with more unexpected examples like comedy legend Eddie Murphy and TV star Bruce Willis in the mix as well), but two icons really defined and in many ways dominated the decade’s larger-than-life action explosion: Arnold Schwarzenegger and Sylvester Stallone.

As that last hyperlinked article indicates, Arnie and Sly really didn’t like each other during the ‘80s. But my interest in this paragraph is not on such personal differences (entertaining as the idea of a rumble between the two icons might be), but instead on what differentiated their action movie characters and performances in the decade (and beyond). Schwarzenegger came to action films from the literally larger-than-life world of Mr. Universe bodybuilding competitions, and his action heroes tended to be similarly unrealistic, capable of feats and body counts as extreme as his musculature. Stallone’s first major film performances were in Rocky(which he also wrote) and First Blood (later renamed Rambo: First Blood), both featuring main characters who feel far more representative of everyday identities and experiences (despite Stallone’s similarly extreme, if not quite Schwarzeneggeresque, physique). I’ve written before about how the character of John Rambo in particular evolved to become more like an Arnie hero (with him shooting down Russian helicopters with arrows in Rambo III, for example); but despite that movement across Sly’s sequels, I would still argue that Stallone’s ‘80s action characters retained a level of everyman believability, while the very idea of Schwarzenegger in a “normal” marriage and family (for example) was treated as intrinsically comic.

Despite those differences in their origins and tones, however, I would say that in a significant number of their ‘80s action films, Arnie and Sly’s characters embodied something fundamentally similar: a fantasy vision of America taking on its adversaries. In Schwarzenegger’s case, those adversaries were as likely to be literal aliens (1987’s Predator) as foreign mercenaries (1985’s Commando); while in Stallone’s films, they were often more directly Cold War enemies like the Russians and the Vietnamese in his two 1985 movies, Rocky IV and Rambo: First Blood Part II. But in any case, these supersoldiers, superboxers, supermen were warding off enemies who seemed to draw on both longstanding Cold War narratives and newer 1980s fears of invaders and threats to America’s hegemony. While 70s action characters like John Shaft and Paul Kersey found themselves fighting against fellow Americans in a troublingly dangerous and divided nation, that is, Arnie and Sly and their ‘80s action counterparts took the fight to the rest of the world.

Last action figure tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Thoughts on these figures and films, or others you’d add to the mix?

November 3, 2021: Action Figures: Charles Bronson and Death Wish

[Wednesday would have been Charles Bronson’s 100th birthday. So this week I’ll AmericanStudy Bronson and other action film stars and characters. Share your own thoughts on these and all other action figures and films for a popcorn-popping crowd-sourced weekend blockbuster!]

On one famous contemporary legacy of Bronson’s watershed role, and a surprising 21st century one.

I said much of what I’d want to say overall about vigilante heroes in this post on the comic book (and frequently adapted) character The Punisher, so in lieu of this first paragraph I’d ask you to check out that post if you would and then come on back here.

My focus there was largely on the pop culture figures and stories themselves, but Charles Bronson’s Paul Kersey, the mild-mannered architect and Korean War conscientious objector (because he had promised his mother never to use a gun after his father was killed in a tragic hunting accident, natch) turned vigilante angel of vengeance in Death Wish (1974) and its many sequels, reflects all too clearly the way that such vigilantes can inspire real-world violence. Bernhard Goetz, the mild-mannered electronics salesman who shot four would-be muggers (probably, although just about every detail of the incident was and remains contested) on a New York subway in December 1985, was overtly inspired by Kersey’s fictional character and was instantly dubbed the “Death Wish” gunman as a result. Moreover, while Kersey vomits after his first act of vigilante violence (at least a bit of a nod to the more overtly anti-vigilante themes of the film’s source material, Brian Garfield’s 1972 novel), Goetz told police “I would have kept shooting had I not run out of bullets. I should have gouged [one of his victim’s] eyes out with my car keys.” Like so many fans of these vigilante characters and stories, Goetz clearly came away with one particular and unambiguous lesson.

It took a bit longer, but Hollywood seems likewise to have learned its own clear lesson from the success of Death Wish. Bronson was 53 years old when the film came out, and it led to a late-career renaissance for the long-time actor, one that focused almost entirely on such action hero roles (including in those four Death Wish sequels over the next 20 years, with the last coming out in 1994 when Bronson was 73!). That seems to be a clear model for a number of 21st century film franchises featuring well-established and often overtly serious actors playing badass vigilantes, from Liam Neeson’s Taken films to Denzel Washington’s Equalizer ones among many others. In both those franchises, like in many of these films, the protagonists are former special forces types, men (and occasionally women) whose “particular set of skills” has perhaps lain dormant for a time but was always part of their identities and stories. Whether that makes their late-life turn to vigilante violence less problematic or more so is, like so many of the issues raised by Charles Bronson’s Death Wish and its legacies, a complex yet crucial question for all film buffs and AmericanActionStudiers.

Next action figure tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Thoughts on these figures and films, or others you’d add to the mix?

November 2, 2021: Action Figures: Gordon Parks and Shaft

[Wednesday would have been Charles Bronson’s 100th birthday. So this week I’ll AmericanStudy Bronson and other action film stars and characters. Share your own thoughts on these and all other action figures and films for a popcorn-popping crowd-sourced weekend blockbuster!]

On how Parks helps us analyze the problems and the possibilities of Blaxsploitation.

Only two years after he directed the deeply personal yet strikingly groundbreaking film The Learning Tree(1969), Gordon Parks was back behind the camera for a very, very different kind of groundbreaking film: Shaft (1971). With this hugely successful film and its sequel, Shaft’s Big Score!(1972), which he also directed, Parks helped usher in one of the 1970s most prolific and profitable film genres, Blaxploitation. Richard Roundtree’s badass private detective John Shaft was quite literally one of the principal archetypes for most of the decade’s Blaxploitation heroes and heroines, as well as inspiring iconic action hero types and images that have endured long beyond the waning of Blaxploitation as a genre—all of which means that his work directing the first two Shaft films could be seen as among the most influential and enduring cultural efforts of Parks’s long and impressive career.

Which, I can’t lie, is a really frustrating sentence to write. How on earth could a photographer who spent more than half a century documenting identities and lives, communities and histories, from FSA portraits to Pittsburgh steel workers, New York City fashion to the Jim Crow South, be best known as the director of a film featuring lines like “Where the hell are you going, Shaft?” “To get laid, where the hell are you going?” or (from Isaac Hayes’s mega-hit theme song) “Who’s the black private dick/That’s a sex machine to all the chicks?” Following on the potent effects and meanings of the Civil Rights Movement and its era, a period that Parks’s photographic works could be said to have helped usher in and in which he participated significantly in any case, 1970s Blaxploitation films can feel at best extremely silly, and at worst exactly as exploitative of serious issues of race and community (among many others) as the name suggests. And Gordon Parks helped create them.

I’m not going to pretend that I’ve got a clear pro-Blaxploitation perspective to reveal here, but I will say this: that last sentence, the fact that Parks did contribute so fully to the development of Blaxploitation as a genre, does in and of itself comprise an argument for taking the genre more seriously. This was an artist, after all, who consistently and crucially innovated, not only in his photographic career but also and just as fully in his film contributions (among other efforts). And here is another innovation, another cultural form that Parks helped create and popularize, another representation of African American and American lives and communities that he brought to wide and enduring audiences. That this representation has its flaws and limitations, that it needs response and analysis, that it leaves out certain stories and exaggerates or misrepresents others, only means that it’s a cultural form like any other, as complex and human as all the people on whom Parks’s portraits focused. And like those portraits, the Shaft films comprise another successful, vital stage in the very American career and life of Gordon Parks.

Next action figure tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Thoughts on these figures and films, or others you’d add to the mix?

November 1, 2021: Action Figures: John Wayne and Jimmy Stewart

[Wednesday would have been Charles Bronson’s 100th birthday. So this week I’ll AmericanStudy Bronson and other action film stars and characters. Share your own thoughts on these and all other action figures and films for a popcorn-popping crowd-sourced weekend blockbuster!]

On two Hollywood lives and legacies, and a film that purposefully complicates both of them.

John Wayne and Jimmy Stewart, both of whom spent many years in and connected to the Boy Scouts, had remarkably parallel childhoods and young adulthoods in many other ways as well. Wayne (his birth name was Marion Morrison) was born in a small Iowa town to parents of mostly Scots-Irish heritage, raised Presbyterian, played football and participated in debate and journalism in high school (his family had moved to Glendale, California by that time), and wanted to attend the US Naval Academy but ended up pre-law at the University of Southern California instead. Stewart was born in a small Pennsylvania town to parents of mostly Scottish heritage, raised Presbyterian, played football and edited the yearbook in high school, and nearly attended the Naval Academy but ended up an architecture major at Princeton University instead. Both men likewise began acting in a serious way while still very young, with Wayne appearing in his first film at the age of 19 (after losing his football scholarship and having to leave USC) and Stewart joining the prominent Cape Cod theater group the University Players while he was still in college.

Perhaps the only significant biographical divergence between Wayne and Stewart occurred during World War II: while it seems that Wayne wanted to serve in some military capacity, he did not do so, touring the South Pacific with the USO but otherwise continuing to make films (many of them about the war); Stewart, on the other hand, flew numerous combat missions for the Air Force between 1942 and 1945, putting his burgeoning Hollywood career entirely on hold for the duration of the war. While each of those military histories is of course individual and complicated, there’s also at least a bit of an irony in comparing them to the two men’s subsequent film careers and overall Hollywood legacies: Wayne became more and more associated with themes like war, violence, and an idealized form of uber-masculinity, a narrative that still endures to this day; while Stewart became connected to more thoughtful and sensitive alternative images of masculinity and movie stardom, perhaps especially due to the first film he made upon resuming his career post-war, It’s a Wonderful Life (1946). While of course life and art almost always diverge, it’s fair to say that in this case both men’s artistic legacies have often been linked directly to perceived aspects of their personal lives and identities, links that their respective wartime experiences at least render more ambiguous and uncertain.

The one film that the two men starred in together, John Ford’s classic 1962 Western The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, interestingly and importantly investigates many of these precise questions and themes. In some ways, Valance relies upon the two men’s stereotypical images: Stewart plays a lawyer and politician whose intellectual identity seems challenged (but whose career has been enhanced) by a famous duel in which he apparently shot and killed a notorious outlaw; while Wayne plays a rough and tumble rancher who was the outlaw’s actual killer and has stoically kept that fact quiet to benefit his friend. Yet on a deeper level, Ford’s film offers a direct challenge to both the Western genre (one in which Ford and his frequent collaborator Wayne worked so often) and the idea that we can trust mythic narratives of identity at all. The film’s most famous line—and one of the more famous in Hollywood history—comes near the end, when a newspaper reporter learns the truth about the shooting but decides not to reveal it to anyone; as explanation he says to Stewart’s character, “This is the West, sir. When the legend becomes fact, print the legend.” It’s a great line, but an incredibly complicated one, and I don’t believe we’re necessarily meant to accept it as the right perspective—or at the very least, it asks us to investigate legends and consider what facts and truths might lie untold beneath those mythic stories. A question that certainly applies to the lives and legacies of both John Wayne and Jimmy Stewart.

Next action figure tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Thoughts on these figures and films, or others you’d add to the mix?

October 30-31, 2021: October 2021 Recap

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

October 4: AmericanFires: The Armory Fire: A series inspired by the Chicago fire’s 150th anniversary kicks off with a Civil War tragedy that sheds light on one of our more complex histories.

October 5: AmericanFires: The San Francisco Earthquake and Fire: The series continues with two distinct, equally inspiring communal responses to one of our most destructive disasters.

October 6: AmericanFires: The Triangle Fire: Two legacies of and one evolving question about a horrific industrial disaster, as the series rages on.

October 7: AmericanFires: The Hindenburg: A justifiably famous context for the airship disaster, and a more ambiguous but equally compelling question.

October 8: AmericanFires: The Great Chicago Fire: The series concludes with a link to my Saturday Evening Post column on lessons from the fire’s 150th!

October 9-10: AmericanFires: Wildfires and Climate Change: A special weekend post on the longstanding history of defining environmental disasters, and why that’s not sufficient to understand our current crisis.

October 11: SitcomStudying: Sitcom Dads: For Lucy’s 75th anniversary, a sitcom series starts with the clichéd extremes of sitcom dads and the men in the middle.

October 12: SitcomStudying: Friends: The series continues with three dark sides of the mega-successful 90s sitcom.

October 13: SitcomStudying: Grace and Frankie: Two ways the Netflix sitcom pushes our cultural boundaries and one way it happily does not, as the series laughs (tracks) on.

October 14: SitcomStudying: Wandavision: One way the innovative Marvel show embodies the best of sitcoms, and one way it reflects the worst.

October 15: SitcomStudying: Why We Love Lucy: On its 75th anniversary, why the groundbreaking sitcom’s comfortable familiarity actually reflects its most radical elements.

October 16-17: Crowd-sourced SitcomStudying: The series concludes with one of my more multi-vocal crowd-sourced posts in a long time—add your thoughts in comments!

October 18: Work in Progress: Graduate English Chair: A series on some of the balls I’m juggling this Fall starts with the crises and changes I’m facing in a new role, and how you can contribute!

October 19: Work in Progress: Lesson Plan for CT Humanities: The series continues with the next stage in the happily long afterlife of a very early online piece of mine.

October 20: Work in Progress: SSN Boston: A tribute to the three amazing folks with whom I work in my role as SSN Boston Chapter co-leader, as the series continues.

October 21: Work in Progress: NEASA and NeMLA: Some of the ways you can get involved with my two favorite scholarly organizations!

October 22: Work in Progress: Two Sandlots: The series concludes with a quick update on my next book and its new subtitle!

October 25: GhostStudying: The Turn of the Screw: My annual Halloween series kicks off with two cultural fears lurking beneath Henry James’ gripping ghost story.

October 26: GhostStudying: Beloved: The series continues with a surprisingly timely post on the psychological and historical sides to Toni Morrison’s haunting masterpiece.

October 27: GhostStudying: Haunted Sites: Three of America’s many symbolic haunted sites, as the series scares on.

October 28: GhostStudying: Ghostly Contacts in Cinema: AmericanStudies lessons from three films about contact with the afterlife.

October 29: GhostStudying: Ghost Stories: The series concludes with psychological and historical layers to the enduring appeal of ghost stories. Happy Halloween!

Next series begins Monday,

Ben

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

October 29, 2021: GhostStudying: Ghost Stories

[For this year’s installment in my annual Halloween series, I’ll be AmericanStudying ghosts in American society and popular culture. Boo (in the best sense)!]

[NOTE: This post originally appeared a few years back, which is why I refer to my now very-teenage sons as ‘tweens—and I should note we have begun to share more beloved books as well!]

On a more psychological and a more historical side to the enduring appeal of ghost stories.

There isn’t a lot of overlap between this AmericanStudier’s favorite books when he was a ‘tween and those of my two ‘tween (although soon to be teenage!) sons, but one series that does feature on both of our lists is Alvin Schwartz and Stephen Gammell’s Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark. Featuring three total books, from 1981’s original through 1984’s More Scary Stories to Tell in the Darkand 1991’s Scary Stories 3: More Tales to Chill Your Bones, and soon to be a major motion picture (if one that from the description I’m quite sure will be loosely adapted at best from the books), the Scary Stories series has been an enduringly popular spooky presence for young audiences for nearly four decades now. And while the books feature scary stories in a number of different genres and forms, I would argue that the ghost story is consistently at their heart, from the original’s “The Ghost with the Bloody Fingers” to the sequel’s “The Guests” to the final book’s “The Dead Hand” and many more. As most of this week’s texts and topics likewise illustrate, there’s clearly just something about ghost stories that we keep coming back to, that keeps them firmly and squirmingly in our collective psyche.

On one level, I think ghost stories and the discomfort and fears they invoke appeal to different elements in our psyches than do other horror tales. Much of horror is about external threats, bogeymen or creatures clearly distinct from us; certainly some of them can turn ordinary humans into threats as well (such as vampires and zombies), but nonetheless the fundamental threat in those kinds of stories comes from something overtly not-us (and thus easy not to believe in). Whereas ghosts are entirely us, our fellow humans with whom we know for a fact we share this world—and given the belief across religions and cultures in some form of an afterlife, it’s not difficult to imagine that we likewise share the world with humans we can no longer see but who remain in some form. Even for someone who does not believe in either an afterlife or ghosts (as I will admit I do not), I guess it would be more accurate to say that I’m pretty sure those things don’t exist—but there’s a level of uncertainty compared to, for example, my certainty that vampires and zombies do not exist. To put it simply, it’s difficult if not impossible to separate the concept of ghosts from other forms of spirituality that define much of human society and existence—and the individual and collective needs for those spiritual beliefs thus help explain the scarier flipside represented by ghost stories.

At the same time, to live in the world in 2018 in particular means that we’re surrounded constantly by layer upon layer of history. Even a relatively young nation like the United States has centuries of such histories layered beneath us, to say nothing of the Native American histories that extend back much further still (and help explain ghost stories like those about the wendigo, of course). Yet much of the time, at least in the U.S. as I argued in comparing it to Rome in this post, we act as if history is something that can be localized to particular sites or spaces, something we can visit and learn about but not necessarily a constant presence in our communities. Deep down I think we know better though, and perhaps the continued popularity of ghost stories also reflects a recognition that the past isn’t dead, it’s not even past—and thus that at any moment it can rise up from the ground or out of the air and grab hold of us. That’s a pretty scary thought to be sure, but as the more complicated and even friendly ghosts in many of this week’s stories illustrate, it doesn’t have to be, not if we first admit the ghostly but real presence of the past and then see where those stories and ghosts might lead us.

October Recap this weekend,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Other ghost stories or histories you’d share?

October 28, 2021: GhostStudying: Ghostly Contacts in Cinema

[For this year’s installment in my annual Halloween series, I’ll be AmericanStudying ghosts in American society and popular culture. Boo (in the best sense)!]

On quick AmericanStudies lessons from three films about contact with the afterlife.

1)      Ghost (1990): I bet you could stump a lot of movie buffs with the fact that the Patrick Swayze-Demi Moore-Whoopi Goldberg romantic thriller was the highest-grossing film of 1990, and indeed if we adjust for inflation is in the top 100 highest-grossing American films of all time. Box office isn’t a measure of quality or enduring importance, of course, but it does at least indicate a film that both reflected and influenced the cultural zeitgeist. And while that much-parodied pottery scene has lingered the most, I would argue that it’s the casting of Goldberg that’s particularly significant—Swayze and Moore as romantic leads was quite expected, but in many ways the film belongs to Goldberg’s psychic/medium character, which fundamentally shifted perceptions of the largely comic actress and won her a Best Supporting Actress Oscar. Of course the character could be located in the long and problematic tradition of the “magical negro” trope (in cinema and otherwise), but I would argue that Goldberg brings enough depth and dimension to the role to make her a meaningful and indeed central character in her own right.

2)      The Sixth Sense(1999; SPOILERS in what follows): The ghostly medium at the heart of M. Night Shyamalan’s smash hit (itself the second-highest grossing film of its year and I would argue even more of a zeitgeist-changer than Ghost) couldn’t be more distinct from Goldberg’s character. Played by the preternaturally (supernaturally?) talented young Haley Joel Osment, just eleven years old when the film was released, Sixth’s Cole Sear is a profoundly troubled and sad young boy who, with the help of Bruce Willis’ equally sad and troubled child psychological Malcolm Crowe, finds a way to make peace with his ability to see and communicate with the dead. While Cole’s character is thus partly in conversation with the kinds of troubled and possessed children long featured in texts like Monday’s focus The Turn of the Screw, he’s actually revealed to be far more proactive and powerful than them, not subject to the film’s horrors so much as a hero who can respond to and even conquer them. One of many ways that Shyamalan’s wonderful film changed cultural narratives and images.

3)      The Gift (2000): This supernatural thriller might have the best pedigree of all these films: directed by horror legend Sam Raimi, written by Billy Bob Thornton (and supposedly based on his mother’s own supernatural abilities), and starring an all-star cast including Cate Blanchett, Hilary Swank, Keanu Reeves, Greg Kinnear, and Katie Holmes (as a murdered girl into whose death Blanchett’s psychic protagonist begins to gain unwanted but crucial insight). Yet it thoroughly flopped (making only $12 million at the US box office, against a $10 million budget), and so has largely disappeared from our collective cultural memory. I’m not here to rehabilitate the film, which I saw once on home video and which left virtually no impression. But I will say that in its Georgia swampland setting, The Gift does represent a minor but interesting contribution to the larger genre of Southern Gothic, and Blanchett’s tortured widow Annie Wilson is defined at least as much through her relationships and roles within that rural Southern community and society as by her titular abilities to see and communicate with the dead.

Last GhostStudying tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Other ghost stories or histories you’d share?