Benjamin A. Railton's Blog, page 144

March 11, 2021: Spring Break Films: Revenge of the Nerds II: Nerds in Paradise

[Like many universities, Fitchburg State cancelled Spring Break for this academic year. But that doesn’t mean we can’t jet off to Daytona Beach in our imaginations, with the help of the Spring Break films I’ll AmericanStudy this week. Share your own Spring Break texts or contexts for a crowd-sourced weekend post that’ll have a little umbrella in its drink!]

On American anti-intellectualism, and the worse and better ways to challenge it.

As I noted in this post on my friend Aaron Lecklider’s great book Inventing the Egghead: The Battle over Brainpower in American Culture (2013), published exactly 50 years after Richard Hofstadter’s influential Anti-Intellectualism in American Life (1963), the precise origins of anti-intellectual attitudes and narratives in American society are a bit unclear and contested. But whether those national narratives are foundational (as Hofstadter argues) or more the product of Cold War anxieties (as Lecklider does), I would say that there can be no argument at all that by the end of the 20th and beginning of the 21st century these anti-intellectual threads have become dominant ones in our cultural pattern. And, more exactly and crucially, that the development and deepening of those narratives throughout the 50 years or so between Hofstadter’s book and the 2016 election helped bring us to the presidency of Donald Trump, a culmination of these anti-intellectual trends as of so many of the worst and most divisive impulses of American politics and culture.

Which brings us, obviously, to the Revenge of the Nerds film series. Beginning with the 1984 original film, and featuring three sequels over the next decade (including 1987’s Spring Break-set Revenge of the Nerds II: Nerds in Paradise, the ostensible focus of this post but, like yesterday’s subject From Justin to Kelly, not a film that needs an entire blog post on its own terms I assure you), the nerdy protagonists of this series challenged the Reagan era’s deepening anti-intellectual sentiments, triumphing time and again over their popular jock adversaries. The first film has in recent years received a good deal of justified criticism for the fact that its triumphant sex scene would actually have to be classified as a rape scene (nerdy hero Lewis has sex with his crush while pretending to be her boyfriend), among quite a few other problematic moments. And in truth, those specific problems illustrate a more fundamental issue with all the Revengefilms: their mostly unlikable heroes don’t triumph through meaningful use of their intelligence, but rather through things like sexual deception and violence (in Nerds in Paradise the climactic victory involves a tank and a punch). The message seems generally to be that nerds can be just as awful as the rest of society.

Fortunately, the Revenge of the Nerds films were not the only 1980s cinematic challenge to anti-intellectualism. The heroes of 1985’s cult classic film Real Genius are also nerds, brilliant and eccentric students at the fictional Pacific Technical University [SPOILERS in what follows, although the undeniable pleasures of Real Genius aren’t in its plot surprises]. These nerds likewise find themselves pitted against Reagan era tropes, this time Cold War militarization and the use of science and technology for dastardly and destructive ends (aided and abetted by their villainous Professor Jerry Hathaway, William Atherton’s second deliciously evil character in two years). But in this case the heroes’ climactic triumph is entirely due to their intellectual prowess, which they use to outwit Hathaway and his military allies and to turn weapons of mass destruction into, well, popcorn. Score one for a more thoughtful and inspiring American intellectualism!

Last Spring Break film tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Responses to this film or other Spring Break texts you’d share?

March 10, 2021: Spring Break Films: From Justin to Kelly

[Like many universities, Fitchburg State cancelled Spring Break for this academic year. But that doesn’t mean we can’t jet off to Daytona Beach in our imaginations, with the help of the Spring Break films I’ll AmericanStudy this week. Share your own Spring Break texts or contexts for a crowd-sourced weekend post that’ll have a little umbrella in its drink!]

On what wasn’t new about the historic beach bomb, and what was.

Full disclosure: I haven’t seen more than a few clips of From Justin to Kelly (2003), the movie Wikipedia notes “is often regarded as one of the worst movies ever made” and that received a 2005 Razzie for “Worst ‘Musical’ of Our First 25 Years” (their delightful scare quotes). Thanks to a Twitter recommendation from AJ Schmitz I did listen to the How Did This Get Made? episode on the film, which I’m quite sure was far more enjoyable than the movie would have been. You might nonetheless argue that I shouldn’t be writing a blog post on a movie I haven’t watched, and I’d understand that critique (evidence-based analyzer that I try to be)—but life is too short to spend 81 minutes watching From Justin to Kelly; and in any case my plan for this post is to analyze not all the nuances of this text (probably should have used scare quotes of my own for both of those last couple nouns), but rather to use it to engage a couple of pop culture contexts.

For one thing, the Spring Break-set From Justin to Kelly, featuring the “acting” debuts (couldn’t resist that time) of American Idol’s first season winner and runner-up Kelly Clarkson and Justin Guarini (I’m sure I could find a YouTube clip to hyperlink there, but I like you all too much to do that to you), is part of a long tradition of sub-par beach films starring teen idol-type actors. I’m thinking in particular about the many, many films inspired by Sandra Dee’s 1959 hit movie Gidget; as I wrote in that post Gidget isn’t terrible (although I think its popularity was due more to a bunch of beautiful bodies making surfing look good than any cinematic strengths), but it doesn’t seem that we can say the same of the majority of the more than 30 “beach party films” that were greenlit after Gidget’s success and were released in the five years after 1963’s Beach Party. These films often starred attractive, popular young stars like Frankie Avalon and Annette Funicello, and, like From Justin to Kelly, were more or less excuses to put those folks on the beach and hope that young audiences would want to join them there enough to overlook the absence of plots, compelling characters, or the like. That legacy doesn’t make From Justin to Kelly any better, but it does make it make a bit more sense.

On the other hand, Avalon and Funicello may not have been Olivier and Hepburn, but they were established actors, performers who had appeared in multiple films before their beach partying days. Guarini and Clarkson were cast in a film immediately after their time on American Idol, and because of that time—Clarkson in particular has noted that she didn’t want to make the film but was contractually obligated to do so. I’m not someone who believes that reality TV is an entirely or even consistently negative cultural presence (certain reality TV presidents notwithstanding), but I think it’s fair to say that the track record of reality TV stars going on to meaningful success in any other arena (or even in their own arena—Clarkson is one of only a few music-show stars to achieve a lasting career in the field) is a mixed oneat best. You might say that even the most talented screen performers couldn’t have saved From Justin to Kelly, but I believe the more accurate frame is quite distinct: that this thoroughly forgettable film would never have been made at all if it weren’t for the goal of producing a vehicle for these two reality TV contestants. This is one Spring Break story that should have stayed broken.

Next Spring Break film tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Responses to this film or other Spring Break texts you’d share?

March 9, 2021: Spring Break Films: Spring Breakers

[Like many universities, Fitchburg State cancelled Spring Break for this academic year. But that doesn’t mean we can’t jet off to Daytona Beach in our imaginations, with the help of the Spring Break films I’ll AmericanStudy this week. Share your own Spring Break texts or contexts for a crowd-sourced weekend post that’ll have a little umbrella in its drink!]

On the fine, fraught line between challenging and exploiting the objectification of female celebrities.

First things first: despite their very similar titles, Spring Breakers(2012) is a much more complex, ambitious, and thoughtful film than yesterday’s subject, Spring Break (1983). Yes, indie , who wrote and directed the film, has said in interviews that he wanted to make it in part to make up for his own missed Spring Break experiences (he was apparently too busy skateboarding to venture to sunnier climes), so Spring Breakerscould be said to reflect the same hedonistic goals as the earlier film. But as has been evident since the controversial and groundbreaking film Kids (1995), his first writing credit, Korine is ultimately more interested in deconstructing than in celebrating such youthful desires and pursuits, and Spring Breakers, an unremittingly bleak and violent film which he’s referred to as a “beach noir,” is no exception.

None of that is what led the media coverage of Spring Breakers, however. The consistent focus was the fact that two of its four female leads were Selena Gomez and Vanessa Hudgens, known at the time as squeaky-clean teen icons (Gomez mostly from a pop music career that had begun on Barney & Friends and Hudgens mostly from the High School Musical films) who in the film give far grittier and more sexualized performances than they ever had before. That was also relatively true for a third lead, Ashley Benson, although her role on the TV show Pretty Little Liars had been a bit darker than Gomez’s and Hudgens’ prior work; the fourth lead, Rachel Korine, is Harmony Korine’s wife and so had been part of his films for some time already. Between spending a good bit of the film in bikinis, taking part in numerous scenes featuring sexual situations and drug use, and eventually killing quite a few characters in a violent climax, these previously and famously Disney-fied actresses thoroughly challenge that image, a reversal that understandably drew a great deal of attention.

While I’m sure Harmony Korine would say that he cast these actresses due to their talents (and their performances are excellent across the board, to be clear), it seems clear to me that he also did so (at least in part) because he knew the controversy over their image revisions would draw more attention and coverage to the film. Which is fine up to a point; but since those revisions again require the actresses to do things like wear skimpy outfits for nearly all of the film, it does feel possible to argue that Korine is both exploiting their celebrity and objectifying them in the process. In her review of the film for The Guardian, critic Heather Long advanced that analysis, arguing that it “reinforces rape culture” and “turns young women into sex objects.” But Rolling Stone’s Josh Eells argued the opposite position, claiming that the film features “a kind of girl-power camaraderie that could almost be called feminist," part of Korine’s career-long goal of doing “the most radical work, but putting it out in the most commercial way to infiltrate the mainstream.” A complex duality which, to be honest, is really at the heart of the whole concept of Spring Break in the 21st century.

Next Spring Break film tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Responses to this film or other Spring Break texts you’d share?

March 8, 2021: Spring Break Films: Spring Break

[Like many universities, Fitchburg State cancelled Spring Break for this academic year. But that doesn’t mean we can’t jet off to Daytona Beach in our imaginations, with the help of the Spring Break films I’ll AmericanStudy this week. Share your own Spring Break texts or contexts for a crowd-sourced weekend post that’ll have a little umbrella in its drink!]

On more and less destructive pop culture stereotypes.

I’m not gonna pretend that 1983’s Spring Break was any kind of groundbreaking cinematic achievement, or even that I had heard of it prior to researching this week’s series. The sex comedy, produced and directed by Friday the 13th (1980) co-creator and director Sean Cunningham, seems from the clips and reviews I’ve seen (and as always feel free to correct me in comments, although I’m not anticipating a lot of Spring Break defenders here) to be a pretty formulaic, unimaginative, and uninteresting depiction of various Spring Break and college stereotypes, from sexy women in wet t-shirt contests to nerdy college guys looking to get drunk and score with those women to straight-laced parents seeking to prevent their kids from taking part in the hedonistic festivities. But the thing with stereotypes, even (or perhaps especially) the lazier varieties of them, is that they can tell us a good bit about their cultural and social contexts—and so it is with the stereotypes that seem to drive the plot of Spring Break.

The film’s more overtly limiting and thus destructive stereotypes seem to be (I know I keep using that phrase, but I haven’t seen it and I don’t want to pretend otherwise!) those related to gender and sex. The most blatant are the depictions of young women, which from what I can tell fall into two and only two categories: the vast majority of them (indeed, all but one), who are nameless and identity-less characters defined only by their sex appeal and the protagonists’ attempts to score with them; and the one more individualized young woman, Susie (), whom nerdy protagonist Nelson (David Knell) meets at a wet t-shirt contest, nearly has sex with during that first encounter, and then eventually (like, a day later) does have sex with. But while male characters like Nelson seem to be a good bit more fleshed-out (pun very much intended), they are likewise defined in quite thoroughly stereotypical ways, presented as driven by their basest desires (for women, for booze, for hedonism) in ultimately quite unoriginal and unattractive ways.

While those pursuits provide the protagonists’ and film’s initial motivations, the central plotline is actually driven by different and more interesting stereotypes around class, wealth, and power. Nelson’s step-father, Ernest (), is a wealthy asshole running for political office, and in the course of the film he pursues Nelson to Florida (worried that his step-son will embarrass his campaign) and befriends a local wealthy asshole (Richard Shull’s Eddie) who is trying to strong-arm his way into purchasing the hotel where the kids are staying. Together the two wealthy assholes conspire to bribe a building inspector to shut down the hotel (killing both of those birds with one wealthy asshole stone), but the kids, with the help of an army of fellow partying college students armed only with beer and whipped cream, get the better of Ernest and Eddie; their machinations are revealed, Nelson’s Mom decides to divorce Ernest, and the little guys triumph in the end. Sticking it to the Man isn’t exactly a revolutionary premise for an 80s comedy, but these themes of political and financial corruption are at least far more compelling and important than wet t-shirt contests.

Next Spring Break film tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Responses to this film or other Spring Break texts you’d share?

March 6-7, 2021: Superhero Comics: Watchmen

[In March 1941, DC Comics published Captain America Comics #1. So for Cap’s 80th birthday, this week I’ve AmericanStudied him and a handful of other comic superheroes, leading up to this post full of student responses to one of our most complex comics.]

My Spring 2020 Intro to Sci Fi/Fantasy class finished, as it always does, with Watchmen. By that time we were having our discussions remotely, through a Google Doc, so I’ve got a number of written student perspectives on the graphic novel saved. With their permission, and made anonymous, here are a few of those thoughtful, compelling readings, all of which could be linked to the HBO show as well:

1)      “Stepping away from the characters for a moment, let me return to the world at large. Most of the story takes place in New York during the height of the Cold War. The fear of potential nuclear war was so thick, it could be cut with a knife. But people overall seemed hopeful that nothing would happen, that changed with the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. Such immense horror was sent thundering through the populace at large, that everything began to reach a boiling point that wouldn’t be reached until the end of the book. Moore wrote into existence such a surrealist and horror inducing world with the assistance of Dave Gibbons’ art that you began to feel as if you were right there. It is difficult to describe it, and honestly, the movie and TV show cannot even begin to properly and effectively replicate it. Upon rereading the first few books I noticed so many intricate little details hinting at the future. Such foreshadowing was such a massive question mark when first reading, but so incredibly obvious upon a second viewing.”

2)  2)     “Despite dealing with far more death and darker subject matter than other stories there is hardly any blood in Watchmen, with many scenes being left up to interpretation in terms of carnage aside from very specific scenes such as Comedians death and when the Squid attacks. This is very much meant to punctuate the scenes at play and show their weight. The novel is seemingly bloodless before the squid but when it arrives there are death bodies of men, women and children littering the streets of New York. It is also to note than aside from Dr. Manhattan there is not a great deal of high concept science fiction or fantasy at play. But when the squid comes it is something out of a pulp science fiction novel, almost looking like something that does not even belong in the novel to begin with. Ozymandias could have had a nuclear explosion or something of that nature but decided to go with something the people of the world had never seen before so it would be inevitable to think Dr. Manhattan, whose reputation had already been damaged, would do it. Moore’s Watchmen has been the shining example of how to handle these sorts of high stakes, realistic stories but in my opinion none have even gotten close to being on the same level. It is an extremely detailed book which is not even a traditional comic book, but rather a comment or satire on comic books. The only reason it is grouped in with other comic books is mainly down to style and some subject matter. If it is a traditional book it would have also been considered a classic. It is more enjoyable and I find more detail with every read and it is a story I will never get tired of.”

3)      About “the political side of Watchmen. Politics is a difficult topic to discuss, as there are many ideas and arguments, and there is rarely a time where most people can agree. And Moore doesn't seem to care much about appealing to all people across the Political aisle. The Watchmen themselves are completely flawed themselves. They take matters into their own hands, believing that they somehow have the right to conduct law and order. And many times, their actions are disgusting and could most definitely be considered war crimes. And the end of the book shows this self righteous attitude when Adrian Veidt decides to kill millions of people. However, this free group of superheroes are not so free, as it is shown that they are used by the United States government to win wars. The Vietnam war for example, could itself be considered a war crime carried out by the United States, and Moore reflects this in his novel to an even greater extent when the United States, in this universe, wins the war with the help of a super being and an almost villain like character, the comedian. I think that Moores reflection of the Vietnam War in his story encapsulates what America would have as an imperialist power if they had the resources like Dr. Manhattan. Moore makes it a point to have a American news reporter say, ‘We repeat: the superman exists, and he’s American.’” 

 

4)      “Alan Moore’s Watchmen is a landmark achievement in graphic novel and superhero storytelling. For the past several years, superhero stories have dominated literature, television, and real-life popular culture. It’s easy to see Watchmen’s influence in all of it- from similar conflicts (should the law interfere with godlike entities?) seen in films such as Batman v. Superman and Captain America: Civil War, the overall darker tone of the story, and even the direct adaptations (The 2009 theatrical film and the 2019 HBO series). Yet, many would argue that Watchmen’s biggest influence was that on stories telling alternate history. This has been a storytelling device for as long as stories have been around, yet Watchmen uses it in a unique way: by incorporating superheroes into a contemporary setting, and covering human history. By highlighting how historic events were different with the existence of godlike entities, the world feels much more believable and realistic. Many alternate history stories with godlike entities (such as Captain America or Wonder Woman) simply make the godlike character disappear for a long period of time. Watchmen instead makes the characters live throughout time, changing every event that comes after their existence. Due to all these seemingly small details, Watchmen is a much more realistic depiction of alternate history than most stories like it.”

Next series starts Monday,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Other superhero contexts or analyses you’d share?

March 5, 2021: Superhero Comics: The Punisher

[In March 1941, DC Comics published Captain America Comics #1. So for Cap’s 80th birthday, this week I’ll AmericanStudy him and a handful of other comic superheroes, leading up to a post full of student responses to one of our most complex comics.]

On the character whose ambiguous heroism illustrates a fundamental American duality.

Each of the comic book heroes I’ve written about this week is complex in one way or another, but I don’t think there’s any doubt that they’re all, at the end of the day, heroes (outside of those individual storylines where Superman goes bad or the like, which only reinforce the character’s general goodness in contrast). But the same cannot necessarily be said of Marvel’s The Punisher (Frank Castle); since his 1974 debut in The Amazing Spider-Man, as a man out to kill Spider-Man both because he believes him to be a criminal and because he seemingly enjoys killing, The Punisher has blurred the lines between hero and villain as much as any comic book character. On the one hand, Castle first became The Punisher after his wife and children were massacred and the killers escaped justice (until he delivered it to them); on the other hand, he has continued to kill ever since, a vigilante often skirting and breaking the law while at the same time claiming to honor and uphold it.

There are salient late 20th century contexts for that kind of ambiguity, perhaps especially in the rise of vigilante characters such as Clint Eastwood’s Dirty Harryand Charles Bronson’s Paul Kersey, men who take the law into their own hands in understandable yet brutal and extreme ways. Pushing that particular envelope even further are characters such as Robert De Niro’s Travis Bickle (spoiler alert for that clip) or Michael Douglas’s Bill Foster, men whose motivations are even more murky and disturbed, although the objects of their violence seem often to deserve their fates just as much as did Clint’s and Bronson’s. It’s no doubt in part because of that sense of rightness in their actions, despite the obvious wrongness in much of their characters, that all four men became pop culture heroes in various ways; but such vigilante heroism is also an enduring American ideal. Even many of the Revolution’s heroes, from the Boston Tea Partiers to Paul Revere to Nathan Hale, operated outside of and in opposition to the law; and they’re far from alone in our popular iconography.

Perhaps the most famous pop cultural embrace of vigilante-ism, however, is also a far more explicitly controversial one, and a reminder of the other side to these American histories. In the final sequence in D.W. Griffith’s technically pioneering and thematically disgusting The Birth of a Nation(1915), the Ku Klux Klan rides triumphantly to the rescue of the film’s protagonists, defying any and all official institutions (who are all in the film’s mythos in league with the villains) in the process; the scene’s celebration of the KKK’s lawlessness would be echoed two decades later by a distinctly similar scene in Gone with the Wind (both the novel and the film). These cultural texts remind us that the vigilante activities of the KKK, like those of lynch mobs, were for many decades in our national narratives treated just like those of The Punisher et al—as a disturbing and perhaps tragic but also understandable and even necessary response to societal ills. Makes Frank Castle that much more ambiguous, doesn’t it?

Special post this weekend,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Other superhero contexts or analyses you’d share?

March 4, 2021: Superhero Comics: Black Panther

[In March 1941, DC Comics published Captain America Comics #1. So for Cap’s 80th birthday, this week I’ll AmericanStudy him and a handful of other comic superheroes, leading up to a post full of student responses to one of our most complex comics.]

On Black Powers, super- and political.

In the July 1966 issue of Fantastic Four, legendary comics duo Stan Lee and Jack Kirby created their newest character, the Black Panther. Other black characters had appeared in various supporting roles in American comics, but the Panther—really a super-powered African prince named T’challa from the fictional nation of Wakanda—is generally considered the first mainstream black superhero. If so, Lee and Kirby, and their successors in writing and illustrating the character (and recently in bringing him to the big screen), have done that pioneering idea full credit, creating a character with as rich a backstory and mythos, home “world,” familial and romantic life, and powers and personality as any of his peers in the Fantastic Four, the Avengers, and the Marvel Universe overall.

From what I can tell it was coincidental that the Panther’s debut was followed three months later by Huey Newton and Bobby Seale’s October 1966 creation of the Black Panther Party(or at least there seem to be no explicit references to any connection between the two Panthers); both might have been responding to the well-known African American World War II tank battalion, among other potential origins for the name. But in any case the timing reflects the complexity of the American racial, social, cultural, and political world into which Lee and Kirby’s character arrived, both within the comic (as an African immigrant to the United States; or perhaps simply a visitor, as he often returns to his home country in the comics) and as a cultural presence. This was a character who was literally the most powerful individual within his African homeland, coming to a world in which the very concept of Black Power (also newly coined in 1966) was a revolutionary one.

So when Stokely Carmichael led those SNCC marchers in the cry of “We want Black Power!,” would the release (just a month later) of the debut Black Panther story have satisfied them? Obviously a comic book superhero is not the equivalent of meaningful political or social change—but the Panther did represent a significant cultural shift, or at least an addition to the mainstream cultural landscape, and such cultural developments have their own value to be sure. Moreover, it’s possible to argue that such cultural shifts can produce social or political ones—as, for example, a generation of comic fans grows up rooting for a super-powered, socially responsible, Ku Klux Klan-fighting African prince, the concept of Black Power moves from an abstraction or a potential division to, ideally, a shared and obvious part of our world. Sounds pretty super-heroic to me.

Last SuperheroStudying tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Other superhero contexts or analyses you’d share?

March 3, 2021: Superhero Comics: Wonder Woman

[In March 1941, DC Comics published Captain America Comics #1. So for Cap’s 80th birthday, this week I’ll AmericanStudy him and a handful of other comic superheroes, leading up to a post full of student responses to one of our most complex comics.]

On the ambiguous creation, evolution, and cultural images of our first female superhero.

Wonder Woman was created only a few years after Superman and Batman, debuting in the December 1941 issue of All Star Comics; but this superhero was hugely distinct from those and other contemporaries, and not just in the basic and obvious fact of her gender. For one thing, her creator, William Moulton Marston, was a Harvard-educated psychologist who was hired first as an educational consultant for comics companies before he developed the idea for this new character. And the circumstances behind that creation were particularly complex: in terms of the inspiration for the character, who was based partly on Marston’s impressive wife Elizabeth (who also, at least according to one article, suggested the character’s gender in the first place) and partly on a young student with whom the couple were supposedly having a polygamous relationship; and in terms of Marston’s stated goals, which included both giving young women a sense of their “force, strength, and power” but also molding them into adults as “tender, submissive, [and] peace-loving as good women are.”

As Wonder Woman evolved over the next few decades, she similarly shifted between more and less progressive and traditional roles and characteristics. For example ,when she joined the Justice Society of America, the first comics super-group (created to help America fight Hitler and the Axis forces in World War II, a complicated echo of Captain America’s origin points about which I wrote on Monday), she did so in large part to serve as the group’s secretary (I suppose a super-group needs a super-secretary); similarly, in a late 1960s storyline she retired the Wonder Woman identity in order to run a mod clothing store as Diana Prince (although she still fought crime on the side). Yet despite such connections to entirely or somewhat traditional women’s worlds, Wonder Woman’s mythology was similar to Superman’s—she came to our society from a distinct and superhuman race and world, in her case as an Amazonian princess, and so her human identity as Diana was the creation and mask—making her at her core a larger-than-life and particularly strong and powerful woman. And I would argue that the 1970s Lynda Carter TV showengaged with both sides of this coin: using skimpy costumes to capitalize on Carter’s physical appearance; yet consistently portraying her strength and toughness against any and all adversaries.

So how do we analyze this character and her social and cultural images and meanings? A historicizing answer doesn’t seem sufficient, since in each era and stage Wonder Woman has had both progressive and traditional, boundary-pushing and stereotypical, sides (the recent films have certainly emphasized the former in each case, but I’d say the duality is still present). Given Marston’s own double-sided quote about what he hoped to convey to young female audiences, a reader-response analysis would also be problematic—that is, while we could argue that readers would emphasize one or another aspect of the character, depending on their own perspectives or goals, Marston seemed to be arguing that both ends of the spectrum were part of his explicit purposes. In both cases, and perhaps in any analysis, the baseline truth seems to be that Wonder Woman has been a multi-layered and contradictory character, one who can reinforce some of our culture’s attitudes and identities while at the same time taking them in distinctly new and radical directions. Not much that’s more AmericanStudies than that combination!

Next SuperheroStudying tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Other superhero contexts or analyses you’d share?

March 2, 2021: Superhero Comics: Batman and Superman

[In March 1941, DC Comics published Captain America Comics #1. So for Cap’s 80th birthday, this week I’ll AmericanStudy him and a handful of other comic superheroes, leading up to a post full of student responses to one of our most complex comics.]

On two distinct AmericanStudies contrasts between our two most enduring superheroes.

A great deal of ink—actual and electronic—has already been spilled about the identities, not only individual but also as a matched pair, of Superman and Batman, Clark Kent and Bruce Wayne, the Man of Steel and the Dark Knight. Heck, there have even been multiple special comic book series (not to mention a very controversial and still evolving recent film) dedicated to the pair’s crime-fighting adventures. Having been created at almost exactly the same time—Superman debuted in 1938 and Batman in 1939—and having evolved, through comics and TV shows and films and reboots, in eerily parallel ways, the two caped crusaders stand as the yin and yang at the top of the superhero pyramid (us Spiderman fans might protest, but, well, we’d be wrong). How much more can an AmericanStudier say about these two?

For one thing, I think more could be made of the immigrant vs. insider dynamic at play in the two characters’ backstories—and, more exactly, how each seemingly flips that backstory on its head in his present, mythic status. Superman, the immigrant from a foreign land (well, planet) who has to change his name in order to assimilate to his adopted family and the United States, ends up becoming the classic all-American symbol and success story, beloved of his countrymen. Batman, the son of privileged and powerful parents, born on third base holding a silver spoon, ends up rejecting much of that identity in favor of the shadows and dark corners, feared far more than he’s admired by his fellow Gothamites. Damned if I know what to make of those shifts exactly, but at the very least they reflect, individually and even more as a tandem, that superheroic myth-making is just as partially and complicatedly related to original identities and communities as is the self-made man narrative.

For another thing, I’d say that the two characters illustrate two very different models of American heroism, images that contradict each other yet have often seemed to coexist in particular moments and stories. In our narratives of the Union’s victory in the Civil War, for example, we tend to give similar credit to Abraham Lincoln, the larger-than-life superman giving the era its moral gravitas; and to Ulysses S. Grant, the down-and-dirty fighter willing to use whatever tactics seemed necessary to get the job done. The two are difficult to reconcile—at the same moment that Lincoln was delivering his unifying Second Inaugural address, envisioning reunion between the regions, Grant was pursuing the final stages of his “total war” strategy, devastating the Confederacy on every front. Yet it’s also possible to see them as necessarily complementary—perhaps Superman’s idealism needs Batman’s realism to get the job done; and yet without the idealism the realism would perhaps seem too dirty or debased. The yin and yang of our superheroic and national myths.

Next SuperheroStudying tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Other superhero contexts or analyses you’d share?

March 1, 2021: Superhero Comics: Captain America

[In March 1941, DC Comics published Captain America Comics #1. So for Cap’s 80th birthday, this week I’ll AmericanStudy him and a handful of other comic superheroes, leading up to a post full of student responses to one of our most complex comics.]

On how timing helps us recognize the aspirational and political roles of superheroes.

I think it’s relatively well known, even among those (like me) with only a passing knowledge of early comic book history, that on the cover of his debut issue Captain America is punching Adolf Hitler (as part of a chaotic scene that also features other soldiers and various military paraphernalia as well as the first glimpse of Cap’s best friend and sidekick Bucky Barnes). It’s a literally and figuratively iconic image, one that immediately captured the essence of this patriotic super-soldier. But here’s the thing: the United States wasn’t at war with Nazi Germany, nor part of World War II at all, when that first issue was published—it was actually released in December 1940, with March 1941 as the cover date; so depending on how we date the issue it was either a year or 9 months away from the Pearl Harbor attack and the American entry into the war. Which is to say, Captain America’s iconic first action wasn’t that punch—it was to break neutrality!

In reflecting on that cover, and on the impetus behind creating Captain America as a new character overall, writer Joe Simon (who worked as usual with his partner, artist Jack Kirby) noted that that pre-war moment and context was precisely the point: “The opponents to the war were all quite well organized. We wanted to have our say too.” And he added that the response to that initial comic and cover included not just excitement and support but also controversy and opposition, remembering, “When the first issue came out we got a lot of threatening letters and hate mail. Some people really opposed what Cap stood for.” Given that the pair’s home base was New York City, which not very long before had hosted the largest Nazi rally in American history, it is no surprise that there were many Americans who did not appreciate the image of a patriotic hero attacking the German dictator, and that some of these Nazi sympathizers went so far as to make death threats and wait outside their New York offices, leading to a police protection detail for Simon and Kirby.  

Those too-easily-overlooked contexts for Captain America Comics #1 certainly reveal a good deal about where America was in 1940 and early 1941. But they also help us remember two vital things about comic books and their superheroic subjects: they are innately political, reflecting and commenting upon aspects of their societies and time periods; and they are often aspirational, working to imagine and depict possibilities beyond those historical contexts and realities. The controversial graphic novelist Alan Moore (on whose iconic Watchmen see the upcoming weekend post) has commented in recent years on superheroes stories as fundamentally fascist; while I understand his point, and while different characters and stories can of course function in different ways, I would argue that very often they can be quite the opposite: not only literally opposed to fascism (as was Captain America, before his nation even was), but also portraying themes of justice and equality in ways that can literally and figuratively model those goals for their readers and societies.

Next SuperheroStudying tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Other superhero contexts or analyses you’d share?