Benjamin A. Railton's Blog, page 166

June 27-28, 2020: June 2020 Recap

[A Recap of the month that was in AmericanStudying.]June 1: MassMediaStudying: CNN and Cable News: On the network’s 40th anniversary, a mass media series kicks off with the best and worst of what cable news can offer. June 2: MassMediaStudying: William Leggett and Early Republic Journalism: The series continues with four NYC periodicals that illustrate an evolving Early Republic medium. June 3: MassMediaStudying: Frederic Remington and Wartime Journalism: What happens when the pen and the sword work together, as the series writes on. June 4: MassMediaStudying: The March of Time and Newsreels: An iconic newsreel series that helps us remember an under-appreciated early 20C genre. June 5: MassMediaStudying: The Internet: The series concludes with the variations, limitations, and possibilities of journalism online. June 6-7: MassMediaStudying: Joseph Adelman’s Revolutionary Networks: A special post highlighting a great recent scholarly book and the online event that featured it. June 8: Portsmouth Posts: The Sheafe Warehouse: A series inspired by the Portsmouth (NH) waterfront kicks off with three generations of Sampson Sheafes in New England history. June 9: Portsmouth Posts: The Navy Yard: The series continues with two famous products of the historic construction facility and one darker history also present there. June 10: Portsmouth Posts: Thomas P. Moses: Two stages to and the broader meanings of a 19C Renaissance life, as the series rolls on. June 11: Portsmouth Posts: Remembering the Marine Railway: The importance of remembering material culture histories, and why we need to go beyond them. June 12: Portsmouth Posts: The Black Heritage Trail: The series concludes with three of the many educational stops along a historic path. June 13-14: New England Historic Daytrips: A special weekend list of prior posts on many other New England historic and cultural sites. June 15: American Horror Stories: The Scream Series and Meta-Storytelling: For Psycho’s 60th, a horror series kicks off with the benefits and drawbacks of meta-fiction. June 16: American Horror Stories: Psycho, The Birds, and Defamiliarization: The series continues with horror, defamiliarization, and prejudice. June 17: American Horror Stories: The Saw Series and Morality: Different visions of morality in/and horror films, as the series screams on. June 18: American Horror Stories: Found Footage Films and Realism: The longstanding appeal, and the limits, of faux-realism. June 19: American Horror Stories: Hostel, Taken, and Xenophobia: The series concludes with the horrifying xenophobia at the heart of two of the 21st century’s biggest hits. June 20-21: Crowd-sourced American Horror Stories: One of my favorite crowd-sourced posts yet, featuring so many responses and nominations from fellow HorrorStudiers—add yours in comments!June 22: BoschStudying: Harry: A series on characters from the Amazon original cop show kicks off with how the protagonist’s dark histories complicate his anti-hero status. June 23: BoschStudying: Jerry Edgar: The series continues with the benefits of giving a supporting character more of an identity and stories of his own. June 24: BoschStudying: Grace Billetts: A character comparison that can help us extend beyond the “grumpy commanding officer” type, as the series detects on. June 25: BoschStudying: Irvin Irving: The most typecast of the show’s leads, and how fatherhood has helped him beyond that type. June 26: BoschStudying: Maddie: The series concludes with my favorite character on the show, and one of the best kid-of-the-protagonist characters of all time. Next series starts Monday,BenPS. Topics you’d like to see covered in this space? Guest Posts you’d like to contribute? Lemme know!

June 26, 2020: BoschStudying: Maddie

[Like most of us, my lockdown has offered the opportunity to check some TV shows off of my list. One of the best I’ve seen is Amazon Prime’s original show Bosch, based on the longstanding series of police procedural detective novels by Michael Connelly(who is part of the showas well). The best part of Bosch is its characters, so this week I’ll AmericanStudy the five most important!]On what a multi-generational dynamic adds to our protagonist, and why it’s more important than that.First things first: I don’t want to suggest that the character of Harry Bosch is in any way singular in having a central and crucial relationship with his kid. Indeed, if we look at the list of anti-hero characters I highlighted in Monday’s post on Harry, a fair number of them have kids; and while in some cases those kids remain a bit too young and peripheral to be main characters on the show (like with Jimmy McNulty and Vic Mackey, perhaps not coincidentally the two other police officers on that list), in many others they grow into important characters in their own right across their show’s arc (certainly the case with Tony Soprano’s, Don Draper’s, and Walter White’s kids, for example). Parent-child relationships and dynamics are after all both a universal human experience (not to say everyone has kids of their own, but we’re all someone’s child) and an excellent storytelling device, and these TV kids, played by some exceptional young actors (I’d highlight Kiernan Shipka’s Sally Draper as a particular standout, but there’s plenty of talent to go around), have helped create some of the great TV storylines of the Golden Age. [On that note I have to make a special mention of Holly Taylor’s Paige Jennings on The Americans, maybe the best TV kid character and performance of all time.]But with all of that said, I would still argue that Madison Lintz’s Maddie Bosch represents an especially interesting and influential kid character for a couple of reasons. For one thing, she opens up sides to Harry’s character in ways that are quite different from the usual “badass anti-hero with a soft spot for his daughter” trope (see Jack and Kim Bauer in particular, but certainly also Tony and Meadow Sopranoamong others). As I argued in Monday’s post, Harry’s greatest strengths and his most telling flaws all stem in one way or another from the darkness that drives him, and the show consistently portrays that darkness and drive through solitary and quiet scenes, generally set in Harry’s striking and strikingly isolated home with its bird’s-eye view of LA. But across the show’s seasons that home has become more and more fully Maddie’s as well, and has thus featured the majority of the intense, awkward, realistic, intimate interactions and conversations between father and daughter that define this evolving dynamic and relationship. In some core ways Harry at the end of season six seems quite similar to the Harry we met at the start of season one (and that’s more than okay), but because of and through Maddie he’s in other ways quite different, and that slow and very moving growth has been a beautiful thing to watch.If this week’s series has had a central through-line, however (besides “I love Bosch!,” which also, yes), it’s been that thanks to its core group of great characters and very talented actors, Bosch is about a lot more than just its titular protagonist. It’s perhaps most important not to analyze or define—and thus not to limit—the character of Maddie solely through her relationship with her dad, for all sorts of reasons but especially because she’s a young woman working to come into her own despite (or really through) some significant challenges and tragedies. Not surprisingly, as the daughter of a cop father and a former FBI profiler mother, she has done so in large part through considering her own possible paths within the world of law and justice—potential paths that so far have included both police officer and lawyer (on either the defense or prosecution sides of the coin). While I’m hopeful that the 7th and final season will give us a glimpse into where Maddie Bosch ends up, just those questions alone reflect the show’s ability to create a truly multi-generational narrative, one where this compelling kid character has become to grow up into and contribute to a world that she shares with, but that importantly exists beyond, her flawed, interesting, deeply human father.  June Recap this weekend,BenPS. What do you think? Takes on this show or others you’d call especially lockdown-binge-worthy?

June 25, 2020: BoschStudying: Irvin Irving

[Like most of us, my lockdown has offered the opportunity to check some TV shows off of my list. One of the best I’ve seen is Amazon Prime’s original show Bosch, based on the longstanding series of police procedural detective novels by Michael Connelly(who is part of the showas well). The best part of Bosch is its characters, so this week I’ll AmericanStudy the five most important!]On the most typecast of Bosch’s five leads, and the humanity and depth we see nonetheless.On The Wire, Lance Reddick portrayed Lieutenant Cedric Daniels, a tough-as-nails, unsmiling commanding officer who gradually worked his way up to deputy chief, chief, and even commissioner before complicated political issues forced him out of the latter role; at the start of the series he was married, but that marriage ended up failing and by the series’ end he was in a committed relationship with another character from within the law enforcement ranks (State’s Attorney Rhonda Pearlman, played by Deirdre Lovejoy). On Bosch, Lance Reddick portrays Deputy Chief Irvin Irving, a tough-as-nails, unsmiling commanding officer who has gradually worked his way up to chief and even a run for Los Angeles mayor before complicated political issues forced him to end his campaign for the latter role; at the start of the series he was married, but that marriage ended up failing and as of season six he is in a committed relationship with another character from within the law enforcement ranks (crisis response team translator Jun Park, played by Linda Park). Reddick is so damn good in both roles that I’m not complaining about the similarities at all (plus I really don’t want him to yell at me), but still, it’s pretty striking when you line ‘em up like that (and Reddick himself has remarked on his frequent typecasting).I wouldn’t be writing a whole post on Irving if the typecasting were the whole story, though; and just as I’ve argued for the other central characters this week, across Bosch’s seasons Irving has indeed been developed in compelling ways that both extend and challenge his more familiar role. Partly that’s due to Reddick’s own talent and charisma, but it’s also been the result of two interconnected, intimate familial plotlines. At the start of season one Irving’s son George was a uniformed police officer, and it seemed that his story would be the likewise familiar one of a privileged child both benefiting from and seeking to escape his father’s shadow. But in season two, George Irving was killed by a group of corrupt cops with whom he had gone undercover—and while that plotline did relate directly to the season’s overarching mystery and procedural stories, it also and to my mind most importantly allowed us to see a vastly different side of Irvin Irving as both a policeman and a father. That is, partly Irving responded to this tragedy in the ways his typecast identity would suggest: getting angry and going after the criminals responsible (in partnership with Bosch, which was truly a delight to watch). But Reddick was consistently able to show us the pain and grief underneath that badass exterior, offering a compelling parallel to the darknesses that so often drive Bosch’s investigations.In the most recent season (six), Irving’s relationship with Jun Park added another, even more human side to these elements of his character and arc. Jun revealed to Irving that she was unexpectedly pregnant and that their child would be a boy, and through a series of largely unspoken but hugely powerful reactions and choices Reddick conveyed all the emotions and layers to what that news meant for Irving (this scene doesn’t seem to be online yet, unfortunately). A central plot thread of season six dealt with Jamie Hector’s Jerry Edgar dealing with his own perspectives on fatherhood, both through his interactions with a grieving father and through his own relationship to his growing sons, and as usual with this great show these multiple threads reflected and enriched each other without any overt commentary. But at the same time, there’s something to be said for the depths and potency of a single moment and conversation—and in that conversation between Irving and Jun, Reddick reveals all the layers and humanity beyond any stereotypical sides to this character or typecasting to his roles and career (to be clear, Park’s performance was great too, and indeed necessary as her character has consistently been to draw out this wonderful new side of Irving and Reddick). Last BoschStudying tomorrow,BenPS. What do you think? Takes on this show or others you’d call especially lockdown-binge-worthy?

June 24, 2020: BoschStudying: Grace Billetts

[Like most of us, my lockdown has offered the opportunity to check some TV shows off of my list. One of the best I’ve seen is Amazon Prime’s original show Bosch, based on the longstanding series of police procedural detective novels by Michael Connelly(who is part of the showas well). The best part of Bosch is its characters, so this week I’ll AmericanStudy the five most important!]On a comparison that can help us analyze a compelling character beyond the “begrudgingly supportive captain” stereotype.If you’ve watched, well, any cop shows or movies ever, you likely get instinctively what I mean by the “begrudgingly supportive captain” character type. There are of course variations within that type, particularly when it comes to how supportive they ultimately are: sometimes the captain is more a partner of sorts to the main characters, publicly expressing unhappiness with their actions but privately having their back against more antagonistic powers that be; sometimes he or she is more aggressively or genuinely unhappy with the main characters, who thus have to hide more from their superior as they pursue justice and the bad guys. Amy Aquino’s Hollywood Homicide Lieutenant Grace Billetts generally falls more into the former category, which is why she’s so beloved by her detectives (like Harry Bosch and Jerry Edgar); but she certainly plays the frustrated superior officerrole with some regularity, particularly when Bosch refuses to follow the rules that seem consistently to get in his way. So Billetts fits both sides of the begrudgingly supportive dynamic nicely, and with a warmth and humor that are all Aquino’s doing.But as I’ve argued about Bosch and Edgar over the first two posts in this series, Billetts also has other sides and layers to her character that go beyond this familiar and stereotypical role, and in her case we can better analyze those layers by comparing her to another compelling TV character. Billetts is gay, which allows for a comparison with Laura Innes’s Dr. Kerry Weaver from ER, another strong female leader (Weaver was over the course of her arc Chief Resident, Chief of Emergency Medicine, and Hospital Chief of Staff) whose personal life offers potential conflicts with her professional roles. The time gap between the 90s (ER aired from 1994 to 2009, with Weaver joining in Season 2) and the 2010s (Bosch has aired from 2014 to the present) is telling here—the moment when Weaver was outed at workby her romantic partner was portrayed as a big deal (and since it was from the same era as the Ellen controversy, clearly was one), while it seems clear that Billetts’s coworkers know and don’t care about her sexuality. But nonetheless, a prior workplace relationship is depicted as what is holding Billetts back from further professional advancement—she has tried unsuccessfully to make captain for years—which reminds us that society has perhaps not evolved as much in these two decades as we would hope.Without spoiling all the details, it’s interesting to note that the most recent (6th) season of Bosch added another layer to those personal and professional issues for Billetts, as she was accused of harassment (of a relatively mild variety, but nevertheless) by one of the department’s detectives. Moreover, the situation was made more complicated because of her fraught relationship to her own superior officer (who occupies the captain position she hasn’t been able to attain). That dynamic likewise parallels one of Dr. Kerry Weaver’s enduring challenges, her navigation of her relationship with her boss (and one of TV’s most toxic male characters), Paul McCrane’s Dr. Robert “Rocket” Romano. But while roughly half of Romano’s interactions with Weaver (and everyone else, perhaps especially Eriq La Salle’s Dr. Peter Benton) could be described as harassment of one kind or another, in that era they were (to my recollection) never overtly portrayed as such. The far greater awareness of those workplace challenges in Bosch makes it one of many shows dealing well with the era of #MeToo, and adds another compelling layer to the character and story of Grace Billetts. Next BoschStudying tomorrow,BenPS. What do you think? Takes on this show or others you’d call especially lockdown-binge-worthy?

June 23, 2020: BoschStudying: Jerry Edgar

[Like most of us, my lockdown has offered the opportunity to check some TV shows off of my list. One of the best I’ve seen is Amazon Prime’s original show Bosch, based on the longstanding series of police procedural detective novels by Michael Connelly(who is part of the showas well). The best part of Bosch is its characters, so this week I’ll AmericanStudy the five most important!]On the benefits to giving a supporting character space to become far more multi-layered.I can’t lie, it took me a not-insignificant portion of Bosch’s season one not to suspect that Jamie Hector’s Jerry Edgar wasn’t secretly an undercover criminal mastermind; no one who has seen Hector as The Wire’s Marlo Stanfield, one of the most chilling villains in TV history, would blame me for having my doubts. Once I got past those associations with Hector’s prior character, Edgar settled in to what seemed to me to be a familiar and comfortable role: as the more straight-laced sidekickto our loose cannon protagonist, often frustrated by and critical of Bosch but always willing and able to have his back when the chips are down. Even their respective choices in apparel seemed to reflect those roles, with Edgar a clotheshorse who demands a stop at the outlets as part of a season one roadtrip and frequently chides Bosch for his far less natty attire. Add in their season one family situations—Edgar a dad to young kids who are of course a central focus of his, Bosch with a teenage daughter he hasn’t seen in many years and who calls him Harry—and the contrast between these partners felt well-established and clear (and evocative of famous prior such pop culture partnerships like Murtaugh and Riggs).While Hector is a talented enough actor that he was able to give Edgar layers even within that familiar and supporting frame, for the next couple seasons it seemed that this dynamic would largely continue, and indeed would be deepened through a plotline in which Edgar found himself investigating Bosch’s own potential misconduct (in pursuit of justice, but nonetheless well outside the lines of what Edgar was willing to condone). But gradually, particularly over the show’s last few seasons (four through six), Bosch has begun to explore sides of Edgar’s identity that are both far less tied to his partner and far different from what we had previously seen or known about the character. It has done so most strikingly through a couple things shared by Edgar and Jamie Hector—Haitian heritageand complex, enduring ties to the Haitian American community. While those elements have been linked to crime and investigations, as you’d expect from a police procedural (and which I won’t spoil here), they’ve also offered a way to understand Edgar’s identity that goes beyond his job, and includes such telling details as his bilingualism and his links to older, 1st generation Haitian American characters we’ve met. The benefits to the show of that broadening and deepening of this supporting character, turning him at times into more of a co-protagonist with Bosch, are likely obvious—while I suppose it would be possible for them to create a sense of disjointedness if they were handled poorly or haphazardly, it seems to me far more likely (and is indeed the case here) that they would create a more compelling tapestry, a season and world with multiple interesting things happening at once (which in their own way includes the other characters on whom I’ll focus in this series as well). But to my mind, the true benefit of this growth in Edgar’s character is quite precisely about more than the show, or rather more than the necessarily limited focus with which any show (like any cultural work) begins. Of course a show called Bosch is going to focus first and foremost on that particular character, and is going to depict other characters and stories as they move through and around his orbit. But too much of that focus risks repeating one of the main problems with the anti-hero type: the idea that there’s something special enough about this one figure that he or she (but usually he) deserves more empathy or understanding than we give to the others in his or her world (such as, often, people whom this anti-hero kills). To some degree that remains the frame for Bosch—but over its six seasons it has also and crucially gone beyond that frame, with characters like Jerry Edgar reminding us that the world is far bigger than Harry and full of stories worth our engagement.Next BoschStudying tomorrow,BenPS. What do you think? Takes on this show or others you’d call especially lockdown-binge-worthy?

June 22, 2020: BoschStudying: Harry

[Like most of us, my lockdown has offered the opportunity to check some TV shows off of my list. One of the best I’ve seen is Amazon Prime’s original show Bosch, based on the longstanding series of police procedural detective novels by Michael Connelly(who is part of the showas well). The best part of Bosch is its characters, so this week I’ll AmericanStudy the five most important!]On the lead character who echoes but also enriches and challenges a couple familiar types.I’m far from the first person to say it, but it’s so true that it bears repeating: there have been few better fits between actor and character in TV history than that of Titus Welliverwith Hieronymus “Harry” Bosch. Welliver has played over the years, working repeatedly with both David Milchand Ben Affleck among others, but one consistent through-line across those roles, as Welliver has been the first to note in interviews, is that many have fallen within the broad category of the hard-boiled cop/detective. Given that Michael Connelly has described a college experience (at the University of Florida) reading Raymond Chandler as a key origin point for his career as a mystery writer, it’s fair to say that Harry Bosch (the first main character Connelly created, beginning with his award-winning debut novel The Black Echo [1992]) could be described as a hard-boiled detective in his own right. All of that felt instinctively true before I had watched a second of the show, and barreling through the six current, phenomenal seasons (with one more still to come) did nothing to dissuade me of the notion.At the same time, Welliver has also in interviews frequently used another phrase to describe Harry: “such a quintessential anti-hero.” I’ve written a good deal in this space about TV anti-heroes, perhaps the single most defining character type of this 21st century Golden Age of Television, from Tony Soprano to Walter White to Jimmy McNulty to Frank Underwood to Don Draper to Jack Bauer to Al Swearengen to Boyd Crowder to Vic Mackey to Dexter Morgan to Olivia Pope (and I could go on and on). Many of those figures are overtly criminal in their defining activities, and many others are at least more than willing to break the law to achieve their goals, so perhaps the closest parallel to Bosch would be McNulty, a police officer who is genuinely trying to be “good police” (and certainly succeeds at times) but whose personal flaws and demons frequently lead him to make mistakes that damage both himself and his communities. Given that the extended first scene of the first episode of Bosch features our protagonist pursuing and killing a suspect, after which his superior officer, Lance Reddick’s Captain Irving (on whom more later this week), says something along the lines of, “Jesus, Bosch, again?!,” there’s no doubt that Harry is established immediately through precisely that balance of good cop and flawed man.But despite those multi-layered familiar tropes, I would ultimately call Bosch something quite different than either the classic hard-boiled detective or the quintessential anti-hero. Jimmy McNulty’s flaws and mistakes can be traced to many of the same vices (or pleasures, depending on how you frame it) that have defined so many hard-boiled detectives—sex and booze, to put it bluntly. Harry Bosch drinks quite a bit, and has it seems had more than his fair share of difficulties with relationships (although on the show they are mostly in his past). But what Welliver has so compellingly called the “darkness” in Bosch comes from a very distinct and much more intimate place, one linked to (without spoiling all the details, since we learn much of this across the first season) his childhood and his mother, the darkness of the world in which he grew up and which so fully shaped both what’s strongest and what’s weakest, most admirable and most frustrating, in him. Those things mostly go unspoken—this is a show that respects its audience as much as any I’ve seen, and demands a great deal of us—but they comprise the beating heart of both the character and the show, and make it something familiar yet strikingly unique and engrossing as well.Next BoschStudying tomorrow,BenPS. What do you think? Takes on this show or others you’d call especially lockdown-binge-worthy?

June 20-21, 2020: Crowd-sourced American Horror Stories

[On June 16th, 1960, Alfred Hitchcock premiered his new film Psycho in New York. So to celebrate that anniversary, this week I’ve contextualized Psycho and other horror films, leading up to this crowd-sourced weekend post featuring the responses and nominations of fellow spooky story studiers—add yours in comments!]Following up Monday’s post on Scream, the great responds, “You really should see New Nightmare . Next to Scream 2 it is probably Wes' finest piece of cinema, overall.” He adds, “I also think Scream 4 is REALLY unfairly maligned and, given the lack of empathy we're currently seeing in society by and large, fairly ahead of its time—much like New Nightmare was.”Following up Wednesday’s post on the Saw films, Sabrina writes, “Complete horror movie junkie and the saw series are legit one of my favorite simply due to the sheer creativity of the plot line as well as the traps.” She follows up, “In a way I do hope that some escape the traps but I still know that if they do they will only face a worse one afterwards. So sometimes it's better if they don’t. Ultimately they're handed their death in the manner it was written. For whatever reason they are there the traps seem to fit most of the cases and reasons. If it is their time to die then there’s really no escaping it. It's just a matter of how and when or how far along they have to go before their time comes.”Sabrina also shares, “Not sure if it would be more horror or thriller category but the movie Population 436 is really good. It’s sort of a play on the short story ‘The Lottery’ but shows how alienated different towns and communities can be and how oblivious the world outside of it can be towards seeing what is really going on. Definitely worth the watch.”Mark Lawton adds, “I can’t imagine most going into these movies without a taste for bloodlust. Sure, there have been movies where one roots for the bad guy: you’ve got your Ocean 11 types, but more on topic you wonder what nightmare Krueger will devise or how exactly the three foot tall Chucky will continue his spree. I admit, among friends I have concocted some Saw death traps. The appeal to me is how the punishment tries to fit the crime according to Kramer. I really dig the psychology of the movies. One man expecting life only to be stricken of it (two lives if you include the unborn baby). It’s why I keep going back to see them. Hell, I even had the video game for the PS2—yes it exists.”Following up Friday’s post on xenophobic horror, Mark writes, “Don’t forget about Roth’s travelers in terror in The Green Inferno in the Amazon. Also in the horror abroad category are Wolf Creek in Australia, Turistas in Brazil, and the more recent Midsommar in Sweden.”And Mark also highlights “ Cabin in the Woods which is a complete satire of the way the world works. Drew Goddard’s inspiration was the fact that he grew up in a town that housed a facility that made nuclear weapons and how people went to work there every day making weapons going about their everyday lives. It adds so much to the horror genre and is completely original and unforgettable. I highly recommend it.”Francesca Lewis writes, “One of my favorite interactions in any horror movie happens at the end of The Strangers when one of the victims asks the killers why they are doing this and one responds with, ‘because you were home.’ It’s a chilling line and I think it demonstrates that truly horrific events can be the result of happenstance—this couple just happened to be in the wrong place at the worst time. The killers didn’t necessarily have anything against these people specifically, but they had the desire to torture and kill and inflicted such horror on unsuspecting, innocent people. Although it’s just a movie, it makes me wonder if there are truly people out there who feel this way.”Linda Patton Hoffman writes, “My friend Mark Miller wrote a wonderful book on Christopher Lee and Hammer movies. (Unfortunately, Mark passed away). He helped me understand that those films are important foundations of the horror genre.”And responses to my request for other socially salient horror films:John Buaas and Paul Daley both highlight Get Out , and Jeff Renye agrees that the film “seems pretty timely.” Jeff also writes, “I also like the move The Endless . Lovecraftian shadow monsters and trapped in an ongoing awful loop of time seems right on the mark." Melissa Kujala goes with The Purge . Zeke Lee writes, “I just watched Midsommar , very unsettling.”Lara Schwartz shares, “ Ready or Not is a fantastic social commentary.”Garrett Zeckerhighlights, “Sorry to Bother You, The Babadook, Requiem for a Dream, Get Out, and Us.”Circe Goldenfyre shares, “Pontypool. Dawn of the Dead remake. If you can find it... Red, White and Blue .” She adds, “Caution: R, W & B is very graphic and horror in the sense of these people could be the girl/guys next door.”R.J. Reibel nominates the “ending of Night of the Living Dead, especially given current events.”Josh Eyler writes, “I once taught a course on horror films. They are usually of their time, but are amazing mirrors. Invasion of the Body Snatchers is a direct commentary on the 1950s and McCarthyism. Night of the Living Dead is an amazing film about social unrest and racism in the 1960s. I could go on and on.”Matt Ramsden adds, “Really zombie films kinda beat you over the head with societal critiques, especially Romero's work. I always felt that horror functions as a way we can talk about things we don't like to talk about. Yes, The Babadook is a monster movie, but it’s about grief. Yes, IT is about a clown, but it’s about trauma. The Witchis a historical horror but it’s about religious vs. familial obligation. The horror-y part is there, but it’s always about something.” Josh agrees, writing, “IT is a great example here, and I feel the recent movies did a better job than King's own book framing it as a story about trauma.”Bryn Upton writes, “I had some stuff in my book if your library at Fitchburg has it (if not make them buy a few hundred copies

June 19, 2020: American Horror Stories: Hostel, Taken, and Xenophobia

[On June 16th, 1960, Alfred Hitchcock premiered his new film Psycho in New York. So to celebrate that anniversary, this week I’ll contextualize Psycho and other horror films, leading up to a crowd-sourced weekend post on your own spooky story studying!]On the horrifying xenophobia at the heart of two of the 21st century biggest hits.It’s hard to argue with success, and Eli Roth’s Hostel (2005) and Pierre Morel’s Taken (2008) are by many measures two of the most unexpectedly successful films of the 21st century’s first two decades. Hostel made more than $80 million worldwide (on a budget of $4.5 million), led to a sequel two years later, and contributed significantly to the rise of an entirely new sub-gerne (the horror sub-genre generally known as “torture porn”). Takencost a lot more to make (budget of $25 million) but also made a lot more at the box office (worldwide gross of over $225 million), spawned multiple sequels and imitations, and fundamentally changed the career arc and general perception of its star Liam Neeson. Neither film was aiming for any Oscars or to make the Sight and Sound list, but clearly both did what they were trying to do well enough to please their audiences and hit all the notes in their generic (in the literal sense) formulas.What the two films were trying to do is, of course, a matter of interpretation and debate (although Eli Roth is more than happy to tell us his take on what his film is about); moreover, they’re clearly very different from each other, in genre and goal and many other ways, and I don’t intend to conflate them in this post. Yet they both share an uncannily similar basic plot: naïve and fun-loving young American travelers are abducted and tortured by evil European captors, against whom the travelers themselves (in Hostel) or the traveler’s badass special forces type Dad (in Taken; young Maggie Grace gets to fight some of her own fights against additional Euro-types in the sequel) have to fight in order to escape. While it’s possible to argue that the travelers in Roth’s film help bring on their own torture as a result of their chauvinistic attitudes toward European women (in the sequel Roth made his protagonists young women, and much more explicitly innocent ones at that), there’s no question that the true forces of evil in each film are distinctly European. Moreover, since all of the young travelers are explicitly constructed as tourists, hoping to experience the different world of Europe, the films can’t help but seem like cautionary tales about that world’s dangerous and destructive underbelly.It’s that last point which I’d really want to emphasize here. After all, bad guys in both horror and action films can and do come from everywhere, and that doesn’t necessarily serve as a blanket indictment of those places; if anything, I would argue that the multi-national and multi-ethnic villainy of (for example) James Bond films is a thematic strength, making clear that evil can and will be found everywhere.  Yet both Hostel and Taken are precisely about, or at least originate with, the relationship between American travelers and Europeans, about the naïve ideals of cultural tourism and about creating plots that depend on very frightening and torturous realities within these foreign worlds. “Don’t travel to Europe, young people,” they seem to argue; and if you do, well, be prepared either to kill a ton of ugly Europeans (or have your Daddy do it) or to be killed by them. Not exactly the travel narrative I’d argue for, and indeed a terrifying contribution to our 21st century American worldview.Crowd-sourced post this weekend,BenPS. So one more time: What do you think? Other horror films or stories you’d highlight for the weekend post?

June 18, 2020: American Horror Stories: Found Footage Films and Realism

[On June 16th, 1960, Alfred Hitchcock premiered his new film Psycho in New York. So to celebrate that anniversary, this week I’ll contextualize Psycho and other horror films, leading up to a crowd-sourced weekend post on your own spooky story studying!]On the longstanding appeal, and the limits, of faux-realism.In this very early post on Washington Irving’s History of New York (1809), I noted how interestingly Irving’s book foreshadows (in form, although clearly not in genre or tone) early 21st century found footage texts such as The Blair Witch Project (1999) and Mark Danielewksi’s House of Leaves(2000). There are obviously just universal and longstanding appeals of such works, among which I would include the possibility that we are encountering something genuine (always a challenge to find anywhere, including in creative art), the blurring of boundaries between fact and fiction (and the resulting discomfort, in the most provocative sense of the term, that such blurring produces), and the undeniable thrill of following along in the processes of making and finding such texts (ie, of putting ourselves in the shoes of both those who filmed and those who “found” Blair Witch’s footage, of both House’s creators and its initial readers, and so on).If found footage has been an artistic element for centuries, though, it has nonetheless reached new levels of popularity and ubiquity in recent years. In film alone we have seen found footage monster movies, found footage superhero films, found footage alien invasion dramas, and, most consistently and most relevantly for this week’s series, the exploding genre of found footage horror films. The latter category includes, to name only a fraction of the entrants (and only some of those that have thus far spawned sequels), the Paranormal Activity series, the [Rec] series, the Grave Encounters series, and the Last Exorcism series. Each of those series fits into a different sub-genre or niche within the horror genre, but all rely on the same found footage trope, and thus all to my mind tap into some of those same aforementioned appeals. (With, perhaps, the added bonus of being able to yell at stupid horror movie characters whom we can imagine are actual people.)When it’s done well, as I would argue it most definitely was in Blair Witch, found footage undoubtedly and potently taps into all those appealing qualities. But I think it has a significant limitation, and not just that it’s become far too frequently used (and certainly not the blurring of fact and fiction, for which I’m entirely on board). To me, the central problem with found footage works of art is that they too often tend, by design, to eschew artistic choices and complexity—after all, their amateur filmmaker characters likely weren’t concerned with such artistic elements (especially not once the crap starting hitting the fan), and so their actual filmmakers often seem not to be either. But while we might well look to works of art for the kinds of appealing elements that found footage features, we also look to them to be artistic, to be carefully and effectively designed as something more than—or at least something other than—the reality with which we’re surrounded. Great found footage works, that is, help us escape into their artistic alternate reality—they don’t simply remind us of our own.Last horror story studying tomorrow,BenPS. What do you think? Other horror films or stories you’d highlight for the weekend post?

June 17, 2020: American Horror Stories: The Saw Series and Morality

[On June 16th, 1960, Alfred Hitchcock premiered his new film Psycho in New York. So to celebrate that anniversary, this week I’ll contextualize Psycho and other horror films, leading up to a crowd-sourced weekend post on your own spooky story studying!]On different visions of morality in horror films, and whether they matter.There’s an easy and somewhat stereotypical, although certainly not inaccurate, way to read the morality or lessons of horror films: to emphasize how they seem consistently to punish characters, and especially female characters, who are too sexually promiscuous, drink or do drugs, or otherwise act in immoral ways; and how they seem to reward characters, especially the “final girl,” who are not only tough and resourceful but also virgins and otherwise resistant to such immoral temptations. Film scholar Carol Clover reiterates but also to a degree challenges those interpretations in her seminal Men, Women, and Chain Saws: Gender in the Modern Horror Film (1992); Clover agrees with arguments about the “final girl,” but makes the case that by asking viewers to identify with this female character, the films are indeed pushing our communal perspectives on gender in provocative new directions.It’s important to add, however, that whether conventional slasher films are reiterating or challenging traditional moralities, they’re certainly not prioritizing those moral purposes—jump scares and gory deaths are much higher on the list of priorities. On the other hand, one of the most successful and influential horror series of the last decade, the Saw films (which began with 2004’s Saw and continued annually through the 7th and supposedly final installment, 2010’s Saw 3D; but subsequently an 8th was released in 2017 and a 9th is on the way), has made its world’s and killer’s moral philosophy and objectives central to the series’ purposes. The films’ villain, John Kramer, generally known only as Jigsaw, has been called a “deranged philanthropist,” as his puzzles and tortures are generally designed to test, alter, and ultimately strengthen his victims’ identities and beliefs (if they survive, of course). That is, not only is it possible to find moral messages in both the films and which characters do and do not survive in them, but deciphering and living up to that morality becomes the means by which those characters can survive their tortures.That’s the films and the characters—but what about the audience? It’s long been assumed (and I would generally agree) that audiences look to horror films not only to be scared (a universal human desire) but also to enjoy the unique and gory deaths (a more troubling argument, but again one I would generally support). So it’d be fair, and important, to ask whether that remains the case for Saw’s audiences—whether, that is, they’re in fact rooting not for characters to survive and grow, but instead to fail and be killed in Jigsaw’s inventive ways. And if most or even many of them are, whether that response—and its contribution to the series’ popularity and box office success and thus its ability to continue across seven years and movies—renders the films’ sense of morality irrelevant (it would certainly make it ironic at the very least). To put it bluntly: it seems to make a big difference whether we see the Sawfilms as distinct in the inventiveness of their tortures/deaths or the morality of their killer. As with any post and topic, I’d love to hear your thoughts!Next horror story studying tomorrow,BenPS. What do you think? Other horror films or stories you’d highlight for the weekend post?