Benjamin A. Railton's Blog, page 173

April 2, 2020: 80s Comedies: Home Alone

[For this year’s April Fool’s series, I decided to AmericanStudy a handful of classic 1980s comic films. Leading up to a special weekend post on one of the best comedies, and films, from 2019!]On the interesting, and definitely American, layers underlying one of our silliest holiday classics.As much as I believe in the power of AmericanStudies analyzing, I’m still not gonna try to make the case that the stunning and perennial popularity of Home Alone (1990) has been due to complex national themes. No, the John Hughes-scripted, Chris Columbus-directed, Macaulay Culkin-starring mega-hit was and remains popular, first and foremost, because of the spider on Daniel Stern’s face, the flying metal bucket to Joe Pesci’s head, Culkin’s reaction to using aftershave for the first time, the pizza guy who thinks the gangster film is reality, and the movie’s many other silly and funny moments. As a lifelong devotee of the Zucker Brothers, I would never judge anyone’s enjoyment of silly and slapstick humor, and for much of its second half Home Alone is a masterclass in those styles. I’ve seen the enduring appeal of those elements first-hand as my sons have become big fans of the film and series (we even watched the non-Culkin-starring Part 3!).Yet just because a movie is entertaingly silly doesn’t mean we can’t find and analyze other elements and layers to it; if anything, Home Alone’s popularity means that any and all details and themes within it have likely been viewed and engaged with by many millions of Americans (and audiences around the world), and so are doubly worth our attention. For example, there’s the secondary but ultimately crucial plotline involving “Old Man Marley,” Kevin’s (Culkin) scary neighbor; Marley is rumored to have killed his family, but eventually Kevin learns that he is simply lonely and estranged from them, and the two help each other: Marley saves Kevin from the burglars, Kevin helps Marley reconnect with his son and granddaughter. The character and plotline strongly echo Boo Radley from To Kill a Mockingbird, suggesting some of the same themes: the need to move beyond communal gossip and myths and learn about the truths of an individual’s identity and life; the ways in which such connections can ultimately save and sustain our own lives and homes. Both Kevin and Marley, after all, spend much of the film “home alone,” and both find their way back to full houses thanks to each other’s efforts.This is more of a stretch—or an extrapolation, let’s say—but I would also connect Kevin’s arc in the film to defining American narratives of individualism and the self-made man. Kevin isn’t exactly a Horatio Alger protagonist, but for most of the film he’s pretty close: like Ragged Dickand all his peers, Kevin finds himself separated from his parents (and particularly his beloved Mom), and is forced to depend on his own wits and strengths to survive and prosper. Yet while Alger’s orphans have forever lost their childhood homes, Kevin is temporarily orphaned within his home, and that crucial detail, coupled with the film’s parallel plotline of his Mom’s frenzied efforts to get back to Kevin, significantly complicates the film’s engagement with these national narratives. Like the Marley plotline, that is, these details both suggest the importance of individual identity and actions and yet reflect the way our lives and homes ultimately depend on community, on the presence of those influential others who help make our homes what they ideally are. There’s some definite value to spending time home alone and to the self-making for which such an experience allows, Kevin’s story argues, but at the end of the day it takes a village to make that home what it is.Last comedy tomorrow,BenPS. What do you think? Other 80s comedies (or other comic films) you’d highlight?

April 1, 2020: 80s Comedies: Back to the Future

[For this year’s April Fool’s series, I decided to AmericanStudy a handful of classic 1980s comic films. Leading up to a special weekend post on one of the best comedies, and films, from 2019!]On what the time travel blockbuster comedy gets wrong, and what it gets right.Since the future moment to which Doc, Marty McFly, and Jennifer travel at the end of Back to the Future (1985)—and in which most of Back to the Future Part II (1989) is set—is 2015, there were a number of pieces published in the course of that year assessing what the film series got right about the future that’s now and what it didn’t. It’s a fun premise, and one that can certainly help us think about how we’ve perceived the future at different moments in our past (although the truth, as revealed by 2001: A Space Odyssey [1968], Ray Bradbury’s The Martian Chronicles [1950], and many other cultural texts, is that we’re almost always wrong when we imagine specific future moments). But since the first Back to the Future is set instead in the past—1955, to be exact—it offers a different and equally valuable lesson: how a mid-80s blockbuster film imagined American history.I generally agree with the piece hyperlinked at “1955, to be exact”: filmmaker Robert Zemeckis and his crew got a good deal about 1955 right, from the music and teenage life and community to the clothes and settings. But when it comes to one of the deeper social issues with which the film (briefly) attempts to engage, race, I’d argue that it gets things very wrong. In two different, seemingly throwaway moments, young white Marty McFly is shown contributing to—if not, indeed, directly causing—sweeping social changes for African Americans: he launches the town’s Civil Rights revolution by convincing a young African American janitor that he could run for mayor someday (which we know from the film’s 1985 opening that he later did); and he kicks off the rock and roll revolution as well, when an African American musician calls his friend Chuck Berry to share McFly’s futuristic guitar stylings. Both moments are intended as gags, of course—but the nature of comic blockbusters is that their jokes and other entertainment-driven choices can and do connect to and influence more serious conversations, and the film’s portrayal of 1950s era racial progress and change is frustratingly wrong.Fortunately, we now have other cinematic options if we want a more accurate portrayal of race, America, and the Civil Rights movement. And in a different way—and one admittedly much more central to its story—Back to the Future gets something very right about our relationship to the past, and more exactly to our parents’ pasts. Granted, it does so through a pseudo-incestuous storyline that requires a definite suspension of disbelief (if not of ethics, morality, or squeamishness). But nonetheless, I think Back to the Future captures a profound truth: the difficulty, but also the importance, of trying to connect to our parents not just as our parents (although of course we can never escape that relationship entirely, nor in most cases would we want to), but as the individual people they are, with lives and histories and stories all their own. Most of us (well, all of us) will never have the opportunity that Marty McFly does, to go back in time and meet our parents as young people, just starting to figure out who they are and where they’re headed. But it’s pretty important that we try to imagine them there, for their own sake and because (as Marty learns) it has a great deal to tell us about our own identities and lives as well.Next comedy tomorrow,BenPS. What do you think? Other 80s comedies (or other comic films) you’d highlight?

March 31, 2020: 80s Comedies: Ghostbusters

[For this year’s April Fool’s series, I decided to AmericanStudy a handful of classic 1980s comic films. Leading up to a special weekend post on one of the best comedies, and films, from 2019!]On two distinct ways to analyze science and the supernatural in the classic scary comedy.First things first: Ghostbusters (1984) is a really fun, funny, scary, entirely successful film, full of great performances, great music, and lines and moments that have stuck with me to this day, and that seemed to hit my sons equally hard when we watched it for the first time over this past holiday season. (The less said about Ghostbusters II [1989], the better; I’m not even gonna hyperlink that one.) It’s important, in the course of these kinds of analytical series, not to lose sight of the fact that both comic films and summer blockbusters are designed and intended, first and foremost, to entertain—that doesn’t mean that they can’t or shouldn’t also be smart or interesting (none of that “It’s not supposed to be Shakespeare” crap here, bud), just that we can’t overlook the qualities that make them fun and make them endure. And Ghostbusters has endured as well as any summer blockbuster I know, and indeed largely created (and certainly popularized) a new genre—the horror comedy—that to my mind has never been done any better than it was done here.But if you think that means we can’t also analyze Ghostbusters—well, you clearly didn’t read my post on Baywatch! And when we start to turn our analytical attention to the film, it seems to clearly take a side within the longstanding and ongoing debate between science and the supernatural (or spiritual). The film opens with our heroes getting fired from their university research job because of their focus on the supernatural. Its main antagonist (yes, Zuul is the climactic villain, but this guy’s hostility drives much of the film) is William Atherton’s incredibly annoying EPA agent Walter Peck. And when the Ghostbusters convince the Mayor to side with them over that EPA agent, they do so by arguing that what’s going to happen to New York is “a disaster of Biblical proportions… Old Testament, real Wrath of God type stuff.” Just as Weird Tales did in their own era, the film suggests that all our modern science isn’t sufficient to engage with another side of the world, an older and perhaps more primal supernatural side that demands its own understanding—and its own heroes to combat it.Yet at the same time, the way those heroes combat the supernatural is precisely through science: their energy streams and containment units, all that they had been working on in that university research role and brought with them to their “private sector” alternative. That is, we could read the film’s attitudes as divided not between science and the supernatural, but rather traditional vs. experimental science, cautious and bureaucractic perspectives such as those of staid academics and the buttoned-up EPA vs. the more liberated and forward-thinking ideas of Egon and his partners. Those latter perspectives are certainly willing and able to engage with the world’s oldest and deepest spiritual truths, but they are also much better equipped to come up with modern answers for those supernatural threats. In that way, we could see Ghostbustersas an example of a modern American Gothic—recognizing a world full of darkness and the supernatural, but ready to push back with courage and rationality. Who else you gonna call?!Next comedy tomorrow,BenPS. What do you think? Other 80s comedies (or other comic films) you’d highlight?

March 30, 2020: 80s Comedies: Airplane

[For this year’s April Fool’s series, I decided to AmericanStudy a handful of classic 1980s comic films. Leading up to a special weekend post on one of the best comedies, and films, from 2019!]On what makes a successful parody, and what makes a truly great one.1980’s Airplane! wasn’t the first comedic parody film made by the brothers David and Jerry Zucker (that would be 1977’s Kentucky Fried Movie), and it certainly wasn’t the first prominent American parody (that honor might go to Washington Irving’s 1809 History of New York). But Airplane! was one of the most influential parodies and comic films of all time, in many ways launching both the Zucker Brothers and a decade of high-profile parodies including This Is Spinal Tap (1984), Spaceballs (1987), and many many others. It certainly achieved that level of influence first and foremost through doing what a good parody has to do: identifying and ever-so-slightly tweaking a large number of elements of its main target, disaster films (along with many late 1970s secondary targetsalong the way), until we see them for the true silliness they are. Perhaps the best single example of that is the airport manager played by Lloyd Bridges, a high-profile serious Hollywood action star whose role in the film (as that hyperlinked montage illustrates) starts with a classic disaster movie cliché (“Looks like I picked the wrong week to quit smoking”) and gradually devolves until total comic chaos (until he’s sniffing glue and hanging upside-down from the ceiling, natch). Yet Airplane! is more than a successful parody: it’s a truly funny and enduring film, one that stands alone even for audiences who are not particularly or even at all familiar with serious disaster films (which was the case for me when I first saw Airplane!, and likewise for my sons who enjoyed it a great deal as well). One big reason why is its introduction of an element that would remain key to all of the Zucker Brothers films: truly inspired comic wordplay. We’re all familiar with “Surely you can’t be serious!” “I am serious, and don’t call me Shirley!,” and I may well have used that line a couple or a couple thousand times in my life to date. But for my money, that’s neither the funniest individual moment of wordplay nor the best recurring wordplay joke: for the first I’d go with, “It’s an entirely different kind of flying. Altogether.” “[Everyone] It’s an entirely different kind of flying!”; and for the second I’d go with the film’s many variations of, “We have to get him to a hospital!” “A hospital? What is it?” “It’s a big building full of sick people, but that’s not important right now.” I suppose you could argue that these lines are still parodying clichés from disaster films, but I would say that they’re more representative of the comic genius of the Zucker Brothers and their collaborators, and add a vital layer to the film in any case.That wonderfully witty wordplay helps individual lines and moments stick with an audience, but for a film as a whole to stick, even a comic parody film, I think it also needs memorable characters, and Airplane!has them in spades. Bridges’ airport employee and Leslie Nielsen’s doctor (he of the “Shirley” lines) are probably the most famous, and rightly so: both of them were well-known as serious actors and action stars, and Airplane! thus both cast them against type very successfully and launched their wonderful second acts as comedy legends. But the film is full of amazing supporting characters, including one (Stephen Stucker’s Johnny) who in the 21st century treads pretty close to offensive or even homophobic but who (thanks to a very effective performance and some really great one-liners) is also still just consistently funny. And as the straight-man hero and heroine (and romantic leads), Robert Hays and Julie Hagerty take what could be thankless roles and invest them with not only humor but genuine backstory and emotion as well. For all these reasons, Airplane! remains one of the great comic parodies and films of all time, and there’s no better movie to launch a decade of comic films (and a series on said decade!).Next comedy tomorrow,BenPS. What do you think? Other 80s comedies (or other comic films) you’d highlight?

March 28-29, 2020: March 2020 Recap

[A Recap of the month that was in AmericanStudying.]March 2: Boston Sites: The Freedom Trail: For the Boston Massacre’s 250thanniversary, a series on Boston sites begins with what the wonderful historic trail leaves out, and how to fill in the gaps.March 3: Boston Sites: The Black Heritage Trail: The series continues with three of the many reasons to walk an under-appreciated, parallel Boston historic trail.March 4: Boston Sites: The U.S.S. Constitution: What the historic ship turned museum helpfully highlights and what it minimizes, as the series tours on. March 5: Boston Sites: Remembering the Massacre: On the Massacre’s 250th, three media that have contributed to our collective memories of the influential event.March 6: Boston Sites: Other Exemplary Boston Sites: From the Gardner Museum to the Harbor Islands, five other spots to experience the historical, cultural, and natural wonders of Boston.March 7-8: Boston Sites: My Talk at MHS: The series concludes with three reasons why my book talk at the Massachusetts Historical Society was one of my most inspiring yet.March 9: Last Week Recaps: SSN Boston and 2020 in Massachusetts: A series on a busy scholarly week kicks off with the latest from the Scholars Strategy Network’s Boston Chapter (the May event I mentioned there has been postponed, of course, but watch this space for more!).March 10: Last Week Recaps: Serena Zabin’s Book Talk: The series continues with two takeaways from a wonderful talk on a vital new book. March 11: NeMLA Recaps: Andre Dubus III: Turning to the 2020 NeMLA Convention, my recaps begin with the inspiring words of our creative keynote speaker.March 12: NeMLA Recaps: Three Great Panels: The recaps continue with three of the many wonderful American Area panels I had the chance to attend.March 13: NeMLA Recaps: Mentorships: The recaps conclude with two more overt and one subtler form of mentorship through this wonderful organization. March 14-15: What’s Next for NeMLA: So if you want to get involved with that organization, here are two ways you can do so ahead of next year’s convention in Philly!March 16: StoweStudying: Stowe beyond UTC: A series on Harriet Beecher Stowe starts with three sides to her life and identity beyond her most famous novel.March 17: StoweStudying: Dred: The series continues with two reasons why it’s crucial for us to better remember Stowe’s second novel. March 18: StoweStudying: New England Local Color: How and why to link Stowe to the popular 19th century literary movement, as the series reads on. March 19: StoweStudying: Tomitudes: The very complicated, confusing, and crucial case of Uncle Tom’s Cabin toys and games. March 20: StoweStudying: Uncle Tom’s Cabin: The series concludes with the fraught but vital question of whether we can blame an uber-popular cultural work for its misappropriations. March 21-22: StoweStudying: The Stowe Center: A special weekend post on three inspiring sides to the Hartford historic and cultural site beyond its own StoweStudying. March 23: AmericanStudying The Deuce: Lori, Emily Meade, and Exploitation: A series on David Simon and George Pelecanos’ wonderful TV show kicks off with the actress who performed the most inspiring work, both in front of and behind the camera. March 24: AmericanStudying The Deuce: Eileen, Pornography, and Film History: The series continues with how my favorite character can help us better remember and recover forgotten feminist filmmakers. March 25: AmericanStudying The Deuce: Ashley, Abby, and Activism: Two compelling characters who embody two distinct forms and outcomes of activism, as the series rolls on. March 26: AmericanStudying The Deuce: Paul, Gay New York, and AIDS: The initially minor character who more fully emerges alongside a community and a crisis. March 27: AmericanStudying The Deuce: Alston, Goldman, and NYC’s Changes: The series concludes with the police and political figures who reflect some of the show’s key themes and debates. Next series starts Monday,BenPS. Topics you’d like to see covered in this space? Guest Posts you’d like to contribute? Lemme know!

March 27, 2020: AmericanStudying The Deuce: Alston, Goldman, and NYC's Changes

[Last fall I had the chance to watch the third and final season of The Deuce , George Pelecanos and David Simon’s phenomenal HBO series about, well, all the things I’ll AmericanStudy in this series and more! I’d love to hear your thoughts on The Deuce, or other TV you’d recommend, in comments!][FYI: SPOILERS for The Deuce in most of this week’s posts, so if you haven’t seen it yet, get thee hence and then come on back!]On the somewhat underutilized characters who nonetheless reflect some of the show’s key themes and debates.David Simon’s TV shows have been pretty wide-ranging in setting and content, but all of them (with the likely exception of 2008’s Generation Kill, the seven-episode Iraq War miniseries that I haven’t yet had a chance to watch) have included one iteration or another of threads focused on the police and politicians. The Deuce is no different: one of the characters present from the first episode to the last is Chris Alston, a police officer played by another of those David Simon Extended Universe actors I was very happy to see back (Lawrence Gilliard Jr., likely still best known as D’Angelo Barksdale from The Wire); and beginning in season two Alston is more or less consistently partnered with Luke Kirby’s Gene Goldman, a political figure loosely affiliated with the police who is working to clean up Times Square/midtown Manhattan ahead of investment and gentrification in the area. A show with as many characters and threads as The Deuce is never going to be able to spend as much time with every one of them as would be ideal, and while for both of these characters we do glimpse interesting additional layers through their personal lives (for Alston in his romantic relationships with women who have very different takes on the city than he does as a cop, and for Goldman because he is a closeted gay man pursuing risky sexual liaisons while married with children), we don’t quite see enough of those elements for them to be developed successfully.What that does mean, however, is that the characters of Alston and Goldman can remain more clearly and centrally focused throughout seasons two and three on the questions of whether and how to “clean up” midtown, and the related questions of the costs and benefits of such changes. The dynamic between the two men is somewhat similar to the contrasting one between Ashley and Abby that I highlighted in Wednesday’s post: Alston is an insider, having spent years in the Deuce and become friendly with many of its denizens (his first scene in episode one is an extended, light-hearted conversation with a group of pimps at a shoeshine booth); while Goldman is an outsider, bringing those outside forces of politics and money to bear on the neighborhood (while, again, he is also, hypocritically partaking in its hidden pleasures through his private life). Yet for most of their time working together, the two have pretty similar agendas, and indeed Alston’s primary role for much of seasons two and three is to utilize his more personal connection to the Deuce to find ways to further Goldman’s goals and help push the neighborhood toward change and gentrification. Of course midtown and the city did significantly change in the years immediately following the show’s 1985 conclusion, and so these two characters perhaps reflect Simon’s sense that those changes were, if not inevitable, at least unchallenged (if not entirely supported) by the various levels of authority and power that these two figures represent.Yet it’s not quite accurate to say that gentrification goes unchallenged within the political world of The Deuce. Of course some of the other characters I’ve highlighted this week vocally oppose those changes, with both Abby and Paul in particular articulating strong arguments against gentrification in the show’s final season. But by the closing episodes Alston has come to share more of their perspective than he (or we) might have expected, and he attempts to share that vision with Goldman in their final scene together: Alston drives Goldman to the Bronx to show him one of the new neighborhoods where prostitution, drugs, and other elements of the Deuce’s seedier side have relocated; when Goldman asks him whether Manhattan is nonetheless better off than it was before their efforts, Alston’s response is simply a final, “I don’t know.” I think it’s fair to say that The Deuce as a whole has a similarly conflicted perspective on these central themes and questions: as I argued Monday, through characters like Lori the show has depicted the hugely destructive effects of the worlds of prostitution and porn that were at the heart of the Deuce in the 70s and 80s; but the final 2019-set coda depicts Times Square as it exists in our current moment, a mecca of capitalist excess and superficiality, and it’s hard not to think about what has been lost and forgotten through that evolution. A multi-layered, contradictory, very American lens on those issues, as this wonderful show was on so many themes.March Recap tomorrow,BenPS. What do you think? Other recent TV you’d recommend?

March 26, 2020: AmericanStudying The Deuce: Paul, Gay New York, and AIDS

[Last fall I had the chance to watch the third and final season of The Deuce , George Pelecanos and David Simon’s phenomenal HBO series about, well, all the things I’ll AmericanStudy in this series and more! I’d love to hear your thoughts on The Deuce, or other TV you’d recommend, in comments!][FYI: SPOILERS for The Deuce in most of this week’s posts, so if you haven’t seen it yet, get thee hence and then come on back!]On an initially minor character who more fully emerges alongside a community and a crisis.One of the most enjoyable things for those of us who have followed the David Simon Extended Universe (DSEU) for a couple decades now is seeing some of his favorite actors appear in multiple projects. The Deucefeatured a number of those folks in both major roles and cameos (one of my favorite of the latter variety was Clarke Peters as a retired pimp), and among the former was the return of Chris Coy. Coy appeared in the third and fourth seasons of Tremeas investigative journalist L.P. Everett, one of my favorite characters on that show (which is a very competitive list), and I was very excited to see him in the opening episodes of The Deuce as Paul Hendrickson, a bartender befriended and then hired by James Franco’s Vincent Martino. During the first season (as I remember it, anyway—I watched that season a couple years back), Paul seemed as if he would be a relatively minor character, helping flesh out the world of Vincent’s bar (a key season one setting that carries forward into the later seasons, although it changes ownership multiple times among the show’s characters) but not necessarily having too much to do outside of that space.Paul gradually took on a far larger and more significant role in the show’s second and third seasons, however, and that emergence reflects two key aspects of both his character and New York City in the 70s and 80s. He’s the show’s most prominent gay character (although far from its only one), and because the show’s three seasons take place across a decade and a half of history (they are set in 1971-72, 1977, and 1984-85 respectively), through Paul’s eyes and experiences (as well as his professional and romantic relationships) we get to witness substantial changes in both the city’s gay culture and the very possibility of living as an out gay man in late 20th century America. Indeed, while both Vincent and the audience know that Paul is gay relatively early in his time at the bar and on the show, I believe it is only in the second season when we start to see Paul present his sexuality as part of his public identity. Of course the Deuce is a neighborhood and New York a city where it was more possible to be openly gay in the 1970s than in much of the rest of the United States, which makes Paul’s identity and journey an important part of how the show represents that world but which also illustrates that even in such a diverse and progressive community to be gay in the 70s was to live a frequently, frustratingly fraught existence.Of course that existence became infinitely more fraught, and indeed constantly endangered, with the emergence of HIV/AIDS in the early 1980s. Until I began watching season three I didn’t realize it would be set in the mid-80s (although I should have suspected as much, given the time jump between seasons one and two), and so didn’t see coming just how fully that final season would focus on the presence and effects of the AIDS crisis. It does so for most of the show’s characters (since the worlds of porn, prostitution, and sex work were particularly threatened by that epidemic), but it is Paul who becomes a strikingly intimate lens on the crisis, both through his long-term partner ( Todd Lang, an actor who is already dying of AIDS when the season begins) and through his resigned acceptance that the disease will eventually claim his life as well. Moreover, while the show certainly does justice to the AIDS epidemic on its own specific terms, it also utilizes the epidemic symbolically, as a striking parallel to the themes of continuity and change, loss and persistence, that are at the heart of how The Deuce portrays its titular neighborhood, New York City, and late 20th century America. Season three’s final 1985 line (before the 2019-set coda) is given to Paul, and works on all those levels: “I love the change of seasons now,” he says wistfully, before walking slowly away (he now must use a cane) into the early fall evening.Last DeuceStudying tomorrow,BenPS. What do you think? Other recent TV you’d recommend?

March 25, 2020: AmericanStudying The Deuce: Ashley, Abby, and Activism

[Last fall I had the chance to watch the third and final season of The Deuce , George Pelecanos and David Simon’s phenomenal HBO series about, well, all the things I’ll AmericanStudy in this series and more! I’d love to hear your thoughts on The Deuce, or other TV you’d recommend, in comments!][FYI: SPOILERS for The Deuce in most of this week’s posts, so if you haven’t seen it yet, get thee hence and then come on back!]On two compelling characters who embody two distinct forms and outcomes of activism.I could write this entire week’s series on the women of The Deuce, which reflects a really important aspect of the show’s cast and diversity (and, it’s worth noting, represents a bit of a departure for David Simon, whose prior shows have tended to focus mostly if not at times entirely on male characters). My final two posts will turn to male characters and their contexts, but today I wanted to highlight and AmericanStudy two more compelling women, a pair of characters who were linked not only through their blossoming friendship but also through shared activist goals and efforts: Jamie Neumann’s Ashley/Dorothy Spina, whom we meet in season one as a veteran prostitute but who leaves and then returns to New York in season two as part of a group of activists and social workers seeking to help prostitutes survive and ideally leave the life; and Margarita Levieva’s Abby Parker, whom we meet as a brilliant and ambitious college student and whose evolution to a bar manager and owner is paralleled by her deepening desire to fight for the legal rights of her midtown friends and neighbors and the city’s most disadvantaged communities. As those brief summaries suggest, these two strong women both focus much of their attention on advocating for other women (as well as men in Abby’s case, but she likewise frequently focuses on women’s rights and issues in particular). Yet they arrive at those activist roles very differently, with Ashley/Dorothy coming out of the gritty, working-class world on which her activism subsequently focuses, and Abby approaching a similar world from (initially at least) an outsider’s and more privileged position. Perhaps as a result of those different origin points (among other, related differences between the two women), their respective activist perspectives and goals likewise feel distinct: Dorothy (Ashley’s birth name, which she uses when she returns to the city) takes a hands-on, pragmatic approach, engaging prostitutes and pimps on the streets in an effort to change both individual lives and the culture as a whole; while Abby approaches the issues with a more legal and philosophical perspective, even choosing to back away from a feminist anti-pornography campaign she had helped originate when the movement begins to threaten First Amendment rights. As that latter detail illustrates, although Dorothy and Abby’s activisms could in many ways be seen as complementary, the distinction between pragmatism and philosophy can and does lead them to diverge significantly as well.Nowhere is the divergence between Dorothy and Abby clearer than in the endpoint of their respective arcs on the show [serious SPOILERS in this paragraph]. At the end of season two, Dorothy’s past as Ashley catches up with her, and she is murdered by pimps (it’s not precisely clear which ones, but they all had known her in her prior life as a prostitute); whereas Abby not only survives, but at the end of season three leaves the world of her bar to return to college (and, in the finale’s 2019 coda, we see that she has gone on to become a successful lawyer, likely fighting similar activist battles in that world). It’d be possible to see these respective endpoints as a commentary on what forms of activism are more or less likely to endure and succeed, and I do think that’s part of what these characters and their arcs depict. But knowing David Simon’s consistent critique of social structures and hierarchies, I would also argue that the characters’ ends have a great deal to do with their beginnings: that Abby’s outsider and privileged position make it much easier for her to leave the world of the Deuce and enter another like the law; whereas Dorothy’s apparently lifelong entanglement in a much more working-class, impoverished world seems to trap her, despite her best efforts to change both her own situation and that world as a whole.Next DeuceStudying tomorrow,BenPS. What do you think? Other recent TV you’d recommend?

March 24, 2020: AmericanStudying The Deuce: Eileen, Pornography, and Film History

[Last fall I had the chance to watch the third and final season of The Deuce , George Pelecanos and David Simon’s phenomenal HBO series about, well, all the things I’ll AmericanStudy in this series and more! I’d love to hear your thoughts on The Deuce, or other TV you’d recommend, in comments!][FYI: SPOILERS for The Deuce in most of this week’s posts, so if you haven’t seen it yet, get thee hence and then come on back!]On an inspiring character who can help us remember and recover forgotten filmmakers.If as I wrote yesterday Lori Madison’s arc across the show’s three seasons was one of the most tragic, Maggie Gyllenhaal’s Eileen Merrell’s was one of the most inspiring(although as you might expect within the world of a Pelecanos/Simon show and as that latter hyperlinked video certainly indicates, “the most inspiring” also means “complicated and bittersweet” to be sure). Like Lori, Eileen begins the show as a prostitute (known as Candy) who becomes a porn actress, but in that latter world the arcs diverge significantly—Eileen moves from acting to directing, becoming over the show’s second and third seasons an award-winning, feminist porn filmmaker and producer. She spends much of the third season trying to make a film that is truly her own, one that examines the questions of gender, sex, work, and society that have been at the heart of her own experiences (as well as the show itself, of course). Although it seems as of the show’s conclusion that she has failed to finish that film, in the most poignant and beautiful reveal in the series finale’s 2019-set coda we learn (through an obituary for Eileen who has passed away from cancer) not only that she completed it, but that the film (despite not receiving much attention upon its release, in large part because she “took the fucking out”), A Pawn in Their Game, became over time an “arthouse classic” that has even been remastered and rereleased by the Criterion Collection. As I watched and read more about the show after that series finale, and through additional conversations with my friend and fellow Deuce fan and TV and film buff Matt Raymond, I learned that both A Pawn in Their Game and Eileen’s character arc were based on actual historical figures and films. Pawn was inspired in large part by former pin-up model Barbara Loden and her one, profoundly personal and independent film Wanda (1970, rereleased by the Criterion Collection as that latter hyperlink illustrates), which she wrote, directed, and starred in. And Eileen’s evolution and perspective as a feminist pornographer was inspired in large part by Candida Royalle, a porn actress turned filmmaker of whom her 2015 New York Times obituary noted, “She defined her work as female-oriented, sensuously explicit cinema as opposed to formulaic hard-core pornographic films that she said degraded women for the pleasure of men.” Although they were combined to produce different aspects of the character of Eileen, it’s important to be clear that these two women and their respective films were quite distinct: Royalle made only pornographic films, if again groundbreaking and feminist ones; Loden made only one film, which while it focuses in gritty and realistic ways on themes of gender and sex would never be described as pornographic.Yet despite those important differences, I would argue that Loden and Royalle are also significantly linked, and not just by their combination into this fictional character. To put it bluntly, these are two prominent filmmakers and cultural voices about whom I—a lifelong film buff and an AmericanStudier who prides himself on his pop culture knowledge—knew absolutely nothing, and of whom I might have never learned were it not for The Deuce and Gyllenhaal (not just as a performer but as an executive producer who rightly takes great pridein helping advance such threads and themes). That might be an indictment of me, of course, but I think it’s more likely an indictment of our collective memories and cultural conversations, and how much these unique, impressive artists have been left out of them. And while there would be various ways to analyze that absence, including in Royalle’s case our general unwillingness to think of porn as an artistic genre at all, I don’t think there’s any question that gender is a central part of the elision of artists like Loden and Royalle. Which makes it that much more important to honor Gyllenhaal’s character and work and, through those things, to do justice to these forgotten, pioneering female filmmakers. Next DeuceStudying tomorrow,BenPS. What do you think? Other recent TV you’d recommend?

March 23, 2020: AmericanStudying The Deuce: Lori, Emily Meade, and Exploitation

[Last fall I had the chance to watch the third and final season of The Deuce , George Pelecanos and David Simon’s phenomenal HBO series about, well, all the things I’ll AmericanStudy in this series and more! I’d love to hear your thoughts on The Deuce, or other TV you’d recommend, in comments!][FYI: SPOILERS for The Deuce in most of this week’s posts, so if you haven’t seen it yet, get thee hence and then come on back!]On the character and actor who together helped the show grapple with its most fraught issues.In an August 2015 interview with Seth Meyers conducted not long before he started shooting The Deuce, David Simon acknowledged the high-wire act required to make a show about pornography without making pornography, to portray a fraught social and cultural topic like that (and related ones like prostitution) without exploiting either it or his performers. With the rise of the #MeToo movement over the next couple years, all those issues and potential landmines for the show became that much more salient still. And then one of the show’s biggest-name stars, James Franco (who played dual roles as the brothers Vincent and Frankie Martino), became embroiled in a #MeToo controversy of his own when a number of female performers came forward with accusations of inappropriate behavior on the actor’s part. In a wide-ranging 2019 interview with Rolling Stone TV critic Alan Sepinwall conducted just after the show concluded, Simon sought to downplay those particular accusations against Franco, while making clear that he and the show had themselves struggled, particularly during the making of the first season, with questions of performer consent and comfort.Franco’s situation remains ongoing, and while I understand Simon’s arguments in that latter interview, I don’t think we yet know how it will play out. But when it comes to The Deuce, I believe the show did succeed at navigating these fraught and important issues and questions, both on and behind the camera, and it did so in large part through one actor and character: Emily Meade’s Lori Madison. Lori, who began the show as a fresh-faced young girl newly arrived in early 1970s New York and pulled into the world of prostitution, gradually became one of the megastars of the booming porn world of that decade, and ended her arc having to face fundamental and heart-breaking questions of whether she had any identity outside of those worlds and roles, represented quite clearly and potently the most exploitative and destructive effects of prostitution and pornography in America. Meade’s multi-layered performance, one of the finest I’ve ever seen in a TV show, made this character far from simply a victim; yet at the end of the day she was indeed victimized and destroyed in ways that forced the audience to examine the costs of everything they’d seen (and perhaps at times cheered for) in the course of the show’s three seasons.As impressive and important as her performance was, however, it was through a contribution to the show behind the scenes that Meade made the biggest difference, not only for this particular show but for Hollywood productions and culture more broadly. Recognizing many of the first-season issues that I referenced above, and feeling in particular the challenge (for herself and for many other performers, especially female ones) of filming so many nude and/or sex scenes, of performing a role that could itself be exploitative or even destructive if not handled sensitively, Meade advocated for the show to hire an intimacy coordinator, someone who could help the performers and the production better navigate such scenes and issues. As Meade acknowledges in both those hyperlinked interviews, intimacy coordinators have been around for a while, but I have to imagine that I’m far from the only pop culture fan who first learned about them (as, it seems, Meade did as well, before she helped bring them to broader attention and indeed to every other HBO show in production) in relationship to their role on The Deuce. I’ll touch throughout the week’s series on a number of aspects that made The Deuce such a successful and significant show, but in truth Meade and her contributions both on and behind the camera are without question at the top of that list.Next DeuceStudying tomorrow,BenPS. What do you think? Other recent TV you’d recommend?