Benjamin A. Railton's Blog, page 180

January 11-12, 2020: Crowd-sourced TV Studying

[This fall I watched Netflix’s Unbelievable, one of the most compelling and important TV shows I’ve seen in a good while. The show opens up a number of AmericanStudies conversations, so this week I’ve highlighted and analyzed a handful of them. Leading up to this crowd-sourced post featuring the responses and TV recommendations of fellow AmericanStudiers—share yours in comments, please!]Responding to the week’s series, Robin Field writes, “Glad you wrote on this great show! This topic is my passion. My 2020 book is Writing the Survivor: The Rape Novel in Late Twentieth Century American Fiction .”Elizabeth Stockton comments on Wednesday’s post, “I think The Wire also makes for a nice comparison. It dealt with making cops' lives three dimensional—without sentimentalizing their personal lives or delving into soap opera. It also gave more depth to behaviors like drug use and insight into how systems can fail without any one person being a villain. It also is technically in the genre of a "procedural," but took risks in terms of pacing and exposition. Not a perfect show, but it seems to resonate with aspects of Unbelievable to me.” She also added another pre-show text to Friday’s post, sharing this Longform Podcast on the case and the “Unbelievable Story of Rape” article.Troy Zaher writes, “Unbelievable was so powerful and thought provoking. I remember feeling like this event should’ve been recognized more. Things like this should bring about change. Though I also believe it did an excellent job at showcasing positive behavior towards assault victims, ie proper treatment of the case in terms of law but also in terms of interpersonal connection. I think this is the style of true crime that feels the most moral (not that other forms of crime documentation are immoral). It makes you squirm and understand the victim empathically.”Donna Moody shares, “All I'm going to say about the series is that I loved it...it also infuriated me because it is exactly how women are treated when they report sexual assault by far too many male law enforcement officers.” writes, “I thought it was brilliant. And is also a perfect example of the benefits of having the topic presented largely via a female lens. The use of multiple female protagonists (and secondary characters) worked extremely well for it.”And Kathryn Tomasek Tweets, “To my great embarrassment, when I decided to watch season 2 of The Sinner this week, I translated my recent viewing of Unbelievable into the first season of the show. I think there’s an actual connection there, especially since there’s so much emphasis on the “bad mother’s” attitude towards the Jessica Biel character in Sinner season 1. And the negative attitude of one of the foster mothers in Unbelievable was yet another of the difficult things to watch in that show. I say ‘yet another’ because the fragmentary memories of sexual assault were really difficult viewing for me, as I’ve been assaulted and took years to recognize the experience for what it actually was. I’m glad I made myself keep watching the series to the end because it was rewarding to see the dots connected and the women’s experiences validated.”Other TV recommendations:First, I’ll note that another 2019 favorite of mine was the final season of The Deuce, about which I’ll be blogging in a few months!Elizabeth Stockton adds, “It seems like I've just got comedies to recommend right now: Shrill , Schitt's Creek , Derry Girls , and Bojack Horseman . And whatever genre Lodge 49 is in.”Tim McCaffrey also highlights Derry Girls, writing, “The accents are bananas so we watched with subtitles.”Veronica Hendrick goes old school, writing, “I have been watching Cheers —and except for the Diane/Sam screaming matches, pretty funny.”Andrew Lipsett asks, “Have you seen the new Watchmen? Some of the best TV I've ever seen, and very much up your alley.” Michael Valeri Jr. seconds that recommendation, and Philip Opere agrees that “Watchmen was amazing!” [Ben responds: “I haven't yet but I know I have to check it out ASAP, thanks!”]My cousin Ryan Railton recommends, “ Travels by Narrowboat . It’s not going to push you to the edge of your seat or challenge your worldview or anything, but it’s mildly entertaining. Just a guy sharing videos of his journey across England on a canal boat.”Andrew DaSilva writes, “I am a fan of the oldies, for something light with a good theme song there's always The Love Boat and or The Bob Newhart Show . For something that might be a bit thought provoking there's The Twilight Zone and All in the Family .”Kelly Stowell adds another classic, “the old Carol Burnett Show . Such hilarity!”Summer Lopeznominates, “ Battlestar Galactica , always.” Mark Rennella writes, “Something completely different is Call my Agent on Netflix, a French series. I loved the first three episodes.”Jacquie Carter-Holbrooks shares a bunch of recommendations: “Ray Donovan, The Durrells in Corfu, Mrs. Maisel, Jack Ryan, Killing Eve, Luther, the first few seasons of Shameless, Top of the Lake, Mad Men , OK- I’ll stop now.”And finally, my favorite TVStudier, Matthew Raymond, highlights, “ Better Things created by, and starring, Pamela Adlon. An avant-garde comedy about a single mother with three kids. But also about the anxiety towards change that we all experience, and discovering moments of love even in our worst moments. Because this is stemming from a discussion about Unbelievable, I feel like I should mention Louis CK was involved in its production the first two season but was fired once he admitted to multiple sexual assaults. Its third season, the first without him, was entirely Pamela Adlon’s and it’s the best season by a large margin.”Next series starts Monday,BenPS. Thoughts on Unbelievable? Other TV shows you’d recommend and analyze?

January 10, 2020: AmericanStudying Unbelievable: “Inspired by True Events”

[This fall I watched Netflix’s Unbelievable, one of the most compelling and important TV shows I’ve seen in a good while. The show opens up a number of AmericanStudies conversations, so this week I’ll highlight and analyze a handful of them, trying my best to avoid SPOILERS (but probably not entirely succeeding). Leading up to a crowd-sourced post on the TV recommendations of fellow AmericanStudiers—share yours in comments, please!]On two stages to how the story behind Unbelievable was uncovered and told, and how the show relates to and builds upon them.According to the interview with creator Susannah Grant and executive producer Sarah Timberman that begins this video (after the trailer for the show), their idea for Unbelievablebegan when they read “An Unbelievable Story of Rape,” a December 2015 journalistic piece and triumph of investigative reporting by ProPublica reporter T. Christian Millerand Marshall Project reporter Ken Armstrong. ProPublica and the Marshall Project represent two sterling examples of the online, deep-dive investigative reporting and long-form journalism that has thrived over the last couple decades, and “An Unbelievable Story” was a striking case in point: both Miller and Armstrong investigated Marie Adler’s story over many months in 2015, as part of even longer-term investigations into rape and the justice system from initially distinct angles, before finding each other and collaborating on the final push for the investigation and then their co-authored, acclaimedand influential piece. Great journalism that both investigates injustice and pushes for justice is of course a deeply ingrained American tradition, but sites and reporters like these have brought that legacy into the 21stcentury, and we owe them a great debt for exploring Marie Adler’s story with the depth and power they did.Miller and Armstrong eventually expanded their article into a book, 2018’s A False Report: A True Story of Rape in America . But just a few months after the article’s first publication, it was adapted into another, even more fully 21st century journalistic genre, the podcast: This American Life’s February 26, 2016 program “Anatomy of Doubt” explores the article and the case, with Armstrong joining host Ira Glass alongside other figures from Marie’s life and world (including Marie herself and two of her many foster parents). Podcasts and radio programs have different potential audiences and effects, and so can in those ways be seen as complementary to online (or hard-copy) written journalism. But the truly multi-vocal aspect of podcasts more fully distinguishes the genre from any form of writing, even a co-authored piece like “An Unbelievable Story.” That is, of course Miller and Armstrong interviewed countless figures and included their voices and perspectives in their article—but hearing directly from someone like Marie Adler in the podcast, hearing her voice communicate her experiences and perspective, is nonetheless quite different and (it seems to me) an important step toward portraying Marie (performed by an actor and in a dramatic way to be sure) on screen in a series like Unbelievable.“Performed by an actor and in a dramatic way” is of course a very complex parenthetical, especially for a show that defines itself (in the standalone final sentence of its Netflix description) as “Inspired by true events.” From everything I’ve seen (including in reading much further into and about the original article for this post), the show does justice to those true events, which is of course a hugely important thing to say about a show with a central theme of how much injustice is done by and to rape victims. But of course it’s also the case that the article is still available to be read (at the hyperlink above), just as the podcast is still available to be listened to (ditto), and that’s just as important a potential effect of the show: that as a Netflix original, and one with a significant amount of buzz, it can push audiences to engage further with this story and others like it, including through finding those prior versions as well as (ideally, but certainly possibly) researching themes of rape and sexual assault, policing and the justice system, women’s experiences in America, and more. If that can happen, Unbelievable would be not just inspired by our 21st century world, but inspiring in its effects on it. Crowd-sourced post this weekend,BenPS. So one more time: thoughts on this post and show? Other TV shows you’d recommend and analyze?

January 9, 2020: AmericanStudying Unbelievable: Three Women

[This fall I watched Netflix’s Unbelievable, one of the most compelling and important TV shows I’ve seen in a good while. The show opens up a number of AmericanStudies conversations, so this week I’ll highlight and analyze a handful of them, trying my best to avoid SPOILERS (but probably not entirely succeeding). Leading up to a crowd-sourced post on the TV recommendations of fellow AmericanStudiers—share yours in comments, please!]On a few of the many impressive layers of characterization present in Unbelievable’s trio of female protagonists (building on what I wrote about them in Tuesday’s post):1)      Marie Adler: I’ve focused a good bit on the police over this series so far, and (while I haven’t done the math) I think it’s fair to say that the two cop protagonists end up with the majority of the show’s screen time. But it’s even fairer to say that from the first shots to the last, and in many crucial ways in between, Unbelievable is Marie’s story. That’s unquestionably and centrally due to Kaitlyn Dever’sperformance, one of the most natural and intimate and powerful acting jobs I’ve seen in years. But it’s also due to the ways in which Dever and the writers make Marie feel deeply three-dimensional and lived-in, like a young woman whose identity and perspective are in no way defined (while of course they are forever affected) by the sexual assault and its aftermaths. Through even the briefest of scenes and conversations with friends and foster families, at work, in every corner of her fragile young life, Marie becomes more and more the beating heart of the show, carried forward inexorably by the plot but at the same time (long before the final episodes) becoming at least as much the thematic center as even the most shocking plot developments. 2)      Karen Duvall: If Marie is the show’s heart, Merrit Wever’sDetective Duvall is its soul. Not just because of the compassion and empathy she brings to every line and moment, although that is indeed the case from her first encounters with Danielle Macdonald’s Amber in ways that significantly and crucially shifts the show’s tone (as I wrote on Tuesday). But also because of an interesting layer to Duvall beyond her professional role and her home life (where her husband, a fellow police officer, is an important supporting character): her religious beliefs and community. Unlike, say, with a character like True Detective’s Rust Cohle (whose strident critiques of religion became viral sensations), Duvall’s perspectives on spirituality only emerge in small moments and lines, and with the same quiet humility she brings to every aspect of her job. But besides feeling far more realistic and human as a result, those small moments are as a result more influential still, both as a window into what makes this impressive woman tic and as one more layer to the show’s grappling with themes of certainty and doubt, hope and despair, justice and tragedy. 3)      Grace Rasmussen: From her muscle car (apparently based on the actual detective’s vehicle, per the interview in the first hyperlinked video above) to her far different first encounter with a civilian (angrily accosting a potential rapist and then chewing him out when he turns out to be simply indifferent to her investigation), Toni Collette’sDetective Rasmussen is best described as the show’s guts. Of course it’s practically a requirement for police dramas that two detectives contrast in one way or another, and Duvall and Rasmussen certainly carry forward that legacy in successful and entertaining ways. But because Collette (like these other two actors) is such a talented performer, she makes Rasmussen into much, much more than simply the clichéd tough cop or the like. Although she professes to hate the word “mentor” (perhaps in part because of the presence of “men” in there), she does become a powerful influence upon the younger Duvall, and makes a choice in the penultimate episode (which I won’t spoil here) that seen through that lens is profoundly moving and one more reflection of Unbelievable’s commitment to modeling so many sides to these three women, individually and collectively. Last UnbelievableStudying tomorrow,BenPS. Thoughts on this post and show? Other TV shows you’d recommend and analyze?

January 8, 2020: AmericanStudying Unbelievable: Police Dramas

[This fall I watched Netflix’s Unbelievable, one of the most compelling and important TV shows I’ve seen in a good while. The show opens up a number of AmericanStudies conversations, so this week I’ll highlight and analyze a handful of them, trying my best to avoid SPOILERS (but probably not entirely succeeding). Leading up to a crowd-sourced post on the TV recommendations of fellow AmericanStudiers—share yours in comments, please!]On a trio of ground-breaking shows that embody three stages in the evolution of TV representations of the police.1)      Dragnet (1951-1959): Across 8 seasons and 276 half-hour episodes, Jack Webb’s Dragnet (adapted from his radio program and itself the source of numerous subsequent TV and film adaptations, including a late 60s one from Webb himself) established a straightforward, earnest cultural representation of police work that has endured across all the decades since. Dragnet’s “The story you are about to see is true” might have turned into the Law & Order franchise’s “ripped from the headlines,” but the two shows nonetheless have a great deal in common, as do many of the current iteration of procedurals (particularly in the CSI and NCIS franchises). Moreover, while of course the casts have become much more diverse over those decades, virtually every one of those procedurals has featured a white male leading man and hero who seems to occupy quite clearly the same role that Webb’s Sergeant Joe Friday did on Dragnet. Those leads have developed additional psychological complexity and, at times, ethical nuance in the more recent versions, but at the end of the day they remain our heroic guides into a world of procedure very much still inspired by Dragnet. 2)      Hill Street Blues (1981-1987): Part of the reason for those character continuities is that Dragnet and its ilk are not focused on the police themselves, but on their procedural roles in investigating and solving crimes. Somewhere along the way an alternative developed, however: a police drama that was at least as interested in the lives and identities of the cop characters as in the crimes and mysteries they were solving. One of the most influential shows in that mold was Steven Bochco and Michael Kozoll’s Hill Street Blues, which chronicled the work and lives of police officers at a single station in an unnamed city. Along with Bochco’s own follow-up show NYPD Blue (1993-2005) and David Simon’s shows Homicide: Life on the Street (1993-1999) and The Wire (2002-2008), Hill Street Blues employed gritty social and psychological realism to explore multiple layers to its urban setting. But Hill Street’s most influential innovation remains its complex attention to the police characters and world themselves, to both the individual and communal identities and issues present in that station and profession. 3)      Seven Seconds (2018): The cops on shows like Hill Street were three-dimensional humans, and could be both individually flawed and (somewhat less frequently) collectively corrupt as a result. But the recent Netflix series about which I wrote in that hyperlinked post represents another evolution in the genre, one in which police corruption and brutality become not an aberration but a central element to the show’s portrayal of cops. There are still more heroic investigators as well, but, like the two detectives at the heart of Unbelievable, they find themselves all too often working both in and against a system that seems designed to thwart their question for justice. Yet at the same time, the heroes of both Seven Seconds and Unbelievable extend the legacies of these other two forms: employing procedures in the meticulous, detailed manner of Dragnet; while bringing all their own identity layers and complexities in the manner of Hill Street Blues. As so often in pop culture, while these sub-genres do represent distinct threads, they also overlap and interconnect and serve as collective influences on our current 21st century crop of police dramas. Next UnbelievableStudying tomorrow,BenPS. Thoughts on this post and show? Other TV shows you’d recommend and analyze?

January 7, 2020: AmericanStudying Unbelievable: The Worst and Best of the Police

[This fall I watched Netflix’s Unbelievable, one of the most compelling and important TV shows I’ve seen in a good while. The show opens up a number of AmericanStudies conversations, so this week I’ll highlight and analyze a handful of them, trying my best to avoid SPOILERS (but probably not entirely succeeding). Leading up to a crowd-sourced post on the TV recommendations of fellow AmericanStudiers—share yours in comments, please!]On two cop duos who reflect the spectrum of possibilities for this crucial civic organization.First of all, as we have seen far too often in recent years, it’s entirely possible (if not all too common) for police officers to be neo-Nazis, white supremacists, connected to the most hateful and destructive forces in our society. Those connections are deeply ingrained in American history, and help explain why the police and other authority figures frequently took part in lynchings and racial hate crimes, why many police officers participated in the violent attacks on the 1913 women’s suffrage parade in Washington, why these public servants have too often taken a hostile stance toward fellow Americans. Yet without denying the legacy and ongoing presence of those issues, I would nonetheless say that they stand clearly outside the official role and mandate (“To protect and to serve”) of police and law enforcement forces. Just as we can recognize (for example) that many judges (past and present) have been motivated by prejudice without dismissing the importance of courts and laws, so too can we separate these despicable police officers from the institution’s important civic role.But even within that official civic role, there is a wide spectrum of how police officers can approach their job, and more exactly how they approach the civilians whose protection comprises the most important part of that job. For some officers, it seems that those civilians, and particularly civilians from minority and disenfranchised communities, are by default suspicious, potential adversaries who must be treated as such. It was that attitude, for example, which led New York City police officers to treat the five young African American men known as the Central Park Five as criminals from the outset, as illustrated with such frustrating potency by the interrogation sequences in Ava DuVernay’s amazing When They See Us . And just as frustratingly (and from what I can tell far too typically when it comes to women who report sexual assaults), it’s that attitude which quickly comes to dominate the interactions between Kaitlyn Dever’s Marie Adler, Unbelievable’s first rape victim, and the two detectives (Eric Lange’s Parker and Bill Fagerbakke’s Pruitt) investigating her assault. To Parker’s credit (SPOILERS in this sentence), he does eventually recognize his own mistakes and failures, even calling himself one of those bad cops who “we should get rid of.” But by that time their hostile treatment of a victim has done a great deal of permanent damage. As I wrote yesterday, such damage is especially ironic and tragic when it is done to a rape victim in the aftermath of her assault, by the people tasked with not only bringing justice for that crime but also and just as importantly compassion for her ordeal. And in Unbelievable’s other two protagonists, Merritt Wever’s Detective Karen Duvall and Toni Collette’s Detective Grace Rasmussen, we see just how much can change when the police approach victims and civilians with that combination of goals in mind. The show establishes that difference with particular power in Duvall’s very first encounter with a rape victim, Danielle Macdonald’s Amber. In every choice and detail in that stunning scene, Duvall embodies a police officer determined to solve a crime yet just as determined (perhaps even more so in this initial encounter with a traumatized victim) to do whatever she can to help Amber in this devastating and crucial moment in her life. Duvall and Rasmussen are portrayed as real people, not idealized heroes—but real people who illustrate all that’s possible, for individuals and for our society as a whole, when the police are at their best.Next UnbelievableStudying tomorrow,BenPS. Thoughts on this post and show? Other TV shows you’d recommend and analyze?

January 6, 2020: AmericanStudying Unbelievable: Sexual Assault

[This fall I watched Netflix’s Unbelievable, one of the most compelling and important TV shows I’ve seen in a good while. The show opens up a number of AmericanStudies conversations, so this week I’ll highlight and analyze a handful of them, trying my best to avoid SPOILERS (but probably not entirely succeeding). Leading up to a crowd-sourced post on the TV recommendations of fellow AmericanStudiers—share yours in comments, please!]On one historical and one ongoing context for the show’s central theme.Unbelievable is far from the first crime drama to deal with sexual assault as a central theme—the entire third season of Broadchurch focuses on the investigation into a rape, for one example; or there are the roughly 50% of Law & Order: SVU episodes that deal with the crime, for another. But in my experience, those shows focus most of their attention on the investigations, and thus on the identities (mysterious at first, uncovered at last) of the rapists. Unbelievable has such a police investigation as one of its two plot threads, and I’ll have more to say about it in future posts this week; but even that thread focuses at least as much on the victims (and in some key ways more so) as on the investigation. And the other plot thread (which receives roughly half of the total screen time) follows all that unfolds for the show’s first victim after she is raped. All of which is to say, I haven’t seen any other TV show that devotes more screen time and more in depth attention to the experiences of sexual assault victims, a purposeful choice that immediately and importantly sets Unbelievable apart.There would be lots of important ways to contextualize that thematic focus—not just sexual assault, but the experiences of its victims—in American history and society. But I don’t think it would be possible to AmericanStudy sexual assault without foregrounding the experiences of African American women. For the 250 years in which slavery was legal, sexual assaults on enslaved African American women (generally by their masters, but of course not limited to that community) were quite simply ubiquitous, a defining feature of American culture. Even after the abolition of slavery, as historian Danielle McGuire demonstrates so compellingly in her book At the Dark End of the Street (2010), sexual assaults on African American remained so common that they became a defining issue for the activists who helped launch the Civil Rights Movement. These histories are particularly ironic when we consider the longstanding American myth of the threatening black male rapist, a propagandistic falsehood that underlay the lynching epidemic (among many other destructive effects). But even that point risks losing sight of the women who should be at the center of our collective memories of these histories, just as Unbelievable seeks to center its attention on the female victims of sexual assault.When we do center the victims of sexual assault in our collective memories and our contemporary attention, it becomes clear that these individuals are all too frequently forced to deal with a second, more subtle and insidious but no less damaging, layer of assault in the aftermath of the first. As a lawyer puts it to a victim late in Unbelievable’s 8-episode run (in a scene whose specific context I won’t spoil), “no one ever accuses a robbery victim of lying, or someone who says they’ve been carjacked. It doesn’t happen. But when it comes to sexual assault?” Or, as an empathetic therapist says to the same victim, “basically you were assaulted twice: once by your attacker, then again by the police.” Of course rape is an intimate crime for which there are rarely witnesses, meaning that the statements of the victims take on added importance but can at times be difficult to corroborate. But there is a wide chasm between recognizing those complex contexts and not believing those victims, or even treating their statements with suspicion (which, as the lawyer notes, is not at all the default position toward other victims of crime). Doing so not only makes it harder for those victims to get justice for what has happened to them, but, again, it risks echoing and even amplifying the violence and pain they have already experienced and are continuing to experience. One more vital context for sexual assault that Unbelievable helps us explore.Next UnbelievableStudying tomorrow,BenPS. Thoughts on this post and show? Other TV shows you’d recommend and analyze?

January 4-5, 2020: 2020 Predictions

[2019—it’s been real, it’s been good, but it ain’t been real good. Actually, I’m not even sure I’d say it’s been good, but it has definitely been eventful. So this week I’ve AmericanStudied a handful of major 2019 stories I haven’t been able to cover on the blog, leading up to these predictions for what’s likely to be an even more eventful 2020.]Last year at this time I wrote that I wasn’t gonna predict a thing about the year to come in politics, and I feel even more confident this time around that none of us have a clue about what’s next. Hopes and prayers, definitely; worries and fears, most definitely; a clue, most definitely not. So once again I’ll focus my predictions on other aspects of American society and culture:1)      Changing cultural forms: Martin Scorsese’s The Irishman, one of the biggest movies of late 2019 from one of the most acclaimed directors in film history (and likely by the time this post airs one of the most nominated films of awards season), was produced by and largely aired on Netflix. That’s just the most overt of many signs that our cultural forms are drastically changing, not only in where and how we experience them, but also in how and where they’re made and shared. While I know it makes me sound roughly 1000 years old, I’ll note that I still find great (or at the very least distinct) value in watching a movie in the theater, and I hope that mode doesn’t ever disappear entirely. Moreover, modes of film distribution and viewership have been evolving for decades, since at least the inventions of home video and cable TV. But as the Scorsese deal illustrates, the changes in our cultural landscape are coming more rapidly and strikingly than ever, and I have to believe we’ll see even more evolution in the year to come.2)      Athletic activism: Another significant late 2019 story were the decisions, first by lawmakers in California and then , to make it possible for college athletes to use their images and skills to make money while in school (as, of course, other college students have always been able to do, such as a violinist on a music scholarship offering lessons on the side). I believe the broader conversations about compensating student athletes will continue throughout this year, as they should. But the late 2019 controversy over the relationship between the NBA and China, along with the continued frustrations of Colin Kaepernick’s blacklisting as more and more NFL teams start backup QBs, make clear that the even more overarching conversations about whether and how athletes can be social activists are likewise reaching a boiling point. I expect at least a few more high-profile controversies this year, perhaps linked to the presidential election (and/or impeachment), that will push that debate even further into the public eye.3)      The kids are all right: I’d go further with that final prediction, and note that college or even high school athletes are at least as likely to push the activist envelope as are their professional peers. I’ve been highlighting youth activists for some time in this space, whether an individual like Santana Jayde Young Man Afraid of His Horses or a community like the Parkland High School students. This past year saw the emergence of one of the most prominent such youth activists in decades, Greta Thunberg, who in late 2019 took another unexpected activist step by rejecting a major environmental award. Between these and many other young activists, including the two (pictured here) with whom I’m blessed to share my home and last name, the future (however horrific it might get) is clearly in good hands. I predict that the under-20 crowd will continue to provide me with much of my hope and optimism in 2020.Next series starts Monday,BenPS. What do you think? Other 2020 predictions?

January 3, 2020: 2019 in Review: The Democratic Primary

[2019—it’s been real, it’s been good, but it ain’t been real good. Actually, I’m not even sure I’d say it’s been good, but it has definitely been eventful. So this week I’ll AmericanStudy a handful of major 2019 stories I haven’t been able to cover on the blog, leading up to a few predictions for what’s likely to be an even more eventful 2020.]On what’s unquestionably historic about the presidential primary, and why the story doesn’t end there.The campaign for the Democratic nomination for president has been going on for at least a year (although it feels like much, much longer than that), and for much of that time I’ve publicly and frequently proclaimed that it was too early to think about the November 2020 election. I meant it, and I think my psychological and emotional health for much of 2019 were greatly improved by not focusing too much on a still very early campaign and specifically on the sniping and infighting that are perhaps inevitable (and perhaps necessary, in moderation anyway) but also unquestionably frustrating elements of such a campaign. But even I have to admit that January of a presidential election year is very much primary season, not just because the first primaries and caucuseswill soon take place, but also and more importantly because it’s time for each and every one of us to figure out who and what gives us the best chance to defeat this historically horrific administration (provided he hasn’t been impeached by the time this post airs—and with a recognition that, as I’ve said quite a bit over the last few months, I would vote for the soap scum that has hardened around my shower drain if it were running for president against Donald Trump). I’m not going to get into my own current preferences for the nomination in this post, as I don’t think that’s what this space is for (feel free to follow me on Twitter if you want to see a bit more of that conversation, although even there I mostly implore the candidates’ uber-fans to stop with the constant circular firing squad). But I will make a couple more overtly AmericanStudies type points about the primary thus far. For one thing, this has been without question the most diverse group of candidates (that’s as of late October, so I’m sure it’ll be different by the time this post airs) fielded by a major party in American history: five women (with three still in strong contention as of this writing); four candidates of color, including the first prominent Latinx and Asian American candidates (and with all four still in contention as of this writing); and the first openly gay major party candidate, among other milestones. At the end of my second book on a new definition of American identity I described President Barack Obama as, in purely symbolic terms (the representation and embodiment of that national identity) that nonetheless matter a great deal, “the first American president”; and along those same lines, I would say that this has been the first inspiringly American presidential primary. May they all be at least this diverse from here on out!If we are fortunate enough to have future presidential primaries, that is. Because the other unquestionable thing about the 2020 Democratic primary is that the stakes have quite literally never been higher (I’d say they were as high in 1864, and that’s about the only competition). That doesn’t mean that the idea of its symbolic value is insignificant, as I think part of the stakes—and not a small part, either—is replacing the worst possible representation of the nation in this highest office with an individual who embodies some of the best of who and what we are (and I think that applies to just about every person included in the categories above, with the definite exception of Marianne Williamson; it also applies to Bernie Sanders who is not part of those categories). But along with such symbolic value, and along of course with the candidates’ platforms and views, primaries also represent an opportunity to asses which candidate has the best chance of defeating the incumbent. That’s a difficult (if not in some ways unknowable) question, and one for which we certainly shouldn’t be too quick to accept easy narratives of “electability” or the like. But however and whenever we answer that question, there’s no way around the fact that defeating Donald Trump is the most vital electoral goal of any of our lifetimes.2020 predictions this weekend,BenPS. What do you think? 2019 stories you’d highlight?

January 2, 2020: 2019 in Review: Once Upon a Time in Hollywood

[2019—it’s been real, it’s been good, but it ain’t been real good. Actually, I’m not even sure I’d say it’s been good, but it has definitely been eventful. So this week I’ll AmericanStudy a handful of major 2019 stories I haven’t been able to cover on the blog, leading up to a few predictions for what’s likely to be an even more eventful 2020.]On what nostalgia for a mythical golden age gets wrong, and what it gets even wronger.There are various reasons why Quentin Tarantino’s films have generally not worked for me over the years, but the most relevant to this blog is that, as I wrote in this post on Django Unchained, I find his frequent and purposeful mis-representations of the past both frustrating and counter-productive. To be clear, as a huge fan of historical fiction I do not believe that creative works owe absolute fidelity to the past—and indeed I think many of the best such works aim to, as Catharine Maria Sedgwick describes her own artistic goals in the Preface to her historical novel Hope Leslie (1827), “illustrate not the history, but the character of the times.” So my problem with Tarantino’s portrayals of American history is not that they are factually inaccurate, but that (to my mind) they also get the broader histories, periods, and themes quite wrong. And wrong in ways that can have really destructive effects on our narratives of those histories—such as, for example, the contrasts between the heroic Django and just about every other enslaved person we encounter in the course of that film.Tarantino’s latest film, Once Upon a Time in Hollywood (which will likely have a number of Oscar nominations by the time this post airs), is once again purposefully inaccurate about the specific histories it portrays, this time (SPOILER alert) altering the course of history when it comes to the Manson family and their infamous 1969 murders of Sharon Tate and others. But my problems with the film’s depiction of history are once again on a broader (and I would argue deeper) level, and have to do with its thoroughgoing nostalgia for a pre-1960s golden age of Hollywood and culture. The films protagonists and heroes, leading man Rick Dalton (Leonardo DiCaprio) and his stunt double and best friend Cliff Booth (Brad Pitt), are relics of that golden age, struggling with all the 60s changes that have seemingly rendered them dinosaurs. Those conflicts come to a head in the climactic showdown with the Mansons, a battle in which not only do Dalton and Booth triumph over these (in Tarantino’s portrayal) exemplars of 60s cultural degradation, but they do so by re-asserting the style of heroic manhood that their 50s golden age featured.I have a lot of problems with that depiction of the decade, but would boil it down to two significant errors. For one thing, Charles Manson and his cohort were themselves reacting against various 1960s trends, and could just as easily (and to my mind more accurately) be aligned with conservatives like Dalton and Booth rather than with those forces for change. At the very least Tarantino’s simplification of 60s counter-culture to this murderous cult is problematic at best. But there’s an even bigger problem with how he portrays that central conflict, and it’s this: the Daltons and Booths of mid-20th century American culture were largely fraudulent. Exhibit A in that argument would be John Wayne, the uber-masculine hero of so many 50s myths (and of 60s conservative backlash to the counter-culture) who was quite literally play-acting at an identity from which his life and career consistently diverged. Am I saying that I can imagine Dalton or Booth stating in 1971, as Wayne did in an infamous Playboy interview, “I believe in white supremacy until the blacks are educated to a point of responsibility”? Yes I am—but in any case, such moments should shatter our myths of these idealized 50s icons, myths that Tarantino’s film traffics in far too thoroughly. Last 2019 review tomorrow,BenPS. What do you think? 2019 stories you’d highlight?

January 1, 2020: 2019 in Review: Global Protests

[2019—it’s been real, it’s been good, but it ain’t been real good. Actually, I’m not even sure I’d say it’s been good, but it has definitely been eventful. So this week I’ll AmericanStudy a handful of major 2019 stories I haven’t been able to cover on the blog, leading up to a few predictions for what’s likely to be an even more eventful 2020.]Happy New Year! On two ways to think about one of last year’s biggest global stories.I know I said I wouldn’t dedicate another post in this week’s series to a Saturday Evening Post Considering History column of mine, and I promise that I have new things to say in today’s post. But in place of this first paragraph, I would ask you to check out one more column inspired by a topic I didn’t get to cover here on the blog: the July 2019 mass protests in Puerto Rico.Welcome back! Those PR protests of course unfolded in response to specific circumstances and factors in that place and community, as protests tend to do (and as I hope I analyzed through the lens of Puerto Rican activism in that column). But it’s impossible to tell the story of 2019—especially the second half of the year—without noting the similarly large-scale protests that took place around the globe: from Hong Kong to Chile, Lebanonto Spain. Those news stories were all taken from a single week, late in October, but they certainly reflect this multi-month, global trend. And I think their global nature is a key part of analyzing these protests—not just that they took place around the world, but that they were in various ways inspired (or at the very least encouraged) by one another. Social media, another complex global force, has played a significant role in amplifying such global interconnections, not just by raising and spreading awareness but by offering models and blueprints for the protests (and more exactly the protesters) themselves. Social media is of course a 21st century context, and an example of what might make this set of global protests distinct from prior historical events or moments. Yet at the same time, the historian in me would note that there are important such past parallels that, at the very least, would be worth engaging as another contextual layer for our current moment. Perhaps the closest such parallel is 1848, a year in which so many revolutions swept through Europe that it came to be known as the “Year of Revolution” (another nickname was the “Spring of Nations,” which as that hyperlinked articles notes make 1848 an interesting counterpart to the 21st century, multi-national revolts that came to be known as the Arab Spring). While I’m far from a European historian, I do know that 1848 offers one particularly clear takeaway: that such contemporary and conjoined revolutions don’t simply reflect their moment, they also and crucially influence all that follows it (even in nationswhere they do not take place). Without getting into 2020 predictions too fully (come back this weekend for more of that!), I’ll say that this feels like a truly revolutionary moment here in the US as well—and as it unfolds we have many lessons we can take away from these global protests.Next 2019 review tomorrow,BenPS. What do you think? 2019 stories you’d highlight?