Benjamin A. Railton's Blog, page 203

April 10, 2019: StatueStudying: The Shaw Memorial

[On April 9th, 2003 a group of both Iraqi civilians and U.S. military forces together toppled the statue of Saddam Hussein in Baghdad’s Firdos Square, a hugely symbolic moment that highlights the role statues can play in our communal spaces and identities. So this week I’ll AmericanStudy that moment and four other statues, leading up to a weekend post on my own continuing thoughts on Confederate statues like those in my hometown.]On a historically, culturally, and symbolically crucial statue and monument.
Thanks to Glory, one of the best American historical films of all time, I don’t think there’s too much danger of us leaving the 54th Massachusetts, Robert Gould Shaw, or African American Civil War soldiers out of our national narratives. It’s true that we largely had done so up until the film’s 1989 release, and certainly also true that it’s not necessarily ideal to get our history straight from a Hollywood film (although having read the letters of both Shaw and an African American soldier from the regiment, I can say that this particular film does a very good job of representing that history with complexity and sophistication while still going for the big emotional notes for sure). But nonetheless, on a blog devoted first and foremost to American things that we should better remember, the 54th and Shaw probably don’t need as much of a spot as many of my topics.
Yet as impressive and inspiring as the events surrounding the 54th were—from the formation of the regiment to its climactic moments at South Carolina’s Fort Wagner, and everywhere in between—I would argue that some of the most inspiring moments to come out of those events happened between twenty and thirty years later, with the development and creation of Augustus Saint-Gaudens’ Boston Common memorial to the regiment and to Shaw (begun in 1884 and unveiled in 1897). The inspiration, then and now, came first from Shaw’s family, who rejected Saint-Gaudens’ initial plans for an equestrian statue of just Shaw and argued instead (echoing Shaw’s father’s insistence that his son remain buried near Fort Wagner with his African American soldiers, rather than being exhumed and moved to a Boston-area cemetery) for a statue that included regimental members as well as their Colonel. And it is a serious understatement to say that Saint-Gaudens ran with that inspiration; he decided to use African American models on which to base his sculptures, becoming (it seems) the first white sculptor to do so for any monument or memorial, and as a result created a memorial that is both grand and intimate, heroic and deeply human.
The first time I saw the Shaw Memorial was as part of a History and Literature seminar in my freshman year of college, and I remember both one of the professors and all of my peers arguing that in it Shaw on horseback was still privileged above (literally and figuratively) the African American soldiers. And I guess I can see that argument (which echoes in part this important book by historian Kirk Savage, perhaps the foremost American scholar of this week’s subject), although Shaw was a Colonel and would have ridden into battle on a horse, so I’d read that detail more as a part of Saint-Gaudens’ attempt at accuracy (especially given the care with which he sculpted those individual African American soldiers). But in any case, the Memorial as a whole, like the process that produced it, and like the men and moment that it captures, represents one of the very best things in our collective history and identity, the collaborative efforts of a multi-generational, multi-racial, and multi-vocal community across decades and in the face of some of the most brutal and tragic events we’ve ever witnessed.Next statue tomorrow,BenPS. What do you think? Other statues you’d highlight and analyze?

April 9, 2019: StatueStudying: Saddam

[On April 9th, 2003 a group of both Iraqi civilians and U.S. military forces together toppled the statue of Saddam Hussein in Baghdad’s Firdos Square, a hugely symbolic moment that highlights the role statues can play in our communal spaces and identities. So this week I’ll AmericanStudy that moment and four other statues, leading up to a weekend post on my own continuing thoughts on Confederate statues like those in my hometown.]On the value of recognizing US hypocrisies, and the need to get beyond them as well.While the situation and histories aren’t identical, many of the same things I said in this post about US support for the 1980s Afghan rebels who went on to become Al Qaeda could be said about US support for Saddam Hussein during the same era as well. Hussein was the enemy of our enemy (the Iranian regime) throughout the decade, and so it stands to reason in a realpolitik kind of way that the Reagan and George H.W. Bush administrations would support, fund, and arm Hussein’s regime. But as that last hyperlinked article notes, the US government was well aware Hussein’s worst excesses in the period and continued to support him despite them. And indeed, the same could be said of his final excess immediately preceding our abrupt shift toward his regime: April Glaspie, an envoy of George H.W. Bush’s administration, apparently tacitly supported Hussein’s potential invasion of Kuwait, which then became the 1991 invasion that prompted the hostile US response that culminated in the first Gulf War and made Hussein into an enemy of the US from then on.All of which made the second Iraq War hugely complex and fraught, even if we leave aside those little things like lies about weapons of mass destruction and false connections of Iraq to the September 11th attacks and etc. And those complexities provide a very different context for the April 9thtoppling of the Saddam statue that provided the impetus for this week’s series. In a symbolic but also very real sense, the United States had helped raise that statue, or at least helped build both a strong foundation and a perimeter fence that together allowed it to stand more securely and powerfully for far longer than might otherwise have been the case. From Trujillo in the Dominican Republic and his many Latin American counterparts to Bin Laden, Hussein, and many many others around the world, helping create and prop up such dictators and extremists was indeed one of the true hallmarks of US foreign policy throughout the 20thcentury (particularly in the Cold War era, but not at all limited to that period as the pre-World War II histories of Trujillo’s DR make clear). To celebrate the statue (and Saddam) falling without recognizing those histories is to reinforce hypocritical divisions between US ideals (especially as a “beacon of freedom” abroad and the like) and such troubling realities.At the same time, Saddam was (like most of those US-supported figures) a violent and brutal dictator, a tyrant who created unfathomably terrifying and horrible conditions for the vast majority of Iraqis throughout his reign. Those details make the US support of him for so long even more awful, but also (or really because of all those factors) shouldn’t be minimized or elided in the slightest. Similarly, the fact that it was apparently Iraqis who instigated the toppling of the statue means that if we analyze that moment primarily through the lens of US foreign policies and hypocrisies, we’re just reinforcing a silencing of those rebellious Iraqi voices and perspectives, not at all unlike what Saddam himself managed to do so thoroughly for so long and with US aid. Obviously on an AmericanStudies blog I tend to focus on the US side of my topics, and the US side of Saddam’s histories and story is one we all need to better remember and engage to be sure. But so for that matter is the Iraqi perspective/narrative of any and all histories, one of many reasons I’m so proud of this work being done by my former FSU graduate student Ross Caputi and colleagues of his. Any story of the Saddam statue has to start and end with those Iraqi perspectives and histories.Next statue tomorrow,BenPS. What do you think? Other statues you’d highlight and analyze?

April 8, 2019: StatueStudying: The Statue of Liberty

[On April 9th, 2003 a group of both Iraqi civilians and U.S. military forces together toppled the statue of Saddam Hussein in Baghdad’s Firdos Square, a hugely symbolic moment that highlights the role statues can play in our communal spaces and identities. So this week I’ll AmericanStudy that moment and four other statues, leading up to a weekend post on my own continuing thoughts on Confederate statues like those in my hometown.]On the gaps in our memories of an iconic American statue, and why they need filling.
The John Harvard Statue, located at the center of Harvard Yard and a favorite spot for tourist and parent-student pictures, is colloquially and accurately known as the statue of three lies: the statue’s likeness is not of 17th-century Pilgrim John Harvard but of a 19th-century student who posed for the sculptor; John Harvard is identified in the statue’s inscription as Harvard’s “Founder” but in fact was just one of the college’s earliest and most crucial financial backers; and the 1638 founding date listed in that same inscription is two years later than the actual 1636 founding (by a vote of the Massachusetts Bay Colony’s General Court). The lesson here is, to my mind, two-part and significant: people are drawn to statues as particularly evocative and unifying symbols of a place or community or history; and yet they can not only condense but also oversimplify and even misrepresent those broad and complex identities and stories. And while none of the misrepresentations contained in the John Harvard Statue have much import outside of the Yard (if they do even inside it), those connected to one of the nation’s and world’s most famous Statues, the Statue of Liberty, are much more influential.
The oversimplifications and misrepresentations in our national narratives about the Statue exist on two distinct and even interestingly contrasting levels. For one thing, most of those narratives and our central images of the Statue link it to the broad theme of immigration to the United States; those connections are superficially verified yet significantly complicated by Emma Lazarus’s great sonnet “The New Colossus” (1883), which was written as part of a collection to raise money for the construction of the Statue’s pedestal and eventually (although only long after Lazarus’s 1887 death) inscribed onto the completed pedestal. Lazarus’s poem is, like many of the dedications at the Statue’s opening, most certainly a tribute to what she calls America’s stance of “world-wide welcome”—but I would stress just how strikingly democratic and open her vision of this core national attribute truly is, in the era of (in fact just one year after the passage of) the Chinese Exclusion Act and a decade in which the first huge waves of Eastern European and Jewish immigration (communities to which Lazarus was connected by ethnicity and distant nationality, although her family had been in America for over a century) were being greeted with significant degrees of distrust and open hostility. Virtually every adjective and phrase with which Lazarus’s “Mother of Exiles” describes her hoped-for immigrants carries a seemingly negative connotation (tired, poor, huddled masses, wretched refuse, homeless), and so the Statue’s and poem’s embrace of these arrivals thus not only welcomes them to America, but makes clear how fully our most ideal national identity is constituted out of, not in spite of, such superficially unwanted immigrants and communities.
On that level the gap between the Statue’s identity and the popular images and narratives is not a particularly large one, although I think we could use some more consistent reminders of the call to welcome all arrivals, now more than ever. Much more wide and meaningful, though, is the gap between definitions of the Statue as connected to immigration and ideal images of America as the Land of the Free (which would include Lazarus’) and its actual point of origin. The idea for the Statue originated with a Frenchman, Edouard Laboulaye, and both his overall perspective and his moment of inspiration were extremely specific: Laboulaye was the chairman of an anti-slavery society, and it was at a dinner party mourning the assassination of Abraham Lincoln that he conceived of a monument to liberty in the United States as a gift for the nation’s 1876 Centennial. While certainly he was thinking in part of the nation’s founding and its ideals of liberty (and France’s role in helping it achieve independence from England), he very definitely hoped to remind Americans and outsiders alike of both the tragic legacy of slavery that existed alongside those ideals and of the role of a leader like Lincoln in helping end that system and bring America’s practices of liberty a bit more fully in line with the ideals. Once Laboulaye’s chosen sculptor, Auguste Bartholdi, came to America and began planning the Statue, he moved away from those specific connections and toward the broader and more ideal American visions; the speeches and dedications at the opening ceremonies entirely echoed those emphases, as did works like Lazarus’, and the Statue’s separation from those questions of slavery and abolition became entrenched in the narratives and images from then on.
As with most of the narratives and images I’ve argued for in this space and in my career, I don’t think this is either-or—we can most definitely celebrate the ideals of our history as a nation of immigrants and of our founding values of liberty and equality while remembering some of our most dark historical realities and betrayals of those ideals. And if the Statue of Liberty could become thus a symbol not only of all that it has already meant and continues to mean, but also of (for example) slavery and of the Chinese Exclusion Act, it would be that much more meaningful and authentic of an American icon. Next statue tomorrow,BenPS. What do you think? Other statues you’d highlight and analyze?

April 6-7, 2019: Crowd-sourced 80s Comedies

[For this year’s April Fool’s series, I decided to AmericanStudy a handful of classic 1980s comic films. This crowd-sourced post is drawn from the responses and nominations of fellow ComedyStudiers—add yours in comments, please!]Responding to Monday’s Airplane! post, Irene Martyniuk shares, “Airplane!  A huge family favorite. Explains Autopilot perfectly. J”Other 80s (or 80s adjacent) comedy nominations:Diego Ubiera goes with What about Bob? (1991) and Weekend at Bernie's (1989).Andy Cornick rants, “I could lecture an entire semester on the nonsensical depiction of the 1984 All-Valley Karate Tournament final round. It is so patently obvious that Johnny Lawrence of the Cobra Kai dojo won.” In terms of the film’s genres, he adds, “Of late, the funniest part of watching most of those movies is realizing how far societal standards have come since they were funny and not cringe-worthy.”Andrew DaSilva writes, “I didn't grow up in the 80's but my brother did and he shared those comedies with me as every older brother should. The ones that come to mind are Planes, Trains, and Automobiles , gotta love that John Hughes he was big in the 1980's; Honey, I Shrunk The Kids ; and of course it wouldn't be the 1980's without the 3 Amigos !, the SNL tri-fecta Martin, Chase and Short! Yet none of those compare to Paul Reubens in the PEE WEE HERMAN Show !”Tim McCaffrey shares, “Rewatching Revenge of the Nerds and realizing that there is a blatant rape in the movie...well, let's just say that it doesn't stand up.”And on Twitter, Mark Helmsing writes, “Deconstruct ‘the city as garden of earthly delights’ theme in Adventures in Babysitting and maybe read The Great Outdoors via Roderick Nash and theories of American wilderness and pastoralism vs. ‘the big city.’”Next series starts Monday,BenPS. What do you think? Other 80s comedies (or other comic films) you’d highlight?

April 5, 2019: 80s Comedies: Working Girl

[For this year’s April Fool’s series, I decided to AmericanStudy a handful of classic 1980s comic films. I know you’ll have responses and nominations of your own for this series, so share ‘em for a high-larious weekend post, please!]On one inspiring and two more frustrating characters in a socially thoughtful dramedy.First things first: I’m a big fan of Mike Nichols’ Working Girl (1988), to the point where I’ve shown it in a couple Writing II classes as our shared multimedia text for a unit/paper where students analyze one of their choice. There are a lot of things that make the film funny and compelling (including a truly great opening and closing credits 80s ballad from Carly Simon), but without question the heart and soul is Melanie Griffith’s career-best performance as protagonist Tess McGill. Griffith delivers the film’s slapstick moments and comic lines pitch-perfectly, and has truly next-level chemistry with her romantic lead Harrison Ford (perhaps not a difficult thing at the height of Ford’s 1980s hotness, but still a vital element of the film’s success); but she also imbues the character with so much charisma, heart, vulnerability, and intelligence that we root for her every step of the way, despite the fact that (and more on this in a moment) she lies and cheats her way through a great deal of the film. I love Tess, love Griffith in this film, and would unequivocally highlight this as one of the decade’s truly great comic and film performances.We have to be able to critique the things we love, though, and I would say that the film’s other two most significant female characters are both in their own ways more problematic than Tess. That’s more obviously the case for Sigourney Weaver’s Katharine Parker, Tess’s duplicitous boss and the film’s villain. Weaver’s villainy hinges entirely on the fact that she steals a great idea of Tess’s and tries to pass it off as her own (despite her claims to be Tess’s biggest champion), and that is indeed a really awful thing to do. But it’s also pretty parallel to much of what Tess does for the remainder of the film once she learns of that action—with Katharine out of commission after a European skiing accident, Tess quite literally steals her identity, from her home and office and wardrobe to her significant other (Ford’s Jack Trainer), lying constantly in order to maintain these appearances. Because we see where Tess starts and what she’s up against, and again because of Griffith’s wonderful performance, we root for her throughout these moments; yet we’re never given any backstory for or really any contextual information at all about Weaver’s character, which makes it impossible to know if she has had to fight a similar fight and deserves similar sympathies. At the very least, that’s not the best contrast to create or villain to rely on in a film about women’s empowerment. The film’s third significant female role, Joan Cusack’s delightful best friend character Cyn, is a lot less complicated: mostly a combination of supportive buddy and comic relief, with an occasional moment of conscience about Tess’s manipulations. Cusack is one of our great comic actors, and she unsurprisingly knocks that role out of the park and is another key element of the film’s success. But in terms of the film’s themes, I’d say Cyn presents a bit of a problem: as the film’s ending [SPOILERS, if not unexpected ones I imagine] illustrates, she is presented as purely and entirely happy that Tess has succeeded and gotten the job and life she always wanted; but Cyn and the rest of their friends remain in the office pool from which Tess emerged, and while I suppose one could argue that all of them could be inspired by Tess to follow a similar path, I think it’s more accurate to say that Tess is presented as unique and that neither Cyn nor any of the others are likely to even try for the same next steps. Of course there’s no one path to success or happiness, but this contrast reinforces some overarching class dynamics that are the heart of conversations about work in America but that this funny and fun film isn’t quite willing to get into.Crowd-sourced post this weekend,BenPS. So one more time: what do you think? 80s comedies (or other comic films) you’d highlight?

April 4, 2019: 80s Comedies: Home Alone

[For this year’s April Fool’s series, I decided to AmericanStudy a handful of classic 1980s comic films. I know you’ll have responses and nominations of your own for this series, so share ‘em for a high-larious weekend post, please!]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? 80s comedies (or other comic films) you’d highlight?

April 3, 2019: 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. I know you’ll have responses and nominations of your own for this series, so share ‘em for a high-larious weekend post, please!]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? 80s comedies (or other comic films) you’d highlight?

April 2, 2019: 80s Comedies: Ghostbusters

[For this year’s April Fool’s series, I decided to AmericanStudy a handful of classic 1980s comic films. I know you’ll have responses and nominations of your own for this series, so share ‘em for a high-larious weekend post, please!]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? 80s comedies (or other comic films) you’d highlight?

April 1, 2019: 80s Comedies: Airplane

[For this year’s April Fool’s series, I decided to AmericanStudy a handful of classic 1980s comic films. I know you’ll have responses and nominations of your own for this series, so share ‘em for a high-larious weekend post, please!]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? 80s comedies (or other comic films) you’d highlight?

March 30-31, 2019: March 2019 Recap

[A Recap of the month that was in AmericanStudying.]March 4: Remembering the Alamo: The Two Films: For the battle’s anniversary, an Alamo series kicks off with what separates the 1960 and 2004 films and a telling shared detail. March 5: Remembering the Alamo: A Mexican Memoir: The series continues with a couple takeaways from a controversial but apparently authentic soldier’s memoir. March 6: Remembering the Alamo: Lone Star: Two exchanges in my favorite film that captures the complexities of collective memory, as the series fights on.March 7: Remembering the Alamo: Phil Collins?!: A couple ways to AmericanStudy a strange and telling 21st century story. March 8: Remembering the Alamo: The Historic Site: The series concludes with two significant problems with the mission statement of an important preservationist effort.March 9-10: Tejano Traditions: Following up the Alamo series with a special weekend post on three products of South Texas Tejano culture (including my childhood favorite restaurant, La Hacienda!).March 11: Irish Americans: Mathew Brady: A St. Patrick’s Day series kicks off with lesser-known historical contexts for the Civil War’s most famous photographer.March 12: Irish Americans: Augustus Saint-Gaudens: The series continues with the artist whose Irish American and international legacy is written in stone.March 13: Irish Americans: Georgia O’Keeffe and Alfred Stieglitz: On the similar yet opposing pulls of artistic and romantic passions, as the series rolls on.March 14: Irish Americans: Gene Kelly’s Films: Stand-out moments from of the legendary actor and dancer’s biggest hit movies.March 15: Irish Americans: Macklemore’s “Irish Celebration”: The series concludes with a song that both relies upon yet also transcends ethnic stereotypes.March 16-17: Irish American Literature: A special weekend post, on five books that can tell us a lot about the Irish American experience.March 18: YA Series: Rick Riordan: A series on some of my sons’ favorite YA series kicks off with some of the reasons why they prefer Riordan’s books to other YA fantasies.March 19: YA Series: Wildwood and Ratbridge: The series continues with the limits and appeals of quirky fantasy series.March 20: YA Series: Artemis Fowl: The fraught perils of rooting for an anti-hero and how Eoin Colfer’s series transcends them through world-building, as the series reads on.March 21: YA Series: Timmy Failure: The difficult task of appealing to kid and adult audiences alike, and how Stephan Pastis’s books pull it off in (Sam) spades.March 22: YA Series: The Chronicles of Prydain, Revisited: The series concludes with the nostalgic and new delights of watching my son read one of my childhood favorite series.March 23-24: Crowd-sourced YA Lit: One of my richest crowd-sourced posts yet, featuring the responses and recommendations of many fellow YALitStudies—add yours here or in comments there, please!March 25: NeMLA Recaps: Imbolo Mbue: A series recapping the 2019 NeMLA convention in DC kicks off with two takeaways from Mbue’s wonderful opening night creative event.March 26: NeMLA Recaps: My Toni Morrison Panel: The series continues with the four great talks on the first half of my “African American Literature and the Ironies of Freedom” panel.March 27: NeMLA Recaps: Homi Bhabha: Tracing Homi Bhabha’s bracing and inspiring keynote through three key phrases, as the series rolls on.March 28: NeMLA Recaps: My Contemporary Af Am Panel: Highlighting the three great papers on the second half of my African American panel.March 29: NeMLA Recaps: Other Standout Sessions: The series concludes with three more excellent and thought-provoking panels from across the conference.                                   April Fool’s series starts Monday,BenPS. Topics you’d like to see covered in this space? Guest Posts you’d like to contribute? Lemme know!