Benjamin A. Railton's Blog, page 238

February 10-11, 2018: The Scouts in Context

[On February 8th, 1910, Chicago publisher William D. Boyceincorporated the Boys Scouts of America, a US version of the international Scouting organization. So this week I’ve AmericanStudied Boyce and a handful of other figures connected to the Boy Scouts, leading up to this weekend post on an international and cross-cultural context for the Scouts.]On really compelling ways to contextualize the Boy Scouts of America with international organizations and histories that are part of American society as well.I had originally planned to focus this weekend post on issues such as gay Scout leaders and girls in the Scouts, but Friday’s post evolved to include those as part of the Alfred Kinsey conversation. Fortunately for me, a colleague and friend shared a very interesting perspective in response to the series, and so I’ve decided to make a somewhat redacted version of it the focus of this post instead. It is:
“In your final note, you asked about other scouting organizations.  So here’s something.  My family members are all proud members of Plast—the Ukrainian Scouting organization.  You can read the full history of it on Wikipedia—it’s quite fascinating as it developed from just a scouting organization into a full-on Resistance movement.
My younger family members attend various Plast camps in the summer where they earn badges and all that.  They really rough it; the kids camp out and practice “no-trace” camping all the time.  They create their own meals and all without parents (although there are various levels of counselors around).  The oldest girl earned the highest badge during her first year of college and the oldest boy has already been a counselor for a year.
And my contribution?  Many a Christmas and birthday gift has been camping equipment!
I was not in Plast nor were my siblings.  I suspect my father was so happy and relieved to be safe in the US (he escaped Ukraine when the Nazis and Soviets were moving in and then stayed in a Displaced Persons camp in Germany for years until he and my grandfather were sponsored to America) that he did not push us into the scouts; I think it was too close to the war and his experiences.  We did go to Ukrainian school on Saturdays, but unlike my young family members, we did not immediately head over to the Plast den.
I must say that I’m fascinated with their adventures.  At the various camps (biking camp, for instance, meant that one young family member biked from Pittsburgh to Washington D.C. during a five day period with about 10 other Plastuns) they make connections with other Plastuns from all over the country.  They learn an incredible level of independence and, oh yeah, only Ukrainian is spoken at the camps (well, officially) so they get immersed in an entirely different culture.
This is not directly related to your post, but it is interesting to me.  I’m sure other ethnicities have similar scouting organizations. 
And one final note—I gave a paper one time on the women in the IRA and the military resistance organizations in Ukraine when it was occupied by the Soviets—the groups that developed out of Plast.  By far and away the most important operatives were women.  Go figure.”As always, some of my very favorite moments on this blog come from readers and fellow AmericanStudiers! Thanks to this colleague, and please keep sharing all such responses, here in comments, by email, or any other way!Valentine’s series starts Monday,BenPS. What do you think? Other Scouting histories or stories you’d share?

February 9, 2018: Famous Boy Scouts: Alfred Kinsey and Bill Gates

[On February 8th, 1910, Chicago publisher William D. Boyceincorporated the Boys Scouts of America, a US version of the international Scouting organization. So this week I’ll AmericanStudy Boyce and a handful of other figures connected to the Boy Scouts, leading up to a weekend post on the Scouts in the 21st century.]On two Scouts who changed the world, and whether the Scouts have changed with it.As a boy growing up in New Jersey, Alfred Kinsey became one of the earliest Boy Scouts, joining the first troop that formed in his community (not long after the organization’s 1910 founding) and working his way to Eagle Scout by 1913 (making him one of the first Eagle Scouts). His scouting experiences likely contributed to his burgeoning interests in biology, zoology, and botany, passions that led him to attend Maine’s Bowdoin College (as an double major in Biology and Psychology) and then Harvard’s agricultural college the Bussey Institution (receiving his PhD in Biology). It’s fair to say that the youthful scouting experiences of Bill Gates, who worked his way from Cub Scout to Boy Scout during his childhood in the Seattle area in the 1960s, were not quite as directly formative for his future professional life and identity. But Gates has nonetheless talked at length, in that case while receiving the highest scouting honor the Silver Buffalo Award, about what the “overall experience of challenging” himself during his years in the Scouts contributed to his perspective and identity.Whatever the differences in their particular experiences of scouting, there’s no doubt that both Kinsey and Gates dramatically influenced and fundamentally changed American and human society, well beyond their chosen professions. That is, of course Kinsey contributed greatly to evolutions in scientific fields like psychology and biology, while Gates did so in technological arenas including computing and the digital revolution. But both men also and even more significantly influenced crucial aspects of how we think and talk about some of the most enduring elements of society and identity: Kinsey reshaped our conversations about and understandings of sex and sexuality; and Gates likewise revised those around technology’s presence and role in our lives and world. While of course both their personal choices (especially Kinsey’s) and professional practices (especially Gates’s) can and should be considered carefully and critiqued (or even condemned) where appropriate, there is in any case no denying just how much these two have helped shape American and human life over the last half-century. Whatever else Americans have shared over those decades, personal lives and personal computers have been integral parts for most of us, and these two men contributed as much to them as any individuals have.Changes in society and the world don’t necessarily produce corresponding changes in particular organizations or institutions, however, and I would argue that the Boy Scouts have embraced many of Gates’ effects while famously and troublingly resisting Kinsey’s. As Gates noted in the same Silver Buffalo speech, the Scouts now offer merit badges in such subjects as programming, digital technology, and nuclear science (among many other additions), reflecting the new world in which these young people are growing up and the kinds of skills that they will need to navigate it. Yet when it comes to sexuality, the Scouts for many decades consistently and vociferously resisted changing along with society and the world—fighting tooth to nail to resist such changes as gay scout leaders, gay and transgender Scouts, and the like. To be clear and to their credit, the Scouts have gradually shifted on each of those issues, and as of last year have even begun to allow girls to join (perhaps an even more radical shift, given the organization’s name). Yet nevertheless, comparing Gates and Kinsey allows us to see with even more clarity how much the Scouts have resisted Kinsey’s kinds of social and cultural changes, compared to their quick and thorough embrace of the kinds linked to Gates. Perhaps an indication that they, and we, still have even more to learn from Kinsey and his colleagues.Special post this weekend,BenPS. What do you think? Other Scouting histories or stories you’d share?

February 8, 2018: Famous Boy Scouts: William Boyce

[On February 8th, 1910, Chicago publisher William D. Boyceincorporated the Boys Scouts of America, a US version of the international Scouting organization. So this week I’ll AmericanStudy Boyce and a handful of other figures connected to the Boy Scouts, leading up to a weekend post on the Scouts in the 21st century.]On the Boy Scouts of America’s quasi-mythic origin story, and some very real, complex subsequent histories.According to a legend that has endured from 1909 down to the present, William Boyce, in the midst of one of his many globe-trotting expeditions to Africa during this period of his life, was lost in the London fog when an unfamiliar young man appeared as a guide. When they reached Boyce’s destination and Boyce thanked and attempted to tip the young man, the boy replied that he was simply doing his duty as a Boy Scout. Boyce had never heard of the organization, and the legend goes that the boy then guided him to the Boy Scout Association’s London headquarters, where Boyce met the group’s original founder Robert Baden-Powell. Inspired by all that he learned during this encounter, Boyce founded the Boy Scouts of America (BSA) four months later, on February 8th, 1910. As often seems to be the case with such historical legends, there are seemingly some core truths to this one (according to Boyce he did meet and was impressed and educated by a young Boy Scout in London in 1909), some elements that have been conflated or simplified (Boyce did not meet Baden-Powell until a different occasion), and some that are perhaps entirely mythologized (Boyce does not for example mention fog in his own version of the encounter with the young Boy Scout, but it does add a certain je ne sais quoi). I understand the appeal of such a mythic origin point, but as is generally true, the actual histories of how the Boy Scouts of America began to develop after Boyce’s 1910 founding are even more compelling (and far more representative of historical and social trends and contexts). For one thing, the Scouts struggled to stay afloat and solvent for their first few years, and it took a number of distinct but interconnected factors to keep the organization going and make it ultimately as successful as it has become. Boyce himself donated $1000 a month from his sizeable fortune for the first few years, but there were numerous other important influences as well: the hiring of the YMCA International’s Boys’ Work Secretary, Edgar Robinson, as the BSA’s first Managing Director; the merger of a couple of already existing boys’ organizations, Daniel Carter Beard’s Sons of Daniel Boone (later the Boy Pioneers of America) and Ernest Thompson’s Woodcraft Indians, with the BSA; and the eventual hiring of lawyer and children’s rights advocate James E. West as the BSA’s first Chief Scout Executive. Each of these moments and events reflects different sides of the Progressive Era, of images of childhood/boyhood and the environment and outdoor activity, and of how social and communal activism truly develop and endure in any historical period and context. Boyce himself would end his active role with the Boy Scouts of America five years after his founding of the organization, in January 1915, and that moment reflects another set of complex and compelling (and largely forgotten) histories. Boyce had apparently clashed with James West on a number of issues, especially whether and how the BSA should start a program for boys who lived too far from towns and could not join regular troops (Boyce was in favor of the idea, having grown up on a Pennsylvania farm himself). As a result Boyce decided to start another organization, the Lone Scouts of America (LSA), which had a more distinctly rural flavor and featured numerous (fraught but nonetheless interesting) nods to Native American culture, including groups known as “tribes” and a treasurer titled the “wampum-bearer.” The LSA also allowed Boyce to embrace his professional life as a publisher more fully, as he started a magazine called Lone Scout that then branched out into a number of regional Tribe Papers. By 1924 the Lone Scouts were failing, and Boyce agreed to merge the remaining members with West’s BSA (although there remains to this day a program within the BSA known as Lone Scouts that serves more rural or isolated members). Yet those nine years reflect and embody a number of compelling historical and cultural issues, and help us understand the life and legacy of William Boyce—and of the BSA—far better than foggy myths ever could.Last Scouts tomorrow,BenPS. What do you think? Other Scouting histories or stories you’d share?

February 7, 2018: Famous Boy Scouts: John Wayne and Jimmy Stewart

[On February 8th, 1910, Chicago publisher William D. Boyceincorporated the Boys Scouts of America, a US version of the international Scouting organization. So this week I’ll AmericanStudy Boyce and a handful of other figures connected to the Boy Scouts, leading up to a weekend post on the Scouts in the 21st century.]On two Hollywood lives and legacies, and a film that purposefully complicates both of them.John Wayne and Jimmy Stewart, both of whom spent many years in and connected to the Boy Scouts, had remarkably parallel childhoods and young adulthoods in many other ways as well. Wayne (his birth name was Marion Morrison) was born in a small Iowa town to parents of mostly Scots-Irish heritage, raised Presbyterian, played football and participated in debate and journalism in high school (his family had moved to Glendale, California by that time), and wanted to attend the US Naval Academy but ended up pre-law at the University of Southern California instead. Stewart was born in a small Pennsylvania town to parents of mostly Scottish heritage, raised Presbyterian, played football and edited the yearbook in high school, and nearly attended the Naval Academy but ended up an architecture major at Princeton University instead. Both men likewise began acting in a serious way while still very young, with Wayne appearing in his first film at the age of 19 (after losing his football scholarship and having to leave USC) and Stewart joining the prominent Cape Cod theater group the University Players while he was still in college.Perhaps the only significant biographical divergence between Wayne and Stewart occurred during World War II: while it seems that Wayne wanted to serve in some military capacity, he did not do so, touring the South Pacific with the USO but otherwise continuing to make films (many of them about the war); Stewart, on the other hand, flew numerous combat missions for the Air Force between 1942 and 1945, putting his burgeoning Hollywood career entirely on hold for the duration of the war. While each of those military histories is of course individual and complicated, there’s also at least a bit of an irony in comparing them to the two men’s subsequent film careers and overall Hollywood legacies: Wayne became more and more associated with themes like war, violence, and an idealized form of uber-masculinity, a narrative that still endures to this day; while Stewart became connected to more thoughtful and sensitive alternative images of masculinity and movie stardom, perhaps especially due to the first film he made upon resuming his career post-war, It’s a Wonderful Life (1946). While of course life and art almost always diverge, it’s fair to say that in this case both men’s artistic legacies have often been linked directly to perceived aspects of their personal lives and identities, links that their respective wartime experiences at least render more ambiguous and uncertain.The one film that the two men starred in together, John Ford’s classic 1962 Western The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance , interestingly and importantly investigates many of these precise questions and themes. In some ways, Valance relies upon the two men’s stereotypical images: Stewart plays a lawyer and politician whose intellectual identity seems challenged (but whose career has been enhanced) by a famous duel in which he apparently shot and killed a notorious outlaw; while Wayne plays a rough and tumble rancher who was the outlaw’s actual killer and has stoically kept that fact quiet to benefit his friend. Yet on a deeper level, Ford’s film offers a direct challenge to both the Western genre (one in which Ford and his frequent collaborator Wayne worked so often) and the idea that we can trust mythic narratives of identity at all. The film’s most famous line—and one of the more famous in Hollywood history—comes near the end, when a newspaper reporter learns the truth about the shooting but decides not to reveal it to anyone; as explanation he says to Stewart’s character, “This is the West, sir. When the legend becomes fact, print the legend.” It’s a great line, but an incredibly complicated one, and I don’t believe we’re necessarily meant to accept it as the right perspective—or at the very least, it asks us to investigate legends and consider what facts and truths might lie untold beneath those mythic stories. A question that certainly applies to the lives and legacies of both John Wayne and Jimmy Stewart.Next Scouts tomorrow,BenPS. What do you think? Other Scouting histories or stories you’d share?

February 6, 2018: Famous Boy Scouts: Neil Armstrong and George Takei

[On February 8th, 1910, Chicago publisher William D. Boyceincorporated the Boys Scouts of America, a US version of the international Scouting organization. So this week I’ll AmericanStudy Boyce and a handful of other figures connected to the Boy Scouts, leading up to a weekend post on the Scouts in the 21st century.]On two different, equally groundbreaking forms of extraterrestrial exploration.It’s of course not the biographical detail for which he’s best known, but Neil Armstrong (1930-2012) was likely the most famous Boy and Eagle Scout of all time. Armstrong joined the Scouts as a boy in Ohio in the late 1930s, and attained the rank of Eagle Scout as a teenager in the early 1940s; during his famous July 1969 space voyage to the moon on the Columbia, he radioed back, “I'd like to say hello to all my fellow Scouts and Scouters at Farragut State Park in Idaho having a National Jamboree therethis week; and Apollo 11 would like to send them best wishes.” The Scouting experiences of actor and activist George Takei (1937- ) are far less well known, but pretty unique and interesting in their own right; after spending much of his early life in a Japanese internment camp, Takei moved with his family back to Los Angeles after World War II, and there he joined Boy Scout Troop 379, organized as part of the city’s famous Koyasan Buddhist Temple. While these two 1940s Scouting (and life) experiences might seem dramatically distinct, I’d also argue that they reflect the way that a national community such as the Boy Scouts can in fact cut across such regional, cultural, and historical differences and help link young Americans in symbolic but meaningful ways.The Scouts aren’t the only link between Armstrong and Takei, of course; and while the two men journeyed to space—the final frontier—in vastly different ways, both of their extraterrestrial experiences could be said to have importantly pushed the boundaries of our society. In this post from almost exactly three years ago I wrote about the persistent conspiracy theories about Armstrong and company’s 1969 moon landing, and I would argue that, ironically but definitely, those extremist theories themselves reflect just how significantly the moon landing affected and shifted our collective narratives and perspectives. That is, Armstrong’s “giant leap for mankind” was giant not only for the more obvious (and certainly accurate) reasons of exploration and science and human achievement and the like, but also for the way it fundamentally and permanently altered our shared horizon. Authors and artists had of course been imagining voyages to the moon for centuries, but the trip, and thus in some meaningful ways the place itself, had remained at that imaginative, that speculative, level (not in actuality, where the moon has always been perfectly real, but in our human perspectives). When Armstrong’s feet first touched the surface of the moon, that all changed; now this distant celestial body was part of our collective landscape of experience.Unlike the Columbia, the Starship Enterprise never got further off the ground than whatever contraption might have been employed at NBC Studios to make it appear that the Star Trek cast were indeed boldly going where no man had ever gone before. But that doesn’t mean that Captain Kirk and company didn’t truly expand our frontiers in all sorts of ways, and I would argue that the show’s casting was in 1966 (the year it premiered) one prominent form of expansion. African American actress Nichelle Nichols (as communications officer Lieutenant Uhuru) was one important such casting choice, a striking nod to an interracial and integrated crew on this future exploratory mission. But casting George Takei as helmsman Lieutenant Sulu was just as groundbreaking, and indeed perhaps even more so given the frustrating paucity of Asian American characters and actors in 1950s and 60s television shows. As with Nichols, I don’t believe that the show engaged much at all with these characters’ racial or ethnic identities, which only amplified the sense that they were simply members of the Enterprise’s crew, participating in these extraterrestrial missions on equal terms with William Shatner’s Kirk, Leonard Nimoy’s Spock, and all the rest. That Takei has since become one of our culture’s most iconic and outspoken gay men (and gay rights advocates) only adds one more layer to his contribution to those social and cultural explorations and expansions.Next Scouts tomorrow,BenPS. What do you think? Other Scouting histories or stories you’d share?

February 5, 2018: Famous Boy Scouts: Michael Jordan and Hank Aaron

[On February 8th, 1910, Chicago publisher William D. Boyceincorporated the Boys Scouts of America, a US version of the international Scouting organization. So this week I’ll AmericanStudy Boyce and a handful of other figures connected to the Boy Scouts, leading up to a weekend post on the Scouts in the 21st century.]On some telling differences and a key similarity between two iconic athletes.Long before the championships and the commercials and the animated film, even before he was famously cut from his high school’s varsity baskeball team, Michael Jordan was a Boy Scout during the 1970s in his childhood hometown of Wilmington, North Carolina. Some three decades earlier, long before his own legendary, record-setting baseball career, Hank Aaron likewise took part in scouting during his own late 1930s and ‘40s childhood in Mobile, Alabama, calling the experience “one of the greatest thrills” of his young life. Both of those hyperlinked stories also connect the young men’s individual scouting experiences to their parents’ perspectives and situations, but in very different ways that reflect the distinct time periods and worlds: Jordan’s mom Deloris highlights his scouting as one of many examples of she and her husband’s desire to give their children everything, remarking that “PTA, Boy Scouts, band—our kids were our life”; whereas Aaron notes that he had to stop scouting when his father could not afford to buy him a pair of the required, regulation long pants. North Carolina in the 1970s was far from an ideal place for an African American family, but it’s fair to say that Alabama in the 1940s was significantly worse still. Those distinct childhood worlds might help explain other differences in the two men’s careers and perspectives. Much (perhaps too much) is made of Jordan’s high school varsity setback, but in truth his career was on a fast-track to professional success from a very early point: he was a McDonald’s All-American his last year in high school; received a scholarship to play at one of the country’s great college programs (North Carolina); and left after his junior year to enter the 1984 NBA draft, where he was selected third overall. Aaron was at least as talented as a young athlete (receiving a professional tryout with Jackie Robinson’s Brooklyn Dodgers at the age of 15), but came of age in an era when segregation was still the norm; his professional career began with multiple seasons in the Negro Leagues before he signed with the Boston Braves in 1952. And it seems likely to me that these distinct career paths, and in particular Aaron’s seemingly much more direct personal and professional experiences of the effects of discrimination and racism, have led to the two men’s widely varied willingness to engage with social and political issues: Jordan famously justified his political neutrality by noting that Republicans buy sneakers too; while Aaron has long been a vocal participant and frequent activist in social and political debates over sports, race, and many related issues.Yet at the same time, I would argue that the two men’s post-playing professional careers have reflected a fundamentally similar desire to continue contributing to the sports they love. Before his somewhat ill-fated comeback with the Washington Wizards from 2001-3, Jordan had already begun such a second act, working as President of Basketball Operations for the Wizards; although he was not able to return to that position after his final 2003 retirement from playing, he has gone on to become first a minority and now a majority owner of the Charlotte Bobcats (making him the only African-American majority owner of an NBA team). Aaron’s second act has been in many ways very similar, with numerous front-office jobs with the Atlanta Braves including director of player development and senior vice president (making him one of the first African Americans in baseball upper management); he has also spearheaded efforts to bring more minorities into baseball at every level, such as his Hank Aaron Rookie League Program. While of course these professional arcs might reflect men unable to turn off their competitive sides altogether, I would nonetheless emphasize instead two legends who hope that their legacies in their respective sports will go beyond simply their Hall of Fame careers and statistics. A focus on communal impact that might have been influenced at least a bit by their scouting starting points. Next Scouts tomorrow,BenPS. What do you think? Other Scouting histories or stories you’d share?

February 3-4, 2018: Crowd-sourced Sports MovieStudying

[Each of the last six years, I’ve used the Super Bowl week to AmericanStudysome sports histories and stories. This year I decided to focus on sports movies and what they can tell us about American culture and identity. This crowd-sourced post is drawn from the responses and nominations of fellow Sports MovieStudiers—add yours in comments, please!]First, I wanted to share this great AAIHS column on Jackie Robinson by my friend Matthew Teutsch.Matthew also replies to the week’s series, Tweeting, “I’m not sure about movies and stories, but I do have some good books. For films, I would say 42 and possibly the Robinson film from the 1950s. Book wise, I’m reading Lou Moore’s I Fight for a Living , and it’s a great companion to thoughts about writers like Dunbar, Chesnutt, Du Bois, and others at the turn of the twentieth century. It’s about boxing from about 1880-1915.”Paul Colemanfollows up Monday’s post, writing, “Bad News Bears (the original) is one of the great American movies of all time. Rich and enjoyable character dramedy, but also has a lot to say about legacy, honor, class, and the role competition plays in American society.” He adds, “ MONEYBALL [BEN: SPOILERS for the film’s end in that clip, but I love it too much not to share it] is also a truly great movie, and just as rich thematically.”Beth Locke Cunningham follows up Tuesday’s post, writing, “Rudy never fails to lift my spirits.”Francesca Lewis follows up Thursday’s post, writing, “Silver Linings Playbook! Extra relevant with the Eagles playing.”Rob Gosselin writes, “If you want to watch an interesting science fiction metaphor for football try the original Rollerball . Every year the similarities to the NFL just get better and better. One of the lines from the movie has an executive saying that all executives secretly wish to be Rollerballers. Just last week Robert Kraft made the statement that throughout his whole career he dreamed about being a football player. And when the fans start chanting ‘Brady,’ all I hear now is ‘Jonathan.’”Andrew McGregor Tweets, “I'm a big fan of Running Brave , about Billy Mills. I still enjoy the classic Chariots of Fire , too.”Andrea Grenadier writes, “It’s amazing to me how few Millennials I talk to about film have never heard of or seen Chariots of Fire. A beautiful film from 1981, it captured a place and time remarkably well, and with the Olympics coming up, a reminder of what we’ve lost in the amateur sporting world and how much the Olympics meant years ago. And let me add the movie about my high school football team, Remember the Titans, should have been a lot better!”Michael Wood Tweets, “ The Program and Blue Chips as early-‘90s critiques of college football and basketball.” Matthew Teutsch responds, “Totally forgot about The Program. Never saw Blue Chips. For a TV show, Ballers is pretty good. Over the top at points, but it addresses CTE, concussions, and post-career.” He adds, “You have other shows like The Simpsons and The Boondockstoo. These use comedy though, but could still spark conversation. From Boondocks season 2 ‘Ballin.’”Larry Rosenwald writes, “American movies, right, so I can't name Chariots of Fire, my favorite sports movie of all? [BEN: All movies and topics are very welcome in this space as ever!] In that case: The Natura l, Hoosier s, Eight Men Out , and Breaking Away .”Lara Scwartz also goes with Eight Men Out.Philip Operelikewise goes with Hoosiers and The Natural, as well as Rocky and Bull Durham .Jonathan Silverman shares, “My favorite sports movie is Slap Shot , and I'm not even a hockey fan. It's really funny and well acted. I think the best sports movie is probably Rocky , simply because Rocky loses at the end of a movie that is taut and thoughtful, save for maybe the initial seduction scene.” Jeff Renye agrees with Rocky, adding “Perfect weekend for it.”Other sports film nominations:Karen Valeri highlights Field of Dreams and Miracle .Daniel Quinnominates Space Jam .Katharine Covino goes with Cool Runnings .AnneMarie Donahue highlights one of the newest sports films, I, Tonya .Floyd Cheungshares the book Assault on Lake Casitas .Andrew DaSilva notes that “this about sums it up.” He adds, “Oh and The Big Lebowski cause BOWLING is a sport!”Daniel Hein highlights “Moneyball, Raging Bull, Cinderella Man, The Wrestler (if you consider wrestling a sport), Seabiscuit , 42.”

Olivia Lucier goes with Cinderella Man as well. Daniel Ellis shares the trailer for Heleno, which he notes is for “adults only but an amazing film nevertheless.”Wyatt Phillips highlights Victory .Matt Desiderio nominates When We Were Kings .Cynthia Lynn Lyerly highlights He Got Game .

Emily Page nominates A League of Their Own, since "There's no crying in baseball!" 

Amanda Parsons highlights 61* . Thomas Murray shares the Negro Leagues documentary Only the Ball Was White , and “also Bang the Drum Slowly with DeNiro and Babe with Alex Karras and Susan Clarke about the multi-sport female sports pioneer Babe Zaharias.”Ezekial Healy writes, “A little out of the box, but I've been thinking about The Running Man a lot in this current regime. It combines the themes of authoritarian regime, gladiator/sports, and Arnold Schwarzenegger! But to me, the deep idea is that in the future (basically now, at this point), the ruling party will be a brand (they sell cola and other products) and derive its power explicitly from maintaining dominance in TV ratings.”And Nancy Caronia writes, “Gah, really? A favorite? Slap Shot, Rocky, Creed, Bull Durham, Raging Bull, The Karate Kid(original)...need I go on?” And Nancy adds, “If we want to get broad here, Jaws , for the thrill of the hunt!”Next series starts Monday,BenPS. What do you think? Other sports movies you’d highlight?

February 2, 2018: AmericanStudying Sports Movies: Remember the Titans

[Each of the last six years, I’ve used the Super Bowl week to AmericanStudysome sports histories and stories. This year I’ve decided to focus on sports movies and what they can tell us about American culture and identity. Be a good sport and share your responses and nominees in comments for a crowd-sourced weekend post that’s sure to take home the championship!]On the over-the-top scene that really shouldn’t work, but somehow does.About midway through Remember the Titans (2000), Denzel Washington’s Coach Herman Boone takes the players on his newly integrated Virginia high school football team (who have gone to Pennsylvania for training camp) on a midnight jog. The team ends up, to their and the audience’s surprise, on the grounds of Gettsyburg National Military Park, where Boone gives a speech on the Civil War battle and both its continuing resonances in and potential lessons for the team’s and its community’s struggles with racial discord and division. The speech and scene ends with Boone’s fervent hope that perhaps, if the players and team can learn the lessons that the battle’s dead soldiers have to offer, they can “learn to play this game like men.”For anybody who has any sense of the horrific awfulness that was Gettysburg, or just the horrific awfulness that was the Civil War in general (and I’m not necessarily disagreeing with Ta-Nehisi Coates when he argues that the war wasn’t tragic, but it sure was bloody and awful in any case, and never more so that on days like Gettysburg’s), this evocation of the battle’s dead for a football team’s lessons feels a bit ridiculous. For that matter, if we think about the most famous speech delivered at the battlefield, in tribute to those honored dead and in an effort to hallow that ground (a phrase that Boone overtly echoes in his own closing thoughts), the filmmakers’ choice to put Boone’s speech in the same spot (and I don’t know whether the Gettysburg speech took place in the real-life histories on which the film is based, but it seems from this article as if it didn’t and it’s a choice in the film in any case) feels even more slight and silly in comparison to that transcendent historical moment.So the scene really shouldn’t work, not for this AmericanStudier at least—but I have to admit that it did when I saw the movie, and did again when I watched the scene to write this post. Partly that’s due to the performances—Denzel is always Denzel, and the main kids are uniformly great as well (including a young Wood Harris, later Avon Barksdale on The Wire). Partly it’s because great sports films are particularly good at taking what is by definition cliché (all those conventions I mentioned in yesterday’s post) and making it feel new and powerful in spite of that familiarity. And partly, ironically given those Gettysburg contrasts, it’s because of the history—because this football team and its story does connect to America’s tortured and far too often tragic legacy of racial division and discrimination, and because the story and thus the film represents one of those moments when we transcended that legacy and reached a more perfect union. When sports, and sports films, are at their best, they have that potential, which is one main reason why we keep going back to them.January Recap this weekend,BenPS. What do you think? Other sports movies you’d highlight?

February 1, 2018: AmericanStudying Sports Movies: The Fighter and Silver Linings Playbook

[Each of the last six years, I’ve used the Super Bowl week to AmericanStudysome sports histories and stories. This year I’ve decided to focus on sports movies and what they can tell us about American culture and identity. Be a good sport and share your responses and nominees in comments for a crowd-sourced weekend post that’s sure to take home the championship!]On the interesting results when an unconventional filmmaker works in a conventional genre.Like any well-established and longstanding genre (from romantic comedies to slasher films to Westerns to action movies), sports movies tend to operate according to certain conventions. As my posts this week have demonstrated, there are certainly different options within those conventions, such as the lovable loser story or the heroic underdog tale. But even across those sub-genres, many of the genre’s conventional beats and stages still apply: the training montage, the moment when all seems hopeless and lost for our protagonists, the dramatic shift that signals the start of something more positive, and so on. Whether we’re talking about the Daniel-san in The Karate Kid (1984), the Jamaican bobsled team in Cool Runnings (1993), or Keanu and his fellow scabs in The Replacements (2000; another team coached by Gene Hackman, in case the genre echoes weren’t strong enough), the story is still the story, by and large.So what happens when a filmmaker whose career has been one long refusal to adhere to convention turns his attention to sports movies? We’ve seen two recent examples of that combination in the career of David O. Russell, the highly unconventional filmmaker behind movies as diverse but uniformly unusual as Spanking the Monkey (1994), Three Kings (1999), and I Heart Huckabees (2004). Russell’s most recent films were the Oscar-nominated American Hustle (2013) and Joy (2015), but before that he made two successive films that I would classify as highly unconventional sports movies: The Fighter (2010), the story of real-life Lowell, Mass. boxer Micky Ward (Mark Wahlberg) and his drug-addicted half-brother Dickie (the phenomenal Christian Bale); and Silver Linings Playbook (2012), a screwball romantic comedy about two troubled Philadelphians (played to perfection by Bradley Cooper and Jennifer Lawrence) that turns into a sports movie as they train for a climactic dance competition while Cooper’s father (Robert De Niro) makes a life-or-death bet on an upcoming Eagles game.In some ways, both films adhere closely to the kinds of conventions I highlighted above: Silver Linings has both an extended training montage for the dance competition and a lovable losers ending (they score a highly mediocre score, but it’s what they needed for the bet so mediocrity is victory in this case); The Fighter ends with its heroic underdog overcoming his obstacles, winning against all odds, and winning the girl in the process. But it’s in their extended, nuanced, dark yet thoughtful portrayals of mental and physical illness that both films go outside the bounds of typical sports movies. By far the best sequences in The Fighter involve Bale’s Dickie, who neither a hero nor a lovable loser, but an addict and criminal struggling to survive from day to day. And despite its more conventional (and foreshadowed from the title on) happy ending, Silver Linings takes all three of its protagonists and its audience with them to uncomfortable places, asking us to see these characters not as underdogs or losers or any other types, but as three-dimensional humans struggling with the kinds of challenges against which there is perhaps no victory, simply endurance. That might not be a sports movie lesson, but it’s a pretty important one.Last MovieStudying tomorrow,BenPS. What do you think? Other sports movies you’d highlight?

January 31, 2018: AmericanStudying Sports Movies: The Longest Yard(s)

[Each of the last six years, I’ve used the Super Bowl week to AmericanStudysome sports histories and stories. This year I’ve decided to focus on sports movies and what they can tell us about American culture and identity. Be a good sport and share your responses and nominees in comments for a crowd-sourced weekend post that’s sure to take home the championship!]On what the changes between an original film and its remake can tell us about American narratives.I’m not going to try to make the case for the original The Longest Yard (1974) as some sort of American classic, but it does offer a pretty gritty and realistic depiction of prison life and community amidst its more comic moments and its lovable underdogs sports story. The film’s sadistic Warden Rudolph Hazen, played to sleazy perfection by Eddie Albert, could be transplanted without much revision to a more overtly realistic contemporary film such as Cool Hand Luke (1967). And as the disgraced football star turned convict, Burt Reynolds feels precisely as flawed and frustrating yet ultimately heroic as Paul Newman in that film or Jack Nicholson in the following year’s One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest (1975). So you know what, maybe I am making the case for Longest Yardas a minor American classic, perhaps not quite on par with those contemporary films or another like Dog Day Afternoon (1975), but in the conversation at least.It will likely come as no surprise to anyone familiar with Adam Sandler’s film oeuvre that the 2005 Longest Yard remake, starring Sandler in the Reynolds role and James Cromwell as the Warden (among many other celebrity roles), is not a classic, minor or otherwise. While I try not to sum up entire works with one moment or detail, I’d say this one qualifies: in the original film, the climactic game between the prisoners and guards was a brutally realistic grudge-fest, with lives and futures on the line; in the remake, that’s ostensibly still the case, but at one point Sandler’s quarterback gives one of the guards a wet willy. I can’t say it any more clearly than does the Wikipedia entry on the remake and its critical reception: “the greatest complaint from critics was that it replaced the original’s dark comedy and grit with juvenile humor and visual gags.” Since “juvenile humor and visual gags” is what you’ll find if you look up “Adam Sandler” in the dictionary, it’s fair to say that his presence had a lot to do with that change; but I would also argue that the two films reflect a significant difference in our national narratives about prison.In this post on Dog Day Afternoon, I wrote about the 1971 Attica Prison rebellion, and the way those prominent and controversial events foregrounded issues of prisoner treatment and life in this easily overlooked American community. Popular and influential films like Luke and Yard likewise reflect the presence of those issues in the era’s collective conversations. In the 21st century, on the other hand, we tend not to think about our prisons and their communities at all; when we do, as John Oliver highlights in this brilliant piece, it’s mostly as fodder for jokes about prison rape (perhaps the least appropriate subject for jokes imaginable) or as the subject of melodramatic entertainments like Oz and Orange is the New Black. So if the remake is set in the same community that was the subject of those gritty, socially realistic earlier films but is instead full of dumb jokes and silly entertainments untethered from reality (which are the variant definitions of “Adam Sandler”), that would seem to be a pretty accurate depiction of the way we now engage with prison, when we engage with it at all.Next MovieStudying tomorrow,BenPS. What do you think? Other sports movies you’d highlight?