Benjamin A. Railton's Blog, page 245

November 4, 2017

November 4-5, 2017: October 2017 Recap



[A Recap of the month that was in AmericanStudying.]October 2: LongmireStudying: Genre Plus: Ahead of its upcoming final season, a Longmire series starts with how a cultural work can be both traditional and groundbreaking. October 3: LongmireStudying: Walt: The series continues with clichés, classic and revised, and a wonderful character who straddles that line.October 4: LongmireStudying: Standing Bear: Two historical contexts for my favorite Longmire character, as the series rolls on.October 5: LongmireStudying: Vic and Cady: The similar strengths and divergent arcs of the show’s two compelling female leads.October 6: LongmireStudying: Nighthorse: The series concludes with a scene that embodies a character’s—and perhaps the show’s—contradictions.October 7-8: Indigenous Performers in Popular Culture: Nipo Strongheart, Jay Silverheels, Graham Greene, and the evolving history of indigenous performers and roles in popular culture.October 9: Columbus Day Alternatives: Brothers Among Nations: A series on cross-cultural alternatives to the holiday starts with Cynthia Van Zandt’s book on the arrival and contact era.October 10: Columbus Day Alternatives: Ely Parker: The series continues with the cross-cultural relationships and experiences of a 19th century icon.October 11: Columbus Day Alternatives: W.J. Harsha and Sarah Winnemucca: Literature, identity, and authenticity in late 19th century writing and society, as the series rolls on.October 12: Columbus Day Alternatives: Zitkala-Ša: The challenging and vital cross-cultural perspective of one of America’s most unique women and voices.October 13: Columbus Day Alternatives: Siobhan Senier on Dawnland Voices: The series concludes with my friend and colleague Siobhan on her wonderful edited anthology of indigenous writing.October 14-15: Guest Post: Nancy Caronia on Italian Americans and Columbus Day: My newest Guest Post, a challenging and compelling look at some hard cultural and communal questions.October 16: Children’s Histories: Mike Mulligan and His America: Inspired by a new YA historical novel, a series on children’s book histories starts with the many layers to a Depression-era classic.October 17: Children’s Histories: Curious George: The series continues with two distinct ways to look at a controversial classic.October 18: Children’s Histories: Dr. Seuss and Propaganda: The iconic children’s author’s surprising starting points, as the series rolls on.October 19: Children’s Histories: Little House on the Prairie: A key difference between the literary and TV versions of a classic story, and why it matters.October 20: Children’s Histories: The Boneshaker: The series concludes with more overt and more subtle lessons from a tale of historical horror.October 21-22: Children’s Histories: The Forbidden Temptation of Baseball: What a new YA historical novel can add to our collective memories of the Chinese Educational Mission.October 23: Stranger (Things) Studying: Dungeons & Dragons: Ahead of Season 2’s release, a Stranger Things series starts with the stigmas and benefits of role-playing games.October 24: Stranger (Things) Studying: Weird Sciences: The series continues with two sides to science in ‘80s pop culture, and how the show engages with both.October 25: Stranger (Things) Studying: Lost Boys: Contextualizing and challenging texts that feature adrift and endangered boys, as the series rolls on.October 26: Stranger (Things) Studying: Pretty (Badass) Women: StrangerStudying the show’s badass female leads.October 27: Stranger (Things) Studying: ‘80s Nostalgia: The series concludes with three layers to the show’s nostalgic embrace of all things 1980s.October 28-29: Jeff Renye on Stranger Things: The New Weird Made Old?: In one of my favorite Guest Posts, Jeff analyzes the show through the lens of the weird tale tradition.October 30: 7 Years of Scholarly Blogging: Matthew Teutsch: For AmericanStudier’s 7thanniversary, a series on some wonderful fellow public scholarly bloggers starts with Matthew Teutsch.October 31: 7 Years of Scholarly Blogging: Emily Lauer on NYsferatu: The series continues with a Halloween special, my friend and frequent Guest Poster Emily Lauer on a new film.November 1: 7 Years of Scholarly Blogging: Robert Greene II: Three ways you can read the unique and wonderful voice of a South Carolina History PhD student, as the series rolls on.November 2: 7 Years of Scholarly Blogging: Rob Velella: The tributes conclude with a multi-talented and –faceted public scholar, Rob Velella.November 3: 7 Years of Scholarly Blogging: AmericanStudier: The anniversary series concludes with two realizations from my first years of blogging, and one goal for what’s next.Next series starts Monday,BenPS. Topics you’d like to see covered in this space? Guest Posts you’d like to contribute? Lemme know!
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Published on November 04, 2017 03:00

November 3, 2017

November 3, 2017: 7 Years of Scholarly Blogging: AmericanStudier



[This coming weekend will mark this blog’s 7-year anniversary (my November 5th debut post on Du Bois has unfortunately vanished). In honor of that milestone, I wanted to spend the week highlighting some of the many wonderful academic and scholarly bloggers to whom this work has happily connected me. Leading up to these quick reflections on my work, past and future, in this space!]Two realizations over the past seven years that have helped shape my work in and beyond this space, and one that I’m still working to figure out.1)      My Biggest Project: I’m not sure exactly when I started to realize just how big of a project the blog was becoming, but I know why I did so: the Word document in which I have kept all of the posts. As I write this, that document is now 2744 single-spaced pages, the equivalent of more book manuscripts than I care to figure out. Yet while such statistics cause the occasional trepidation, in truth the dominant emotion they produce is one of immense satisfaction at the time and work that have gone into this project, as well as a recognition that it has become by any measure my most career-long and extended piece of writing. That the blog has led to the kinds of communal connections I highlighted throughout this week’s series, as well as to each of my last few book projects and many other opportunities, only reinforces how central it has become and will remain to every part of my career.2)      Valuing Digital Public Scholarship: Yet at the same time, I believe that the current structures of academia and higher education—and even the broader structures of public scholarship—remain largely unable to view scholarly blogs as anything other than private journals, unrelated to the bulk of what we emphasize and prioritize. I understand that they’re not peer-reviewed, although many forms of online/digital scholarship are not (at least not in the conventional sense of the peer review process). But they also have the ability to reach and engage audiences far more directly and meaningfully than do most peer-reviewed publications, and thus each form complements the other as part of a 21st century scholarly career. My experiences with AmericanStudier have thoroughly convinced me of the need to value digital public scholarship as part of our institutional, communal, and public conversations, and I’ve already done what I can to bring that perspective to Fitchburg State’s tenure and promotion process. 3)      Further Conversation: As longtime readers of the blog know, my most consistent wish across all seven years has been for more comments, to hear more of what readers are thinking (including what brings them here, but also and especially their take on my posts and topics). Stats seem to show that I’ve gotten more viewers and readers each year, and that’s a really nice thing to see and not one I would ever take for granted. But I can’t lie, every additional reader also feels like another chance to hear a bit about and from that person—who you are, what brings you here, what you find, what you’d say in response, and so on. If adding a comment on a post doesn’t work for whatever reason, you should feel free to send me an email with any such thoughts as well. If I could average something like a comment or response per post for my 8th year of blogging, I’d find this space even more meaningful and satisfying than I already do. October Recap this weekend,BenPS. You know what to do!
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Published on November 03, 2017 03:00

November 2, 2017

November 2, 2017: 7 Years of Scholarly Blogging: Rob Velella



[This coming weekend will mark this blog’s 7-year anniversary (my November 5th debut post on Du Bois has unfortunately vanished). In honor of that milestone, I wanted to spend the week highlighting some of the many wonderful academic and scholarly bloggers to whom this work has happily connected me. Leading up to a few reflections on my work, past and future, in this space!]Three sides to a unique but also illustrative public scholarly voice and career.1)      The American Literary Blog: I first met Rob through his daily American Literary Blog, which quickly became an early and influential model for my own blog in many ways (perhaps most especially the discipline to produce quality posts with that level of frequency). We then had the chance to write Guest Posts on each other’s blogs, and that too modeled for me the way in which digital scholarly connections can genuinely enrich each conversation and become ideal versions of online and academic communities. While Rob has since moved on to other, ongoing pursuits (including those I’ll mention), his blog remains accessible and vital as an illustration of all those and many other goals.2)      Performing Poe and Hawthorne: As his Guest Post on my blog reflected, Rob has been offering public scholarly performances as these two 19th century authors for many years; but as his information sheet attests, he has stepped up the frequency and scope of those performances in recent years. Too often, we (however you want to define that we) treat living history, performance and interpretation, museums and historic/cultural sites, and other such spaces as entirely distinct from public scholarly writing; whereas in reality they’re all on a very clear spectrum, one focused on the question of connecting history, culture, literature, and related topics to public audiences. Rob’s career importantly makes it impossible to miss those intersections.3)      Public Education: Rob’s working these days as a Student Development Specialist at the Community College of Allegheny County, one clear reflection of his commitment to public education. But (as I understand it) he began his professional public scholarly career as a Park Ranger at Cambridge’s Longfellow National Historic Site, which reflects another and equally meaningful side to his commitment to public education. Earlier this week my younger son’s 5th grade class took a field trip to Concord’s Minuteman National Historical Park, and I’d say such moments represent not just fun excursions, but the intersections of different and complementary forms of public education. Rob’s been modeling those intersections throughout his public scholarly career, and I look forward to seeing where he (like all my week’s focal voices) goes next!A few thoughts on my own scholarly blogging tomorrow,BenPS. Bloggers, scholarly or otherwise, you’d highlight?
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Published on November 02, 2017 03:00

November 1, 2017

November 1, 2017: 7 Years of Scholarly Blogging: Robert Greene II



[This coming weekend will mark this blog’s 7-year anniversary (my November 5th debut post on Du Bois has unfortunately vanished). In honor of that milestone, I wanted to spend the week highlighting some of the many wonderful academic and scholarly bloggers to whom this work has happily connected me. Leading up to a few reflections on my work, past and future, in this space!]On three ways you can read the unique, important, and compelling voice of the University of South Carolina History PhD student and one of my earliest Guest Posters.1)      The United States Intellectual History (USIH) blog: I first encountered Robert’s work through the USIH blog, one of the most lively, rigorous, and exemplary digital public scholarly conversations and communities I know. His posts for USIH have consistently illustrated his ability to weave together African American, Southern, and American history, intellectual and philosophical history, and popular culture, among other threads of his powerfully interdisciplinary work. I don’t really want to highlight just one, but will note that one of his most recent posts, on Ta-Nehisi Coates’s new book, significantly shifted my sense of Coates and his writing moving forward, which is the kind of perspectival change I almost always get from reading Robert.2)      His own blog, Forty Acres and a Starship: Honestly, if that title alone doesn’t make you want to check out Robert’s personal scholarly blog, I don’t know what to tell you! I’m certainly Robert’s ideal audience for such a blog, combining as it does sci fi and other “nerd” genres with history, American Studies, and many related topics. But everybody can learn a great deal from Robert’s interests and intersections, and we see a particularly compelling version of them on his personal blog.3)      Everywhere else!: Over the last couple years, Robert has become one of the most prolific public scholarly writers I know, and so you can also read his work in Jacobin , The Nation, The Atlantic, and In These Times , to name just a few such spaces. Each and every such piece is well worth your time, but together they truly illustrate the possibility and value of public scholarly and digital writing and engagement.Next scholarly blogger tomorrow,BenPS. Bloggers, scholarly or otherwise, you’d highlight?
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Published on November 01, 2017 03:00

October 31, 2017

October 31, 2017: 7 Years of Scholarly Blogging: Emily Lauer on NYsferatu



[This coming weekend will mark this blog’s 7-year anniversary (my November 5th debut post on Du Bois has unfortunately vanished). In honor of that milestone, I wanted to spend the week highlighting some of the many wonderful academic and scholarly bloggers to whom this work has happily connected me. Leading up to a few reflections on my work, past and future, in this space!][Emily Lauer is an associate professor of English at Suffolk County Community College, SUNY, and Past President of the CAITY Caucus in NeMLA. Her academic publications include articles and chapters on Spider-Man, young adult dystopia, and Alice's Adventures in Wonderland. She is co-editor of a collection of essays about the Harry Potter Generation forthcoming in 2018, and she is currently on sabbatical writing about adaptations of texts into and out of the comics form. Her PhD is from the CUNY Graduate Center. She has recently started writing and copyediting for WomenWriteAboutComics.com. This is her third GuestPost for AmericanStudier.]
Beauty, Fear and a Legacy in the Vampire Art Film NYsferatu
On Friday the Thirteenth, I went downtown to the Cantor Film Center at New York University and watched a beautiful monster movie and thought about how layers of history pile meaning upon meaning to create different versions of stories.
NYsferatu: Symphony of a Century is a highly intertextual film by Andrea Mastrovito. Projected at the rate of nine frames a second and accompanied by Simone Giuliani’s beautiful original score, “NYsferatu is a rotoscope recreation of Friedrich W. Murnau’s seminal 1922 film Nosferatu, itself an adaptation of Bram Stoker’s Dracula. Each background scene has been entirely redrawn to set the film in present day New York City. Taking the first step in a three-year process, Mastrovito and a team of 12 artists drew each background three times to replicate the beautifully eerie flickering shutter effect of early cinema,” according to the NYsferatu.org website, where you can watch the trailer and teaser clips online.

Stoker's classic novel is concerned with a British fear of infection, infiltration, and infestation. In NYsferatu, it is clear that our culture's current fears along the same lines - both Islamophobia and of immigration more generally - have their roots in scapegoating of outsiders in earlier eras. The rhetorical thrust of this movie is that ours are not new fears or old fears reborn: they are the same continuing ones, constantly being generated and constantly flickering into their next position.There is a clear layering of eras in the website description: the flickering silver images of actors from 1922, depicting thinly-veiled versions of Stoker's Victorian novel, atop a fictionalized version of our contemporary New York City create a sensation of constant movement in which the past and the present and a possible future all mix. Because the music, the rotoscope and the grey palate unite the images, the current typographies and cars, machine guns and contemporary speech in the caption cards meld seamlessly with the old-fashioned clothes and hair and the familiar depiction of Nosferatu himself.

At the screening I attended, the movie was followed by a roundtable discussion titled "Our Vampires, Ourselves: Immigrants, Desire, Fear" drawing on the title of Nina Auerbach's book Our Vampires, Ourselvesfrom 1995, in which she famously posits that "every age embraces the vampire it needs and gets the vampire it deserves." Even the titling of the event evokes layers of versioning, since Auerbach's book title refers to the influential "Our Bodies, Ourselves" from 1971, and Auerbach's work, is, of course, specifically about the versioning of the vampire figure which can reposition it in ways that will resonate in different times and places.

The roundtable discussion brought together the film's director with Angela Zito, a professor in NYU's Religious Studies department, and Simran Jeet Singh, an assistant professor in the Religion department of Trinity University in Texas. During the roundtable Mastrovito discussed how he wanted the film to address many refugee and immigrant stories. A native speaker of Italian, he workshopped NYsferatu with speakers of Chinese and Arabic, among others. "I tried to put all of their stories into the movie," he said, and he is now beginning the laborious process of translating it into Italian so that it can be shown at a film festival in Rome. This film, a reworking of a German film which reworked a British novel, not only brings in a multiplicity of voices, but will now be translated.

In Stoker's Draculaand in Murnau's Nosferatu, the vampire is indeed the monstrous murderer he seems. He is brought, with his coffin of dirt, into the Western World and there terrorizes the populace until he is destroyed. In NYsferatu, on the other hand, as Mastrovito pointed out during the roundtable afterwards, we never see the vampire commit any murders. Rather, a giant frightening shadow figure, a spectre of fear itself, is the one to actually commit the murders, but the vampire is the one to suffer for them.

In NYsferatu, it is monstrous fear that kills and that leads the populace to begin a wave of destruction purportedly to eradicate the scapegoat. During the roundtable discussion, Singh pointed out that NYsferatuis a film about how a society will tear itself apart trying to destroy whatever it thinks is persecuting it. Mastrovito furthered that while many people feel it is impossible that war would arrivein the United States, this is a movie about how it is, however, much more likely to arise here.

So, while NYsferatuis a stylized art film, intentionally a work of beauty, and while I enjoyed it as an aesthetic object, its function as a monster movie was also fulfilled: I was terrified.  

[Next scholarly blogger tomorrow,BenPS. Bloggers, scholarly or otherwise, you’d highlight?]
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Published on October 31, 2017 03:00

October 30, 2017

October 30, 2017: 7 Years of Scholarly Blogging: Matthew Teutsch



[This coming weekend will mark this blog’s 7-year anniversary (my November 5th debut post on Du Bois has unfortunately vanished). In honor of that milestone, I wanted to spend the week highlighting some of the many wonderful academic and scholarly bloggers to whom this work has happily connected me. Leading up to a few reflections on my work, past and future, in this space!]Three ways one of my more recent Guest Posters and one of the most talented and prolific digital AmericanStudiers exemplifies scholarly bloggers and public scholarly voices.1)      Through Something We Share: Over the last few months, I have had the chance to work directly with Matthew on #NoConfederateSyllabus, a crowd-sourced documentproviding texts and contexts for the evolving controversy over HBO’s planned show Confederate. The document was entirely Matthew’s idea, and while I’m proud of the work I’ve done to help create and develop it (and excited about all that others have contributed to it as well—add your ideas, please!), I see it as first and foremost a reflection of his own commitment to African American, Southern, ethnic American, and shared American histories, literatures, popular cultures, and conversations. As his blog consistently reflects, he’s also committed to finding ways to share and teach all those topics, both in classrooms and in digital and civic conversations, and #NoConfederateSyllabus reflects those commitments as well. I’m honored to be connected to it and Matthew’s work through it.2)      Through What He Does: This second item could include many different impressive sub-topics, from Matthew’s teaching and invited lectures to his work with the Ernest J. Gaines Center and his publications (such as a great forthcoming collection on Frank Yerby). But Matthew complements and extends all of those through his exemplary public scholarly blogging, as illustrated most impressively through his work as a contributor to the African American Intellectual History Society (AAIHS) blog Black Perspectives. This sample, April 2017 post on race and racism in comics embodies Matthew’s ability to combine specific pop culture analysis, historical and cultural frames, multi-layered literary and cultural contexts for those topics, and an engaging voice that clearly parallels his work teaching such subjects as well. All those factors make him one of the best public scholarly bloggers and voices I’ve encountered, and to my mind in 2017 America there are few roles that are more important, inside and outside the academy, than that one.3)      Through What He Will Do: That public scholarly success certainly illustrates one striking facet of the promising career of which Matthew’s just at the start, as do many of these other specific achievements and roles. But I’m thinking here in particular about the combination of all of them, and what that combination reflects about Matthew’s potential as a colleague and member of any department, program, and institution. I’ve been on lots of search committees over the years, and more than anything else that’s what I look for, that combination of factors which can indicate someone’s potential as a colleague, a contributor to all that we do, not only immediately but for many years to come. Working with Matthew on the syllabus has only reinforced that sense of him as an ideal colleague, and I’m very excited to see what’s next in this exemplarly public scholarly, AmericanStudying career.Next scholarly blogger tomorrow,BenPS. Bloggers, scholarly or otherwise, you’d highlight?
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Published on October 30, 2017 03:00

October 28, 2017

October 28-29, 2017: Jeff Renye on Stranger Things: The New Weird Made Old?



[I’ve written about my colleague and friend Jeff Renye a few times in this space, but haven’t had the chance to share a Guest Post of his until now. The timing couldn’t be better, as Jeff is one of our premiere scholars of Weird Tales and the supernatural in literature and culture, contexts that as he demonstrates here add many more layers to our understandings of Stranger Things!]
This short piece sketches some common points between the legacy of a narrative mode known as the weird tale, whose modern origins can be found in the literary and visual arts of the late-nineteenth century, and that mode’s inflection in the television drama Stranger Things.  No influence in the arts that crosses parts of three centuries will find direct replication or have precise resonance in its latest iteration.  What the prepared eye and ear do find are odd echoes of the weird legacy that Stranger Things is able to strike with a deft mix of form and content.  These elements provide evidence of the show’s debt to an earlier period of anxiety and crisis and speculation from which the weird tale emerges. 

The first major reference to the weird tale is from 1927 in a long essay authored by American pulp horror writer H. P. Lovecraft, Supernatural Horror in Literature .  This work is Lovecraft’s sustained reflection on what he identifies as and asserts is a specific type of story that exists within the larger field of horror—a tale type that he otherwise comments upon in a fragmented and scattered manner in letters to fellow writers and admirers like Clark Ashton Smith and August Derleth.  Lovecraft’s fiction is often faulted for its wordiness, a fact accounted for in part by a paid-by-the-word arrangement with the pulp magazines that published him, such as Weird Tales ; however, his essay has an economy of thought and concision that has proved its enduring value for how we can consider a show like Stranger Things.  Lovecraft’s first sentence wastes no time to state a kernel of truth that has been a constant in modern horror fiction, for here is the essence of what underlies the weird tale: “The oldest and strongest emotion of mankind is fear, and the oldest and strongest kind of fear is fear of the unknown.”  That final phrase, “the unknown,” is the key term that Lovecraft then applies to a Trans-Atlantic group of authors from Britain and America.  He then makes an important amplification of this idea of the unknown, and the attendant human fear of it, with emphasis on the cosmic terror that some authors and their stories invoke.  It is these stories that earn the approved label of weird tale.  Lovecraft is careful to make a distinction about why these tales are in some way apart from the bulk of horror, much of which derives from the penny dreadful popular fiction of the previous century:
            “The true weird tale has something more than secret murder, bloody bones, or a sheeted    form clanking chains according to rule. A certain atmosphere of breathless and   unexplainable dread of outer, unknown forces must be present; and there must be a           hint…of a malign and particular suspension or defeat of those fixed laws of Nature which   are our only safeguard against the assaults of chaos and the daemons of unplumbed          space.”
Some clarification is needed here.  That “unplumbed space” of the weird tale often has meant something other than place in a strict sense of standard physical measurement, let alone a space that can be found out there, above and beyond the earth’s atmosphere.  Lovecraft himself wrote an entire mythos of tales that include references to realities and creatures from beyond the stars, where no aeronaut will ever reach.  A prime example of this creative vision is “The Call of Cthulhu”(drafted by Lovecraft in the summer of 1926 and first published in Weird Tales magazine in 1928, the year after the completion of Supernatural Horror in Literature). 
Other-dimensionality as a serious topic for study appears in the late-Victorian period parallel to the fiction included by Lovecraft as the first entries to deserve notice as the modern weird tale.  Charles Howard Hinton’s 1884 pamphlet What Is the Fourth Dimension? is among the first non-fiction works to discuss the question posed by his title.  Within a few years, Hinton will coin the term tesseract as an image meant to visualize a dimension beyond the three that humans most-readily perceive and experience (Hinton’s book The Fourth Dimension appears in 1904, and its earlier 1880s form exerts significant influence in a much later work of fiction, the neo-Victorian novel From Hell , where time and space undergo displacement in some weird ways while at the same time characters contend with grim realities and the investigation a mystery). 
For context, the pamphlet from Hinton is published within a few years of Arthur Machen’s draft of the supernatural horror tale The Great God Pan (published 1894, but part one, “The Experiment,” completed by 1889).  Machen is named by Lovecraft in Supernatural Horror’s final section as a “modern master,” a writer who is one of the “living creators of cosmic fear raised to its most artistic pitch” and “few if any can hope to equal the versatile Arthur Machen…in which the elements of hidden horror and brooding fright attain an almost incomparable substance and realistic acuteness.”  Set aside the praise for a moment because for our purposes here the skill of Machen is best considered for its depiction of borderlands, geographical and symbolic, psychological and immaterial.  This visionary plane on which Machen’s late-Victorian fiction plays out will then carry into the efforts of Lovecraft, which will then develop (with accumulations of other influences along the way, like the working-class realism of Stephen King) into the popular horror of the 1980s, and then arrive at the inventive pastiche of the Duffer brothers in Stranger Things.
The Midwestern America of small town Hawkins in Stranger Things is an instance of the pleasant place made dangerous in a manner familiar to the weird tale.  Yet, such a depiction has ancient origins, like the rugged beauty of Arcadia in ancient Greek tales where the dualistic goat-god Pan resides in light and shadow.  This beneficent protector, but also sinister threat, appears in a manner that humanity cannot predict.  As to which manifestation Pan will show depends upon a prerogative of preternatural decision making, not in accordance with the “fixed laws of Nature” or with whatever interest is held by the mortal audience who make seek contact with this force.  Consider for a moment in Stranger Things how Matthew Modine’s character insists for Eleven in the sensory tank experimentto make contact with the creature of the Upside Down, in spite of her terror and disregard to consequences.  Pan signifies the significant power of the edge places, where settled humanity and wild life and the unknown meet, and where, when met, upheaval and violent death can and do occur.  And, as in Stranger Things, Machen’s The Great God Pan opens with a section titled “The Experiment” where a scientist subjects a young girl to contact with an otherworldly being. The disastrous results allow the entrance of a being that wreaks havoc in the common reality of the story before a kind of dissolution of the body as seen at the end of Stranger Things
Border places and liminal spaces have long held special associations for humanity.  They have been host to a variety of prescribed actions from sacred rites to secular ceremonies.  Such locales feature prominently in many popular twentieth-century media from which the Duffer brothers borrow.  The folklore of the crossroads is found in an alternate way in Stranger Things with Eleven’s mediumistic ability to psychically reach into other planes of existence, the so-called Upside Down. 
In this sketch of a tale-telling device, it is time to move now from Lovecraft and Machen, from the Victorians and the ancients, to more recent influences on the weird content of the show.  Stranger Things borrows liberally from the storyscape of the late-1970s and 1980s (images that cite Alien to E.T. abound).  The show is one of the finer examples of a narrative told in the time of a source like TV Tropes , the website that catalogues and cross references the stock elements out of which many contemporary (and older) television shows and movies are made.  The show’s allusiveness to 1980s pop culture generally, and the decade’s horror genre specifically, lends itself to the era of trope lists—or, to consider another popular story development in TV land, the anthology show (American Horror Story plays with many familiar horror tropes as the title implies, but then so does True Detective in its first season with the citation to the Yellow King, the invention of American writer Robert W. Chambers from his collection The King in Yellow from 1895).
Much about the sensory information out of which the Duffer brothers make Stranger Things has a counterpart in older stories.  The neon-marquee font of their show’s title sequenceappears with a score whose design is more subtle and minimal than shows from which this one builds.  (Also, see the first edition cover of Steven King’s 1980 novel Firestarter, which resembles the Stranger Things aesthetic). The sound design manages to blend the familiar electronica of the eighties with the odd menace that is struck by the credit scene in the 1990s series the X-Files.  However, another show deserves attention in this discussion.  Set to the notes of a high-pitched synthesizer, the opener of mid-1980s American horror television anthology Tales from the Darkside (1983 – 1988, and produced by zombie tale maestro George Romero) is a forerunner in tone and theme of Stranger Things, even if there are few specifics shared by either show in storyline, acting, set design, or quality of cinematography.  As a product of the pre-digital age of film effects and editing, the campy title sequence of Darkside takes the viewer through a series of pastoral Americana scenes (wind-blown reeds on a sunny, blue sky day, a covered bridge, a weathered barn, a babbling brook in a clearing, etc.) that then flip into a color-drained obverse reality.  As the images pass, a gruff voice with an alarmist-tinge explains: “Man lives in the sunlit world of what he believes to be reality, but there is unseen by most an underworld—a place that is just as real but not as brightly lit, a darkside.”  While the effect is more rudimentary than what can be found in the sophisticated sound design of a show like Hannibal , Darksidedeals in the realms of the weird that would not be unfamiliar to the basic definition provided by Lovecraft.  Now, Stranger Things has found its own place on the chronology of the weird tale, where alternate realities are explored—recklessly by the scientists of the Hawkins Lab, terrifyingly by Eleven, and hopefully by Joyce and Hopper—that exist beside our own and that are probably better left unopened and untouched to begin with.
The weird tale is cross-cultural and adaptable to multiple media.  Its emergence from the twilight of late-nineteenth Victorian culture is when the British empire’s London capital was a place of pathological class and gender divisions, of sensationalized crimes and new forms of the literary supernatural.  From that specific there and when, Arthur Machen emerged as a foremost voice who mused upon the borderlands and the so-called thin places.  Here, in the modern weird tale, the tentative nature of consensus reality of our common humanity makes contact with other dimensions.  In one of the last works of fiction that Machen wrote, a short story with the enigmatic title “N” (from 1935), the late-Victorian crisis of faith and anxiety over the old ways lost and a new world arrived resonate in the words of three friends who meet regularly at a pub to reminisce about the past.  Each would have reached adulthood in the 1880s – 1890s, and, like the weird tale of which they are a part, the tradition that they keep alive through their storytelling carries on post-Great War.  The final lines of “N” convey well the atmospheric effect of the weird tale: 
“I believe that there is a perichoresis, an interpenetration.  It is possible, indeed, that we threeare now sitting among desolate rocks, by bitter streams.“. . . And with what companions?”
There is a terrifying wonder of the unknown that Stranger Things creates: Yes, there is the monster from the Upside Down whose existence is fearful, and there is there is a countervailing force of Eleven with her marvelous power.
Stranger Things synthesizes characteristics of the cosmic fear implied by Lovecraft’s early scholarship, plays with features found in the late-Victorian fiction of writers such as Arthur Machen, and cites the 1980s horror that will find a frame of conspiratorial paranoia from Chris Carter’s X-Filesin the 1990s.  Stranger Things is a new entry in the field of the weird tale made from many familiar parts, combining them with a technique that places the show as a fine example of the survival of an old fascination with fear of the unknown and the entertainment to be experience from its depiction. 
The show’s first season aired in the Summer of 2016 amidst a contentious and bitter election season where many social issues long-ignored and ineptly-handled by the mainstream have gained greater exposure, while contested narratives of a vision of what America is and can be are played out in public in private life. This current season’s South Parkintroduces the member berries as commentary on the longing for the past when things seemed better, safer, more ordered.  Stranger Things immerses itself in nostalgia for a bygone time, but in doing reveals itself to be another instance of old concerns and modes of storytelling re-appearing in the midst of a new crisis.  In such times, the arts serve not only as reflection, but as respite, and, quite possibly, resistance to our own period’s needs.[Thanks, Jeff! Next series starts Monday,BenPS. What do you think?]
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Published on October 28, 2017 03:00

October 27, 2017

October 27, 2017: Stranger (Things) Studying: ‘80s Nostalgia



[This Friday, season 2 of the wonderful Netflix series Stranger Things will be released. So this week I wanted to share once more this series of posts AmericanStudying the Duffer Brothers’ nostalgic thriller, leading up to a Guest Post from an expert on supernatural cultural texts!]On three layers to the show’s nostalgic embrace of all things 1980s.
First things first: I don’t think there’s any way to explain the runaway popularity of Stranger Things that doesn’t start with 80s nostalgia. I’m not suggesting that the show is only or even centrally a nostalgia-fest; I hope that my posts all week have made clear the layers of compelling characters and complex themes that have kept me interested and engaged throughout eight episodes and a week of blogging alike. But as any David Simon fan knows, great television doesn’t necessarily mean popular television, and I would argue that our collective love for all things 80s went a long way toward leading so many Netflix viewers to stream Stranger Things. Much has been made of the prominent role of nostalgia in producing so many remakes and reboots, including of one TV show (The X-Files) that has a lot in common with Stranger Things. But Stranger Things offered a unique and perhaps even more potent form of nostalgic art—an entirely original story that nonetheless echoed a prior decade’s popular culture on numerous satisfying levels.
I’ve written about nostalgia in this space before, and made the case that it can be a limiting and too often an exclusionary perspective. It’d be difficult not to the say the same thing about the 80s world nostalgically conjured up by Stranger Things—while one of the show’s three youthful protagonists is African American (played by the wonderful Caleb McLaughlin), he and an African American police officer seem to be the only two people of color in an otherwise very white Indiana town. There’s no necessary reason why every show has to feature a diverse cast, of course—but at the very least any show produced in 2016 has to engage with those questions, as another great Netflix original show (Aziz Ansari’s Master of None) deals with at length through its focus on an Indian American actor struggling to break into the business. That is, Stranger Things isn’t defined by the whiteness of its 80s world, but we can’t ignore that element either.
Yet if the show is in many ways frustratingly bland on that cultural level, it does offer—as I’ve argued in other posts this week—interesting and often revisionary examinations of gender, social roles and identities, and the possibilities of science, among other themes. And while there would be many different ways a 2016 cultural text could bring audiences into such re-examinations, I think Stranger Things’ use of nostalgia to do so is particularly compelling: partly because it taps into such a potent shared emotion to interest and draw in viewers; and especially because it then offers characters and themes that challenge just as much as they comfort those viewers. At best, perhaps such a sneakily revisionist nostalgia could allow viewers to reexamine both their memories of the 80s and their sense of its popular culture, all while still allowing for enjoyment of some of that popular culture’s most prominent tropes and trends. If that seems like a lot for one 8-episode supernatural thriller to accomplish—well, I’ve seen stranger things in American culture.Guest Post this weekend,BenPS. What do you think? Other responses to the show?
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Published on October 27, 2017 03:00

October 26, 2017

October 26, 2017: Stranger (Things) Studying: Pretty (Badass) Women



[This Friday, season 2 of the wonderful Netflix series Stranger Things will be released. So this week I wanted to share once more this series of posts AmericanStudying the Duffer Brothers’ nostalgic thriller, leading up to a Guest Post from an expert on supernatural cultural texts!]StrangerStudying the show’s three badass female leads (with apologies to a fourth, the much-beloved and –lamented Barb).1)      Eleven: Without question the show’s breakout character and star is Eleven, the telepathically poweredrunaway girl played with a perfect combination of creepy dissonance and youthful hesitancy by British actress Millie Bobby Brown. While Eleven certainly has her 80s antecedents, including Stephen King’s Firestarter and the girl from Poltergeist, I would argue that she represents, especially in her evolving relationship with the show’s young male protagonists, a unique blend of “other” and “average kid”—a combination that makes (SEMI-SPOILER ALERT) her ultimate, crucial acts of courage and heroism that much more striking and moving. Indeed, making Eleven into a protagonist and hero as much as an outsider or threat distinguishes Stranger Things from many of the boy-centered texts about which I wrote in yesterday’s post.2)      Joyce Byers: Critical and fan opinions seem a bit more split on 80s star Winona Ryder’scomeback turn as the grieving and desperate mother to missing young Will Byers. I agree with critiques that Ryder’s performance is a bit over-the-top at times, although I imagine that virtually no reactions or behavior would be truly out-of-bounds for a parent who has not only lost her young son, but suspects that he remains somewhere close and yet frustratingly out of reach. Moreover, while Ryder’s histrionics might draw the most attention, the truth is that in many of her scenes she is not only emoting but also and most importantly taking action, and that by the season’s end she’s proven entirely right about what is happening to and with her son. Which is to say, in her crucial partnership with David Harbour’s pitch-perfect Sheriff Hopper, Joyce is truly the lead investigator.3)      Nancy Wheeler: Both Eleven and Joyce are unique and compelling leads, but for this viewer it’s Natalia Dyer’s teenage Nancy who represents the show’s most innovative female character. On the surface, Nancy seems to be drawn very fully from John Hughes romantic comedies—the shy pretty girl who is torn between the asshole bad boy and the sweet but awkward outcast. Yet while that love triangle does persist until the season’s final moments, the truth is that Nancy also kicks as much monstrous buttas any character on the show—and significantly more than either of those love interest men. I’ll have more to say in tomorrow’s post about how Stranger Things utilizes but also revises nostalgia for 80s pop culture, but certainly the character of Nancy falls more in the latter category, and reflects a show that’s aware of the gendered limitations of many of its influences and determined to move beyond them.Last StrangerStudying tomorrow,BenPS. What do you think? Other responses to the show?
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Published on October 26, 2017 03:00

October 25, 2017

October 25, 2017: Stranger (Things) Studying: Lost Boys



[This Friday, season 2 of the wonderful Netflix series Stranger Things will be released. So this week I wanted to share once more this series of posts AmericanStudying the Duffer Brothers’ nostalgic thriller, leading up to a Guest Post from an expert on supernatural cultural texts!]On contextualizing and challenging 80s texts that feature boys who are adrift and endangered.Another aspect that links many of the youthful protagonists about whom I wrote in yesterday’s post is that they are the children of divorce and single parents. That detail is particularly overt when it comes to E.T.’s Elliott, both because his storyline opens with a discussion of where his absent father is and because the film’s threatening scientist character (played by Peter Coyote) is also a potential romantic interest for Elliott’s single mother (played by Dee Wallace). But I would argue that it’s even more central to the film that gives today’s post its title, The Lost Boys (1987): not only are protagonists Michael (Jason Patric) and Sam (Corey Haim) the sons of a recently single mother Lucy (Dianne Wiest) who finds herself in a relationship with a threatening new man (Edward Herrmann), but that man turns out to be the leader of the same group of vampires with which Michael and Sam find themselves entangled. This clan of vampires represent one version of the title’s “lost boys,” a misfit clan of teenage outcasts for whom Herrmann’s dangerous father figure is looking for a mother; but Michael and Sam are clearly positioned as another pair of potentially lost boys, an overt parallel to the vampire clan that inspires its youthful leader (Kiefer Sutherland) to pursue Michael as a new member of the group.Will Byers, the character whose disappearance sets off the events of Stranger Things, is likewise the child of a divorced single mom Joyce (Winona Ryder) with a social outcast older brother Jonathan (Charlie Heaton) who is explicitly linked to 80s counter-culture (represented in short-hand through his love for the British punk rock band The Clash). As with the 80s film characters, I think both of those social and cultural contexts offer valuable and interconnected ways to understand these character types and their meanings. That is, the more obvious and clearly salient social context would be the significant late 20th century uptick in divorce, a trend that has been at times overstated (at least in our collective inability to recognize the longstanding presence of divorce in American culture and society) but that nonetheless both occurred historically and became and remains to this day a key part of our cultural narratives. Yet just as relevant to these lost youthful characters and their experiences and communities are the voices and lives on which Donna Gaines focuses in her vital sociological oral history Teenage Wasteland: Suburbia’s Dead End Kids (1991). Like Jonathan Byers, Gaines’s 1980s teenagers were social outcasts who found solace in the counter-culture community of punk rock, yet whose future remained as uncertain and threatened as those of an overtly lost boy like Will.
There’s one important difference between Gaines’s focal individuals and those in most of the cultural texts on which I’m focusing here, though: gender. That is, Gaines features both boys and girls in her sociological purview, whereas in most of the 1980s films the protagonists were overtly and importantly boys, with young women generally present only as (as in The Lost Boys) romantic interests or (as in E.T.) cute younger sisters. Stranger Things certainly does include a number of complex and interesting female characters, as I’ll analyze in tomorrow’s post; yet nonetheless, the show’s originating character remains a lost boy, one pursued by a quartet of fellow outcast boys (his older brother and his three best friends). As a result, it’d be important to link these texts to one additional cultural context: our longstanding narratives of boys and men who depart civilization, stories that lead them toward dangers (Rip’s 20-year nap, the White Whale, the violence of the river world Huck encounters) yet also allow them to escape for a time a society that is often overtly linked to mother figures (Rip’s wife, Huck’s pair of maternal influences). Recognizing that connection could help us not only contextualize but also challenge the emphasis on lost boys in these cultural texts.Next StrangerStudying tomorrow,BenPS. What do you think? Other responses to the show?
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Published on October 25, 2017 03:00

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