Benjamin A. Railton's Blog, page 269

January 27, 2017: NASAStudying: Apollo I

[January 27thmarks the 50th anniversary of the Apollo 1 tragedy, one of many setbacks and challenges that didn’t deter from the US manned space program from making history. So this week I’ll AmericanStudy five moments or contexts for NASA’s early years. I’d love your responses and thoughts in comments, as always!]On two kinds of lessons we can take away from a historic and tragic disaster.On January 27th, 1967, during a launch rehearsal test ahead of a scheduled February 21st launch, the capsule for Apollo 1, the NASA Apollo Program’s first manned mission, experienced a tragic and deadly fire, killing all three astronauts on board (Virgil “Gus” Grissom, Edward White, and Roger Chaffee). I’m not going to pretend to have anywhere near the expertise or knowledge to add much to the accounts and details provided by those hyperlinked sites and texts, or even by the (seemingly) very comprehensive and well-sourced Wikipedia page on the tragedy. While there are of course the uncertainties and varying theories that would accompany any such tragedy, the central facts of what happened and why seem relatively clear and accepted. NASA and the Apollo Program would suspend any further manned flights for 20 months while investigating and responding to the tragedy, but in October 1968 Apollo I’s backup crew (Wally Schirra, Donn Eisele, and R. Walter Cunningham) successfully completed the manned Apollo 7 launch and flight, and the program that culminated the following year in Apollo 11 and the moon landing was back on track.While the Apollo I tragedy was thus part of the larger NASA story with which I’ve tried to engage this week, it was also singular and distinct from the rest of that story, and as a result offers a couple of specific AmericanStudies lessons well worth considering. For one thing, the extensive Congressional investigation into the tragedy, efforts spearheaded by a young Minnesota Senator named Walter Mondale (in only his third year in the Senate, after being appointed to fill Vice President Hubert Humphrey’s seat in 1964), revealed a significant example of governmental and corporate synergy and malpractice. Mondale learned of the existence of a report detailing extensive problems with North American Aviation, one of the contractors working most fully with the Apollo program; although Apollo Program Director Major General Samuel Phillips initially denied any knowledge of what came to be called the “Phillips Report,” details continued to emerge that reflected poorly on both NASA senior staff and North American Aviation. Whatever else we make of such details, they certainly illustrate the need for complete, public transparency and accountability from both government agencies and their corporate partners—a need that Mondale would pursue even more actively in his role chairing the 1970s Church Committee on intelligence agencies.The lessons of the Apollo 1 tragedy aren’t all dark or cynical, however. As is often the case, it’s easy with a full perspective on history to assume that it naturally or inevitably would have unfolded the way it did—easy but almost always inaccurate, as any moment (and especially significant moments like Apollo I) could lead to a number of different potential outcomes and futures. After such a horrific disaster with what would have been the Apollo Program’s first manned launch, the program certainly could have been shut down, and the decade’s goal of a moon landing indefinitely postponed (if not abandoned entirely). There were of course various factors and influences that kept the program and goal going instead, but one central one was President Lyndon Johnson, a longtime NASA supporter and advocate who used his influence to counter Congressional critiques of the organization (Mondale, for example, wrote an addendum to the Congressional investigation report accusing NASA of “evasiveness” and a “lack of candor,” among other things). The continued efforts of NASA and the Apollo Program were what most directly made it possible for Apollo I not to be the end of the story—but the support and patience of a figure like Johnson helped create a space for those efforts to continue, and for history to unfold in the successful and inspiring way it did.January Recap this weekend,BenPS. What do you think? Other NASA takes you’d share?

January 26, 2017: NASAStudying: John Glenn and Hidden Figures

[January 27thmarks the 50th anniversary of the Apollo 1 tragedy, one of many setbacks and challenges that didn’t deter from the US manned space program from making history. So this week I’ll AmericanStudy five moments or contexts for NASA’s early years. I’d love your responses and thoughts in comments, as always!]On additive rather than competitive revisionist histories, and their potential limits.Two prominent recent news stories have drawn attention to distinct yet complementary sides of one of the US space program’s most famous and singular events. On December 8th, 2016, former astronaut and Senator John Glenn passed away at the age of 95, leading to numerous stories highlighting Glenn’s 1962 space flight in which he became the first American to orbit the Earth (doing so three times). And in early January of this year, the very different space flight Rogue One: A Star Wars Storywas stunningly dethroned from atop the box office charts (after three weeks in that position) by the film Hidden Figures, a historical drama (based on historian Margot Lee Shetterly’s award-winning book) about three female African American mathematicians (Katherine Johnson, Dorothy Vaughan, and Mary Jackson) who worked at the segregated Langley Research Center and whose expertise (Johnson’s in particular in this case) contributed immeasurably to Glenn’s groundbreaking flight among many other NASA efforts. I haven’t had a chance to see Hidden Figures yet, but the picture of Johnson meeting actress Octavia Spencer (who plays Vaughan in the film) at the film’s December 1st NASA premiere is one of my favorite recent photos.At the most superficial level, it might be possible to see Hidden Figures as an example of what I’ve elsewhere described as the “competitive” form of revisionist history, one that seeks to replace previously prominent historical figures with previously under-remembered ones. But I don’t think that’s really the case at all—Hidden Figuresnot only features John Glenn as a character (and one who in a key scene importantly and accurately stands up for his African American colleagues), but it is precisely the significance of Glenn’s flight that makes the contributions of Johnson and her colleagues so similarly vital. Which makes Hidden Figures much more of an example of what I would call an “additive” revisionist history, one that asks us to remember not only the already-famous white male Glenn, but also the previously much less well-known African American women who worked alongside him and helped make this historical turning point possible and successful. Indeed, I’d say the same of the work of Johnson and her peers that I did of Lewis Latimer’s contributions to Thomas Edison’s and Alexander Graham Bell’s inventions in this post: that if we don’t better remember the work of these (not coincidentally) Americans of color, we’re both missing the full picture of what happened and replicating the injustices that were far too often done to these figures in their own times and lives.Such additive revisionist histories are welcome and necessary, and I’m glad that Hidden Figures exists and is doing as well as it is. But every kind of cultural text and genre has its limits or shortcomings, and I can’t help but think that the unexpected popularity of Hidden Figures might reflect such a limit of this particular kind of revisionist history. That is, the story of Glenn’s flight is a story of stunning and groundbreaking success, and the story of Hidden Figures is about how even figures who were oppressed found a way to rise above that oppression and contribute to that success. That’s true, and an important lesson to boot. But it’s also very much a feel-good story, and one to which 21st century Americans can (at least potentially) look to both recognize that we’ve made progress (African American NASA employees no longer have to use separate bathrooms or coffee pots) and to argue that even the worst of our past couldn’t hold back those who were truly determined to overcome. I’m not suggesting we shouldn’t tell such stories and remember such stories—just that it’d be important to complement them with (to name one example) a historical film about the victims of the “Tuskegee Study of Untreated Syphilis in the Negro Male.” Now that’d be a truly additive revisionist history.Last NASA post tomorrow,BenPS. What do you think? Other NASA takes you’d share?

January 25, 2017: NASAStudying: Kennedy’s Speech

[January 27thmarks the 50th anniversary of the Apollo 1 tragedy, one of many setbacks and challenges that didn’t deter from the US manned space program from making history. So this week I’ll AmericanStudy five moments or contexts for NASA’s early years. I’d love your responses and thoughts in comments, as always!]On the Cold War limits yet compelling possibilities of the famous “moon shot” speech.On May 25th, 1961, just a few months into his term of office, President John F. Kennedy delivered a speech before a joint session of Congress. The speech contained a number of sections and proposals, but it is Section IX: Space that has endured in our collective memories, for it was in that section that Kennedy famously and ambitiously argued, “I believe that this nation should commit itself to achieving the goal, before this decade is out, of landing a man on the moon and returning him safely to the Earth.” A year and a half later, on September 12th, 1962, at Houston’s Rice University, Kennedy fleshed out that goal further in another, more focused speech, laying out in detail both the histories and motivations that help explain why “we choose to go to the moon” and some of the many steps that the government and nation (with the help of scientists such as those at Rice) were taking to achieve that aim. While of course Kennedy tragically did not live to see the culmination of those efforts, NASA and the space program achieved his ambitious hopes with room to spare, launching the first manned moon voyage in July 1969, just over 8 years after the original speech.If we examine the full text of Section IX, in which the moon proposal occupies only one of thirteen paragraphs, what stands out most is just how fully Kennedy couches his space program goals in the context of the Cold War. He opens the section by arguing, “if we are to win the battle that is now going on around the world between freedom and tyranny, the dramatic achievements in space which occurred in recent weeks should have made clear to us all, as did the Sputnik in 1957, the impact of this adventure on the minds of men everywhere, who are attempting to make a determination of which road they should take.” That is, Kennedy isn’t just linking the space race to other rivalries between the US and the Soviet Union—he’s overtly arguing that whichever nation achieves its goals more quickly and fully in the “adventure” that is space exploration might well convince other nations and communities around the world to take its side in the broader Cold War conflicts. It’s a kind of Domino Theory motivation for space exploration, and Kennedy elaborates on it throughout much of the section, such as his admission that because the Soviets have a “head start,” “we cannot guarantee that we shall one day be first, [but] we can guarantee that any failure to make this effort will make us last.” Perhaps it’s inevitable that Cold War fears would drive even these most otherworldly ambitions, but it’s still striking to see just how much Kennedy frames his moon shot in those terms.Despite those historical limits, however, the section’s second half features a number of compelling visions of the future. The moon proposal is only the first of four such goals, which also include: accelerating development of the Rover nuclear rocket, with the hopes of exploring “perhaps beyond the moon, perhaps to the very end of the solar system itself”; accelerating “the use of space satellites for world-wide communications”; and producing “at the earliest possible time a satellite system for world-wide weather observation.” The latter two goals in particular make clear that Kennedy was not thinking solely of a Cold War space race, nor even indeed of space exploration at all, but rather of the multiple layers of scientific and global progress that NASA and the space program could help achieve. And in the section’s most beautiful lines, Kennedy acknowledges precisely the global and human nature of those potential achivements: “But this is not merely a race. Space is open to us now; and our eagerness to share its meaning is not governed by the efforts of others. We go into space because whatever mankind must undertake, free men must fully share.” In Kennedy’s speech and moon shot ambitions, then, we see—as we do so often in American history—the nation’s more contingent and narrow needs yet at the same time its most ideal and inspiring visions.Next NASA post tomorrow,BenPS. What do you think? Other NASA takes you’d share?

January 24, 2017: NASAStudying: NASA’s Origins

[January 27thmarks the 50th anniversary of the Apollo 1 tragedy, one of many setbacks and challenges that didn’t deter from the US manned space program from making history. So this week I’ll AmericanStudy five moments or contexts for NASA’s early years. I’d love your responses and thoughts in comments, as always!]Three moments and figures that (along with yesterday’s international influences) contributed to the space agency’s starting points:1)      NACA: NASA’s predecessor in the federal government, the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics (NACA), dated all the way back to March 1915, when it was founded as part of the nation’s responses to World War I (although President Taft had proposed a somewhat similar National Aerodynamical Laboratory Commission as early as 1911-2). After a few years of explicitly war-related activites, NACA began to expand and deepen its research interests in 1920, when President Woodrow Wilson appointed aviation pioneer Orville Wright to the agency’s board. Wright would serve on the NACA board for 28 years, helping bridge the period between these World War I origins and the post-World War II transitions into the atomic age and the origins of the space race. During that time, NACA was involved in a number of prominent and influential projects, including the supersonic research exemplified by test pilot Chuck Yeager’s famous 1947 flight.2)      Robert Goddard: Interestingly, the man who came to be known as the father of rocket propulsion was (as far as I know) never officially part of NACA. But over the same early twentieth-century decades that Wright and his fellow NACA members were expanding their pioneering efforts, Goddard was performing his, exemplified by his March 19, 1926 launch of the first recorded liquid-fueled rocket in Auburn, Massachusetts. Goddard’s subsequent experiments were funded by both the government (in the form of the Smithsonian Institution) and the Guggenheim Foundation (thanks to the support of Goddard’s longtime friend Charles Lindbergh), reflecting the role that both public and private enterprises played in furthering these advances. Between them, the work done by NACA and Goddard in the 1920s and 30s not only led directly to the space program, but proved invaluable to the Allied cause in World War II.3)      Dwight Eisenhower: As I wrote in this Talking Points Memo piece, we tend to give presidents more of a central role in particular periods or histories than they necessarily deserve. But at the same time, expanding our histories to include other figures and influences shouldn’t mean forgetting or eliding the role that presidents can and do play, and Eisenhower’s contributions to the origins of NASA are a case in point (as is John F. Kennedy’s subsequent role, on which more tomorrow). In part that meant, as it often does (but as, now more than ever, we unfortunately can’t take for granted), agreeing with and supporting the recommendations of his scientific advisors and the wider research community. But as reflected in his signing statement for the July 1958 National Aeronautics and Space Act (the law that established NASA), Eisenhower was also well aware of the significance of these efforts, both in continuing the work done by NACA and others and in moving closer to genuine global as well as national progress in the exploration of space. One more inspiring and influential figure and moment in the multi-decade origins of NASA and the US space program.Next NASA post tomorrow,BenPS. What do you think? Other NASA takes you’d share?

January 23, 2017: NASAStudying: Sputnik and von Braun

[January 27thmarks the 50th anniversary of the Apollo 1 tragedy, one of many setbacks and challenges that didn’t deter from the US manned space program from making history. So this week I’ll AmericanStudy five moments or contexts for NASA’s early years. I’d love your responses and thoughts in comments, as always!]On the more overt and more subtle ways that wartime adversaries drove the US space program.It’s a truism, but nonetheless a necessary one with which to begin a series on the early years of the US space program, that our Cold War rivalry with the Soviet Union provided a great deal of the impetus for and motivation behind the development of that program. Calling this element of the rivalry the “space race” (as that hyperlinked article does) links it to the “arms race” a bit more fully than might be warranted—that is, while both competitions did pit the two superpowers against one another in a race to develop new programs and technologies first, the arms race was explicitly focused on weapons that could be used to threaten and (if necessary) destroy the other nation; the space race occasionally included such military technologies (most famously, Reagan’s proposed “Star Wars” program) but also and most consistently represented a scientific undertaking with its own significant, global benefits that extended well beyond the Cold War. Yet while it thus may not be accurate to limit our understanding of the space race and the US space program overall to our adversarial relationship with a foreign power, it remains vital to consider just how fully such wartime relationships influenced and directed the space program’s historical origins.By far the most overt such wartime influence was the Soviet Union’s October 4th, 1957 launch of Sputnik I, the world’s first artificial satellite. Both nations had been working on such satellites over the prior few years, but when the Soviet Union got there first—and then did so again less than a month later, with the November 3 launch of the even more substantial and groundbreaking Sputnik II—the resulting global attention and US political outcry galvanized American public and governmental support for a robust space program. The US would launch its own first artificial satellite, Explorer I, on January 31st, 1958; even more significantly, in late July Congress would pass the National Aeronautics and Space Act, setting a date of October 1, 1958 (not coincidentally, almost exactly a year after Sputnik I’s launch) for the creation of a new governmental agency known as NASA. As I’ve written about numerous times in this space, and despite our fondness for images of national exceptionalism and isolation, virtually all elements of America’s government and culture have been informed and influenced by international relationships and factors in one way or another—yet few have been produced in such immediate and direct response to a single international action as were these originating space program steps. I’m sure our space program would have developed eventually in any case, but it’s entirely accurate to say that it did so when and how it did because of Sputnik and the Soviet Union.What’s perhaps less well known is just how fully those originating US space program steps likewise depended on the presence and role of another wartime adversary and technology. The Explorer I projectfeatured a number of distinct teams led by prominent scientists, with Dr. William Pickering’s team (at Cal Tech) designing and building the satellite itself and Dr. James Van Allen’s (at Iowa State) designing the instrumentation. Yet Explorer never would have made it into orbit—never would have made it off the ground at all—were it not for the Jupiter-C rocket, a modification of the Redstone ballistic missile that was produced by former Nazi scientist Dr. Wernher von Braun and based directly on the German V-2 rocket that von Braun had helped develop for the Nazis. Von Braun not only directed the army’s ballistic missile program at Redstone Arsenal for a decade, he would then go on to direct NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center and develop the Saturn V launch vehicle that would make NASA’s moon voyages possible. While the US space program’s starting points were heavily influenced by the Soviet Union, they were directly dependent on von Braun, and thus on science and technologies that had originated with our World War II adversary the Nazis. Just one more complex and unavoidable layer to the international influences on NASA and the space program.Next NASA post tomorrow,BenPS. What do you think? Other NASA takes you’d share?

January 21-22, 2017: A Tale of Three Inaugurations

[Although I’m writing this in early January, the current plan is for Donald Trump to be inaugurated on Friday, January 20th as the 45thPresident of the United States. While I’d like nothing more than to think not at all of this impending event, that’s not the AmericanStudier way—so for this special post I wanted to use two salient prior inaugurations to consider this one. I’d love your thoughts, fears, hopes, or fervent prayers in comments, please!]1)      1865: I’ve written before about how uncertain, and how vital, the 1864 presidental election was. Abraham Lincoln’s victory in that election would seem to make his subsequent Second Inaugural Address, delivered on March 4th, 1865, far less significant in contrast. Yet even if we leave aside the speech’s aesthetic power (it’s usually put on par with the Gettysburg Address as a measure of Lincoln’s rhetorical gifts), I would argue that it nonetheless comprises a vital historical moment all its own. The speech is largely remembered for the magnanimous phrases and attitudes of its concluding paragraph, particularly the opening clauses, “With malice toward none, with charity for all.” But I would stress that those attitudes follow the long prior paragraph, in which Lincoln engages at length with slavery, “the cause of the war” and such a historic horror that, he argues, if the war were to continue for hundreds more years, “still it must be said ‘the judgments of the Lord are true and righteous altogether.’’ It seems to me that we could use a lot more communal spirit derived from engagement with, rather than ignorance of, dark historical realities here in January 2017.2)      2009: Barack Obama has been compared to (or contrasted with) Abraham Lincoln unceasingly over the last 8 years, and I’m not trying to continue the tradition. Nor am I suggesting that the national situation in January 2009 was as dark or challenging as those faced by Lincoln, although I’d say it’s on the list of the most difficult moments faced by a President-elect (as, to be sure, is our current one). Instead, I’m highlighting Obama’s first Inaugural Address on its own terms, both as a response to such a challenging moment and (especially) for its uses of history both personal (“why a man whose father less than 60 years ago might not have been served in a local restaurant can now stand before you to take a most sacred oath”) and national (“In the year of America's birth, in the coldest of months, a small band of patriots huddled by dying campfires on the shores of an icy river”) in service of its potent vision of America’s identity and future. I’d be lying if I said I believed Donald Trump could summon up either of those forms of historical argument successfully to help reframe our own troubled moment and uncertain future—but I’m trying to remain an optimist.3)      2017: So here we are. Not yet in a second Civil War or next Great Recession, but in a moment that feels fraught with such horrific possibilities. Inaugurating a president who is neither Lincoln nor Obama, but who will nonetheless be at least as central to what happens next as they were. I’ve written elsewhere about what we public scholars and Americans can do in such a moment, and am not trying to minimize those roles in any way. But Donald Trump will have a role to play as well, and no amount of either wishful thinking nor of resistance will change that fact. Will that role be as destructive as I fear? Is it possible that Trump can offer or become something different from the worst version of ourselves he has represented throughout this campaign? The inauguration will be only one moment in any case, but I want to have some small hope that it might begin to reflect such alternatives, linked to the best versions of our history and identity that we can find in these prior inaugural moments. As with much, time will tell, and we AmericanStudiers will be vigilant.Next series starts Monday,BenPS. What do you think?

January 20, 2017: Luke Cage Studying: #BlackLivesMatter on TV

[Like a record number of fellow viewers, I spent a good bit of last September enjoying Netflix’s newest Marvel superhero show, Luke Cage . While Cage is unquestionably entertaining, however, I would also call it the first #BlackLivesMatter TV show—and as such, I wanted to spend this MLK Day week studying a few of the show’s connections and contexts. I’d love your thoughts and reviews in comments!]On where Luke differs from two other TV engagements with the movement, and why that matters.There’s a ton of television I haven’t had the chance to watch in the last few years (I haven’t gotten to see any of the much-acclaimed Atlanta yet, for example), so as always I would love corrections or additions to this post in comments, please! But my sense is that there have been two particular episodes in which prominent TV shows have engaged directly and at length with the #BlackLivesMattermovement and the social and political issues to which it’s responding: an episode of Shonda Rhimes’ mega-hit drama Scandalentitled “The Lawn Chair” that focused on the police shooting of an unarmed black teenager and its aftermath; and an episode of the sitcom Blackish entitled “Hope” in which the family gathered to watch the announcement of the possible indictment of a police officer in such a shooting (and then decided to attend together the protests after the officer was not indicted). These two episodes are as distinct as the shows and genres of which they’re part, and each deserves its own viewing and analysis to be sure; but I would argue that in both cases it’s important that the #BlackLivesMatter thread comprised one focal episode, rather than an overarching focus and theme of the show as a whole.That singular focus doesn’t mean that the episodes couldn’t do justice in their own hour or half hour space to this important topic—but it does mean that the shows were of necessity treating the topic as one part of the larger world in which their characters and plots operate, in much the same way that (as I have argued in this space) Margaret Mitchell treats the Civil War and Reconstruction as principally challenges facing Scarlett O’Hara (more than as significant historical events in their own right) in Gone with the Wind. Perhaps it would have been impossible (or at least impractical) to write storylines in which police shootings happened to (or involved) main characters on the shows, but in the absence of such impacts it’s fair to say that these #BlackLivesMatter plots did not continue to resonate on the shows in specific or extended ways beyond their focal episodes. (Again, if I’m wrong about that, please feel free to correct me or add your thoughts below!) Which means that, while it would be entirely fair to call these #BlackLivesMatter episodes, I would reiterate my definition of Luke Cage, in the intro paragraph above, as the first #BlackLivesMatter TV show.Of course, Luke doesn’t focus on a main character who’s a #BlackLivesMatter activist (although I would certainly watch such a show); neither does it tell the story of a police shooting victim as did the wonderful film Fruitvale Station . Luke’s titular protagonist is a former convict gifted (or cursed) with superhuman abilities while in prison who decides (after much pushing and prodding) to use his powers to fight criminal masterminds in his Harlem neighborhood. Not exactly a realistic slice of 21st century American life, I’ll admit. Yet as I’ve argued all week, Luke’s characters, settings, and stories consistently and thoroughly do parallel many of the issues—debates over black lives and histories, the relationship between police and young black men in hoodies, questions of communal responsibility and violence and what role each of us has in responding to them—that are central to #BlackLivesMatter and the figures and textsthat have come to represent it. Which is to say, the world of Luke Cage is the world of #BlackLivesMatter, not incidentally or partially but as the core worldbuilding on which the show’s superheroic character and stories are built. Whatever brings a viewer to the show, he or she will come away with a deeper and more meaningful understanding of that world, and of its central presence in and connections to our own.Special inauguration post this weekend,BenPS. One more time: what do you think? Other responses to Luke Cage you’d share?

January 19, 2017: Luke Cage Studying: Taking the Rap

[Like a record number of fellow viewers, I spent a good bit of last September enjoying Netflix’s newest Marvel superhero show, Luke Cage . While Cage is unquestionably entertaining, however, I would also call it the first #BlackLivesMatter TV show—and as such, I wanted to spend this MLK Day week studying a few of the show’s connections and contexts. I’d love your thoughts and reviews in comments!]On two compelling layers to the most overt musical reference in a show full of them.Perhaps no aspect of Luke Cage has been more written about and studiedthan its music, and for good reason: from the first moments of the first episode, set to Ernie Vincent and the Top Notes’ “Dap Walk (2013),” the show is consistently scored by some of the best African American and American music ever released, past and present. (Once you watch the video of the Crispus Attucks attack I highlighted yesterday, you’ll be as amazed as I was that no one has previously set an action sequence to Wu-Tang Clan’s “Bring Da Ruckus (1993)” [lyrics to that song NSFW, natch].) Moreover, because Mahershala Ali’s character Cottonmouth runs a Harlem night club and is a very talented musician in his own right, most of the episodes are able to seamlessly feature amazing live performances, adding one more layer to the multifaceted interconnections of music and popular culture to the show’s Harlem setting, communal ambiance, and historical and cultural themes.While those performances introduce musical artists in a logical and organic way, the show’s most overt musical cameois a bit more strained: Luke stops a robbery at a liquor store where none other than Method Man (himself part of Wu-Tang Clan of course) is shopping, and the two trade hoodies (so Luke can fly under the radar and Method can get a superhero souvenir in the form of Luke’s bullet-hole-riddled hoodie). It’s a funny sequence, but one that on its own terms does feel somewhat artificial and tangential to the rest of the show—until we see the payoff, that is. Later in the same episode, Method Man does a radio interview (with the famous NYC Wake Up Show) where he recounts the experience, praises Luke, and performs a new rap, “Bulletproof Love,” written in Luke’s honor (and scored the show’s musical composers, Adrian Younge and Ali Shaheed). As this article details at length, the song narrates a good deal of the show’s overarching themes and goals, never more so than in this section: “Look, dog, a hero never had one/Already took Malcolm and Martin this is the last one/I beg your pardon, somebody pullin’ a fast one/And now we got a hero for hire and he a black one/And bullet-hole hoodies is the fashion.”If all we got in this sequence was Method Man’s song, it would already amplify and extend the show in meaningful ways. But as this video highlights, his performance is accompanied by a series of images that give the line “bullet-hole hoodies is the fashion” dramatic and significant life. Luke is by this time in the series on the run from the law, and so we see the police stopping numerous African American men in bullet-hole-ridden hoodies, only to find that they are other men who have donned those hoodies in both tribute to Luke and as a way to (to coin a phrase) take the rap for him. In so doing, these Harlem men are not only flipping the script on the problem with Luke running from the law (that thanks to his powers he seems to stand out and would be easily found)—they’re even more importantly and movingly flipping the far-too-common script for police stoppages of hoodie-wearing African American men, making such moments into gestures of power and solidarity from the city’s African American community. It was, to this viewer at least, the show’s most affecting and inspiring sequence, and one of the best I’ve seen on television.Last post tomorrow,BenPS. What do you think? Other responses to Luke Cageyou’d share?

January 18, 2017: Luke Cage Studying: Mariah and History

[Like a record number of fellow viewers, I spent a good bit of last September enjoying Netflix’s newest Marvel superhero show, Luke Cage . While Cage is unquestionably entertaining, however, I would also call it the first #BlackLivesMatter TV show—and as such, I wanted to spend this MLK Day week studying a few of the show’s connections and contexts. I’d love your thoughts and reviews in comments!]On the historical insights and limits of the show’s complex female villain.If Frankie Faison’s Pop is one of my two favorite characters on Luke Cage, the other would have to be Alfre Woodard’s Mariah Dillard. I’ve been a huge fan of Woodard’s since her brilliant turn in John Sayles’s criminally underrated Passion Fish(1992), and she was great in a small but complex and compelling role in 12 Years a Slave (2013), among many other parts over the years. In the first few episodes of Luke Cage, Mariah might seem to be only a supporting character, occupying a background role to her villainous adopted brother Cottonmouth (Mahershala Ali); but [AGAIN, SERIOUS SPOILER ALERT] after she kills Cottonmouthin a post-traumatic rage (he has accused her of asking for and even “wanting” repeated childhood rapes by a family member) in the show’s seventh episode, she takes center stage as a main villain for the season’s second half. In so doing, she not only influences the show’s plot arcs and conclusions, but also gets the chance to dominate a number of important moments and scenes, with Luke as well as with police detective Misty Knight (Simone Missick) and Mariah’s assassin love interest Shades (Theo Rossi).I find Mariah compelling for all those reasons (and for the sheer, indisputable fact of Woodard’s towering talent), but am most intrigued by her purposeful connection to and use of Harlem and African American history. For much of the show, Mariah (a Harlem politician and businesswoman long before she adds supervillain to the list) is working to open the Crispus Attucks Complex, a Harlem community center named after the iconic Revolutionary War figure (and, historians believe, mixed-race son of a Massachusetts slave and a Wampanoag Native American). Speaking to reporters in the first episode of the need for such facilities, Mariah references prior Harlem icons such as Zora Neale Hurston, Langston Hughes, and Malcolm X, and then argues, “For black lives to matter, black history and ownership must matter.” While the line might be a bit on the nose, it helps establish from the show’s opening episode on that this superhero story will be set in our 21st century American society and culture, and will consider both the historic legacies and present realities of the African American experience in that world—and, just as much, this line and moment establish Mariah Dillard as a spokesperson for those legacies and realities, an advocate for remembering that experience.At the same time, however, Mariah also intends and constructs the Crispus Attucks Complex to be a literally impenetrable fortress in which to hide the ill-gotten monies she, Cottonmouth, and their criminal enterprises are accumulating (Luke proves the impenetrable part to be a fallacy, natch). This is a superhero show, after all, and she is a villain (and, again, eventually a supervillain), so such details are perhaps an inevitable part of her character. But while (as I argued yesterday about Pop and the barbershop) certain aspects of the wedding of African American culture and superhero stories work pitch-perfectly, I’m somewhat less sure of how to make sense of these two sides of Mariah Dillard’s character and role in the show. That is, she is again in many ways the most consistent spokesperson for African American history and #BlackLivesMatter—or is she just a hypocrite, using those topics and questions as a front for her selfish criminal agenda? I don’t think that latter argument is sufficient to capture either Mariah’s complexity or the fact that she’s not wrong in her statements about black history and community—but on the other hand, we know at every moment that those statements are at best half the story of Mariah and her identity and vision, and come to see that even more clearly as her villainy deepens. I don’t have any definite answers to these questions—and would love to hear your thougths in comments—but their presence alone suggests the interesting depths of Luke Cage.Next post tomorrow,BenPS. What do you think? Other responses to Luke Cageyou’d share?

January 17, 2017: Luke Cage Studying: Pop and Luke

[Like a record number of fellow viewers, I spent a good bit of last September enjoying Netflix’s newest Marvel superhero show, Luke Cage . While Cage is unquestionably entertaining, however, I would also call it the first #BlackLivesMatter TV show—and as such, I wanted to spend this MLK Day week studying a few of the show’s connections and contexts. I’d love your thoughts and reviews in comments!]On the vital voice and setting of a character who left the show much too soon.Luke Cage is full of wonderful performances from talented actors, with Mike Colter in the title role leading the way. (Since I won’t be writing about them nearly as much as they deserve this week, I’ll also single out here Mahershala Ali as Cottonmouth and Simone Missick as Misty Knight.) But I’ll admit to a serious soft spot for Cage’s barbershop boss and elder voice of wisdom Henry “Pop” Hunter, played by the great Frankie Faison with the same combination of humor and gravitas he brings to every role (and far more consistent warmth and humanity than in his crucial Wire role as police commissioner Ervin Burrell). Unfortunately [SPOILERS, as there will be in every post this week—but c’mon, you know you should have watched Luke Cage by now!] Pop was only in two episodes of Luke before he was murdered by Cottonmouth’s men, a killing that helped bring Luke out of the shadows and into his hero role. But in that brief time, Pop’s voice and perspective add a significant element to both the show and the character of Luke.My instinct is to write that Pop helps Luke realize how much his Harlem community needs hope, and what role Luke—as a man endowed with superheroic gifts, but one initially reluctant to use those gifts or play any public role in his community—can and must play in bringing that hope. But when put that way, Pop’s lesson sounds similar to any number of superhero stories, including the first Netflix Marvel show, Daredevil (where Charlie Cox’s Matt Murdock defines his own role, both as a lawyer and as the hero Daredevil, quite explicitly as bringing hope to a Hell’s Kitchen community that seems to have lost it entirely). Moreover, wise elderly mentor-characters like Batman’s Alfred are often explicitly the ones to provide such lessons to the younger and less certain heroes. So in some clear ways, Pop is as much an inheritor of a storytelling tradition as is a reluctant superhero like Luke (or many of the show’s other archetypical characters, such as the superpowered villainwith a personal grudge against the hero whom Luke eventually opposes). And there’s nothing wrong with that, not only because storytelling traditions often define the way we experience culture and the world, but also because in linking these superhero tropes to African American characters and communities Luke Cage extends, adds to, and in the process changes even the most familiar such tropes.But there’s more that differentiates Pop from the Alfreds of the superhero world than just his race, and I would argue that the distinctions are closely connected to his barbershop setting. The barbershop of course likewise has a long tradition in both African American communities and stories, and Cedric the Entertainer’s elderly Barbershop character and relationship to Ice Cube’s protagonist are not unlike Pop’s (if somewhat more of a joke, as befitting a comic film). But by bringing the barbershop into a superhero story, Luke Cage does more than just wed these two distinct traditions—it imagines a different vision of the hero’s relationship to his community than I’ve seen in any other superhero story. That is, Pop isn’t just Luke’s wise elder, he’s his boss, and more exactly he’s the boss of the barbershop, teaching Luke (as the brief clip in this trailerillustrates) about a communal space that is dedicated to shared, collective responsibility and support. And that, in turn, means that when Luke decides to become the Harlem hero Pop has encouraged him to be, he’s not so much becoming a superhero as a super-barber, one performing a more extreme version of the same communal role he has learned from Pop. While many superheroes (like Daredevil and Batman) occupy an outsider’s position, even as they seek to protect their communities, Luke becomes more of a representative of his community writ (literally and figuratively) large—and that’s due directly to the influence and example of Pop.Next post tomorrow,BenPS. What do you think? Other responses to Luke Cageyou’d share?