Benjamin A. Railton's Blog, page 274

November 30, 2016: James MonroeStudying: Expanding America

[On December 4th, 2016, James Monroe was elected the fifth president of the United States. So this week I’ll AmericanStudy five histories and contexts linked to Monroe’s life and presidency.]On three ways Monroe’s public service reflects a globally and geographically expanding nation.Thanks in large part to Hamilton, some of the key questions and debates from America’s long-forgotten first decade as a post-Constitution political entity (the 1790s) have become more familiar: the battles between the Hamilton and Jefferson factions, the questions of federal power and potency, the visions of what the new nation would truly become and be. But to my mind, at least as central to 1790s America were a pair of international entanglements: the conflicts with North African states and pirates that led to the 1797 Treaty of Tripoli; and the undeclared war with France that culminated in the 1798 Alien and Sedition Acts. Distinct and complex as each of these conflicts was, taken together they reflect a new nation that was expanding its commercial, military, and diplomatic presence around the globe. And in his position as George Washington’s Ambassador to France during the particularly tense and touchy period prior to the Alien and Sedition Acts (and amidst France’s own ongoing and controversial Revolution), James Monroe both illustrates those globalizing trends and played a key role in shaping the official response to them.Although he returned to Virginia during the Adams administration, beginning his terms as the state’s Governor in 1799, Monroe remained linked to both the national Democrat-Republican party and France, and through those connections was sent by President Thomas Jefferson back to France in January 1803 to help Ambassador Robert Livingston negotiate the Louisana Purchase. Nearly two decades later, during his own first term as president, Monroe and his administration (led by John Quincy Adams, Monroe’s successor as president) signed the 1819 Adams-Onís Treaty with Spain, purchasing Spanish Florida and integrating it into the United States. Taken together, the purchase and treaty hugely increased the total area of the United States, reflecting a nation that was rapidly expanding from its origins as a small collection of eastern colonies into a continental presence. Yet the 1819 treaty likewise stipulated that the U.S. would not pursue any interests in what was (at that time) Spanish Texas, illustrating the continued territorial and international complexities that would accompany this continental expansion. Those issues and histories were vital to early 19thcentury America, and James Monroe was closely linked to many of them.Just as vital to Early Republic America, of course, was the issue of slavery, and there too (in addition to his personal connections to slavery, about which I wrote yesterday) Monroe reflected and extended the relationship between a globalizing nation and this dark historical reality. Monroe was an early member of the American Colonization Society, the organization founded in 1816 (the same year as his presidential election) to promote the “resettlement” of freed slaves to Africa. As president, Monroe helped secure $100,000 in Federal money to support colonization, funds that allowed the group to purchase the land that would eventually become the new nation of Liberia (with a capital, Monrovia, named after Monroe). As I detailed in yesterday’s post, Monroe was no abolitionist (although he did, late in life, describe slavery as a “blight” on the nation), and the colonization efforts were driven at least as much by racism as by opposition to slavery or (least consistently) concern for African American communities and lives. Yet in any case, they represented one more way in which America was expanding its influence and connections around the globe, and one more such expansion to which James Monroe was closely linked.Next MonroeStudying tomorrow,BenPS. What do you think? Monroe histories or contexts you’d highlight?

November 29, 2016: James MonroeStudying: Slavery and the Founders

[On December 4th, 2016, James Monroe was elected the fifth president of the United States. So this week I’ll AmericanStudy five histories and contexts linked to Monroe’s life and presidency.]On two ways Monroe’s story expands and amplifies an originating American truth.I’ve written a good deal about the complex interconnections between slavery and the Revolutionary era and its framing documents, including in my second-most-viewed piece on Talking Points Memo. As I’ve tried to argue throughout those posts, and would reiterate at the start of this one, the point and goal of such analyses aren’t simply or centrally to highlight hypocrisy, nor to critique or tear down iconic images of the Founding Fathers. Instead, such revisionist (in the best sense) historical efforts are meant to help us better understand the kinds of complex, dark, and inescapable histories out of which the United States was born, and which have continued to influence and shape our identity for the subsequent 240 years. Slavery wasn’t the only historical reality of the founding era, of course; but besides its own multifaceted and nation-wide presence, it was also inextricably bound to many of the period’s other histories and stories, including the lives and identities of a great many of the Founding Fathers and four of the first five presidents.James Monroe was one of those presidents, a slaveowner throughout his adult life who owned multiple Virginia plantations at the height of his success. (He did also advocate late in life for the resettlement of freed slaves in Africa, a complex history about which I’ll write more in tomorrow’s post.) Monroe’s biography also helps us engage with two other histories to which slavery and the Revolution must be connected. For one thing, Monroe inherited his first plantation at the age of 16 in 1774, when his father (Virginia planter Spence Monroe) passed away. That’s how many slavers and plantation owners—and, even more overtly and tragically, slaves—became part of the system, of course: by being born into it. Indeed, while there were moral and philosophical considerations as well, the Framers could write an ambiguous legal end to the slave trade into the Constitution precisely because reproduction had become a sufficient method through which to ensure the continuation of slavery. But Monroe’s story also reminds us that, while the Revolution certainly changed a good deal in America, in many ways the society and structures that were in place by the 1770s remained in place after the war. The landed, slaveowning Virginia community that helped usher in the Revolution, drafted its most famous documents, and produced 80% of our first presidents represent one particularly clear continuity between 18th and 19thcentury America.Monroe sold that small family plantation when he entered Congress in 1783, but over the course of his life would own a number of other, larger plantations around the state. Yet because he spent most of that subsequent life living elsewhere—as a Congressman in the 1780s, as the Minister to France in the 1790s, as Governor of Virginia in the first decade of the 1800s, and then in James Madison’s administration before his own two-term presidency—Monroe delegated the running of those plantationsto a group of overseers. The website for Monroe’s home Highland works to highlight the ways in which Monroe and his family would have been personally connected to at least some of the plantation’s slaves, but the straightforward reality is that for most of his life, Monroe was a public servant, and his slaves, like his plantations, existed as business ventures, not homes or personal communities. The same was true, of course, for all of the slaveowning founders and presidents; our collective memories tend (for understandable if frustrating reasons) to focus on more humanizing moments such as Washington’s complex final freeing of at least some of his slaves, but in most ways these men were related to their plantations much like the CEO of Nike is to the company’s sweatshops around the world. That’s not an analogy that quite comports with many of our narratives of the founders, but it’s one we need to grapple with, and James Monroe offers a place to start.Next MonroeStudying tomorrow,BenPS. What do you think? Monroe histories or contexts you’d highlight?

November 28, 2016: James MonroeStudying: Ash Lawn-Highland

[On December 4th, 2016, James Monroe was elected the fifth president of the United States. So this week I’ll AmericanStudy five histories and contexts linked to Monroe’s life and presidency.]On two very different, yet equally meaningful, ways to use a historic site.James Monroe’s longtime home, Ash Lawn-Highland (renamed in recent years as simply Highland, but I’ll always know it by that hyphenated name!), sits just down the hill from Thomas Jefferson’s much more famous Monticello, and it’s fair to say that Monroe’s home will forever be in that shadow of that most prominent Charlottesville, Virginia, and American landmark. The relationship between the two houses and sites, much like that between the two Founding Fathers and Presidents (and their neighbor and the president who served in between their terms, James Madison), is certainly an interesting one, and could lead to plenty of American Studies analyses in its own right; but I believe that we owe it to Monroe and his home not to analyze them solely in that light. Moreover, having had the opportunity to spend two high school summers working at Ash Lawn-Highland, I came away particularly interested in the relationship between two quite distinct elements of the site.The first, and far more traditional, is the site’s recreation of Monroe’s home and era, its role as an educational and performative historic site. There are a couple of interestingly unique components to that role, to be sure: Monroe, an alumnus of the College of William and Mary, left his house to that institution, and so its educational connections are long-term and multi-layered; and the site is a working farm, making its recreations not just performative but in many ways quite productive as well. Yet despite those unique qualities, Ash Lawn-Highland’s identity as a historic site parallels it very fully to other similar sites, from Monticello and Madison’s Montpelier to America’s many other historic houses. Such sites, as we discussed at length at the Spring 2012 New England ASA Colloquium, have their strengths and weaknesses, their opportunities and limitations in how they connect audiences to the past; they are in any case an invaluable part of our national heritage, and Ash Lawn-Highland is certainly a representative and interesting example of the type.But every summer for many decades, Ash Lawn-Highland has featured a very different event: the Opera Festival (known, when I worked for two summers in the ticket and box office, as the Summer Music Festival). While some of the shows perfomed in the Festival are period pieces from the era of Monroe’s life, many are not—each summer includes at least one 20thcentury musical, for example; and many of the operas that have been performed over the years are likewise outside of the context of Monroe’s era. Yet what struck me about the festival, which for most of its run saw the shows performed on the site’s grounds (they have moved in recent years to a different Charlottesville theater), was precisely what it contributed to the experience of Ash Lawn-Highland: a new perspective on the home, in every sense; a chance to sit behind the main house on a summer evening, to see it in a different light (literally and figuratively), to have an experience that felt not at all disconnected from the goals and identities of America’s founders and of the educational, historical, and cultural legacies of their lives and era and purposes of the sites that remember them. There are many ways to connect to a figure like Monroe, and the world of which he was and is a part; in the Festival, Ash Lawn-Highland highlighted precisely the variety and power of those different approaches.Next MonroeStudying tomorrow,BenPS. What do you think? Monroe histories or contexts you’d highlight?

November 24-27, 2016: Thanksgiving and Supporting an Inclusive American Community

On the vital importance of modeling an inclusive national community—and a couple specific ways to support that work.I’ve written before, in a post on how Rush Limbaugh uses Thanksgiving to present a largely false and entirely propagandistic narrative of history, about some of the myths and realities of our collective memories of the holiday. But however simplified the elementary school stories of Pilgrims and Native Americans sharing a holiday meal, I would stress one exemplary side to that image: it presents an originating vision of an inclusive national community, one defined by multiple cultures coming together and creating something new out of that connection. Too many of our collective narratives of American identity are dependent on exclusion instead, a process that likewise began with the Pilgrims (as in William Bradford’s description of “First Encounter,” the violent conflict with Native Americans that marks the outset of the Pilgrim community in direct opposition to those “others”). The inclusive vision can’t and doesn’t mean eliding our memories of those exclusionary trends and their oppressive effects for communities like Native Americans, but it means likewise remembering—and celebrating—the moments and ways we’ve modeled a more shared national community instead.In our own moment, the exclusionary national narrative seems ascendant in both specific and overarching ways, making it that much more important that we emphasize and support more inclusive spaces and communities. I can think of few specific contemporary histories that echo and extend the worst sides of our exclusionary past more clearly than the violence directed at the Dakota Access Pipeline protesters on the Standing Rock reservation in North Dakota. The pipeline’s destruction of Standing Rock sacred land itself reflects an exclusion of this community and its spiritual and social concerns from our collective narratives; but the casual violence and brutality with which officials have responded to the protests, and the relative lack of mass media attention to that violence, represent additional layers to an exclusionary vision of Standing Rock. So a first step in modeling an inclusive vision of community would be simply to engage more fully and collectively with what’s happening at Standing Rock, as we should any American place and community experiencing such horrors. And then we could take that engagement further and turn it into more direct action, such as in the options highlighted in this recent piece on methods of registering collective protest and solidarity with the Standing Rock activists and community.On the more overarching level, the aftermath of Donald Trump’s election has seen numerous prominent exclusionary attitudes and actions: from the surge in hate crimes against minorities of all kinds to the nomination of overt white supremacists such as Steve Bannon and Jeff Sessions to key administration positions. One central thread of these contemporary exclusions has been directed at immigrants, from Trump’s promise to immediately deport “two to three million” undocumented Americans to his surrogate’s use of Japanese internment as a “precedent” for the creation of a registry of Muslim arrivals and Americans. While of course I would argue that a better understanding of our histories of exclusion and immigration would help challenge this contemporary exclusion, it’s also vital that we more actively support efforts and organizations to help immigrant communities. Many of the organizations highlighted on this site do vital work and are well worth your time and support; I would point to this specific organization, Kids in Need of Defense (KIND), as one such effort. This list likewise includes a number of wonderful organizations, such as the National Immigration Law Center. And finally, Jose Antonio Vargas’ EmergingUS site and hashtag models collective conversations about how we define this more inclusive vision of American community.I’m thankful for all these organizations and efforts, and for all of us working to remember, celebrate, and support an inclusive vision of America, now more than ever.Next series starts Monday,BenPS. Happy Thanskgiving!

November 19-23, 2016: 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 experiment to 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 Storyplays 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 , Darkside deals 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 capitalwas 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.[I’m very Thankful for Jeff and for this post, so will leave it up for part of Thanksgiving week. One more Thanksgiving special post coming,BenPS. What do you think?]

November 18, 2016: Stranger (Things) Studying: ‘80s Nostalgia

[Like most of my fellow humans, I spent a good bit of the late summer obsessed with Netflix’s Stranger Things. So this week I’ll AmericanStudy a handful of topics linked to 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?

November 17, 2016: Stranger (Things) Studying: Pretty (Badass) Woman

[Like most of my fellow humans, I spent a good bit of the late summer obsessed with Netflix’s Stranger Things. So this week I’ll AmericanStudy a handful of topics linked to 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’s comeback 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?

November 16, 2016: Stranger (Things) Studying: Lost Boys

[Like most of my fellow humans, I spent a good bit of the late summer obsessed with Netflix’s Stranger Things. So this week I’ll AmericanStudy a handful of topics linked to 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 lots 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 disappearancesets 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?

November 15, 2016: Stranger (Things) Studying: Weird Sciences

[Like most of my fellow humans, I spent a good bit of the late summer obsessed with Netflix’s Stranger Things. So this week I’ll AmericanStudy a handful of topics linked to the Duffer Brothers’ nostalgic thriller, leading up to a Guest Post from an expert on supernatural cultural texts!]On two sides to science in 80s popular culture, and how Stranger Things engages with both.Among the many ways it significantly influenced film and pop culture in and after the 1980s, Steven Spielberg’s E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial (1982) helped establish a particular, highly critical image of scientists and science in such cultural texts. Although in a later version of the film Spielberg replaced his scientists’ guns with walkie-talkies, in the original these supposed men of knowledge tellingly wielded such weapons, one of many ways that their pursuit of the film’s titular alien and of those kids who help him is treated as highly hostile and threatening. Such intimidating and dangerous scientists also feature heavily in other 80s films across a variety of genres, from comedies such as Ghostbusters (1984; granted, the heroes are also rogue scientists, but the villain works for the EPA!) and Real Genius (1985) to teen dramas such as War Games (1983) and The Manhattan Project (1986). Despite many differences, all these stories share a sense that scientists are willing and able to threaten and kill in service of (if not indeed as) their goals.Yet in many of those same films, the protagonists and heroes could also be defined as scientists—not necessarily professional and certainly not official ones, indeed often young people who have not entered professional or official worlds at all, but nonetheless still characters who view science and knowledge as sources of power and utilize them in service of their goals and victories. Even more exemplary of that narrative is the film which gives my post its title, Weird Science (1985); while that film’s two uber-nerdy protagonists (played by the decade’s go-to actors for such characters, Anthony Michael Hall and Ilan Mitchell-Smith) certainly do not expect all of the effects of their scientific experiments, and encounter threats both silly and serious as a result, the ultimate message nonetheless validates, as do most of the films I’ve mentioned thus far, such scientific pursuits and the kind of nerdy dedication that they require. Indeed, it’s fair to say that the key difference between the heroes and villains in many of these films comes down to the contrast between an idealized vision of science as serving all humankind and one that serves instead as a source of division and violence (whether incidental or intended).As will be addressed in every subsequent post this week, and most especially in both my Friday post and the weekend Guest Post, Stranger Things does its cultural work in direct but complex engagement to a variety of 1980s tropes and trends. That’s most definitely the case when it comes to these competing yet complementary 80s cultural visions of science: the show features a menacing human villain in scientist Martin Brenner (Matthew Modine) and his plethora of well-armed and willing-to-kill henchmen and –women; yet its youthful protagonists are defined centrally not only by nerdy interests like yesterday’s topic Dungeons & Dragons, but also specifically by their love of all things science, a passion encouraged by one of the show’s most heroic characters, middle school science teacher Mr. Clarke. Indeed, one of the show’s most crucial sequences (SEMI-SPOILER ALERT) hinges on the boys constructing a sensory deprivation tank under Mr. Clarke’s guidance, an apparatus that directly parallels one used by Brenner and his evil scientists yet serves what we might call precisely the opposite purpose. Just one of many scenes and ways through which Stranger Things extends, echoes, and adds to such 1980s images and narratives.Next StrangerStudying tomorrow,BenPS. What do you think? Other responses to the show?

November 14, 2016: Stranger (Things) Studying: Dungeons & Dragons

[Like most of my fellow humans, I spent a good bit of the late summer obsessed with Netflix’s Stranger Things. So this week I’ll AmericanStudy a handful of topics linked to the Duffer Brothers’ nostalgic thriller, leading up to a Guest Post from an expert on supernatural cultural texts!]On the stigmas and the benefits of D&D and other role-playing games.As I’ll write a good bit more about in later posts this week, Stranger Things is chock full of references to 1980s culture, so much so that there is already a great deal of work dedicated to finding every such reference. Many of them, as I’ll argue in Friday’s post, are more about engaging with the audience’s expectations and emotions, and don’t necessarily contribute in any direct way to the show’s plot or themes. But the first episode’s opening scene (after a brief prologue as you can see) offers an ‘80s reference that is both more straightforward and far more crucial than most of those that follow it. The four middle school boys on whom much of Stranger Things will focus are taking part in what seems to their chief leisure time activity: a role-playing campaign in the world of Dungeons & Dragons. The monster who concludes their campaign offers one overt moment of foreshadowing for the show that this scene introduces. But I would argue that Dungeons & Dragons also helps us see two other sides to these young protagonists: their status as outcasts; and their imaginative power.On the first note, I’m ashamed to admit that I (a former role-player myself, although I spent more time with Middle-earth Role Playing [MERP] than D&D) hesitated a bit in deciding to make role-playing one of this week’s focal points. The reason for my reluctance is the enduring social stigma that comes with the subject, and really with any reference to Dungeons & Dragons. You’d think that the widespread popularity of video games (including many, such as Skyrim and World of Warcraft, that owe quite a bit to D&D and its ilk), of fan conventions like Comic-Con, of fantasy literature, films, and television shows, and the like would have changed these narratives, but I don’t believe that it necessarily has: to my mind, and in my experience, cultural references to D&D almost always entail the same tired clichés of socially awkward nerds in their parents’ basements (which is, not coincidentally, where the Stranger Things kids are playing their campaign), creating fantasy worlds to escape the tragicomic circumstances of their realities. Moreover, the broader and even more damaging social narratives and fears, of D&D turning teenagers into suicidial or even homicidal outcasts, have likewise remained in play, at times virtually unchanged from the first such stories when D&D was new. There are a variety of ways to push back on those stigmas and argue instead for social, communal, and individual benefits to role-playing games (including some exemplified by the pieces at those last two hyperlinks); here, I’ll just highlight two that are also illustrated nicely by Stranger Things (in specific ways that I won’t spoil if you haven’t had a chance to check out the show yet). For one thing, role-playing games require consistent leaps of imagination in a way that differentiates them from many other toys or games—on the part of the game-master, the person in charge of creating the world and scenarios and guiding the other players into and (to a degree) through it; but also from all those players, who have to both respond to what’s unfolding in front of them and yet create their own stories and futures. And for another, the specific experience of being the game-master—of creating that world and its different narratives, of conveying it to the players, and yet then of being required to adjust and shift it as the game plays out, and even to scrap any or all of it in favor of where the players are going and of producing the most fun and meaningful experience as a result—offers vital preparation for a number of adult roles and responsibilities, including both parenting and teaching.Next StrangerStudying tomorrow,BenPS. What do you think? Other responses to the show?