Benjamin A. Railton's Blog, page 30

November 1, 2024: The Politics of Horror: Recent Films

[For thisyear’s Halloween series, right before a particularly scary election, I thoughtI’d focus on some of the many horror films that remind us of the genre’sinescapable intersections with political issues. Add your nominations incomments, please!]

Quickpolitical takeaways for five horror films from the last decade.

1)     ItFollows (2014): As at least a couple of the earliest posts in this serieshave illustrated, sex and horror have always been intertwined in this genre. ButI’m not sure any horror film has been quite so explicit, and yet quite soambiguous, about the links between those two elements. I’m not here to tell youhow to interpret this film’s themes in social or political ways—but you can’twatch it and not try to do so, and that’s a great case for horror’s politicalechoes regardless of your perspective.

2)     GetOut (2017): In that hyperlinked post I framed a trio of other filmsthat provide contexts and perhaps inspirations for Jordan Peele’s modern horrorclassic. Here I’ll simply add that Peele’s choice in a 2017 film to make whitesupremacy the truest source of horror has to be among the single most prescientcultural decisions in our history.

3)     Midsommar (2019): Thatsmart hyperlinked analysis says a great deal of what I’d want to say about Ari Aster’scult classic and themes of toxic masculinity. A lot of horror film killers andvillains seem to hate women with a particular vengeance, so I’d say it was longpast time we had a horror film in which men are the specific target instead.Maybe that’s a reductive reading of Midsommar, though, which is plentydivisive in its interpretations as well as its reviews. As with every film here,check it out for yourself and share your thoughts!  

4)     Prey (2022): Thislatest installments in the long-running Predators franchise is a lotless ambiguous than the others in this list, and a lot more badass, with young Comanchewarrior Naru (Amber Midthunder)more than up to the challenge of taking on the alien predator (at least as muchas was Ahnold back in the day, I’d argue). Here the politics aren’t in the film’scontent so much as in its existence as cultural representation, and (as the abovehyperlinked piece also argues) it’s really excellent for that.

5)     MaXXXine (2024): Idon’t know either this particular film or the trilogy it concludes very well,so I’ll mostly hand things over to my favorite contemporary reviewer Vern inthat hyperlinked review (which engages with all three films, and certainlyincludes their social and political themes as Vern always does). I’ll just addthat, as with Prey, these films seem to continue a trend of foregroundingbadass young women in contemporary horror, and that in and of itself is a powerfulsocial and political stance.

OctoberRecap this weekend,

Ben

PS. Whatdo you think? Other horror films you’d analyze?

October 31, 2024: The Politics of Horror: The Saw Series

[For thisyear’s Halloween series, right before a particularly scary election, I thoughtI’d focus on some of the many horror films that remind us of the genre’sinescapable intersections with political issues. Add your nominations incomments, please!]

Ondifferent visions of morality in horror films, and whether they matter.

There’s aneasy and somewhat stereotypical, although certainly not inaccurate, way to readthe morality or lessons ofhorror films: to emphasize how they seem consistently to punish characters,and especially female characters, who are too sexually promiscuous, drink or dodrugs, or otherwise act in immoral ways; and how they seem to rewardcharacters, especiallythe “final girl,” who are not only tough and resourceful butalso virgins and otherwise resistant to such immoral temptations. Film scholarCarol Clover reiterates but also to a degree challenges those interpretationsin her seminal Men, Women, and Chain Saws: Gender in theModern Horror Film (1992); Clover agrees with arguments about the “final girl,” but makesthe case that by asking viewers to identify with this female character, thefilms are indeed pushing our communal perspectives on gender in provocative newdirections.

It’simportant to add, however, that whether conventional slasher films arereiterating or challenging traditional moralities, they’re certainly notprioritizing those moral purposes—jump scares and gory deaths are much higheron the list of priorities. On the other hand, one of the most successful andinfluential horror series of the last decade, the Saw films (which began with 2004’s Saw and continued annually through the 7th and supposedlyfinal installment, 2010’s Saw 3D), hasmade its world’s and killer’s moral philosophy and objectives central to theseries’ purposes. The films’ villain, John Kramer,generally known only as Jigsaw, has been called a“deranged philanthropist,” as his puzzles and tortures are generallydesigned to test, alter, and ultimately strengthen his victims’ identities andbeliefs (if they survive, of course). That is, not only is it possible to findmoral messages in both the films and which characters do and do not survive inthem, but deciphering and living up to that morality becomes the means by whichthose characters can survive their tortures.

That’s thefilms and the characters—but what about the audience? It’s long been assumed(and I would generally agree) that audiences look to horror films not only tobe scared (auniversal human desire) but also to enjoy the unique and gory deaths(a moretroubling argument, but again one I would generally support). Soit’d be fair, and important, to ask whether that remains the case for Saw’s audiences—whether, that is,they’re in fact rooting not for characters to survive and grow, but instead tofail and be killed in Jigsaw’s inventive ways. And if most or even many of themare, whether that response—and its contribution to the series’ popularity andbox office success and thus its ability to continue across seven years andmovies—renders the films’ sense of morality irrelevant (it would certainly makeit ironic at the very least). To put it bluntly: it seems to make a bigdifference whether we see the Sawfilms as distinct in the inventiveness of their tortures/deaths or the moralityof their killer. As with any post and topic, I’d love to hear your thoughts!

Lastpolitical horror tomorrow,

Ben

PS. Whatdo you think? Other horror films you’d analyze?

October 30, 2024: The Politics of Horror: Hostel and Taken

[For thisyear’s Halloween series, right before a particularly scary election, I thoughtI’d focus on some of the many horror films that remind us of the genre’sinescapable intersections with political issues. Add your nominations incomments, please!]

On thehorrifying xenophobia at the heart of two of the 21st centurybiggest hits.

It’s hardto argue with success, and Eli Roth’s Hostel (2005) and Pierre Morel’s Taken (2008) are by many measures two of the mostunexpectedly successful films of the 21st century’s first twodecades. Hostel made more than $80million worldwide (on a budget of $4.5 million), led to a sequel two yearslater, and contributed significantly to the rise of an entirely new sub-gerne (the horror sub-genre generally knownas “torture porn”). Takencost a lot more to make (budget of $25 million) but also made a lot more at thebox office (worldwide gross of over $225 million), spawned multiple sequels andimitations, and fundamentally changed the careerarc and general perception of its star Liam Neeson. Neitherfilm was aiming for any Oscars or to make the Sight and Sound list, butclearly both did what they were trying to do well enough to please theiraudiences and hit all the notes in their generic (in the literal sense)formulas.

What thetwo films were trying to do is, of course, a matter of interpretation anddebate (althoughEli Roth is more than happy to tell us his take on what his film is about);moreover, they’re clearly very different from each other, in genre and goal andmany other ways, and I don’t intend to conflate them in this post. Yet theyboth share an uncannily similar basic plot: naïve and fun-loving young Americantravelers are abducted and tortured by evil European captors, against whom thetravelers themselves (in Hostel) orthe traveler’s badass special forces type Dad (in Taken; youngMaggie Grace gets to fight some of her own fights against additional Euro-typesin the sequel) have to fight in order to escape. While it’s possible to arguethat the travelers in Roth’s film help bring on their own torture as a resultof their chauvinistic attitudes toward European women (in thesequel Roth made his protagonists young women, and much more explicitlyinnocent ones at that), there’s no question that the true forces ofevil in each film are distinctly European. Moreover, since all of the youngtravelers are explicitly constructed as tourists, hoping to experience thedifferent world of Europe, the films can’t help but seem like cautionary talesabout that world’s dangerous and destructive underbelly.

It’s thatlast point which I’d really want to emphasize here. After all, bad guys in bothhorror and action films can and do come from everywhere, and that doesn’tnecessarily serve as a blanket indictment of those places; if anything, I wouldargue that themulti-national and multi-ethnic villainy of (for example) James Bond films is athematic strength, making clear that evil can and will be foundeverywhere.  Yet both Hostel and Taken are precisely about, or at least originate with, therelationship between American travelers and Europeans, about the naïve idealsof cultural tourism and about creating plots that depend on very frighteningand torturous realities within these foreign worlds. “Don’t travel to Europe,young people,” they seem to argue; and if you do, well, be prepared either tokill a ton of ugly Europeans (or have your Daddy do it) or to be killed bythem. Not exactly the travel narrative I’d argue for, and indeed a terrifyingcontribution to our 21st century American worldview.

Nextpolitical horror tomorrow,

Ben

PS. Whatdo you think? Other horror films you’d analyze?

October 29, 2024: The Politics of Horror: Last House on the Left

[For thisyear’s Halloween series, right before a particularly scary election, I thoughtI’d focus on some of the many horror films that remind us of the genre’sinescapable intersections with political issues. Add your nominations incomments, please!]

On the horror film that’s more disturbing in what it makes us cheer forthan how it makes us scream.

The Last House on the Left (1972) was Wes Craven’s directorial debut, as well as oneof the only films that he wrote and edited as well as directed (although it wasat least partly based on Ingmar Bergman’s The Virgin Spring [1960], as Craven has admitted). But despite launching one of the late 20th century’s mostsignificant horror talents, Last House is far less well known than Craven’s Nightmare on Elm Street series, or even(I would argue) his other prominent early film, The Hills Have Eyes (1977). Partly that’s because Last House feels extremely raw inexecution, the product of a talent still figuring out much of what he could do;but partly it’s because it also feels raw in another and more troubling way,one that makes us more deeply uncomfortable than horror films generally do.

Thatrawness is most obviously comprised by the extended and very graphic abduction,rape, and murder sequence that opens the film—a sequence that feels less likehorror than like cinemaverité of an extremely disturbing kind. But even more raw, both in itsemotional brutality and in the places it takes the audience, is the film’sculminating sequence, in which the killers find themselves in the home of theparents of one of the murdered girls—and the audience finds itself rooting forthose parents to take the bloodiest and most violent revenge possible on thesepsychopaths. I suppose it’s possible to argue that we’re not meant to root inthat way, or that we’re meant to feel conflicted about these ordinary and goodpeople turning into vengeful monsters—but to be honest, any audience that haswatched the film’s opening seems to me to be primed instead to cheer as thekillers get their violent comeuppance, even—perhaps especially—if it requires thistransformation of grieving parents into their own terrifying kind of killers.

To beclear, if we do find ourselves cheering for the parents, we’re doing so notjust because of how Craven’s film has guided us there. We’re also taking thenext step in what I called, in this poston the comic book hero The Punisher, the long history of vigilante heroesin American culture; and perhaps at the same time living vicariously the mostpotent (if extra-legal) argumentsfor the death penalty. Yet the rawness of Craven’s film, whetherintended or simply a result of its stage in his career, serves one additionaland crucial symbolic purpose: it reminds us that vigilante justice andexecutions, however deserved they might feel, are also grotesque andhorrifying, as difficult to watch as they are to justify when the heat of themoment has cooled off. Last House isscarier for what it reveals in ourselves than for anything that’s on screen—butwhat’s on screen can also help us examine that side of ourselves honestly, andthat’s a pretty important effect.

Nextpolitical horror tomorrow,

Ben

PS. Whatdo you think? Other horror films you’d analyze?

October 28, 2024: The Politics of Horror: Psycho and The Birds

[For thisyear’s Halloween series, right before a particularly scary election, I thoughtI’d focus on some of the many horror films that remind us of the genre’sinescapable intersections with political issues. Add your nominations incomments, please!]

Ondefamiliarization, horror, and prejudice.

In his essay “Artas Technique,” pioneering RussianFormalist theorist Viktor Shklovsky (whom I never imagined I’d bediscussing in this space, but I am an AmericanStudier and I contain multitudes)developed the concept of“defamiliarization”: the idea that one of art’s central goals andeffects is to make us look at the world around us, and particularly thosethings with which we are most familiar, in a new and unfamiliar light. Suchdefamiliarizations can have many different tones and effects, includingpositive ones like opening our minds and inspiring new ideas; but it seems tome that one of their chief consistent effects is likely to be horror. Afterall, the familiar is often (even usually) the comfortable, and to be jarred outof that familiarity and comfort, whatever the long-term necessity and benefits,can be a terrifying thing.

StephenKing, by all accounts one of the modern masters of horror, seems wellaware of that fact, having turned such familiar objects as dogs and cars intosources of primal terror. And AlfredHitchcock, one of the 20th century’s such masters (and, yes, aBrit, but he set many of his films, including today’s two, in the U.S.),certainly was as well, as illustrated by one of his silliest yet also one ofhis scariest films: The Birds (1963).The film’s heroine Melanie, played by the inimitable Tippi Hedren, asks herboyfriend, “Mitch, doseagulls normally act this way?”; it’s a ridiculous line, but at thesame time it nicely sums up the source of the film’s horror: we’re alwayssurrounded by birds of one kind or another, and there are few ideas moreterrifying than the notion that such accepted and generally harmless parts ofour world could suddenly become constant threats. I defy anyone to watchHitchcock’s film and not look askance at the next pigeon you come across.

The Birds was Hitchcock’s second consecutivehorror film, following on what was then and likely remains hisbiggest hit: Psycho (1960). Psycho relies for its horror more on a combination of slow-burnsuspense andsurprising and veryfamous jump scares than defamiliarization, with one crucialexception (SPOILERS for the four people who don’t know the film’s revealalready): the ending, and itsrelevation of the killer’strue identity and motivations. If that ending is meant to be the mostterrifying part of all—and the film’s marketing campaign suggestedas much very clearly—then there’s no way around it: the defamiliarization ofgender and sexuality that accompanies the revelation of Norman Bates’ cross-dressing ispresented as something fundamentally frightening, not only connected toNorman’s murderous ways but indeed the titular psychosis that produced them.That is, while those murderous birds are clearly deviating from their familiarbehaviors, I would argue that Bates is presented as deviant in his normalbehaviors—and that his gender and sexual deviancy represents, again, the film’sculminating and most shocking, and thus troubling and prejudiced, horror.

Nextpolitical horror tomorrow,

Ben

PS. Whatdo you think? Other horror films you’d analyze?

October 26-27, 2024: A PrisonStudying Reading List

[On October 27th,1994, the U.S. Justice Department announced that the population infederal and state prisons had topped one million for the first time in Americanhistory. To commemorate that sobering and horrifying statistic, one that hasonly gotteninfinitely worse in the thirty years since, this week I’veAmericanStudied prison stories from throughout our history. Leading up to thisweekend post highlighting some vital further PrisonStudying reading!]

Five recentbooks all PrisonStudiers should read (of the many that could populate such alist, so please share more below, including older ones of course!):

1)     Michelle Alexander, TheNew Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness (2010): Iwrote at length about Alexander’s book inthis post, and then got to teach it in my Fall2016 Analyzing 21st-Century America course, so here I’ll just addthat few if any 21st-century books have been more prescient about akey issue facing our society. Every other one in this list followed Alexander’s,in every sense.

2)     Shaka Senghor, WritingMy Wrongs: Life, Death, and Redemption in an American Prison (2013): Thereare a number of recent memoirs by incarcerated or formerly incarceratedindividuals, and every one of them is as worth our time and attention as allsuch individuals are. But Senghor’s is particularly powerful on many levels,including its central emphasis on one of the most brutal aspects of modernprisons, solitary confinement.

3)     Bryan Stevenson, JustMercy: A Story of Justice and Redemption (2014): I wrote at lengthabout Stevenson and his vital book when heand it won the Stowe Prize in 2017, and have made extensive classroom andscholarly use of the resources created by Stevenson’s EqualJustice Initiative so I’m a certified super-fan. In many ways Just Mercyrepresents a focused response to a particularly outdated aspect of our prisonand justice systems, the death penalty. But it’s also a wider look into theroles that racism, economic inequality, and other forms of discrimination playin every aspect those systems.

4)     Shane Bauer, AmericanPrison: A Reporter’s Undercover Journey into the Business of Punishment(2018): Bauer went undercover as a prison guard, not a prisoner, and so I don’twant to suggest that his investigative journalist project was quite as bold noras brave as NellieBly’s self-imprisonment in a mental asylum. But it’s still a unique andimportant act that produced a striking book as a result, and one that offers adistinctive perspective on prisons with which all of us should engage.

5)     Christine Montross, Waitingfor an Echo: The Madness of American Incarceration (2020): The mental,psychological, and emotional effects of prisons are one of those topics that Iimagine we all have some sense of, yet at the same time most of us have no realsense of, if that duality makes sense. We can’t truly talk about this issue norabout incarcerated Americans without a fuller such collective awareness, andMontross’s book is thus a vital resource to add to this reading list.

Nextseries starts Monday,

Ben

PS. Whatdo you think? Other PrisonStudying readings you’d highlight?

October 25, 2024: Prison Stories: The Inside Literary Prize

[On October 27th,1994, the U.S. Justice Department announced that the population infederal and state prisons had topped one million for the first time in Americanhistory. To commemorate that sobering and horrifying statistic, one that hasonly gotteninfinitely worse in the thirty years since, this week I’llAmericanStudy prison stories from throughout our history. Leading up to aweekend post highlighting some vital further PrisonStudying reading!]

Threequotes that together help sum up why one of our newestliterary prizes is also one of the most important ever.

1)     “Freedombegins with a book”: That’s ReginaldDwayne Betts, Founder and CEO of the awesome Freedom Reads project, one of the Prize’sprincipal collaborating organizations. It goes without saying that books arefar from the only form of freedom or rights that incarcerated individuals andcommunities should possess, and I know Betts and the project would of courseagree. But I hope it also goes without saying for readers of this blog that Idon’t think it’s possible to overstate the impact and influence of books andall that they offer; and if that’s true for all of us (as I believe it is), itis infinitely more true still for folks for whom books can represent a bridgeto the world that might otherwise not be present in any form. Getting books inthe hands of incarcerated folks is a vital enterprise, and then listening to, respecting,and fully recognizing their reading of and response to those books—as this newprize, judged entirely by incarcerated people, does—is a wonderful next step.

2)     “Thisliterary prize that honors how engaging with great books can both buildcommunity and facilitate a deeper understanding of our shared human experience”:That’s Lori Feathers,co-owner of the very cool InterabangBooks in Dallas and one of the principal voices behind the prize’s initialcreation. It’s a bit of a paradox but also undeniably the case that two of themost crucial ways we can support incarcerated people are both to help strengthentheir inside communities and to help connect them to all of our outsidecommunities. Neither of those is easy to accomplish, and doing both at the sametime seems particularly challenging—but I agree with Feathers that this prize andits processes very much do both, creating impressive communal ties between incarceratedpeople and yet fully connecting them to our society as a whole at the sametime.

3)     “Tothe people inside, please know when I say ‘we’ and when I refer to ‘my people,’I mean you too”: That’s Professor Imani Perry,the phenomenal author and scholar whose excellent book Southto America: A Journey Below the Mason-Dixon to Understand the Soul of a Nation(2022) was the winner of the inaugural 2024 Inside Literary Prize. (It’s also,to my shame, the only one ofthe four National Book Award-nominated finalists I’ve read, but I hope toseek the others out soon!) Perry’s book is more than deserving of this prize onits own terms, but I think that quote really sums up both the prize’simportance and why she was a perfect first choice for what will hopefully becomean annual addition to our literary landscape—and an inspiring addition to our justicesystem.

Readinglist post this weekend,

Ben

PS. Whatdo you think? Prison stories or histories (or contemporary contexts) you’dhighlight?

October 24, 2024: Prison Stories: Johnny Cash

[On October 27th,1994, the U.S. Justice Department announced that the population infederal and state prisons had topped one million for the first time in Americanhistory. To commemorate that sobering and horrifying statistic, one that hasonly gotteninfinitely worse in the thirty years since, this week I’llAmericanStudy prison stories from throughout our history. Leading up to aweekend post highlighting some vital further PrisonStudying reading!]

On the messagethe Man in Black still has for us—if we can ever start to hear it.

In thisvery early post on my colleague and friend IanWilliams’ work with prison inmates (which I reposted yesterday as part ofthis series), I made the case that the incarcerated might well represent themost forgotten or elided American community (and that they’re in that bleakconversation in any case). I wish I could say that anything has changed in thenearly four years since I made that case [NB. This post originally appeared in September2014, but once again I believe it fully holds up more than a decade later], butI don’t believe it has; perhaps Orangeis the New Black will help produce a sea-change in our awareness of andattitudes toward those millions of incarcerated Americans, and perhaps the proposedfederal changes in drug-related sentencing will begin to make a dent inthose shocking numbers, but as of right now it seems to me that the prison industrialcomplex is only growing in size and strength.

More than fiftyyears ago, one of the most iconic 20th century American artists andvoices began a career’s worth of efforts to force us to think about the worldand life of our prisons. I had some critical things to say about Johnny Cash inthis post, so it’s more than fair that I pay respect here to one of hismost impressive and interesting attributes: his consistent attention to thatsetting and its experiences and communities, from the 1955 song “Folsom Prison Blues”through his many prison performances, culminating (but by no means concluding)in the groundbreaking live albums At Folsom Prison (1968) and At San Quentin(1969). My friend and fellow AmericanStudierJonathan Silverman identifies Cash’s trip to Folsom as one of the NineChoices through which Cash most reflected and influenced Americanculture, and I would go further: it was one of the most unique and significantmoments in any American artistic career.

Or it shouldbeen that significant, at least. Forty-five years later, with our collectiveawareness, understanding, and attitudes toward prisoners seemingly morenegative than ever (although studies like this 2002 onegive some reason for hope in that regard), I don’t know that Cash’s clearrecognition of the shared humanity between himself and those prisoners—and,implicitly but clearly, between those prisoners and every other audience towhom Cash performed—has reached his fellow Americans in any consistent way. Thatmight seem like a given, recognizing prisoners’ humanity—but when I read andhear frequentcritiques of prisoner access to exercise and health facilities, to media,to decent food, to liveable conditions, to any of the things that seem todefine American life as we generally argue for it, I’m not at all sure thatsuch recognition is widespread. Perhaps we must first, to quote another prisonsong (sung by a man who did his owntime for drug-related offenses), Steve Earle’s “The Truth”(2002), “Admit that what scares you is the me in you.”

Lastprison story tomorrow,

Ben

PS. Whatdo you think? Prison stories or histories (or contemporary contexts) you’dhighlight?

October 23, 2024: Prison Stories: Ian Williams and Teaching in Prisons

[On October 27th,1994, the U.S. Justice Department announced that the population infederal and state prisons had topped one million for the first time in Americanhistory. To commemorate that sobering and horrifying statistic, one that hasonly gotteninfinitely worse in the thirty years since, this week I’llAmericanStudy prison stories from throughout our history. Leading up to aweekend post highlighting some vital further PrisonStudying reading!]

[N.B. Thispost on my inspiring then-colleague and still-friend Ian Williams’ experiences teaching inprisons originally aired way back in my blog’s first month, inNovember 2010. But it’s all still damn true, other than the sad fact thatwe haven’t been colleagues for far too long.]

If you wanted to feel verydepressed, you could spend some time trying to decide which at-risk Americanpopulation is more elided in our national narratives and perspectives about ourcurrent identity and community: certainly Native Americans, on whom I’vealready focused a good deal in this space and will continue to do so, have agood case (although probably it was better before casinos forced us to admitthat they still exist); the homeless and those living at the very bottom of theeconomic ladder are definitely in the conversation too. But I think a verystrong argument could be made that the population we most consistently forgetto include in our sense of ourselves, until and unless there’s some sort ofscandal that makes us think about them but solely in negative terms (seeHorton, Willie), is the more than 2.3 million Americans—or more than 1 in 100,and that statistic is from 2008 so it’s likely higher today—who are in prison. (Makingus, it’s important to add, the worldwide leader in both the overall number ofcitizens and the percentage of the population behind bars.) It’s ironic but, Ibelieve, entirely accurate to note that much more press and attention was paidto (for example) Paris Hilton or Lindsay Lohan’s couple of weeks in jail thanis paid to the millions of their fellow Americans who are spending significantportions of their lives in that world.

There are all sorts of issuesassociated with that world and this community, as well as an equally strikingnumber of complicating factors and influences that have helped create andsustain it, and it would be irresponsible of me to pretend to know nearlyenough about any of them to focus on them in a piece here (I’m quite sure thatmany readers will know a good deal more and should, as always, chime in). Andin any case, my focus today, in the first of three Thanksgiving-inspired posts,is instead on an incredibly impressive kind of academic and American (in thebest sense) work being done in this community by a colleague of mine, IanWilliams. Ian is, in his own ways, a model of the type of interdisciplinaryscholar and teacher and person that I consistently aspire to be: he teaches andproduces scholarship about American literature and identity and culture, as doI, but he’s also a published and on-the-rise poet and author of fiction, hastaught dance and performance, and has entirely revamped our department’sliterary magazine and website, to cite only a few of his broad and meaningfulpursuits and accomplishments. But the most impressive of his efforts, to mymind, is also perhaps the least overtly visible: he has over the last coupleyears begun to go into local prisons and develop reading and writingconversations and courses with inmates, dialogues that have continued wellbeyond his individual visits and that have, without question, addedimmeasurably to the world and possibilities of those imprisoned Americans.

I can’t claim to speak for Ian’sexperiences, and he has written a bit recently about them on his own blog [BEN:Now sadly defunct, but trust me, it was great]. And I’m quite sure that hewould dispute my sense that this gig is a thankless one; whether it garners anyvisibility or attention is not, that is, at all connected to whether it’sappreciated or makes a difference, and the thanks, similarly, come not fromoutside perspectives but from those impacted directly by the work. I agree withall of those thoughts (that I’ve imagined into Ian’s perspective!), but wouldalso argue that the absence of visibility is itself a further sign of how muchwe don’t include this world and community nearly enough in our nationalnarratives and consciousness. Every few years (at least) sees a new movie aboutan inspiring teacher doing important work with public school students in theinner city; I can’t agree strongly enough that such individuals are sources ofinspiration, and I don’t think we could make enough movies celebrating teachersin any case (duh, I suppose). But the communities whom Ian is inspiring areeven more desperately in need of that influence—and while their inhabitantscan’t necessarily (or at least often can’t) get to the happy endings andbrighter futures that are often featured in the captions at the end of thosemovies, that doesn’t mean that we should celebrate any less fully the teachersand Americans who are doing what they can to connect with and impact theirworlds and lives.

I’ll stop there,since I can already imagine Ian’s demurrals from much of what I’ve written. Atthe end of the day, again, he isn’t doing this work so it’ll get written up,here or in much more prominent publications or spaces. But that doesn’t mean itshouldn’t be—nor that American Studies shouldn’t include and study the world ofour imprisoned fellow Americans much more fully than it often does. Nextprison story tomorrow,

Ben

PS. Whatdo you think? Prison stories or histories (or contemporary contexts) you’dhighlight?

October 22, 2024: Prison Stories: Alcatraz

[On October 27th,1994, the U.S. Justice Department announced that the population infederal and state prisons had topped one million for the first time in Americanhistory. To commemorate that sobering and horrifying statistic, one that hasonly gotteninfinitely worse in the thirty years since, this week I’llAmericanStudy prison stories from throughout our history. Leading up to aweekend post highlighting some vital further PrisonStudying reading!]

On why it’s okayto turn a prison into a tourist attraction—and what we could do instead.

San Francisco’s Pier 39 is one of the more interesting tourist areas I’veseen—because of its unique origin point, as the site of an annual (and nowseemingly permanent) gathering of sea lions; because of the collection of stores and games and entertainments that hassprung up around that focal point, making the pier feel a bit like acombination of Coney Island and the Mall of America; and because it’s also thelaunching point for tours and explorations of Alcatraz, the island, National Park, and former federal prison in San Francisco Bay. Asa result of that latter connection to The Rock (the penitentiary, not theaction film starring Connery and Cage at their most, well, Connery and Cage),Pier 39 also houses the Alcatraz Gift Shop, a store where you can buy, among countless other things, baby clothesdesigned to look like inmates’ apparel (right down to the numbered nametags).

When I firstencountered the gift shop, I found it in pretty poor taste, a crasscommercialization of a site where over a thousand Americans were imprisoned, many for life and all in the most bleak maximum security conditions. I’dstill say that’s part of the story, although the gift shop’s earnings dosupport the National Park and thus (as I understand it) the very deservingNational Park Service as a whole. But I would also say that the gift shop, likethe National Park, like the tours and explorations of the island, and perhapseven like the action film, although that would be a stretch at best, has thepotential to connect tourists and visitors to the history of the prison—andthat such a connection, like any burgeoning historical interest, could lead aswell to further investigation and engagement with issues in the present, withthe broader histories and stories of America’s prisons and prisoners. I’ve longsince come to the conclusion that almost any method of engaging Americans withour histories, as long as it doesn’t blatantly misrepresent or falsify thatpast, is worthwhile, and certainly the Alcatraz tourism industry has thepotential to produce such engagement.

On the otherhand, there’s another Alcatraz history, one located after the prison’s 1963closure and before its 1973 opening as a National Park, that isn’t part of thegift shop at all, nor, I would argue, much present in the island’s touristnarratives more broadly. That’s the 1969 takeover of the island by a group ofNative Americans affiliated with the American Indian Movement; this particular community called themselves “Indians of All Tribes” andhoped to turn the island into a cultural center. During the nearly two years of occupation, thisactivist effort certainly succeeded in raising awareness and changing national conversations, although (as was the case with each AIM endeavor) italso produced unintended acts of destruction and violence. The history of theoccupation is thus a complex one, connected to longer-term and even morecomplex histories and obviously unable to be turned into a gift shop product;but why couldn’t Alcatraz become the site of a cultural center, one that couldinclude not only Native American communities and stories but those of the manyother cultures that have called and continued to call the Bay Area home? Notsure I can imagine a more inspiring future for a former prison.

Nextprison story tomorrow,

Ben

PS. Whatdo you think? Prison stories or histories (or contemporary contexts) you’dhighlight?