Benjamin A. Railton's Blog, page 355

April 18, 2014: Animated History: The Lego Movie

[Inspired by my recent viewings of The Lego Movie and Frozen with my boys, a series on what animated films (including those two) can help us AmericanStudy. Leading up to a special Guest Post on a particularly complex and under-appreciated American animator!]
On consumerism, childhood, and contradiction. [Some SPOILERS for the film follow.]I’m sure there was some golden age when children’s cartoons weren’t directly tied into toys and other consumer products—but not so by my childhood, when I could play with my He-Man or G.I. Joe or Transformers figures while watching their TV shows and movies, when my younger sister could do the same with her My Little Ponies or Care Bears, and when one of my favorite Saturday morning cartoons featured the exploits of a line of candy bears. Indeed, in all of those cases (I believe) the toys preceded the animated shows and films, making the cultural works entirely inseparable from (if not simply a merchandising arm of) the consumer products. Which is to say, such synergies have been central to the experiences of American childhood for at least a few decades (and didn’t turn me into some sort of capitalist automaton, at least not to my knowledge).On the other hand, even within that long history The Lego Movie (2014) could be seen as representing a new level of consumer culture. I refuse either to capitalize Lego or to put the trademark symbol after it, but both are part of the film’s title, revealing just how fully the movie is a product of, well, a product. I was in a Lego Store with my boys before the film’s release, and even then a substantial percentage of the products for sale were direct movie tie-ins; I know from experience (what can I say, I spend a lot of time in toy stores) that the merchandising has only ramped up in the weeks since. Given that the film’s ultimate themes include both an emphasis on imaginative play that refuses to “follow directions” and a direct critique of corporate culture and conformity (in the form of the film’s villain, Lord Business), such consumer connections seem hugely ironic and even hypocritical, a position at the heart of Anthony Lane’s pointed review of the film in The New Yorker.I take that point, but would push back on it to a degree as well. After all, a great deal of childhood, now as ever, is defined precisely by contradictions: between dependence and independence, safety and adventure, rules and fun, and, yes, consumerist conformity and imaginative inspiration. Which is to say, the presence of such contradictions in a film, as in any area of life, does not necessarily reflect hypocrisy so much as simply inevitable reality. The Lego Movie is a two-hour sales pitch; it’s also an imaginative, engaging, and effective story. My boys saw it and wanted to own some of the Lego products it includes; they also came out talking about its themes, about why it was important for the protagonists (both Lego and human, although I won’t spoil it further than that) to break from the tyranny of conformity and Business and find their own path. I can’t say for sure which end of those spectrums was or is more influential, no more than I can say if my boys’ video game playing is more meaningful to their young lives or future development than our nightly chapter book reading. It’s all part of the childhood and cultural mix, and The Lego Movie is both a troubling and a thoughtful contribution to that mix as well.That special Guest Post this weekend,BenPS. What do you think? Thoughts on this film, or other animated histories and stories you’d highlight?

April 17, 2014: Animated History: Frozen

[Inspired by my recent viewings of The Lego Movie and Frozen with my boys, a series on what animated films (including those two) can help us AmericanStudy. Leading up to a special Guest Post on a particularly complex and under-appreciated American animator!]
On challenges to our expectations, less and more successful. [SPOILERS for Frozen follow!]If the subject of yesterday’s post, The Princess and the Frog, significantly revised the existing canon of Disney Princesses, the newest and now most financially successful Disney animated film, Frozen (2013), goes further still. The film overtly seeks to revise a number of the tropes and myths at the heart of virtually every prior Disney film, including romantic narratives and their reliance on the concepts of love at first sight and true love, heroines/princesses and their arcs and goals, and even the relative importance of familial vs. romantic relationships in our storytelling. We’re not talking Who Framed Roger Rabbit? level meta-textuality here, exactly—but for a  Disney animated film, I was struck by just how much Frozen comments on and challenges those traditional tropes.All of those challenges are interesting and meaningful, but it’s also instructive to note which ones work and which, to this viewer, don’t. In the latter category I would locate the film’s challenge to romantic narratives, which it achieves by first linking its princess heroine Anna with the dashing Prince Hans and then eventually revealing him to be a heartless villain instead. It’s true that Frozen foreshadows that character shift through multiple characters’ reactions to Anna’s instant love and connection; she is repeatedly, incredulously asked, “You’re engaged to a man you just met?!” But it’s also true that much of the early section of Frozen makes happy use of the romantic tropes, including the extended song and dance number “Love is an Open Door.” So if Hans’ sudden shift feels somewhat unbelievable (and to this viewer it did), the film’s own heavy earlier reliance on those romantic tropes would have to be seen as contributing to that effect.On the other hand, I found Frozen’s challenges to the traditional heroine arcs and emphases very successful and quite moving. That’s true for the two individual characters, as both Anna and (especially) her sister Elsa have journeys that are far more about their perspectives, experiences, and identities than about finding a romantic partner. But it’s even more true for them as sisters, as their stories are deeply intertwined and come to a powerful conclusion that remains more about them, individually and as a pair, than it is about the love interest character or indeed anyone outside of this complex duo. To see a pair of complex women whose relationship is rich and evolving and multi-layered, and whose most powerful emotional notes depend on that familial history and bond—well, I don’t know that I was ready for a Disney film that could pass the Bechdel Test. But I’m very glad that this one does.Last animated history tomorrow,BenPS. What do you think? Thoughts on this film, or other animated histories and stories you’d highlight?

April 16, 2014: Animated History: The Princess and the Frog

[Inspired by my recent viewings of The Lego Movie and Frozen with my boys, a series on what animated films (including those two) can help us AmericanStudy. Leading up to a special Guest Post on a particularly complex and under-appreciated American animator!]
On race, representation, and seeing ourselves and our histories on screen.Since I went pretty hard after Disney on topics of ethnicity and race yesterday, it seems only fair to balance that with a post on 2009’s The Princess and the Frog , the animated film that introduced Tiana, Disney’s first African American princess. (I suppose I could also have balanced that Peter Pan post with one on Pocahontas [1995], but that’ll have to be a topic for another time—or feel free to share your takes on it in comments now!) The film represented a shift or evolution for Disney not only in that particular protagonist and her identity, but also in its striking blend of a classic fairy tale (the Brother Grimm’s “Frog Prince”) with a very specific historical and cultural moment and setting (the African American community and its contexts and connections in 1920s New Orleans). It was a box office, critical, and awards-season success, and I think is hugely significant on at least two distinct but interconnected levels.For one thing, I think it’s difficult to overstate the importance of a community of American audience members (and particularly youthful audience members) seeing a protagonist whose appearance and identity mirror their own. In a post last February I wrote about Philip Nel’s work on the controversy of young adult publishers “whitewashing” their covers and marketing efforts, changing or at least minimizing the ethnic and racial identities of the works’ protagonists in the images that represent those characters. Of course a novel’s reader can encounter the protagonist through his or her own lens in any case, but those visual images and representations have a strong influence on an audience’s perceptions, and again especially youthful audiences. And far more influential still would be the images of an animated protagonist, whose appearance and identity so fully guide our viewing of that work. So the presence of an African American Disney princess in such a film and for its audiences is to my mind far from simply a token or a gesture.But I would argue that at least as important is the film’s aforementioned historical and cultural setting. I’ve waxed poetic multiple times in this space about New Orleans as an exemplary American space, and The Princess and the Frog engages with multiple sides to that place and its histories, from the Creole community and voodoo customs and spiritualities to the city’s histories of masquerades and even the meanings of particularly significant local settings such as St. Louis Cathedral. I also think that the decision to set the film in the 1920s is an important and effective one, tapping into ongoing post-19th century histories, to segregation, and to concurrent contemporary trends such as the Harlem Renaissance, allowing its youthful audiences not only to connect with Tiana and her world, but also and crucially to recognize that world’s distinct yet still ongoing and resonant histories and stories. Pretty inspiring for a Disney film!Next animated history tomorrow,BenPS. What do you think? Thoughts on this film, or other animated histories and stories you’d highlight?

April 15, 2014: Animated History: Peter Pan

[Inspired by my recent viewings of The Lego Movie and Frozen with my boys, a series on what animated films (including those two) can help us AmericanStudy. Leading up to a special Guest Post on a particularly complex and under-appreciated American animator!]
On datedness, racism, and teachable moments.In the midst of Disney’s Peter Pan (1953) can be found one of the most cringe-worthy, tone-deaf, racist sequences you’re likely to find in any mainstream Hollywood film of the post-World War II era. Centered on the song “What Makes the Red Man Red,” this sequence—which, if you haven’t seen, I can’t possibly do justice to here, so please watch the 3.5 minute clip hyperlinked there if you would—includes so many visual, linguistic, cultural, and historical stereotypes associated with Native Americans that it feels a bit like the perfect card in Racism Bingo (which would be about the worst party game ever). Given that the Native American chief’s daughter, Tiger Lily, is portrayed as a potential love interest for (and in any case loyal friend to) our hero Peter Pan, the sequence clearly wasn’t intended to be insulting to that character or her culture—but, well, the road to hell and all.It’d be easy to excuse or at least rationalize the sequence as simply dated, a reflection of a very different era in American culture and society (which is what many of the YouTube commenters on that linked video seem to have done). But while that might be partly true, it’s just as accurate to note that there had been prominent American critiques of such stereotypes (both from within the Native American community and from reformers and allies of that broad community) for more than a century prior to the film’s release. Moreover, while the 1950s were certainly far different from the 2010s in terms of racial images and issues overall, I can’t imagine a parallel 1953 sequence featuring African American or Asian American characters being created and included in a mainstream film (What Makes the Yellow Man Yellow? Doubtful). It seems indisputable that the sequence exists because of another, complementary set of racist narratives—the sense that Native Americans were not a meaningful contemporary American presence, not a potential audience bloc, not a community toward whose interests and responses Disney would need to be sensitive.So do we throw out the baby with the bathwater, dismissing the whole of this important animated film because of this one egregious and to my mind indefensible sequence? I don’t think we can or should—but neither do I think we should just minimize or ignore the sequence, or otherwise try to view the movie without it. Instead, I think it’s vital to focus overtly on how, in a movie that has nothing to do with such issues or images (that is, this isn’t Song of the South ), a sequence like this could be created and included, could become part of mainstream American culture in 1953. Which is to say, while I think we tend to overuse the concept of “teachable moments” these days, I absolutely believe that if and when I show my sons Peter Pan, it would be vital to highlight and use this sequence as precisely such a moment, a reflection of some of the worst (but also most telling, now as then) of our culture’s narratives and attitudes.Next animated history tomorrow,BenPS. What do you think? Thoughts on this film, or other animated histories and stories you’d highlight?

April 14, 2014: Animated History: Doctor Propaganda

[Inspired by my recent viewings of The Lego Movie and Frozen with my boys, a series on what animated films (including those two) can help us AmericanStudy. Leading up to a special Guest Post on a particularly complex and under-appreciated American animator!]
On an icon’s surprising starting points.As I wrote in one of my earliest posts, it’s possible to read The Cat in the Hat (1957) as particularly radical in its portrayals of family and gender roles (especially in relationship to dominant 1950s images and narratives). But even if you don’t subscribe to that reading of Cat, it’d be very difficult to argue that its author, Dr. Seuss (Theodore Geisel), didn’t have a substantial and generally very radical impact on the world of children’s books and animation—not just in his voice and style, his silliness and playfulness, his breaking of virtually every formal and generic rule, but also in his subtle but frequent inclusion of progressive themes and morals, including prominently the anti-Cold War (and anti-war period) ethics of The Butter Battle Book,among many other such messages.Which makes it that much harder to grapple with the fact that Geisel got his start crafting animated propaganda films for the military during and after World War II. But he did—first making army training films (featuring the cautionary tales of one Private Snafu) as part of Frank Capra’s Signal Corps (the organization that produced the most prominent U.S. WWII propaganda, the epic eight-part Why We Fight series ), then branching out into even more overt anti-Axis propaganda works. Geisel even continued to make such films in the aftermath of the war, creating works to be distributed to soldiers in occupied post-war Germany. To call these films propaganda isn’t to critique them, necessarily—the term has come to be used pejoratively much of the time, but at its core it’s simply descriptive, a categorization of works that are overtly designed to further political purposes. Geisel’s World War II works were precisely that, and achieved their purposes clearly and convincingly.As the Capra reference indicates, Geisel was far from alone as an artist who enlisted in the war effort—in fact, he was more the norm than the exception. Moreover, it’s even possible to link his World War II works directly to (for example) his later anti-Cold War messages, since in both cases he could be seen as opposing the proliferation of violence and war (in the first case by the Axis powers, in the second by the Cold War superpowers). But for me, the problem is more one of style—whatever else we say about propaganda films, they are by design and necessity both straightforward and conservative, neither of which are terms that we would likely apply to most of Seuss’s subsequent children’s books and works. Of course we can simply say that Seuss evolved and changed, as does any artist (especially a talented one) over the length of a long career. But we also have to consider that each stage of Seuss’s career tells us something about the man and his work, and can’t dismiss or minimize the first stage just because it doesn’t line up with how we (or at least I) like to think of him.Next animated history tomorrow,BenPS. What do you think? Thoughts on this film, or other animated histories and stories you’d highlight?

April 12-13, 2014: Crowd-sourced AmericanStudies Books

[A couple weeks back, I had the chance to attend the 2014 Narrative conference at MIT. While there, I spent some time browsing the book tables, and realizing how many interesting new AmericanStudies works are constantly joining the conversation. So in this week’s series I’ve highlighted a handful of the books I discovered there. This crowd-sourced post is drawn from titles shared by fellow AmericanStudiers—share yours in comments, please!]
First, two more from this AmericanStudier: the edited collection Storytelling, History, and the Postmodern South (edited by Jason Phillips).And my friend Sari Edelstein’s Between the Novel and the News: The Emergence of American Women’s Writing (2014).The great poet Charles Bane Jr. shares Arthur Schlesinger, Sr.’s  The Birth of a Nation: A Portrait of the American People on the Eve of Independence.Craig Carey highilghts Alan Trachtenberg’s The Incorporation of America and James Livingston’s Pragmatism and the Political Economy of Cultural Evolution . Luke Dietrich reiterates Trachtenberg, and adds Amy Kaplan’s The Anarchy of Empire in the Making of U.S. Culture, Gloria Anzaldúa’s Borderlands/La Frontera , and Philip Deloria’s Indians in Unexpected Place s.Todd Parry notes that Charlotte Biltekoff’s Eating Right in America: The Cultural Politics of Food and Health “is insightful and very cleverly written.”Adam Golub highlights Louis Menand’s The Metaphysical Club and Albert Murray’s The Omni-Americans: Black Experience and American Culture .For more creative works, Matt Cogswell mentions American Horror Story and Quintin Burks goes with One Hundred Years of Solitude ; while Ian James notes, “I found Noa h to be a very interesting film that made me think. Not only was it a compelling new take on the classic story that featured the human struggle with personal morality, but it prompted an inner discussion in my mind about storytelling as well.”Next series starts Monday,BenPS. Any other new (or classic) AmericanStudies books you’d highlight?

April 11, 2014: New AmericanStudies Books: Aggressive Fictions

[A couple weeks back, I had the chance to attend the 2014 Narrative conference at MIT. While there, I spent some time browsing the book tables, and realizing how many interesting new AmericanStudies works are constantly joining the conversation. So I thought I’d dedicate a series to highlighting a handful of the books I discovered there. Share your own new favorites (or classics!) for a bibliophiliac crowd-sourced weekend post, please!]
On the sentence I really love in the description for the week’s final new scholarly book.There seems to be a lot to like about Kathryn Hume’s Aggressive Fictions: Reading the Contemporary American Novel (2011; so not as new as the others in the series, but I just learned about it at the conference): her readings of about forty (!) late 20th and early 21stcentury novels; her striking variety of authors, genres, and themes/topics within that wide-ranging collection of texts; her willingness to confront head on, and then make the case for, some of the most challenging and frustrating elements of contemporary fiction. But I’ll admit that my central interest in Hume’s book stems from one particular sentence in the book’s description: “Looking beyond the theory-based justifications that critics often provide for such fiction, Hume offers a commonsense guide for the average reader who wants to better understand and appreciate books that might otherwise seem difficult to enjoy.” Amen. A scholarly book both written for general audiences and making the case for the importance of its focal subjects for such audiences. A. Freaking. Men. Nothing else I need to say!Crowd-sourced post this weekend,BenPS. So one more time: new (or classic) AmericanStudies books you’d highlight? Share for the weekend post!

April 10, 2014: New AmericanStudies Books: Failure and the American Writer

[A couple weeks back, I had the chance to attend the 2014 Narrative conference at MIT. While there, I spent some time browsing the book tables, and realizing how many interesting new AmericanStudies works are constantly joining the conversation. So I thought I’d dedicate a series to highlighting a handful of the books I discovered there. Share your own new favorites (or classics!) for a bibliophiliac crowd-sourced weekend post, please!]
On the next book in the evolving career of one of the most interesting AmericanStudiers.I think all of us humans look to other people for models and inspiration, and I know that such examples are vital in a profession and career as complex and open-ended as academia. Many of the fellow scholars about whom I’ve written in Scholarly Review and Tribute posts fit that bill for me, have offered in their careers and work models for the path I hope to follow in my own. But few have seemed to offer quite as overt a blueprint for my own series of AmericanStudies books as Gavin Jones, who similarly began his career with a cultural and historical analysis of Gilded Age literature ( Strange Talk , 1999), moved into a broader engagement with American literary and cultural history ( American Hungers , 2007), and has found his way to an even more sweeping public scholarly topic in his most recent book: Failure and the American Writer: A Literary History (2014).Jones’ first two books weren’t just models in terms of their respective focal points and motivating questions, however; they were also exemplary scholarly engagements with their topics. Strange Talk takes the often-controversial subject of dialect literature seriously without losing a sense of ethics, analyzing all the different permutations of the form in the late 19th century on their own terms yet maintaining a clear set of arguments about the more and less troubling and even oppressive versions of the trend. American Hungerstraces more than a century of literary and cultural representations of poverty both broadly and specifically, making convincing connections across its works and periods while paying close, nuanced attention to particular examples and elements throughout. In their respective ways both books provided pitch-perfect illustrations of successful AmericanStudies scholarship, and I have no doubt that Failure will offer its own impressive models for my ongoing thinking and writing.I haven’t had a chance to read it yet, but it also seems likely to me that Failure will add another layer to my ongoing thoughts about the topic of my own next book: the idea, which I’m trying to capture in the phrase Hard-Won Hope, that it’s only through our engagements with our darkest realities and histories that we can find our way to a brighter future. In his focus on the topic of failure, as partly a contrast with but also and even more importantly a complement to our national emphasis on success, Jones has found a rich vein of such darker but still productive shared experiences and emotions. But at the same time, it looks as if Jones has continued to link such broad ideas to his readings of particular authors and works, and thus to model one more time how much our overarching narratives and arguments depend on close, sustained engagement with specific examples and analyses. I look forward to another round of inspiration for my own such work!Last new book tomorrow,BenPS. New (or classic) AmericanStudies books you’d highlight? Share for the weekend post!

April 9, 2014: New AmericanStudies Books: Viewing America

[A couple weeks back, I had the chance to attend the 2014 Narrative conference at MIT. While there, I spent some time browsing the book tables, and realizing how many interesting new AmericanStudies works are constantly joining the conversation. So I thought I’d dedicate a series to highlighting a handful of the books I discovered there. Share your own new favorites (or classics!) for a bibliophiliac crowd-sourced weekend post, please!]
On the book that takes 21st century TV as seriously as it deserves.On the same day that this post appears, my Writing II students will turn in their fourth paper of the semester, a comparative analysis of two film and/or TV texts (of their choosing). I assigned this particular paper in part as a sneaky way to get them thinking about comparative analysis while making it fun, and in part because the class’s overall focus is on reading our 21st century world and so much of that entails reading and analyzing these kinds of visual media. But I also believe—as this blog has demonstrated time and again—that we AmericanStudies scholars need to take film and TV texts (like pop music, material culture, and other forms) just as seriously as we do more traditional literary and historical ones; not only because they can all reveal aspects of our culture and identity, but because they demand the same level of close attention and analysis.While I would make that case for any and all film and TV texts, however, it’s also undeniably true—as I wrote in this post expressing my appreciation for this trend—that the last couple decades have witnessed a golden age for AmericanStudies television. I’ve read plenty of blog posts and reviews that have expressed similar perspectives on this era in TV—including, most consistently, the work of the great Alan Sepinwall, whose book The Revolution was Televised (2012) collected his arguments about twelve seminal 1990s and 2000s shows—but on the Narrative book tables I saw one of the first scholarly books I’ve seen on the subject: Christopher Bigsby’s Viewing America: Twenty-First Century Television Drama (2013). Bigsby’s book covers nine shows in great depth, ranging from completed classics such as The Sopranos, The West Wing , and The Wire to newer, not-yet-finished shows including Mad Men and (the since-completed) Treme.I only got a chance to browse Bigsby’s book briefly, and already found at least a few takes on both West Wingand The Wire with which I would disagree. But that’s a big part of the point—here’s a scholarly engagement with some of the same great shows with which I’ve tried to engage in this space, as part of my AmericanStudying of our turn of the 21st century moment. I wouldn’t necessarily go so far as to make the case (which Bigsby does, I believe) that TV has become the medium for the most consistently impressive 21stcentury American art and artists—but it’s in the conversation, as this important AmericanStudies book reflects and amplifies. Next new book tomorrow,BenPS. New (or classic) AmericanStudies books you’d highlight? Share for the weekend post!

April 8, 2014: New AmericanStudies Books: The Negro in Illinois

[A couple weeks back, I had the chance to attend the 2014 Narrative conference at MIT. While there, I spent some time browsing the book tables, and realizing how many interesting new AmericanStudies works are constantly joining the conversation. So I thought I’d dedicate a series to highlighting a handful of the books I discovered there. Share your own new favorites (or classics!) for a bibliophiliac crowd-sourced weekend post, please!]
On the book that provides much-needed closure—and opens up so much more.In the late 1930s, the Illinois’ Writers Project, a section of the Roosevelt administration’s Works Progress Administration (WPA) and Federal Writers’ Project, teamed with a number of Harlem Renaissance authors and artists on a multi-year research and writing effort entitled The Negro in Illinois . Utilizing the talents of numerous writers centered in Chicago, including Richard Wright, Margaret Walker, and many others, the project was intended to produce a comprehensive history of African American experiences and communities in the state, one both historical (dating back to the earliest records of slavery) and contemporary (based on oral histories and other research). It would have resulted in a publication unlike any other in American culture—but when the project was canceled in 1942, most of what had been produced was simply shelved.Until July 2013, when the University of Illinois Press and editor Brian Dolinar (working with Chicago Public Library archivist Michael Flug) released The Negro in Illinois , an edited volume that collects and annotates the majority of the project’s efforts. The fact that this book has been produced at all, more than 70 years after the project’s cancellation, is in and of itself a hugely inspiring story, one of those very rare moments when unfinished histories, the kinds seemingly inevitably lost to the march of time, can receive this kind of renewed attention and closure. But for any scholar and American not able to travel to Illinois to view the original papers and interested in the histories and stories, the lives and communities, captured in those papers—which should be all Americans interested in our history and culture and identity—that closure also opens up many doors, avenues for reading and research that can and will lead to many more discoveries and projects.To cite one specific and compelling example: the collection includes a good deal of previously unpublished writing by Richard Wright, one of the 20th century’s most unique and impressive writers and voices. While literary discoveries are always possible, of course, I would imagine that most literary AmericanStudiers have shared my own feeling that all of Wright’s signficant writing had already been found and published in one form or another, that we had all we were going to get from this complex, singular talent. And then here comes this book, and this body of (for most of us) unread material by Wright (and many others). I have no idea what it will include, whether it will feel as individually and literarily meaningful as it is unquestionably historically and socially and culturally vital. I can’t wait to find out!Next new book tomorrow,BenPS. New (or classic) AmericanStudies books you’d highlight? Share for the weekend post!