Benjamin A. Railton's Blog, page 38

July 30, 2024: Martin Sheen Studying: Catholic Activism

[Thiscoming weekend, the greatMartin Sheen celebrates his 84th birthday. Sheen’s life has been asimpressiveand inspiring as his iconic career, so this week I’ll AmericanStudy a handfulof threads to both. Leading up to a special tribute to a pair of even moreinspiring Americans!]

On a greatexample of art imitating and amplifying life.

For aDecember 2019 piece for my Saturday Evening Post Considering Historycolumn, I highlighted the inspiring Catholic activism of Dorothy Day. Day eventuallyplayed an important role in Martin Sheen’s own activist life, so I’d ask you tocheck out that column if you would and then come on back for two layers toSheen’s relationship to Day and Catholic activism.

Welcome back! The Wikipedia page for Sheenclaims that he “met Catholic activist Dorothy Day” while pursuing his youthfulacting career with the Living Theatrecompany in New York City, but that seems to be an overstatement. As Sheenremembered it in this2015 interview with Chicago Catholic, “He may have met Dorothy Dayin 1959 or 1960 when he was a young man working for a pittance in anavant-garde theater in Greenwich Village and eating the free meal providedevery night by the Catholic Worker. ‘They had a breadline, and you didn’t haveto pay and you didn’t have to listen to a sermon, you just showed up fivenights a week and you got a free supper,’ he said. ‘Now, I could have metDorothy Day. I can’t say for sure because I went there for months and months,but I was only there for the food. Eventually, I came to a far betterunderstanding of the Catholic Worker and it became a very powerful force in mylife and a great source of inspiration and I’m still to this day verysupportive of the Catholic Workers all over the United States.’”

So Sheen’s personal connection to Day and the CatholicWorker movement was a long arc, although no less (and perhaps in some ways evenmore) meaningful for it. But he also has an interesting artistic connection tothe movement, through his performance as Peter Maurin in the 1996 independentfilm EntertainingAngels: The Dorothy Day Story (1996; Sheen’s West Wing co-star Moira Kelly plays Day). Maurin co-founded theCatholic Worker movement with Day, and was in his own right a hugely important figurenot just in that specific spiritual and activist tradition, but in the arc of20th century American social and laboractivism among other histories. As I know every reader of this blog knowswell, I believe that cultural representations of our figures and historiesoffer one of the most compelling and successful ways to add them to our collectivememories; few American figures need such adding more than Dorothy Day and PeterMaurin, and Martin Sheen offers us a cultural as well as biographical andactivist way to better remember that pair.

NextSheenStudying tomorrow,

Ben

PS. Whatdo you think?

July 29, 2024: Martin Sheen Studying: Youthful Origin Points

[Thiscoming weekend, the great MartinSheen celebrates his 84th birthday. Sheen’s life has been as impressive and inspiringas his iconic career, so this week I’ll AmericanStudy a handful of threads toboth. Leading up to a special tribute to a pair of even more inspiring Americans!]

On threefoundational moments that helped make the man.

1)     Health Challenges: Sheen (whose birth andlegal name is , as I’ll write more about on Wednesday) was born in 1940, and in hischildhood dealt with the devastating effects of one of the period’s most persistenthealth crises: polio. I haven’t been able to find the exact age at which Sheenwas stricken with the potentially fatal illness, but apparently he was bedriddenfor a year before the experimental SisterKenny treatment helped him regain use of his legs. Combined with adifferent physical ailment caused by his difficult birth (his left arm waspartially crushed by forceps, leaving him with chronicErb’s palsy), these childhood afflictions no doubt affected young Sheen,and to my mind must have played a role in creating an individual with suchempathy and commitment to helping others.

2)     Family Crisis: Unfortunately, health issueswere not the only such crises—when Sheen was 11 his mother (Irishimmigrant Mary-Ann Phelan) died, and his factory worker father ()did not have either the income nor the time to take care of Sheen and his ninesiblings. They were faced with the very real possibility of being raised in orphanagesor the foster care system, but fortunately Holy Trinity CatholicChurch in Sheen’s hometown of Dayton offered sufficient support to keep thefamily together. As I’ll discuss in tomorrow’s post, Catholic activism would becomea lifelong and defining element of Sheen’s identity, and I imagine this foundationalexperience with the best of Catholic community contributed greatly to thatemphasis.

3)     Labor Activism: That activism began longbefore Sheen became an adult, in a surprising place: on the Oakwoodgolf course at Dayton Country Club, where he and his older brothers workedas caddies. Sheen had joined them when he was just 9, and by the age of 14 wasfed up with the combination of low pay, grueling responsibilities, and abusivetreatment from the club’s wealthy clientele. So Sheen ledthe caddies on a walk-out, risking the wrath of not just those elite membersbut also his boss, who Sheenremembers coming out and telling them, “Well your [butts] are in troublenow. You better change your mind.” Although the strike apparently did notsucceed, and Sheen was fired, clearly this final foundational moment only lit afire in a young man who would go on to live his life bythis mantra: “Acting is what I do for a living but activism is what I do tostay alive.”

NextSheenStudying tomorrow,

Ben

PS. Whatdo you think?

July 27-28, 2024: July 2024 Recap

[A Recapof the month that was in AmericanStudying.]

July1: Models of Critical Patriotism: “What to the Slave is the 4th ofJuly?”: A July 4th series inspired by my book Of Thee I Singkicks off with a stunning speech that challenges us as much today as it did 172years ago.

July2: Models of Critical Patriotism: “Eulogy on King Philip”: The series continueswith a speech that offers two complementary models of critical patriotism.

July3: Models of Critical Patriotism: Suffrage Activists at the CentennialExposition: National divisions and critical patriotism at the nation’s 100thbirthday celebration, as the series rolls on.

July4: Models of Critical Patriotism: America is in the Heart: An author andbook that both introduce under-narrated histories and redefine American identity.

July5: Models of Critical Patriotism: MLK and Baldwin, Kaepernick and the 1619Project: The series concludes with a link to my Saturday Evening PostConsidering History column on the long legacy of African American criticalpatriotism.

July6-7: Critical Patriotism in 2024: And a special weekend follow-up onprotests that exemplify critical patriotism, protests that don’t quite, and whyit’s not as simple as that.

July8: Found Footage Stories: History of New York: For the 25thanniversary of the Blair Witch Project, a series on found footagestories kicks off with a humorous text that was way ahead of its time.

July9: Found Footage Stories: The “Introduction” to “Rip Van Winkle”: Theseries continues with a silly and a serious layer to Washington Irving’scontinued use of found footage frames.

July10: Found Footage Stories: House of Leaves: The limitations andpossibilities of scary stories, as the series discovers on.

July11: Found Footage Stories: Illuminae: Two ways to contextualize a bestsellingdystopian YA series that relies on found footage.

July12: Found Footage Stories: Horror Films: The series concludes with thelongstanding appeal and the limits of faux-realism.

July13-14: Found Footage Stories: The Blair Witch Project: For the film’s 25thanniversary, a special weekend post on three Blair Witch legacies.

July15: ElvisStudying: Elvis and Sinatra: In honor of an iconic date in his history,a series on Elvis Presley kicks off with the differences between influential andinteresting.

July16: ElvisStudying: Elvis Films: The series continues with takeaways fromthree stages in Presley’s iconic film career.

July17: ElvisStudying: Graceland: Mythic facades, the realities behind them,and a third way to look at Elvis’ historic home, as the series rocks on.

July18: ElvisStudying: The Presidential Medal of Freedom: The important nationalhonor as a unifying occasion or a partisan instrument.

July19: ElvisStudying: First and Last: For that iconic anniversary, on how wecan understand Elvis’ profound changes, and why they’re not the whole story.

July20-21: ElvisStudying: Representing the King: The series concludes withquick takeaways from a handful of the countless cultural depictions of Elvis.

July22: Revisiting the Canon: Ernest Hemingway: In honor of Hemingway’s 125thbirthday, a series on revisiting canonical authors kicks off with three phenomenalHem short stories.

July23: Revisiting the Canon: James Fenimore Cooper: The series continues withhistorical and literary reasons to revisit a challenging early bestseller.

July24: Revisiting the Canon: Nathaniel Hawthorne: How two of our mostover-taught texts can still be under-appreciated, as the series reads on.

July25: Revisiting the Canon: Mark Twain: Reading and thinking about along-past author as a contemporary commentator.

July26: Revisiting the Canon: William Faulkner: The series concludes with how aclassic author’s struggles can be as illuminating as his triumphs.

Nextseries begins Monday,

Ben

PS. Topicsyou’d like to see covered in this space? Guest Posts you’d like to contribute? Lemme know!

July 26, 2024: Revisiting the Canon: William Faulkner

[This pastweekend we celebrated ErnestHemingway’s 125th birthday. While I’ve been very glad to do mypart to diversifyour curricula way beyond the canon, I also believe there are still lotsof valuable AmericanStudies reasons to read canonical authors. So this weekI’ll make that case for Hemingway and four other canonized folks!]

On how aclassic author’s struggles can be as illuminating as their triumphs.

In thisblog post focused especially on August Wilson and his ten-play Pittsburgh Cycle,I briefly made the case for William Faulkner’s ambitious, messy, amazing book Absalom,Absalom! (1936) as “America’s most morally powerful novel.” I stand by thatcase, also a central subject of myfirst academic article way back in the day, and would ask you to check out thatpost (or that article if you’re feeling as ambitious as Faulkner was!), andthen come on back for some further thoughts on Faulkner’s successes andfailures.

Welcomeback! As I also argued in that article, one of the single most frustratingfacts in American literary history is that Faulkner’s immediate follow-up to Absalomwas TheUnvanquished (1938), a Civil War-set novel that pretty consistentlyendorses Lost Cause andwhite supremacist narratives of the war and race in Southern and Americanhistory. (Although this2015 article makes a more positive case for Unvanquished’s politics,so maybe I should give it another chance.) While Faulkner certainly didn’t writeabout those subjects across his career in ways that echo the worst of ThomasW. Dixon or Margaret Mitchell, it’s fair to say that his default wasn’tnearly as nuanced and powerful as Absalom either—I’d argue that a moreapt reflection of Faulkner’s limited ability to write or even truly think aboutAfrican American characters, for example, is his single-sentence description ofDilsey in the 1945Appendix to The Sound and the Fury: “They endured.” Not blatantlydiscriminatory and not inaccurate, but, compared to the huge swaths of new texthe creates about the other (white) Compson characters in that Appendix, anillustration of Faulkner’s relative lack of interest in the identity and lifeof a character like Dilsey—of whose family, not coincidentally, he also writesthere, “These others were not Compsons. They were black.”

While nosingle author can or should write about everyone or everything, Faulkner’sfailures when it comes to African American characters and stories, communitiesand histories, do to my mind mean that we can’t consider him one of ourgreatest novelists. But he was hugely talented and an important literary andcultural voice, and if we can include his struggles and failures along with hisstrengths and successes as complementary and interconnected parts of ourreading and response, I’d argue that only makes an even more compelling casefor teaching him and his works. To round off the whole of this week-longseries, part of the problem with the canon as it developed was precisely thatit treated authors and works as “classics” to be praised, rather than complexand multi-layered subjects worthy of our critiques along with every other formof engagement and analysis. We can’t read or teach everything, much as I wishwe could; and when we’re making choices about what to engage, it’s not just (orto my mind even mostly) about what’s great, but also and especially about what’smost illuminating. I’d say that’s the case for every one of the authors Ihighlighted this week, and it’s most definitely the case for William Faulkner.

July Recapthis weekend,

Ben

PS. Whatdo you think?

July 25, 2024: Revisiting the Canon: Mark Twain

[This pastweekend we celebrated ErnestHemingway’s 125th birthday. While I’ve been very glad to do mypart to diversifyour curricula way beyond the canon, I also believe there are still lotsof valuable AmericanStudies reasons to read canonical authors. So this weekI’ll make that case for Hemingway and four other canonized folks!]

[NB. Thispost is obviously a repeat from the end of my Fall 2017 Twain course, but Ithink it also makes the case for continuing to engage this most-canonizedAmerican author as well as any could!]

On reading andthinking about a long-past author as a contemporary commentator.

I’m pretty sureI hadn’t thought at all yet about the syllabus or specifics for my MajorAuthor: Mark Twain senior seminar when I gave last March’s talk at the Twain House on the topic of “Twainas Public Intellectual.” (Perhaps that’s a bit more inside baseball thanyou’d like if you’re a non-higher ed reader, but it’s a general truth, if notindeed a fact universally acknowledged, that as of March 3rd wedon’t often have any real sense of our Fall classes, beyond their basicexistence.) I’d even go further, and say that when I put in my idea to focusthis third iteration of mine for the course (after ones on HenryJames and W.E.B.Du Bois) on Twain, I did so much more because of the breadth and diversityof his career and works than because of any particular thought aboutcontemporary connections he might offer. I knew that toward the end of hiscareer Twain wrote anumber of pieces that engaged very fully with his contemporarysociety (in ways that would alsoresonate with our own), but generally saw that as one of many stages inthat long and multi-faceted career.

Well, I waswrong—or at least severely understating the case—on two distinct but interconnectedlevels. For one thing, I discovered in one of those late-career texts, 1905’s “AsRegards Patriotism” (that’s not the whole piece, which also includes someengagement with the U.S. occupation of the Philippines that had pushedTwain so fully into the political realm, but it gives you a good sense ofit at least), perhaps the most relevant historical source for our contemporarydebates over the NFLanthem protests that I’ve yet encountered. And for another, even moreunexpected thing, I likewise discovered a very early-career piece of Twain’s,1866’s “What Have thePolice Been Doing?,” that resonates quite closely and stunningly with thecurrent debates over police brutality that are so intimately linked to thoseanthem protests and manyother contemporary conversations. Which is to say, across the whole arc ofhis long career Twain not only engaged with aspects of his contemporarysociety, but did so in ways that also offer specific and important contexts andlessons for ongoing issues and debates in 21st century America.

That last clauseis a tricky one, though. The latest of these Twain pieces were written wellmore than 100 years ago, and the police piece more than 150. Obviously thewhole of my public scholarly career is dedicated to the idea that learningabout the past can and should affect us in the present in a variety of ways,but is it really possible—or desirable—to see particular pieces from 100 to 150years ago as direct and relevant commentaries on our contemporary moment andsociety? Shouldn’t we instead take both them and their historical and socialcontexts on their own terms, complex as they already were? I would agree thatthat’s a primary move, and hope and believe that we began and dwelled in thatspecific analytical space for many of our class conversations. But it’s noteither-or, and we also consistently (in our shared work and in individualstudent responses and papers) linked both specific pieces like the ones aboveand overarching aspects of Twain’s writing and genres, career and perspective,society and contexts, to debates, issues, cultural works, and ideas in 2017. Speakingfor myself, I learned a great deal about both Twain and us through thosecontemporary links, and wish that many more Americans had the chance to readthese pieces and consider what Twain can tell and offer us.

LastCanonStudying tomorrow,

Ben

PS. Whatdo you think?

July 24, 2024: Revisiting the Canon: Nathaniel Hawthorne

[This pastweekend we celebrated ErnestHemingway’s 125th birthday. While I’ve been very glad to do mypart to diversifyour curricula way beyond the canon, I also believe there are still lotsof valuable AmericanStudies reasons to read canonical authors. So this weekI’ll make that case for Hemingway and four other canonized folks!]

On how twoover-taught texts can still be under-appreciated.

Unlikeyesterday’s subject James Fenimore Cooper, Nathaniel Hawthorne is an authorabout whom I’ve writtena great deal in this space, including an entire week-longseries inspired by The House of the Seven Gables (1851) and thispost on The Blithedale Romance (1852) among others. Yetinterestingly enough, I don’t think I’ve written much about the two Hawthornetexts with which American high school students are consistently confronted (andbased on what I’ve heard from those students when they arrive in collegeliterature courses, the encounter does feel very much like a confrontation tomost of them): his short story “YoungGoodman Brown” (1835) and his novel The ScarletLetter (1850). I’m not sure Hawthorne’s very 19th-century stylecan really speak to most 21st century teenagers, so I’m not here todisagree with their frustrations with his ubiquitous classroom presence. But atthe same time, I would argue that the frustrations can lead not only our highschool students but also and more importantly for this point all of the rest ofus (who might well carry such classroom challenges with us into later life) tomiss just how much both those texts have to offer.

Part ofwhat makes “Young Goodman Brown” well worth our time is connected with Houseof the Seven Gables, as both the story and the novel offer uniqueand thoughtful perspectives on one of our most frustrating and telling Americanhistories: the SalemWitch Trials. As a descendentof a Witch Trials judge, Hawthorne was particularly horrified by what had happenedin late 17th century Salem, and in “Young Goodman Brown” that personalinterest leads him to a nuanced engagement with how both individuals andcommunities can get to such extreme and destructive moments. But Hawthorne’smulti-layered story is just as interested in a profoundly universal theme, onealso explored in Bruce Springsteen’s deeply personal Tunnelof Love (1987) album: whether and how we can ever really know anotherperson, even (if not especially) the one to whom we’re married. Therelationship and arc of Young Goodman Brown and his new wife Faith representsone of the most tragic yet also one of the most human depictions of marriage inall of American literature, making this a story with meanings far beyond itshistorical setting and subject.

The ScarletLetter likewise features a pair of central romantic relationships, and I’dargue that both HesterPrynne’s marriage to Roger Chillingsworth and her affair with ArthurDimmesdale are similarly thoughtful and illuminating about the dynamics,limits, and possibilities of such relationships in all of our lives. But whilethose two male characters take up a great deal of space in Hawthorne’s novel(and while their evolving relationship with each other is complex and crucialin its own right), at the end of the day this book is all about itsfemale protagonist, and to my mind she’s one of the best in Americanliterary history (both on her own terms and as a mother to the somewhat lesswell-developed but still fascinating character of herdaughter Pearl). I don’t broadly disagree with the overarching argument of JudithFetterley’s The Resisting Reader (1978), her thesis that muchof canonical American literature reflects at best a limited male perspective onfemale identity. But I think Hawthorne’s most-canonized and best novel comprisesa compelling alternative to that trend.

NextCanonStudying tomorrow,

Ben

PS. Whatdo you think?

July 23, 2024: Revisiting the Canon: James Fenimore Cooper

[This pastweekend we celebrated ErnestHemingway’s 125th birthday. While I’ve been very glad to do mypart to diversify our curriculaway beyond the canon, I also believe there are still lots of valuableAmericanStudies reasons to read canonical authors. So this week I’ll make thatcase for Hemingway and four other canonized folks!]

On historicaland literary reasons to revisit a challenging early bestseller.

Given thefact that myDad’s first book was an extended analysis of James Fenimore Cooper’s careerand life, it’s somewhat shameful how little I’ve written about Cooper in mynearly 14 years of blogging (although given that my Dad’s analysis was based ona psychoanalytical interpretation of Cooper’s relationship with his father,maybe the absence is also a telling one!). But I have to admit that when itcomes to Cooper’s style, I tend to agree with Mark Twain (another of my Dad’s subjects—ah whata tangled web we AmericanStudiers weave!) and his thorough takedown in thesatirical essay “FenimoreCooper’s Literary Offenses” (1895). Style is always a matter of taste tosome degree, but Cooper’s is nonetheless unquestionably clunky from a 21stcentury perspective (even more so than it was to Twain’s late 19thcentury one). And at the very least, Cooper’s ponderous prose makes itdifficult for me to recommend him to either my students (I’ve occasionally inmy first-halfAmerican Lit Survey taught the one chapter from Last of the Mohicansthat’s included in the Norton Anthology of American Literature, but that’sit) or broader audiences.

At thesame time, no early 19th century author reads like one of ourcontemporaries, and of course I’d still make the case for the value of reading literarytexts from that period. A significant part of that value is what these worksand authors can help us see in our histories, and Cooper in particular has agreat deal to tell us about how our national myths developed in the decadesafter the Revolution and how those collective American stories engaged withNative American histories and communities. All of the so-called “LeatherstockingTales” in particular—the five novels that, taken together and read in storyrather than publication order, follow protagonist NattyBumppo from the 1740s through his death in the early 19thcentury—offer a strikingly broad and deep window into those historical themes,as Bumppo is both instrumental in the development of the American frontier (before,during, and after the Revolution) and closely tied to the Native Americancommunities for whom that “frontier” was much more of a slow-moving invasion.While Cooper never fully captures the Native American perspective on thosethemes, as I’ve argued his contemporarynovelist Catharine Maria Sedgwick briefly but importantly managed to, hisbooks unquestionably represent a significant literary and cultural layer tothose fraught histories.

We’ve gota name for works of fiction that represent histories, of course, and for one ofthe preeminent scholars of that genre Cooper was a truly towering figure: theRussian critic Georg Lukács writes about Cooper a great deal (far more than hedoes any other American writer, in fact) in his groundbreaking work TheHistorical Novel (1955). Lukács traces the genre’s origins to theEnglish novelist Sir Walter Scott,and sees Cooper (as Cooperlikewise saw himself) as Scott’s American heir and Natty Bumppo as a closeparallel to Scott’s most famous protagonist EdwardWaverly. And even for folks who aren’t the slightest bit interested ineither Georg Lukács or Walter Scott, I’d argue that we all remain fascinated bythe genre of historical fiction, as illustrated for example by two of the year’smost popular TV shows, Shōgun and Bridgerton. No American author fromany period has been more interested in exploring how fiction can represent historiesthan was James Fenimore Cooper, and so for literary and cultural as well ashistorical reasons I believe it’s well worth wading into that challengingprose.

NextCanonStudying tomorrow,

Ben

PS. Whatdo you think?

July 22, 2024: Revisiting the Canon: Ernest Hemingway

[This pastweekend we celebrated ErnestHemingway’s 125th birthday. While I’ve been very glad to do mypart to diversify our curriculaway beyond the canon, I also believe there are still lots of valuableAmericanStudies reasons to read canonical authors. So this week I’ll make thatcase for Hemingway and four other canonized folks!]

ThreeHemingway short stories that remind us of both his genius and his relevance.

1)     “AClean, Well-Lighted Place” (1933): I said most of what I’d want to sayabout this stunning story in thispost more than a decade ago. Here I’ll add that the publication date istelling—by 1933 the success of novels like The Sun Also Rises (1926) andAFarewell to Arms (1929) had fully established Hemingway’s literarycred, but he was still crafting some of the era’s most perfect short stories.

2)     “BigTwo-Hearted River” (1925): Before those novels, Hemingway began his careerwith the masterful short story cycle InOur Time (1925), a book that grapples with the effects of war and itstraumas just as potently as does the more famous (and also great) TheThings They Carried. “Big Two-Hearted River,” the book’s concludingstory, works best as part of that cycle; but even on its own terms, it’s astrikingly beautiful story that exemplifies Hemingway’s “iceberg theory.”

3)     “Hillslike White Elephants” (1927): “Hills” is the Hemingway story that reallyputs this post and week’s thesis to the test, as it’s so thoroughly canonizedthat virtually every high school student reads it at some point (it’s one ofthe couple texts I teach that I can assume almost every student of mine haspreviously encountered). But here’s the thing—I’ve read literally hundreds ofpapers on “Hills” over the years, and I’m still seeing new layers thanks tothat student work. It’s a formally unique work that challenges ourunderstanding of what a short story is and does, yet at the same time opens upsome of our most familiar and shared themes of relationships, communication,identity, and more. I don’t know that short stories get better, and I don’tthink there’s a better case for still reading Hemingway’s.

NextCanonStudying tomorrow,

Ben

PS. Whatdo you think?

July 20-21, 2024: ElvisStudying: Representing the King

[July 19thwas a doubly significantday for Elvis Presley: on July 19, 1954, his debut single wasreleased; and on July 19, 1977, what would be his final album dropped. So thisweek I’ve AmericanStudied a handful of layers to the Elvis mythos, leading upto this special post on cultural representations of Presley!]

On quick takeawaysfrom just a handful of the literally countless cultural depictions of Elvis.

1)     Andy Warhol: It can be difficult, from our2024 vantage point, to really understand the cultural significance of Warholand his pop art. But inthe 1960s no single figure shaped American popular culture—or at the very leastits representations of and relationship to celebrity—more than Warhol, and hepainted no less than ten “silkscreens”of Elvis, with 1963’s Double Elvis perhapsthe most iconic.

2)     The Twilight Zone: “The Once and Future King,”the first episode of the second (1986-87) season of the 1980s revival of TheTwilight Zone, tells the story of an Elvis impersonator who travels back intime to meet the real King. By far the most interesting thing about thisepisode from a 2024 perspective is that it was written by none other than George R.R.Martin! But it also reflects the King’s towering cultural presence a decadeafter his death.

3)     Bubba Ho-Tep: In this 2002 comic horror film,Bruce Campbell plays a nursing home resident who claims to be Elvis Presley,having in this telling switched places with an Elvis impersonator who was in theone who died in 1977. And that’s about the fifth least-weird thing in thisfilm, which also stars Ossie Davis as a Black man who claims to be John F.Kennedy and which eventually teams the two up to fight an undead Egyptianmummy. By the 21st century, that is, all things Elvis weregetting pretty strange.

4)     Fallout: New Vegas: I don’twant to overstate the presence of Elvis in this post-apocalyptic 2010 videogame, but on the other hand: the game features a group of roving bandits knownas “The Kings”because they found an abandoned Elvis Impersonator school and make its costumesand other materials their own. But apparently Presley’s name has been lost tothe ravages of time, so they only know him as “The King,” a striking commentaryon how a real figure can become his iconic image.

5)     Recent Biopics: I didn’t see Baz Luhrmann’s 2022 film Elvis,so I can’t say too much about its depiction of Presley, but it’s interesting tonote that AustinButler dedicated himself so fully to his own impersonation of the King thathe found himself unable to stop talking like him when filming was complete. Butmore interesting still, for this not-yet-viewer, is Sofia Coppola’s 2023 film Priscilla,perhaps the first cultural work to focus on Presley’s wife (played by CaileeSpaeny, with Jacob Elordi’sperformance as Elvis as a supporting character). If we’re going to keepElvis present in our pop culture going forward, it’s long past time to broaden whoas well as how we think about him.

Nextseries starts Monday,

Ben

PS. Whatdo you think? Other takes on Elvis?

July 19, 2024: ElvisStudying: First and Last

[July 19thwas a doubly significantday for Elvis Presley: on July 19, 1954, his debut single wasreleased; and on July 19, 1977, what would be his final album dropped. So thisweek I’ll AmericanStudy a handful of layers to the Elvis mythos, leading up toa special post on cultural representations of Presley!]

On how we canunderstand the profound changes Elvis underwent, and why they’re not the wholestory.

It’sobviously coincidental but still quite striking that July 19th soclearly marks both the beginning and the end of Elvis Presley’s recording career.By July 1954 the 19-year-old Presley had been unsuccessfully trying to releaserecords with Sam Phillips’ MemphisRecording Service (the predecessor to his hugely influential Sun Recordslabel) for about six months; but when his version of Arthur Crudup’s 1946 bluessong “That’s All Right” drew the attention of local radio DJ DeweyPhillips (no relation to Sam), Presley was finally able to put out a singleon July 19th, with the slightly retitled “That’s Alright (Mama)”on the A-side and Presley’scover of Bill Monroe’s “Blue Moon of Kentucky” onthe B-side. And in July 1977, Presley put out his final album, MoodyBlue, a compilation of live tracks and various recordings from hisfinal studio sessions in February and October 1976 (including the hit title track which hadbeen first recorded at Graceland in February 1976); less than a month after thealbum’s release Presleywould pass away at the tragically young age of 42, and the album would go onto be certified Gold and then Platinum by September.

It takesnothing away from the genuine tragedy of that very early passing to note justhow much had changed for Elvis between these two July 19ths just over twodecades apart. When Dewey Phillips interviewedPresley in July 1954, he had to ask him what high school he attended inorder to communicate to the radio audience that this young artist whom they obviouslycould not see and knew less than nothing about was white; when Elvis died in July1977, he was arguably one of themost recognizable as well as one of the most famous people in the world. Thatfame had begun to develop relatively quickly—Presley bought hisfirst home in Memphis in 1956, but fans began to congregate outside it soconsistently that the neighbors became annoyed and he purchased the more isolatedand difficult to access Graceland mansion less than a year later. His fame onlygrew from there, and would remain an inescapable presence until the literallast hours of his life, as illustrated by afamous paparazzi photo taken upon Presley’s return to Graceland aftermidnight on the day he died, August 16th, 1977. (And of course hisfame endured long after his passing, as reflected by the persistentrumors of Elvis sightings across the subsequent decades.)

Yetdespite those unquestionable and in some ways unfathomable changes between 1954and 1977, I believe these two July 19th releases can also remind usof some unchanging aspects of Presley’s career in music (which, as Tuesday’spost on his films illustrates, was not his only career, but was by far his mostinfluential one). While he apparently contributed some ideas to the productionof a few songs here and there (getting the occasional andcontroversial collaboration credits as a result), Presley nevertruly wrote a song, meaning that all of his releases were at leastperformances of others’ songs if not outright covers (as was the case with bothhis first single and a number of songs from his last album). To be clear, thatdoesn’t necessarily mean he “stole” others’ music (as recentnarratives have sometimes put it)—as I’ve writtenmultiple times in this space, covers were a ubiquitous if not indeed definingpresence in the earlydecades of rock ‘n roll. But it does mean that Elvis was always first andforemost a performer, gaining popularity and success and fame for his iconicsuch performances and all the layers of identity that they embodied (literallyand otherwise), rather than for his own creative output. Indeed, he maywell have been the 20th century’s mostsuccessful performer, a title for which he was at least competitive fromhis first release to his last.

Specialpost this weekend,

Ben

PS. Whatdo you think? Other takes on Elvis?