Benjamin A. Railton's Blog, page 39

July 18, 2024: ElvisStudying: The Presidential Medal of Freedom

[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 theMedal of Freedom as a unifying occasion or a partisan instrument.

Firstthings first: I’m on record, in thisspace and most everywhere else, as Bruce Springsteen’s biggest fan; andI’m also on record in this space as significantly less of afan of Elvis Presley. On that latter point, Bruce and I disagree veryfully—he famously jumped thewall at Graceland while on tour in 1976 in an attempt to meethis idol; and Bruce has recorded no less than (and probably many more than) a dozencovers of songs by the artist he has called one of his greatest inspirationssince he first saw Elvis’s controversial performance on the EdSullivan show. I promise (Bruce, myself, you all) to keep an open mind and keepgiving Elvis the old college try, but in any case this post isn’t about the twoartists themselves; it’s about how Barack Obama’s 2016 Presidential Medal ofFreedom tribute to Bruce Springsteen and Donald Trump’s 2018 Medal tribute toElvis Presley (posthumously, of course) reveal (as does most everything elseabout the two presidents) two distinct and fundamentally opposed visions ofwhat something like the Medal of Freedom means, for the president and for thenation.

At the November2016 ceremony honoring Springsteen and 20 others, President Obama said of theMedal that “it’s a tribute to the idea that all of us, no matter where we comefrom, have the opportunity to change this country for the better….These 21individuals have helped push America forward, inspiring millions of peoplearound the world along the way.” About Springsteen more specifically, he added,“The stories he has told, in lyrics and epic live concert performances, havehelped shape American music and have challenged us to realize the Americandream.” As has so often been the case with Obama’s speeches and publicstatements, his use of first-person plural pronouns here is crucial,establishing the medal and occasion as a collective expression and reflection (andamplification) of that communal experience and identity. That choice purposefullydownplays both Obama’s own individual action (despite of course being thepresident giving the Presidential Medal) and the larger 21st centurynarrative of a divided America whose citizens might or might not all celebratesuch figures (while it boggles my mind that anyone wouldn’t celebrate Bruce,there’s no doubt he has becomeincreasingly linked to progressive politiciansand causes).

WhileElvis Presley has at times been associated with the (overstated,I’ve argued) narrative of white artists capitalizing on black music, it wouldnonetheless be easy and appropriate to present him with a posthumous Medal ofFreedom in much the same unifying terms. But it will come as no surprise toanyone who has been alive and awake for the last five years that PresidentTrump did not talk about Elvis in that way shortly afterawarding him that November 2018 medal. In contrast with Obama’s “we,” Trumplinked Elvis to himself, claiming that he didn’t want to sound “very conceited”but noting that, “other than the blond hair, when I was growingup they said I looked like Elvis. Can you believe it? I always consideredthat a great compliment.” And he went on to connect Elvis to one of themoment’s most divisive issues, that of theso-called “migrant caravan” making its way to the Mexican Americanborder; “They're not going to put in Elvis in there,” he stated, going out ofhis way to differentiate the iconic American artist from a community he soughttime and again to define as a foreign threat to the U.S. There are literallycountless ways we could trace the changes and gaps between 2016/Obama and2018/Trump, but their frames for these two rock ‘n roll medals do the tricknicely.

LastElvisStudying tomorrow,

Ben

PS. Whatdo you think? Other takes on Elvis?

July 17, 2024: ElvisStudying: Graceland

[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 mythic façades,the realities behind them, and a third way to look at Elvis’historic home.

In herbook Graceland:Going Home with Elvis (1996), scholar Karal Ann Marling writes that Gracelandis “a Technicolor illusion. The façade is Gone with the Wind all the way.The den in the back is Mogambo with a hint of Blue Hawaii. Livingin Graceland was like living on a Hollywood backlot, where patches of tropicalscenery alternated with the blackened ruins of antebellum Atlanta.” I think it’squite nicely telling that Marling references not actual Southern plantationsand other interconnected settings (such as Mogambo’s Africa) but cultural representationsof them, and specifically cinematic representations, including not just specificfilms but an overarching, mid-20th century technological innovationlike Technicolor. As I traced in yesterday’s post, Elvis had only just begunhis film acting career when he purchasedGraceland in March 1957, but it seems clear that he (or at least hisdesigners and team, but likely with his input and perspective as well) workedhard from then on to turn the house into a cultural and cinematic text in itsown right, one that echoed both Southern and global tropes that were equally famousand fraught.

While hemay have and likely did make such changes (especially to interior spaces likethe famous JungleRoom) during the two decades that he and his family lived in Graceland,however, Elvis did not in any sense build it from scratch—it was an existing homeas well as property that he purchased. The property and the name Graceland bothlong predated the mansion—in the late 19th century the land belongedto the well-known Memphis printerStephen C. Toof, who named the site Graceland after his daughter. AfterGrace inherited it from him upon his 1894 death, in the early 20thcentury her nieceRuth Moore inherited the land from Grace, and in 1939 Ruth and her husbandThomas Moore commissioned the architects Max Furbringerand Merrill Ehrman to build a 10,000 square foot Colonial Revival stylemansion. That style alone reminds us that the Moores too were participating ina cultural project driven as much by narratives and nostalgia as by any contemporaryrealities, and thus that Graceland featured those layers already by the timeElvis acquired it. But nonetheless, it’s worth being clear that his $102,500 purchasewas of an existing home in every sense, one that he built upon but (like everyother part of his career) did not himself invent.

As Iimagine every post in this series will exemplify in its own ways, though, there’snothing in Elvis’ life nor his legacy that isn’t intertwined with thedevelopment of the collective mythos around the man, and that’s unquestionablythe case when it comes to Graceland as well. Perhaps the most striking exampleof turning Graceland into a holy site for this sanctified American icon is theliteral pilgrimage to the place, an annual procession known as Elvis Week that takesits pilgrims to and through the home and past his grave (along with other sitessuch as theElvis Mass at the city’s St. Paul’s Church). And no artist or text has summedup this collective phenomenon better than Paul Simon in the chorus of his song “Graceland” (1986): “I’mgoing to Graceland, Graceland/Memphis, Tennessee/I’m going to Graceland/Poorboys and pilgrims with families/And we are going to Graceland.” In the song’sfinal verse, he adds, “Maybe I’ve a reason to believe/We all will bereceived/in Graceland,” and I would use this idea to link the collective visionof the place to Elvis’ own—that is, perhaps his own mythic reimaginingslikewise sought to turn a real place into a sacred shrine, to the ideas ofAmerica that he was also always seeking.

NextElvisStudying tomorrow,

Ben

PS. Whatdo you think? Other takes on Elvis?

July 16, 2024: ElvisStudying: Elvis Films

[July 19thwas a doubly significantday for Elvis Presley: on July 19, 1954, his debut single was released; andon July 19, 1977, what would be his final album dropped. So this week I’llAmericanStudy a handful of layers to the Elvis mythos, leading up to a specialpost on cultural representations of Presley!]

OnAmericanStudies takeaways from three stages in Presley’s iconic film career.

1)     Love Me Tender (1956): Justtwo years after his first single dropped, and a couple months before the famouslyscandalous Ed Sullivan Show performance, Presley made his film debut in thismusical Western. Although the film was named after Presley’s ballad (whichhad been released in August 1956, and a performance of which was included inthe film), he didn’t receive top billing, reflecting his far-from-establishedconnection to the movie business in this very early moment. But by far the mostprominent aspect of the film (SPOILERS) was that Presley’s character is killedin its climactic shootout, a storytelling choice that literally led to a fan protestat the film’s premiere and a subsequent re-releasewith an alternate ending. Even in his film debut, Elvis was causing a commotion.

2)     A Billion 1960s Films: Okay, not a billion,but: every year between 1962 and 1969 Presley starred in three films, for atotal of 24 films released in that period (with another two each in 1960 and1961, so 28 total in the decade). I know there were a lot more films being madeand released in general in that era than in our 21st century moment(and that they took much shorter to make than do today’s), but it’s hard for meto believe any major performer appeared in more 1960s films than that. And asyou might expect, quantity did not necessarily lead to quality, to the pointthat, according to his wife Priscilla’s 1985 memoirElvis and Me, Elvis was quite miserable with his film career’sdimishing returns, believing for example that 1967’sClambake represented a career low.

3)     Charro! and Change of Habit (both1969): Fortunately, Elvis was a big enough star that we had able to help changethat narrative, and he did so especially with two of his final three dramaticfilm performances (along with the still-more-perfunctory The Trouble with Girlsfrom the same year). Charro!was another Western and not dramatically different from any of his othersin that genre, but importantly was the only film in which Elvis did not sing onscreen, reflecting his desire to develop his acting talents and career (as, perhaps,does his character’s beard, the only in his entire filmography). And he did so evenmore overtly and successfully in his final dramatic role in Change of Habit, inwhich Elvis plays inner-city doctor (!) John Carpenter alongside Mary Tyler Moore (!!) asa nun who becomes his love interest (!!!). As with so many things Elvis Presley,it would have been very interesting to see where film career might have gonefrom here if not for his tragic death a few years later.

NextElvisStudying tomorrow,

Ben

PS. Whatdo you think? Other takes on Elvis?

July 15, 2024: ElvisStudying: Elvis and Sinatra

[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 thedifferences between influential and interesting, and why even the former can beproblematic.

It seemsto me that you can’t tell the story of American popular music in the 20thcentury—and thus the story of American popular music period—withoutincluding Frank Sinatra and Elvis Presley inprominent roles. Indeed, given each man’s forays into acting, entrepreneurship, andother cultural and social arenas, I’m notsure you could leave them out of a broader 20th century history ofAmerica either. In their own ways, and in their own particular, most successfulperiods (Sinatra’s career extended well into Presley’s, of course, but he wasat his most successful in its first couple decades, between 1935 and about1955; Presley rose to prominence in the mid-1950s and was at his peak from thenuntil about 1970), the two artists dominatedtheir respective musical genres time and again, leavinglegacies that extend well beyond record sales or awards (although both areamong the mostsuccessful artists of all time as measuredin those ways as well).

So Iwouldn’t necessarily argue with definitions of Sinatra and Elvis as among themost influential musical artists of all time (although I might, in a moment,argue that point too). But influential isn’t the same as interesting, and onthat score both artists fall short for me. Partly that’s just about taste andhow there’s, y’know, no accounting for it (degustibus, non est disputandum, as our Roman friends knew); I’m not a bigfan of either crooners or rockabilly, and thus likely outside of the idealaudience for either man’s biggest hits or signature styles. But my point hereisn’t simply about my personal tastes, which I don’t expect are hugelyinteresting either—I’m thinking as well about the nature of the men’smainstream popularity and prominence. Despite the unquestionable (if, inretrospect, very silly) controversyover Presley’s hips, that is, I would argue that both mensucceeded as consistently as they did because they were largelyunobjectionable, hitting cultural sweet spots with regularity in a way thatdoesn’t seem as interesting as artists who push the envelope or challengenorms.

Moreover,I’m not sure that describing these two artists as influential is entirelyjustified either. After all, a significant percentageof both men’s songs were written byother songwriters or were covers of other artists; clearlytheir stunning voices and signature styles played a prominent role in makingthe songs as successful as they were, but I don’t know that simply singing andperforming someone else’s songs qualifies an artist as influential. To beclear, I’m not trying to rehash the old argument about Presley exploitingAfrican American music; that issue is part of the Elvis story to be sure, butthe truth (as I argued at length in Monday’s post) is that a great deal ofearly rock and roll, if not indeed the entire genre, crossed racial andcultural boundaries. Instead, I’m simply trying to differentiate between whatwe might call performers and artists, and to argue that those whom we wouldlocate in the former category (such as two men whose most consistent successeswere as performers singing others’ words, or similarly as actors recitingothers’ lines) might be more important than they were influential orinteresting.

NextElvisStudying tomorrow,

Ben

PS. Whatdo you think? Other takes on Elvis?

July 13-14, 2024: Found Footage Stories: The Blair Witch Project

[25 yearsago this weekend, The BlairWitch Project was released in theaters. Blair is one of the most prominentand successful examples of a longstanding genre, the found footagestory, so this week I’ve AmericanStudied a handful of such examples, leading upto this weekend post on what Blair can tell us a quarter-century later!]

On the groundbreakingfilm’s most obvious legacy, and two other compelling ways it foreshadowed our moment.

As I hopethis week’s series has proven quite definitively, the found footage genre was avery longstanding and well-established one in American culture by the late 20thcentury. Yet at the same time, there’s no arguing with the ways in which the hugelysuccessful film The Blair Witch Project (1999) revitalized thatgenre and createdan entire subgenre of horror films (about which I wrote in yesterday’s post).For an indie (to put it mildly) film with a$60,000 budget (I didn’t forget any 0s, that’s really sixty thousand) tobecome the 10th highest-grossing release of 1999 (grossing nearly $250 millionworldwide) was a cinematic Cinderella story the likes of which we rarelysee, and that striking success led not just to a plethora of imitators but also,again, an entirely new subgenre within the already broad and deep genre of filmhorror. If that subgenre has perhaps run its course to a degree 25 years later,that shouldn’t lead us to minimize Blair Witch’s transformative effects.

Like most anycultural work, of course, Blair Witch has multiple things going on, andI would say in at least two other ways it likewise foreshadowed the quarter-centurysince its release (perhaps more as a reflection than a direct influence, but nonetheless).The more obvious one has to do with theviral marketing campaign that helped make Blair Witch such a hit,and that depended entirely on a thoroughgoing blurring of the lines betweenfiction and reality. The filmmakers went to extreme lengths to convinceaudiences that their found footage was documentary rather than fiction,including keeping theirthree main actors hidden to suggest that they really had died at the handsof the titular witch. Obviously they planned to reveal the truth at some point(and did so not long after the film’s release); but at the same time, thecampaign depended on genuinely fooling as much of the audience as possible foras long as possible, and thus on making it as difficult as possible for folksto distinguish fact from fiction. I’m not sure any trend has become moredominant in our 21st century moment than such confusion—“alternativefacts,” anyone?—nor that any late 20th century moment foreshadowedit more than Blair Witch’s marketing campign.

That’s abit of a downer point, I know, so I’ll end this post and series on a differentand hopefully more inspiring note. By the late 20th century, itwould have been easy to say that a great deal of the mystery and magic of theworld was disappearing, or at the very least that ongoing and deepening trendslike the rise of the internet and the ubiquity of cell phones were making itharder and harder not to feel like we knew what was out there, and thus to feelcynical and even jaded about the possibility of finding wonder in our world(rather than, for example, in escaping into fantastical stories). There arevarious ways that cultural works can challenge such trends, and certainly manyof them are less dark or disturbing than horror films about murderous creatureshaunting the most ordinary of woods. But any work and genre that can portraythose weird and supernatural layers to our world—and that can even convinceaudiences that they are genuinely present in their own world—offers acompelling reminder that mystery and magic remain with us.

Nextseries starts Monday,

Ben

PS. Whatdo you think? Other example of the genre you’d highlight?

July 12, 2024: Found Footage Stories: Horror Films

[25 yearsago this coming weekend, The BlairWitch Project was released in theaters. Blair is one of the most prominentand successful examples of a longstanding genre, the found footagestory, so this week I’ll AmericanStudy a handful of such examples, leading upto a weekend post on what Blair can tell us a quarter-century later!]

On thelongstanding appeal, and the limits, of faux-realism.

In Monday’spost on Washington Irving’s History of New York (1809), I noted how interestinglyIrving’s book foreshadows (in form, although clearly not in genre or tone)early 21st century found footage texts such as tomorrow’s focus, TheBlair Witch Project (1999),and Wednesday’s text, MarkDanielewksi’s House of Leaves (2000).There are obviously just universal and longstanding appeals of such works,among which I would include the possibility that we are encountering somethinggenuine (always a challenge to find anywhere, including in creative art), theblurring of boundariesbetween fact and fiction (and the resulting discomfort, in the mostprovocative sense of the term, that such blurring produces), and the undeniablethrill of following along in the processes of making and finding such texts(ie, of putting ourselves in the shoes of both those who filmed and those who“found” Blair Witch’s footage, ofboth House’s creators and its initialreaders, and so on).

If foundfootage has been an artistic element for centuries, though, it has nonethelessreached new levelsof popularity and ubiquity in recent years. In film alone we have seenfound footage monstermovies, found footage superhero films, foundfootage alien invasiondramas, and, most consistently and most relevantly for a series inspiredby Blair Witch, the exploding genre of found footage horror films. Thelatter category includes, to name only a fraction of the entrants (and onlysome of those that have thus far spawned sequels), the Paranormal Activity series,the [Rec] series, the GraveEncounters series, and the Last Exorcism series.Each of those series fits into a different sub-genre or niche within the horrorgenre, but all rely on the same found footage trope, and thus all to my mindtap into some of those same aforementioned appeals. (With, perhaps, the addedbonus of being able to yell atstupid horror movie characters whom we can imagine are actualpeople.)

When it’sdone well, as I would argue it most definitely was in Blair Witch, found footage undoubtedly and potently taps into allthose appealing qualities. But I think it has a significant limitation, and notjust that it’s become far too frequently used (and certainly not the blurringof fact and fiction, for whichI’m entirely on board). To me, the central problem with foundfootage works of art is that they too often tend, by design, to eschew artisticchoices and complexity—after all, their amateur filmmaker characters likelyweren’t concerned with such artistic elements (especially not once the crapstarting hitting the fan), and so their actual filmmakers often seem not to beeither. But while we might well look to works of art for the kinds of appealingelements that found footage features, we also look to them to be artistic, tobe carefully and effectively designed as something more than—or at leastsomething other than—the reality with which we’re surrounded. Great foundfootage works, that is, help us escape into their artistic alternatereality—they don’t simply remind us of our own.

Specialpost this weekend,

Ben

PS. Whatdo you think? Other example of the genre you’d highlight?

July 11, 2024: Found Footage Stories: Illuminae

[25 yearsago this coming weekend, The BlairWitch Project was released in theaters. Blair is one of the most prominentand successful examples of a longstanding genre, the found footagestory, so this week I’ll AmericanStudy a handful of such examples, leading upto a weekend post on what Blair can tell us a quarter-century later!]

On twoways to contextualize a bestselling dystopian YA series.

I tryalways to be honest with y’all, dear readers, and so I have to start this postby noting that I have not yet had the chance to read Amie Kaufman and Jay Kristoff’sIlluminae(2015), nor its two sequels Gemina(2016) and Obsidio(2018). (My younger son is a huge fan of dystopian YA stories, so I promise wewill try to rectify this oversight ASAP.) In lieu of pretending to have moreknowledge about the book’s and series’ specifics than I do, I’ll ask you to learna bit more just as I did, through this Wikipedia entry, andthen come on back for some further AmericanStudying thoughts.

Welcomeback! Even if you don’t have the same level of expertise about YA dystopiasthat being a Dad to an obsessed son has granted me, you’re likely aware that afocus on both teenage protagonists generally (often, although not always, teenagegirl protagonists) and their teenage romances specifically is pretty ubiquitousin the genre, and so the least surprising clause in that Wikipedia description islikely “the collective story of teenage colonist Kady Grant and her boyfriendEzra Mason.” By 2015 those character types and tropes had already been so well establishedthat any author entering the genre would need to find a variation in order tostand out from the Hunger Games and Divergents and MazeRunners of the world, and it seems that Kaufman and Kristoff hit on foundfootage as their twist, using (again quoting Wikipedia) “classified reports,censored emails, camera transcriptions, and interviews” to fill in the story ofKady and Ezra and their journey through a sci fi dystopian world.

To me themost interesting clause in that particular Wikipedia sentence is actually thefinal one, right after that list of found footage types: “all of which werecurated for a court case against the main antagonist company, BeiTech.” Anotherprominent subgenre of dystopian stories features nefarious corporations andtheir destructive effects on their worlds, with the Weyland-Yutanicorporation from the Alien franchise as a particularly clear case inpoint. But I’m not familiar with any other cultural works that tell that storythrough found footage that documents the corporation’s effects after the fact,and certainly not one that creates such a logical rationale for the existenceof the found footage as evidence for a trial. As all of this week’s posts illustrate,the question of how and why the audience has access to the found footage is aconsistent conundrum faced by the genre, and Kaufman and Kristoff found astrikingly successful and elegant answer in their found footage trilogy.

Last foundfootage studying tomorrow,

Ben

PS. Whatdo you think? Other example of the genre you’d highlight?

July 10, 2024: Found Footage Stories: House of Leaves

[25 yearsago this coming weekend, TheBlair Witch Project was releasedin theaters. Blair is one of the most prominentand successful examples of a longstanding genre, the found footage story,so this week I’ll AmericanStudy a handful of such examples, leading up to aweekend post on what Blair can tell us a quarter-century later!]

On the limitations and the possibilities of scary stories.

I don’t have any problem thinking ofgenre fiction and scholarly conversations about literature in the sameballpark, or even on the same base—I’m the guy who wrote one of my earliestposts here about RossMacDonald’s hardboiled detective novels, and am also the guy who created an Introductionto Science Fiction and Fantasy class and has had an unabashedly good timeteaching it six times now (including thelatest section this past semester). When you get right down to it, it canbe pretty difficult to parse out what qualifies as genre fiction and whatdoesn’t in any case—Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom! (1936)owes a lot to detective fiction, Twain’s Connecticut Yankee (1889) is in many ways a Jules Verne-esque timetravel sci fi novel, and, as critic DavidReynolds has convincingly argued, Hawthorne’s Scarlet Letter (1850) has a great deal in common with contemporarypotboiler works of religion, romance, and scandal. So while I’m not averse tomaking judgment calls about whether a particular text is worth extendedattention (in a class, in scholarly work, etc), I try not to base those callson whether it’s been put in a particular generic box or not.

And yet, I’ll admit that I have a bitof an analytical prejudice against works whose primary purpose—or one of themat least—is to scare their audiences. I suppose it has always seemed to me thata desire to frighten, while very much a valid and complex formal and stylisticgoal—and one brought to the height of perfection I’d say by Edgar Allan Poe,whose every choice and detail in a story like “The Fall of the House of Usher” (1839)contributes to its scariness, making it a perfect example of his theory ofthe unity of effect—, is nonetheless a desire that requires anaudience to turn off their analytical skills, to give in entirely to primalresponses that, while not insignificant, are to my mind a bit more passive thanideal. (I’d compare this for example to humor, which certainly does tap intoprimal responses as well but which nonetheless can still ask an audience tothink as well as laugh.) This isn’t necessarily the case when it comes toWeirdTale kinds of scares, ones that connect an audience to deeply unfamiliar worlds andforce them to imagine what they might entail and affect; but the moremainstream horror, tales of vampires and zombies and ghosts and the like, doesoften ask an audience mainly to react in terror to the artist’s and text’smanipulations.

But like any reasonable person whorecognizes his or her prejudices, I’d like to challenge and eventuallyundermine this perspective of mine, and a text that has very much helped me tobegin doing so in this case is MarkDanielewski’s postmodern horror novel House of Leaves (2000). Postmodern is a must-useadjective in any description of Danielewski’s novel, which features, amongother things, at least three distinct narrations and narrators (one of whomdoes much of his narrating in footnotes, and another who does the majority ofhis narrating in footnotes on thosefootnotes); pages with only a single word, located in a random location;elaborate use of colored type to signal and signify different (if vague andshifting) emphases; and a large number of invented scholarly works, fully andaccurately cited both parenthetically and in the aforementioned footnotes(alongside some actual works). Yet—and I know that scariness is a verysubjective thing, which is perhaps another reason why I have a hard timeanalyzing it, but nonetheless—the novel is also deeply, powerfully,successfully scary. And moving, for that matter—certainly to my mind the besthorror (and Poe would qualify here for sure) reveals and sympathizes withhumanity even as it threatens and destroys many of its human characters, andDanielewski’s novel does each of those things, to each character at each levelof story and narration, very fully and impressively. Yet I believe that thebook’s principal purpose, first and last, is to scare its readers, and for me,at least, it has done so, not only the first time I read it but the second andthird as well (another mark of the best horror I’d say).

So what?,you might ask. Well, for starters, you should check out House of Leaves, perhaps beginning with this fun and, yes, scary companion website. But forme, I suppose the ultimate lesson here is that the more I’m open to thepotential power and impressiveness of any work of literature (and art in anymedium), both emotionally and analytically, the more I can find the greatestworks, of our moment and every other one. Nothing scary about that! Next found footagestudying tomorrow,

Ben

PS. Whatdo you think? Other example of the genre you’d highlight?

July 9, 2024: Found Footage Stories: The “Introduction” to “Rip Van Winkle”

[25 yearsago this coming weekend, TheBlair Witch Project was releasedin theaters. Blair is one of the most prominentand successful examples of a longstanding genre, the found footage story,so this week I’ll AmericanStudy a handful of such examples, leading up to aweekend post on what Blair can tell us a quarter-century later!]

On a sillyand a serious layer to Washington Irving’s continued use of found footageframes.

If youhappened to miss yesterday’s post on Washington Irving’s way-ahead-of-its-time A History of New York, by Diedrich Knickerbocker (1809), I’ll ask you to check outthat post if you would, and then come on back here for further analysis of Irving’ssubsequent use of the fictional, found footage-style historian characterDiedrich Knickerbocker.

Welcome back! As I highlighted in that post, Irving continued to useKnickerbocker as a framing device for some of his short stories, most famouslyin the “Introduction” to “Rip VanWinkle” (1819; scroll down to find that Introduction). He did so most clearlyto add some of the same ironic humor to “Rip” that thoroughly defined the styleof History; of the three paragraphs in this short “Introduction,” both the secondand the third are largely there to feature such tongue-in-cheek lines as “Itschief merit is its scrupulous accuracy” and “it cannot do much harm to hismemory to say that his time might have been much better employed in weightierlabours.” Given the popularity of History that I discussed yesterday, it's safe to assume that Irving would haveexpected his readers to be familiar with that prior text and its style andtone, and thus that he included Knickerbocker as part of a short story like “Rip”in order to create some continuity across these different publications andgenres.

Yet if that were the only layer to or effect of this Introduction Iwouldn’t be writing about it in its own post for this week’s series, bothbecause it would be too similar to yesterday’s subject and because it justwouldn’t interest me all that much. Much more interesting, and I thinkgenuinely new to this use of Knickerbocker, is the Introduction’s firstparagraph and the way it defines history. “His historical researches,” Irvingwrites of his fictional historian, “did not lie so much among books as amongmen; for the former are lamentably scanty on his favorite topics; whereas hefound the old burghers, and still more their wives, rich in that legendary loreso invaluable to true history.” There are many ways to define the found footagegenre as a whole, but it seems to me that one consistent and central element isan attempt to present cultural works—and generally fictional ones—as representationsof “history,” of real events that took place. Which makes Irving’s Introductiona particularly interesting commentary on how both people and legends can be “truehistory” in a way that history books might not.

Next foundfootage studying tomorrow,

Ben

PS. Whatdo you think? Other example of the genre you’d highlight?

July 8, 2024: Found Footage Stories: History of New York

[25 yearsago this coming weekend, TheBlair Witch Project was releasedin theaters. Blair is one of the most prominentand successful examples of a longstanding genre, the found footage story,so this week I’ll AmericanStudy a handful of such examples, leading up to aweekend post on what Blair can tell us a quarter-century later!]

On the humorouscreation that was way, way ahead of its time.

An extensive and entirelystraight-faced viral media campaign, an elaborate hoax which creates afictional character (a curmudgeonly historian), passes him off as a realperson, and notifies the public that he has gone missing and is being sought. Aramping-up of that campaign as the release of said historian’s most extended(but of course entirely fictionalized) work (a history of his native state ofNew York) approaches, including equally fictional newspaper “responses” byother (fabricated) locals who have known the historian and have informationabout his whereabouts. And the deeply meta-textual and multi-level satire thatis the book itself, beginning with a straight-faced account by the (actual)author of finding said book “in the chamber” of the historian, and publishingit “in order to discharge certain debts he has left behind”; and continuinginto no less than three different prefaces To The Public, including one byanother fictional character (one of those who had published a newspaper notice)about his experiences with the fictional historian.

Sounds pretty postmodern, doesn’tit? Like a 21st-century literary equivalent to The Blair Witch Project (1999);like, in fact, one of the new century’s most inventive and postmodern novels, MarkDanielewski’s House of Leaves(2000). But the book I’m talking about was published over two centuries ago, in1809, and was authored (along with thewhole media hoax) by Washington Irving, a figure often associated insteadwith some of the Early Republic’s most genteel and Anglophile images and texts.Irving certainly deserves those associations in many ways, but a return to thisstriking first major book of his, A History of New York, by Diedrich Knickerbocker,can help us to see just how satirical and subversive our nation’s firstprofessional author (a somewhat debated but not inaccurate title) could be andoften was. And while the satire and subversion are most overt in the hoax andthe book’s equally fictional prefatory materials, I would argue that the wholeof the book comprises a more extended and in-depth, and certainly morethematically and methodologically significant, effort to satirize and subvertmany of his period’s conventions of history-writing and understandings of theworld. This effort begins with Book I’s Chapter I, “Containing Divers IngeniousTheories and Philosophic Speculations, Concerning the Creation and Populationof the World, as Connected with the History of New York,” and doesn’t let upthroughout the text’s seven Books and many centuries of world and localhistory.

Those satires and subversions canfeel somewhat directly pointed at other historians and writers, and reading thewhole of the History is thus, whilefun (in an 1809 kind of way), not necessarily crucial for large numbers of 21st-centuryAmericans. But Irving was not done with Knickerbocker in 1809, and one of thesubsequent stories that he attributes to the character, “Rip Van Winkle” (first publishedin an 1819 collection entitled The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon[another fictional character]), illustrates just how fully he could turn thatsatirical and subversive eye to more broadly and meaningfully Americansubjects. Much of “Rip” is just funny and silly, from its opening portrait ofRip’s extreme laziness and extremely hen-pecking wife to its folkloric,myth-making (literally, as it leads in the story to local myths aboutthunderstorms) central encounter with a dour Hendrick Hudson, his supernaturalbowling buddies, and the sleep-inducing potent potable that Rip imbibes intheir company. But Rip’s twenty-year nap coincides directly with the AmericanRevolution, so that the story’s images of one village and its society becomevery overtly (if with no one clear point or argument) symbolic of American lifebefore and after the Revolution’s shifts and transformations. I’ll leave it upto you—as I do with my students when I teach this story in my first-halfsurvey—to decide what you make of the story’s closing pages and images ofpost-Revolution America; in any case, Irving’s story represents one of theearliest literary attempts to grapple seriously with both the Revolution’seffects and meanings and, most relevantly for our own (and every) era, thenation that we were and are becoming through and after them.

Irving was oneof post-Revolutionary America’s first, and remains one of our most unique,literary voices, and was as the viral media hoax illustrates ahead of his timeas a self-promoter and multi-layered meta-textual writer, and there’s a gooddeal to be said for reading him for those reasons alone. But underneath thefictional narrators and fictional commentators and humorous jabs at mosteverything and everybody lies, especially in these early works, a commitment tochallenging and satirizing and reimagining some of our deepest beliefs andideas—a profoundly American project for sure. Next found footage studying tomorrow,

Ben

PS. Whatdo you think? Other example of the genre you’d highlight?