Benjamin A. Railton's Blog, page 409
August 14, 2012
August 14, 2012: Southern Sons
[To honor a week that began with my Dad’s birthday and includes my own, I’m featuring a series on fatherhood in American culture, history, and literature. This is the second in that series. Once again, the weekend’s post will be a crowd-sourced one, so please share your responses, ideas, thoughts, suggestions, and perspectives for that post!]
On the complex generational relationship that helps explain the Southern Renaissance.It’s easy enough, and certainly not inaccurate, to characterize the group of Southern intellectuals and writers who formed the vanguard of the 1920s and 30s Southern Renaissance as profoundly conservative, as rebelling against radical and future-driven national and international movements and trends such as modernism, urbanization, and (eventually) the New Deal. This was the group, after all, who called themselves first the Fugitivesand then the Agrarians, and whose collective writings culminated in the unquestionably conservative manifesto I’ll Take My Stand (1930). No American Studiers worthy of the name could fail to take such historical and cultural contexts into consideration when analyzing why these young men (mostly) and womencame together at this moment, and why they wrote and thought the things they did.Yet there are other kinds of contexts that also inform any and every writer’s (and person’s) identity, perspective, and works, of course, and I believe a biographical one is particularly important when it comes to analyzing the Southern Renaissance figures. They were born around the turn of the 20th century, which meant that their parents had been born, in most cases, just after the end of the Civil War; those parents were thus the children of both Civil War veterans and of the incredibly complex and fraught post-war period, the children of (among other things) both the Lost Cause and the New South. To take the Renaissance’s most enduring literary figure, for example: William Faulkner was born in 1897, to parents born in 1870 and 1871; his father Murry both tried to build the family’s railroad company and to carry on the legacy of his own grandfather, a writer and Civil War hero known as “The Old Colonel.” Is it any wonder, then, that young Quentin Compson is so obsessed with the voice and perspective of his father, Jason Compson, and of the family and Southern pasts about which he learns from Jason?If we move beyond Faulkner, and into the works of the Fugitive and Agrarian writers who even more overtly self-identified as part of the Renaissance, we likewise find works and characters centered on—obsessed with, even—the legacies of their fathers. Perhaps no work better exemplifies that trend than Allen Tate’shistorical and autobiographical novel The Fathers (1938), a text that engages in every tortured word with the legacies of the Civil War and its aftermath and of the familial and cultural issues raised therein. Far more ambiguous and complex, but perhaps even more telling of this father-centered trend, is Robert Penn Warren’s poem “Mortmain” (1960), a five-section elegy for Warren’s father; the first section is entitled “After Night Flight Son Reaches Bedside of Already Unconscious Father, Whose Right Hand Lifts in a Spasmodic Gesture, as Though Trying to Make Contact: 1955,” and while the subsequent four sections range far beyond that man and moment, they do so precisely to ground many other historical and cultural questions in that profoundly autobiographical starting point. As Warren’s life and career illustrate, the Southern Renaissance figures were not circumscribed by such generational relationships—but they were certainly influenced, and in many ways defined, by them.Next father-focused post tomorrow,BenPS. What do you think? Responses, ideas, or suggestions about fatherhood in America?8/14 Memory Day nominee: Ernest Thayer, the philosopher, journalist, and poetwhose most defining legacyis as the author of the definitive poetic tribute to America’s national pastime.
On the complex generational relationship that helps explain the Southern Renaissance.It’s easy enough, and certainly not inaccurate, to characterize the group of Southern intellectuals and writers who formed the vanguard of the 1920s and 30s Southern Renaissance as profoundly conservative, as rebelling against radical and future-driven national and international movements and trends such as modernism, urbanization, and (eventually) the New Deal. This was the group, after all, who called themselves first the Fugitivesand then the Agrarians, and whose collective writings culminated in the unquestionably conservative manifesto I’ll Take My Stand (1930). No American Studiers worthy of the name could fail to take such historical and cultural contexts into consideration when analyzing why these young men (mostly) and womencame together at this moment, and why they wrote and thought the things they did.Yet there are other kinds of contexts that also inform any and every writer’s (and person’s) identity, perspective, and works, of course, and I believe a biographical one is particularly important when it comes to analyzing the Southern Renaissance figures. They were born around the turn of the 20th century, which meant that their parents had been born, in most cases, just after the end of the Civil War; those parents were thus the children of both Civil War veterans and of the incredibly complex and fraught post-war period, the children of (among other things) both the Lost Cause and the New South. To take the Renaissance’s most enduring literary figure, for example: William Faulkner was born in 1897, to parents born in 1870 and 1871; his father Murry both tried to build the family’s railroad company and to carry on the legacy of his own grandfather, a writer and Civil War hero known as “The Old Colonel.” Is it any wonder, then, that young Quentin Compson is so obsessed with the voice and perspective of his father, Jason Compson, and of the family and Southern pasts about which he learns from Jason?If we move beyond Faulkner, and into the works of the Fugitive and Agrarian writers who even more overtly self-identified as part of the Renaissance, we likewise find works and characters centered on—obsessed with, even—the legacies of their fathers. Perhaps no work better exemplifies that trend than Allen Tate’shistorical and autobiographical novel The Fathers (1938), a text that engages in every tortured word with the legacies of the Civil War and its aftermath and of the familial and cultural issues raised therein. Far more ambiguous and complex, but perhaps even more telling of this father-centered trend, is Robert Penn Warren’s poem “Mortmain” (1960), a five-section elegy for Warren’s father; the first section is entitled “After Night Flight Son Reaches Bedside of Already Unconscious Father, Whose Right Hand Lifts in a Spasmodic Gesture, as Though Trying to Make Contact: 1955,” and while the subsequent four sections range far beyond that man and moment, they do so precisely to ground many other historical and cultural questions in that profoundly autobiographical starting point. As Warren’s life and career illustrate, the Southern Renaissance figures were not circumscribed by such generational relationships—but they were certainly influenced, and in many ways defined, by them.Next father-focused post tomorrow,BenPS. What do you think? Responses, ideas, or suggestions about fatherhood in America?8/14 Memory Day nominee: Ernest Thayer, the philosopher, journalist, and poetwhose most defining legacyis as the author of the definitive poetic tribute to America’s national pastime.
August 13, 2012
August 13, 2012: They Call Me Mr. Mom
[To honor a week that began with my Dad’s birthday and includes my own, I’m featuring a series on fatherhood in American culture, history, and literature. This is the first in that series. Once again, the weekend’s post will be a crowd-sourced one, so please share your responses, ideas, thoughts, suggestions, and perspectives for that post!]
On the ways in which we’ve come pretty far in the last few decades—and the ways in which we haven’t.As representative cultural documents go, I’m not sure you can find a more embarrassingly telling one than the Michael Keaton film Mr. Mom (1983). Fired from his job and forced to stay home while his wife becomes the family’s sole breadwinner, Keaton’s character proves entirely, comically inept at—as just that minute and a half long trailer illustrates—vacuuming, cooking, cleaning, grocery shopping, child care, and even disposing of diapers in the trash, among other things. Even the film’s title alone makes clear that the very idea of a married man performing “Mom’s” roles is a source of comedy, a nonsensical paradox that can be solved only by Keaton’s manic eyebrow wiggling. While of course the film could be read as part of the decade’s backlash against feminism, or as symbolizing cultural fears about what the presence of more women in the workforce might mean, it also clearly reveals that the simple idea of a dad performing household activities was nothing short of ludicrous to many Americans in the early 1980s.Much has changed in America in the three decades since that film’s release, of course, and one of the most striking such social changes has been the rise in the number of fathers who are identified as their children’s primary caregiver. Recent statistics for that trend can’t entirely be separated from the current recession, and thus from accidental situations and employment and role changes not unlike those in the movie. Yet I believe that the trend is also more long-term and intentional than that—my evidence is primarily anecdotal, but I can most definitely say that within the families of many friends and colleagues, and indeed across a high percentage of the families in my own generation with which I’m familiar, fathers are choosing to (at least) share evenly the duties of home and childraising and (in many cases, including my own) are because of circumstance, profession, and inclination taking on the majority of such duties. Call us Mr. Mom if you want—the title no longer carries the same humorous sting.And yet. In a variety of ways, cultural narratives seem not to have changed nearly so much. Virtually every page of Parents magazine is directed specifically at moms; there will usually be one article per issue by a dad for dads or the like, but otherwise, this ostensibly gender-neutral publication remains overtly and overwhelmingly focused on moms. The same is true for almost every TV commercial for products for kids: “Mom, if you’re looking to feed your kids healthier…,” and so on. And while I know that such choices are at least partly based on business and basic statistics—if as the above article argues 35% of dads are the primary caregiver, that still means the majority of primary caregivers and thus readers/customers are moms—there are other cultural signs as well. One of the much-hyped new fall TV shows, for example, is called Guys with Kids , a title and set of marketing images that seem to suggest that the very idea of a man with kids remains a source of comic ridiculousness. But at least the guys are plural, so maybe Mr. Mom is evolving a bit. If so, I’d say it’s time.Next father-focused post tomorrow,BenPS. What do you think? Responses, ideas, or suggestions about fatherhood in America?8/13 Memory Day nominees: A tie between two very different but equally interesting and influential 19th century women, Lucy Stone and Annie Oakley.
On the ways in which we’ve come pretty far in the last few decades—and the ways in which we haven’t.As representative cultural documents go, I’m not sure you can find a more embarrassingly telling one than the Michael Keaton film Mr. Mom (1983). Fired from his job and forced to stay home while his wife becomes the family’s sole breadwinner, Keaton’s character proves entirely, comically inept at—as just that minute and a half long trailer illustrates—vacuuming, cooking, cleaning, grocery shopping, child care, and even disposing of diapers in the trash, among other things. Even the film’s title alone makes clear that the very idea of a married man performing “Mom’s” roles is a source of comedy, a nonsensical paradox that can be solved only by Keaton’s manic eyebrow wiggling. While of course the film could be read as part of the decade’s backlash against feminism, or as symbolizing cultural fears about what the presence of more women in the workforce might mean, it also clearly reveals that the simple idea of a dad performing household activities was nothing short of ludicrous to many Americans in the early 1980s.Much has changed in America in the three decades since that film’s release, of course, and one of the most striking such social changes has been the rise in the number of fathers who are identified as their children’s primary caregiver. Recent statistics for that trend can’t entirely be separated from the current recession, and thus from accidental situations and employment and role changes not unlike those in the movie. Yet I believe that the trend is also more long-term and intentional than that—my evidence is primarily anecdotal, but I can most definitely say that within the families of many friends and colleagues, and indeed across a high percentage of the families in my own generation with which I’m familiar, fathers are choosing to (at least) share evenly the duties of home and childraising and (in many cases, including my own) are because of circumstance, profession, and inclination taking on the majority of such duties. Call us Mr. Mom if you want—the title no longer carries the same humorous sting.And yet. In a variety of ways, cultural narratives seem not to have changed nearly so much. Virtually every page of Parents magazine is directed specifically at moms; there will usually be one article per issue by a dad for dads or the like, but otherwise, this ostensibly gender-neutral publication remains overtly and overwhelmingly focused on moms. The same is true for almost every TV commercial for products for kids: “Mom, if you’re looking to feed your kids healthier…,” and so on. And while I know that such choices are at least partly based on business and basic statistics—if as the above article argues 35% of dads are the primary caregiver, that still means the majority of primary caregivers and thus readers/customers are moms—there are other cultural signs as well. One of the much-hyped new fall TV shows, for example, is called Guys with Kids , a title and set of marketing images that seem to suggest that the very idea of a man with kids remains a source of comic ridiculousness. But at least the guys are plural, so maybe Mr. Mom is evolving a bit. If so, I’d say it’s time.Next father-focused post tomorrow,BenPS. What do you think? Responses, ideas, or suggestions about fatherhood in America?8/13 Memory Day nominees: A tie between two very different but equally interesting and influential 19th century women, Lucy Stone and Annie Oakley.
August 12, 2012
August 12, 2012: Crowd-Sourcing Americans Abroad
[This week we’re hosting a Chinese exchange student as part of a program at the boys’ elementary school, so I thought I’d return the favor and focus in the week’s series on interesting representations of Americans abroad. This is the next crowd-sourced post, drawn from responses and suggestions from readers and other American Studiers. Add yours below!]
S. Thomas Summers responds to the satire and Twain post by noting that “Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels contains some biting satire as well.” Later in the week, he nominates American Werewolf in London as another horror film about naïve Americans abroad.Going back to a prior crowd-sourced post, on American Studies beach reads, Patricia Vandever (one of my high school English teachers and mentors!) highlights a couple with ties to this week’s series too: “ Abraham Verghese’s Cutting for Stone , which is initially set in Ethiopia and follows a medical family’s joys and disappointments–heart wrenching at times, but it’s the kind of novel that pains you to finish it. I also adore anything by Alexander McCall Smith. He has a new series out called Corduroy Mansions that is delightful.”And if I can add one more beach read nomination of my own, my most recently completed book and one of the first I’ve read for pleasure in far too long: Chad Harbach’s The Art of Fielding. Harbach’s book isn’t about Americans abroad, but it does owe a great deal to one of the greatest American novels and one that focuses on a community of Americans away from their homelands: Moby-Dick .Next series starts tomorrow!BenPS. Any other responses or thoughts on this topic? Representations of Americans abroad you’d highlight?8/12 Memory Day nominee: Cecil B. DeMille, one of America’s most significant and ground-breaking film directors, and a pop culture showman who combined P.T. Barnum with D.W. Griffith.
S. Thomas Summers responds to the satire and Twain post by noting that “Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels contains some biting satire as well.” Later in the week, he nominates American Werewolf in London as another horror film about naïve Americans abroad.Going back to a prior crowd-sourced post, on American Studies beach reads, Patricia Vandever (one of my high school English teachers and mentors!) highlights a couple with ties to this week’s series too: “ Abraham Verghese’s Cutting for Stone , which is initially set in Ethiopia and follows a medical family’s joys and disappointments–heart wrenching at times, but it’s the kind of novel that pains you to finish it. I also adore anything by Alexander McCall Smith. He has a new series out called Corduroy Mansions that is delightful.”And if I can add one more beach read nomination of my own, my most recently completed book and one of the first I’ve read for pleasure in far too long: Chad Harbach’s The Art of Fielding. Harbach’s book isn’t about Americans abroad, but it does owe a great deal to one of the greatest American novels and one that focuses on a community of Americans away from their homelands: Moby-Dick .Next series starts tomorrow!BenPS. Any other responses or thoughts on this topic? Representations of Americans abroad you’d highlight?8/12 Memory Day nominee: Cecil B. DeMille, one of America’s most significant and ground-breaking film directors, and a pop culture showman who combined P.T. Barnum with D.W. Griffith.
August 11, 2012
August 11, 2012: Rachel Collins’ Guest Post
[Rachel Collins earned her PhD from Syracuse University in 2010 and is currently an adjunct professor at Arcadia University where she teaches courses in composition and the geohumanities. Her research focuses on the geographic manifestations of class and power in American literature. Recent publications include "'Where all the ground is friendly': Subterranean Living and the Ethic of Cultivation in Willa Cather's My Antonia" in Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and the Environment and "'Amid all the maze, uproar, and novelty': the Limits of Other-Space in Sister Carrie" in the book
Geocritical Explorations
.]
I vividly remember first time I watched Undercover Boss . It was on February 7, 2010, immediately following the New Orleans Saints’ 31-17 Super Bowl victory over the Indianapolis Colts. I, along with a record-breaking 38.6 million people, stuck around after the game to watch the premier of a new reality television show that promised to deliver a wealthy CEO picking up trash, cleaning toilets, and getting fired for doing it poorly. Of course, the timing couldn’t have been better. Just sixteen months after the economic collapse of 2008, Americans were eager to see a CEO struggling to perform dirty, menial tasks, particularly as public anger continued to rise over the mismanagement of public bailout funds and news headlines decried the “golden parachutes” being handed out to disgraced executives. The narrative formula Undercover Boss follows is simple enough: each episode features a corporate executive who dons a disguise and works an entry-level job alongside employees in his own company. But as I watched Larry O’Donnell, President and Chief Operating Officer of Houston-based Waste Management, grow a stubbly beard and exchange his designer suits for jeans and a baseball cap, I experienced an overwhelming sense of déjà vu, for I recognized a modern version of the nineteenth-century class-passing narratives that I research and teach. Dozens of these undercover narratives were published during the Gilded Age and Progressive Era, and they proved to be wildly popular. Like Undercover Boss, they were voraciously consumed by a populace angry about the material excesses of the rich and powerful, labor conditions that were increasingly exploitive, and the growing gap between prosperity and poverty.
Most famous among these earlier class-passing narratives is probably Stephen Crane’s 1894 “An Experiment in Misery,” published in the New York Press. Disturbed by the omnipresent homelessness he sees in New York City, Crane puts on a tattered set of clothes and spends the night in a seven-cent flophouse near Chatham Square, attempting to find out—as Jacob Riis had recently put it—“how the other half lives.”As I watched the Undercover Boss premier, however, I was even more strongly reminded of the nineteenth century class-passing narratives authored by women, because they typically focused on sites of wage labor, as opposed to the alleyways and homeless shelters favored by male writers like Crane. In 1902, for example, Bessie Van Vorst, an upper middle class woman, left a comfortable home and traveled to Pittsburgh, where she posed as a working girl and took a job in a pickle factory. Describing her first day in the factory, Van Vorst writes, “My shoulders are beginning to ache. My hands are stiff, my thumbs almost blistered. The enthusiasm I had felt is giving way to a numbing weariness” (25). In fact, pain and physical injury are precisely the point for Van Vorst, for as she looks around they are what she sees in her fellow working girls. She repeatedly describes the women she meets as disfigured and endangered by the conditions of poverty, describing one as having “the appearance of a cave-bred creature” (42), while another woman has “arms, long and withered, [that] swing like the broken branches of a gnarled tree” and another seems like a “mechanical creature wound up for work and run down in the middle of a task” (19). Van Vorst’s narrative purpose is to denounce the injustice inherent in Gilded Age class extremes, and to expose, as she says, that “this land which we are accustomed to call democratic, is in reality composed of a multitude of kingdoms whose despots are the employers-- the multi-millionaire patrons--and whose serfs are the labouring men and women” (9). Her method is to depict the hardships and struggles of working women by taking on their conditions as her own, and advocating for social change.However, the seeming absence of any such social advocacy kept nagging at me on February 7, 2010, as I watched the Undercover Bosspremier. For instance, near the end of the episode O’Donnell finds that his recent cost-cutting decision to downsize the Fairport, NY, staff has forced a young woman named Jaclyn Pilgrim to absorb the duties of several eliminated positions—she now functions as office manager, administrative assistant to the facility manager, scale operator, and scale supervisor. As O’Donnell follows her through a frenetic day, he is impressed with her work, but finds himself far more interested in her personal life. It turns out that Pilgrim has battled multiple forms of cancer, and when she kindly invites O'Donnell to dinner with her family, he also learns they are about to lose their home to rising property taxes that her salary can't cover. O'Donnell is convinced that something is wrong with this picture, and because he sees Pilgrim as so personally admirable, he promises to promote her—to get her, individually, out of an untenable situation. Instructively, his solution is not to adjust the entire Rochester facility's pay-scale to keep wages in line with the region’s cost of living, nor is it to reverse the downsizing he'd ordered to ease pressure on the job site. Indeed, throughout the series the titular undercover bosses never discover that their employees’ problems include structural disenfranchisement, corporate abuse, or unreasonable productivity demands. That kind of critique is simply not the point of the show. Instead, the goal of Undercover Bossis to tell positive stories about executives getting to know, and building affection for, their most loyal entry-level employees. At base, UndercoverBoss seems to be network television’s attempt at rehabilitating the image of CEOs in the wake of the 2008 financial collapse.By comparison, Bessie Van Vorst’s 1902 class-passing narrative depicted an educated and genteel lady suffering bodily pain from the abuses of factory labor with the express purpose of horrifying readers, eliciting support for labor reform efforts, and rousing sentiment against the policies of owners and bosses. However, an undercover executive like Larry O’Donnell, who awkwardly struggles to perform the work he demands of his lowest-paid employees, is supposed to be comical. And what’s more, his good-natured stumbling functions to humanize the him, and positions the executive as the central figure with whom viewers sympathize and identify—which ultimately allows him to be positioned as the narrative hero who bestows gifts and favors on struggling employees. Today, in a historical moment that is being heralded as a second Gilded Age, the resurgence of the class-passing narrative form that was popular in the first Gilded Age is not surprising. What is fascinating, however, is how this narrative form has been transformed so that it works against the goals of its earlier iterations. Such a profound transformation raises bigger questions: How does a genre of tragedy and social critique turn into one of comedy and heartwarming personal interest? How do we make sense of the American reluctance to see class as a collective situation or structural formation, but instead as a set of individual circumstances? These are the issues running through my head as I watch shows like Undercover Boss. Readers, what about you? What’s your take on the cultural function of class-passing narratives? [Ben’s PS. Well, what do you think, readers? And if you have any final responses or suggestions to the week’s posts and series on Americans abroads, please share them too, ahead of tomorrow’s crowd-sourced post!]8/11 Memory Day nominees: A tie between two talented American writers, Sarah Piatt and Alex Haley, and one American Studier pére.
I vividly remember first time I watched Undercover Boss . It was on February 7, 2010, immediately following the New Orleans Saints’ 31-17 Super Bowl victory over the Indianapolis Colts. I, along with a record-breaking 38.6 million people, stuck around after the game to watch the premier of a new reality television show that promised to deliver a wealthy CEO picking up trash, cleaning toilets, and getting fired for doing it poorly. Of course, the timing couldn’t have been better. Just sixteen months after the economic collapse of 2008, Americans were eager to see a CEO struggling to perform dirty, menial tasks, particularly as public anger continued to rise over the mismanagement of public bailout funds and news headlines decried the “golden parachutes” being handed out to disgraced executives. The narrative formula Undercover Boss follows is simple enough: each episode features a corporate executive who dons a disguise and works an entry-level job alongside employees in his own company. But as I watched Larry O’Donnell, President and Chief Operating Officer of Houston-based Waste Management, grow a stubbly beard and exchange his designer suits for jeans and a baseball cap, I experienced an overwhelming sense of déjà vu, for I recognized a modern version of the nineteenth-century class-passing narratives that I research and teach. Dozens of these undercover narratives were published during the Gilded Age and Progressive Era, and they proved to be wildly popular. Like Undercover Boss, they were voraciously consumed by a populace angry about the material excesses of the rich and powerful, labor conditions that were increasingly exploitive, and the growing gap between prosperity and poverty.
Most famous among these earlier class-passing narratives is probably Stephen Crane’s 1894 “An Experiment in Misery,” published in the New York Press. Disturbed by the omnipresent homelessness he sees in New York City, Crane puts on a tattered set of clothes and spends the night in a seven-cent flophouse near Chatham Square, attempting to find out—as Jacob Riis had recently put it—“how the other half lives.”As I watched the Undercover Boss premier, however, I was even more strongly reminded of the nineteenth century class-passing narratives authored by women, because they typically focused on sites of wage labor, as opposed to the alleyways and homeless shelters favored by male writers like Crane. In 1902, for example, Bessie Van Vorst, an upper middle class woman, left a comfortable home and traveled to Pittsburgh, where she posed as a working girl and took a job in a pickle factory. Describing her first day in the factory, Van Vorst writes, “My shoulders are beginning to ache. My hands are stiff, my thumbs almost blistered. The enthusiasm I had felt is giving way to a numbing weariness” (25). In fact, pain and physical injury are precisely the point for Van Vorst, for as she looks around they are what she sees in her fellow working girls. She repeatedly describes the women she meets as disfigured and endangered by the conditions of poverty, describing one as having “the appearance of a cave-bred creature” (42), while another woman has “arms, long and withered, [that] swing like the broken branches of a gnarled tree” and another seems like a “mechanical creature wound up for work and run down in the middle of a task” (19). Van Vorst’s narrative purpose is to denounce the injustice inherent in Gilded Age class extremes, and to expose, as she says, that “this land which we are accustomed to call democratic, is in reality composed of a multitude of kingdoms whose despots are the employers-- the multi-millionaire patrons--and whose serfs are the labouring men and women” (9). Her method is to depict the hardships and struggles of working women by taking on their conditions as her own, and advocating for social change.However, the seeming absence of any such social advocacy kept nagging at me on February 7, 2010, as I watched the Undercover Bosspremier. For instance, near the end of the episode O’Donnell finds that his recent cost-cutting decision to downsize the Fairport, NY, staff has forced a young woman named Jaclyn Pilgrim to absorb the duties of several eliminated positions—she now functions as office manager, administrative assistant to the facility manager, scale operator, and scale supervisor. As O’Donnell follows her through a frenetic day, he is impressed with her work, but finds himself far more interested in her personal life. It turns out that Pilgrim has battled multiple forms of cancer, and when she kindly invites O'Donnell to dinner with her family, he also learns they are about to lose their home to rising property taxes that her salary can't cover. O'Donnell is convinced that something is wrong with this picture, and because he sees Pilgrim as so personally admirable, he promises to promote her—to get her, individually, out of an untenable situation. Instructively, his solution is not to adjust the entire Rochester facility's pay-scale to keep wages in line with the region’s cost of living, nor is it to reverse the downsizing he'd ordered to ease pressure on the job site. Indeed, throughout the series the titular undercover bosses never discover that their employees’ problems include structural disenfranchisement, corporate abuse, or unreasonable productivity demands. That kind of critique is simply not the point of the show. Instead, the goal of Undercover Bossis to tell positive stories about executives getting to know, and building affection for, their most loyal entry-level employees. At base, UndercoverBoss seems to be network television’s attempt at rehabilitating the image of CEOs in the wake of the 2008 financial collapse.By comparison, Bessie Van Vorst’s 1902 class-passing narrative depicted an educated and genteel lady suffering bodily pain from the abuses of factory labor with the express purpose of horrifying readers, eliciting support for labor reform efforts, and rousing sentiment against the policies of owners and bosses. However, an undercover executive like Larry O’Donnell, who awkwardly struggles to perform the work he demands of his lowest-paid employees, is supposed to be comical. And what’s more, his good-natured stumbling functions to humanize the him, and positions the executive as the central figure with whom viewers sympathize and identify—which ultimately allows him to be positioned as the narrative hero who bestows gifts and favors on struggling employees. Today, in a historical moment that is being heralded as a second Gilded Age, the resurgence of the class-passing narrative form that was popular in the first Gilded Age is not surprising. What is fascinating, however, is how this narrative form has been transformed so that it works against the goals of its earlier iterations. Such a profound transformation raises bigger questions: How does a genre of tragedy and social critique turn into one of comedy and heartwarming personal interest? How do we make sense of the American reluctance to see class as a collective situation or structural formation, but instead as a set of individual circumstances? These are the issues running through my head as I watch shows like Undercover Boss. Readers, what about you? What’s your take on the cultural function of class-passing narratives? [Ben’s PS. Well, what do you think, readers? And if you have any final responses or suggestions to the week’s posts and series on Americans abroads, please share them too, ahead of tomorrow’s crowd-sourced post!]8/11 Memory Day nominees: A tie between two talented American writers, Sarah Piatt and Alex Haley, and one American Studier pére.
August 10, 2012
August 10, 2012: Tortured Travelers
[This week we’re hosting a Chinese exchange student as part of a program at the boys’ elementary school, so I thought I’d return the favor and focus in the week’s series on interesting representations of Americans abroad. This is the fifth and final post in the series. Your responses, and other suggestions and nominations, very welcome for the weekend’s crowd-sourced post!]
On the crowd-pleasing xenophobia at the heart of two recent hit films.It’s hard to argue with success, and Eli Roth’s Hostel (2005) and Pierre Morel’s Taken (2008) are by many measures two of the most successful films of the last decade. Hostel made more than $80 million worldwide (on a budget of $4.5 million), led to a sequel two years later, and contributed significantly to the rise of an entirely new sub-gerne (the horror sub-genre generally known as “torture porn”). Takencost a lot more to make (budget of $25 million) but also made a lot more at the box office (worldwide gross of over $225 million), has its own sequel coming out later this year, and fundamentally changed the career arc and general perception of its star Liam Neeson. Neither film was aiming for any Oscars or to make the Sight and Sound list, but clearly both did what they were trying to do well enough to please their audiences and hit all the notes in their generic (in the literal sense) formulas.What the two films were trying to do is, of course, a matter of interpretation and debate (although Eli Roth is more than happy to tell us his take on what his film is about); moreover, they’re clearly very different from each other, in genre and goal and many other ways, and I don’t intend to conflate them in this post. Yet they both share an uncannily similar basic plot: naïve and fun-loving young American travelers are abducted and tortured by evil European captors, against whom the travelers themselves (in Hostel) or the traveler’s badass special forces type Dad (in Taken; young Maggie Grace apparently gets to fight some of her own fights against additional Euro-types in the sequel) have to fight in order to escape. While it’s possible to argue that the travelers in Roth’s film help bring on their own torture as a result of their chauvanistic attitudes toward European women (in the sequel Roth made his protagonists young women, and much more explicitly innocent ones at that), there’s no question that the true forces of evil in each film are distinctly European. Moreover, since all of the young travelers are explicitly constructed as tourists, hoping to experience the different world of Europe, the films can’t help but seem like cautionary tales about that world’s dangerous and destructive underbelly.It’s that last point which I’d really want to emphasize here. After all, bad guys in both horror and action films can and do come from everywhere, and that doesn’t necessarily serve as a blanket indictment of those places; if anything, I would argue that the multi-national and multi-ethnic villainy of (for example) James Bond filmsis a thematic strength, making clear that evil can and will be found everywhere. Yet both Hostel and Taken are precisely about, or at least originate with, the relationship between American travelers and Europeans, about the naïve ideals of cultural tourism and about creating plots that depend on very frightening and torturous realities within these foreign worlds. “Don’t travel to Europe, young people,” they seem to argue; and if you do, well, be prepared either to kill a ton of ugly Europeans (or have your Daddy do it) or to be killed by them. Not exactly the travel narrative I’d argue for!Crowd-sourced post this weekend, so one more chance to add your responses and ideas!BenPS. You know what to do!8/10 Memory Day nominee: Anna Julia Cooper!
On the crowd-pleasing xenophobia at the heart of two recent hit films.It’s hard to argue with success, and Eli Roth’s Hostel (2005) and Pierre Morel’s Taken (2008) are by many measures two of the most successful films of the last decade. Hostel made more than $80 million worldwide (on a budget of $4.5 million), led to a sequel two years later, and contributed significantly to the rise of an entirely new sub-gerne (the horror sub-genre generally known as “torture porn”). Takencost a lot more to make (budget of $25 million) but also made a lot more at the box office (worldwide gross of over $225 million), has its own sequel coming out later this year, and fundamentally changed the career arc and general perception of its star Liam Neeson. Neither film was aiming for any Oscars or to make the Sight and Sound list, but clearly both did what they were trying to do well enough to please their audiences and hit all the notes in their generic (in the literal sense) formulas.What the two films were trying to do is, of course, a matter of interpretation and debate (although Eli Roth is more than happy to tell us his take on what his film is about); moreover, they’re clearly very different from each other, in genre and goal and many other ways, and I don’t intend to conflate them in this post. Yet they both share an uncannily similar basic plot: naïve and fun-loving young American travelers are abducted and tortured by evil European captors, against whom the travelers themselves (in Hostel) or the traveler’s badass special forces type Dad (in Taken; young Maggie Grace apparently gets to fight some of her own fights against additional Euro-types in the sequel) have to fight in order to escape. While it’s possible to argue that the travelers in Roth’s film help bring on their own torture as a result of their chauvanistic attitudes toward European women (in the sequel Roth made his protagonists young women, and much more explicitly innocent ones at that), there’s no question that the true forces of evil in each film are distinctly European. Moreover, since all of the young travelers are explicitly constructed as tourists, hoping to experience the different world of Europe, the films can’t help but seem like cautionary tales about that world’s dangerous and destructive underbelly.It’s that last point which I’d really want to emphasize here. After all, bad guys in both horror and action films can and do come from everywhere, and that doesn’t necessarily serve as a blanket indictment of those places; if anything, I would argue that the multi-national and multi-ethnic villainy of (for example) James Bond filmsis a thematic strength, making clear that evil can and will be found everywhere. Yet both Hostel and Taken are precisely about, or at least originate with, the relationship between American travelers and Europeans, about the naïve ideals of cultural tourism and about creating plots that depend on very frightening and torturous realities within these foreign worlds. “Don’t travel to Europe, young people,” they seem to argue; and if you do, well, be prepared either to kill a ton of ugly Europeans (or have your Daddy do it) or to be killed by them. Not exactly the travel narrative I’d argue for!Crowd-sourced post this weekend, so one more chance to add your responses and ideas!BenPS. You know what to do!8/10 Memory Day nominee: Anna Julia Cooper!
August 9, 2012
August 9, 2012: Cultural Turistas
[This week we’re hosting a Chinese exchange student as part of a program at the boys’ elementary school, so I thought I’d return the favor and focus in the week’s series on interesting representations of Americans abroad. This is the fourth in the series. Your responses, and other suggestions and nominations, very welcome for the weekend’s crowd-sourced post!]
On the two very different yet not necessarily dissimilar visions of Americans in Mexico in the same film.As I wrote in this post on Edouard Glissant and the idea of creolization, the United States has a lot more in common with the Caribbean and the rest of the Western Hemisphere than we often acknowledge. Moreover, as I spentan entireweek’sworthof poststrying to illustrate, the relationship between the United States and Mexico is even more interconnected. Yet despite those parallel and interconnected histories and identities, and notwithstanding the basic fact of geographical proximity between the two nations, there’s no question of course that Mexico is its own place, a fundamentally different nation than the US—and thus that we can and must analyze how Americans travel to and engage with Mexico (in reality and in cultural representations) just as we would with any other place.One of the most complex and interesting such cultural representations, of the last couple decades and of any moment, has to be John Sayles’ Men with Guns (1997). Sayles’ film was shot entirely on location in Mexico, using an all-Mexican cast who speak Mexican Spanish (with English subtitles) throughout the film, which makes the few scenes when two overtly American, English-speaking turistas show up that much more striking and significant. The two tourists, played to exaggerated perfection by Mandy Patinkin and Kathryn Grody, are as clichéd and stereotypical as (I would argue) the rest of the film’s characters are multi-layered and complex; but while that leads their scenes to have a certain heavy-handedness, it’s also clearly Sayles’ point in these moments. These minor characters are not only outsiders and intruders in the film’s setting and world—they have no ability to understand this place and no interest in doing so, and their cultural tourism is, in the context of the film’s dark and powerful main stories and themes, both utterly ridiculous and deeply insulting. That might not describe all Americans’ attitudes toward or relationships to our hemispheric neighbors, but it’s certainly (both Sayles and I would argue) a far too prevalent perspective.Sayles’ film would seem to be precisely the opposite: a thoughtful, nuanced, culturally immersive engagement with Mexican culture and community and history and issues. I love Sayles and am a fan of the film (although it’s not at the top of my list of his works), so I would agree with that description. Yet on the other hand, can’t we also see Sayles here as a kind of intellectual and artistic version of the tourist couple? A cultural tourist who comes down to Mexico for a while, engages with the place while he’s there, and then returns to the United States, to tell his stories of what he found? The film is, after all, not entirely unlike a tourist’s slideshow; “What John Did on His Mexican Vacation.” At the very least, I think we have to acknowledge that both Sayles and the tourists exist on the same spectrum, of American experiences in and with Mexico—and while of course it would be far too reductive to argue that all points on that spectrum are identical, it would be just as wrong-headed to claim that they don’t have anything in common. Only by acknowledging that we’re all cultural tourists, after all, can we perhaps start to analyze our own perspective and figure out how we can at times get beyond it.Next Americans abroad tomorrow,BenPS. What do you think? Responses or suggestions of works about Americans abroad?8/9 Memory Day nominee: Pierre Charles L’Enfant, the Franco American engineer and architectwho fought in the Revolution and created the plan for Washington, DC—just another compelling reason to thank the French!
On the two very different yet not necessarily dissimilar visions of Americans in Mexico in the same film.As I wrote in this post on Edouard Glissant and the idea of creolization, the United States has a lot more in common with the Caribbean and the rest of the Western Hemisphere than we often acknowledge. Moreover, as I spentan entireweek’sworthof poststrying to illustrate, the relationship between the United States and Mexico is even more interconnected. Yet despite those parallel and interconnected histories and identities, and notwithstanding the basic fact of geographical proximity between the two nations, there’s no question of course that Mexico is its own place, a fundamentally different nation than the US—and thus that we can and must analyze how Americans travel to and engage with Mexico (in reality and in cultural representations) just as we would with any other place.One of the most complex and interesting such cultural representations, of the last couple decades and of any moment, has to be John Sayles’ Men with Guns (1997). Sayles’ film was shot entirely on location in Mexico, using an all-Mexican cast who speak Mexican Spanish (with English subtitles) throughout the film, which makes the few scenes when two overtly American, English-speaking turistas show up that much more striking and significant. The two tourists, played to exaggerated perfection by Mandy Patinkin and Kathryn Grody, are as clichéd and stereotypical as (I would argue) the rest of the film’s characters are multi-layered and complex; but while that leads their scenes to have a certain heavy-handedness, it’s also clearly Sayles’ point in these moments. These minor characters are not only outsiders and intruders in the film’s setting and world—they have no ability to understand this place and no interest in doing so, and their cultural tourism is, in the context of the film’s dark and powerful main stories and themes, both utterly ridiculous and deeply insulting. That might not describe all Americans’ attitudes toward or relationships to our hemispheric neighbors, but it’s certainly (both Sayles and I would argue) a far too prevalent perspective.Sayles’ film would seem to be precisely the opposite: a thoughtful, nuanced, culturally immersive engagement with Mexican culture and community and history and issues. I love Sayles and am a fan of the film (although it’s not at the top of my list of his works), so I would agree with that description. Yet on the other hand, can’t we also see Sayles here as a kind of intellectual and artistic version of the tourist couple? A cultural tourist who comes down to Mexico for a while, engages with the place while he’s there, and then returns to the United States, to tell his stories of what he found? The film is, after all, not entirely unlike a tourist’s slideshow; “What John Did on His Mexican Vacation.” At the very least, I think we have to acknowledge that both Sayles and the tourists exist on the same spectrum, of American experiences in and with Mexico—and while of course it would be far too reductive to argue that all points on that spectrum are identical, it would be just as wrong-headed to claim that they don’t have anything in common. Only by acknowledging that we’re all cultural tourists, after all, can we perhaps start to analyze our own perspective and figure out how we can at times get beyond it.Next Americans abroad tomorrow,BenPS. What do you think? Responses or suggestions of works about Americans abroad?8/9 Memory Day nominee: Pierre Charles L’Enfant, the Franco American engineer and architectwho fought in the Revolution and created the plan for Washington, DC—just another compelling reason to thank the French!
August 8, 2012
August 8, 2012: Not That Innocent
[This week we’re hosting a Chinese exchange student as part of a program at the boys’ elementary school, so I thought I’d return the favor and focus in the week’s series on interesting representations of Americans abroad. This is the third in the series. Your responses, and other suggestions and nominations, very welcome for the weekend’s crowd-sourced post!]
On the double-edged satire at the heart of Mark Twain’s first big hit.I haven’t done an exhaustive survey or anything, but it seems to me that most social or political satireis both directed at a particular target and driven by an earnest embrace of some alternative idea. Take perhaps the most famous satirical work of all time, Jonathan Swift’s “A Modest Proposal” (1729): seems to be suggesting that the solution to the problems of Irish poverty and hunger is to eat Irish babies; is really satirizing English bigotry toward the Irish; and so is genuinely (if of course very subtly) pro-Irish instead. Similarly, Joseph Heller’s Catch-22 (1961) satirizes virtually every aspect of war (even a war as seemingly noble as World War II) while sympathizing quite overtly and poignantly with its soldier protagonists; Heller’s satire would to my mind be entirely unsuccessful if we didn’t come to care about those soldiers. Certainly there are satirical voices which take on all comers (The Onion comes to mind), but for the most part, I’d say that social satire needs the accompanying earnest advocacy to function.Mark Twain’s most famous character, Huck Finn, proves that point quite precisely: Huck is painfully earnest, almost always unable to recognize humor at all (for example), and it is through that earnest perspective that Twain creates his satiresof numerous aspects of antebellum (and postbellum) Southern and American society. But Twain’s first book, the travelogue Innocents Abroad; or, The New Pilgrim’s Progress (1869, revised from 1867 newspaper pieces), is much more confusingly and crucially all-encompassing in its satirizing. At first glance Twain seems to be satirizing the reverent tone and attitude of typical travelogues, and thus too the Old World cultures which demand such reverence; but at the same time, his American travelers, including the author himself, come in for just as much ridicule, most especially for their ignorance of these other cultures and their tendency toward pro-American provincialism. If both communities are ultimately, equally foolish and silly, though, it’s fair to ask whether the satire has a point.Innocents is unquestionably a messy and sprawling book (reflecting at least in part its origins in those many different newspaper pieces), but I’d argue that its satire is in fact pointed precisely in its multi-directionality. After all, one of the central goals of any satirist must be to create discomfort, to force an audience out of any and all comfort zones and into the space where established narratives or norms are challenged and made literally laughable. While Heller’s book (for example) certainly does so when it comes to any and all pro-war narratives, it might at the same time make already anti-war readers morecomfortable, reinforce their existing views and ideas. That’s not necessarily a bad thing (again, having an earnest point can make the satire of other points more successful), but there’s something to be said for a satire that doesn’t let any of us get too comfortable in where we are or what we believe. And that’s doubly true for a travel satire—whether we think home is always the best or are just constantly searching for somewhere better, we’re likely to be over-simplifying both places, and Twain’s book forces us to push beyond those simplifications and continue our journey in a more complex perspective.Next Americans abroad tomorrow,BenPS. What do you think? Responses or suggestions of works about Americans abroad?8/8 Memory Day nominee: Bob Smith, the physician and longtime alcoholic whose founding of Alcoholics Anonymous has not only helped many millions of Americans, but has helped change our cultural attitudes toward addiction.
On the double-edged satire at the heart of Mark Twain’s first big hit.I haven’t done an exhaustive survey or anything, but it seems to me that most social or political satireis both directed at a particular target and driven by an earnest embrace of some alternative idea. Take perhaps the most famous satirical work of all time, Jonathan Swift’s “A Modest Proposal” (1729): seems to be suggesting that the solution to the problems of Irish poverty and hunger is to eat Irish babies; is really satirizing English bigotry toward the Irish; and so is genuinely (if of course very subtly) pro-Irish instead. Similarly, Joseph Heller’s Catch-22 (1961) satirizes virtually every aspect of war (even a war as seemingly noble as World War II) while sympathizing quite overtly and poignantly with its soldier protagonists; Heller’s satire would to my mind be entirely unsuccessful if we didn’t come to care about those soldiers. Certainly there are satirical voices which take on all comers (The Onion comes to mind), but for the most part, I’d say that social satire needs the accompanying earnest advocacy to function.Mark Twain’s most famous character, Huck Finn, proves that point quite precisely: Huck is painfully earnest, almost always unable to recognize humor at all (for example), and it is through that earnest perspective that Twain creates his satiresof numerous aspects of antebellum (and postbellum) Southern and American society. But Twain’s first book, the travelogue Innocents Abroad; or, The New Pilgrim’s Progress (1869, revised from 1867 newspaper pieces), is much more confusingly and crucially all-encompassing in its satirizing. At first glance Twain seems to be satirizing the reverent tone and attitude of typical travelogues, and thus too the Old World cultures which demand such reverence; but at the same time, his American travelers, including the author himself, come in for just as much ridicule, most especially for their ignorance of these other cultures and their tendency toward pro-American provincialism. If both communities are ultimately, equally foolish and silly, though, it’s fair to ask whether the satire has a point.Innocents is unquestionably a messy and sprawling book (reflecting at least in part its origins in those many different newspaper pieces), but I’d argue that its satire is in fact pointed precisely in its multi-directionality. After all, one of the central goals of any satirist must be to create discomfort, to force an audience out of any and all comfort zones and into the space where established narratives or norms are challenged and made literally laughable. While Heller’s book (for example) certainly does so when it comes to any and all pro-war narratives, it might at the same time make already anti-war readers morecomfortable, reinforce their existing views and ideas. That’s not necessarily a bad thing (again, having an earnest point can make the satire of other points more successful), but there’s something to be said for a satire that doesn’t let any of us get too comfortable in where we are or what we believe. And that’s doubly true for a travel satire—whether we think home is always the best or are just constantly searching for somewhere better, we’re likely to be over-simplifying both places, and Twain’s book forces us to push beyond those simplifications and continue our journey in a more complex perspective.Next Americans abroad tomorrow,BenPS. What do you think? Responses or suggestions of works about Americans abroad?8/8 Memory Day nominee: Bob Smith, the physician and longtime alcoholic whose founding of Alcoholics Anonymous has not only helped many millions of Americans, but has helped change our cultural attitudes toward addiction.
August 7, 2012
August 7, 2012: Quiet but Dangerous
[This week we’re hosting a Chinese exchange student as part of a program at the boys’ elementary school, so I thought I’d return the favor and focus in the week’s series on interesting representations of Americans abroad. This is the second in the series. Your responses, and other suggestions and nominations, very welcome for the weekend’s crowd-sourced post!]
On the controversial British novel that captures the too-often-minimized dark side of America abroad.One of the toughest things about bridging the gap between academic and public American Studies scholarship is the fact that in many ways academics and the public can seem to have entirely different understandings of American history. Take 20thcentury foreign policy, for example. It seems to me that the popular narrative focuses almost entirely on the wars, and on the best intentions or goals behind them; while the less triumphant efforts in Korea and Vietnam can’t be elided from that narrative, they can for example be contextualized as part of the Cold War, and thus still linked to sympathetic and even inspiring ideals (the spread of democracy, containing communism, and so on). An academic narrative, on the other hand, might focus instead on the broader and much less easily idealized spread of US intervention and influence throughout the 20th century: highlighting Nicaraguaalongside World War I, Guatemalaalongside the Korean War, the Dominican Republic alongside Vietnam, and so on. In this analysis, while America might have had some good intentions around the world, it has for at least a century been all too willing to pursue any and all means (including much more shadowy and even illegal ones) to achieve its international objectives.Obviously (to anybody who has read this blog or knows me, at least) I’m in favor not of revision so much as of addition, of expanding and complicating and strengthening our national and public narratives as much as possible, including as much of the history and story as we can, engaging as fully as we’re able with all the events and details. What we do with the expanded narratives, how we interpret and analyze them, what meaning we make of them for the present and future, are entirely and crucially open questions—but they can’t be answered in any meaningful way if they aren’t proceeded by that process of addition. Just as obviously, I hope and think that scholarly writing—such as, you know, on blogs—can contribute to that process. But the truth is that creative and artistic works can do so as well, and with an intimacy and immediacy and ability to speak to their audience that certainly distinguish them from even the most compelling works of scholarship. And when it comes to these questions of American foreign policy and interventions, of their best intentions and their far more complex and often much darker sides, I don’t know of any better or more revealing work than a British novel, Graham Greene’s The Quiet American(1955).Greene’s novel, based in large part on his experiences as a war correspondent in French Indochina in the prior few years, is many things: a somewhat conventional love triangle; a pseudo-autobiographical narrative of a middle-aged British war correspondent (Thomas Fowler); an interesting sociological depiction of early 1950s Vietnam. But its most famous and controversial element is the title character, an idealistic yet shady young American diplomat named Alden Pyle; Pyle seems genuinely to want the best for Vietnam, yet (spoilers ahead!) later in the novel is willing to explode a car bomb (and kill many civilians) in order to push the country in the direction he prefers. In Greene’s fictional world, the British journalist then conspires to assassinate the American diplomat, and perhaps helps save Vietnam from further such actions; in reality, on the other hand, America took over from France and Britain as the dominant international presence in Vietnam, and the next two decades are, well, history. And while Greene’s novel thus has a great deal to say about its particular setting and issues, those focal points can at the same time help us engage with more than a century of sometimes quiet but always significant American foreign interventions.Next Americans abroad tomorrow,BenPS. What do you think? Responses or suggestions of works about Americans abroad?8/7 Memory Day nominee: Ralph Bunche, the pioneering political scientist and mediator whose efforts in Palestine earned him the Nobel Peace Prize, one of many signal achievements in his inspiring life.
On the controversial British novel that captures the too-often-minimized dark side of America abroad.One of the toughest things about bridging the gap between academic and public American Studies scholarship is the fact that in many ways academics and the public can seem to have entirely different understandings of American history. Take 20thcentury foreign policy, for example. It seems to me that the popular narrative focuses almost entirely on the wars, and on the best intentions or goals behind them; while the less triumphant efforts in Korea and Vietnam can’t be elided from that narrative, they can for example be contextualized as part of the Cold War, and thus still linked to sympathetic and even inspiring ideals (the spread of democracy, containing communism, and so on). An academic narrative, on the other hand, might focus instead on the broader and much less easily idealized spread of US intervention and influence throughout the 20th century: highlighting Nicaraguaalongside World War I, Guatemalaalongside the Korean War, the Dominican Republic alongside Vietnam, and so on. In this analysis, while America might have had some good intentions around the world, it has for at least a century been all too willing to pursue any and all means (including much more shadowy and even illegal ones) to achieve its international objectives.Obviously (to anybody who has read this blog or knows me, at least) I’m in favor not of revision so much as of addition, of expanding and complicating and strengthening our national and public narratives as much as possible, including as much of the history and story as we can, engaging as fully as we’re able with all the events and details. What we do with the expanded narratives, how we interpret and analyze them, what meaning we make of them for the present and future, are entirely and crucially open questions—but they can’t be answered in any meaningful way if they aren’t proceeded by that process of addition. Just as obviously, I hope and think that scholarly writing—such as, you know, on blogs—can contribute to that process. But the truth is that creative and artistic works can do so as well, and with an intimacy and immediacy and ability to speak to their audience that certainly distinguish them from even the most compelling works of scholarship. And when it comes to these questions of American foreign policy and interventions, of their best intentions and their far more complex and often much darker sides, I don’t know of any better or more revealing work than a British novel, Graham Greene’s The Quiet American(1955).Greene’s novel, based in large part on his experiences as a war correspondent in French Indochina in the prior few years, is many things: a somewhat conventional love triangle; a pseudo-autobiographical narrative of a middle-aged British war correspondent (Thomas Fowler); an interesting sociological depiction of early 1950s Vietnam. But its most famous and controversial element is the title character, an idealistic yet shady young American diplomat named Alden Pyle; Pyle seems genuinely to want the best for Vietnam, yet (spoilers ahead!) later in the novel is willing to explode a car bomb (and kill many civilians) in order to push the country in the direction he prefers. In Greene’s fictional world, the British journalist then conspires to assassinate the American diplomat, and perhaps helps save Vietnam from further such actions; in reality, on the other hand, America took over from France and Britain as the dominant international presence in Vietnam, and the next two decades are, well, history. And while Greene’s novel thus has a great deal to say about its particular setting and issues, those focal points can at the same time help us engage with more than a century of sometimes quiet but always significant American foreign interventions.Next Americans abroad tomorrow,BenPS. What do you think? Responses or suggestions of works about Americans abroad?8/7 Memory Day nominee: Ralph Bunche, the pioneering political scientist and mediator whose efforts in Palestine earned him the Nobel Peace Prize, one of many signal achievements in his inspiring life.
August 6, 2012
August 6, 2012: Two Talented, Troubling Americans
[This week we’re hosting a Chinese exchange student as part of a program at the boys’ elementary school, so I thought I’d return the favor and focus in the week’s series on interesting representations of Americans abroad. First up is a repeat of a post from this time last year. Your responses, and other suggestions and nominations, very welcome for the weekend’s crowd-sourced post!]
On two very complex and important 20th century American characters.Writing about Matt Damon in yesterday’s post got me thinking about what I consider his two best film performances, both as reflections of his truly remarkable range and just as two impressively complex and rich character creations: Tom Ripley, the con artist protagonist of The Talented Mr. Ripley (1999); and Jason Bourne, the fugitive former-assassin protagonist of The Bourne Identity (2002), The Bourne Supremacy (2004), and The Bourne Ultimatum (2007). There’s plenty that could be said about each of these films, including the very impressive supporting casts (Jude Law has never been as good as he is in Ripleyand the Bourne films almost made me like Julia Stiles, to cite two particularly impressive examples); similarly, each character was created by an interesting and underrated late 20th-century American novelist whose works still have a great deal to offer in their own right (Ripley appeared in four novels by Patricia Highsmith, whose ground-breaking psychological thrillers also included Strangers on a Train [1951]; Bourne in three novels by Robert Ludlum, whose dense espionage thrillers without question inspired future bestsellers such as Tom Clancy). But for this blog, what’s most interesting about both Ripley and Bourne is how much they connect to and yet complicate and critique dominant American narratives.Tom Ripley, at least in the film’s representation of him (while I’ve read both Highsmith and Ludlum, it was a while ago and for this post I’m going with my much clearer memories of the films; I’ll also be spoiling those films a good bit, so feel free to stop here if you haven’t seen ‘em!), has a great deal in common with one of the most iconic American fictional (in every sense) characters: Jay Gatsby. Like Gatsby, Ripley is born into poverty but will do whatever it takes to become wealthy, successful, and (perhaps most importantly) accepted by the most elite and upper-crust of his countrymen; also like Gatsby, Ripley is most talented precisely at performance, at inhabiting every aspect of the character and world he is continually creating. While both men’s stories end with a great deal of death and destruction, it’s certainly true that Ripley is a far more overt cause of that chaos than Gatsby; Ripley, in short, is willing to murder in order to keep up his performances, while Gatsby’s undeniable culpability lies more in his various forms of cheating (financial, adulterous) and his sins of omission. Yet you could make a convincing case that Gatsby is nearly as reprehensible as Ripley, and that the main difference lies in the fact that we see Gatsby through the eyes of Fitzgerald’s novelist-narrator Nick Carraway, a man who both falls under Gatsby’s charm and who (to an extent) shares Gatsby’s culpability in the novel’s final events; our vision of Ripley, unmediated by such a narrating voice, makes it easier to judge his most heinous actions for the atrocities that they really are. And as destructive as both men’s ambitions and desires ultimately are, it would also be important to keep in mind how fully they line up with some of America’s defining narratives, most especially the self-made manand the prominent place he occupies in the American Dream.Jason Bourne’s American connections (again, in the film version of the character) are in many ways much more explicitly contemporary, more directly in conversation with national narratives and realities post-9/11. The series’ engagement with those contemporary and political issues has been present since the first film but was ramped up in each subsequent sequel; the villain played by the great David Strathairn in Ultimatumrepresents a particularly clear stand-in for American “war on terror” policies and practices and their logical yet terrifying endpoints. Moreover, both Bourne’s complicity in those extremes and horrors and his gradual but absolutely determined extrication of himself and his prior identity from them can be read across the three films as a powerful argument for how the nation as well can and must leave behind what we’ve become in the decade since 9/11. Yet on another level Bourne connects to a centuries-old and archetypal American hero, the kind of character described by literary critic R.W.B. Lewis as “the American Adam”: these Adamic heroes, who originated as many American literary images did with James Fenimore Cooper (and specifically with his recurring hero Natty Bumppo), seem to exist as innocent and largely self-made“new men,” outside of (or at least not ultimately bound by) the limits of history and society. Bourne is not the first character who can be said to reveal the fundamental flaws in and even impossibility of such an Adamic identity—Lewis rightly notes that Gatsby can be read in precisely that way—but he is a particularly compelling case: an Adamic hero who comes to realize that he has been instead an anti-hero, and must fight to escape and destroy that anti-heroic identity and the myths that come with it. Both Ripley and the Bourne films are great entertainments on their own terms, but as with all of the best art, they also echo and engage with and amplify ongoing narratives and images, with our ideas about who we are and with what those stories often leave out or gloss over. And that’s a very impressive talent for sure. Next Americans abroad tomorrow,BenPS. What do you think? Responses or suggestions of works about Americans abroad?8/6 Memory Day nominees: A tie between two 20th century figures who took Americans to placesthey had never beenbefore, Matthew Henson and Lucille Ball.
On two very complex and important 20th century American characters.Writing about Matt Damon in yesterday’s post got me thinking about what I consider his two best film performances, both as reflections of his truly remarkable range and just as two impressively complex and rich character creations: Tom Ripley, the con artist protagonist of The Talented Mr. Ripley (1999); and Jason Bourne, the fugitive former-assassin protagonist of The Bourne Identity (2002), The Bourne Supremacy (2004), and The Bourne Ultimatum (2007). There’s plenty that could be said about each of these films, including the very impressive supporting casts (Jude Law has never been as good as he is in Ripleyand the Bourne films almost made me like Julia Stiles, to cite two particularly impressive examples); similarly, each character was created by an interesting and underrated late 20th-century American novelist whose works still have a great deal to offer in their own right (Ripley appeared in four novels by Patricia Highsmith, whose ground-breaking psychological thrillers also included Strangers on a Train [1951]; Bourne in three novels by Robert Ludlum, whose dense espionage thrillers without question inspired future bestsellers such as Tom Clancy). But for this blog, what’s most interesting about both Ripley and Bourne is how much they connect to and yet complicate and critique dominant American narratives.Tom Ripley, at least in the film’s representation of him (while I’ve read both Highsmith and Ludlum, it was a while ago and for this post I’m going with my much clearer memories of the films; I’ll also be spoiling those films a good bit, so feel free to stop here if you haven’t seen ‘em!), has a great deal in common with one of the most iconic American fictional (in every sense) characters: Jay Gatsby. Like Gatsby, Ripley is born into poverty but will do whatever it takes to become wealthy, successful, and (perhaps most importantly) accepted by the most elite and upper-crust of his countrymen; also like Gatsby, Ripley is most talented precisely at performance, at inhabiting every aspect of the character and world he is continually creating. While both men’s stories end with a great deal of death and destruction, it’s certainly true that Ripley is a far more overt cause of that chaos than Gatsby; Ripley, in short, is willing to murder in order to keep up his performances, while Gatsby’s undeniable culpability lies more in his various forms of cheating (financial, adulterous) and his sins of omission. Yet you could make a convincing case that Gatsby is nearly as reprehensible as Ripley, and that the main difference lies in the fact that we see Gatsby through the eyes of Fitzgerald’s novelist-narrator Nick Carraway, a man who both falls under Gatsby’s charm and who (to an extent) shares Gatsby’s culpability in the novel’s final events; our vision of Ripley, unmediated by such a narrating voice, makes it easier to judge his most heinous actions for the atrocities that they really are. And as destructive as both men’s ambitions and desires ultimately are, it would also be important to keep in mind how fully they line up with some of America’s defining narratives, most especially the self-made manand the prominent place he occupies in the American Dream.Jason Bourne’s American connections (again, in the film version of the character) are in many ways much more explicitly contemporary, more directly in conversation with national narratives and realities post-9/11. The series’ engagement with those contemporary and political issues has been present since the first film but was ramped up in each subsequent sequel; the villain played by the great David Strathairn in Ultimatumrepresents a particularly clear stand-in for American “war on terror” policies and practices and their logical yet terrifying endpoints. Moreover, both Bourne’s complicity in those extremes and horrors and his gradual but absolutely determined extrication of himself and his prior identity from them can be read across the three films as a powerful argument for how the nation as well can and must leave behind what we’ve become in the decade since 9/11. Yet on another level Bourne connects to a centuries-old and archetypal American hero, the kind of character described by literary critic R.W.B. Lewis as “the American Adam”: these Adamic heroes, who originated as many American literary images did with James Fenimore Cooper (and specifically with his recurring hero Natty Bumppo), seem to exist as innocent and largely self-made“new men,” outside of (or at least not ultimately bound by) the limits of history and society. Bourne is not the first character who can be said to reveal the fundamental flaws in and even impossibility of such an Adamic identity—Lewis rightly notes that Gatsby can be read in precisely that way—but he is a particularly compelling case: an Adamic hero who comes to realize that he has been instead an anti-hero, and must fight to escape and destroy that anti-heroic identity and the myths that come with it. Both Ripley and the Bourne films are great entertainments on their own terms, but as with all of the best art, they also echo and engage with and amplify ongoing narratives and images, with our ideas about who we are and with what those stories often leave out or gloss over. And that’s a very impressive talent for sure. Next Americans abroad tomorrow,BenPS. What do you think? Responses or suggestions of works about Americans abroad?8/6 Memory Day nominees: A tie between two 20th century figures who took Americans to placesthey had never beenbefore, Matthew Henson and Lucille Ball.
August 4, 2012
August 4-5, 2012: Crowd-Sourcing American Siblings
[This American Studier’s sister turns 30 this week—which makes this American Studier feel really old, but that’s another story—and in honor of that occasion I’m featuring a series on interesting American siblings. Today’s is the latest crowd-sourced post, featuring responses and ideas from various fellow American Studiers. Add yours below!]
Matt Goguen nominates the Baldwin brothers, Alec, Daniel, William and Stephen Baldwin, who are perhaps especially interesting in their very different political perspectives.Irene Martyniuk thinks about sports siblings, wondering what leads to their shared successes: “Does raw talent run in families or do they tend to practice more because they are siblings? Some have the same body types, so it makes sense, but others, like the Williams sisters, are quite different, but are still crazy successful.” And later in the week Irene responds to the James brothers post by mentioning another pair of close, different, but also entirely interconnected siblings: the Hardy boys.Jeff Renye shares this great site on the Grimke sisters and the Philadelphia abolitionist event.Next series starts on Monday,BenPS. Interesting American siblings you’d highlight? Other responses to the week’s posts?8/4 Memory Day nominees: A tie between two unique and very talented 20thcentury American artists and voices, Louis Armstrong and Robert Hayden.8/5 Memory Day nominees: Another tie, this one between two pioneers without whom American history (as a discipline and as a narrative) would be significantly different, Mary Ritter Beard and Neil Armstrong.
Matt Goguen nominates the Baldwin brothers, Alec, Daniel, William and Stephen Baldwin, who are perhaps especially interesting in their very different political perspectives.Irene Martyniuk thinks about sports siblings, wondering what leads to their shared successes: “Does raw talent run in families or do they tend to practice more because they are siblings? Some have the same body types, so it makes sense, but others, like the Williams sisters, are quite different, but are still crazy successful.” And later in the week Irene responds to the James brothers post by mentioning another pair of close, different, but also entirely interconnected siblings: the Hardy boys.Jeff Renye shares this great site on the Grimke sisters and the Philadelphia abolitionist event.Next series starts on Monday,BenPS. Interesting American siblings you’d highlight? Other responses to the week’s posts?8/4 Memory Day nominees: A tie between two unique and very talented 20thcentury American artists and voices, Louis Armstrong and Robert Hayden.8/5 Memory Day nominees: Another tie, this one between two pioneers without whom American history (as a discipline and as a narrative) would be significantly different, Mary Ritter Beard and Neil Armstrong.
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