Benjamin A. Railton's Blog, page 45

May 8, 2024: Beach Blogging: Brighton Beach Memoirs

[Releasedon May 11, 1964, “I Get Around” would goon to become the first #1hit for The Beach Boys. To celebrate that sunny anniversary, thisweek I’ll AmericanStudy a handful of beachtastic texts, leading up to a repeatGuest Post from one of our up-and-coming BeachStudiers!]

On threecultural genres and media on which Neil Simon left alasting imprint [yes, I know the post is officially about his semi-autobiographical1982 play BrightonBeach Memoirs, but I’m taking the blogger’s privilege and using theoccasion as a jumping-off point for Simon’s impressive career overall]:

1)     TV comedy: When Simon was just in his early20s, he quit an entry-level job at Warner Brothers to write comedy scripts withhisbrother Danny. The bold move paid off, as the pair were hired by influentialproducerMax Liebman to write for the popular sketch and variety show Your Show ofShows. Simon would laterdescribe just how loaded that writers’ room was: “There were about sevenwriters, plus Sid [Caesar], Carl Reiner, and Howie Morris. Mel Brooks and maybeWoody Allen would write one of the other sketches.” Yet even among that powerhousecrowd, Simon stood out enough to be hired as well to write for a popular late1950s sitcom, ThePhil Silvers Show. TV was in many ways the center of the comedy worldin that era, and Neil Simon became central to that community at a very youngage.

2)     Broadway shows: While he was working on thoseTV shows, Simon was honing his first Broadway play, ComeBlow Your Horn. The honing paid off, as after the show opened in February1961 it ran for 678 performances at New York’s BrooksAtkinson Theatre (now renamed for the legendary Lena Horne). Over the restof the decade Simon would pen countlessBroadway smashes, including Barefootin the Park (1963), The Odd Couple(1965), Sweet Charity (1966), and Last of the Red Hot Lovers (1969). Thoseand many other simultaneously running shows throughout the 1960s and 70s (withmany continuing into the 80s and 90s as he continued to produce new work like Brighton Beach Memoirs and the Pulitzer-winning Lost in Yonkers [1991]) made Simon thehighest-paidBroadway writer in history, and as influential on the American stage as anysingle voice has ever been.

3)     Film screenplays: Simon adapted many of his playsinto screenplays for the film versions, with The Odd Couple(1968) being the most famous. But he also wrote original screenplays for someof the smartest and funniest film comedies of all time, including The Out-of-Towners(1970) and two of my favorites, the mystery parodies Murder By Death(1976) and The Cheap Detective(1978; Peter Falk hasnever been better, and I say that as a die-hard Columbo fan). Given the understandable ways in which Simon’scontemporary and Your Show of Showscolleague Woody Allen has lost much of his luster in recent years, I’d say thatSimon’s film career is due for a reexamination—he was always a playwright firstand foremost, but nobody wrote film comedy better than his multi-talentedAmerican icon.

Next Beachtext tomorrow,

Ben

PS. Whatdo you think? Other beachtastic texts you’d highlight?

May 7, 2024: Beach Blogging: On the Beach

[Releasedon May 11, 1964, “IGet Around” would go on to become the first#1 hit for The Beach Boys. To celebrate that sunny anniversary, this week I’llAmericanStudy a handful of beachtastic texts, leading up to a repeat Guest Postfrom one of our up-and-coming BeachStudiers!]

On theintense and tragic film that couldn’t compete with historic fears.

1959, thesame year as the original Gidget movieabout which I blogged yesterday, also saw the release of a very, very differentbeach film: On the Beach. Based onBritish-Australian writer Nevil Shute’s 1957 novel, the filmfeatured an all-star cast (including Gregory Peck, Ava Gardner, and Fred Astaire) as thesailors, scientists, and their friends and loved ones dealing with apost-apocalyptic world. It’s 1964, World War III has taken place, and theresulting radiation is slowly taking over the world and destroying itsremaining inhabitants. Mostly set on or around Peck’s submarine, the film usesthat setting to create a broadly claustrophobic tone, portraying a world inwhich likely slow death by radiation poisoning or the humane but absolutealternative of suicide pills seem to be the only possible futures. It’sunrelenting and uncompromising, and deserves to be much better remembered thanit is.

Whilethat’s true of the film on its own artistic merits, it’s even more true interms of what the film reveals about the Cold War’s threats and fears. When Ithink of World War III scenarios in popular films, I tend to think ofover-the-top dramatics of one kind or another: the ridiculous satire of Dr.Strangelove (1964);the teenage humor and heroics of WarGames (1983) and TheManhattan Project (1986); the flag-waving jingoism of RedDawn (1984).All of those films can illustrate certain important aspects of the period, butall feel, again, exaggerated in one way or another, extreme in both their plotsand tones. Whereas On the Beach, tothis AmericanStudier at least, feels profoundly grounded, offers a socially andpsychologically realistic depiction not just of the potential aftermath of anuclear war, but also and even more tellingly of the period’s collective fearsabout what such a war would mean and do. Seeing [SPOILER ALERT] Fred Astairekill himself rather than face imminent radiation poisoning—well, that feelsdeeply representative of the moment’s worst fears.

You’dthink that such fears might have lead to more widespread opposition to the ColdWar’s arms race and militaryindustrial complex—and indeed the U.S. military must havethought so too, as they denied the filmmakers permission to use a submarine orany other official materials. But I would argue that whatever possibleinfluence such fears might have had was far outweighed by a different set offears, ones exemplified by October1962’s Cuban Missile Crisis: fears not of nuclear war and its aftermathper se, but rather of the Soviet Union’s nuclear arsenal, and what would happenif America’s did not match and even exceed that opposing threat. Whereas On the Beach portrayed the horrificresults of a nuclear war, the Missile Crisis reflected and amplified fears thatthe U.S. was potentially unprepared for such a war, one that our enemy waswilling and able to bring to our very doorstep. Perhaps no film, not even oneas compelling and convincing as On theBeach, could compete with such historic threats—and so the arms race andthe Cold War only deepened in the 1960s and beyond.

Next Beachtext tomorrow,

Ben

PS. Whatdo you think? Other beachtastic texts you’d highlight?

May 6, 2024: Beach Blogging: Gidget and Friends

[Releasedon May 11, 1964, “IGet Around” would go on to become the first#1 hit for The Beach Boys. To celebrate that sunny anniversary, this week I’llAmericanStudy a handful of beachtastic texts, leading up to a repeat Guest Postfrom one of our up-and-coming BeachStudiers!]

On popularcultural images of the beach, and what we might make of them.

An alienobserver seeking to learn about America solely from its popular culture mightwell think that in the early 1960s the whole nation had gone surf crazy. Thehit 1959 film Gidget (1959), starring Sandra Dee as arebellious 17 year old who joins the local surfer culture and Cliff Robertson as theKorean War vet turned surf guru who shepards her along, quickly spawned twopopular sequels: 1961’s GidgetGoes Hawaiian (withDeborah Walley taking over the title role) and 1963’s GidgetGoes to Rome (with Cindy Carol doing the same). One of1962’s best-selling rock albums was Surfin’Safari, the debut by the California group The Beach Boys; less than ayear later they released their first mega-hit, Surfin’U.S.A. (1963).There were of course many other popular trends in these years, but on both thebig screen and the record machine, surfing was a surefire early 1960s hit.

Trying tomake sense of why and how Americanfads get started can be pretty difficult at best, but I wouldargue that the surfing fad in popular culture can be analyzed in a coupledifferent ways. For one thing, the fad represents an interesting way toillustrate the transition between the 1950s and 1960s—as Gidget demonstrates, surfingculture has often been portrayed as a counter-culture, an alternativeto the more buttoned-down mainstream society, and of course the rise ofcounter-cultures (and the kinds of social and cultural movements to which theyconnected) is a key element to the 1960sin America. So the popularity of these surfing texts (like the popularityof early rock and roll more generally) could be read as anindication that Americans were ready for such counter-culture movements, and Gidget itself could be defined as a 1959origin point for much of what followed in next decade. Seen in that light, thehugely popular 1966documentary The Endless Summerrepresents a high-water mark for all these trends, before the counter-culturebegan to distintegrate later in the decade.

While thatspecific historical context would be one way to analyze the early 1960s surfingfad, however, I think a longstanding American narrative could offer anotheroption. It was three decades later that the film PointBreak (1991) overtly linked surfers to outlaws, potraying a band ofsurfing bank robbers led by Patrick Swayze’s philosophical Bodhi (acharacter not unlike Cliff Robertson’s in Gidget).But to my mind, surfing culture has always contained echoes of the Wild West,represented a new lawless frontier where rough but noble cowboys escape theconfines of civilization, battle for survival in extremeconditions, and, if they’re lucky, ride off in Western sunsets. The WildWest was always more of a cultural image than a historical or social reality,of course, and an image constructed with particular clarity in a pop culturetext, the Western. That genre was famously moving toward morerevisionist films by the late 1960s—but perhaps it had alreadybeen supplanted, or at least supplemented, in popular consciousness by surfingstories. In any case, to quote “Surfin’ Safari”: “I tell you surfing’s mightywild.”

Next Beachtext tomorrow,

Ben

PS. Whatdo you think? Other beachtastic texts you’d highlight?

May 4-5, 2024: Communist Culture in the 21st Century

[In honor of MayDay/International Workers’ Day, this week I’ve AmericanStudied somecompelling cultural representations of communism in American history andidentity. Leading up to this weekend post on contemporary communist culture!]

On two parallelyet very different types of 21st century cultural commentary oncommunism.

First thingsfirst: it’s impossible to separate the question of how communism is portrayedin 21st century American cultural works from our period’s resurgentRussophobia. To say this as clearly as I can, critiques of Putin (and thusof Putin’s Russia) are more than justified, and any attempt to stop suchcritiques with accusationsof Russophobia is dead wrong. But we have to be able to engage both theworld and ourselves with nuance, and there’s no doubt that those specific andjustified critiques have the potential to morph into far more overarching andproblematic prejudice (as is also the case with justified critiques of the Chinese governmentand the potential for sinophobia, an even more longstanding Americanprejudice of course). Even though communism is a separate subject fromRussia, for a century now the two have been entirely intertwined in American historyand narratives alike, and so it’s important to acknowledge that continued,complex connection in discussing current cultural representations of communism.

Moreover, two ofthe last decade’s most interesting American cultural depictions of communismhave used famous historical periods in the Soviet Union as the lens throughwhich to do so (although interestingly, and certainly tellingly, both have beenin English and have used casts of mostly non-Russian actors). The satiricalfilm The Death of Stalin (2017) makes that mid-20thcentury Soviet and world historical event into an over-the-top farce, and onewhich I would argue is designed to appeal to American (or at least Western)narratives about the ludicrous layers of bureaucracy and power struggles that(from this perspective at least) really defined the supposedly communist andegalitarian Soviet state. Cultural works are open to interpretation, and I’msure one could analyze Death of Stalinas equally a commentary on the U.S. government (perhaps especially in the ageof our own cult-likeleader). But for this viewer, the film’s most farcical elements, combinedwith the mostly non-Russian actors enacting them, seem to play into thoseexisting critiques of Soviet communism as hypocritical, fraudulent, and ultimatelyfailed.

There’s an evenmore stringent and serious critique of the Soviet state at the heart of anotherrecent cultural work, the HBOminiseries Chernobyl (2019). Withoutspoiling every storytelling beat in a series I believe everyone should watch(although of course we all have a sense of what went down at Chernobyl!), I’llnote that the show’s final minutes have a great deal to say about the SovietUnion’s reliance on propaganda and lies, and how much those elements directlycontributed to (indeed, in many ways caused) this global catastrophe. Yet Chernobyl is not a satire, and thatdifference from Death of Stalin ismuch more than just about tone or genre—at its heart, this show is about a coregroup of courageous and good people doing their best to do the right thing, andgenuinely working together (at the direct risk and ultimate expense of theirown lives) to protect their comrades and (quite literally) save the world. Tomy mind, that’s a pitch-perfect description of the ideals of a communistsociety, ideals that their government consistently betrayed but that thesefigures fought and died for—and ideals from which the U.S. in 2024 could learna great deal.

Nextseries starts Monday,

Ben

PS. Whatdo you think? Communist cultural works, present or past, you’d highlight?

May 3, 2024: Communist Culture: Woody Guthrie and Steve Earle

[In honor of MayDay/International Workers’ Day, a series on some compelling culturalrepresentations of communism in American history and identity. Leading up to aspecial weekend post on contemporary communist culture!]

On communistprotest anthems and artists, then and now.

In one of myearliest blog posts, I nominated Woody Guthrie’s “This Land is Your Land”(1944)—ideally the version withall the verses, but I was willing to settle for the more commonly accepted shortenedversion—as a new national anthem. I have been interested to see that both of mysons have learned and performed the song (in that shortened version) in theirelementary school music classes, as I vaguely remember doing in my own. Becausethe truth is that, even without the usually excluded verse about the “Notrespassing” sign that has nothing written on the back, “This Land” offers whatwe would have to call a communist vision of America: as a place that isfundamentally shared by all of us, owned not as private property or competitiveresource but as a communal space that “belongs to you and me.” By 1944,communism had already come to be closely associated with (if not entirely tiedto) the Soviet Union, and thus to an explicit alternative to American identity,making Guthrie’s song a subtle but (to my mind) definite protest anthem.

Far, far lesssubtle is Steve Earle’s song “Christmas in Washington”(1997), which in its chorus implores, “Come back Woody Guthrie/Come back to usnow/Tear your eyes from paradise/And rise again somehow.” Earle’s song is aboutthe need for new protest anthems at the turn of the 21st century, aswell as representing an attempt to offer precisely such a new anthem, andbesides the request of Guthrie’s ghost Earle’s speaker also calls for thereturn of a pair of early 20th century communist activists: “So comeback Emma Goldman/Rise up old Joe Hill/The barricades are going up/They cannotbreak our will.” Which is to say, while protestsongs can of course take any number of different politicaland social perspectives, Earle ties both his and Guthrie’s protest anthemsmuch more specifically to communism—not, again, in the Soviet sense, but ratherin an emphasis on radical activisms (both labor and social) and theirconcurrent arguments for social and economic equality.

Earle’s song iseven less likely than the full version of Guthrie’s to become a new nationalanthem (and, to be clear, much less powerful than Guthrie’s as well, especiallyin the much-too-specific late 1996 setting of its opening verse). But onesignificant benefit of playing the two songs back to back is the reminder thatGuthrie wasn’t just a unifying American voice—he certainly wanted to be and (Iwould argue) was that, but he did so through offering a radical, protestingperspective, one that it is no stretch to call communist. Which, like all ofthe week’s texts and artists in their own interconnected ways, would remind usthat communism has not been just some external threat to the United States—thatit has also, and far more importantly, been a multi-century thread and presencein our own society and identity, an American community and perspectivedeserving of the extended attention and analysis that these cultural works helpprovide.

April Recap thisweekend,

Ben

PS. What do youthink? Cultural representations of communism you’d highlight?

May 2, 2024: Communist Culture: The Blithedale Romance

[In honor of MayDay/International Workers’ Day, a series on some compelling culturalrepresentations of communism in American history and identity. Leading up to aspecial weekend post on contemporary communist culture!]

On the novelthat significantly shifted an author’s career—and yet its continuity with histwo prior masterpieces.

Nearly a centurybefore Richard Wright published his autobiographical essay “I Tried to Be aCommunist” (1944), Nathaniel Hawthorne published a semi-autobiographical novelthat could have been titled the exact same thing. Between April and November1841, Hawthorne lived at Georgeand Sophia Ripley’s West Roxbury, Massachusettsutopian experimentBrook Farm; the experiment brought together many other prominentTranscendentalists, including Ralph Waldo Emerson, Margaret Fuller, and BronsonAlcott. Hawthorne’s experience with the Brook Farm community (which continuedfor another six years or so after his departure) was mixed, as reflected bothin the letters he wrote while there to his futurewife Sophia Peabody and in his subsequent description of the period as“essentially a daydream, and yet a fact.” And just over a decade later, hewould portray a strikingly similar utopian community in TheBlithedale Romance (1852).

Blithedale was Hawthorne’s third romancein three years—following The Scarlet Letter (1850) and The House of the Seven Gables(1851)—and marked a significant shift from the prior two. I would categorizeboth of them as historical romances: Scarletquite overtly, as it is set more than two hundred years prior to itspublication date; and Gables in itscentral use of the Salem Witch Trials, a history which Hawthorne calls in the novel’s famous Preface“a legend prolonging itself, from an epoch now gray in the distance, down intoour ownbroad day-light, and bringing along with it some of its legendary mist.” Blithedale, on the other hand, is notonly set in its own historical moment but centrally focused on engaging with,challenging, and at times satirizing that moment’s philosophies and ideals,most especially those of both Transcendentalism and communism. Perhaps to aidin that sense of present grounding, Hawthorne likewise shifts from the earliernovels’ third-person narrators to a semi-autobiographical (if also quitecomplex) first-person one, MilesCoverdale, who narrates for us his own experiences of the Blithedaleutopian community.

But if Blithedale is interestingly distinctfrom the two novels that preceded it, I would nonetheless argue that reading itin relationship to those historical romances helps us analyze how Hawthornechooses to depict his socially realistic topic. After all, both earlier novelslikewise featured realistic historical subjects—community in Puritan NewEngland and the causes and legacies of the Witch Trials—but portrayed themthrough what Hawthorne described, in that GablesPreface, as the Romance’s “right to present that truth under circumstances,to a great extent, of the writer’s own choosing or creation” (in contrast tothe Novel, which he argues “is presumed to aim at a very minute fidelity … tothe probable and ordinary course of man’s experience”). Literary historianshave long sought to pin down which Blithedalecharacter is which historical figure—Zenobiais Fuller! Hollingsworth is Ripley! and so on—but Hawthorne’s definition ofthe Romance would lead us in a different direction: to consider instead how hebends the historical realities of that place and time into a new, more Romanticshape, “manages his atmospherical medium” to present “the truth of the humanheart.” Like both prior novels, that is, Blithedaleultimately presents the human heart of its histories—an important achievementindeed.

Last culturalcommunism tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do youthink? Cultural representations of communism you’d highlight?

May 1, 2024: Communist Culture: Doctorow and Coover

[In honor of MayDay/International Workers’ Day, a series on some compelling culturalrepresentations of communism in American history and identity. Leading up to aspecial weekend post on contemporary communist culture!]

On two distinctbut complementary postmodern historical novels.

As I wrote in thispost on American hypocrites, Tony Kushner’s play Angelsin America (1991-1993) includes one of the most searing and tragicdepictions of McCarthyism: Kushner’s portrayal of Roy Cohn, and most especiallyof Cohn’s literally andfiguratively haunting conversations with the ghost of Ethel Rosenberg,whose conviction and demise a young Cohn helped ensure and who becomes inKushner’s imagining the last “person” to speak with Cohn before his own deathfrom AIDS. And Kushner isn’t alone is capitalizing upon Ethel Rosenberg’sliterary and symbolic qualities, as the famous communist (whether guiltyof espionage or not, she certainly was that) and her husband also occupy acomplex and central place in two of the most significant late 20thcentury American historical novels: E.L. Doctorow’s TheBook of Daniel (1971) and Robert Coover’s ThePublic Burning (1977).

Scholar LindaHutcheon developed a new category, “historiographicmetafiction,” to describe postmodern historical novels, works that puthistory and fiction in complex and often playful interrelationship and that doso in self-aware and –reflective ways. Both Doctorow’s and Coover’s novels fitaspects of this category, but in very different ways: Doctorow’s novel isnarrated by the son of a fictionalized version of the Rosenbergs (known in hisnovel as the Isaacsons), and it is the narrator Daniel’s awareness of his ownproject, audience, and historical significance that makes the book trulypostmodern; whereas Coover’s novel’s most prominent characters include not onlyEthel Rosenberg but also Richard Nixon (who serves as one of the text’s mainperspectives) and Uncle Sam (who is a folksy and vulgar chorus of sorts,appearing periodically to comment on the action). Needless to say, despitetheir shared subject matter, only one of the novels produced a significantcontroversy upon its publication.

Yet if weconsider that shared subject matter, and more exactly the question of howfiction can help us engage with difficult and divisive historical subjects moregenerally, it seems to me that Doctorow’s and Coover’s books complement eachother quite nicely. Coover’s is biting and angry, lashing out at the kinds ofhysterias and extremes that McCarthyism exemplified (whether the Rosenbergswere guilty or not) and that UncleSam’s America has always included. Doctorow’s is intimate and tragic,considering the legacies of such histories on the individuals and families, aswell as the communities and nation, that experience them. Coover focuses on themost public moments and figures, Doctorow on the most private effects andlives. Together, they help us remember that every American history and issue,even the Cold War boogeyman of communism, became and remains a part of ourcommunal and human landscapes as well.

Next culturalcommunism tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do youthink? Cultural representations of communism you’d highlight?

April 30, 2024: Communist Culture: Dos Passos and Wright

[In honor of MayDay/International Workers’ Day, a series on some compelling culturalrepresentations of communism in American history and identity. Leading up to aspecial weekend post on contemporary communist culture!]

On twostrikingly parallel yet also importantly distinct 1930s to ‘50s American arcs.

As I mentionedin yesterday’s post, despite our longstanding collective national antagonismtoward communism there have been both moments and communities in which thepolitical philosophy has had substantially broader and deeper appeal. In the 1930s,two such factors came together to help produce a sizeable and vocal cohortof writers and intellectuals who embraced communism: the Great Depression’sheightening of wealth inequalities and social stratification seemed tohighlight the limitations and even destructive capabilities of uncheckedcapitalism, leading a numberof American writers and artists to imagine and depict alternative socialand communal ways of living; and those economic woes, coupled with thecontinued destructive forces of segregation, lynching, and other communal illsand threats, led many AfricanAmericans similarly to seek an alternative to the dominant Americansystems.

Those responseshappened (and thus differed) within multiple communities, but they can besuccinctly illustrated by two individuals, writers whose most significantnovels bookend the 1930s in American literature and culture. John Dos Passoshad been publishing fiction since the mid-1920s, but it was the trilogy thatcame to be collected as U.S.A. (1938)—The 42nd Parallel (1930), 1919 (1932), and The Big Money (1936)—that exemplified both hisstylistic experimentation and his socialistic philosophies. Richard Wrightlaunched his career with the short story collection UncleTom’s Children (1938) but truly entered the literary stratosphere twoyears later with NativeSon (1940), the best-selling and hugely controversial novel thatfeatures both one of American literature’s most eloquent defenders of communism(in the lawyer Max) and a character (protagonist Bigger Thomas) whose tragicand brutal arc makes numerous, purposefully ineloquent but nonetheless compellingarguments for the philosophy.

In the 1940s to50s, both writers famously broke with those philosophies and with the CommunistParty: Wright in one pivotal moment, the essay “I Tried to Be aCommunist” (1944); and Dos Passos more gradually, in a series of publicstatements and positions that culminated in his qualified supportfor Joseph McCarthy (among other turning points). Yet I would also arguethat their shifts represent two quite distinct personal and nationalnarratives: Dos Passos genuinely seemed, in response to World War II, the ColdWar, and other factors, to change in his political and social perspectives;whereas to my mind Wright’s perspectives remained largely unchanged, and hecame instead to see, as does for example RalphEllison’s Invisible Man, the Communist Party as an imperfect and indeedfailed vehicle through which to seek such political and social change. Such adistinction would of course become even more important in the 1960s, when a newgeneration of African American activists found anew a compellingalternative in American socialism.

Next culturalcommunism tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do youthink? Cultural representations of communism you’d highlight?

April 29, 2024: Communist Culture: “The Palace-Burner”

[In honor of MayDay/International Workers’ Day, a series on some compelling culturalrepresentations of communism in American history and identity. Leading up to aspecial weekend post on contemporary communist culture!]

On themasterpiece of a poem that destroys easy “us vs. them” narratives.

I made the casefor my favorite American poet, Sarah Piatt, in oneof my first posts, and did so in large part through her best poem, “The Palace-Burner” (1873). Thereare a lot of factors that make “Palace-Burner” one of the great American poems,including its exemplification of Piatt’s frequent use of a unique andmulti-layered perspective that I named in myfirst book the dialogic lyric, an individual speaker’s perspective filteredthrough conversation and the shifts and evolutions it always produces. But atthe top of the list for me would be Piatt’s incredibly sophisticatedrepresentation—through the lens of a mother and young son discussing anewspaper picture of a female rebel from the 1871Paris Commune—of what I called in thispost three crucial and interconnected levels to empathy: “connecting to seemingly distant others, working to understand those towhom we’re close, and examining our own identities through those lenses.”

This wasn’t necessarily the case in the 1870s (although given theimmense popularity of Horatio Alger novels in the period, maybe itwas), but over the century and a half since I would say that there have beenfew world communities with which Americans have had, collectively, a moredifficult time empathizing than communists. Of course there are significantexceptions, both in terms of time periods during which that philosophy hasseemed more appealing (such as the Great Depression, about which more intomorrow’s post) and in terms of American communities who have beensufficiently disenfranchised from our dominant national narratives to see thewisdom of such alternatives (such as African Americans in the mid-20thcentury, on whom likewise more tomorrow). But when it comes to our overarching,dominant narratives, communism has been one of the most consistent “them’s” toour constructed “us” for a long while; we can see both sides of that equation,for example, in our consistent need to define the Soviet Union as “godless” incontrast to equally constructed images of the United States as a “Christian nation.”

There would be various possible ways to complicate and revise thatkind of “us vs. them” narrative, including highlighting the many originating and influentialforms and moments of Americansocialism and communism. But Piatt takes another, and to my mind particularlycompelling, tack: creating in her poetic speaker a woman who seems thoroughlyremoved from not only communism but political conversations in general(especially in the “separate spheres” mentality thatcontinued to reign for most middle-class American families in the period); andthen giving that speaker the opportunity to consider whether and how she and a foreigncommunist woman might have anything in common. Neither the speaker nor the poemcome to any easy or comfortable answers—empathy is neither of those things inany case—but they ask the questions, and that seems to me to an impressivemodel for all of us.

Next culturalcommunism tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do youthink? Cultural representations of communism you’d highlight?

April 27-28, 2024: April 2024 Recap

[A Recapof the month that was in AmericanStudying.]

April1: Satire Studying: African American Satire: An April Fool’s series onsatire starts with a link to my recent SaturdayEvening Post Black History Month column.

April2: Satire Studying: Innocents Abroad: The series continues with thedouble-edged satire at the heart of Mark Twain’s first big hit.

April3: Satire Studying: The Interview: What’s problematic, and what’simportant, about a hugely controversial cinematic comedy, as the series pokeson.

April4: Satire Studying: TV Satires: Four news and sketch comedy shows fromwhich we can learn a lot (but which I originally posted in 2017, so add morerecent nominations please!).

April5: Satire Studying: The Big Short and Vice: The series concludes with valueand limits of satire when it comes to contemporary, contested events.

April6-7: Emily Lauer on Comics Analysis & Editing as Public-Facing Scholarship:My newest Guest Post from a familiar friend of the blog—Emily Lauer with her record-setting4th Guest Post!

April8: I Am AmericanStudying Sidney Poitier: Vaughn Joy on No Way Out: A serieson the 60th anniversary of Poitier’s groundbreaking Oscar win kicksoff with a FilmStudier I really love on Poitier’s cinematic debut.

April9: I Am AmericanStudying Sidney Poitier: The Blackboard Jungle: The series continueswith a Poitier character who’s very similar to a 1980s favorite, and oneimportant distinction.

April10: I Am AmericanStudying Sidney Poitier: The Defiant Ones: Two differentgenres through which to contextualize Poitier’s 1958 prison break film, as theseries roles on.

April11: I Am AmericanStudying Sidney Poitier: Two 1967 Classics: Standoutspeeches and sweet sendoffs in Poitier’s pair of pitch-perfect 1967 films.

April12: I Am AmericanStudying Sidney Poitier: Lillies of the Field: The seriesconcludes with what was historic about Poitier’s Oscar-winning role, what wasn’tquite, and what’s importantly outside that framing.

April13-14: I Am AmericanStudying Sidney Poitier: 21C Heirs: A special weekend follow-upon noteworthy performances from five of our best contemporary Black actors (notincluding Denzel and Morgan who could each get whole posts for their workalone).

April15: Mythic Patriotisms: The 1776 Project: For Patriots’ Day this year I wantedto trace some histories and layers to one of the main categories in my book Of Thee I Sing, starting with a post onhow a project dedicated to “patriotic education” embodies the worst of mythic patriotism.

April16: Mythic Patriotisms: The National Anthem: The series continues with twolayers of mythic patriotism found in the lesser-known later verses of “TheStar-Spangled Banner.”

April17: Mythic Patriotisms: “Self-Made”: How an iconic American narrative ismythic patriotic in both meanings and effects, as the series pledges on.

April18: Mythic Patriotisms: Defining America’s Origins: The multiple mythic patrioticlayers to an origin story that centers on the Pilgrims/Puritans.

April19: Mythic Patriotisms: Love It or Leave It: The series concludes with the1960s constructions of a phrase that sums up mythic patriotism’s exclusions.

April20-21: Mythic Patriotisms in 2024: There’s never been a moment with moreovert mythic patriotism than our own, and for this weekend follow-up I bothanalyzed that presence and asked for connections to chances to talk more aboutthese topics!

April22: Climate Culture: Cli Fi: An Earth Day series on cultural works aboutthe climate crisis kicks off with a stunning recent novel that extends the longlegacy of cli fi.

April23: Climate Culture: The Day After Tomorrow and Don’t Look Up: The seriescontinues with the necessity but limitations of disaster movies, and animportant recent variation on the genre.

April24: Climate Culture: “The Tradition”: Two complementary ways to read aclimate change moment in Jericho Brown’s powerful 21st century sonnet,as the series rolls on.

April25: Climate Culture: “The Ghost Birds”: What’s specific and what’s universalin Karen Russell’s amazing 2021 short story.

April26: Climate Culture: Climate Songs: The series and month conclude with fiveexamples of pop music perspectives on the climate crisis, including MidnightOil’s great album Resist (2022).

Nextseries starts Monday,

Ben

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