Benjamin A. Railton's Blog, page 52

February 17-18, 2024: AmericanStudying Love Songs: Five New Classics

[I know itmight not be very 2024 of me to say, but love is in the air, and not justbecause it’s Valentine’s week. If you’re feeling it too, or maybe if you need alittle help getting into the V-Day spirit, this week I’ve quickly highlighted theAmericanStudies stories behind a handful of our great past love songs, leadingto this special post on recent ones that have hit my heart. Add your Valentine’stunes in comments, please!]

1)     “Prizefighter” (2012): I’vewritten about my favorite 21st century rock band The Killers once before in this space,focusing there (as you would expect) on their most AmericanStudying song. TheKillers don’t tend to do unironic love songs—they’re more a fan of the ironicvariety, a la their biggest hit “Mr. Brightside”—but this one, a bonus track ontheir best album Battle Born (2012),delivers a high-octane burst of pure adoration that should be on any Valentine’sDay playlist.

2)     “Dead Sea” (2012): For along time, I knew The Lumineers through their one huge hit, “Ho Hey” (also,like this track, from 2012’s self-titled debut album). That’s more of a breakupsong than a love song, if a particularly catchy and uniquely written one to besure. But as I’ve taken a much deeper dive into the band over the last fewyears, I’ve learned that they can express the full gamut of human emotionsthrough equally striking songwriting, including one of the purest expressionsof love as partnership I know, “Dead Sea.”

3)     “Fire and the Flood”(2015): I don’t have as much personal history with the next two songs; I justthink they’re great 21st century love songs that belong on any V-Daylist! My favorite thing about Australian singer-songwriter Vance Joy’s “Fireand the Flood” is the way he gives the floor to the speaker’s significant otherfor the first part of a call-and-response, climactic bridge: “‘Now listen here,’she said/‘Boy when you know, you’ll know’/And I know.” What else do I need tosay?

4)     “Roller Coaster” (2016): WhenI teach poetry I talk a lot with students about metaphor, and more exactlyabout the concept of an extended metaphor, one that drives an entire poem ortext through its symbolic meanings. I’m not sure there’s a better one in 21stcentury love songs than Bon Jovi’s “Roller Coaster,” as exemplified by the song’schorus: “Hold on tight, slide a little closer/Up so high, stars on ourshoulders/Time flies by, don’t close your eyes/Kiss by kiss love is like athrill ride/What goes up might take us upside down/Life ain’t amerry-go-round/It’s a roller coaster.” Well said, JBJ and company—and wellmodeled for all those students of poetry!

5)     “BeforeYou” (2022): I said everything I need to say about Benson Boone, thisbeautiful love song, and my connection to him through my sons in that post fromlast year’s Valentine’s week series. Check it out, and much love, all!

Anti-favoritesseries starts Monday,

Ben

PS. Whatdo you think? Other love songs, present or past, you’d AmericanStudy?

February 16, 2024: AmericanStudying Love Songs: “Happy”

[I know itmight not be very 2024 of me to say, but love is in the air, and not justbecause it’s Valentine’s week. If you’re feeling it too, or maybe if you need alittle help getting into the V-Day spirit, this week I’ll quickly highlight theAmericanStudies stories behind a handful of our great past love songs, leadingto a special post on current ones that have hit my heart. Add your Valentine’stunes in comments, please!]

You didn’treally think I could get through a whole songtastic series without includingBruce, didya? When Springsteen was young, he was—as he himself has since admittedquite honestly and thoughtfully—not great when it came to romanticrelationships, and thus often not at his songwriting best when depicting them(although there are still somegreats on the earlyrecords). But in the decades since, Springsteen has matured and become atrue master of what I would call the “adult love song”—songs about both thegaps between romantic ideals and human realities and (most importantly and tothis listener inspiringly) the ways we try to navigate and make the most of ourrelationships and lives nonetheless. For my money, no song has ever capturedthose layers better than does “Happy” (1992),especially in its final verse: “We’re born in this world, darling, with fewdays/And trouble never far behind/Man and woman circle each other in a cage/Acage that’s been handed down the line/Lost and running ‘neath a million deadstarts/Tonight let’s shed our skins and slip these bars.” Word, Boss.

Specialpost this weekend,

Ben

PS. Whatdo you think? Other love songs you’d AmericanStudy?

February 15, 2024: AmericanStudying Love Songs: “Storybook Love”

[I know itmight not be very 2024 of me to say, but love is in the air, and not justbecause it’s Valentine’s week. If you’re feeling it too, or maybe if you need alittle help getting into the V-Day spirit, this week I’ll quickly highlight theAmericanStudies stories behind a handful of our great past love songs, leadingto a special post on current ones that have hit my heart. Add your Valentine’stunes in comments, please!]

It’s nocoincidence that the first song I highlighted in this week’s series, “At Last,”made its debut as part of a feature film, as the relationship betweenlove songs and movies is a longstanding and multilayered one (far beyondjust great soundtracksfor romantic comedies, although that’s part of the story to be sure). Mostlythose are existing songs that the films adapt to their own purposes, butsometimes an original love song is written for a film—and an even rarer sometimesthat song is both beautiful on its own and a pitch-perfect accompaniment to themovie in question. Checking off every one of those boxes for me is “Storybook Love,” a songwritten by singer-songwriterWilly DeVille and arranged by Dire Straits’ lead singer and guitarist Mark Knopfler for the closing creditsof The Princess Bride (the beloved 1987Rob Reiner film for which Knopfler wrote the whole soundtrack). My favorite thingabout “Storybook Love” is that it is a love song about love songs, and moreexactly about how those songs (and films as well) present an idealized visionof romantic love and partnerships—but how, as I can very well attest, realitydoes occasionally and amazingly live up to those ideals.

Last lovesong tomorrow,

Ben

PS. Whatdo you think? Other love songs you’d AmericanStudy?

February 14, 2024: AmericanStudying Love Songs: “You Can’t Hurry Love”

[I know itmight not be very 2024 of me to say, but love is in the air, and not justbecause it’s Valentine’s week. If you’re feeling it too, or maybe if you need alittle help getting into the V-Day spirit, this week I’ll quickly highlight theAmericanStudies stories behind a handful of our great past love songs, leadingto a special post on current ones that have hit my heart. Add your Valentine’stunes in comments, please!]

Everycorner of American popular music has produced a shit-ton of love songs—maybe ifyou’re lucky (or cursed?) I’ll devote a future weeklong series to boy bands,for example; don’t even front, you know you want it that way—but I’m not sureany community did so more consistently and more successfully than Motown.The artists and groups signed by Barry Gordy’s Motown Records released a laundrylist of phenomenal love songs, and any and all of them could work for today’s post(I’ve definitely got more Marvin GayeStudying to do, to name just one example). But I don’t think any artists betterembody Motown than did TheSupremes, especially during their decade with the legendary Diana Ross before she left the group in1970 to pursue her solo career; and among their many hit love songs (and hitsperiod) I would single out for this Valentine’s Day the beautiful and wise “You Can’t Hurry Love”(1966). What I especially love about “You Can’t Hurry Love” is that it remindsus that love songs aren’t simply or at least not necessarily about romanticlove, but also about the other forms and expressions of love in our lives—such asthe speaker’s mother in this song, and they her advice represents a lovinglegacy she has left with the speaker as she navigates her own life and questfor companionship. May we remember all those we love and who love us on thisV-Day!

Next lovesong tomorrow,

Ben

PS. Whatdo you think? Other love songs you’d AmericanStudy?

February 13, 2024: AmericanStudying Love Songs: “Wake Up Little Susie”

[I know itmight not be very 2024 of me to say, but love is in the air, and not justbecause it’s Valentine’s week. If you’re feeling it too, or maybe if you need alittle help getting into the V-Day spirit, this week I’ll quickly highlight theAmericanStudies stories behind a handful of our great past love songs, leadingto a special post on current ones that have hit my heart. Add your Valentine’stunes in comments, please!]

The early yearsof rock ‘n roll featured plenty of conventional love ballads,as every form of pop culture always has and probably always will. But this newgenre also included more boundary-pushinglove songs that embodied its youthful and controversial elements—or thatmight have if we couldonly figure out what they were saying. Right on the border between thosetwo tones we find The Everly Brothers’ “Wake Up Little Susie”(1957), a song about a pair of innocent young lovebirds who accidentally fellasleep at the movies and now will be seen as scandalous sex fiends by familyand friends—or maybe it’s about how two appropriately lustful teens gave in tonature’s call and had sex, and now have to concoct a plausible story to fitthemselves back into conventional images of love. After all love songs, likelove and life, have and help us connect to all those layers—and if we can singand bop along while we do, well there’s not much better than that!

Next lovesong tomorrow,

Ben

PS. Whatdo you think? Other love songs you’d AmericanStudy?

February 12, 2024: AmericanStudying Love Songs: “At Last”

[I know itmight not be very 2024 of me to say, but love is in the air, and not justbecause it’s Valentine’s week. If you’re feeling it too, or maybe if you need alittle help getting into the V-Day spirit, this week I’ll quickly highlight theAmericanStudies stories behind a handful of our great past love songs, leadingto a special post on current ones that have hit my heart. Add your Valentine’stunes in comments, please!]

For mostof us, Etta James’ “AtLast” (1960) is the quintessential wedding song, a timeless expression ofwhat it means to finally find the love we’ve been seeking. I’m not here tochallenge that perspective—wouldn’t be very Valentine’s week of me!—but ratherto remind us that behind even the most timeless tunes are some specificcontexts and histories, details and stories that can only enhance ourappreciation of the art. In the case of “At Last,” that certainly includesJames’ own striking, fraught, and ultimately moving and inspiring life story, an arcthat reminds us that finding what we seek—and then choosing and celebrating itwhen we do—is a daily and lifelong goal. But it also includes the song’smultiple and very telling 20th century histories—its origins as aperformance by the GlennMiller orchestra for the 1941 film Sun Valley Serenade;its subsequent release on a 1942 “Victory Disc”from the U.S. War Department; and its numerous versions beyond James’, includinga 1952 release fromMiller’s trumpeter Ray Anthony that was the highest-charting version beforeJames made it her own.

Next lovesong tomorrow,

Ben

PS. Whatdo you think? Other love songs you’d AmericanStudy?

February 10-11, 2024: AmericanStudying Sports Movies: My Pitch!

[For manyyears now, I’ve used the SuperBowl week to blog about sportshistories and stories. This year I wanted to do the same, focusing thistime on sports movies and what they can tell us about American culture andidentity and leading up to my pitch for a new such film. Be a good sport andshare your thoughts in comments, please!]

First, fulldisclosure—there’s probably no story from American history that I’ve spent moretime trying to add to our collective memories than that of the Celestials, the1870s semi-pro baseball team comprised of students from the Chinese EducationalMission in Hartford. I did so most fully in thisSaturday Evening Post Considering Historycolumn, but also for this TeachItCTlesson plan and in mythird book, among other places.

As I’ve shared multipletimes in this space, my in-progressseventh book likewise focuses on the Celestials, and specifically on theirtriumphant, tragic, and very telling September 1881 final game on a SanFrancisco sandlot. I’m still hopeful that that book will find a home (and wouldwelcome any ideas for places it might or people I could talk to about it!), butbecause I’m so determined to get this story out there in any and all possibleways, I’m certainly also considering other media through which the story of theCelestials and their last game might be told. That definitely includes a limited-runpodcast, for example, which is something I’m just in the early stages ofthinking through but am excited to consider further for sure.

But as this week’sseries has reminded us, there’s no better venue through which to tell the mostexciting and inspiring sports stories than film. And I can’t lie, I’ve long hadthe basic idea in mind for a screenplay on the Celestials—with that last gameas the throughline, and then with flashbacks to the experiences of the players,their fellow students in the stands, the city of San Francisco and its anti-Chinesemovement and massacre, Chinese Educational Mission founder YungWing, and more. I’m thinking John Sayles to direct, but in whoever’s hands,I believe the story of the Celestials’ last game could be one of the greatAmerican sports films, historical dramas, and much more. Let’s make it happen,fellow AmericanStudiers!

Valentine’sseries starts Monday,

Ben

PS. So what doyou think of my pitch?!

February 9, 2024: AmericanStudying Sports Movies: Remember the Titans

[For manyyears now, I’ve used the SuperBowl week to blog about sportshistories and stories. This year I wanted to do the same, focusing thistime on sports movies and what they can tell us about American culture andidentity, leading up to my pitch for a new such film. Be a good sport and shareyour thoughts in comments, please!]

On theover-the-top scene that really shouldn’t work, but somehow does.

About midwaythrough Remember the Titans (2000),Denzel Washington’s Coach Herman Boone takes the players on his newlyintegrated Virginia high school football team (who have gone to Pennsylvaniafor training camp) on a midnight jog. The team ends up, to their and theaudience’s surprise, on the grounds of Gettsyburg National Military Park,where Boone gives aspeech on the Civil War battle and both its continuing resonances in andpotential lessons for the team’s and its community’s struggles with racialdiscord and division. The speech and scene ends with Boone’s fervent hope thatperhaps, if the players and team can learn the lessons that the battle’s deadsoldiers have to offer, they can “learn to play this game like men.”

For anybody whohas any sense of the horrific awfulness that was Gettysburg,or just the horrific awfulness that was the Civil War in general (and I’m notnecessarily disagreeing with Ta-NehisiCoates when he argues that the war wasn’t tragic, but it sure was bloodyand awful in any case, and never more so that on days like Gettysburg’s), thisevocation of the battle’s dead for a football team’s lessons feels a bitridiculous. For that matter, if we think about themost famous speech delivered at the battlefield, in tribute to thosehonored dead and in an effort to hallow that ground (a phrase that Booneovertly echoes in his own closing thoughts), the filmmakers’ choice to putBoone’s speech in the same spot (and I don’t know whether the Gettysburg speechtook place in the real-life histories on which the film is based, but it seems from this article asif it didn’t and it’s a choice in the film in any case) feels even moreslight and silly in comparison to that transcendent historical moment.

So the scenereally shouldn’t work, not for this AmericanStudier at least—but I have toadmit that it did when I saw the movie, and did again when I watched the sceneto write this post. Partly that’s due to the performances—Denzel is alwaysDenzel, and the main kids are uniformly great as well (including a young WoodHarris, later AvonBarksdale on The Wire). Partlyit’s because great sports films are particularly good at taking what is bydefinition cliché (all those conventions I mentioned in yesterday’s post) andmaking it feel new and powerful in spite of that familiarity. And partly,ironically given those Gettysburg contrasts, it’s because of thehistory—because this football team and its story does connect to America’stortured and far too often tragic legacy of racial division and discrimination,and because the story and thus the film represents one of those moments when wetranscended that legacy and reached a more perfect union. When sports, andsports films, are at their best, they have that potential, which is one mainreason why we keep going back to them.

My sports moviepitch this weekend,

Ben

PS. What do youthink? Other sports movies you’d highlight?

February 8, 2024: AmericanStudying Sports Movies: The Fighter and Silver Linings Playbook

[For manyyears now, I’ve used the SuperBowl week to blog about sportshistories and stories. This year I wanted to do the same, focusing thistime on sports movies and what they can tell us about American culture andidentity, leading up to my pitch for a new such film. Be a good sport and shareyour thoughts in comments, please!]

On the interestingresults when an unconventional filmmaker works in a conventional genre.

Like anywell-established and longstanding genre (from romantic comedies to slasherfilms to Westerns to actionmovies), sports movies tend to operate according to certain conventions. Asmy posts this week have demonstrated, there are certainly different optionswithin those conventions, such as the lovable loser story or the heroicunderdog tale. But even across those sub-genres, many of the genre’s conventionalbeats and stages still apply: thetraining montage, the moment when all seems hopeless and lost for ourprotagonists, the dramatic shift that signals the start of something morepositive, and so on. Whether we’re talking about the Daniel-san in The Karate Kid (1984), the Jamaicanbobsled team in Cool Runnings(1993), or Keanu and hisfellow scabs in The Replacements (2000; another team coached by GeneHackman, in case the genre echoes weren’t strong enough), the story is stillthe story, by and large.

So what happenswhen a filmmaker whose career has been one long refusal to adhere to conventionturns his attention to sports movies? We’ve seen two 21st-centuryexamples of that combination in the career of David O. Russell, the highlyunconventional filmmaker behind movies as diverse but uniformly unusual as Spanking the Monkey (1994), Three Kings (1999), and I Heart Huckabees (2004). Russell’s mostacclaimed film was the Oscar-nominated blockbuster American Hustle (2013), but before that he made two successivefilms that I would classify as highly unconventional sports movies: The Fighter (2010),the story of real-life Lowell, Mass. boxer Micky Ward (Mark Wahlberg) and hisdrug-addicted half-brother Dickie (the phenomenal Christian Bale);and Silver Linings Playbook (2012),a screwball romantic comedy about two troubled Philadelphians (played toperfection by BradleyCooper and Jennifer Lawrence) that turns into a sports movie as they trainfor a climactic dance competition while Cooper’s father (Robert De Niro) makes alife-or-death bet on an upcoming Eagles game.

In some ways,both films adhere closely to the kinds of conventions I highlighted above: Silver Linings has both an extendedtraining montage for the dance competition and a lovable losers ending (theyscore a highly mediocre score, but it’s what they needed for the bet somediocrity is victory in this case); TheFighter ends with its heroic underdog overcoming his obstacles, winningagainst all odds, and winning the girl in the process. But it’s in theirextended, nuanced, dark yet thoughtful portrayals of mental and physicalillness that both films go outside the bounds of typical sports movies. By farthe best sequences in The Fighter involveBale’s Dickie, who neither a hero nor a lovable loser, but an addict andcriminal struggling to survive from day to day. And despite its moreconventional (and foreshadowed from the title on) happy ending, Silver Linings takes all three of itsprotagonists and its audience with them to uncomfortable places, asking us tosee these characters not as underdogs or losers or any other types, but asthree-dimensional humans struggling with the kinds of challenges against whichthere is perhaps no victory, simply endurance. That might not be a sports movielesson, but it’s a pretty important one.

LastMovieStudying tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do youthink? Other sports movies you’d highlight?

February 7, 2024: AmericanStudying Sports Movies: The Longest Yard(s)

[For manyyears now, I’ve used the SuperBowl week to blog about sportshistories and stories. This year I wanted to do the same, focusing thistime on sports movies and what they can tell us about American culture andidentity, leading up to my pitch for a new such film. Be a good sport and shareyour thoughts in comments, please!]On what the changes between an original filmand its remake can tell us about American narratives.

I’m not going totry to make the case for the original The Longest Yard (1974)as some sort of American classic, but it does offer a pretty gritty andrealistic depiction of prison life and community amidst its more comic momentsand its lovable underdogs sports story. The film’s sadistic Warden RudolphHazen, played to sleazy perfection by Eddie Albert, could be transplantedwithout much revision to a more overtly realistic contemporary film such as Cool Hand Luke(1967). And as the disgraced football star turned convict, Burt Reynolds feelsprecisely as flawed and frustrating yet ultimately heroic as Paul Newman in that filmor Jack Nicholson in the following year’s One Flew Over the Cuckoo’sNest (1975). So you know what, maybe I am making the case for Longest Yard as a minor Americanclassic, perhaps not quite on par with those contemporary films or another likeDogDay Afternoon (1975), but in the conversation at least.

It will likelycome as no surprise to anyone familiar with Adam Sandler’s film oeuvre that the 2005 Longest Yard remake, starringSandler in the Reynolds role and James Cromwell as the Warden (among many othercelebrity roles), is not a classic, minor or otherwise. While I try not to sumup entire works with one moment or detail, I’d say this one qualifies: in theoriginal film, the climactic game between the prisoners and guards was abrutally realistic grudge-fest, with lives and futures on the line; in theremake, that’s ostensibly still the case, but at one point Sandler’squarterback gives one of the guards a wet willy. I can’t say it any moreclearly than does the Wikipediaentry on the remake and its critical reception: “the greatest complaintfrom critics was that it replaced the original’s dark comedy and grit withjuvenile humor and visual gags.” Since “juvenile humor and visual gags” is whatyou’ll find if you look up “Adam Sandler” in the dictionary, it’s fair to saythat his presence had a lot to do with that change; but I would also argue thatthe two films reflect a significant difference in our national narratives aboutprison.

In this 2014 poston Dog Day Afternoon, I wroteabout the 1971 Attica Prison rebellion, and the way those prominent andcontroversial events foregrounded issues of prisoner treatment and life in thiseasily overlooked American community. Popular and influential films like Luke and Yard likewise reflect the presence of those issues in the era’scollective conversations. In the 21st century, on the other hand, wetend not to think about our prisons and their communities at all; when wedo, as John Oliverhighlights in this brilliant piece, it’s mostly as fodder for jokes aboutprison rape (perhaps the least appropriate subject for jokes imaginable) or asthe subject of melodramatic entertainments like Oz and Orange is the NewBlack. So if the remake is set in the same community that was the subjectof those gritty, socially realistic earlier films but is instead full of dumbjokes and silly entertainments untethered from reality (which are the variantdefinitions of “Adam Sandler”), that would seem to be a pretty accuratedepiction of the way we now engage with prison, when we engage with it at all.

NextMovieStudying tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do youthink? Other sports movies you’d highlight?