Benjamin A. Railton's Blog, page 96

September 23, 2022: Southern Storytelling: Faulkner at the University

[September 25th marks William Faulkner’s 125th birthday. So this week I’ll AmericanStudy Faulkner and other Southern storytellers, leading up to a special weekend tribute to a great new Faulkner website!]

On one ironic and one inspiring lesson to take away from the famous conversations.

For two years, between 1957 and 1958, William Faulkner served as the University of Virginia’s first Writer-in-Residence. He did quite a bit with his time in Charlottesville, but most famously and significantly he gave a series of public readings from and lectures on his career and works, including question and answer sessions with UVA students and members of the community. A few years ago, my Dad Stephen Railton and a team of digital scholars and designers produced an online, digitized archive of those public conversations, and I encourage any Faulkner fan—or anyone interested in American literature and culture and history, the craft of writing, or public performance, among other relevant topics—to spend some time losing yourself in that archive.

Before you listen to or read those lectures and conversations, however, it’s important to note that one of the ironic but central ideas I would take away from them is that artists cannot be entirely trusted when it comes to talking about their own works. Time and again, Faulkner says things about his works and career that, at best, feel drastically over-simplified, and at times feel (to this reader and FaulknerStudier, at least) blatantly inaccurate. That’s perhaps most true of his famous statements about The Sound and the Fury (1929), a novel that’s already plenty difficult enough to read and interpret without having to contend with some serious authorly misdirection. To be more generous to Faulkner, he was making those statements thirty years after publishing Sound, and so at the very least we have to treat all of his 1950s perspectives and ideas as just as another collection of primary texts to analyze, no more authoritative and certainly no more absolute than the complex works about which he’s talking.

But if we step back from the content of the conversations—which again is very interesting and well worth your time—and consider the basic fact of their existence, it’s hard not to be hugely inspired. Here was one of America and the world’s most famous artists, a Nobel Prize winner toward the end of his legendary career, coming to a university not just for the recognition or a stipend or the like, but instead to engage, deeply and extensively, with members of its community—including, indeed especially, some of its youngest members. That Faulkner did so at all is extremely impressive; that he did so numerous times over the course of two full years is unique and striking; that we now have so many ways to access, engage with, and become part of those conversations is a bit of a 21stcentury miracle.

Special post this weekend,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Southern storytellers you’d share?

September 22, 2022: Southern Storytelling: Representing Katrina

[September 25th marks William Faulkner’s 125th birthday. So this week I’ll AmericanStudy Faulkner and other Southern storytellers, leading up to a special weekend tribute to a great new Faulkner website!]

On three exemplary stages of artistic depictions of the controversial 21st century tragedy.

1)      Documenting: Released less than a year after Katrina hit, Spike Lee’s gripping documentary When the Levees Broke: A Requiem in Four Acts (2006) is required viewing for anyone seeking to understand the hurricance and its many complex contexts and effects; but it’s only one of many impressive documentary films on those topics released in the years after the storm. Among them I would especially highlight Trouble the Water(2008), an immersive account of the storm filmed by a local family and featuring some of the most stunning and devastating on the ground footage of a hurricance ever captured. Taken together, Levees and Trouble offer crucial complementary lenses through which to document Katrina, and on a broader level exemplify what documentary storytelling can do in representing such histories and communicating them to audiences.

2)      Rebuilding: There are likewise important documentaries about the multi-layered, ongoing efforts to rebuild New Orleans in the post-storm era. But I believe that the best artistic representation of that process is Treme, David Simon and Eric Overmyer’s four-season HBO show about music, food, race, culture, relationships, and the residents of that New Orleans neighborhood (and of the city overall) in the storm’s aftermath. Simon is a master television storyteller, and one of our culture’s most impressive depictors of urban communities and stories, but I would also argue that a TV show was the perfect artistic vehicle to chronicle the rebuilding process. Being able to follow the show’s numerous characters across multiple episodes and seasons provided a gradual, nuanced, contradictory, and always compelling perspective on whether and how the city could find its way again after the destructions and traumas of the storm.

3)      Remembering: Both those documentaries and a show like Treme continue to have vital roles to play as New Orleans and the nation continue to document and rebuild, but nearly a dozen years after the storm, the complexities and meanings of remembering have also taken on a more prominent place in our collective narratives of Katrina. I don’t know of any artistic texts about Katrina that represent those complexities and meanings more successfully and powerfully than does Jesmyn Ward’sNational Book Award-winning novel Salvage the Bones (2011). Ward’s immersive, lyrical novel of a Mississippi family before, during, and after the storm is in many ways singular, but I would nonetheless argue that it also exemplifies what novels can do as representations of dark and potentially divisive histories. By focusing so fully and deeply on her central characters and family, Ward’s novel illustrates how fiction can produce empathy with the individual experiences and perspectives that are at the heart of any historical event—and thus can reshape our collective memories of those histories through such intimate, individual voices and stories.

Last storytelling studying tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Southern storytellers you’d share?

September 21, 2022: Southern Storytelling: Carson McCullers

[September 25th marks William Faulkner’s 125th birthday. So this week I’ll AmericanStudy Faulkner and other Southern storytellers, leading up to a special weekend tribute to a great new Faulkner website!]

On three compelling works by the precocious, hugely talented Southern writer lost far too soon.

1)      The Heart is a Lonely Hunter (1940): McCullers published three phenomenal novels before she turned 30, and her masterpiece might well be the first, published when she was just 23 years old. Heartis one of the more unique American novels, assembling a cast of Sherwood Anderson-inspired “grotesques” and exploring both the universal human themes reflected by the book’s title and many specific social and cultural layers to life in a 1930s Georgia mill town. There are many reasons to read beyond the Southern Renaissance authors on whom I’ve focused earlier in this series, including questions of inclusion and diversity to be sure; but high on the list as well is the very different early 20th century Souths to which an author like McCullers and work like Hearthelp us connect.

2)      The Member of the Wedding (1946): As I mentioned in this post, McCullers’ third novel (although she began it immediately after publishing Heart) offers a coming of age story that complements but also contrasts with the far more well-known To Kill a Mockingbird. Featuring slightly more familiar characters than the true originals in Heart, Member has been frequently adapted, including by McCullers herself for the 1950 Broadway show that ran for 501 performances and spawned an acclaimed 1952 film adaptationfeaturing many of the same actors as the play. So there are lots of ways to connect with this story, but I still highly recommend the novel, and agree with McCullers when she wrote to her husband Reeves that it is “one of those works that the least slip can ruin. It must be beautifully done,” and it most definitely was.

3)      Illumination and Night Glare(1999): Perhaps sensing the end of her far too short life was approaching, McCullers dictated her autobiography over her final months in 1967; but it was left unfinished, and only published (in that unfinished form) 32 years later. As that New York Timesreview suggests, Illumination is a short and at times frustratingly opaque book, perhaps because of its unfinished state, certainly because of McCullers’ own reticence to write at length about her many struggles and challenges. But what the book does capture is what its title suggests: the moments of epiphany that pierce through the darkness of those struggles and challenges and provide a writer with inspiration to go with the precocious talent. For anyone interested in learning more about the writing process and life, I highly recommend McCullers’ autobiography.

Next storytelling studying tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Southern storytellers you’d share?

September 20, 2022: Southern Storytelling: Thomas Wolfe

[September 25th marks William Faulkner’s 125th birthday. So this week I’ll AmericanStudy Faulkner and other Southern storytellers, leading up to a special weekend tribute to a great new Faulkner website!]

On the largely, ironically forgotten author who deserves to be remembered and read.

A decade ago I wrote a weeklong series on AmericanStudies connections found in a US Airways Magazine. Just after a feature on Charlottes, the magazine included a briefer piece on various historic sites elsewhere in North Carolina. A few of them are connected to Asheville, the Western North Carolina, mountain city that has provided hotel stays and getaways for many prominent Americans (including multiple presidents at George Vanderbilt’s enormous Biltmore House) over the last century and more. Unmentioned among those references, however, is the modernist American novelist who grew up in Asheville and whose mother made her living in the city’s booming early 20th century real estate and boarding businesses: Thomas Wolfe. Wolfe’s absence from the article is unsurprising, as he has I would argue largely been forgotten in the 65 years since his tragically early death; but it’s also both ironic and unfortunate.

The irony of Wolfe’s elision, both from our collective memories and from an article on North Carolina, is that he was, as much as any American author, deeply concerned with the question of how and whether an artist—or anyone—can both remain part of and escape from his home and past. The original subtitle of his novel Look Homeward, Angel (1929) was A Story of the Buried Life, and the novel begins with a fragmented quote that includes the lines “Remembering speechlessly we seek the great forgotten language” and “O lost, and by the wind grieved, ghost, come back again.” Throughout, Wolfe’s hugely autobiographical novel engages both backwards—into his own, his family’s, his city’s, and the national pasts—and forwards, wondering whether its protagonist can unearth those pasts, will become himself buried in the process, should instead move on into a more separate future, and so on. Five years later, Wolfe would explore those same themes again, from some of the same yet also very distinct angles, in You Can’t Go Home Again (1934). For this author to be absent from most of our national narratives of modernist writers, American literature, or even his home state is, again, powerfully ironic.

But it’s more than that: it’s a shame. Even in his own lifetime, Wolfe struggled with his editors over his sprawling and difficult style, and found limited (or at least more limited than he otherwise might have) audiences and successes as a result. Yet it seems to me that Wolfe’s style is as entirely interconnected with his content and themes as were those of his fellow modernists Hemingway and Faulkner; while it’s fair to say that Wolfe’s was not as influential as either of theirs, I would also argue that the experience of reading his can be just as rewarding and meaningful on its own terms. Moreover, while some of Hemingway’s characters and stories feel more focused on European experiences and some of Faulkner’s more specific to the South, Wolfe’s works are, to my mind, profoundly representative of shared American (and perhaps human) questions, both from that early twentieth century moment and from across all our generations and communities. Time to put him back on the map, I’d say.

Next storytelling studying tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Southern storytellers you’d share?

September 19, 2022: Southern Storytelling: Fathers and Sons

[September 25th marks William Faulkner’s 125th birthday. So this week I’ll AmericanStudy Faulkner and other Southern storytellers, leading up to a special weekend tribute to a great new Faulkner website!]

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 a community 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 Fugitives and then the Agrarians, and whose collective writings culminated in the unquestionably conservative (and at times unfortunately racist) manifesto I’ll Take My Stand (1930). No AmericanStudiers worthy of the name could fail to take such historical and cultural contexts into consideration when analyzing why these young men (mostly) and women came together at this moment, and why they wrote and thought the things they did.

Yet there are of course other kinds of contexts that also inform any and every writer’s (and person’s) identity, perspective, and works, 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 20thcentury, 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 familial 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 storytelling studying tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Southern storytellers you’d share?

September 17-18, 2022: War is Hella Funny: M*A*S*H

[50 years ago this coming weekend, the pilot episode of M*A*S*H aired. So in honor of that ground-breaking sitcom, this week I’ve AmericanStudied wartime comedies in various media, leading up to this special post on M*A*S*H itself!]

On AmericanStudies takeaways from each of the three iterations of M*A*S*H.

1)      The Novel: I can’t be alone (at least among us born post-1970) in not having been aware that the entire MASH franchise originated with a book, Richard Hooker’s (a pseudonym for military surgeon H. Richard Hornberger) MASH: A Novel about Three Army Doctors(1968). That was just the beginning of the literary franchise, as Hooker followed it up with two sequels over the next decade, M*A*S*H Goes to Maine (1972) and M*A*S*H Mania (1977). When we remember that Monday’s subject, Joseph Heller’s Catch-22, was published just seven years before Hooker’s book, the two novels become part of a longer conversation (along with Wednesday’s subject Dr. Strangelove) about 1960s wartime comedies and satires. Interestingly none of those works focuses on the decade’s ongoing war in Vietnam, but of course all of them were at least implicitly in conversation with that contemporary event.

2)      The Film: Just two years after the publication of Hooker’s novel, journalist and screenwriter adapted it into a screenplay that was then directed by the young filmmaker Robert Altman as M*A*S*H (1970). Both Lardner Jr. (in tandem with his dad Ring Lardner Sr.) and Altman have plenty to tell us about American culture and pop culture across the 20thcentury, as does the fact that the film is apparently the first studio movie to feature audibly the word “fuck.” But what’s particularly interesting to me is the way in which the film’s main changes from Hooker’s novel involve the two characters of color: in the book the main Black character is known as “Spearchucker” Jones and is the target of significant stereotyping, whereas he gets a more three-dimensional portrayal in the film; and in the book the young Korean soldier Ho-Jon is killed off, whereas in the film (and later the TV show) he survives. Close in time, but quite distinct in tone, are these two texts.

3)      The TV Show: Just two years after that film (and thus only four years after the novel—this franchise exploded very fast), on September 17, 1972, that hyperlinked opening scene of the pilot episode aired on CBS, launching what would become one of the most successful TV shows in history by the time its hugely prominent finale aired in February 1983. Of course a show that ran for 256 episodes across 11 seasons diverged in all sorts of big and small ways from the book and film alike; but the core characters remained the same, a striking testimony to their appeal across all these genres and media. But one thing that’s specific to the show’s more than a decade-long timeline is how much the world changed across those years—from the Vietnam War ending to the changes in the Cold War between 1972 to 1983, and with many concurrent changes to the medium of television itself, a show like M*A*S*H can help us track and analyze contexts well beyond its characters and plots.

Next series starts Monday,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Other wartime comedies you’d highlight?

September 16, 2022: War is Hella Funny: Tropic Thunder

[50 years ago this coming weekend, the pilot episode of M*A*S*H aired. So in honor of that ground-breaking sitcom, this week I’ll AmericanStudy wartime comedies in various media, leading up to a special post on M*A*S*H!]

On whether and how the Hollywood meta-comedy is also a wartime meta-comedy.

I could write a whole different weekly series about Hollywood meta-comedies and satires, and to a significant degree director and co-writer Ben Stiller’s very funny (and quite frequently offensive) Tropic Thunder (2008) would fit better in that series than it does in this one. The main characters (including Stiller alongside Robert Downey Jr., Jack Black, Jay Baruchel, and Brandon T. Jackson) are all actors making a film that goes terribly wrong; the supporting characters include the film’s director (Steve Coogan) and its special effects man (Danny McBride), the author of the book being adapted into the film (Nick Nolte), the overbearing studio head (Tom Cruise), and the sleazy agent (Matthew McConaughey) for one of the actors. Add in the fact that each of those characters is played by a talented comic actor giving an extremely exaggerated performance—yes, I do mean extremely exaggerated—and you’ve got all the makings of a very funny Hollywood meta-satire.

As I imagine you already know, and as each and every one of those hyperlinked clips reflects, the movie that all those characters are making is a war movie, the Vietnam War-set Tropic Thunder. That means without question that the satirical, meta-comic elements are consistently directed at other war and Vietnam War films—it’s not a coincidence for example that the film’s trailer begins with the uber-familiar notes of Buffalo Springfield’s “For What It’s Worth” (probably the second most consistently used track in Vietnam War- and 1960s-set films, after “Fortunate Son”). Many of the film’s other central elements, such as the team’s diverse collection of personalities who butt heads constantly but have to come together to achieve their mission, are drawn from the traditions and stereotypes of war films more generally, making this a comedy that parodies that longstanding cultural genre on multiple successful levels.

But beyond those two successful and funny levels of film meta-comedy—a satire of Hollywood and a parody of war films—is Tropic Thunder a film about war in any way? I’m not entirely sure that it is, but I would say that there’s one interesting and easily overlooked layer which qualifies: the mythologized source material on which the film-within-the-film is based. It turns out that the wartime memoir written by “Four Leaf” Tayback (Nick Nolte) was entirely invented—he served in the Coast Guard during the Vietnam War and never left the U.S., and his hook hands are also fake, an affectation to amplify his faux-authenticity as a vet. Partly that adds yet more to the meta-commentary, since it turns out that however far down we dig, Tropic Thunder (the same of Tayback’s memoir as well as the film-within-the-film and, yes, the actual film) is an invented, fake story. But I’d say this telling details also reminds us of just how many of the narratives around war are always similarly invented, revealing more about our need to believe in them than about the histories they purport to portray. That ain’t so funny, but it’s a lesson worth learning to be sure.

Special post this weekend,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Other wartime comedies you’d highlight?

September 15, 2022: War is Hella Funny: Good Morning, Vietnam

[50 years ago this coming weekend, the pilot episode of M*A*S*H aired. So in honor of that ground-breaking sitcom, this week I’ll AmericanStudy wartime comedies in various media, leading up to a special post on M*A*S*H!]

On three competing yet ultimately intersecting layers to the hit 1980s wartime comedy.

The origin point for Barry Levinson’s film Good Morning, Vietnam(1987) was a pitch for a sitcom very much in the vein of (and likely even inspired by) M*A*S*H. In 1979, former Armed Forces Radio Service DJ Adrian Cronauer pitched a sitcom based on his experiences during the Vietnam War; no network picked it up, so he turned it into a TV movie script which became the basis for the feature film’s screenplay (if with significant revisions by , who had in fact worked as a writer on M*A*S*H). The whirlwind known as Robin Williams (on whom more momentarily) certainly shifted things from there, but there’s a reason why the character name was and remained Adrian Cronauer—this is a story intended to be grounded in reality, in a historical figure’s actual experiences at the interesting and fraught intersections of DJ and soldier, American rock music and Southeast Asian warzone, comedy and tragedy. That history and humanity alike come through at key moments, and I’d argue constitute the film’s most successful elements.

They’re not the most famous one, though. Cronauer once said of the film’s central casting that Williams “was playing a character named Adrian Cronauer who shared a lot of my experiences. But actually, he was playing Robin Williams.” Partly that seems to me an understandable critique of Williams’ tendency to ham it up and treat film roles like excuses for stand-up comedy, a problem that to my mind severely affects a film like Dead Poets Society (1989). But at the same time, there’s no doubt that Williams was a profoundly talented actor as well as comedian, and he brings both layers to his performance in Good Morning, Vietnam—infusing the justifiably famous radio sequences with humor and energy to spare (selling the audience entirely on why this DJ would have become so beloved among his soldier-listeners); but gradually and impressively making his Cronauer into a complicated and conflicted human being whose mistakes and morals alike influence the film’s events. Williams was right in the upward arc of his explosion into full movie-stardom in 1987, and there’s no doubt that this performance and film both reflected and amplified that trajectory.

That 1987 moment was also amidst another striking Hollywood trend—the explosion of late 80s Vietnam War films that I discussed as part of this post, and which also of course included another 1987 film from yesterday’s focal director Stanley Kubrick, Full Metal Jacket. Good Morning, Vietnam is of course by far the funniest of those films, which might also make it seem like the least serious and/or the least focused on the war—but I hope this whole series would offer a clear counterpoint to those ideas and a clear reflection of the role that humor can play in cultural portrayals of wartime histories and themes. The film has some overtly tragic events, particularly those connected to Cronauer’s fraught friendship with the Vietnamese young man Tuan(played movingly by Tung Thanh Tran). But I would add that its humor is likewise an element of its portrayal of the Vietnam War, both in the necessity of Cronauer’s broadcasts and in the challenge they present to official narratives of the conflict. Just one more layer to this complex, compelling wartime comedy.

Last wartime comedy tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Other wartime comedies you’d highlight?

September 14, 2022: War is Hella Funny: Dr. Strangelove

[50 years ago this coming weekend, the pilot episode of M*A*S*H aired. So in honor of that ground-breaking sitcom, this week I’ll AmericanStudy wartime comedies in various media, leading up to a special post on M*A*S*H!]

On how a film can sometimes offer more historical clarity than, y’know, history.

Obviously this is a very competitive category, but I think President Dwight Eisenhower’s farewell address has to be on the short list of the most under-remembered 20th century speeches. I wrote at some length in that hyperlinked post about that speech and its crucial coinage of the phrase and concept “military-industrial complex,” so will ask you to check out that post and then come on back here for today’s thoughts if you would.

Welcome back! While of course Eisenhower’s phrase has certainly endured in our collective conversations, I don’t know that the specifics of his concerns and critiques have stayed with us in the same ways—and I certainly would argue that far too few Americans know of (much less are concerned about) the absolutely stunning growth of that military-industrial complex in the six decades since Eisenhower’s speech. There are various reasons for that, including the often much too sanctified way that we approach the military in our conversations about government, spending, priorities, and policies. But without question one reason is that the topic can seem dry and boring (as illustrated by the very phrase itself—nothing with either a hyphen or the word “complex” is likely to grab our attention), a discussion of budgets and allocations and contractors and lobbyists and so on. And as much as I value Eisenhower’s speech, I think it’s fair to say that a presidential address is not generally the kind of compelling cultural text that’s going to cut through such dryness and boringness.

Or, at the very least, speeches and other more overtly “historical” texts can and should be complemented by more pop cultural ones (that is the AmericanStudier’s Credo, after all). And when it comes to the Cold War-era growth of the military-industrial complex, I don’t know any pop culture texts that have more to offer than Stanley Kubrick’s Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb (1964). The film’s most famous quote, and one of the single most famous quotes in 20th century American film overall, is “Gentlemen, you can’t fight in here. This is the War Room!,” a funny and telling moment that nicely sums up not just the wartime absurdities I discussed in Monday’s Catch-22 post, but also the very contradictions inherent in the phrase military-industrial complex. But I would argue that an even more telling detail is the fact that Kubrick cast the actor and comic genius Peter Sellers to play both the U.S. President and the title character (an ex-Nazi turned military expert/advisor to the government, itself a key Cold War historical element). The question of how deeply intertwined the military-industrial complex has become with our government is a thorny yet vital one—and one a black comic film can cut through pitch-perfectly with one inspired casting choice.

Next wartime comedy tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Other wartime comedies you’d highlight?

September 13, 2022: War is Hella Funny: Hogan’s Heroes

[50 years ago this coming weekend, the pilot episode of M*A*S*H aired. So in honor of that ground-breaking sitcom, this week I’ll AmericanStudy wartime comedies in various media, leading up to a special post on M*A*S*H!]

On the vital importance of not judging a book by its cover (or a sitcom by its premise).

Maybe starting each post in this week’s series with some blog inside baseball is going to be a thing, because I have to do the same for today’s subject (if in a very different way than I did for Catch-22yesterday). Despite reruns of the show playing on Nick at Nite quite a bit during my childhood, I’ve never seen a single episode of the long-running hit sitcom Hogan’s Heroes (1965-71), and that’s not an accident: I always found the premise, the very idea of a comedy set at a Nazi POW camp, to be one I just couldn’t wrap my head around (I have a similar feeling about the film Life is Beautiful, which I’ve also never seen). I’m not saying that there are topics which should be absolutely off-limits to comedy, necessarily—part of the whole thrust of this series is that there shouldn’t be, that comedy has a role to play in how we engage with even our hardest and darkest histories and themes—but that doesn’t mean that every comedy is for me, and this one quite simply felt like it wasn’t.

Can’t say I had given the show a single further thought since those childhood days until I sat down to research this post. And, well, let me quote at length from the “Casting” section of its Wikipedia page: “The actors who played the four major German roles—Werner Klemperer (Klink), John Banner (Schultz), Leon Askin (General Burkhalter), and Howard Caine (Major Hochstetter)—were all Jewish. Furthermore, Klemperer, Banner, and Askin had all fled the Nazis during World War II (Caine, whose birth name was Cohen, was an American). Further, Robert Clary, a French Jew who played LeBeau, spent three years in a concentration camp (with an identity tattoo from the camp on his arm, ‘A-5714’); his parents and other family members were killed there. Likewise, Banner had been held in a (pre-war) concentration camp and his family was killed during the war. Askin was also in a pre-war French internment camp and his parents were killed at Treblinka. Other Jewish actors, including Harold Gould and Harold J. Stone, made multiple appearances playing German generals. As a teenager, Klemperer, the son of conductor Otto Klemperer, fled Hitler's Germany with his family in 1933. During the show's production, he insisted that Hogan always win against his Nazi captors, or else he would not take the part of Klink. He defended his role by claiming, ‘I am an actor. If I can play Richard III, I can play a Nazi.’ Banner attempted to sum up the paradox of his role by saying, ‘Who can play Nazis better than us Jews?’”

I’m not sure I need to say much more, but I will add this: how freaking cool is that? There’s no doubt that this casting trend was intentional and purposeful, and it honestly makes me rethink the show’s very genre; seems to me that it should be described not only as a sitcom, but also and especially as continued resistance to the narratives of Nazism, anti-Semitism, white supremacy, and more. Heroic indeed.

Next wartime comedy tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Other wartime comedies you’d highlight?