May 8, 2024: Beach Blogging: Brighton Beach Memoirs

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

On three cultural genres and media on which Neil Simon left a lasting imprint [yes, I know the post is officially about his semi-autobiographical 1982 play Brighton Beach Memoirs, but I’m taking the blogger’s privilege and using the occasion as a jumping-off point for Simon’s impressive career overall]:

1)      TV comedy: When Simon was just in his early 20s, he quit an entry-level job at Warner Brothers to write comedy scripts with his brother Danny. The bold move paid off, as the pair were hired by influential producer Max Liebman to write for the popular sketch and variety show Your Show of Shows. Simon would later describe just how loaded that writers’ room was: “There were about seven writers, plus Sid [Caesar], Carl Reiner, and Howie Morris. Mel Brooks and maybe Woody Allen would write one of the other sketches.” Yet even among that powerhouse crowd, Simon stood out enough to be hired as well to write for a popular late 1950s sitcom, The Phil Silvers Show. TV was in many ways the center of the comedy world in that era, and Neil Simon became central to that community at a very young age.

2)      Broadway shows: While he was working on those TV shows, Simon was honing his first Broadway play, Come Blow Your Horn. The honing paid off, as after the show opened in February 1961 it ran for 678 performances at New York’s Brooks Atkinson Theatre (now renamed for the legendary Lena Horne). Over the rest of the decade Simon would pen countless Broadway smashes, including Barefoot in the Park (1963), The Odd Couple (1965), Sweet Charity (1966), and Last of the Red Hot Lovers (1969). Those and many other simultaneously running shows throughout the 1960s and 70s (with many 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 the highest-paid Broadway writer in history, and as influential on the American stage as any single voice has ever been.

3)      Film screenplays: Simon adapted many of his plays into screenplays for the film versions, with The Odd Couple (1968) being the most famous. But he also wrote original screenplays for some of 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 has never been better, and I say that as a die-hard Columbo fan). Given the understandable ways in which Simon’s contemporary and Your Show of Shows colleague Woody Allen has lost much of his luster in recent years, I’d say that Simon’s film career is due for a reexamination—he was always a playwright first and foremost, but nobody wrote film comedy better than his multi-talented American icon.

Next Beach text tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Other beachtastic texts you’d highlight?

May 7, 2024: Beach Blogging: On the Beach

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

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

1959, the same year as the original Gidget movie about which I blogged yesterday, also saw the release of a very, very different beach film: On the Beach. Based on British-Australian writer Nevil Shute’s 1957 novel, the film featured an all-star cast (including Gregory Peck, Ava Gardner, and Fred Astaire) as the sailors, scientists, and their friends and loved ones dealing with a post-apocalyptic world. It’s 1964, World War III has taken place, and the resulting radiation is slowly taking over the world and destroying its remaining inhabitants. Mostly set on or around Peck’s submarine, the film uses that setting to create a broadly claustrophobic tone, portraying a world in which likely slow death by radiation poisoning or the humane but absolute alternative of suicide pills seem to be the only possible futures. It’s unrelenting and uncompromising, and deserves to be much better remembered than it is.

While that’s true of the film on its own artistic merits, it’s even more true in terms of what the film reveals about the Cold War’s threats and fears. When I think of World War III scenarios in popular films, I tend to think of over-the-top dramatics of one kind or another: the ridiculous satire of Dr. Strangelove (1964); the teenage humor and heroics of War Games (1983) and The Manhattan Project (1986); the flag-waving jingoism of Red Dawn (1984). All of those films can illustrate certain important aspects of the period, but all feel, again, exaggerated in one way or another, extreme in both their plots and tones. Whereas On the Beach, to this AmericanStudier at least, feels profoundly grounded, offers a socially and psychologically realistic depiction not just of the potential aftermath of a nuclear war, but also and even more tellingly of the period’s collective fears about what such a war would mean and do. Seeing [SPOILER ALERT] Fred Astaire kill himself rather than face imminent radiation poisoning—well, that feels deeply representative of the moment’s worst fears.

You’d think that such fears might have lead to more widespread opposition to the Cold War’s arms race and military industrial complex—and indeed the U.S. military must have thought so too, as they denied the filmmakers permission to use a submarine or any other official materials. But I would argue that whatever possible influence such fears might have had was far outweighed by a different set of fears, ones exemplified by October 1962’s Cuban Missile Crisis: fears not of nuclear war and its aftermath per se, but rather of the Soviet Union’s nuclear arsenal, and what would happen if America’s did not match and even exceed that opposing threat. Whereas On the Beach portrayed the horrific results of a nuclear war, the Missile Crisis reflected and amplified fears that the U.S. was potentially unprepared for such a war, one that our enemy was willing and able to bring to our very doorstep. Perhaps no film, not even one as compelling and convincing as On the Beach, could compete with such historic threats—and so the arms race and the Cold War only deepened in the 1960s and beyond.

Next Beach text tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Other beachtastic texts you’d highlight?

May 6, 2024: Beach Blogging: Gidget and Friends

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

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

An alien observer seeking to learn about America solely from its popular culture might well think that in the early 1960s the whole nation had gone surf crazy. The hit 1959 film Gidget (1959), starring Sandra Dee as a rebellious 17 year old who joins the local surfer culture and Cliff Robertson as the Korean War vet turned surf guru who shepards her along, quickly spawned two popular sequels: 1961’s Gidget Goes Hawaiian (with Deborah Walley taking over the title role) and 1963’s Gidget Goes to Rome (with Cindy Carol doing the same). One of 1962’s best-selling rock albums was Surfin’ Safari, the debut by the California group The Beach Boys; less than a year 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 the big screen and the record machine, surfing was a surefire early 1960s hit.

Trying to make sense of why and how American fads get started can be pretty difficult at best, but I would argue that the surfing fad in popular culture can be analyzed in a couple different ways. For one thing, the fad represents an interesting way to illustrate the transition between the 1950s and 1960s—as Gidget demonstrates, surfing culture has often been portrayed as a counter-culture, an alternative to the more buttoned-down mainstream society, and of course the rise of counter-cultures (and the kinds of social and cultural movements to which they connected) is a key element to the 1960s in America. So the popularity of these surfing texts (like the popularity of early rock and roll more generally) could be read as an indication that Americans were ready for such counter-culture movements, and Gidget itself could be defined as a 1959 origin point for much of what followed in next decade. Seen in that light, the hugely popular 1966 documentary The Endless Summer represents a high-water mark for all these trends, before the counter-culture began to distintegrate later in the decade.

While that specific historical context would be one way to analyze the early 1960s surfing fad, however, I think a longstanding American narrative could offer another option. It was three decades later that the film Point Break (1991) overtly linked surfers to outlaws, potraying a band of surfing bank robbers led by Patrick Swayze’s philosophical Bodhi (a character 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 the confines of civilization, battle for survival in extreme conditions, and, if they’re lucky, ride off in Western sunsets. The Wild West 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 culture text, the Western. That genre was famously moving toward more revisionist films by the late 1960s—but perhaps it had already been supplanted, or at least supplemented, in popular consciousness by surfing stories. In any case, to quote “Surfin’ Safari”: “I tell you surfing’s mighty wild.”

Next Beach text tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Other beachtastic texts you’d highlight?

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

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

On two parallel yet very different types of 21^st century cultural commentary on communism.

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

Moreover, two of the last decade’s most interesting American cultural depictions of communism have used famous historical periods in the Soviet Union as the lens through which to do so (although interestingly, and certainly tellingly, both have been in English and have used casts of mostly non-Russian actors). The satirical film The Death of Stalin (2017) makes that mid-20^th century Soviet and world historical event into an over-the-top farce, and one which 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 and egalitarian Soviet state. Cultural works are open to interpretation, and I’m sure one could analyze Death of Stalin as equally a commentary on the U.S. government (perhaps especially in the age of our own cult-like leader). But for this viewer, the film’s most farcical elements, combined with the mostly non-Russian actors enacting them, seem to play into those existing critiques of Soviet communism as hypocritical, fraudulent, and ultimately failed.

There’s an even more stringent and serious critique of the Soviet state at the heart of another recent cultural work, the HBO miniseries Chernobyl (2019). Without spoiling 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’ll note that the show’s final minutes have a great deal to say about the Soviet Union’s reliance on propaganda and lies, and how much those elements directly contributed to (indeed, in many ways caused) this global catastrophe. Yet Chernobyl is not a satire, and that difference from Death of Stalin is much more than just about tone or genre—at its heart, this show is about a core group of courageous and good people doing their best to do the right thing, and genuinely working together (at the direct risk and ultimate expense of their own lives) to protect their comrades and (quite literally) save the world. To my mind, that’s a pitch-perfect description of the ideals of a communist society, ideals that their government consistently betrayed but that these figures fought and died for—and ideals from which the U.S. in 2024 could learn a great deal.

Next series starts Monday,

Ben

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

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

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

On communist protest anthems and artists, then and now.

In one of my earliest blog posts, I nominated Woody Guthrie’s “This Land is Your Land” (1944)—ideally the version with all the verses, but I was willing to settle for the more commonly accepted shortened version—as a new national anthem. I have been interested to see that both of my sons have learned and performed the song (in that shortened version) in their elementary school music classes, as I vaguely remember doing in my own. Because the truth is that, even without the usually excluded verse about the “No trespassing” sign that has nothing written on the back, “This Land” offers what we would have to call a communist vision of America: as a place that is fundamentally shared by all of us, owned not as private property or competitive resource 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 tied to) 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 less subtle is Steve Earle’s song “Christmas in Washington” (1997), which in its chorus implores, “Come back Woody Guthrie/Come back to us now/Tear your eyes from paradise/And rise again somehow.” Earle’s song is about the need for new protest anthems at the turn of the 21^st century, as well as representing an attempt to offer precisely such a new anthem, and besides the request of Guthrie’s ghost Earle’s speaker also calls for the return of a pair of early 20^th century communist activists: “So come back Emma Goldman/Rise up old Joe Hill/The barricades are going up/They cannot break our will.” Which is to say, while protest songs can of course take any number of different political and social perspectives, Earle ties both his and Guthrie’s protest anthems much more specifically to communism—not, again, in the Soviet sense, but rather in an emphasis on radical activisms (both labor and social) and their concurrent arguments for social and economic equality.

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

April Recap this weekend,

Ben

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

May 2, 2024: Communist Culture: The Blithedale Romance

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

On the novel that significantly shifted an author’s career—and yet its continuity with his two prior masterpieces.

Nearly a century before Richard Wright published his autobiographical essay “I Tried to Be a Communist” (1944), Nathaniel Hawthorne published a semi-autobiographical novel that could have been titled the exact same thing. Between April and November 1841, Hawthorne lived at George and Sophia Ripley’s West Roxbury, Massachusetts utopian experiment Brook Farm; the experiment brought together many other prominent Transcendentalists, including Ralph Waldo Emerson, Margaret Fuller, and Bronson Alcott. Hawthorne’s experience with the Brook Farm community (which continued for another six years or so after his departure) was mixed, as reflected both in the letters he wrote while there to his future wife Sophia Peabody and in his subsequent description of the period as “essentially a daydream, and yet a fact.” And just over a decade later, he would portray a strikingly similar utopian community in The Blithedale Romance (1852).

Blithedale was Hawthorne’s third romance in 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 categorize both of them as historical romances: Scarlet quite overtly, as it is set more than two hundred years prior to its publication date; and Gables in its central 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 into our own broad day-light, and bringing along with it some of its legendary mist.” Blithedale, on the other hand, is not only 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 aid in that sense of present grounding, Hawthorne likewise shifts from the earlier novels’ third-person narrators to a semi-autobiographical (if also quite complex) first-person one, Miles Coverdale, who narrates for us his own experiences of the Blithedale utopian community.

But if Blithedale is interestingly distinct from the two novels that preceded it, I would nonetheless argue that reading it in relationship to those historical romances helps us analyze how Hawthorne chooses to depict his socially realistic topic. After all, both earlier novels likewise featured realistic historical subjects—community in Puritan New England and the causes and legacies of the Witch Trials—but portrayed them through what Hawthorne described, in that Gables Preface, 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 to the Novel, which he argues “is presumed to aim at a very minute fidelity … to the probable and ordinary course of man’s experience”). Literary historians have long sought to pin down which Blithedale character is which historical figure—Zenobia is Fuller! Hollingsworth is Ripley! and so on—but Hawthorne’s definition of the Romance would lead us in a different direction: to consider instead how he bends the historical realities of that place and time into a new, more Romantic shape, “manages his atmospherical medium” to present “the truth of the human heart.” Like both prior novels, that is, Blithedale ultimately presents the human heart of its histories—an important achievement indeed.

Last cultural communism tomorrow,

Ben

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

May 1, 2024: Communist Culture: Doctorow and Coover

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

On two distinct but complementary postmodern historical novels.

As I wrote in this post on American hypocrites, Tony Kushner’s play Angels in America (1991-1993) includes one of the most searing and tragic depictions of McCarthyism: Kushner’s portrayal of Roy Cohn, and most especially of Cohn’s literally and figuratively haunting conversations with the ghost of Ethel Rosenberg, whose conviction and demise a young Cohn helped ensure and who becomes in Kushner’s imagining the last “person” to speak with Cohn before his own death from AIDS. And Kushner isn’t alone is capitalizing upon Ethel Rosenberg’s literary and symbolic qualities, as the famous communist (whether guilty of espionage or not, she certainly was that) and her husband also occupy a complex and central place in two of the most significant late 20^th century American historical novels: E.L. Doctorow’s The Book of Daniel (1971) and Robert Coover’s The Public Burning (1977).

Scholar Linda Hutcheon developed a new category, “historiographic metafiction,” to describe postmodern historical novels, works that put history and fiction in complex and often playful interrelationship and that do so in self-aware and –reflective ways. Both Doctorow’s and Coover’s novels fit aspects of this category, but in very different ways: Doctorow’s novel is narrated by the son of a fictionalized version of the Rosenbergs (known in his novel as the Isaacsons), and it is the narrator Daniel’s awareness of his own project, audience, and historical significance that makes the book truly postmodern; whereas Coover’s novel’s most prominent characters include not only Ethel Rosenberg but also Richard Nixon (who serves as one of the text’s main perspectives) and Uncle Sam (who is a folksy and vulgar chorus of sorts, appearing periodically to comment on the action). Needless to say, despite their shared subject matter, only one of the novels produced a significant controversy upon its publication.

Yet if we consider that shared subject matter, and more exactly the question of how fiction can help us engage with difficult and divisive historical subjects more generally, it seems to me that Doctorow’s and Coover’s books complement each other quite nicely. Coover’s is biting and angry, lashing out at the kinds of hysterias and extremes that McCarthyism exemplified (whether the Rosenbergs were guilty or not) and that Uncle Sam’s America has always included. Doctorow’s is intimate and tragic, considering the legacies of such histories on the individuals and families, as well as the communities and nation, that experience them. Coover focuses on the most public moments and figures, Doctorow on the most private effects and lives. Together, they help us remember that every American history and issue, even the Cold War boogeyman of communism, became and remains a part of our communal and human landscapes as well.

Next cultural communism tomorrow,

Ben

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