March 24, 2023: Bruce on the Blog: Born in the U.S.A.

[This week, I finally get to cross off one of the very top items on my bucket list—seeing Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band in concert with my sons! In honor of that truly momentous occasion, I wanted to share a handful of the past posts where I’ve featured Bruce on the blog—leading up to a special weekend reflection on the concert!]

On two ways to argue for the patriotic possibilities of an easily misunderstood song and album.

In one of my first-year blog posts (back in those silly mid-2011 days before I used hyperlinks, dear reader), I used an article by music journalist Ben Schwartz on the battles over Bruce Springsteen’s “Born in the U.S.A.” (the song) to think about questions of audience readings and misreadings, of whether and how an artist’s choices can contribute to them, and of why I’d still make the case for “Born” as representing some of the best and most thoughtful (rather than most bombastic or simplified) visions of American identity and community. Many of those same questions and lenses can be applied to the Born in the U.S.A. album as a whole, of course, which consistently weds arena and bar rock sounds to dark and painful lyrics and situations. No fewer than three of the album’s songs end with main characters under arrest or in prison, and yet two of them (“Darlington County” and “Working on the Highway”) are also among the album’s most upbeat-sounding rockers. As I argued in that post, I believe audiences should be and are capable of looking beyond sound and music to hear and engage with songs on lyrical and thematic levels as well—but I also called “Born” a split-personality song there, and the same can definitely be said about the album as a whole.

The most overt way to read “Born” as uber-patriotic is, as I also wrote in that post, likewise both a misreading and a further emphasis on sound over lyrics (the first line of both the song and album is “Born down in a dead man’s town,” after all). But that doesn’t mean that there aren’t other, and important, ways to think of both song and album as patriotic nonetheless. In recent years Springsteen has consistently described one of his central and lifelong artisitic goals as charting “the distance between American reality and the American Dream,” and the album’s opening and closing songs (“Born” and “My Hometown”) chart particular aspects of that distance with clarity and force. Like another easily misunderstood song of Springsteen’s, “We Take Care of Our Own” (the lead single from and first song on 2012’s Wrecking Ball), “Born” creates an especially clear representation of that distance between ideal and reality in the back and forth between its patriotic chorus and its far more dark and critical verses (although the same could be said of “My Hometown,” with a chorus that recognizes the value of a foundational place even while the verses chart that place’s decline and limits). I’ve written a lot in recent years, including in my fourth book (NB. and then doubly so in my sixth book), about the concept of critical patriotism, and both this overall idea of distance and the specific representations of it in these songs and their structural shifts exemplify critical patriotism.

There’s another, even more overarching way to think about Born in the U.S.A. as a patriotic album, however. The album’s most optimistic song is its exact midpoint, “No Surrender,” an anthemic tribute to Springsteen’s lifelong musical companion Steve Van Zandt and to the power of rock and roll (“We learned more from a three-minute record, babe, than we ever learned in school”). But what if we read that central song as a mission statement for the album itself? That is, to put it in first-year writing terms, what if “No Surrender” is the album’s thesis, “Born in the U.S.A.” and “My Hometown” are its introduction and conclusion, and the remaining songs are the evidence paragraphs? In that case, even if the songs are consistently darker in their themes and images, the acts of creating and performing them, of assembling them into an album, of sending that album out into the world, of touring to share it with audiences, and so on are all optimistic recognitions and extensions of the power and importance of rock and roll, and of the role it can play in helping America move toward a better future. Perhaps that future comprises the “romantic dreams” that the speaker of “No Surrender” still has in his head, dreams that animate—if not without challenge and complexity—the critical patriotism of Born in the U.S.A.

Concert reflection this weekend,

Ben

PS. What do you think?

March 23, 2023: Bruce on the Blog: “American Skin (41 Shots)”

[This week, I finally get to cross off one of the very top items on my bucket list—seeing Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band in concert with my sons! In honor of that truly momentous occasion, I wanted to share a handful of the past posts where I’ve featured Bruce on the blog—leading up to a special weekend reflection on the concert!]

On two more reasons I have come to love my long-time favorite song.

I’ve written on at least two prior occasions in this space, as well as at length in the opening of my second book, about Bruce Springsteen’s “American Skin (41 Shots)” (2000; I still prefer that 2000 Live in New York City version to any subsequent one, although this post-Trayvon Martin performance from 2012 comes very close for sure). But I don’t think I’ve ever mentioned in this space a very cool complement to my own love for the song: my younger son’s early and continuing affection for it as well. Of course that began with my playing it for the boys, but I’ve played plenty of songs for them, and it was “American Skin” that really grabbed my son and has endured across many years and many other shifts in musical taste. To hear him sing along to my favorite lines—“We’re baptized in these waters/And in each other’s blood”—has been one of those singularly moving moments that parenting can offer.

So that’s one way I’ve come to love Springsteen’s song even more fully. But another is the reason I’m highlighting it today (NB. when I first shared this post in February 2018): this afternoon I’ll be giving Fitchburg State University’s biannual Harrod Lecture, focusing on the topic of my book in progress, We the People: The 500-Year Battle over Who is American (2019). I’ve been thinking about those themes pretty much nonstop for the last couple years, and I’m not sure I’ve encountered a cultural work that more succinctly and powerfully highlights both of them than does “American Skin.” Even the title alone features both ends of the spectrum: Amadou Diallo was killed because of the color of his skin and what it meant to certain other Americans; but by calling it his “American skin,” Springsteen reminds us that those racist and exclusionary attitudes do not and cannot deny Diallo his full participation in an American community and identity. That we still so desperately need to hear that message is just one more reason to keep listening to “American Skin (41 Shots).”

Last Bruce blogging tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think?

March 22, 2023: Bruce on the Blog: Wrecking Ball and High Hopes

[This week, I finally get to cross off one of the very top items on my bucket list—seeing Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band in concert with my sons! In honor of that truly momentous occasion, I wanted to share a handful of the past posts where I’ve featured Bruce on the blog—leading up to a special weekend reflection on the concert!]

On two entirely different and equally inspiring recent albums from an all-time great.

As is no doubt obvious from this blog, many of my favorite American artists died long ago, meaning that (barring surprising rediscoveries) I have long since run out of new works of theirs to encounter and experience. As a result, I believe I get even more excited about new releases by the living artists I love—like John Sayles and Jhumpa Lahiri—than would already always be the case. There is, of course, always the possibility that these new releases won’t live up to the artist’s past work or overall career; but as I wrote in that Sayles and Lahiri post, I’m an optimist on this score as on most others (yes, even in 2023 when it is getting very hard out here for an optimist). And when it comes to my single favorite artist, Bruce Springsteen, I’m happy to say that his most recent two albums (NB. as of 2014 when I wrote this post) have entirely rewarded my excited anticipation, if in almost entirely different ways.

2012’s Wrecking Ball is one of the most thematically unified yet stylistically diverse albums I’ve ever heard. Every song on the album, including the two bonus tracks, represents a response to the 2008 economic collapse and its many ongoing effects and meanings in American society; yet almost every one utilizes a distinct style, engages with a different musical tradition and sound, with which to do so. For both reasons the album has been compared to The Rising (2002), Springsteen’s post-9/11 masterwork; I would agree with that comparison, yet to my mind, because September 11^th has inspired so many responses and representations (in every artistic genre), Wrecking Ball is an even more unique and significant social and historical document. While it might not have any individual songs that crack my Springsteen top 10, I would say it’s one of his couple best albums—and that’s pretty impressive for a record released forty years after an artist’s debut!

About a month ago (NB. in January 2014), Springsteen released his most recent studio album, High Hopes. But to be honest, High Hopes isn’t really a unified album at all, existing at the other end of the spectrum from something like Wrecking Ball—it’s a collection of (mostly) previously unreleased tracks, representing the last couple decades of Springsteen’s career (if not even further back, since a song like “Frankie Fell in Love” feels more like his 1970s works). Interestingly, the most thematically unified songs, the title track and the concluding “Dream Baby Dream,” are both covers of other artists, the first time Springsteen has included covers on a studio album in his long career. And that last clause is precisely what makes High Hopes so inspiring to me—that even forty-two years into his recording career, Springsteen is continuing to experiment and innovate, trying new things, pushing himself in new directions, refusing to rest on that already impressive body of work. I didn’t really think I could love Bruce more, but these last couple albums have indeed raised the bar.

Next Bruce blogging tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think?

March 21, 2023: Bruce on the Blog: “State Trooper”

[This week, I finally get to cross off one of the very top items on my bucket list—seeing Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band in concert with my sons! In honor of that truly momentous occasion, I wanted to share a handful of the past posts where I’ve featured Bruce on the blog—leading up to a special weekend reflection on the concert!]

On two very different ways to AmericanStudy one of Bruce’s most ambiguous songs.

As my 2013 series on ambiguous songs (and any other time I’ve written about music on this blog) no doubt proved, when it comes to music I’m a lyrics guy—by which I mean not just that I listen to them closely, but that I try to figure out what they mean, even when (as with one of my favorite 21^st century bands, The Killers) that’s damnably hard to do (“Jealousy, turning saints into the sea”?!). There are no artists to whose lyrics I’ve listened more frequently and more attentively than Bruce Springsteen, and thus few Springsteen songs that I haven’t obsessively figured out. But there are still some that remain elusive to me, their ambiguity defying my repetitive listens and analyses. And at the top of that list would have to be the most eerie and evocative song on an album full of them (and about which I wrote yesterday as well), Nebraska’s “State Trooper” (1982).

From its title track on, Nebraska can be located in the American tradition of what we might call outlaw romanticism, valorizing—or at least sympathizing with—the misdeeds of those who find themselves living and dying outside the law. The opening verse of “State Trooper” concludes with an indication that its speaker sees himself as precisely such a justified outlaw: “License, registration, I ain’t got none / But I got a clear conscience ‘bout the things that I’ve done.” Seen in that light, his repeated injunction to “Mister State Trooper, please don’t you stop me,” might reflect an outlaw code of honor, a sense that while the speaker and the law are by necessity opposed, he hopes to avoid violence whenever possible, particularly against innocent men who “maybe … got a kid, maybe … got a pretty wife.” “My argument is not with you,” says Jason Bourne to a Moscow policeman at the start of his trilogy’s final film (NB. since I wrote this post that has turned out not to be the final Jason Bourne film, but in this household it will always be!), before he takes his outlaw fight to the heart of the American power structure.

Despite their cynical attitudes toward the law and power, such outlaw narratives tend to be ultimately optimistic, at least in their sense that there are those who will fight back—and their admiration for such figures. Yet from the final lines of its opening title track—“They wanted to know why I did what I did / Well sir I guess there’s just a meanness in this world”—Springsteen’s album is far more dark and pessimistic, portraying its outlaws as embodiments of a fallen and perhaps irredeemable America (although the album does end with another ambiguous song called “Reason to Believe”). While the speaker of “State Trooper” is apparently driving “to my baby,” the final lines suggest that he has nowhere to go: “Hey, somebody out there, listen to my last prayer / Hi-ho silver-o, deliver me from nowhere.” Seen in this light, the speaker’s injunction to the state trooper is simply a threat of more darkness and violence to come, in a world “where the great black rivers flow” and where “the only thing that I got’s been bothering me my whole life.” This is the land of the American nightmare, and its outlaws are simply symptoms of the disease, not a potential cure.

Next Bruce blogging tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think?

March 20, 2023: Bruce on the Blog: Executioner Songs

[This week, I finally get to cross off one of the very top items on my bucket list—seeing Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band in concert with my sons! In honor of that truly momentous occasion, I wanted to share a handful of the past posts where I’ve featured Bruce on the blog—leading up to a special weekend reflection on the concert!]

On two striking similarities and one important difference in a pair of pop culture serial killer texts.

Norman Mailer’s The Executioner’s Song (1979) and Bruce Springsteen’s “Nebraska” (1982) both consistently link the story of their real-life serial killer protagonists—Gary Gilmore in Mailer’s novel and Charles Starkweather in Springsteen’s song—to key women in the men’s lives. Although Mailer’s opening section is titled “Gary,” it begins instead with the perspective of Brenda Nicol, a cousin and childhood friend of Gilmore’s who remained linked to him through his final killing spree; parts two and three are titled “Nicole” and “Gary and Nicole,” after the girlfriend (Nicole Barrett) who stayed with Gary through his execution and on whom much of Mailer’s portrait of Gilmore focuses. Similarly, Springsteen’s song uses the 19 year old Starkweather’s relationship with 14 year old Caril Ann Fugate, who accompanied Starkweather while he took part in his own killing spree, as its linchpin, from the song’s opening lines, “I saw her standin’ on her front lawn/just twirlin’ her baton,” through to Starkweather’s culminating desire to have Fugate “sitting right there on my lap” when he is executed. These family and romantic relationships certainly humanize Mailer and Springsteen’s protagonists, but they also seem tied to the men’s crimes in complex ways that echo the links between sex and horror I discussed in this post.

Mailer’s and Springsteen’s works also similarly feature a near-complete disappearance of their creators in the course of the texts. That’s perhaps more expected in a song like Springsteen’s, but I don’t just mean that Springsteen doesn’t refer to himself in any overt way; even the voice in which he sings “Nebraska” is strikingly affected and distinct from Bruce’s own (and an entire departure from the voice in which he had sung any of his five prior albums), and since this was the first song on the album, would have taken contemporary listeners entirely by surprise. The absence of Norman Mailer from his book is more striking still, as the book is as the subtitle puts it “A True Life Novel,” and one based (as he writes in a brief “Afterword”) on extensive interviews and conversations between Mailer, Gilmore, and many other individuals. Yet to the best of my recollection Mailer does not appear anywhere in the book’s more than 1000 pages, engaging with his role in producing the text (and even participating in the text’s events in the closing period of Gilmore’s life) only in that brief concluding coda. As a result, Mailer’s mammoth book feels as closely focused on Gilmore and everything within and connected to his life and identity as Springsteen’s intimate song does on Starkweather, even though in both cases the texts are the careful, artistic constructions of two deeply talented creators in their respective genres.

There’s one key formal difference between the two texts, though, and it significantly impacts their portrayals of the two serial killers. As he does with all but one of the songs on Nebraska, Springsteen sings the title track in the first-person, speaking directly as Starkweather (the only historical figure among the album’s first-person speakers); Mailer’s book features a fully omniscient third-person narrator, one who can provide the perspectives of any and all of his historical figures (including Brenda and Nicole among many others) alongside Gary’s. Due in large part to that narrative distinction, Springsteen’s song forces its audience into a direct and unfiltered relationship with Starkweather’s raw voice and cynical worldview, as in its nihilistic concluding lines: “They wanted to know why I did what I did/Well sir I guess there’s just a meanness in this world.” Mailer’s more sweeping narration, on the other hand, situates Gilmore as part of broader communities (family, romantic relationships, neighborhood, prison, region, nation) and offers more of a sociological than a psychological engagement with his identity and perspective. I wouldn’t say Executioner’s Song is optimistic, exactly, but it certainly offers its audience more ways to understand its serial killer subject than does “Nebraska”—while the latter lets us see through that subject’s eyes, whether we want to or not.

Next Bruce blogging tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think?

March 18-19, 2023: Wild West Stories: Wyatt Earp

[175 years ago this weekend, Wyatt Earp was born in Illinois. Earp would go on to become one of the most iconic Wild West figures, so this week I’ve AmericanStudied stories of that complex and mythic region and history. Leading up to this weekend birthday post on engaging Earp!]

On Wild West myths, realities, and how to split the difference.

While the mythos of a figure like Billy the Kid very much began during his (brief) lifetime, it seems that the myth of Wyatt Earp only truly began to be created after his January 1929 death at the age of 80. Earp had been living in Los Angeles for the last couple decades of his life, trying among other things to get a film of his life made; to that end he had been working with Western author Walter Noble Burns, whose book Tombstone, an Iliad of the Southwest (1927) had really begun the mythologizing of Earp. The process accelerated significantly with Stuart Lake’s authorized biography Wyatt Earp: Frontier Marshal (1931), a bestseller which was based on many conversations between Lake and Earp but which nonetheless (or perhaps as a result) established many of the iconic details of the Earp myth that have endured to this day. It is those details, centered on the shootout at Tombstone’s O.K. Corral but also and especially framed by stories of a lifetime of legal and extralegal justice delivered with his trusty pistols (and alongside his brothers and his best friend Doc Holliday), that became the basis for pop culture representations, from TV shows like The Life and Legend of Wyatt Earp (1955-61) to films like Tombstone (1993) and Wyatt Earp (1994) among many others.

Earp did work off and on as a lawman throughout his life, but it was his brother Virgil who was working as a Deputy U.S. Marshal in Tombstone (Wyatt was working as a stagecoach shotgun rider at the time). And in any case, the through-line of Earp’s life, at least from his first police work in Wichita, Kansas when he was in his mid-20s through his move to LA in his 60s, was not any one profession but rather constant sojourns across a series of Western boomtowns in an effort to strike it rich. The settings also included Dodge City, Kansas; Deadwood, South Dakota; Tombstone, Arizona; Eagle City, Idaho; Nome, Alaska; and San Francisco. The get-rich-quick schemes included participating in numerous silver and gold rushes, owning and operating saloons, dealing faro (a popular card game at the time), racing horses, and refereeing boxing matches. If the latter doesn’t sound like a way to get rich quick, it’s worth noting that Earp was suspected of having fixed the December 1896 heavyweight championship bout in San Francisco between Bob Fitzsimmons and Tom Sharkey, an accusation that haunted Earp until the end of his life. Earp’s brothers and Holliday frequently joined him in these endeavors, as did his multiple wives, reinforcing these pursuits as the most consistent part of his identity.

So beyond simply noting oversimplifications and inaccuracies in the pop culture stories (a somewhat useful but too often pedantic exercise), how do we put these different stories in conversation with one another? I’d say one important way to do so would be to recognize that work as a lawman was simply one of many professional paths for Earp (and his brothers and friends), and indeed one through which he and they were likewise hoping to prosper. That doesn’t mean they were necessarily corrupt, but rather that the system and society of these towns, of the late 19^th century West more broadly, and of Gilded Age America overall was one in which law and justice were very much caught up in power and prosperity, gold and greed, the American Dream and its darker undertones. Those interconnections are somewhat specific to the world of the “Wild West,” not in its mythic meanings but in its all too fraught realities. But, as Monday’s focal voice Richard Slotkin would no doubt remind us, those interconnections are also definingly American, one more reason why the Wild West has retained its powerful hold on our collective imaginations.

Next series starts Monday,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Wild West stories or histories you’d highlight?

March 17, 2023: Wild West Stories: True Grit

[175 years ago this coming weekend, Wyatt Earp was born in Illinois. Earp would go on to become one of the most iconic Wild West figures, so this week I’ll AmericanStudy stories of that complex and mythic region and history. Leading up to a birthday post on engaging Earp!]

On how a classic Wild West story both uses and challenges elements of the myth.

I think it’s fair to say that most audiences still know the story of True Grit through the 1969 film starring John Wayne as Rooster Cogburn (a performance for which he would win his one Oscar and which he reprised six years later in a film sequel named for the character). Many others (like this AmericanStudier, who has a lifelong aversion to all things John Wayne) have come to the story through the Coen Brothers’ 2010 version. But after greatly enjoying that 2010 film, and with the recommendation of my favorite fellow reader Ilene Railton, I picked up the original source material, Charles Portis’ 1968 novel (originally published in serial form in the Saturday Evening Post!). While much of the story and characters are very similar between all three versions, I’m focused here on Portis’ novel; not only because it was the original, but also and especially because I think it represents a particularly interesting engagement with Wild West tropes, one written not at all coincidentally right toward the tail end of the Golden Age of Westerns.

The character of Rooster Cogburn became popular enough to warrant a sequel not just because he was played in that first film adaptation (and played well, even I will admit having watched lots of clips to write this post) by John Wayne. No, I would argue that in his novel Portis clearly and purposefully creates Rooster as a living (if of course aging) embodiment of Wild West myths, and indeed of those myths at their most idealized—of that titular characteristic of “true grit.” Idealized doesn’t mean he’s without his flaws, and indeed Rooster is a profoundly flawed man; but even those flaws fit well into Wild West stereotypes of the ornery lone gunfighter, a man who has great difficulty getting along with others or even living his day-to-day life, but who can absolutely be counted on for both his talents and his tenacity in a shootout. Moreover, the way he genuinely comes to care about and for the novel’s youthful protagonist and narrator Mattie Ross, his eventual role as a father-figure to a young woman whose own father has been murdered, makes him a powerfully appealing such gunfighter, one whose true grit is in service of protecting those who need it most.

As I wrote about Walt Longmire earlier this week, there’s nothing wrong with using and adapting such familiar and even mythic character tropes, especially not as well as Portis does with Rooster. But I don’t think True Grit would be nearly as interesting if it weren’t for that other main character, Mattie—a protagonist who, both as the story’s youthful character and as its much older narrator, significantly challenges Wild West myths. It’s not just that Mattie is a 14 year old girl who can more than hold her own with men like Rooster (and the novel’s other main characters, all of whom are likewise hardened Wild West types of one kind or another). It’s that in her perspective, even at that young age and doubly so in her narration, she directly questions the stories and myths themselves, refusing to settle for accepted visions of anything (from gender and age to fundamental themes of right and wrong). There are all sorts of ways to create a revisionist Western, a genre that features two of my all-time favorite films, Thunderheart (1992) and Lone Star (1996). But I’m not sure anyone has done it better than did Charles Portis with Mattie Ross.

Wyatt Earp birthday post this weekend,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Wild West stories or histories you’d highlight?

March 16, 2023: Wild West Stories: Annie Oakley

[175 years ago this coming weekend, Wyatt Earp was born in Illinois. Earp would go on to become one of the most iconic Wild West figures, so this week I’ll AmericanStudy stories of that complex and mythic region and history. Leading up to a weekend birthday post on engaging Earp!]

On three figures who each and together help us see the human realities behind the mythic sharpshooter.

1)      Frank Butler: By the age of 15 Oakley (then known by her birth name Phoebe Ann Moses) was already well known in her native Ohio as a sharpshooter. But it was when she bested famous traveling trick shooter Butler in an 1875 Thanksgiving Day contest in Cincinnati (or maybe an 1881 one—it can be tricky to discover the realities behind the myths!) that she really became Annie Oakley, in every sense—not only due to the acclaimed victory, but also and especially because she and the 28 year old Butler soon married and began touring together (with Oakley now going under that stage name). Their age gap and respective ages at the time might seem creepy; but the date of their meeting is a bit unclear, it was the 19^th century, and in any case this was without question a lifelong partnership—when Oakley died in 1926 at the age of 66, Butler apparently stopped eating and died less than three weeks later. For half a century and even after death, Oakley and Butler were genuinely inseparable.

2)      Lillian Smith: In 1885, after touring together for a few years, Oakley and Butler joined one of the period’s most famous entertainments, Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show. It was there that Oakley met one of the few Americans who could genuinely be said to be her match—Lillian Smith, who was a 15 year old shooting prodigy when she joined the show in 1886. It seems likely that at this time Oakley began reporting her age as a few years younger in order to compete more directly with Smith, leading to another level of subsequent mythic confusion over basic details of her story and identity. What’s definite is that Oakley left the show for a time, returning only when Smith herself left in 1889. When she returned Oakley became the show’s second-highest-paid performer, after only Bill himself, so it was clearly a smart business and career decision—but also one that reflects human uncertainties behind the sharpshooter’s supremely and justifiably confident performance.

3)      Sitting Bull: If romantic partners and rivals are two kinds of distinctly human relationships behind a mythic story, then certainly good friends are a third, and one of Oakley’s closest friends happened to be one of the most famous Americans of the era. The Hunkpapa Lakota warrior Sitting Bull met Oakley in 1884, famously requesting a picture with her, and perhaps not coincidentally he likewise joined Buffalo Bill’s show in 1885. He gave her a new nickname, “Little Sure Shot,” that she used for the rest of her career; and the two became so close that he symbolically adopted her as a daughter (his own had tragically died young) and into his tribe. As Oakley would later write, “he had asked me to take the place of the daughter he lost.” A mythic moment behind two American legends to be sure, but also a powerfully human one—and while Sitting Bull was himself tragically killed in 1890, there’s no doubt that his legacy stayed with Oakley for the rest of her life.

Last Wild West story tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Wild West stories or histories you’d highlight?

March 15, 2023: Wild West Stories: Walt Longmire

[175 years ago this coming weekend, Wyatt Earp was born in Illinois. Earp would go on to become one of the most iconic Wild West figures, so this week I’ll AmericanStudy stories of that complex and mythic region and history. Leading up to a weekend birthday post on engaging Earp!]

On clichés, classic and revised, and a character who straddles the line.

However far back you want to go to define the origin of the cultural genre known as the Western—Owen Wister’s bestselling novel The Virginian: A Horseman of the Plains (1902) is a popular choice, but you could go further back to the Gilded Age’s Wild West shows or dime novels, among other possibilities—one central feature has been a very particular type for its protagonist: the strong, stoic, stubborn cowboy-lawman, good with a gun and horses, true to his word, a noble and mythic frontier archetype. By the early 20^th century moment of Wister’s novel that type was already largely a relic of an earlier era (if it had ever existed at all—as many Western historians have noted, neither frontier lawmen nor cowboys were much like the myths), and thus quickly became more of a cliché than anything else, a shorthand way to signal a specific kind of hero and storytelling. But few American cultural clichés have had more resonance or staying power, as illustrated by one of the 20^th century’s most iconic and influential actors: John Wayne, that identity itself a persona or construction of Marion Morrison’s.

While that type has found its way into various late 20^th and early 21^st century cultural texts as well—Timothy Olyphant’s Marshal Seth Bullock on Deadwood, as well as his modernized version of the same character on Justified, come to mind—many of our recent Westerns have offered complicatedly revisionist depictions instead. These revisions don’t tend to undermine the Western hero type exactly, so much as to suggest layers and contradictions while nonetheless keeping core elements of the cliché and myth intact. I’m thinking of Clint Eastwood’s retired gunfighter turned quasi-lawman (for hire, at least) William Munny in Unforgiven (1992), or Val Kilmer’s dying and sarcastic gunfighter turned lawman Doc Holliday in Tombstone (1993), or Christian Bale’s rancher turned reluctant lawman Dan Evans in 3:10 to Yuma (2007), among many others. Sharon Stone’s gunslinger out for revenge Ellen in The Quick and the Dead (1995) and Will Smith’s smooth-talking lawman James West in Wild Wild West (1999) offered gendered and ethnic revisions of the archetype, but still retained many of those core elements. Despite their many differences, all of these characters and texts reflect a desire both to carry the Western hero forward and to look for layers or quirks beneath the mythologizing.

Robert Taylor’s Walt(er) Longmire, the titular sheriff protagonist of Longmire, is in many ways a classic Western hero. All of the descriptions I employed in the opening sentence above apply quite precisely to Walt, and in a couple telling moments in the show’s later seasons he was characterized directly as a man born in the wrong time, one who would have been more comfortable in an era long past. But at the same time, Walt features layers and contradictions beyond those most mythic Western qualities, character traits often highlighted by his closest friends and loved ones (his daughter Cady, his deputy and potential love interest Vic, and his best friend Henry Standing Bear, on all of whom see those respective posts) but also seen in encounters with his perceived enemies (such as the ambiguous casino developer Jacob Nighthorse, on whom see that post). Without spoiling any of the details of the show’s final seasons, I would say that the tension between the most heroic and the most complex sides to Walt became a defining thread as the show moved toward its epic yet thoughtful conclusions. And while I’m generally in favor of complexity and revision, in this particular case (again, without any spoilers) I’ll say that it was entirely appropriate that there remained elements of the Wild West Walt in the character with whom we ended the wonderful story that is Longmire.

Next Wild West story tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Wild West stories or histories you’d highlight?

March 14, 2023: Wild West Stories: Billy the Kid

[175 years ago this coming weekend, Wyatt Earp was born in Illinois. Earp would go on to become one of the most iconic Wild West figures, so this week I’ll AmericanStudy stories of that complex and mythic region and history. Leading up to a weekend birthday post on engaging Earp!]

On two telling layers to the famous outlaw’s mythos, and the context they both mostly miss.

Like most outlaws, Billy the Kid went by a number of names and identities (each at least somewhat uncertain, due to the historical ambiguities that necessarily come with lives lived outside legal and social norms): he was born Henry McCarty, and renamed (by himself, apparently) at the age of 18 as William H. Bonney. But there’s a reason why Billy the Kid was and remains the one that stuck, and it’s not just because his first arrest came at 16, he was accused of murder at 18, and he was dead at 21. As best reflected in the two blockbuster Young Guns films of the late 1980s, and the portrayal of Billy therein by the baby-faced Emilio Estevez, Billy’s youth is a hugely evocative quality: partly because of the irony of a “kid” who is at the same time one of our most famous killers; but also, and I would argue most importantly, because the emphasis on his youth allows us to embrace and even celebrate a shadowy historical figure about whom virtually everything we know relates to crime.

That embrace and celebration of Billy are elements of what I would call the romanticization of the outlaw, a trend illustrated by the Young Guns films but much more complicatedly evoked and analyzed by a book published in the same year that Young Guns was released: Larry McMurtry’s underrated historical novel Anything for Billy (1988). By creating as his first-person narrator a successful dime novelist who was also one of Billy’s most consistent companions, and thus an artist creating exaggerated, romanticized depictions for his outsider (Eastern) audiences of real figures and experiences, McMurtry makes the dual subjects of his novel both Billy himself and his legend. Yet although he certainly recognizes Billy’s flaws and failures, that narrator nonetheless (as the title suggests) comes to idolize the young outlaw, and thus his perspective (and, inevitably, McMurtry’s novel) participates in the romanticization process. Even referring to him as Billy (which of course conjures up the full Billy the Kid sobriquet) rather than William or Henry links McMurtry’s narrator and novel more to the mythos than whatever historical realities we might recover underneath it.

Perhaps the most significant such historical reality, and one about which scholars have recovered a great deal, is the Lincoln County War of 1878. Interestingly, perhaps the best historical work on that war published to date, Robert Utley’s High Noon in Lincoln: Violence on the Western Frontier (1989), was released in between the two Young Guns films (the first film does, to its credit, depict some key aspects, figures, and moments from the war). Yet even Utley’s book, as the titular reference to the film High Noon implies, at least partly links the war to the same mythos of mano-a-mano, gunfighter violence that is so central to the romanticization of Billy and his murders (and about which I wrote in yesterday’s post). Whereas to my mind the details of the Lincoln County War and its culminating, mid-July Battle of Lincoln depict a much more organized, communal conflict between competing business interests, each deploying a mob of such violent individuals (Billy’s mob were known as the Regulators) to protect their assets. Which is to say, the ultimate irony of Billy the Kid might be how he can help us recognize that the Wild West was more capitalistic and corporate than it was wild or romantic.

Next Wild West story tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Wild West stories or histories you’d highlight?

March 13, 2023: Wild West Stories: Gunfighter Nation

[175 years ago this coming weekend, Wyatt Earp was born in Illinois. Earp would go on to become one of the most iconic Wild West figures, so this week I’ll AmericanStudy stories of that complex and mythic region and history. Leading up to a weekend birthday post on engaging Earp!]

On what a groundbreaking AmericanStudies book can help us understand about the Wild West mythos.

In one of my early posts, attempting to understand the kinds of histories of political and social violence that could help contextualize the January 2011 mass shooting that had targeted and badly wounded Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords (and of course have been all too applicable to the so, so many mass shootings since), I cited historian and cultural commentator Richard Slotkin’s trilogy of books on the myth of the frontier in America: Regeneration through Violence: The Mythology of the American Frontier, 1600-1860 (1973); Fatal Environment: The Myth of the Frontier in the Age of Industrialization, 1800-1890 (1985); and Gunfighter Nation: The Myth of the Frontier in Twentieth-Century America (1992). As the words “violence,” “fatal,” and “gunfighter” in their respective titles suggest, Slotkin’s focus across all three of these important books is not just on the frontier mythos overall, but also and specifically on themes of violence and destruction, as part of that frontier mythos and also within the larger American narratives and histories to which Slotkin consistently connects that myth.

All three of those books likewise have a lot to do with a second and of course closely connected mythos, that of the Wild West. Indeed, it might seem that the middle one, with a focal time period that directly covers the late 19^th century era in which that Wild West mythos first developed, would be especially applicable. But I would argue that it is Gunfighter Nation which has the most to tell us about why and how the Wild West came to take such hold on our collective consciousness. For one thing, while of course there are many layers to the Wild West myths, gunfighters have always occupied a significant (and I would argue significantly oversized) place in that imagery. Even a deeply revisionist cultural work like Deadwood, a show which worked very hard to undermine or at least complicate all sorts of Wild West myths, featured in a central role in its opening episodes the character Wild Bill Hickok—and involved him in a fast-draw gunfight at the end of the very first episode. We’ve had a collective love affair with gunfighters for nearly 150 years now, and I’m with Slotkin: there are serious consequences to those particular mythic images.

But there’s another and even more troubling layer to the close association of gunfighters with the Wild West (and both of them with America writ large). The entire premise of a gunfighter culture—as exemplified again by that concluding scene in Deadwood episode one—is that the best solution to many social problems and challenges, if not indeed the only viable solution, is to see who can draw first and/or draw first blood (to quote another great Wild West-set cultural work, Jon Bon Jovi’s “Blaze of Glory”). Even as we’ve come to better understand the social and cultural realities of the Western U.S., the real challenges that faced the individuals and communities who lived in and through those histories, we’ve still tended to fall back on gunfighter stories and myths—meaning, inevitably, that we still see violence as an integral part of both that society and period and our own. And I would say that those two narratives are frustratingly interconnected: that if we continue to imagine a Wild West full of gunfighters, it becomes all too easy to see such violence as a necessary part of our story and identity overall. Just because those narratives might have dominated much of the last century-plus, that is, there’s no reason why we have to remain a gunfighter nation as we move forward.

Next Wild West story tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Wild West stories or histories you’d highlight?

March 10, 2023: American Cars: The Fast and the Furious

[As his 16^th birthday approaches, my younger son has begun the driving lessons that will soon mean I have two youthful drivers in the family. To help me deal with that stunning reflection of the passage of time, this week I’ll blog about a handful of American car histories and cars. Share your thoughts on all things American cars for a crowd-sourced weekend post, please!]

On two ways to contextualize the hugely (and surprisingly) popular car racing franchise.

I can’t imagine that anyone really imagined that 2001’s The Fast and the Furious, a Point Break-inspired street racing film starring a group of relatively unknown young actors, would become the starting point for one of the 21^st century’s most successful film franchises. But that is indeed what has happened: 2023’s forthcoming Fast X will be the 10^th film to date in a franchise that has cumulatively grossed over $6 billion (making it the sixth-highest-grossing film series ever). Add in the fact that Wiz Khalifa and Charlie Puth’s song “See You Again” (2015), a tribute to the late actor Paul Walker that was featured in the final scene of 2015’s Furious 7 (I dare you to watch that clip and not tear up), is one of YouTube’s most watched videos, and it’s fair to say—whether we quite understand it or not—that the Fast and Furious film franchise has become one of the new century’s most influential cultural texts.

Here at AmericanStudies we work to understand, however, and I would say that there are a couple of contexts that help explain the franchise’s success. For one thing, the first film in particular—but also in many ways the series as a whole—provides yet another example of American cultural fascination with and admiration for outlaws. Vin Diesel’s Dominic Toretto and his crew are, quite simply, criminals, fronting as a legitimate garage but really making money sticking up and robbing tractor trailer drivers. They’re not doing so for some grand purpose or out of necessity, but for both the money and the thrill. Yet not only are viewers clearly meant to agree with Paul Walker’s undercover police officer Brian O’Conner when he decides to let Toretto go at the film’s conclusion, but also as the franchise develops O’Conner and Toretto consistently work together. At a certain point they and the crew shift from criminals pulling elaborate heists to semi-law enforcement figures working with the authorities (especially Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson’s Agent Luke Hobbs) to help catch other criminals; but even that arc highlights how much we seem to want to believe in these outlaw figures as vigilante forces for good in our society.

There’s a second important context for the series’s success, though, and I would (shockingly, I know) connect it to a Bruce Springsteen song, “Racing in the Street” (1978). The one aspect of Springsteen’s catalogue that I’ve never quite connected with is the consistent emphasis on cars, one that has produced some of his most beautiful songs (not only “Racing,” but also of course “Born to Run” [1975] and one of my very favorites “Brothers Under the Bridges” [1983], among many others). I think perhaps the last verse of “Racing” comes closest to explaining this automotive obsession: “For all the shut-down strangers and hot rod angels/Rumbling through this promised land/Tonight my baby and me, we’re gonna ride to the sea/And wash these sins off our hands.” Which is to say, the connection of cars to the American Dream isn’t just about getting in what Tracy Chapman calls a “fast car” and driving somewhere else and better (although yes)—it’s also and perhaps especially about the possibility of starting over, of getting clean, of transcending our limitations and racing toward a more perfect future. In that sense, Toretto and company aren’t just outlaws, they’re all of us, desperately driven to be something else and something more and racing in the street to try to get there.

Crowd-sourced post this weekend,

Ben

PS. So one more time: what do you think? Car histories or stories you’d highlight?

March 9, 2023: American Cars: Smart Cars

[As his 16^th birthday approaches, my younger son has begun the driving lessons that will soon mean I have two youthful drivers in the family. To help me deal with that stunning reflection of the passage of time, this week I’ll blog about a handful of American car histories and cars. Share your thoughts on all things American cars for a crowd-sourced weekend post, please!]

On AmericanStudies lessons from three cars with minds of their own.

1)      KITT: I’ve blogged about Baywatch in this space, so I suppose it was only a matter of time before I got around to David Hasselhoff’s other magnum opus, Knight Rider (1982-86). To be honest I don’t think I’ve ever watched an entire episode of Knight Rider, and I damn sure don’t remember a single thing about it other than the voice of KITT the artificially intelligent automobile (provided by an uncredited William Daniels). But I suppose that’s the point: with all apologies to the Hoff, there’s no doubt that the car was the star of the show—and also a reflection of one powerful myth of both cars and technology, that they are not just extensions of our human selves, but at their best can make us more impressive and heroic than we otherwise would be through their own characteristics. As the hyperlinked video above illustrates, Hasselhoff’s Michael Knight was a bit of an asshole, but working alongside (or rather inside) KITT he became an action hero.

2)      Christine: That’s one myth of cars and technology, anyway, but there’s another equally persistent and potent type—stories that view these elements as potentially antagonistic to our human survival, if not indeed blatantly evil (certainly many stories of AI technology in particular present it through that latter lens). Christine, the titular vehicle in Stephen King’s 1983 novel (as well as John Carpenter’s 1983 film adaptation), isn’t an AI, but rather possessed by the evil spirit of a serial killer who gradually begins to take over the car’s nebbishy new owner. But I think King was nonetheless tapping into the same kinds of early 1980s fears of advancing, independent, potentially destructive technology that surfaced in another 1983 film, War Games—and by linking those fears to one of the technologies in which we most often find ourselves, and on which we so often rely for our everyday lives, he tapped into (as he so often has) a particularly potent version of these concerns.

3)      Herbie: Somewhere in between the heroism of KITT and the horror of Christine lies Herbie, the supernaturally smart Volkswagen Beetle at the heart of the 1968 film The Love Bug and its five sequels (to date—the most recent appeared in 2005, so Herbie fans can take heart in the possibility of more to come). Herbie initially and understandably freaks out his new owner, race car driver Jim Douglas (Dean Jones), but he’s not the least bit scary; his intelligence allows him to win races he has no business winning, but he’s no action hero (he is a Bug, after all). No, Herbie’s just a car with a personality, a character in his own right who is equal parts sad and funny, frustrating and sympathetic, and ultimately an important sidekick for our protagonist as he navigates career, romance, and more. While there will always be a place for both action and horror stories, it seems to me that Herbie is by far the most recognizable and relatable of these supernatural smart cars, and definitely the one I’d most want to find in my own garage.

Last CarStudying tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Car histories or stories you’d highlight?

March 8, 2023: American Cars: Rebel Without a Cause

[As his 16^th birthday approaches, my younger son has begun the driving lessons that will soon mean I have two youthful drivers in the family. To help me deal with that stunning reflection of the passage of time, this week I’ll blog about a handful of American car histories and cars. Share your thoughts on all things American cars for a crowd-sourced weekend post, please!]

On a few reasons why the film’s famous “chicken run” scene is so significant.

Given how iconic he was and remains in the American imagination—despite, or perhaps in part because of, his tragically brief life—it’s a bit surprising that I’ve apparently only mentioned James Dean once before on the blog, as part of my 2019 series on blue jeans. But it makes sense that he would make his second appearance in a series on cars—just as he came to be closely associated with those iconic blue jeans, so too did Dean’s death in a September 1955 highway accident forever cement the link between the Hollywood heartthrob and automobiles. Since Rebel Without a Cause (1955) hadn’t yet been released when Dean died and would open in theaters less than a month after his passing, it likewise stands to reason that that dramatic film would become closely associated with Dean’s life and death. And as that hyperlinked clip illustrates, Dean’s character Jim Stark is similarly closely connected throughout the film to “his car.”

All of those factors come together to make the film’s centerpiece scene, the dramatic “chicken run” duel between Stark and teenage gang leader Buzz Gunderson (Corey Allen), even more of a standout than it would likely always have been. The scene’s automotive action might seem pretty tame for a 2023 audience used to over the top action like in the Fast and Furious films about which I’ll write in Friday’s post, but in many ways the opposite is true: this scene and others like it were the inspiration for that evolving genre of car action, and of course in 1955 they had virtually no special effects and so what you see on screen was to a significant extent what was happening during filming. Of course Allen himself did not actually go over a cliff in his car like the character does, but it certainly appears that a car made the plunge—and again, given how soon after Dean’s car crash the film was released, the fact that this centerpiece scene illustrates the fatal dangers associated with cars only amplifies that set of audience automotive associations.

Those contexts connected to both Dean and the film’s specific cultural moment are certainly part of what made the chicken run scene a focus when the film was released. But while they, like Dean, undoubtedly remain in our collective consciousness, I don’t think they’d be enough on their own terms to have caused this specific scene to endure as much as it has (far more so than the film as a whole, I’d argue). Instead, I’d say this scene captured a fundamental combination at the heart of the car mythos: the interconnections of manhood and violence, teenage community and romance, the potential of accident and death, and the sense of freedom and independence that cars have long offered all of us (and young people most of all). I’ve written before about how the one aspect of Bruce Springsteen’s discography that doesn’t quite hit me is his obsession with cars—that remains true, but I sure understand how and why that passion connects for so many, interweaves with our identities on so many levels, and so does this film and its central car scene.  

Next CarStudying tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Car histories or stories you’d highlight?

March 7, 2023: American Cars: Crime Cars

[As his 16^th birthday approaches, my younger son has begun the driving lessons that will soon mean I have two youthful drivers in the family. To help me deal with that stunning reflection of the passage of time, this week I’ll blog about a handful of American car histories and cars. Share your thoughts on all things American cars for a crowd-sourced weekend post, please!]

On AmericanStudies contexts for three early 20^th century crime cars.

1)      Bonnie and Clyde’s car: That extensive hyperlinked article on the many fake versions of Bonnie Parker and Clyde Barrow’s stolen V8 Ford and the current resting place for the one authentic one (at a Nevada casino’s car museum that also houses the second crime car below) reveals just how much of a hold this particular early 20^th century car has on the American imagination. It had at least a much a hold on Clyde himself, who famously wrote to Henry Ford, just a month before the May 1934 police ambush that killed the pair and shot up their car, “While I still have got breath in my lungs I will tell you what a dandy car you make. I have drove Fords exclusively when I could get away with one. For sustained speed and freedom from trouble the Ford has got every other car skinned and even if my business hasn't been strictly legal it don't hurt anything to tell you what a fine car you got in the V-8.” That’s the kind of detail that would feel outrageous in a novel, but stranger than fiction, y’know.

2)      Al Capone’s car: Again that same Primm, Nevada casino and museum holds Al Capone’s bulletproof 1928 Cadillac, a helpful alteration for a life of crime that would have served Bonnie and Clyde well; the car was already bulletproofed when Capone bogarted it from deceased gangster Dutch Schultz, and it never took any fire during Capone’s life (although casino/museum owner Gary Primm shot a bunch of bullets at it to prove the point and make it more tourist-friendly). Of course Bonnie and Clyde’s car was stolen late in their crime spree while Capone’s was (after he acquired it in tellingly gangster fashion) his own and integral to the day to day operations of his criminal enterprises. But while that distinction reflects the very different types of criminals we’re talking about, the common thread is that by the 1930s, the most famous criminals all had equally famous wheels.

3)      Gatsby’s car: Jay Gatsby was a fictional character, but in his world he was just as famous as these figures; his criminality was a matter of more dispute, but many of the rumors about him do define him in that way, and it seems from the novel’s final revelations that he was indeed in some sort of nefarious business with gangsters like Meyer Wolfsheim. But while Gatsby’s yellow automobile might well have been purchased with ill-gotten gains, it becomes a crime car in a very different and much more tragic way: when Gatsby allows novice driver Daisy Buchanan to steer back from New York City and she hits and kills Myrtle Wilson (and then flees the scene of the crime). While mythic real-life criminals like Capone and Bonnie and Clyde can capture our collective imaginations, it’s fair to say that this fictional accidental criminal tragedy is much more like the reality of both crime and the human experience. With cars as a through-line across every form of story to be sure.

Next CarStudying tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Car histories or stories you’d highlight?