May 31, 2023: Decoration Day Histories: Roger Pryor

[Following up Monday’s Memorial Day special, a series on some of the complex American histories connected to the holiday’s original identity as Decoration Day.]

On the invitation and speech that mark two shifts in American attitudes.

In May 1876, New York’s Brooklyn Academy of Music invited Confederate veteran, lawyer, and Democratic politician Roger A. Pryor to deliver its annual Decoration Day address. As Pryor noted in his remarks, the invitation was most definitely an “overture of reconciliation,” one that I would pair with the choice (earlier that same month) of Confederate veteran and poet Sidney Lanier to write and deliver the opening Cantata at the Centennial Exposition in Philadelphia. Indeed, reunion and reconciliation were very much the themes of 1876, threads that culminated in the contested presidential election and the end of Federal Reconstruction that immediately followed it (and perhaps, although historians have different perspectives on this point, stemmed from that election’s controversial results). In any case, this was a year in which the overtures of reconciliation were consistently heard, and we could locate Pryor’s address among the rest.

Yet the remarks that Pryor delivered in his Decoration Day speech could not be accurately described as reconciliatory—unless we shift the meaning to “trying to reconcile his Northern audiences with his Confederate perspective on the war, its causes and effects, and both regions.” Pryor was still waiting, he argued, for “an impartial history” to be told, one that more accurately depicted both “the cause of secession” and Civil War and the subsequent, “dismal period” of Reconstruction. While he could not by any measure be categorized as impartial, he nonetheless attempted to offer his own version of those histories and issues throughout the speech—one designed explicitly, I would argue, to convert his Northern audience to that version of both past and present. Indeed, as I argue at length in my first book, narratives of reunion and reconciliation were quickly supplanted in this period by ones of conversion, attempts—much of the time, as Reconstruction lawyer and novelist Albion Tourgée noted in an 1888 article, very successful attempts at that—to convert the North and the nation as a whole to this pro-Southern standpoint.

In my book’s analysis I argued for a chronological shift: that reunion/reconciliation was a first national stage in this period, and conversion a second. But Pryor’s Decoration Day speech reflects how the two attitudes could go hand-in-hand: the Northern invitation to Pryor could reflect, as he noted, that attitude of reunion on the part of Northern leaders; and Pryor’s remarks and their effects (which we cannot know for certain in this individual case, but which were, as Tourgée noted, quite clear in the nation as a whole) could both comprise and contribute to the attitudes of conversion to the Southern perspective. And in any case, it’s important to add that both reconciliation and conversion differ dramatically from the original purpose of Decoration Day, as delineated so bluntly and powerfully by Frederick Douglass in his 1871 speech: remembrance, of the Northern soldiers who died in the war and of the cause for which they did so. By 1876, it seems clear, that purpose was shifting, toward a combination of amnesia and propaganda, of forgetting the war’s realities and remembering a propagandistic version of them created by voices like Pryor’s.

Next Decoration Day history tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think?

May 30, 2023: Decoration Day Histories: Frederick Douglass

[Following up Monday’s Memorial Day special, a series on some of the complex American histories connected to the holiday’s original identity as Decoration Day.]

On one of the great American speeches, and why it’d be so important to add to our collective memories.

In a long-ago guest post on Ta-Nehisi Coates’s The Atlantic blog, Civil War historian Andy Hall highlighted Frederick Douglass’s amazing 1871 Decoration Day speech (full text available at the first hyperlink in this sentence). Delivered at Virginia’s Arlington National Cemetery, then as now the single largest resting place of U.S. soldiers, Douglass’s short but incredibly (if not surprisingly) eloquent and pointed speech has to be ranked as one of the most impressive in American history. I’m going to end this first paragraph here so you can read the speech in full (again, it’s at the first hyperlink above), and I’ll see you in a few.

Welcome back! If I were to close-read Douglass’s speech, I could find choices worth extended attention in every paragraph and every line. But I agree with Hall’s final point, that the start of Douglass’s concluding paragraph—“But we are not here to applaud manly courage, save as it has been displayed in a noble cause. We must never forget that victory to the rebellion meant death to the republic”—is particularly noteworthy and striking. Granted, this was not yet the era that would come to be dominated by narratives of reunion and reconciliation between the regions, and then by ones of conversation to the Southern perspective (on all of which, see tomorrow’s post); an era in which Douglass’s ideas would be no less true, nor in which (I believe) he would have hesitated to share them, but in which a Decoration Day organizing committee might well have chosen not to invite a speaker who would articulate such a clear and convincing take on the causes and meanings of the Civil War. Yet even in 1871, to put that position so bluntly and powerfully at such an occasion would have been impressive for even a white speaker, much less an African American one.

If we were to better remember Douglass’s Decoration Day speech, that would be one overt and important effect: to push back on so many of the narratives of the Civil War that have developed in the subsequent century and a half. One of the most frequent such narratives is that there was bravery and sacrifice on both sides, as if to produce a leveling effect on our perspective on the war—but as Douglass notes in the paragraph before that conclusion, recognizing individual bravery in combat is not at all the same as remembering a war: “The essence and significance of our devotions here today are not to be found in the fact that the men whose remains fill these graves were brave in battle.” I believe Douglass here can be connected to Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address, and its own concluding notion of honoring the dead through completing “the unfinished work”: “It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us.” That work and task remained unfinished and great long after the Civil War’s end, after all—and indeed remain so to this day in many ways. Just another reason to better remember Frederick Douglass’s Decoration Day speech.

Next Decoration Day history tomorrow,

BenI

PS. What do you think?

May 29, 2023: Remembering Memorial Day

[Before a series on Decoration Day, the holiday that preceded and evolved into Memorial Day, a special post on shifting our collective memories of the holiday’s histories.]

On what we don’t remember about Memorial Day, and why we should.

In a long-ago post on the Statue of Liberty, I made a case for remembering, and engaging much more fully, with what the Statue was originally intended, by its French abolitionist creator, to symbolize: the legacy of slavery and abolitionism in both America and France, the assassination of Abraham Lincoln and the memories of what he had done to advance that cause, and so on. I tried there, hopefully with some success, to leave ample room for what the Statue has come to mean, both for America as a whole and, more significantly still, for generation upon generation of immigrant arrivals to the nation. I think those meanings, especially when tied to Emma Lazarus’ poem and its radically democratic and inclusive vision of our national identity, are beautiful and important in their own right. But how much more profound and meaningful, if certainly more complicated, would they be if they were linked to our nation’s own troubled but also inspiring histories of slavery and abolitionism, of sectional strife and Civil War, of racial divisions and those who have worked for centuries to transcend and bridge them?

I would say almost exactly the same thing when it comes to the history of Memorial Day. For the last century or so, at least since the end of World War I, the holiday has meant something broadly national and communal, an opportunity to remember and celebrate those Americans who have given their lives as members of our armed forces. While I certainly feel that some of the narratives associated with that idea are as simplifying and mythologizing and meaningless as many others I’ve analyzed here—“they died for our freedom” chief among them; the world would be a vastly different, and almost certainly less free, place had the Axis powers won World War II (for example), but I have yet to hear any convincing case that the world would be even the slightest bit worse off were it not for the more than 50,000 American troops who lives were wasted in the Vietnam War (for another)—those narratives are much more about politics and propaganda, and don’t change at all the absolutely real and tragic and profound meaning of service and loss for those who have done so and all those who know and love them. One of the most pitch-perfect statements of my position on such losses can be found in a song by (surprisingly) Bruce Springsteen; his “Gypsy Biker,” from Magic (2007), certainly includes a strident critique of the Bush Administration and Iraq War, as seen in lines like “To those who threw you away / You ain’t nothing but gone,” but mostly reflects a brother’s and family’s range of emotions and responses to the death of a young soldier in that war.

Yet as with the Statue, Memorial Day’s original meanings and narratives are significantly different from, and would add a great deal of complexity and power to, these contemporary images. The holiday was first known as Decoration Day, and was (at least per the thorough histories of it by scholars like David Blight) originated in 1865 by a group of freed slaves in Charleston, South Carolina; the slaves visited a cemetery for Union soldiers on May 1^st of that year and decorated their graves, a quiet but very sincere tribute to what those soldiers have given and what it had meant to the lives of these freedmen and –women. The holiday quickly spread to many other communities, and just as quickly came to focus more on the less potentially divisive, or at least less complex as reminders of slavery and division and the ongoing controversies of Reconstruction and so on, perspectives of former soldiers—first fellow Union ones, but by the 1870s veterans from both sides. Yet former slaves continued to honor the holiday in their own way, as evidenced by a powerful scene from Constance Fenimore Woolson’s “Rodman the Keeper” (1880), in which the protagonist observes a group of ex-slaves leaving their decorations on the graves of the Union dead at the cemetery where he works. On the one hand, these ex-slave memorials are parallel to the family memories that now dominate Memorial Day, and serve as a beautiful reminder that the American family extends to blood relations of very different and perhaps even more genuine kinds. But on the other hand, the ex-slave memorials represent far more complex and in many ways (I believe) significant American stories and perspectives than a simple familial memory; these acts were a continuing acknowledgment both of some of our darkest moments and of the ways in which we had, at great but necessary cost, defeated them.

Again, I’m not trying to suggest that any current aspects or celebrations of Memorial Day are anything other than genuine and powerful; having heard some eloquent words about what my Granddad’s experiences with his fellow soldiers had meant to him (he even commandeered an abandoned bunker and hand-wrote a history of the Company after the war!), I share those perspectives. But as with the Statue and with so many of our national histories, what we’ve forgotten is just as genuine and powerful, and a lot more telling about who we’ve been and thus who and where we are. The more we can remember those histories too, the more complex and meaningful our holidays, our celebrations, our memories, and our futures will be. Next Decoration Day post tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think?

May 27-28, 2023: Barrett Beatrice Jackson’s Guest Post on Norman Rockwell, Robert Butler, and her Grandfather

[Barrett Beatrice Jackson is a political scientist and legal historian, as well as a Fellow at the Behavioral International Economics Development Society (BIED). Her work brings together academic scholarship, public policy and law, and genealogy and family history, as this wonderful Guest Post illustrates!]

              Norman Rockwell was always a name thrown around in our family. The essence of Americana, though I never knew quite why. After my grandfather died, framed Saturday Evening Post covers started showing up, hung in linear fashion, clearly old and faded, around our house. I always knew my grandfather was somewhat “quirky” – he is the reason why I now have hundreds of books dated back to the early 19^th century on U.S. Presidents found at random garage sales he’d find over the years.

The story behind the Normal Rockwell’s, however, is a bit more complex and one which inspires a historiographic resolution that it is the “outliers” – those that go against the contemporary stereotypes and who may not be in the history books or regarded as the greatest thinker of their time but nonetheless are central in shaping our collective history. There was, and continues to be, a basic goodness of soul that deafens the noise of the world. We were taught to “Always Live In View of Eternity” – the family mantra being “ALIVE”. Showing up at the insular Methodist church for a couple hours every week wasn’t enough.

Let me provide some context. Before desegregation was no longer thought of as un-Godly, and World War II veterans were reaching middle age, Glenn Brown practiced as an OBGYN in middle Florida. (I’ve been told that after the war, he resolved to bring as much life into the world to atone for those he took away in Japan.) He was cultured and worldly, despite having grown up in Selma, Alabama, during Jim Crowe. He held himself to a higher standard—a believer in Kantian-like imperatives that transcend societal definitions of right versus wrong. He instilled in us all the conviction that there is more to life than the “rat race”, as he put it. Thus, he would risk his safety (and reputation) to travel deep within the black neighborhoods of rural Florida swampland to provide them free obstetrical care.

Enter Robert Butler. Also defying segregation laws, Butler was a penniless black artist who would try to sell his works at the same spot along the same rural highway in Okeechobee, Florida, every day. Inevitably, he and Dr. Brown would meet and, more surprisingly, become good friends over the years. Butler painted what he knew: the everglades, and was a master of water-colored landscapes in a signature style that exuded a unique ability to “read the land”.

Of course, supporting a family on a love of painting meant a life of barely scraping by. So by the late 1960s, he had to set out on the road to try to sell his paintings from his car. He later told the St. Petersburg Times, “I was swimming in this fantastic psychological soup at the time; I came from this poor background and yet this door was opening wide for me, to this universe that could be explored forever. I wanted to paint as much as I could and never looked back.”

From such different backgrounds, the two men shared this passion of finding profound meaning in the everyday mundane. Dr. Brown found inspiration in this man who “never looked back” as he himself lived in deep-seated guilt over those he killed during WWII and for a country that still vilified racial parity. What did he fight for? How could he atone? In Butler’s world, my grandfather recognized his naivete in making life a celebration of colors, a purity of soul unmarred by the realities of war.

Thus Dr. Brown began purchasing Butler’s paintings for his office and introduced him to other doctors in the city. Butler would go on to be a father to nine children, most of whom Dr. Brown delivered. Payment was in the form of a new painting. It was an unconventional arrangement but neither individual cared much for fitting any molds. In this way, everything that seemed at odds – race, class, education, et al – somehow strengthened their friendship.

My grandfather may have subconsciously been jealous of Butler’s natural joie de vivre but that is exactly why he surrounded himself, working in an extremely sterile hospital environment, with bright paintings that served as inspirational reminders—windows to the outside—of there being meaning in his being a doctor in such a socially backward and hypocritical area of the country. I’d like to think that Butler recognized this universal thirst of the soul and that is why his paintings were born out of such purpose and effortlessly bright natural beauty.

By the 1990’s, Robert Butler had become a household name in “wild Florida” and proved to be that one-in-a-million prodigy who had officially made it. He became a symbol of a group of black artists called “The Florida Highwaymen,” who saw and painted the world regardless of societal boundaries. In 2004 he was inducted into the Florida Artists Hall of Fame. He was sought after by all sorts of collectors, hunters, and outdoor enthusiasts. After his death, our family had to promise his children that all the now extremely expensive paintings he had made for my grandfather would not be sold. So they hang amongst the homes of the children and grandchildren.

              Now you may be wondering how Norman Rockwell fits into this story. The Rockwell originals were not just haphazardly found by my grandfather; rather, each one was sought after and selected based on the dates of publication of each Saturday Evening Post. Not necessarily famous dates in history but ones from family birthdays, marriages, personal milestones. Nostalgia personified. A deeply personal and private kind that retains symbolism beyond that amorphous concept of “Americana” and the well-known family at Thanksgiving dinner.

              Not unlike Butler’s paintings, they—along with their subjects and dates published—are quintessential reminders of life’s small miracles amidst the ordinary. And perhaps that multi-layer of interpretation is one factor of Rockwell’s genius. The last painting Butler personalized for my grandfather embodied all of this. One of Dr. Brown’s favorites of Rockwell’s was his cover depicting a doctor holding an old-fashioned stethoscope to a young girl’s heart. He is kneeling down to her level, looking at her in a way that suggests he is mentally picturing all the things this girl was to grow up to be and do. As a sort of parting gift once his career reached new heights, Butler painted this Rockwell work, even copying the Rockwell signature, with his own “R. Butler” one to make it unique.

              It remained in my grandfather’s offices throughout the years until he passed it down to my mother, his only child who pursued a career in medicine. As a woman. In the early 1970s. In Alabama. It then hung in her office until she retired last year. Whether she was an assistant professor or chief of staff, the painting was always there gaining new meaning as she fought to be taken as seriously as the male doctors. I do not know exactly how she sees herself in the painting –whether as the timid patient or the all-in devoted physician who encapsulates an unselfish Hippocratic Oath, despite administrative and political encumbrances in today’s current healthcare system. Probably a bit of both.

How then do we narrow in upon what has been, and is, utilitarian in American society? Is it about straining to appeal to everyone? Reach the most people for glory rooted in selfishness? Even strictly applying J.S. Mill to social movements and the backlash from pandemics and ensanguine public policies falls short outside of Democratic Theory 101.

On the contrary, it is about honesty: about past decisions and regrets, about recognizing reality is difficult and being self-aware and emotionally mature enough not to dwell but to “keep painting” for the future, so to speak. It is about accepting that self-forgiveness is a lifelong pursuit.

Allow me to put these rather personal sentiments into a broader context. Sometimes we prefer to romanticize history along the lines of “we are fighting in the name of freedom” and do not venture further to openly discuss the meaning of “freedom”. The backlash of world war and the new global dichotomy of democratic versus communist superpowers resulted in the 1950’s a decade of re-branding normality, the “traditional nuclear family”, and selling a new type of American Dream: peace through idealized stability.

At the same time, just as the Harlem Renaissance signified a growing grassroots resistance to accept that status quo, others rebelled courageously with their own art, providing a bond that reached across classes and regions. Able to bring a disillusioned white doctor from Selma, AL, to be moved by such sorrowful beauty in the middle of the Florida Everglades as a reason for hope and purpose to heal such deeply engrained wounds.

For more on Butler: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Butler_(artist)

And his works: https://www.floridahighwaymenpaintings.com/highwaymen/robert-butler/

https://www.invaluable.com/artist/butler-robert-1943-vhquwn7hpz/sold-at-auction-prices/

[Memorial Day series starts Monday,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Guest Posts you’d like to contribute?]

May 26, 2023: Great American Screenplays: Memento

[I had planned to feature this week a pre-Memorial Day series on blockbuster films. But with the ongoing and very necessary WGA strike, I’ve decided to share instead a handful of older posts which have focused on films with particularly perfect screenplays. I’d love your thoughts on these as well as your nominees for other great screenplays and writing—in any medium—for a crowd-sourced weekend post of solidarity!]

[FYI: this post will focus on some key elements to the final sequence in Christopher Nolan’s film Memento (2000). Which if you haven’t seen, go watch and then come on back. I’ll be here.]

On the dark, cynical, and unquestionably human final words of a contemporary American classic.

I might be stretching things a bit by calling Memento (2000) an American classic—after all, it was directed by Englishman Christopher Nolan; adapted from a short story, “Memento Mori,” by his equally English brother Jonathan; and stars Aussie Guy Pearce and Canadian Carrie-Anne Moss in two of the three principal roles. But I’m sticking to my guns, and not just because the film is set in the western United States (specifically Nevada, I believe, based on the glimpses we get of license plates; key earlier events and flashbacks take place in California). To me, some of the film’s central themes, while unquestionably universal in significance, echo particularly American narratives: the idea, or perhaps the myth, of the self-made man, creating himself anew out of will and ambition, writing his own future on a blank page (or, in this case, his own body); the Western film trope of a lone warrior, a quiet and threatening man with seemingly no identity or past, traveling on a quest for justice and/or revenge, and entering and changing a corrupt town in the process. In those and other core ways, Memento is deeply and importantly American.

Given that Americanness, and given that it’s a mystery—if a highly unconventional and postmodern one to be sure—it’s likely no surprise that I love the film. But compared to many of the loves I’ve shared this week, and compared to my general AmericanStudying attitude for that matter, Memento is also strikingly dark and cynical; it takes that tone throughout, but most especially in its final revelations and in the interior monologue with which it concludes (that scene is more spoilerific than I’m going to be here, so don’t watch if you haven’t seen the film!). That monologue’s middle section feels logical and rational enough, particularly the lines “I have to believe in a world outside my own mind. I have to believe that my actions still have meaning, even if I can’t remember them. I have to believe that when my eyes are closed, the world’s still here.” But it begins with the speaker, protagonist Leonard Shelby, making one of the most blatantly and purposefully self-deceptive and disturbing choices ever put on film, while thinking, ““Do I lie to myself to be happy? … Yes I will.” And so when Leonard (and the film) ends by arguing, “We all need mirrors to remind ourselves who we are. I’m no different,” it seems, in the specific context of what he has done and is doing, who and what he has been revealed to be, to be a profoundly pessimistic perspective on human nature and identity.

Maybe it is that pessimistic—it’s okay if so, not everything can end on notes of hard-won hope, much as I enjoy the concept. The world’s more complex and multi-faceted than that. But if we take a step back from some of the specifics of what Leonard is doing at this moment, it’s also possible to read his actions here, and throughout the film, as purely and simply and definingly human. He’s trying to make meaning out of the world around him, out of the details of his own life (and most especially the hardest and toughest of them), out of what has happened and what is happening and what he hopes to make happen in the time to come. What Leonard does overtly—in those tattoos on his skin, in his photographs and note cards and wall hangings, in his constant interior monologue—is what we all do more subtly but just as constantly: read and respond to the world around us, and make it part of our developing narratives and stories and identities. Granted, I hope that we can do it in less destructive ways than Leonard; he does have that unique condition to contend with, after all (spoilers there too!). But we all do it, and one of the things I love most about Memento is its ability to hold that mirror up to us and how we move through the world.

Crowd-sourced post this weekend,

Ben

PS. So one more time: what do you think? Other great screenwriting you’d nominate?

May 25, 2023: Great American Screenplays: The Opposite of Sex and You Can Count on Me

[I had planned to feature this week a pre-Memorial Day series on blockbuster films. But with the ongoing and very necessary WGA strike, I’ve decided to share instead a handful of older posts which have focused on films with particularly perfect screenplays. I’d love your thoughts on these as well as your nominees for other great screenplays and writing—in any medium—for a crowd-sourced weekend post of solidarity!]

On nontraditional families in groundbreaking children’s books and provocative films.

The combination of being a professional analyzer of literature and being a daily reader of at least a couple children’s books means that I spend quite a bit of time—some might say way too much time, but I yam what I yam—analyzing those books. That’s especially true of the ones that I’ve read enough by this point to be able to recite them largely by heart, freeing my mind for even deeper such analyses. And near the top of that list, both because I have read it a ton and because it’s just full of mysteries awaiting—nay, demanding—my analytical attention, is The Cat in the Hat. The most striking mysteries are the most central ones: why is the Cat so thoroughly destructive a presence in the home of Sally and the unnamed narrator, and what are kids to take away from this tale of an uninvited house guest who bends rakes, tears gowns, traumatizes fish, and the like? But underlying those mysteries is an even more foundational, and (given the book’s 1957 publication date) even more striking, one: why has Mother left her two young children alone for the day, and where’s Father?

I might be reading too much into it (shockingly), but it seems to me that Mother is a single parent, and that because of that status she sometimes has to leave her kids at home alone (leaving them open in the process to the advances of strange men, or male cats at least, and their wild and destructive Things, but again I’m really not sure what to make of that). If so, that would make Cat a pretty significantly alternative vision of family in the era of Leave It to Beaver and, more relevantly, of the Little Bear books, which feature Mother Bear who stays at home and sews and cooks and Father Bear who goes off on long fishing trips in his hat and tie. Over the next few decades, of course, our pop culture images of family would become significantly more diverse and varied, and single parents thus less striking of a prospect (although in many representations, as in the 1980s TV shows Who’s the Boss? and Full House, those single parent families are due to deaths, not divorce or children born out of wedlock). But I would argue that our most dominant narratives of family identity still rely heavily on very traditional nuclear models; and relatedly, one role for many out-of-the-mainstream texts (such as independent films) has been to push back on those models and construct their own alternative visions of family.

Two of the most smart and successful indie films of the last fifteen years, Don Roos’ The Opposite of Sex (1998) and Kenneth Lonergan’s You Can Count On Me (2000), are centered on precisely such alternative family units. Lonergan’s is slightly more conventional, with pitch-perfect Laura Linney’s never-married single mother trying to balance raising her son, working full-time (and beginning an affair with Matthew Broderick’s married co-worker), and mothering her wayward brother (played to equal perfection by Mark Ruffalo); but the reason for their close sibling relationship, the death of both of their parents when they were very young, makes them a fundamentally distinct kind of family. On the other hand, Roos’s vision of family is purposefully non-traditional and extreme—the film’s central family unit features a teenage runaway (Christina Ricci), her gay step-brother (Martin Donovan), his young boyfriend who then becomes Ricci’s boyfriend (Ivan Sergei), and the sister (Lisa Kudrow) of Donovan’s former boyfriend who had died of AIDS—but by the end of the film makes clear how much these characters, and the few others who have come into their circle, have become most definitely a family in the fullest senses, including the presence of two newborn babies in the mix. Similarly, both movies take very cynical and sarcastic tones toward themes like love and loyalty for much of their running time, yet by their conclusions they have become (in entirely believable and not at all clichéd ways) testaments to how much their characters and relationships emblematize those themes (if at times in spite of themselves).

Such non-traditional families are, of course, no more necessarily representative as images of the American family than were Beaver’s and Little Bear’s; it is, instead, very much the spectrum of possibilities for what family is and means that represents the variety and diversity of American experiences and models. And thanks to some of our most talented artistic voices, from Dr. Seuss up to Roos and Lonergan, our popular culture includes, and thus helps make more present and (ultimately) more fully accepted, many more of those possibilities. Last great screenplay tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Other great screenwriting you’d nominate?

May 24, 2023: Great American Screenplays: Affliction and A Simple Plan

[I had planned to feature this week a pre-Memorial Day series on blockbuster films. But with the ongoing and very necessary WGA strike, I’ve decided to share instead a handful of older posts which have focused on films with particularly perfect screenplays. I’d love your thoughts on these as well as your nominees for other great screenplays and writing—in any medium—for a crowd-sourced weekend post of solidarity!]

On winter’s and America’s possibiliities and limits in two dark and powerful films.

When you think about it, snow and the American Dream have a lot in common. (Don’t worry, I’m not talking about race. Not this time, anyway.) Both are full of possibility, of a sense of childlike wonder and innocence, conjuring up nostalgic connections to our families and our childhoods as well as ideals of play and community and warmth (paradoxical for snow I know but definitely true for me—snow always makes me think of hot chocolate and fires in the fireplace). Yet as we get to be adults, both also suggest much more realistic and limiting and even threatening details, of dangerous conditions and losses of power and the cold that can set in if we can’t afford to heat our home. And once we have kids of our own, the coexistence of those two levels is particularly striking—seeing their own excitement and innocence and thorough focus on the possibilities, and certainly sharing them, but also worrying that much more about whether we can get them through the drifts, drive them safely where they need to go, keep them warm.

 I might be stretching the connection to its breaking point, but the link might help explain why so many films that explore the promises and pitfalls of the American Dream seem to do so amidst a snow-covered landscape. Near the top of that list for me are two character-driven thrillers from the late 1990s: Paul Schrader’s Affliction (1997) and Sam Raimi’s A Simple Plan (1998). Both are based on novels—the former a work of literary fiction by the late great Russell Banks, the latter a page-turning thriller by Scott Smith—but both, to my mind, are among those rare examples of films that significantly improve upon the source material; partly they do so through amazing screenplays (Smith interestingly wrote the screenplay based on his own book, and I would argue changed it for the better in every way), but mostly through inspired and pitch-perfect casting: Affliction centers on a career-best performance from Nick Nolte, but his work is definitely equaled by James Coburn (in an Academy-Award winning turn), Sissy Spacek, Mary Beth Hurt, and Willem Dafoe; while Simple is truly an ensemble piece, with Billy Bob Thornton and Bill Paxton both doing unbelievable work but great contributions as well from Bridget Fonda, Brent Briscoe, Chelcie Ross, and Gary Cole. And in both, again, the snowy setting—small-town New Hampshire in Affliction, small-town North Dakota in Simple, but they might as well be next door—is a central presence and character in its own right.

The multiple, interconnecting plot threads of both films are complex, rich, and intentionally suspenseful and mysterious, and I’m most definitely not going to spoil them here. But I will say that both are, at heart, stories of the dreams and weaknesses, the ideals and failures, that we inherit from our parents, and how as adults (and especially perhaps as adults struggling with the responsibilities of family and parenthood) we try to live up to and beyond the dreams and ideals but are pulled back by and ultimately risk becoming ourselves the weaknesses and failures. It is perhaps not much of a spoiler either (just look at the titles!) to note that both films, while offering their characters and audiences glimpses of possibility and hope, bring them and us to extremely bleak final images, worlds where the snow storms may have passed but where the silence and lifelessness they have left behind are all we can see and all we can imagine. And both do so, most powerfully, by bringing their protagonists back to their childhood homes, sites (in these cases) at one and the same time of those most innocent ideals and of some of the strongest influences in turning those ideals into something much darker and colder.

When it comes to wintry or especially holiday fare, these two definitely aren’t It’s a Wonderful Life, which certainly connects its own bleak middle section very fully to a world of snow and storm but which of course ends with its protagonist in the warmest and most hopeful possible place (and in a home that has become again the source of such ideals). But either could make a pretty evocative snow day double feature with that equally great film of the American Dream and its limits. Next great screenplay tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Other great screenwriting you’d nominate?

May 23, 2023: Great American Screenplays: Chinatown

[I had planned to feature this week a pre-Memorial Day series on blockbuster films. But with the ongoing and very necessary WGA strike, I’ve decided to share instead a handful of older posts which have focused on films with particularly perfect screenplays. I’d love your thoughts on these as well as your nominees for other great screenplays and writing—in any medium—for a crowd-sourced weekend post of solidarity!]

On a classic film noir mystery that’s also a pitch-perfect historical fiction.

I don’t think I need to use too much space here arguing for the greatness of Chinatown (1974). By any measure, from contemporary awards (ie, nominated for 11 Oscars and 10 BAFTAs and 7 Golden Globes) to historical appreciations (named to the National Film Registry by the Film Preservation Board in 1991) to ridiculously obvious criteria (a 2010 poll of British film critics named it “the best film of all time”!), Roman Polanski’s film noir (although it feels at least as right to write “Robert Towne’s film noir,” since the screenplay is to my mind the greatest one ever filmed and of course Polanski is now a rightly disgraced figure) about a world-weary private detective and pretty much everything else in 1937 Los Angeles is one of the most acclaimed and honored American films. It stars Jack Nicholson at the absolute height of his career and powers; features a pitch-perfect supporting cast including legendary director John Huston as one of the great villains of all time; centers on a multi-generational Southern California familial and historical mystery that would make Ross MacDonald proud; is equal parts suspenseful, funny, sexy, dark, and emotionally affecting; and has the single greatest final line ever (not gonna spoil it or any main aspect of the plot here). If you haven’t seen it yet, I can’t recommend strongly enough that you do so.

On top of all of that, I think Chinatown is one of the very few hugely successful and popular American films that is deeply invested in complex and significant American Studies kinds of questions (interestingly, it lost the Best Picture Oscar to another such film: The Godfather Part II). By the 1970s it was likely very difficult to remember—and is of course even more unfamiliar in our own Hollywood-dominated cultural moment—just how unlikely of a site Los Angeles had once been for one of the nation’s largest and most important cities; despite its close proximity to the Pacific Ocean, LA is more or less built in a desert, and by the turn of the 20^th century, when the city’s population had just moved past the 100,000 mark, it seemed impossible for the city to provide enough water to support that community. It took the efforts of one particularly visionary city planner, William Mulholland, to solve that problem; Mulholland and his team designed and constructed the Los Angeles Aqueduct, a mammoth project that, once completed in 1913, assured that the city could continue to support its ever-growing (especially with the rise of Hollywood in the 1920s) population.

But if that’s the basic historical narrative of LA’s turning point, an American Studies perspective would want to push a lot further on a number of different factors and components within that: where the water was coming from, and what happened in those more rural and agricultural communities are a result of the aqueduct’s creation; how much of the money involved was public, how much was private and from whom, and if the project benefited the whole of the city equally or if its effects were similarly linked to class and status; what role LA’s significant diversity—even in those early years it already included sizeable Mexican, African, and Asian American populations, for example—played in this process; whether the city’s built environment, its architecture and neighborhoods and streets and etc., shifted with the new availability of water, or whether there were other factors that more strongly influenced its planning; and so on. And perhaps the most impressive thing about Chinatown is that it manages at least to gesture at almost all of those questions and issues, without becoming for even a moment the kind of (forgive me) dry historical drama that they might suggest.

Next great screenplay tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Other great screenwriting you’d nominate?

May 22, 2023: Great American Screenplays: Lone Star

[I had planned to feature this week a pre-Memorial Day series on blockbuster films. But with the ongoing and very necessary WGA strike, I’ve decided to share instead a handful of older posts which have focused on films with particularly perfect screenplays. I’d love your thoughts on these as well as your nominees for other great screenplays and writing—in any medium—for a crowd-sourced weekend post of solidarity!]

[FYI: Spoilers for Lone Star (1996) in what follows, especially the last paragraph!]

On two exchanges in my favorite film that capture the complexities of collective memory.

I believe I’ve written more about my favorite filmmaker, John Sayles, in this space than any other single artist, including an entire October 2013 series AmericanStudying different Sayles films. Yet despite that consistent presence on the blog, I believe I’ve only focused on my favorite Sayles film, and favorite American film period, Lone Star (1996) for about half of one post (if one of my very first on this blog, natch). That’s pretty ironic, as I could easily spend an entire week’s series (an entire month? All of 2019???) focusing on different individual moments from Lone Star and the many histories and themes to which they connect. I’ll spare you all that for the moment, though, and focus instead on the film’s most consistent theme: the fraught and contested border between the U.S. and Mexico. Lone Star’s fictional South Texas town is named Frontera (a clear nod to Gloria Anzaldúa), located directly on the border within fictional Rio county; and as usual when Sayles journeys to a particular place to create a story and film about that setting, he delves deeply and potently into the histories and contexts that inform that world.

Two specific dialogue exchanges/scenes focused on the Alamo illustrate a couple of the many lenses that Sayles and his film provide on the particular theme of collective memories of the battle and the border. Very early in the film we see one of the film’s principal protagonists, high school history teacher Pilar Cruz (the wonderful, tragically lost Elizabeth Peña), debating her school’s new, multi-cultural curriculum with a multi-ethnic, angry group of parents. Pilar is defending her goal of presenting different perspectives on history, and an enraged Anglo father responds, “I’m sure they’ve got their own version of the Alamo on the other side, but we’re not on the other side!” But Pilar responds calmly that “there’s no reason to get so upset,” noting that their ultimate goal has simply been to highlight a key aspect of life for all those kids growing up in a town like Frontera, past and present: “Cultures coming together, in positive and negative ways.” For the Anglo father, Frontera and Texas are “American,” by which he clearly means Anglo/English-speaking like himself; the Mexican perspective is “the other side.” But what Pilar knows well, from personal experience as well as historical knowledge, is that Frontera’s America (and, by extension, all of America) is both Mexican and Anglo American, English- and Spanish-speaking, and thus that multiple versions of the Alamo are part of this one place and its heritage, legacy, and community.

In the film’s final scene (again, SPOILERS in this paragraph, although I won’t spoil all the details as the film is a mystery on multiple levels), Pilar communicates a different perspective in conversation with one of the film’s other main protagonists, Chris Cooper’s Sheriff Sam Deeds. Pilar and Sam are former high school sweethearts pulled apart by complex family and cultural dynamics and now just beginning to reconnect, and in this scene are debating whether and how they can truly start once more. Pilar makes the case to a doubting Sam that they can indeed “start fresh,” and in the film’s amazing final lines, argues, “All that other stuff? All that history? To hell with it, right? Forget the Alamo.” That might seem like a striking reversal from both her earlier perspective and her job as a history teacher, and indeed from the film’s overall emphasis on the importance (if certainly also the difficulty) of better remembering histories both personal/familial and communal/cultural. But I would argue—and I know Sayles would too, as I had the chance to talk about this scene with him when I met him briefly in Philadelphia at an independent film festival—that what Pilar wants to forget is not the actual past but the mythic one constructed too often in collective memories and symbolized so succinctly by the phrase “Remember the Alamo.” Forgetting the Alamo, that is, might just help us remember better, a complex and crucial final message fitting for this wonderful film.

Next great screenplay tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Other great screenwriting you’d nominate?

May 20-21, 2023: Our Watergate

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May 19, 2023: Watergate Figures: Jill Wine-Volner

[On May 18^th, 1973, the nationally televised Senate Watergate hearings began. So for the 50^th anniversary of that historic moment, this week I’ll highlight one telling detail each for a handful of the key figures in those hearings. Leading up to a weekend post on a few contemporary echoes of that moment!]

One of the single most famous moments in the long, multi-stage process that was the Watergate hearings was when Justice Department investigator Jill Wine-Volner cross-examined President Nixon’s secretary (and close personal friend) Rose Mary Woods about the infamous 18.5 minute gap on the Watergate recordings. Wine-Volner (who subsequently divorced and remained, and so is now Jill Wine-Banks) recounted that pivotal exchange in detail for this 2020 Salon interview, making clear just how much planning, preparation, and strategizing went into what was without doubt a turning point in the case and scandal. Yet in 1973, Wine-Volner was even more famous for the frequent miniskirts she wore to work, a professional and fashion choice that became the subject of a great deal of consternation and controversy. I almost wrote “surprisingly great deal” there, but I’m not sure there’s anything surprising, then or now, about a hugely talented young female attorney being subject to such overtly superficial and stereotyping narratives. To make sure we don’t replicate that problem, I’d ask you to take away from this post Wine-Volner’s vital cross-examination, a key Watergate moment to be sure.

One of the most

Special post this weekend,

Ben

PS. What do you think?

May 18, 2023: Watergate Figures: Archibald Cox Jr.

[On May 18^th, 1973, the nationally televised Senate Watergate hearings began. So for the 50^th anniversary of that historic moment, this week I’ll highlight one telling detail each for a handful of the key figures in those hearings. Leading up to a weekend post on a few contemporary echoes of that moment!]

While the Watergate hearings absolutely shifted public opinion on the scandal and the Nixon administration, it was a parallel event that provided the most direct impetus for the possibility of impeachment (and thus Nixon’s preemptive resignation). When Watergate Special Prosecutor Archibald Cox Jr. refused to back down from a subpoena for Nixon’s illegal private recordings, Nixon fired Cox in the October 1973 event that became known as the Saturday Night Massacre; it was that unconstitutional firing and the uproar it produced which truly set the impeachment conversations in motion. Given that particular context, it’s quite striking and telling that Cox would go to be chair of the board of directors for a dozen years (from 1980 to 1992) of Common Cause, a groundbreaking and vital bipartisan organization (founded just three years before the Watergate hearings and still active to this day) advocating for government reform, transparency and accountability, and a government that, as their mission statement puts it, “serves the public interest.” In some ways Watergate was and remains singular, but in many others it was a bellwether of a great deal of issues and debates to come, and Archibald Cox continued to be part of those conversations long after his special prosecuting of Watergate came to a close.

Last Watergate figure tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think?

May 17, 2023: Watergate Figures: John Dean

[On May 18^th, 1973, the nationally televised Senate Watergate hearings began. So for the 50^th anniversary of that historic moment, this week I’ll highlight one telling detail each for a handful of the key figures in those hearings. Leading up to a weekend post on a few contemporary echoes of that moment!]

Speaking of President George W. Bush’s 2005 admission that he had authorized NSA wiretaps without obtaining warrants, John Dean argued that Bush was “the first President to admit to an impeachable offense.” I’m not sure any American, past or present, would be in a better position to make such assertions than Dean, who had served as White House Counsel under Nixon, had been instrumental in the cover-up of the Watergate break-in, and after signing a plea deal became a key witness in the Senate Watergate hearings. Dean isn’t just an impeachment expert, though—he’s an exemplary illustration of two late 20^th century trends: former government officials becoming political pundits and commentators; and members of the Goldwater generation of the Republican Party becoming increasingly disillusioned with the party’s gradual evolution into the Cult of Trump. Reflecting both those trends is Dean’s trilogy of books released in the first decade of the 21^st century: Worse than Watergate (2004), Conservatives without Conscience (2006), and Broken Government: How Republican Rule Destroyed the Legislative, Executive, and Judicial Branches (2007). A Watergate-era voice we should all still be listening to for sure.

Next Watergate figure tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think?

May 16, 2023: Watergate Figures: Howard Baker

[On May 18^th, 1973, the nationally televised Senate Watergate hearings began. So for the 50^th anniversary of that historic moment, this week I’ll highlight one telling detail each for a handful of the key figures in those hearings Leading up to a weekend post on a few contemporary echoes of that moment!]

Howard Baker, a Republican Senator from Tennessee, was the ranking minority member on the Ervin Committee, and it was Baker who famously asked, “What did the President know and when did he know it?” However, it was also Baker who was revealed—thanks, as so much of the Watergate investigation was, to Nixon’s thorough and thoroughly illegal recording system—to have said to that president in a private conversation, “I’m your friend. I’m going to see that your interests are protected.” That duality of course reflects—as a scandal like Watergate did in so many ways—some of the best and the worst of how the branches of government as well as political parties can operate. But it also captures the dualities of Baker himself, the first Republican Senator from Tennessee since Reconstruction and Ronald Reagan’s future Chief of Staff yet also one of the deciding votes in favor of the Civil Rights Act of 1968, the Clean Air Act of 1970, and the Supreme Court confirmation of Thurgood Marshall. Ain’t that America?

Next Watergate figure tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think?

May 15, 2023: Watergate Figures: Sam Ervin

[On May 18^th, 1973, the nationally televised Senate Watergate hearings began. So for the 50^th anniversary of that historic moment, this week I’ll highlight one telling detail each for a handful of the key figures in those hearings. Leading up to a weekend post on a few contemporary echoes of that moment!]

The Democratic Senator from North Carolina who helped stop Joseph McCarthy in the early 1950s and bring down Richard Nixon two decades later (the Senate committee which investigated Watergate was informally known as the Ervin Committee due to his central role) was also a lifelong defender of Jim Crow segregation, often citing his legal training and the Constitution as justifications for maintaining that racist system. That incredibly complex set of realities not only sums up the layers and evolution of the Democratic Party in the South and throughout the nation in the course of the 20^th century, but also reminds us of the inescapable and often quite fraught interconnections between historical issues and debates. American political history owes Sam Ervin a substantial debt, but he and his ilk also owe Black Americans and all those who care about social justice a significant apology.

Next Watergate figure tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think?