May 21, 2024: Criminal Duos: Leopold & Loeb

[100 years ago this week, the criminal duo who came to be known as Leopold & Loeb set their murderous plan in motion. So this week I’ll AmericanStudy L&L and four other criminal duos, leading up to a repeat Guest Post on the genre of true crime!]

On three broader issues to which the pair of “perfect criminals” can be connected (from the most straightforward to the most complex).

1)      The Death Penalty: Once Leopold & Loeb had been arrested for and confessed to the murder of 14 year-old Bobby Franks, the central remaining question was whether they would be sentenced to death (the famous trial was much more of a sentencing hearing, as both men had already pled guilty). It was directly to address that question that Loeb’s family retained Clarence Darrow, the nation’s most famous trial lawyer and an avowed opponent of the death penalty; Darrow’s twelve-hour summation on the subject is considered one of the most important speeches in American legal history. His speech convinced the judge to give the two young killers life in prison instead, and while that didn’t end up mattering for Loeb (who was murdered by a fellow inmate a dozen years later), it did for Leopold who was paroled in 1958 and lived the last 8 years of his life as a free man. This isn’t nearly enough space for me to get into all that I feel about the death penalty, but I’ll just note that to my mind 19 and 18 year olds are far too young for such absolute punishments.

2)      Sexuality: Not that the death penalty isn’t plenty complicated, but (when it comes to these figures and this crime) this subject is a great deal more thorny still. Not the basic fact, which is that Leopold & Loeb seem to have been in a sexual relationship with each other (although only for a few months before the murder). But the ways in which that fact became a sensationalized part of the story, not only for example by the press in the aftermath of Loeb’s murder in prison (when it was reported, with no evidence, that he had made sexual advances on the killer), but also by Darrow himself during the trial. Darrow brought in psychiatric experts to claim that the pair were abnormal, with their sexuality front and center in that defense. I wrote in this post about how the first edition of the DSM, published in 1952, classified homosexuality as a “sociopathic personality disturbance”; obviously those ideas went far beyond this one trial and case, but I can’t say that they helped the cause any.

3)      School Shootings: This subject definitely represents a far more tenuous connection than my first two, and I want to be clear that there are plenty of differences between L&L and school shooters. But I would also suggest that there are at least parallels between this criminal pair and (for example) the Columbine shooters Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold—a sense of superiority to all their peers, a willingness to take the lives of young people (something shared by all school shooters of course), and of course a sociopathic separation from the layers of community that bind most of us to one another. But fortunately for Leopold & Loeb’s peers, guns were both far less powerful and destructive and far more difficult to come by in the 1920s, and so they could senselessly take the life of only one young person in their act of mutual criminality.

Next duo tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Other duos you’d highlight?

May 20, 2024: Criminal Duos: Pecos Bill & Joaquin Murrieta

[100 years ago this week, the criminal duo who came to be known as Leopold & Loeb set their murderous plan in motion. So this week I’ll AmericanStudy L&L and four other criminal duos, leading up to a repeat Guest Post on the genre of true crime!]

On two folk heroes, and the competing frontier histories they reveal.

Even as a kid, encountering his stories in a compilation of tall tales, I could tell that Pecos Bill was a bit of a Paul Bunyan knockoff—an outlandish origin story (Bill fell out of his family’s wagon as a baby and was raised by a pack of wolves as one of their own), similarly larger-than-life animal companions (his otherwise un-rideable horse Widow-Maker, the rattlesnake Shake that he used as a lasso), an equally mythic love interest (Slue-Foot Sue, who rode a giant catfish down the Rio Grande). So I wasn’t surprised to learn that Bill was a late addition to the “big man” school of tall tales, likely created in 1916 by Edward O’Reilly and shoehorned back into the mythos of Westward expansion, the frontier, and the Wild West, one more addition to the roster of lawless heroes who had by the early 20^th century come to define that American mythos so fully.

That Bill didn’t come into existence until a few decades after the closing of the frontier doesn’t lessen his symbolic status, however—if anything, it highlights just how much the mythos of the American West was and remains just that, a consciously created set of myths that have served to delineate after the fact a messy, dynamic, often dark, always complex region and history. Moreover, that mythos was as multi-cultural as the West itself, as illustrated by Mexican American folk hero Joaquin Murrieta, “the Robin Hood of El Dorado”: Murrieta, a California 49er from northern Mexico, first came to national prominence in a popular dime novel, John Rollin Ridge’s The Life and Adventures of Joaquin Murieta (1854); the tales of his charming banditry have been a part of the region’s folk history ever since, including a cameo as Zorro’s older brother in the Antonio Banderas film The Mask of Zorro (1998).

Yet however much Murrieta’s story has been fictionalized and mythologized, it did originate with an actual historical figure—and that distinction can help us see past the myths to some of the frontier’s messier, darker, and more defining realities. For one thing, Murrieta apparently began his outlaw career after he and his family were violently dispossessed of a land claim, events which connect to the social and legal aftermath of the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo. For another, his gang’s victims included not only Anglo settlers but also Chinese laborers, revealing California’s genuinely and often painfully multicultural community as of the mid-19^th century. A fuller engagement with these histories would in part force Americans to confront the centuries of conflict and violence that have so frequently comprised the world of the frontier—but it would also allow us to push beyond tall tales of larger-than-life individuals and to recognize just how collective and communal are both the myths and realities of the Southwest, and of America.

Next duo tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Other duos you’d highlight?

May 18-19, 2024: American(Studier) Wedding!

No post this weekend for a very good reason—I’m marrying my best friend and soulmate! See you on Monday, and much love in the meantime,

Ben

May 17, 2024: Spring 2024 Stand-Outs: Special Guests!

[Another semester comes to a close this week, and this time for my usual end-of-semester reflections series I wanted to highlight stand-out days from my classes. Leading up to a weekend off for a very stand-out reason!]

Yesterday I wrote about my favorite discussion in one of my First-Year Writing II sections—but when it comes to my favorite day in Writing II this semester, and indeed in any course this semester, and quite possibly in any course ever, it’s a tie between two other moments that complemented each other quite beautifully and movingly:

--In February, my sons were able to come to campus with me for the first time since Spring 2019, and probably the last time together as my older son will be headed off to his own first year of college in a few short (so, so short) months. Taking no names at the all-you-can-eat dining hall was definitely the highlight for them, but for me seeing them seated at a desk in the back of my afternoon Writing II section, and flashing back to all the times they’ve come to campus and classes with me since I rocked my older son in his car carrier at the first meeting of my Summer 2006 Grad class, was just about the most beautiful thing I could imagine.

--But pretty darn close was my other special guest in that same section, just a few weeks later: my fiancé. We’re not online/on social media with our relationship, so I haven’t talked much about us in this space. But she’s my favorite (non-offspring) person and my partner in everything I do and am, including my teaching, and it was so good to have her there, most especially in the same room where my sons had been with me as well. The past and the future, right there in my Spring 2024 present—that’s some stand-out stuff!

Special post this weekend,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Semester reflections or other work you’d share?

May 16, 2024: Spring 2024 Stand-Outs: Cereal in Composition

[Another semester comes to a close this week, and this time for my usual end-of-semester reflections series I wanted to highlight stand-out days from my classes. Leading up to a weekend off for a very stand-out reason!]

When you’ve been doing this as long as I have—finishing year 19 at FSU and 24 of teaching overall this week—you can often see stand-out moments coming; that was definitely the case with the Larsen and Zhang conversations I wrote about in the last two posts, for example. But if I ever find myself entirely unable to be taken by surprise, I’ll know it’s time to retire. Fortunately that definitely isn’t the case yet, and of the many moments and days that surprised me this semester, none stands out more than a phenomenal discussion in one of my First-Year Writing II sections about this 1960s Post Honeycomb Cereal ad. I found that ad at the last minute, looking through an archive I had shared with the students and hoping to find a text that seemed targeted toward kids (the subject of one of our scholarly article readings in that unit), and—get ready for some pedagogical inside baseball—had not watched it in full prior to sharing it with the students. And then it became the source of the best discussion we had all semester in that section, with more than half of the 18 students sharing thoughtful takes on choices and details in the ad. Surprise stand-outs ftw!

Last stand-out tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Semester reflections or other work you’d share?

May 15, 2024: Spring 2024 Stand-Outs: Gold in Grad Historical Fiction

[Another semester comes to a close this week, and this time for my usual end-of-semester reflections series I wanted to highlight stand-out days from my classes. Leading up to a weekend off for a very stand-out reason!]

My American Historical Fiction Grad class was the first course I got to teach for our MA program (back in Summer 2006, at the end of my first year at FSU), and is the one I’ve returned to the most often by far. Certain aspects have stayed the same across those nearly twenty years and half-dozen sections, but one thing that keeps it fresh is that I always end with a 21^st century text, and have chosen a different one each time. They’ve consistently been great and led to excellent class conversations, but I was especially happy with my choice this time, C. Pam Zhang’s How Much of These Hills is Gold (2020). Zhang’s novel is one of my favorites in recent years, but (as I discussed in that hyperlinked post) it’s also an incredibly complex vision not just of American history, but of historical fiction as a genre. All those layers made it a particularly phenomenal text with which to close out this class, and one to which the students (most of them fellow educators, and all of them awesome as our MA students always are) responded with thoughtful and impassioned takes that made this conversation a truly stand-out one.

Next stand-out tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Semester reflections or other work you’d share?

May 14, 2024: Spring 2024 Stand-Outs: Ambiguity in Am Lit

[Another semester comes to a close this week, and this time for my usual end-of-semester reflections series I wanted to highlight stand-out days from my classes. Leading up to a weekend off for a very stand-out reason!]

As I highlighted and contextualized in this December 2020 semester reflections post, and as has continued to be the case a good bit of the time, in the semesters and years since Covid I’ve frequently moved away from longer readings in favor of multiple shorter ones. A lot of the time I think that can achieve my and the course’s goals equally well, but I’m also committed to not abandoning longer works altogether, and more exactly to making the choice in each specific instance rather than having a blanket policy or perspective. And this semester offered a perfect illustration of something that can only happen with a longer work we’ve read and discussed across multiple class meetings: our final day with Nella Larsen’s stunning novella Passing (1929), where we had one of our liveliest discussions of the semester about what we make of that book’s shocking and ambiguous ending (no SPOILERS here). We couldn’t have had that stand-out conversation if we hadn’t built to it across multiple days of work with Larsen, and that was a great reminder of the importance of continuing to find ways to make longer texts part of my classes.

Next stand-out tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Semester reflections or other work you’d share?

May 13, 2024: Spring 2024 Stand-Outs: Salvatore in Sci Fi/Fantasy

[Another semester comes to a close this week, and this time for my usual end-of-semester reflections series I wanted to highlight stand-out days from my classes. Leading up to a weekend off for a very stand-out reason!]

I’ve had the chance to connect my students with folks on our syllabus a few times: when Kevin Gannon Zoomed into my English Studies Capstone after we read Radical Hope; and when Monique Truong and Eric Nguyen generously answered questions about their books The Sweetest Fruits and Things We Lost to the Water for other sections of that same course. Each and every one of those experiences was exceptional, but this semester featured a next level moment: when hugely prolific and popular author (and Fitchburg State alum!) R.A. Salvatore visited my Intro to Science Fiction & Fantasy course. Whether he was thoughtfully considering the similarities and differences between sci fi and fantasy worldbuilding, sharing advice from his own four decades in the field, or just casually discussing the day he visited Skywalker Ranch to talk with George Lucas about writing Star Wars novels, Salvatore not only engrossed us all from start to finish, but really brought the course’s texts, ideas, and conversations to vivid life. That’s a stand-out day for sure!

Next stand-out tomorrow

Ben

PS. What do you think? Semester reflections or other work you’d share?

May 11-12, 2024: Beach Blogging: Guest Posts from Elsa Devienne and Jamie Hirami

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

First, I can't BeachStudy in 2024 without highlighting Elsa Devienne's awesome new book, Sand Rush: The Revival of the Beach in 20th-Century Los Angeles. You shouldn't need anything more than that title to make you seek it out, but just in case, Elsa shares:

"Think of this book as the Beach Boys meets Chinatown meets Blade Runner meets Baywatch. There's real estate battles, presidents strolling on the sand, beatniks playing the bongo drum, black bathing beauties, evil Malibu beach homeowners and, of course, climate change coming to ruin the fun of everyone!"

Second, I wanted to re-share a great prior BeachStudying Guest Post from Jamie Hirami:

[Jamie Hirami is a PhD candidate in American Studies at the amazing Penn State Harrisburg program, where she’s writing a dissertation on Venice Beach which promises to break significantly new ground in American material culture and cultural studies. This Guest Post is just a glimpse of what’s to come!]

[NB. I wrote that bio when this post originally aired in 2014; I’m not sure what Jamie is up to these days, but I’m willing to bet it’s impressive!]

Freak Beach.  Muscle Beach.  Silicon Beach.  Coney Island of the Pacific.  Slum by the Sea.  Venice Beach, a neighborhood of Los Angeles, goes by many monikers.  None of those nicknames reference the original plan that founder Abbot Kinney, heir to a tobacco fortune, envisioned in 1898 when he bought out his real estate partners for the southern portion land that also originally encompassed Santa Monica: a resplendent, middle-class seaside resort and town, which would cater to its clientele with Chautauqua’s and other elements of high culture.  Ultimately, mass and popular cultures shaped its direction as an amusement destination while the counter cultures of the mid-twentieth century influenced its modern reputation as bohemian community. 

Modeled after Venice, Italy, Kinney transformed the marshy land into a series of navigable canals along which, early visitors could buy real estate for single-family home development. Venice-of-America officially opened on July 4, 1905 to a crowd of about 40,000 people.  Kinney’s grand cultural intentions culminated in a 3,400 seat auditorium built for educational lectures and cultural performances, which closed after one season.  Instead, visitors flocked to the pier, bathhouse, beach and other amusements.  In fact, rides and games proved to be so much more popular than the Chautauqua experience, that in January 1906, he opened the hugely popular midway plaisance, which included exhibits and freak shows from the world’s fairs in Portland and St. Louis.

By the time Kinney died in October 1920, Venice’s original luster had greatly diminished.  The canals did not drain properly, creating murky and dirty waterways, and the national trend for boardwalk amusements, in general, faded.  Years of opposition by the growing permanent residents and clergy to boxing matches, alcohol, dancing, and more sordid amusements was capped by a hugely destructive fire that caused over a $1 million in damages.  In 1925, the City of Los Angeles annexed Venice, filling its famous canals in 1929 to make room for roads. 

Over the next forty years, Venice remained an outwardly run-down version of its former self, but in its place, a vibrant counter-culture fomented cultural growth.  It became a Southern California hotbed for the Beats; a hippie commune during the Sixties; and it embraced transients, hustlers, artists, and performers. 

Today, Venice’s increasingly gentrified neighborhoods have put homeless and homeowners, hustlers and shop-owners, and low-income versus high-income residents at odds, but it still maintains a fierce stance against the mainstream.  In 2007, Abbot Kinney Blvd. (the main commercial thoroughfare) opened its first chain store—Pinkberry—causing an uproar among residents and local shop owners who petitioned people to boycott the chain.  Three years later, it closed because it was underperforming.  More importantly, Venice still maintains ties to its popular culture beginnings with numerous sidewalk performers, a freak show along the boardwalk, and a voyeuristic outdoor gym among other diversions.  Venice Beach, through its varied history, remains, at heart, a destination that caters to popular amusements.

[Next series starts Mondy,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Other beach histories or stories, or BeachStudiers, you’d highlight?]

May 10, 2024: Beach Blogging: The Beach Boys

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

On three ways to contextualize the iconic beach band (beyond the early 60s surfing culture contexts I wrote about in Monday’s post).

1)      Kids and Cars: I’ve long noted that the one layer of Bruce Springsteen’s work that has never quite resonated with me is his obsession with cars; that perspective of mine hasn’t changed, but it’s certainly worth noting that the intersection of car culture and American rock music long predates the Boss. The Beach Boys certainly did their part to contribute to that tradition, including one of their biggest early hits “Little Deuce Coupe” (1963) among many, many others. And they, along with the role of car culture in films like Rebel Without a Cause (1955), can help me appreciate just how much cars contributed to the period’s youth counter-culture; not everyone had an ocean to surf, and most folks couldn’t make a guitar talk, but just about every American kid could dream of getting away from it all in a coupe.

2)      The Beatles and Competition: The Beach Boys and their surfing and car songs might have dominated the first couple years of the 1960s (alongside all the surfing culture I discussed on Monday), but soon enough a different oceanic influence would take over the American musical and cultural landscape—the invasion of The Beatles and so many contemporary and subsequent bands from across the Atlantic. The Beach Boys were on the same record label, Capitol Records, as The Beatles U.S. releases, and apparently Brian Wilson in particular was very frustrated by all the attention the Fab Four received, later noting that The Beatles “eclipsed a lot we’d worked for, eclipsed the whole music world.” While of course Wilson’s psychological state was famously fragile and such stressors didn’t help, it’s nonetheless also the case that the competition with The Beatles led The Beach Boys to create one of the most experimental, unique, and greatest albums in American rock history, Pet Sounds (1966), which would go on to directly influence The Beatles as well.

3)      “Kokomo” and Classic Rock: The question of when rock music turns into “classic rock” is an interpretative one, and of course one that can make fans feel real old. I would argue that as early as 1971, with their album Surf’s Up, The Beach Boys were making music that was overtly designed to tap into nostalgia for their earlier music and that early 60s surfing craze, which could be a case for calling that album “classic rock.” But while that’s a debatable point, I don’t think anyone would argue that 1988’s “Kokomo,” which was recorded for the Cocktail soundtrack and became the group’s first #1 hit since Pet Sounds, was anything other than an overt (and entirely successful) attempt to recapture those 1960s vibes, one that extended into an entire album, Still Cruisin’ (1989). Which went platinum, proving that, fresh or classic, there remains a place for beachtastic pop music.

Guest Post this weekend,

Ben

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

May 9, 2024: Beach Blogging: Baywatch

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

On why those beautiful beach bodies are also a body of evidence.

Back in the blog’s early days, I humorously but also earnestly noted that to a dedicated AmericanStudier, any text, even Baywatch, is a possible site of complex analysis. I stand by that possibility, and will momentarily offer proof of same. But before I do, it’s important to foreground the basic but crucial reason for Baywatch’s existence and popularity, one succinctly highlighted by Friends’ Joey and Chandler: pretty people running in slow-motion in bathing suits. While I plan to make a bit more of the show and its contexts and meanings than that, it’d be just plain cray-cray to pretend that either the show’s intent or its audience didn’t focus very fully on those beautiful bodies. Moreover, such an appeal was nothing new or unique—while the beach setting differentiated Baywatch a bit, I would argue that most prime-time soap operas have similarly depended on the attractiveness of their casts to keep their audiences tuning in.

If Baywatch was partly a prime-time soap opera, however, it would also be possible to define the show’s genre differently: in relationship to both the police and medical dramas that were beginning to dominate the TV landscape in the late 1980s and early 1990s (Baywatch debuted in 1989). After all, the show’s plotlines typically included both rescues and crimes; while the lifeguards often dealt with romantic and interpersonal drama as well, so too did the docs of ER or the cops of Miami Vice (to name two of the era’s many entries in these genres). Seen in this light, and particularly when compared to the period’s police dramas, Baywatch was relatively progressive in the gender balance of its protagonists—compared to another California show, CHiPs, for example, which similarly featured pretty people solving promised land problems but which focused almost entirely on male protagonists. Yes, the women of Baywatch were beautiful and dressed skimpily—but the same could be said of the men, and both genders were equally heroic as well.

The creators of Baywatch tried to make the cop show parallel overt with the ill-fated detective spinoff Baywatch Nights, about which the less said the better (even AmericanStudiers have their limits). But the problem with Baywatch Nights wasn’t just its awfulness (Baywatch itself wasn’t exactly The Wire, after all), it was that it missed a crucial element to the original show’s success: the beach. And no, I’m not talking about the bathing suits. I would argue that the most prominent 1970s and 1980s cultural images of the beach were Jaws and its many sequels and imitators, a set of images that made it seem increasingly less safe to go back in the water. And then along came David Hasselhoff, Pam Anderson, and company, all determined to take back the beaches and shift our cultural images to something far more pleasant and attractive than Bruce munching on tourists. Whatever you think of the show, is there any doubt that they succeeded, forever inserting themselves and their slow-mo running into our cultural narratives of the beach?

Last Beach text tomorrow,

Ben

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

May 8, 2024: Beach Blogging: Brighton Beach Memoirs

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

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

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

2)      Broadway shows: While he was working on those TV shows, Simon was honing his first Broadway play, Come Blow Your Horn. The honing paid off, as after the show opened in February 1961 it ran for 678 performances at New York’s Brooks Atkinson Theatre (now renamed for the legendary Lena Horne). Over the rest of the decade Simon would pen countless Broadway smashes, including Barefoot in the Park (1963), The Odd Couple (1965), Sweet Charity (1966), and Last of the Red Hot Lovers (1969). Those and many other simultaneously running shows throughout the 1960s and 70s (with many continuing into the 80s and 90s as he continued to produce new work like Brighton Beach Memoirs and the Pulitzer-winning Lost in Yonkers [1991]) made Simon the highest-paid Broadway writer in history, and as influential on the American stage as any single voice has ever been.

3)      Film screenplays: Simon adapted many of his plays into screenplays for the film versions, with The Odd Couple (1968) being the most famous. But he also wrote original screenplays for some of the smartest and funniest film comedies of all time, including The Out-of-Towners (1970) and two of my favorites, the mystery parodies Murder By Death (1976) and The Cheap Detective (1978; Peter Falk has never been better, and I say that as a die-hard Columbo fan). Given the understandable ways in which Simon’s contemporary and Your Show of Shows colleague Woody Allen has lost much of his luster in recent years, I’d say that Simon’s film career is due for a reexamination—he was always a playwright first and foremost, but nobody wrote film comedy better than his multi-talented American icon.

Next Beach text tomorrow,

Ben

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

May 7, 2024: Beach Blogging: On the Beach

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

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

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

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

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

Next Beach text tomorrow,

Ben

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

May 6, 2024: Beach Blogging: Gidget and Friends

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

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

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

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

While that specific historical context would be one way to analyze the early 1960s surfing fad, however, I think a longstanding American narrative could offer another option. It was three decades later that the film Point Break (1991) overtly linked surfers to outlaws, potraying a band of surfing bank robbers led by Patrick Swayze’s philosophical Bodhi (a character not unlike Cliff Robertson’s in Gidget). But to my mind, surfing culture has always contained echoes of the Wild West, represented a new lawless frontier where rough but noble cowboys escape the confines of civilization, battle for survival in extreme conditions, and, if they’re lucky, ride off in Western sunsets. The Wild West was always more of a cultural image than a historical or social reality, of course, and an image constructed with particular clarity in a pop culture text, the Western. That genre was famously moving toward more revisionist films by the late 1960s—but perhaps it had already been supplanted, or at least supplemented, in popular consciousness by surfing stories. In any case, to quote “Surfin’ Safari”: “I tell you surfing’s mighty wild.”

Next Beach text tomorrow,

Ben

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Next series starts Monday,

Ben

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

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

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

On communist protest anthems and artists, then and now.

In one of my earliest blog posts, I nominated Woody Guthrie’s “This Land is Your Land” (1944)—ideally the version with all the verses, but I was willing to settle for the more commonly accepted shortened version—as a new national anthem. I have been interested to see that both of my sons have learned and performed the song (in that shortened version) in their elementary school music classes, as I vaguely remember doing in my own. Because the truth is that, even without the usually excluded verse about the “No trespassing” sign that has nothing written on the back, “This Land” offers what we would have to call a communist vision of America: as a place that is fundamentally shared by all of us, owned not as private property or competitive resource but as a communal space that “belongs to you and me.” By 1944, communism had already come to be closely associated with (if not entirely tied to) the Soviet Union, and thus to an explicit alternative to American identity, making Guthrie’s song a subtle but (to my mind) definite protest anthem.

Far, far less subtle is Steve Earle’s song “Christmas in Washington” (1997), which in its chorus implores, “Come back Woody Guthrie/Come back to us now/Tear your eyes from paradise/And rise again somehow.” Earle’s song is about the need for new protest anthems at the turn of the 21^st century, as well as representing an attempt to offer precisely such a new anthem, and besides the request of Guthrie’s ghost Earle’s speaker also calls for the return of a pair of early 20^th century communist activists: “So come back Emma Goldman/Rise up old Joe Hill/The barricades are going up/They cannot break our will.” Which is to say, while protest songs can of course take any number of different political and social perspectives, Earle ties both his and Guthrie’s protest anthems much more specifically to communism—not, again, in the Soviet sense, but rather in an emphasis on radical activisms (both labor and social) and their concurrent arguments for social and economic equality.

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

April Recap this weekend,

Ben

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

May 2, 2024: Communist Culture: The Blithedale Romance

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

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

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

Blithedale was Hawthorne’s third romance in three years—following The Scarlet Letter (1850) and The House of the Seven Gables (1851)—and marked a significant shift from the prior two. I would categorize both of them as historical romances: Scarlet quite overtly, as it is set more than two hundred years prior to its publication date; and Gables in its central use of the Salem Witch Trials, a history which Hawthorne calls in the novel’s famous Preface “a legend prolonging itself, from an epoch now gray in the distance, down into our own broad day-light, and bringing along with it some of its legendary mist.” Blithedale, on the other hand, is not only set in its own historical moment but centrally focused on engaging with, challenging, and at times satirizing that moment’s philosophies and ideals, most especially those of both Transcendentalism and communism. Perhaps to aid in that sense of present grounding, Hawthorne likewise shifts from the earlier novels’ third-person narrators to a semi-autobiographical (if also quite complex) first-person one, Miles Coverdale, who narrates for us his own experiences of the Blithedale utopian community.

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

Last cultural communism tomorrow,

Ben

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

May 1, 2024: Communist Culture: Doctorow and Coover

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

On two distinct but complementary postmodern historical novels.

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

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

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

Next cultural communism tomorrow,

Ben

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