October 31, 2024: The Politics of Horror: The Saw Series

[For this year’s Halloween series, right before a particularly scary election, I thought I’d focus on some of the many horror films that remind us of the genre’s inescapable intersections with political issues. Add your nominations in comments, please!]

On different visions of morality in horror films, and whether they matter.

There’s an easy and somewhat stereotypical, although certainly not inaccurate, way to read the morality or lessons of horror films: to emphasize how they seem consistently to punish characters, and especially female characters, who are too sexually promiscuous, drink or do drugs, or otherwise act in immoral ways; and how they seem to reward characters, especially the “final girl,” who are not only tough and resourceful but also virgins and otherwise resistant to such immoral temptations. Film scholar Carol Clover reiterates but also to a degree challenges those interpretations in her seminal Men, Women, and Chain Saws: Gender in the Modern Horror Film (1992); Clover agrees with arguments about the “final girl,” but makes the case that by asking viewers to identify with this female character, the films are indeed pushing our communal perspectives on gender in provocative new directions.

It’s important to add, however, that whether conventional slasher films are reiterating or challenging traditional moralities, they’re certainly not prioritizing those moral purposes—jump scares and gory deaths are much higher on the list of priorities. On the other hand, one of the most successful and influential horror series of the last decade, the Saw films (which began with 2004’s Saw and continued annually through the 7^th and supposedly final installment, 2010’s Saw 3D), has made its world’s and killer’s moral philosophy and objectives central to the series’ purposes. The films’ villain, John Kramer, generally known only as Jigsaw, has been called a “deranged philanthropist,” as his puzzles and tortures are generally designed to test, alter, and ultimately strengthen his victims’ identities and beliefs (if they survive, of course). That is, not only is it possible to find moral messages in both the films and which characters do and do not survive in them, but deciphering and living up to that morality becomes the means by which those characters can survive their tortures.

That’s the films and the characters—but what about the audience? It’s long been assumed (and I would generally agree) that audiences look to horror films not only to be scared (a universal human desire) but also to enjoy the unique and gory deaths (a more troubling argument, but again one I would generally support). So it’d be fair, and important, to ask whether that remains the case for Saw’s audiences—whether, that is, they’re in fact rooting not for characters to survive and grow, but instead to fail and be killed in Jigsaw’s inventive ways. And if most or even many of them are, whether that response—and its contribution to the series’ popularity and box office success and thus its ability to continue across seven years and movies—renders the films’ sense of morality irrelevant (it would certainly make it ironic at the very least). To put it bluntly: it seems to make a big difference whether we see the Saw films as distinct in the inventiveness of their tortures/deaths or the morality of their killer. As with any post and topic, I’d love to hear your thoughts!

Last political horror tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Other horror films you’d analyze?

October 30, 2024: The Politics of Horror: Hostel and Taken

[For this year’s Halloween series, right before a particularly scary election, I thought I’d focus on some of the many horror films that remind us of the genre’s inescapable intersections with political issues. Add your nominations in comments, please!]

On the horrifying xenophobia at the heart of two of the 21^st century biggest hits.

It’s hard to argue with success, and Eli Roth’s Hostel (2005) and Pierre Morel’s Taken (2008) are by many measures two of the most unexpectedly successful films of the 21^st century’s first two decades. Hostel made more than $80 million worldwide (on a budget of $4.5 million), led to a sequel two years later, and contributed significantly to the rise of an entirely new sub-gerne (the horror sub-genre generally known as “torture porn”). Taken cost a lot more to make (budget of $25 million) but also made a lot more at the box office (worldwide gross of over $225 million), spawned multiple sequels and imitations, and fundamentally changed the career arc and general perception of its star Liam Neeson. Neither film was aiming for any Oscars or to make the Sight and Sound list, but clearly both did what they were trying to do well enough to please their audiences and hit all the notes in their generic (in the literal sense) formulas.

What the two films were trying to do is, of course, a matter of interpretation and debate (although Eli Roth is more than happy to tell us his take on what his film is about); moreover, they’re clearly very different from each other, in genre and goal and many other ways, and I don’t intend to conflate them in this post. Yet they both share an uncannily similar basic plot: naïve and fun-loving young American travelers are abducted and tortured by evil European captors, against whom the travelers themselves (in Hostel) or the traveler’s badass special forces type Dad (in Taken; young Maggie Grace gets to fight some of her own fights against additional Euro-types in the sequel) have to fight in order to escape. While it’s possible to argue that the travelers in Roth’s film help bring on their own torture as a result of their chauvinistic attitudes toward European women (in the sequel Roth made his protagonists young women, and much more explicitly innocent ones at that), there’s no question that the true forces of evil in each film are distinctly European. Moreover, since all of the young travelers are explicitly constructed as tourists, hoping to experience the different world of Europe, the films can’t help but seem like cautionary tales about that world’s dangerous and destructive underbelly.

It’s that last point which I’d really want to emphasize here. After all, bad guys in both horror and action films can and do come from everywhere, and that doesn’t necessarily serve as a blanket indictment of those places; if anything, I would argue that the multi-national and multi-ethnic villainy of (for example) James Bond films is a thematic strength, making clear that evil can and will be found everywhere.  Yet both Hostel and Taken are precisely about, or at least originate with, the relationship between American travelers and Europeans, about the naïve ideals of cultural tourism and about creating plots that depend on very frightening and torturous realities within these foreign worlds. “Don’t travel to Europe, young people,” they seem to argue; and if you do, well, be prepared either to kill a ton of ugly Europeans (or have your Daddy do it) or to be killed by them. Not exactly the travel narrative I’d argue for, and indeed a terrifying contribution to our 21^st century American worldview.

Next political horror tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Other horror films you’d analyze?

October 29, 2024: The Politics of Horror: Last House on the Left

[For this year’s Halloween series, right before a particularly scary election, I thought I’d focus on some of the many horror films that remind us of the genre’s inescapable intersections with political issues. Add your nominations in comments, please!]

On the horror film that’s more disturbing in what it makes us cheer for than how it makes us scream.

The Last House on the Left (1972) was Wes Craven’s directorial debut, as well as one of the only films that he wrote and edited as well as directed (although it was at least partly based on Ingmar Bergman’s The Virgin Spring [1960], as Craven has admitted). But despite launching one of the late 20^th century’s most significant horror talents, Last House is far less well known than Craven’s Nightmare on Elm Street series, or even (I would argue) his other prominent early film, The Hills Have Eyes (1977). Partly that’s because Last House feels extremely raw in execution, the product of a talent still figuring out much of what he could do; but partly it’s because it also feels raw in another and more troubling way, one that makes us more deeply uncomfortable than horror films generally do.

That rawness is most obviously comprised by the extended and very graphic abduction, rape, and murder sequence that opens the film—a sequence that feels less like horror than like cinema verité of an extremely disturbing kind. But even more raw, both in its emotional brutality and in the places it takes the audience, is the film’s culminating sequence, in which the killers find themselves in the home of the parents of one of the murdered girls—and the audience finds itself rooting for those parents to take the bloodiest and most violent revenge possible on these psychopaths. I suppose it’s possible to argue that we’re not meant to root in that way, or that we’re meant to feel conflicted about these ordinary and good people turning into vengeful monsters—but to be honest, any audience that has watched the film’s opening seems to me to be primed instead to cheer as the killers get their violent comeuppance, even—perhaps especially—if it requires this transformation of grieving parents into their own terrifying kind of killers.

To be clear, if we do find ourselves cheering for the parents, we’re doing so not just because of how Craven’s film has guided us there. We’re also taking the next step in what I called, in this post on the comic book hero The Punisher, the long history of vigilante heroes in American culture; and perhaps at the same time living vicariously the most potent (if extra-legal) arguments for the death penalty. Yet the rawness of Craven’s film, whether intended or simply a result of its stage in his career, serves one additional and crucial symbolic purpose: it reminds us that vigilante justice and executions, however deserved they might feel, are also grotesque and horrifying, as difficult to watch as they are to justify when the heat of the moment has cooled off. Last House is scarier for what it reveals in ourselves than for anything that’s on screen—but what’s on screen can also help us examine that side of ourselves honestly, and that’s a pretty important effect.

Next political horror tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Other horror films you’d analyze?

October 28, 2024: The Politics of Horror: Psycho and The Birds

[For this year’s Halloween series, right before a particularly scary election, I thought I’d focus on some of the many horror films that remind us of the genre’s inescapable intersections with political issues. Add your nominations in comments, please!]

On defamiliarization, horror, and prejudice.

In his essay “Art as Technique,” pioneering Russian Formalist theorist Viktor Shklovsky (whom I never imagined I’d be discussing in this space, but I am an AmericanStudier and I contain multitudes) developed the concept of “defamiliarization”: the idea that one of art’s central goals and effects is to make us look at the world around us, and particularly those things with which we are most familiar, in a new and unfamiliar light. Such defamiliarizations can have many different tones and effects, including positive ones like opening our minds and inspiring new ideas; but it seems to me that one of their chief consistent effects is likely to be horror. After all, the familiar is often (even usually) the comfortable, and to be jarred out of that familiarity and comfort, whatever the long-term necessity and benefits, can be a terrifying thing.

Stephen King, by all accounts one of the modern masters of horror, seems well aware of that fact, having turned such familiar objects as dogs and cars into sources of primal terror. And Alfred Hitchcock, one of the 20^th century’s such masters (and, yes, a Brit, but he set many of his films, including today’s two, in the U.S.), certainly was as well, as illustrated by one of his silliest yet also one of his scariest films: The Birds (1963). The film’s heroine Melanie, played by the inimitable Tippi Hedren, asks her boyfriend, “Mitch, do seagulls normally act this way?”; it’s a ridiculous line, but at the same time it nicely sums up the source of the film’s horror: we’re always surrounded by birds of one kind or another, and there are few ideas more terrifying than the notion that such accepted and generally harmless parts of our world could suddenly become constant threats. I defy anyone to watch Hitchcock’s film and not look askance at the next pigeon you come across.

The Birds was Hitchcock’s second consecutive horror film, following on what was then and likely remains his biggest hit: Psycho (1960). Psycho relies for its horror more on a combination of slow-burn suspense and surprising and very famous jump scares than defamiliarization, with one crucial exception (SPOILERS for the four people who don’t know the film’s reveal already): the ending, and its relevation of the killer’s true identity and motivations. If that ending is meant to be the most terrifying part of all—and the film’s marketing campaign suggested as much very clearly—then there’s no way around it: the defamiliarization of gender and sexuality that accompanies the revelation of Norman Bates’ cross-dressing is presented as something fundamentally frightening, not only connected to Norman’s murderous ways but indeed the titular psychosis that produced them. That is, while those murderous birds are clearly deviating from their familiar behaviors, I would argue that Bates is presented as deviant in his normal behaviors—and that his gender and sexual deviancy represents, again, the film’s culminating and most shocking, and thus troubling and prejudiced, horror.

Next political horror tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Other horror films you’d analyze?

October 26-27, 2024: A PrisonStudying Reading List

[On October 27^th, 1994, the U.S. Justice Department announced that the population in federal and state prisons had topped one million for the first time in American history. To commemorate that sobering and horrifying statistic, one that has only gotten infinitely worse in the thirty years since, this week I’ve AmericanStudied prison stories from throughout our history. Leading up to this weekend post highlighting some vital further PrisonStudying reading!]

Five recent books all PrisonStudiers should read (of the many that could populate such a list, so please share more below, including older ones of course!):

1)      Michelle Alexander, The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness (2010): I wrote at length about Alexander’s book in this post, and then got to teach it in my Fall 2016 Analyzing 21^st-Century America course, so here I’ll just add that few if any 21^st-century books have been more prescient about a key issue facing our society. Every other one in this list followed Alexander’s, in every sense.

2)      Shaka Senghor, Writing My Wrongs: Life, Death, and Redemption in an American Prison (2013): There are a number of recent memoirs by incarcerated or formerly incarcerated individuals, and every one of them is as worth our time and attention as all such individuals are. But Senghor’s is particularly powerful on many levels, including its central emphasis on one of the most brutal aspects of modern prisons, solitary confinement.

3)      Bryan Stevenson, Just Mercy: A Story of Justice and Redemption (2014): I wrote at length about Stevenson and his vital book when he and it won the Stowe Prize in 2017, and have made extensive classroom and scholarly use of the resources created by Stevenson’s Equal Justice Initiative so I’m a certified super-fan. In many ways Just Mercy represents a focused response to a particularly outdated aspect of our prison and justice systems, the death penalty. But it’s also a wider look into the roles that racism, economic inequality, and other forms of discrimination play in every aspect those systems.

4)      Shane Bauer, American Prison: A Reporter’s Undercover Journey into the Business of Punishment (2018): Bauer went undercover as a prison guard, not a prisoner, and so I don’t want to suggest that his investigative journalist project was quite as bold nor as brave as Nellie Bly’s self-imprisonment in a mental asylum. But it’s still a unique and important act that produced a striking book as a result, and one that offers a distinctive perspective on prisons with which all of us should engage.

5)      Christine Montross, Waiting for an Echo: The Madness of American Incarceration (2020): The mental, psychological, and emotional effects of prisons are one of those topics that I imagine we all have some sense of, yet at the same time most of us have no real sense of, if that duality makes sense. We can’t truly talk about this issue nor about incarcerated Americans without a fuller such collective awareness, and Montross’s book is thus a vital resource to add to this reading list.

Next series starts Monday,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Other PrisonStudying readings you’d highlight?

October 25, 2024: Prison Stories: The Inside Literary Prize

[On October 27^th, 1994, the U.S. Justice Department announced that the population in federal and state prisons had topped one million for the first time in American history. To commemorate that sobering and horrifying statistic, one that has only gotten infinitely worse in the thirty years since, this week I’ll AmericanStudy prison stories from throughout our history. Leading up to a weekend post highlighting some vital further PrisonStudying reading!]

Three quotes that together help sum up why one of our newest literary prizes is also one of the most important ever.

1)      “Freedom begins with a book”: That’s Reginald Dwayne Betts, Founder and CEO of the awesome Freedom Reads project, one of the Prize’s principal collaborating organizations. It goes without saying that books are far from the only form of freedom or rights that incarcerated individuals and communities should possess, and I know Betts and the project would of course agree. But I hope it also goes without saying for readers of this blog that I don’t think it’s possible to overstate the impact and influence of books and all that they offer; and if that’s true for all of us (as I believe it is), it is infinitely more true still for folks for whom books can represent a bridge to the world that might otherwise not be present in any form. Getting books in the hands of incarcerated folks is a vital enterprise, and then listening to, respecting, and fully recognizing their reading of and response to those books—as this new prize, judged entirely by incarcerated people, does—is a wonderful next step.

2)      “This literary prize that honors how engaging with great books can both build community and facilitate a deeper understanding of our shared human experience”: That’s Lori Feathers, co-owner of the very cool Interabang Books in Dallas and one of the principal voices behind the prize’s initial creation. It’s a bit of a paradox but also undeniably the case that two of the most crucial ways we can support incarcerated people are both to help strengthen their inside communities and to help connect them to all of our outside communities. Neither of those is easy to accomplish, and doing both at the same time seems particularly challenging—but I agree with Feathers that this prize and its processes very much do both, creating impressive communal ties between incarcerated people and yet fully connecting them to our society as a whole at the same time.

3)      “To the people inside, please know when I say ‘we’ and when I refer to ‘my people,’ I mean you too”: That’s Professor Imani Perry, the phenomenal author and scholar whose excellent book South to America: A Journey Below the Mason-Dixon to Understand the Soul of a Nation (2022) was the winner of the inaugural 2024 Inside Literary Prize. (It’s also, to my shame, the only one of the four National Book Award-nominated finalists I’ve read, but I hope to seek the others out soon!) Perry’s book is more than deserving of this prize on its own terms, but I think that quote really sums up both the prize’s importance and why she was a perfect first choice for what will hopefully become an annual addition to our literary landscape—and an inspiring addition to our justice system.

Reading list post this weekend,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Prison stories or histories (or contemporary contexts) you’d highlight?

October 24, 2024: Prison Stories: Johnny Cash

[On October 27^th, 1994, the U.S. Justice Department announced that the population in federal and state prisons had topped one million for the first time in American history. To commemorate that sobering and horrifying statistic, one that has only gotten infinitely worse in the thirty years since, this week I’ll AmericanStudy prison stories from throughout our history. Leading up to a weekend post highlighting some vital further PrisonStudying reading!]

On the message the Man in Black still has for us—if we can ever start to hear it.

In this very early post on my colleague and friend Ian Williams’ work with prison inmates (which I reposted yesterday as part of this series), I made the case that the incarcerated might well represent the most forgotten or elided American community (and that they’re in that bleak conversation in any case). I wish I could say that anything has changed in the nearly four years since I made that case [NB. This post originally appeared in September 2014, but once again I believe it fully holds up more than a decade later], but I don’t believe it has; perhaps Orange is the New Black will help produce a sea-change in our awareness of and attitudes toward those millions of incarcerated Americans, and perhaps the proposed federal changes in drug-related sentencing will begin to make a dent in those shocking numbers, but as of right now it seems to me that the prison industrial complex is only growing in size and strength.

More than fifty years ago, one of the most iconic 20^th century American artists and voices began a career’s worth of efforts to force us to think about the world and life of our prisons. I had some critical things to say about Johnny Cash in this post, so it’s more than fair that I pay respect here to one of his most impressive and interesting attributes: his consistent attention to that setting and its experiences and communities, from the 1955 song “Folsom Prison Blues” through his many prison performances, culminating (but by no means concluding) in the groundbreaking live albums At Folsom Prison (1968) and At San Quentin (1969). My friend and fellow AmericanStudier Jonathan Silverman identifies Cash’s trip to Folsom as one of the Nine Choices through which Cash most reflected and influenced American culture, and I would go further: it was one of the most unique and significant moments in any American artistic career.

Or it should been that significant, at least. Forty-five years later, with our collective awareness, understanding, and attitudes toward prisoners seemingly more negative than ever (although studies like this 2002 one give some reason for hope in that regard), I don’t know that Cash’s clear recognition of the shared humanity between himself and those prisoners—and, implicitly but clearly, between those prisoners and every other audience to whom Cash performed—has reached his fellow Americans in any consistent way. That might seem like a given, recognizing prisoners’ humanity—but when I read and hear frequent critiques of prisoner access to exercise and health facilities, to media, to decent food, to liveable conditions, to any of the things that seem to define American life as we generally argue for it, I’m not at all sure that such recognition is widespread. Perhaps we must first, to quote another prison song (sung by a man who did his own time for drug-related offenses), Steve Earle’s “The Truth” (2002), “Admit that what scares you is the me in you.”

Last prison story tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Prison stories or histories (or contemporary contexts) you’d highlight?

October 23, 2024: Prison Stories: Ian Williams and Teaching in Prisons

[On October 27^th, 1994, the U.S. Justice Department announced that the population in federal and state prisons had topped one million for the first time in American history. To commemorate that sobering and horrifying statistic, one that has only gotten infinitely worse in the thirty years since, this week I’ll AmericanStudy prison stories from throughout our history. Leading up to a weekend post highlighting some vital further PrisonStudying reading!]

[N.B. This post on my inspiring then-colleague and still-friend Ian Williams’ experiences teaching in prisons originally aired way back in my blog’s first month, in November 2010. But it’s all still damn true, other than the sad fact that we haven’t been colleagues for far too long.]

If you wanted to feel very depressed, you could spend some time trying to decide which at-risk American population is more elided in our national narratives and perspectives about our current identity and community: certainly Native Americans, on whom I’ve already focused a good deal in this space and will continue to do so, have a good case (although probably it was better before casinos forced us to admit that they still exist); the homeless and those living at the very bottom of the economic ladder are definitely in the conversation too. But I think a very strong argument could be made that the population we most consistently forget to include in our sense of ourselves, until and unless there’s some sort of scandal that makes us think about them but solely in negative terms (see Horton, Willie), is the more than 2.3 million Americans—or more than 1 in 100, and that statistic is from 2008 so it’s likely higher today—who are in prison. (Making us, it’s important to add, the worldwide leader in both the overall number of citizens and the percentage of the population behind bars.) It’s ironic but, I believe, entirely accurate to note that much more press and attention was paid to (for example) Paris Hilton or Lindsay Lohan’s couple of weeks in jail than is paid to the millions of their fellow Americans who are spending significant portions of their lives in that world.

There are all sorts of issues associated with that world and this community, as well as an equally striking number of complicating factors and influences that have helped create and sustain it, and it would be irresponsible of me to pretend to know nearly enough about any of them to focus on them in a piece here (I’m quite sure that many readers will know a good deal more and should, as always, chime in). And in any case, my focus today, in the first of three Thanksgiving-inspired posts, is instead on an incredibly impressive kind of academic and American (in the best sense) work being done in this community by a colleague of mine, Ian Williams. Ian is, in his own ways, a model of the type of interdisciplinary scholar and teacher and person that I consistently aspire to be: he teaches and produces scholarship about American literature and identity and culture, as do I, but he’s also a published and on-the-rise poet and author of fiction, has taught dance and performance, and has entirely revamped our department’s literary magazine and website, to cite only a few of his broad and meaningful pursuits and accomplishments. But the most impressive of his efforts, to my mind, is also perhaps the least overtly visible: he has over the last couple years begun to go into local prisons and develop reading and writing conversations and courses with inmates, dialogues that have continued well beyond his individual visits and that have, without question, added immeasurably to the world and possibilities of those imprisoned Americans.

I can’t claim to speak for Ian’s experiences, and he has written a bit recently about them on his own blog [BEN: Now sadly defunct, but trust me, it was great]. And I’m quite sure that he would dispute my sense that this gig is a thankless one; whether it garners any visibility or attention is not, that is, at all connected to whether it’s appreciated or makes a difference, and the thanks, similarly, come not from outside perspectives but from those impacted directly by the work. I agree with all of those thoughts (that I’ve imagined into Ian’s perspective!), but would also argue that the absence of visibility is itself a further sign of how much we don’t include this world and community nearly enough in our national narratives and consciousness. Every few years (at least) sees a new movie about an inspiring teacher doing important work with public school students in the inner city; I can’t agree strongly enough that such individuals are sources of inspiration, and I don’t think we could make enough movies celebrating teachers in any case (duh, I suppose). But the communities whom Ian is inspiring are even more desperately in need of that influence—and while their inhabitants can’t necessarily (or at least often can’t) get to the happy endings and brighter futures that are often featured in the captions at the end of those movies, that doesn’t mean that we should celebrate any less fully the teachers and Americans who are doing what they can to connect with and impact their worlds and lives.

I’ll stop there, since I can already imagine Ian’s demurrals from much of what I’ve written. At the end of the day, again, he isn’t doing this work so it’ll get written up, here or in much more prominent publications or spaces. But that doesn’t mean it shouldn’t be—nor that American Studies shouldn’t include and study the world of our imprisoned fellow Americans much more fully than it often does. Next prison story tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Prison stories or histories (or contemporary contexts) you’d highlight?

October 22, 2024: Prison Stories: Alcatraz

[On October 27^th, 1994, the U.S. Justice Department announced that the population in federal and state prisons had topped one million for the first time in American history. To commemorate that sobering and horrifying statistic, one that has only gotten infinitely worse in the thirty years since, this week I’ll AmericanStudy prison stories from throughout our history. Leading up to a weekend post highlighting some vital further PrisonStudying reading!]

On why it’s okay to turn a prison into a tourist attraction—and what we could do instead.

San Francisco’s Pier 39 is one of the more interesting tourist areas I’ve seen—because of its unique origin point, as the site of an annual (and now seemingly permanent) gathering of sea lions; because of the collection of stores and games and entertainments that has sprung up around that focal point, making the pier feel a bit like a combination of Coney Island and the Mall of America; and because it’s also the launching point for tours and explorations of Alcatraz, the island, National Park, and former federal prison in San Francisco Bay. As a result of that latter connection to The Rock (the penitentiary, not the action film starring Connery and Cage at their most, well, Connery and Cage), Pier 39 also houses the Alcatraz Gift Shop, a store where you can buy, among countless other things, baby clothes designed to look like inmates’ apparel (right down to the numbered nametags).

When I first encountered the gift shop, I found it in pretty poor taste, a crass commercialization of a site where over a thousand Americans were imprisoned, many for life and all in the most bleak maximum security conditions. I’d still say that’s part of the story, although the gift shop’s earnings do support the National Park and thus (as I understand it) the very deserving National Park Service as a whole. But I would also say that the gift shop, like the National Park, like the tours and explorations of the island, and perhaps even like the action film, although that would be a stretch at best, has the potential to connect tourists and visitors to the history of the prison—and that such a connection, like any burgeoning historical interest, could lead as well to further investigation and engagement with issues in the present, with the broader histories and stories of America’s prisons and prisoners. I’ve long since come to the conclusion that almost any method of engaging Americans with our histories, as long as it doesn’t blatantly misrepresent or falsify that past, is worthwhile, and certainly the Alcatraz tourism industry has the potential to produce such engagement.

On the other hand, there’s another Alcatraz history, one located after the prison’s 1963 closure and before its 1973 opening as a National Park, that isn’t part of the gift shop at all, nor, I would argue, much present in the island’s tourist narratives more broadly. That’s the 1969 takeover of the island by a group of Native Americans affiliated with the American Indian Movement; this particular community called themselves “Indians of All Tribes” and hoped to turn the island into a cultural center. During the nearly two years of occupation, this activist effort certainly succeeded in raising awareness and changing national conversations, although (as was the case with each AIM endeavor) it also produced unintended acts of destruction and violence. The history of the occupation is thus a complex one, connected to longer-term and even more complex histories and obviously unable to be turned into a gift shop product; but why couldn’t Alcatraz become the site of a cultural center, one that could include not only Native American communities and stories but those of the many other cultures that have called and continued to call the Bay Area home? Not sure I can imagine a more inspiring future for a former prison.

Next prison story tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Prison stories or histories (or contemporary contexts) you’d highlight?

October 21, 2024: Prison Stories: Dorothea Dix

[On October 27^th, 1994, the U.S. Justice Department announced that the population in federal and state prisons had topped one million for the first time in American history. To commemorate that sobering and horrifying statistic, one that has only gotten infinitely worse in the thirty years since, this week I’ll AmericanStudy prison stories from throughout our history. Leading up to a weekend post highlighting some vital further PrisonStudying reading!]

On the groundbreaking and inspiring activist who changed both prisons and mental health treatment, and from whom we still have a lot to learn.

In March 1841, a thirty-nine-year-old teacher and social worker named Dorothea Dix visited East Cambridge Jail in Massachusetts. She was there to teach a Sunday School class for female prisoners, but what immediately and entirely drew her attention were the conditions in which all of the inmates—but most egregiously, to her sensitive perspective, the mentally ill and disabled, who were held there not because they had necessarily committed a crime but because the facility doubled as an asylum, as almost all American prisons in the era did—were held. Among other things, the facility was entirely unheated and had been kept that way throughout the New England winter; when Dix inquired about this policy, she was told that “the insane do not feel heat or cold” (a frustratingly ubiquitous belief at the time).

That falsehood represents just the tip of a very sizeable iceberg of misinformation that constituted the vast, vast majority of public and even medical thinking about the mentally ill in the first half of the 19^th century. But Dix was not one to accept conventional or traditional wisdom, no matter how widespread or entrenched it might be. She took it upon herself to visit virtually all of the state’s jails and almshouses (the latter a more charitable but often no more suitable space in which the mentally ill were housed), talked at length with all those who worked in them as well as (when she could) some of those who were housed there, and wrote up incredibly detailed and thorough notes on the eerily similar conditions she observed throughout her travels; she turned those notes into a document for the Massachusetts legislature, and won as a result a significant state outlay of funds to expand the Worcester State Hospital and make it into a much more appropriate home for the state’s mentally ill wards.

That successful journey was only the beginning of an epic quest that would encompass much of Dix’s remaining forty-odd years of life; she would eventually travel across every state east of the Mississippi and even numerous European nations, visiting facilities constantly and working tirelessly to improve conditions in those facilities, to advocate for the opening of better facilities, and, perhaps most significantly, to change fundamentally the way society viewed these individuals and communities. Dix once wrote, as evidence for why she knew that many can be “raised from these base conditions,” of a young woman who “was for years ‘a raging maniac’ chained in a cage and whipped to control her acts and words. She was helped by a husband and wife who agreed to take care of her in their home and slowly she recovered her senses.” This woman represents only one individual among the untold millions who were positively influenced by Dix’s work and perspective, but of course even one individual’s live so radically changed for the better is a significant achievement; to contemplate how many people around the world were given the opportunity to go from unheated cages and brutal beatings to sensitive care and treatment by Dix’s efforts is to truly understand how much one inspiring American can do and transform in a life’s work.

Yet as much good as Dix’s efforts accomplished, it would do her memory no honor to pretend that we have adequately shifted our perception or, most importantly, our social and communal treatment of the mentally ill; a late 20^th century text like One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest highlights (in fictional but not at all inaccurate form) just how far from desirable our mental institutions often remain. The definition of insanity, the phrase goes, lies in doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results. Dorothea Dix’s redefinitions are still, it seems, very much needed. Next prison story tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Prison stories or histories (or contemporary contexts) you’d highlight?

October 19-20, 2024: An AmericanStudier Tribute to the Phone

[75 years ago this week, operator-assisted toll dialing was introduced to make long-distance phone calls much easier. So this week I’ve AmericanStudied some classic phone calls in American culture, leading up to this special tribute to what phones mean in my own 21^st century life!]

As a son who has lived more than 550 miles away from his parents for more than half of his life, and as a Dad who has been apart from his sons about half the time for the last twelve years or so, I’ve long relied on the telephone to help me stay connected to the people I love most. But in the last few months, I’ve significantly amplified that need: getting married to the love of my life who happens to live thousands of miles away at the moment; and moving my older son into college in a city more than a thousand miles away. Quite simply, if it weren’t for FaceTime and video calls, for voicenotes and texted memes, for all the ways big and small that I can reach out to these favorite people and they can reach out to me and we can stay connected despite the thousands of miles in between, I would be infinitely unhappier and less whole and less me. I’m well aware of the challenges and problems that SmartPhones present, but there’s literally nothing in our 21^st century world for which I’m more grateful.

Next series starts Monday,

Ben

PS. What do you think?

October 18, 2024: Famous Phone Calls: The 2024 Election

[75 years ago this week, operator-assisted toll dialing was introduced to make long-distance phone calls much easier. So this week I’ll AmericanStudy some classic phone calls in American culture, leading up to a special tribute to what phones mean in my own 21^st century life!]

On how phone calls can symbolize the striking contrast in our 2024 electoral choice.

I haven’t written much in this space about the 2024 campaign, which is fine by me and I imagine fine by you all as well (plenty of that elsewhere, and really everywhere else, if you want it!). I do have an election-week series on the 1924 campaign coming up in a couple weeks, and will end that series with a weekend post reflecting on the 2024 results, whatever they will be (keeping everything crossed, natch). I know it’s no secret to any reader of this blog (or anyone who knows me, or anyone who exists in October 2024) what I fervently hope will happen on Tuesday November 5^th, and not just for all the obvious and crucial political and contemporary reasons (although duh)—I also still believe, and in fact believe even more fully than I did when I wrote that 2020 Considering History column now that I’ve learned a lot more about her, that Kamala Harris’s heritage and identity make her just as foundationally American as, if not even slightly more tellingly and importantly American than, Barack Obama (whom I’ve called “the first American President”).

So yeah, the stakes in this election are high, in AmericanStudies terms as in literally every other way. And I’d say that phone calls offer a clear and compelling way to represent one of the most fundamental contrasts at the heart of our electoral choice. On the one hand we have the two justifiably infamous phone calls through which then-President Donald Trump sought to undermine the 2020 election (before and after it took place) as well as American democracy and ideals, the rule of law, and our relationships with foreign allies among other things: his July 2019 call to Ukrainian President Volodymr Zelensky; and his January 2021 call to Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger. There are no shortage of moments to which we can point to make the case that Trump was the worst president in American history (with all due respect to Andrew Johnson), but I don’t think it gets much clearer than the combination of those two phone calls. Or, to put it another and even more telling way: Trump embodied and continues to embody the worst of American history, our most divisive and destructive impulses, the frustrating but inescapable fact that our boasted civilization is but a thin veener; and these phone calls are exhibits 1 and 1A in that case.

On the other hand we have a famous phone call that came to symbolize the actual results of the 2020 election: “We did it, Joe!” The contrast in not just content but also and I’d argue especially tone between that November 2020 call and Trump’s pair is striking, and connects to the ways that this year’s Democratic National Convention in August leaned into tones of hope and joy (in direct and potent contrast to the fearful and resentful Republican National Convention in July). But it was also just a very meaningful and moving moment for Vice President-elect Kamala Harris, an important stage in the arc of a definingly American family story, individual life, and political career that are all both literally and figuratively on the ballot this November. I guess I’m not telling y’all how to vote (although if you’re planning to vote Trump, I really am not sure what you get out of this blog)—but who on earth would vote for the guy who made those 2019 and 2021 phone calls when they could vote for the lady who made this 2020 one?!

Tribute post this weekend,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Famous cultural phones you’d highlight?

October 17, 2024: Famous Phone Calls: “Madam and the Phone Bill”

[75 years ago this week, operator-assisted toll dialing was introduced to make long-distance phone calls much easier. So this week I’ll AmericanStudy some classic phone calls in American culture, leading up to a special tribute to what phones mean in my own 21^st century life!]

On a funny and fun poetic voice and character, and the layers of meaning she reveals.

Across his nearly 50 years writing and publishing poetry (among other genres), American treasure Langston Hughes went through a number of different stages and series. One of the more unique were the Madam Alberta K. Johnson poems—originally created by Hughes in “Madam and the Number Runner” (later revised to “Number Writer”), published in the Autumn 1943 issue of Contemporary Poetry, Johnson would go to serve as the speaker/persona for nearly 20 more of his poems (all titled in that same “Madam and the” style) over the next few years. Johnson was a confident, no-nonsense Harlem matriarch, a woman navigating with humor, resilience, and serious attitude both contemporary and universal challenges of economics and survival, gender and relationships, race and community, and many more. As with almost all of Hughes’ works, the Madam poems are deceptively straightforward, highly readable and engaging but with significant layers and depth (of literary elements and cultural/historical contexts alike) that reward our close readings.

The one that I’ve close read the most often, as I teach it in my American Literature II course alongside a couple other Hughes poems, is “Madam and the Phone Bill” (1944). Like most of the Madam poems, this one is presented as part of a dialogue, but with the reader only getting Johnson’s half of the conversation. In this case that conversation is with a representative of the “Central” phone company who has contacted Johnson to make her pay for a long-distance call from her wandering (in both senses) significant other Roscoe. The first stanza immediately establishes every aspect of that situation along with Johnson’s unique and witty voice and perspective: “You say I O.K.ed/LONG DISTANCE?/O.K.ed it when?/My goodness, Central/That was then!” Effortlessly using poetic elements like rhythm and rhyme, as well as typographical ones like capitalization, italics, and punctuation, Hughes locates us within his speaker’s voice, in the middle of this phone conversation (or rather argument) in progress, and with an immediate sense of the problem facing our put-upon heroine. The voice and humor only deepen from there, as in the poem’s middle stanza (the 5^th of 10): “If I ever catch him,/Lawd, have pity!/Calling me up/From Kansas City.”

But like all the Madam poems, and as I said all of Hughes’ poems and works period, there’s a lot more to “Phone Bill” than just that fun and funny feel. Certainly the poem offers a glimpse into Johnson’s fraught negotiation of gender dynamics, such as the contradictions between her desire to maintain her status as an independent woman and her worries about what “them other girls” might offer Roscoe (perhaps especially while he’s hundreds of miles away in KC). Written in the shadow of the recently ended Great Depression (a frequent Hughes topic), the poem likewise reflects the fraught dynamics of an individual’s conversations with the corporations who could with a single bill (or instead with an understanding waiving of that bill) profoundly change their economic situations. And I would say that it’s particularly relevant that the bill in question is a phone bill—the period’s increasingly ubiquitous telephones, and more exactly evolving technological possibilities like long-distance calling, symbolized at once greater social and communal connections and yet another way in which individuals were beholden, to grasping corporations and distant but still needy significant others alike. Like it or not, Alberta, those are debts we’re all “gonna pay!”

Last famous phone call tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Famous cultural phones you’d highlight?

October 16, 2024: Famous Phone Calls: Phone Songs

[75 years ago this week, operator-assisted toll dialing was introduced to make long-distance phone calls much easier. So this week I’ll AmericanStudy some classic phone calls in American culture, leading up to a special tribute to what phones mean in my own 21^st century life!]

On five pop songs that call upon this technology.

1)      “Operator (That’s Not the Way It Feels)” (1972): One of the more interesting lost elements of telephone technology is the role of the switchboard operator, that unseen middle person on whom callers relied for decades to make their connections. While I believe that role had significantly lessened by the 1970s (I certainly never had to speak to an operator to make a phone call), both of my first two songs use it in a compelling symbolic way, with Jim Croce’s 1972 ballad featuring a speaker who spills his emotions over a breakup to an apparently quite sympathetic operator.

2)      “Switchboard Susan” (1979): Nick Lowe’s speaker addresses the switchboard operator even more directly and spills some emotions as well, but in a quite different tone than that of Croce’s ballad. In an attempt to pick up this “greater little operator” with whose “ringing tone” he “fell in love” immediately, that speaker resorts to a series of increasingly desperate telephonic double entendres, including (apropros of the week’s inspiration) “When I’m near you girl I get an extension/And I don’t mean Alexander Graham Bell’s invention.” What more is there to say about that?

3)      “867-5309/Jenny” (1981): As operators faded away, wannabe callers could dial their desired numbers directly—but this former teenage dialer can confirm that it’s not always easy to go through with the call. That’s one telephonic lesson of one-hit wonder Tommy Tutone’s 1980s smash: with the line “I tried to call you before but I lose my nerve” he succinctly sums up that painful experience of ending a call mid-dial. But Tutone’s song also illustrates another side to the topic I talked about with Scream yesterday—the way the phone can connect us to strangers. In horror films that’s a threatening proposition, but as “number[s] on the wall” like Jenny’s suggest, it can be an enticing one as well. 

4)      “Standing Outside a Broken Phone Booth with Money in My Hand” (1996): Sometimes the phone lets us down, though. I’m sure there are other pop songs which also use the distinctive (if perhaps now outdated) sounds of telephone calls falling to connect, but I don’t know of any off-hand. And in any case, this Primitive Radio Gods track with one of the longest titles in pop music history is a true original, in sound and sound effects as well as in lyrics.

5)      “Telephone” (2009): Music videos were of course already a thing in 1996 (and even in 1981), but over the subsequent decades they’ve become more and more fully a genre unto themselves, as illustrated by that hyperlinked short film for Lady Gaga and Beyoncé’s “Telephone.” To be honest, that video is far more interesting than (and quite fully distinct from) the song. But I did want to note that even in our cell phone/smartphone age, the trope of a phone call (answered or unanswered) to represent the highs and lows of a romantic relationship remains very much in force in pop music.

Next famous phone call tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Famous cultural phones you’d highlight?

October 15, 2024: Famous Phone Calls: The Scream Films

[75 years ago this week, operator-assisted toll dialing was introduced to make long-distance phone calls much easier. So this week I’ll AmericanStudy some classic phone calls in American culture, leading up to a special tribute to what phones mean in my own 21^st century life!]

On one thing that’s really changed since the first Scream, and one that hasn’t.

I wrote about the most important conceit of the Scream series of horror films, their metatextual commentary on the tropes and traditions of the horror genre, in this 2020 post. I think that element relates closely to the way the films use phones, so I’ll ask you to check out that post and then come on back here for this related topic.

Welcome back! One of the many, many many many, horror movie tropes on which Scream (1996) was commenting was the external yet intimate threat posed by horror monsters and killers, a threat exemplified by Halloween’s Michael Myers looking into windows but also captured quite nicely by a threatening phone call (whether or not it’s “coming from inside the house!”). There’s a reason, after all, why Scream begins with the sound of a phone ringing followed by a young woman’s screams, before the audience even sees the specific, threatened young woman (Drew Barrymore) who will unfortunately answer this call and provide her own screams. But it’s pretty telling that that call comes in on a landline, and one without caller ID at that—if Barrymore’s Casey Becker and her family had that technology, and/or if she had a cell phone with caller ID as well, she’d likely not pickup a call from a strange number, eliminating the entire premise of the killers toying with her over the phone.

Yet even as the Scream series has evolved into the smartphone era (with both 2011’s Scream 4 and, even more fully, 2022’s Scream and 2023’s Scream VI set in that brave new world), a time when virtually everyone has both a cell phone and the ability to see and screen our calls, it has apparently maintained this central trope of the killers calling on the phone (I haven’t seen any of those films, so as always I welcome corrections and comments of all kinds!). I’m sure the filmmakers have found specific ways to explain how these smartphone-era killers are maintaining their anonymity (even in the original Scream there’s an elaborate plotline about a cloned cell phone, for example). But to my mind, the more important point is that the scary phone call trope endures, and perhaps has even deepened in the smartphone era—I know for me, almost every time my phone rings these days (unless it’s my kids calling to say goodnight when they’re with their mom) it feels at best unnerving and at worst potentially threatening. It doesn’t have to a psycho killer on the other end to make the phone an external yet intimate and potentially invasive technology, it turns out.

Next famous phone calls tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Famous cultural phones you’d highlight?