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?

April 30, 2024: Communist Culture: Dos Passos and Wright

[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 strikingly parallel yet also importantly distinct 1930s to ‘50s American arcs.

As I mentioned in yesterday’s post, despite our longstanding collective national antagonism toward communism there have been both moments and communities in which the political philosophy has had substantially broader and deeper appeal. In the 1930s, two such factors came together to help produce a sizeable and vocal cohort of writers and intellectuals who embraced communism: the Great Depression’s heightening of wealth inequalities and social stratification seemed to highlight the limitations and even destructive capabilities of unchecked capitalism, leading a number of American writers and artists to imagine and depict alternative social and communal ways of living; and those economic woes, coupled with the continued destructive forces of segregation, lynching, and other communal ills and threats, led many African Americans similarly to seek an alternative to the dominant American systems.

Those responses happened (and thus differed) within multiple communities, but they can be succinctly illustrated by two individuals, writers whose most significant novels bookend the 1930s in American literature and culture. John Dos Passos had been publishing fiction since the mid-1920s, but it was the trilogy that came to be collected as U.S.A. (1938)—The 42^nd Parallel (1930), 1919 (1932), and The Big Money (1936)—that exemplified both his stylistic experimentation and his socialistic philosophies. Richard Wright launched his career with the short story collection Uncle Tom’s Children (1938) but truly entered the literary stratosphere two years later with Native Son (1940), the best-selling and hugely controversial novel that features both one of American literature’s most eloquent defenders of communism (in the lawyer Max) and a character (protagonist Bigger Thomas) whose tragic and brutal arc makes numerous, purposefully ineloquent but nonetheless compelling arguments for the philosophy.

In the 1940s to 50s, both writers famously broke with those philosophies and with the Communist Party: Wright in one pivotal moment, the essay “I Tried to Be a Communist” (1944); and Dos Passos more gradually, in a series of public statements and positions that culminated in his qualified support for Joseph McCarthy (among other turning points). Yet I would also argue that their shifts represent two quite distinct personal and national narratives: Dos Passos genuinely seemed, in response to World War II, the Cold War, and other factors, to change in his political and social perspectives; whereas to my mind Wright’s perspectives remained largely unchanged, and he came instead to see, as does for example Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man, the Communist Party as an imperfect and indeed failed vehicle through which to seek such political and social change. Such a distinction would of course become even more important in the 1960s, when a new generation of African American activists found anew a compelling alternative in American socialism.

Next cultural communism tomorrow,

Ben

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

April 29, 2024: Communist Culture: “The Palace-Burner”

[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 masterpiece of a poem that destroys easy “us vs. them” narratives.

I made the case for my favorite American poet, Sarah Piatt, in one of my first posts, and did so in large part through her best poem, “The Palace-Burner” (1873). There are a lot of factors that make “Palace-Burner” one of the great American poems, including its exemplification of Piatt’s frequent use of a unique and multi-layered perspective that I named in my first book the dialogic lyric, an individual speaker’s perspective filtered through conversation and the shifts and evolutions it always produces. But at the top of the list for me would be Piatt’s incredibly sophisticated representation—through the lens of a mother and young son discussing a newspaper picture of a female rebel from the 1871 Paris Commune—of what I called in this post three crucial and interconnected levels to empathy: “connecting to seemingly distant others, working to understand those to whom we’re close, and examining our own identities through those lenses.”

This wasn’t necessarily the case in the 1870s (although given the immense popularity of Horatio Alger novels in the period, maybe it was), but over the century and a half since I would say that there have been few world communities with which Americans have had, collectively, a more difficult time empathizing than communists. Of course there are significant exceptions, both in terms of time periods during which that philosophy has seemed more appealing (such as the Great Depression, about which more in tomorrow’s post) and in terms of American communities who have been sufficiently disenfranchised from our dominant national narratives to see the wisdom of such alternatives (such as African Americans in the mid-20^th century, on whom likewise more tomorrow). But when it comes to our overarching, dominant narratives, communism has been one of the most consistent “them’s” to our constructed “us” for a long while; we can see both sides of that equation, for example, in our consistent need to define the Soviet Union as “godless” in contrast to equally constructed images of the United States as a “Christian nation.”

There would be various possible ways to complicate and revise that kind of “us vs. them” narrative, including highlighting the many originating and influential forms and moments of American socialism and communism. But Piatt takes another, and to my mind particularly compelling, tack: creating in her poetic speaker a woman who seems thoroughly removed from not only communism but political conversations in general (especially in the “separate spheres” mentality that continued to reign for most middle-class American families in the period); and then giving that speaker the opportunity to consider whether and how she and a foreign communist woman might have anything in common. Neither the speaker nor the poem come to any easy or comfortable answers—empathy is neither of those things in any case—but they ask the questions, and that seems to me to an impressive model for all of us.

Next cultural communism tomorrow,

Ben

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

April 27-28, 2024: April 2024 Recap

[A Recap of the month that was in AmericanStudying.]

April 1: Satire Studying: African American Satire: An April Fool’s series on satire starts with a link to my recent Saturday Evening Post Black History Month column.

April 2: Satire Studying: Innocents Abroad: The series continues with the double-edged satire at the heart of Mark Twain’s first big hit.

April 3: Satire Studying: The Interview: What’s problematic, and what’s important, about a hugely controversial cinematic comedy, as the series pokes on.

April 4: Satire Studying: TV Satires: Four news and sketch comedy shows from which we can learn a lot (but which I originally posted in 2017, so add more recent nominations please!).

April 5: Satire Studying: The Big Short and Vice: The series concludes with value and limits of satire when it comes to contemporary, contested events.

April 6-7: Emily Lauer on Comics Analysis & Editing as Public-Facing Scholarship: My newest Guest Post from a familiar friend of the blog—Emily Lauer with her record-setting 4^th Guest Post!

April 8: I Am AmericanStudying Sidney Poitier: Vaughn Joy on No Way Out: A series on the 60^th anniversary of Poitier’s groundbreaking Oscar win kicks off with a FilmStudier I really love on Poitier’s cinematic debut.

April 9: I Am AmericanStudying Sidney Poitier: The Blackboard Jungle: The series continues with a Poitier character who’s very similar to a 1980s favorite, and one important distinction.

April 10: I Am AmericanStudying Sidney Poitier: The Defiant Ones: Two different genres through which to contextualize Poitier’s 1958 prison break film, as the series roles on.

April 11: I Am AmericanStudying Sidney Poitier: Two 1967 Classics: Standout speeches and sweet sendoffs in Poitier’s pair of pitch-perfect 1967 films.

April 12: I Am AmericanStudying Sidney Poitier: Lillies of the Field: The series concludes with what was historic about Poitier’s Oscar-winning role, what wasn’t quite, and what’s importantly outside that framing.

April 13-14: I Am AmericanStudying Sidney Poitier: 21C Heirs: A special weekend follow-up on noteworthy performances from five of our best contemporary Black actors (not including Denzel and Morgan who could each get whole posts for their work alone).

April 15: Mythic Patriotisms: The 1776 Project: For Patriots’ Day this year I wanted to trace some histories and layers to one of the main categories in my book Of Thee I Sing, starting with a post on how a project dedicated to “patriotic education” embodies the worst of mythic patriotism.

April 16: Mythic Patriotisms: The National Anthem: The series continues with two layers of mythic patriotism found in the lesser-known later verses of “The Star-Spangled Banner.”

April 17: Mythic Patriotisms: “Self-Made”: How an iconic American narrative is mythic patriotic in both meanings and effects, as the series pledges on.

April 18: Mythic Patriotisms: Defining America’s Origins: The multiple mythic patriotic layers to an origin story that centers on the Pilgrims/Puritans.

April 19: Mythic Patriotisms: Love It or Leave It: The series concludes with the 1960s constructions of a phrase that sums up mythic patriotism’s exclusions.

April 20-21: Mythic Patriotisms in 2024: There’s never been a moment with more overt mythic patriotism than our own, and for this weekend follow-up I both analyzed that presence and asked for connections to chances to talk more about these topics!

April 22: Climate Culture: Cli Fi: An Earth Day series on cultural works about the climate crisis kicks off with a stunning recent novel that extends the long legacy of cli fi.

April 23: Climate Culture: The Day After Tomorrow and Don’t Look Up: The series continues with the necessity but limitations of disaster movies, and an important recent variation on the genre.

April 24: Climate Culture: “The Tradition”: Two complementary ways to read a climate change moment in Jericho Brown’s powerful 21^st century sonnet, as the series rolls on.

April 25: Climate Culture: “The Ghost Birds”: What’s specific and what’s universal in Karen Russell’s amazing 2021 short story.

April 26: Climate Culture: Climate Songs: The series and month conclude with five examples of pop music perspectives on the climate crisis, including Midnight Oil’s great album Resist (2022).

Next series starts Monday,

Ben

PS. Topics you’d like to see covered in this space? Guest Posts you’d like to contribute? Lemme know!

April 26, 2024: Climate Culture: Climate Songs

[It’s hard not to think about the climate crisis every day in 2024, but it’s impossible not to do so on Earth Day. So this week in honor of that solemn occasion, I’ll AmericanStudy cultural works that represent and help us engage with climate change.]

On five examples of pop music perspectives on the climate crisis.

1)      Don Henley, “Goodbye to a River” (2000): As I highlighted in this post featuring Henley’s successful efforts to preserve Walden Woods, the former Eagle has become one of our most prominent and dedicated environmental activists. So it makes sense that he penned an early and excellent climate crisis song, from his wonderfully political yet deeply personal album Inside Job. That album was hugely prescient about the nascent 21^st century, and never more so than its fears for a changing planet.

2)      Common, “Trouble in the Water” (2014): If Henley’s song is a lament, Common’s track (featuring a ton of guest contributors) is a righteously enraged banger. Many of its targets are human forces, like the corporate fuckery called out in bars such as “Everything was people/Until you showed up on the land to fuck the people/Contaminate the ocean/Now the water is lethal/Four bucks for two liters/That should be illegal.” But as Common’s anthem depicts all too potently, it’s on our environment that such man-made trouble will have the most damaging effects.

3)      Childish Gambino, “Feels like Summer” (2018): This song (from actor Donald Glover’s rap persona Childish Gambino) occupies a third genre, a sweet summer ballad—yet one that asks us to look closer and think deeper while we bop along. Never more so than in the second verse: “Every day gets hotter than the one before/Running out of water, it’s about to go down/Air that kills the bees that we depend upon/Birds were made for singing, waking up to no sound.” I don’t know if Karen Russell listened to “Feels like Summer” before imagining a future with no birds in the short story I wrote about in yesterday’s post, but I know her story and Gambino’s song make for a particularly powerful pairing.

4)      Billie Eilish, “All the Good Girls Go to Hell” (2019): As I’ve blogged about many times (and even included as an example of critical patriotism in the 1980s chapter of my most recent book), rap has a long tradition of social commentary. I don’t know that pop music has the same legacy necessarily, and of course social commentary isn’t the only thing music can or should do in any case; but there certainly is plenty of socially conscious pop music, and singer-songwriter Billie Eilish’s amazing 2019 track is a great recent example. I’m not sure there’s a more hard-hitting nor better three-line verse from the last decade of pop music than “Hills burn in California/My turn to ignore ya/Don’t say I didn’t warn ya.” Whew.

5)      Midnight Oil, Resist (2022): I blogged for my Valentine’s series last year about one of the many great songs on Midnight’s Oil latest album. The whole album is deeply connected to the climate crisis, but it’s the first song, “Rising Seas,” which is a particularly bracing and vital example of where climate change music is here in the 2020s. Listen, get mad, and recognize that, as Oil puts it in the final lines of the impassioned “At the Time of Writing,” “At the time of writing we were on the brink/At the time of writing we still had time to think.”

April Recap this weekend,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Climate texts of any type you’d share?

April 25, 2024: Climate Culture: “The Ghost Birds”

[It’s hard not to think about the climate crisis every day in 2024, but it’s impossible not to do so on Earth Day. So this week in honor of that solemn occasion, I’ll AmericanStudy cultural works that represent and help us engage with climate change.]

On what’s specific and what’s universal in Karen Russell’s amazing story.

I first encountered “The Ghost Birds” in the Best American Short Stories 2022 anthology (well worth getting your hands on as those collections always are), but it originally appeared in The New Yorker in October 2021. Whether you’re a subscriber or not you should be able to read it as one of your free articles for the month, so in lieu of a full first paragraph here I’ll recommend that you read this phenomenal short story and then come on back for a couple of my thoughts.

Welcome back! At the heart of Russell’s story is a depiction of a very real natural phenomenon: the annual flight of Vaux’s Swifts, migratory birds who settle in spaces like (most famously) the chimney of a Portland (Oregon) elementary school. Most of the cultural works about climate change that I’ve encountered focus on its effects for human characters and communities, which is of course understandable (these are texts created by human artists, after all) but also both limited and ironic given the role that humans have played in creating this crisis. Russell’s text certainly still features central human characters as I’ll discuss in a moment, but from its title on it is also deeply concerned with what a climate crisis future might look like for the natural world, including the dystopian yet frustratingly realistic concept of a world from which birds have almost entirely disappeared. I really don’t like to think about that possibility, which is precisely what makes Russell’s story so important, both as a unique work of climate culture and as an intervention in our own moment.

But that’s not what made Russell’s story hit me so hard the first time I read it. Her narrator and protagonist Jasper is a single father, one who is trying desperately to reconnect with his teenage daughter Starling (he’s a birder through and through) through a shared trip to try to find those titular ghost birds. It’s not just that I’m a divorced single father too, but also and especially that I think all the time about the climate crisis as it connects to my sons and their futures (not least because they have become very dedicated activists for that cause on a variety of fronts). Concerns about what the future will hold for our kids are of course one of the most universal human perspectives and experiences, and yet one that needs to be depicted through specific moments and emotions if a cultural work centered on that perspective is going to ring true. And for this reader, Russell’s story, despite its setting in a dystopian future, rings as story as any I’ve read in a while.

Last climate culture tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Climate texts of any type you’d share?

April 24, 2024: Climate Culture: “The Tradition”

[It’s hard not to think about the climate crisis every day in 2024, but it’s impossible not to do so on Earth Day. So this week in honor of that solemn occasion, I’ll AmericanStudy cultural works that represent and help us engage with climate change.]

On two complementary ways to read a climate change moment in a 21^st century sonnet.

I’ve written about the great contemporary poet Jericho Brown in multiple posts here, including this one on his wonderful TED talk and this one on a few different ways and settings in which he engages his audiences. As part of the latter post, I mentioned his poem “The Tradition” (2015), which was the first work of Brown’s I encountered (as the epigraph for Jesmyn Ward’s phenomenal 2016 collection The Fire This Time) and which I’ve had the chance to teach many times since. “The Tradition” is a particularly interesting poem from a contemporary poet in that it’s technically a sonnet, both in 14-line length and in terms of elements like the final rhyming couplet (an aspect of the Shakespearean sonnet in particular); but Brown also purposefully plays with that poetic tradition very fully, creating line and section structures that utilize yet also deconstruct the classical form, just as he brings into his diction both Latin words and deeply 21^st century details and names.

One of those 21^st century details is the poem’s allusion to climate change in its middle third (lines 5-8), where Brown writes (in between the names of flowers that are the poem’s most consistent throughline), “Summer seemed to bloom against the will/Of the sun, which news reports claimed flamed hotter/On this planet than when our dead fathers/Wiped sweat from their necks.” In a poem that’s so much defined by the relationships between tradition and change in all the ways I just highlighted, this moment certainly reflects how climate change functions as an overt disruption to even the most seemingly consistent cycles: how familiar, even indeed unchanging, elements like the sun and the seasons have become different as a result of this new reality. “News reports claimed” might make it seem that the poem’s speaker isn’t himself sure of the veracity of that reality, but the poem’s final couplet includes the phrase “Where the world ends,” so I’d argue that he is well aware of at least the possibility of those genuine changes leading to catastrophe.

On the other hand, the catastrophic losses with which “The Tradition” ends are due not to climate change or natural disaster but racist and institutional violence, as illustrated by the final line’s names of three young Black men killed by the police (“John Crawford. Eric Garner. Mike Brown.”). And seen through that lens, the poem’s climate change lines read a bit differently: as not a radical shift so much as yet another unfolding history (not unlike the systems like slavery and sharecropping alluded to with “dead fathers/Wiped sweat from their necks”) that targets people of color and the disadvantaged far more consistently and destructively than it does the planet’s more privileged communities. That kind of discriminatory targeting is its own American (and really global, but this is AmericanStudier) tradition, after all, and one that doesn’t disappear with the emergence of new 21^st century issues. All of which makes Brown’s poem an even more multilayered and meaningful work of climate culture to add into this week’s series.

Next climate culture tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Climate texts of any type you’d share?

April 23, 2024: Climate Culture: The Day After Tomorrow and Don’t Look Up

[It’s hard not to think about the climate crisis every day in 2024, but it’s impossible not to do so on Earth Day. So this week in honor of that solemn occasion, I’ll AmericanStudy cultural works that represent and help us engage with climate change.]

On the necessity but limitations of disaster movies, and an important variation.

It makes perfect sense that the first climate change film would have been a disaster movie. By far the most consistent type of disaster on which that longstanding genre focuses (although not the only one of course, and thank goodness or there’d be no Airplane!) is the natural disaster: whether relatively everyday ones like fires and floods, more extreme ones like mega-earthquakes and –tsunamis, or thoroughly extreme ones like volcanoes and asteroids, it’s very often nature that is creating the catastrophic conditions which jumpstart these movies. Which makes The Day After Tomorrow (2004), a film in which rapidly worsening climate change causes a huge number and variety of natural disasters (including pretty much all of those referenced above, among others) to strike Earth all at once, just about the most iconic disaster film of all time. In 2004 that premise seemed like dystopian science fiction; twenty years later, it hits a whole lot closer to home. But either way, I don’t know that there could be climate change cinema without the genre of the disaster film.

But here’s the thing about disaster films: they have to find their way to some sort of a happy ending. Of course there’s been plenty of destruction and death along the way, so things won’t simply return to the way they were; but for at least some of our characters, usually the protagonists natch, there’s got to be a sense at the film’s conclusion that they will be okay moving forward. (There are of course, as with every rule, exceptions.) The Day After Tomorrow certainly doesn’t try to pretend that the world hasn’t changed—indeed, one of its final moments involves astronauts on the International Space Station looking down upon a profoundly changed planet—but nonetheless, much of the film’s conclusion focuses on our main characters, who have survived the catastrophic events and are reunited with loved ones to uplifting notes on the musical score and so on. As realistic as disaster movies can (at least at times) be, that is, there’s still a layer of melodramatic storytelling that makes the genre somewhat less well-equipped to really confront the worst possibilities of the climate crisis.

And then there’s Don’t Look Up (2021). In many ways Don’t Look Up seems to be another classic disaster film, with the impending disaster this time a comet with the potential to destroy all life on Earth, the usual scientist characters who figure out the disaster before everyone else, and so on. But Don’t Look Up turns out to be a satire instead, and so all the folks in that “everyone else” don’t pay any attention to the scientists and the disaster continues unabated—right up to (SPOILERS) an ending in which apparently no one, not our protagonists or anyone else, escapes the disaster with their lives. That might seem pretty bleak, and in some ways it certainly is—but as you can see from that hyperlinked clip, there’s also a remarkable degree of tenderness and shared humanity in that ending, and I find those emotions more realistic and moving than a more typical happy ending could possibly be. As a subgenre, the climate disaster movie might just have to evolve from the familiar tropes, and if so Don’t Look Up offers at least one model for how to do so.

Next climate culture tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Climate texts of any type you’d share?