April 4, 2025: Foolish Texts: Fool

[For this year’s April Fool’s series, I’ll be AmericanStudying cultural works with “fool” in the title. Share your thoughts on foolish texts, with or without the word, for a fool-hearty crowd-sourced weekend post!]

First, repeating yesterday’s a bit of inside baseball: I haven’t yet had a chance to check out either of the texts on which my last two posts in this series will focus. I don’t want to pretend to have specific things to say about them, but I did want to both highlight them and use them as a lens for broader AmericanStudies questions. So in honor of Christopher Moore’s 2009 novel reframing King Lear from the Fool’s perspective, here are AmericanStudies takeaways from a trio of similar such Shakespearean adaptations:

1)      Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead (1966): Tom Stoppard’s play is quite simply one of the most unique and compelling cultural works I’ve ever encountered, and I’d say the 1990 film adaptation captures its essence (if you’re able to check that out more easily than the play). There are a lot of reasons why, from the philosophical debates to the witty wordplay to the ultimate pathos, but I’d say a significant element in the play’s success is integral to this broader genre of cultural text: it reminds us that many of our greatest literary works (especially from earlier centuries, although the trend undoubtedly continues) focus too fully on elite characters and worlds, and that it’s worth stopping to consider how different the story and our takeaways from it alike might look from the perspective of others (to foreshadow next week’s series, Myrtle Wilson, anyone?).

2)      Shakespeare in Love (1998): Look, I know there are people who think this film (co-written by Tom Stoppard!) is one of the most overrated ever, not least because it beat out Spielberg’s Saving Private Ryan for the Best Picture Oscar. Maybe all I need to say here is that I 1000% support that Oscar win, and think this is one of the most clever, funny, and ultimately moving films I’ve ever seen. But even if you don’t agree with all of that, I think it’s undeniable that Shakespeare offers a unique and thoughtful perspective on both the creative process and how it intersects with broader historical events. Given how much we tend to think of plays like Romeo and Juliet as timeless or universal, I very much appreciate this film’s reminder that it was created in one time and place, by a playwright and a group of collaborators fully and importantly immersed in that world.

3)      Opheliamachine (2013): I’ve only had the chance to read that Google Books excerpt of Magda Romanska’s postmodern drama (which as you can see only features peripheral materials for and about the play), and so will mostly direct you to check out that excerpt as well as the Wikipedia entry on what sounds like a fascinating attempt to adapt Shakespeare’s characters in a 21^st century world. While there are lots of reasons to create such adaptations, as just these few examples of the genre clearly reflect, I’d say their most important effect is precisely Romanska’s goal: to help us think further about both the original work and our own moment, on their own terms but also and especially in conversation with each other. I love this genre for both those reasons, and look forward to reading Fool soon to add another example!

Crowd-sourced post this weekend,

Ben

PS. So one more time: what do you think? Foolish texts you’d share?

April 3, 2025: Foolish Texts: This Fool

[For this year’s April Fool’s series, I’ll be AmericanStudying cultural works with “fool” in the title. Share your thoughts on foolish texts, with or without the word, for a fool-hearty crowd-sourced weekend post!]

First, a bit of inside baseball: I haven’t yet had a chance to check out either of the texts on which my last two posts in this series will focus. I don’t want to pretend to have specific things to say about them, but I did want to both highlight them and use them as a lens for broader AmericanStudies questions. So in honor of the acclaimed recent sitcom about cholo young men and their families and communities in LA, some thoughts on three other Latino cultural works that each redefined their respective genres (as that sitcom seems to have):

1)      Ruiz de Burton’s novels: Between that post for the American Writers Museum blog and posts here like this one, I’ve said a good bit about María Amparo Ruiz de Burton, one of my favorite 19^th century American authors and a truly unique voice and perspective on our history, community, identity, and more. Here I’ll just add one thing: I wrote in this post about my friend Larry Rosenwald’s excellent book Multilingual America: Language and the Making of American Literature (2008), and while Ruiz de Burton published her novels in English, I’d still say she exemplifies a multilingual literary legacy that can help us radically reframe what American literature itself includes and means.

2)      The Salt of the Earth (1954): When it comes to this groundbreaking film about Latino and labor history, I can’t say it any better than did the great film historian Vaughn Joy in that first hyperlinked post for her Review Roulette newsletter. In many ways Salt is in conversation with other films about labor history, including one of my personal favorites from my favorite filmmaker, John Sayles’ Matewan (1987). But in the mid-1950s, with the horrific Operation Wetback in frustratingly full swing, a film about Latino workers represents a truly radical cultural work—and one that likewise embodies an alternative vision of what the era’s “social problem films” could be and do.

3)      In the Heights (2005): As part of a 2016 series on Puerto Rican stories and histories, I wrote about West Side Story (1957), which as I noted there started with very distinct cultural backgrounds for its protagonists before evolving to feature a Puerto Rican heroine (and her even more overtly Puerto Rican friends and community). Given that multilayered evolution, I’d say that the title of “first Latino Broadway musical” was still up for grabs, and that In the Heights might well qualify. But such distinctions are ultimately less important than what cultural works themselves feature and do, and there’s no doubt that the voices and beats, the identities and communities, put on stage by Lin-Manuel Miranda and Quiara Alegría Hudes added something significant to the genre of the Broadway musical, as each of these texts has in its respective genres.

Last foolish text tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Foolish texts you’d share?

April 2, 2025: Foolish Texts: Nobody’s Fool

[For this year’s April Fool’s series, I’ll be AmericanStudying cultural works with “fool” in the title. Share your thoughts on foolish texts, with or without the word, for a fool-hearty crowd-sourced weekend post!]

Two important American Studies lessons from one of our quirkier, funnier, and more affecting late 20^th century films.

Nobody’s Fool (1994), the Paul Newman starring vehicle based on the 1993 Richard Russo novel of the same name (which I will admit, in a very non-literature professor moment, to not having read), is a very funny movie. It’s funny in its script, which includes plenty of laugh-out-loud funny insults, retorts, and quips; Newman’s Sully gets the lion’s share, but perhaps the single funniest line is given to a judge who critiques a trigger-happy local policemen by noting, “You know my feelings on arming morons: you arm one, you’ve got to arm them all, otherwise it wouldn’t be good sport.” And it’s just as funny in its world, its creation of a cast of quirky and memorable characters (who, not coincidentally, are played by some of our most talented character actors, including Jessica Tandy in her final role). That those same characters are ultimately the source of a number of hugely moving moments is a testament to the film’s (and probably book’s) true greatness.

Unlike many of the other late 20^th and early 21^st century films I’ve discussed in this space—Lone Star and City of Hope, Gangs of New York, Jungle Fever and Mississippi Masala, and many more—Nobody’s Fool is not explicitly engaged with significant American Studies issues. But that doesn’t mean that there aren’t American Studies lessons to be learned from its subtle and wise perspectives on identity and community. For one thing, Sully’s most central culminating perspective (SPOILER alert, here and in the next paragraph!) is a powerful and important vision of our interconnectedness to the many communities of which we’re a meaningful part: “I just found out I’m somebody’s grandfather. And somebody’s father. And maybe I’m somebody’s friend in the bargain,” Sully notes, rejecting a tempting but escapist future in favor of staying where he is; while he has ostensibly known about all these relationships for years, what he has realized through the film’s events is both how significant these roles are for his own identity and life, and how much his presence or absence in relation to them will in turn influence the people and communities around him.

If Sully has learned that specific, significant lesson by the film’s end, he has also, more simply yet perhaps even more crucially, done something else: recognized the possibility for change. Sully’s not a young man by the time we meet him, and it’s fair to say that he’s very set in his ways; one of his first lines of the film, in response to his landlady (Tandy) offering him tea, is “No. Not now, not ever,” and the exchange becomes a mantra of sorts for the film, shorthand for Sully’s routines (with every person in his life) and the fixity of his perspective and voice. So it’s particularly salient that the film ends with an extended and different version of this exchange: “No. How many times do I have to tell you?” Newman replies, and Tandy answers, “Other people change their minds occasionally. I keep thinking you might.” “You do? Huh,” are Newman’s final words in the film, and he delivers them with surprise and, it seems to me, a recognition, paired with the earlier epiphany about interconnections, that perhaps Tandy is right, and he has future shifts ahead of him that he can’t yet imagine. If the American future is going to be all that it might be, that’s going to depend on most—perhaps all—of us being open to change, most especially in our own identities and perspectives; Sully’s only begun that trajectory, but exemplifies its possibility, at any point in our lives and arcs, for sure.

Next foolish text tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Foolish texts you’d share?

April 1, 2025: Foolish Texts: “Won’t Get Fooled Again”

[For this year’s April Fool’s series, I’ll be AmericanStudying cultural works with “fool” in the title. Share your thoughts on foolish texts, with or without the word, for a fool-hearty crowd-sourced weekend post!]

On AmericanStudies lessons and limits from an English classic rock anthem.

In one of my early posts, nearly 14 years ago, I wrote about the Australian rock band Midnight Oil (whose excellent latest album I included in this much more recent post), and the limits but also and especially the possibilities of the transnational turn in AmericanStudies. Since I’m writing about a song by another rock group from outside of the US, England’s The Who, in today’s post, I’d ask you to check out that prior one (the first hyperlink above), and then come on back for some thoughts on that transnational band and one of their biggest hits.

Welcome back! The Who’s “Won’t Get Fooled Again” (1971) is very much a product of its early 1970s moment, and specifically of a rising sense of pessimism and even cynicism about the prior decade’s social movements and efforts to change the world. That tone is present throughout the song, but most especially in the chorus: “I’ll tip my hat to the new Constitution/Take a bow for the new revolution/Smile and grin at the change all around/Pick up my guitar and play/Just like yesterday/Then I’ll get on my knees and pray/We don’t get fooled again.” A lot has been written about how Watergate contributed to an erosion of trust and shift away from 1960s idealism in the early to mid-1970s, but this song (featured on the album Who’s Next) came out nearly two years before that scandal began to break, and despite its English origins I have to think it can be contextualized in similar perspectives in the US as well. The transition between decades is never a singular nor linear one, but that doesn’t mean that there aren’t moments of demarcation, and I’d say this Who song can help us identify one between the 60s and 70s.

At the same time, it’s fair to say that a bunch of English white men aren’t going to be the best judges of what did and didn’t take place for disadvantaged American communities, and I think this Who song also features some less apt moments along those lines. For example, there’s the second verse: “A change, it had to come/We knew it all along/We were liberated from the fold, that’s all/And the world looks just the same/And history ain’t changed/’Cause the banners, they were all flown in the last war.” Maybe that last line is an anti-Vietnam War sentiment, in which case fair enough on that score, but when it comes to American domestic history I think it’s impossible to argue that the world looked just the same after 1960s changes like (for example) the Civil Rights Movement, the women’s movement, the Great Society programs, and more. I’m not a historian of England, and maybe less had really changed across the pond during this turbulent decade; but here in the US, I think it’d be foolish to suggest that “history ain’t changed” over that time.

Next foolish text tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Foolish texts you’d share?