December 8-9, 2012: Lincoln, Culture, and History

[In this week that culminates in National Pearl Harbor Remembrance Day, I’ve been blogging about different aspects of how we remember World War II’s Pacific Theater (and related issues), which led up to Friday’s Pearl Harbor-centered post. I’d still love any and all responses to those posts or any related themes, but wanted to share as well my thoughts on the current film that has prompted many parallel discussions in the last few weeks.]

My take on the film that has every AmericanStudier talking.

I can’t say that I have a ton to add to the interesting and evolving conversations about Steven Spielberg’s Lincoln. For one thing, some of our most talented and compelling public scholars and historians have already weighed in: see for this example the exchanges compiled by Ta-Nehisi Coates here; or the many posts and responses on Kevin Levin’s Civil War Memory blog. I can’t recommend strongly enough that anyone interested in the film and in the questions of how it represents Lincoln, the Civil War, African Americans, and history check out those conversations, and the many spaces and voices to which they link. And to be honest, whatever my own merits as a public AmericanStudier, I have in this case one glaring flaw compared to all those voices: I haven’t seen the film yet!

So I can’t—or at least shouldn’t, because god knows us academics are more than capable of analyzing things we haven’t actually seen but should try to resist that urge whenever possible—speak to the film’s specific choices and details. I can say that I was very excited to learn that Ely Parker shows up, played by a first-time Native American actor; but subsequently disappointed to find out that he apparently has no lines and only stands behind Ulysses S. Grant in a few scenes. I suppose that detail could be said to represent in miniature the critique of the film articulated most famously by historian Kate Masur, both in New York Times op-eds and on Coates’ blog: that it includes minority characters (specifically African Americans in her critique) but does so more as background than in the leading roles they often took in the era’s social and political movements and progress. Obviously no film can do or include everything, but just as Masur wishes for even individual lines or details that could point to such active roles for characters already present in the film (like Mrs. Lincoln’s attendant Elizabeth Keckley), so too would I love the thought of Ely Parker having even a couple lines through which to represent his amazing American life and perspective.

But if we leave aside questions of what the film does and doesn’t include (on which, again, I defer in any case to those who have seen it—if you have, add your take below, please!), these conversations have also raised for me a broader issue that I wanted to highlight and on which I would also love to hear your takes, fellow AmericanStudiers. That question, which Coates himself raises in the above-linked post with which he concludes the week’s roundtable, has to do with the effects and influences of a historical film like Lincoln. Coates argues briefly for (or at least wonders aloud about) one possibility, a positive end of the spectrum, in which a film like this prompts further conversation, additional films, new voices and emphases, ongoing investigations and researches, and so on. Since such further response is one of the central goals of my own public AmericanStudying, I certainly love that idea. But I also worry about the opposite end of the spectrum—that a successful and impressive work such as Spielberg’s film can become a main source of interpretation and thus ultimately of history for many Americans, shutting down more than (or at least as much as) it opens up in our narratives and understandings of our history and identity. It’s not either-or, but these are two hugely distinct, and in many ways opposed, effects that a towering historical work can produce—and obviously each would mean very different things in terms of the exclusions or absences that worry historians such as Masur.

So what do you think? What’s your take on the film, specifically, in terms of these broader questions of effect and influence, or on any other level? Would love to hear ‘em!

Next series starts Monday,

Ben

12/8 Memory Day nominees: A tie between two unique, witty, and very talented 20^th century cultural figures, James Thurber and Sammy Davis, Jr.

12/9 Memory Day nominees: A tie between Emmett Kelly, perhaps America’s most famous clown and one of the only ones to wed that art to social commentary; and John Cassavetes, one of the godfathers of independent cinema and a truly original American artist.

December 7, 2012: AmericanStudying the Pacific, Part Five

[In this week that culminates in National Pearl Harbor Remembrance Day, I’ve been blogging about different aspects of how we remember World War II’s Pacific Theater (and related issues). That has led up to this Pearl Harbor-centered post. Please share your thoughts on these topics, World War II, memories of war, or any related themes for the weekend post!]

On the complex, challenging, and crucial question of how we remember our infamous days.

Few presidential statements have been proven as accurate by the subsequent decades as Franklin Roosevelt’s description of December 7^th, 1941 as “a date which will live in infamy.”  We have a fair number of national memory days of one kind or another, of course, but I can’t think of another that remembers anything that’s anywhere near as explicitly negative and destructive as does National Pear Harbor Remembrance Day (although of course Columbus Day would qualify from the counter-argument side). The only potential equivalent would be September 11^th, which doesn’t currently have an official remembrance day but likely will get there—and for that reason, along with many others, it’s worth considering how we remember an event like Pearl Harbor, and what the stakes are.

In the Atlantic essay that I hyperlinked under “likely will get there,” historian and educator Kevin Levin argues that, as the essay’s synopsis puts it, “Over time, our memory of national catastrophes becomes less personal and more nuanced.” But Levin’s comparison for September 11^th is to our national memories of the Civil War, and I would argue that there’s an overt and key difference between that horrific event and either 9/11 or Pearl Harbor: everyone involved in the Civil War was an American (whether they wanted to admit it at the time or not), and so after the event it became and has continued for the next 150 years to be important (for better and for worse reasons) for us to find ways to produce more nuanced and less divisive memories of it. Obviously there are American communities of which we could say the same when it comes to Pearl Harbor (ie, the Japanese Internment) and 9/11 (the anti-Muslim backlash), but the fact remains that those infamous events were caused by nations and entities outside of America, and so it’s entirely possible for us to continue to define them through a more explicitly divided, us vs. them frame.

Is that a bad thing? Not necessarily, or at least not absolutely—Pearl Harbor and 9/11 were both, in their definitely distinct ways, attacks on the United States by such external forces, and there’s no way we can or should try to remember them outside of such a frame. While I would certainly emphasize remembering those who were lost in the attacks, rather than focusing our attention on the attackers, that shift wouldn’t change the fundamental frame so much as (potentially) produce different emotional responses to it (mourning rather than anger, for example). The White House statement hyperlinked at “National Pearl Harbor Remembrance Day” in the intro section above illustrates this kind of emphasis and emotion nicely, I’d say. But to come back to Levin’s argument, I would agree with him that more nuance—more understanding of the multiple perspectives and histories contained in an event, and the various and often competing causes and elements that lead up to it, and the equally varied and in many cases still unfolding results—should always be part of our goal for such remembrance as well. That it’s far more difficult to reach for such nuance when it comes to these external attacks (compared to the Civil War) only makes the effort that much more valuable.

Crowd-sourced post this weekend,

Ben

PS. So last chance—what do you think? Thoughts on these issues and questions, on any of the week’s posts, or on any related themes for that crowd-sourced post?

12/7 Memory Day nominee: Willa Cather, for her Nebraska trilogy to be sure, but for a career’s worth of equally unique, impressive, and enduring American stories.

December 6, 2012: AmericanStudying the Pacific, Part Four

[In this week that culminates in National Pearl Harbor Remembrance Day, I’ll be blogging about different aspects of how we remember World War II’s Pacific Theater (and related issues). That’ll lead up to a Pearl Harbor-centered Friday post. Please share your thoughts on these topics, World War II, memories of war, or any related themes for the weekend post!]

On a childhood building models, and what they can help us understand.

I’m not sure exactly when it started, but by the time I was in middle school I was seriously into model-building. I know that I constructed some trucks, a few planes, maybe the occasional car, but the vast majority of the models I built were of naval ships. I distinctly remember a box in our upstairs bathroom full of those completed steel-gray models—battleships, cruisers, destroyers, aircraft carriers, PT boats, troop carriers and amphibious landers, you name it and I had at least a few in my assembled fleet. The hobby hasn’t continued into my adult years (although I look forward to making some models with my boys, and especially my very careful and mechanically minded older son), but I’m sure that the skills it helped me hone—reading and following directions, precision, patience—have come with me into lots of other aspects of my life and identity.

Yet as I think back on those model ships, I have to admit that I don’t know that they communicated much at all about the complex realities of their uses, their histories, the battles and conflicts in which they participated. Obviously they weren’t necessarily designed to do so—or at least I’ve never encountered a plastic model that comes with any way to represent the effects of explosions, of aeriel bombardment or ship-to-ship combat, or the like—and there’s no reason why they would have to; there are plenty of other ways for interested young people to learn about war, after all. But you could make the case, and I think I might be inclined to agree, that in the absence of any such contexts and complications, military models can help convey ideals of war as a purely exciting and noble pursuit, something that every young person can imagine participating in heroically. For one of the most clear and compelling accounts of such youthful ideals and what they can produce, I can’t recommend strongly enough Ron Kovic’s Born on the Fourth of July (1976).

I remember one model that was very different, though. That was a model of the beachhead at Tarawa (that’s not the one I had, but it’s not dissimilar), the Pacific Island which became the site of one of World War II’s most horrific and destructive battles. The model of course couldn’t convey every detail of the battle, but it did a couple of things that were distinct from the ships: it forced me to consider the experiences and lives (and deaths) of the individual soldiers I was putting down on the beachhead; and it inspired me to investigate the battle I was assembling, and so to learn about the U.S. casualties, the Japanese defenders who literally fought to the last man to hold the island, and so on. Doing so didn’t stop me from working on those other kinds of models, but it did make it much harder for me to entirely ignore or elide the contexts—or, more exactly, the defining realities—of the Pacific Theater, of World War II, and of war in general. That’s a perspective worth modeling, I’d say.

Next Pacific-inspired post tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Thoughts on these issues, on modeling or other connectinos to war, or on any related themes for the weekend post?

12/6 Memory Day nominee: Ira Gershwin, who with his brother and partner George contributed some of America’s most memorable and enduring songs and musicals.

December 5, 2012: AmericanStudying the Pacific, Part Three

[In this week that culminates in National Pearl Harbor Remembrance Day, I’ll be blogging about different aspects of how we remember World War II’s Pacific Theater (and related issues). That’ll lead up to a Pearl Harbor-centered Friday post. Please share your thoughts on these topics, World War II, memories of war, or any related themes for the weekend post!]

On the clear and telling differences between two similarly star-studded World War II films.

Jack Smight’s Midway (1976) and Terrence Malick’s The Thin Red Line (1998) have more in common than just their Pacific Theater settings. Or at least they have one pretty obvious and striking thing in common: each uses a huge and star-studded cast to capture a wide range of soldier and officer experiences within its focal battle. Midway features Henry Fonda, Glenn Ford, Charlton Heston, Hal Holbrook, James Coburn, Dabney Coleman, Robert Mitchum, Toshiro Mifune, Pat Morita, Cliff Robertson, Robert Wagner, and Erik Estrada (among others!); Line includes Sean Penn, Adrien Brody, Jim Caviezel, George Clooney, John Cusack, Woody Harrelson, Nick Nolte, John C. Reilly, and John Travolta (to say nothing of the equally big-name actors, such as Martin Sheen, Billy Bob Thornton, and Gary Oldman, whose parts were cut by Malick during editing). When it comes to cast size and scope, the two films are similarly old-school epics to be sure.

The similarities pretty much end there, though, and while some of the differences can be attributed to Malick’s particular and very unique style—see: long, long shots of waving grass and the like—others can reveal a great deal about both the eras in which the films were made and the distinct genres in which they could be classified. For example, Midway makes significant use of stock footage, both from wartime camera shots of aerial battles and from numerous other films (American and Japanese); Malick’s film features no such footage. That’s partly a difference in period, as the use of stock footage was still somewhat common in the 1970s and has almost entirely disappeared from filmmaking in the decades since (other than in rare and significant cases such as Forrest Gump). But to my mind it also reveals a key difference in the films’ emphases and goals: Midway is largely uninterested in engaging critically or analytically with the history it portrays, focusing instead on the character identities, interactions, and communities as they experience those events; whereas in Line individual characters come and go almost at random (and again, some were dropped entirely in post-production), making the history itself far more consistently central than any particular identities or interactions—and making the battle scenes the film’s acknowledged centerpieces, rather than simply stock footage to be quickly shown before we get back to the characters.

To connect those distinct emphases to genre, I would argue that the films break down along the “period fiction” vs. “historical fiction” line that I delineated in this post. As I noted there, such a distinction is never absolute when it comes to individual works—it would be silly to claim that Midway could be set against the backdrop of any battle without changing in one important way or another; and some of Line’s key themes of individual choice and war’s destructiveness could be located in any military conflict. Moreover, it’s important to note that Midway includes an interesting subplot dealing with a very specific and important history, that of the Japanese Internment. Yet those qualifications notwithstanding, Midway is to my mind about its star-studded cast, and the individual characters they create and interactions they portray; while Line’s famously haphazard usage of its equally starry cast makes clear how much Malick sees those individuals as instead part of a larger and more central tapestry. While that distinction does to my mind make Malick’s the more historically complex and interesting film, the truth, as so often in this space, is this: watching both provides a particularly balanced picture of how epic films can portray war.

Next Pacific-inspired post tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Thoughts on these issues, on either or both of these films, or on any related themes for the weekend post?

12/5 Memory Day nominees: A tie between two titanic 20^th century cultural icons and influences, Walt Disney and Little Richard.

December 4, 2012: AmericanStudying the Pacific, Part Two

[In this week that culminates in National Pearl Harbor Remembrance Day, I’ll be blogging about different aspects of how we remember World War II’s Pacific Theater (and related issues). That’ll lead up to a Pearl Harbor-centered Friday post. Please share your thoughts on these topics, World War II, memories of war, or any related themes for the weekend post!]

Trying to make sense of the two very different, and even opposed, public roles served by San Diego’s most unique historic site.

Floating in San Diego’s harbor, just a few hundred yards away from the city’s downtown, is a hugely singular and compelling public space: the U.S.S. Midway, a formerly operational aircraft carrier that has (since 2004) served as a naval and aviation museum. The museum offers visitors at least three distinct visions into the lives of naval sailors and aviators: on the flight deck, a number of actual planes and helicopters, many of which the visitors can sit in; in the hangar beneath (alongside a few more planes), flight simulators and other re-creations of piloting and wartime experiences; and below-decks, an elaborately preserved and re-created vision of everyday life aboard the carrier for its officers, aviators, and sailors. My boys were particularly struck by the laundry room, with loads of fake clothes tumbling in the giant washers and dryers, and detailed depictions of the sailors whose job it was to carry the hundred-pound bags of laundry around the ship.

That laundry room illustrates what is to my mind the most significant and inspiring public role of the Midway museum: to help 21^st century visitors understand the experiences and identities of those men and women who served aboard the carrier and its many sister ships, at all times but most especially during times of war. As I wrote in my first Veteran’s Day post (in analysis of the post-World War II film The Best Years of Our Lives), when it comes to American Studiers and our connections to the American past, there are few acts of empathy more important than such understandings of what the experiences of war and military service have entailed; obviously such experiences are hugely varied, both in different periods/wars and for different individuals, but nonetheless a museum like the Midway offers a very striking and effective means to create those connections with past servicemen and women. I’ve visited a number of battlefields and other wartime historic sites, and would rank the Midway (and particularly its below-decks exhibits) among the most effective such connection-creators I’ve encountered.

There’s another side to that connection, though, and it’s one that is to my mind much less historical and more propagandistic. On the Midway I found it illustrated most succinctly by the placard in front of one of the flight deck planes; the placard was describing the plane’s role during the Vietnam War, and noted that it was frequently used for “close-in bombing” in the war’s later stages. Which is to say, although the placard was careful not to say this: these bombers almost certainly participated in President Nixon’s often secret, likely illegal, and thoroughly despicable carpet-bombing campaigns of Cambodia and Laos; even if they didn’t, they most likely dropped napalm and other weapons of mass deconstruction indiscriminately on North Vietnamese villages. Such bombings are quite possibly, as I wrote in my post on Dresden, an inevitable part of war; but that inevitability does not in any way elide their horrific brutality, and it most definitely did not make me view the plane being connected to such bombings with anything other than horror. But in the context of the Midway, with its stated motto of “Live the Adventure, Honor the Legend,” Vietnam and its bombing raids are folded into that adventurous, honorable, legendary history—which is perhaps just as disturbing as the bombings themselves.

A multifaceted, complex, and vital American Studies, public historic site for sure! Next Pacific-inspired post tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Thoughts on these issues, on the Midway, on historic sites, or on any related themes for the weekend post?

12/4 Memory Day nominee: Cornell Woolrich, the crime and suspense novelist known as the father of noir, not only for his books but for the many influential films that came from them.

December 3, 2012: AmericanStudying the Pacific, Part One

[In this week that culminates in National Pearl Harbor Remembrance Day, I’ll be blogging about different aspects of how we remember World War II’s Pacific Theater (and related issues). That’ll lead up to a Pearl Harbor-centered Friday post. Please share your thoughts on these topics, World War II, memories of war, or any related themes for the weekend post!]

On the more and less meaningful, complex, and valuable ways in which we remember wars.

Michael Kammen, whose Mystic Chords of Memory: The Transformation of Tradition in American Culture (1991) changed my life when I read it in college and remains one of the best American Studies books I’ve ever read (and is just one of many great books he’s written), has persuasively argued that we need at least two distinct concepts for public memory: remembrance, which would describe genuine attempts to remember the past in all its complexity; and commemoration, which would categorize those efforts that are more simplifying and mythologizing, and usually more tied to present concerns than to the past itself. Kammen goes into much more detail and nuance than that, as would I, but ultimately I do think there’s significant value to separating out such thoroughly distinct kinds of public (and at least potentially, for that matter, private) memory and history.

There are many applications for that two-part concept, but in following up on an earlier post on the Tuskegee Airmen, it seems to me that our memories of war are particularly ripe for this kind of analysis. I’m thinking especially about cultural memories, stories and representations of war in popular culture—like Lucas’s Red Tails, and like so, so many other war films, TV shows, novels, and more. I would argue that many, if not the vast majority, of those cultural representations are commemorative (which doesn’t have to mean celebratory); that whether the cultural sources seek to celebrate wartime heroism (as does Lucas’ film) to attack the brutalities and horrors of war (as does for example Stanley Kubrick’s Full Metal Jacket), or to stake out any position in between, they almost always create simplified and even mythologized depictions of war in service of their agendas and goals. They might incidentally introduce complexities and even contradictions (an ironic critique of American racism within the celebratory Red Tails; a positive depiction of soldierly comraderie in the cynical world of Jacket), but to my mind their overall construction of war is far closer to commemoration than to remembrance.

We do have models in our popular culture for remembering rather than commemorating war, though. One such model is when a talented artist builds on but deepens and amplifies his or her personal experiences of war and creates a complex and powerful text as a result—Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse Five is one such text, as are the best novels by Tim O’Brien. Just as important, however, are those models that don’t depend on personal experience (at least not of the artist him or herself), and for that I would highlight two complementary films from one of my Memory Day nominees: Clint Eastwood’s Flags of Our Fathers and Letters from Iwo Jima. If we try to consider what a battle like Iwo Jima, or a war like World War II, would look like and mean for those fighting it on both sides, it seems to me that we’re a long way toward remembering war in all its complexities. And it doesn’t hurt that Flags itself focuses directly on the most destructive effects of an emphasis on commemoration, in that case in the post-war lives of the Iwo Jima flag raisers.

Commemoration has its value, as Kammen certainly acknowledges. But you know me well enough to know that I greatly prefer remembrance—even more so when it comes to a complex, dark, and crucial historical theme like war. Next Pacific-inspired post tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Thoughts on these issues, on Iwo Jima, on Eastwood’s films, or on any related themes for the weekend post?

12/3 Memory Day nominee: Gilbert Stuart, who painted some of America’s first and most memorable portraits, and whose images continue to influence how we remember the Revolutionary era.

December 1-2, 2012: Chilly Crowd-sourcing

[This week’s series has focused on interesting and telling images of winter in American culture. This crowd-sourced post is drawn from the ideas and responss of my fellow AmericanStudiers to that topic and the week’s posts—please add your stone cold suggestions!]

In response to Monday’s post on snow, Monica Jackson writes, “This post made me think of Where the Wild Things Are (movie version). I was excited to take my older son to see it when it came out, but in the film the story is so depressing and I think it's because of the snow. Max is sad, alone, and angry because the teenagers are too rough when playing with the snow. They break his fort and hurt him unintentionally, but then it leads into a string of depressing issues that always seem to arise during the winter months. There are layers to winter and snow. It's nice to look at, brings up memories or associations, but it leaves your fingers numb and if you get hit with a snowball, it will sting.”

Following up the same post, Ronny Belmontes considers the film Cinderella Man, and specifically the way in which winter can be the toughest time for those experiencing economic and familial hardships; and so Ronny reflects on how Jim Braddock’s young children (as represented in that film) were forced to grow up particularly fast in their coldest moments.

Rob Velella follows up the Fireside Poets post, writing, “I love your reading of "Snow-Bound" by putting it in the context of post-bellum America. It's also interesting to note how radical Whittier must have looked in his earlier period when he was using his poetry almost exclusively for the abolitionist cause (and he wrote some violently angry poetry for a Quaker). Longfellow, by far the superior poet, also wrote out against slavery before, as I say, using his poetry as a unifying force to create the American identity - to that end, he used history, calming imagery, etc. The reality was, of course, that it worked, which is reflected by his popularity. Further, I agree with your conclusion: I wouldn't take any of these folks out of our literary history.”

Steve Edwards follows up the post on holiday classics by highlighting this interesting and informative story on a revised scene from Rudolph.

On Twitter, Luke Dietrich highlights a couple complex American literary representations of snow: “Wallace Stevens' ‘The Snow Man’ is a favorite. The end of Ann Petry's novel The Street sees NYC blanketed in snow.”

Next series starts Monday,

Ben

PS. What do you think? What images or ideas of winter would you highlight?

12/1 Memory Day nominees: A tie between William Mahone, the Confederate officer whose complex and inspiring trajectory led to one of the post-war south’s most succesful biracial political parties; and Minoru Yamasaki, the architect who helped his parents escape the Japanese Internment and went on to design the World Trade Towers.

12/2 Memory Day nominee: Harry Burleigh, the composer, musician, and singer who contributed significantly not only to American music, but to Dvorak’s “From the New World.”