February 8, 2022: SportsLiteratureStudying: Play for a Kingdom

[For this year’s Super Bowl week series, I wanted to write about some of our great works of sports literature. Leading up to a special Guest Post from an FSU English Studies alum & budding sports journalist!]

On baseball, America, and the Civil War.

Far more knowledgeable baseball historians than I have long debated the sport’s origins, and specifically the role that famous “inventor” Abner Doubleday did or did not play in creating our national pasttime (or even whether said national pasttime was in fact invented in a different nation, one from which we had recently declared independence no less!). It’s an interesting and important debate, one that touches on not only 19^th century history, the development of mythological narratives in communities and nations, and how culture moves and changes across international borders, but also on the ongoing role that sports plays in our collective consciousness and imaginations. But to my mind, it’s also deeply meaningful that the invention of baseball has long been tied to Doubleday, a man otherwise most famous as a decorated Union officer during the Civil War.

Doubleday’s supposed and contested invention of the sport took place well before the war, in Cooperstown (NY) in 1839. But I would argue that many of our collective narratives of baseball’s earliest days are closely tied to the Civil War, to images of soldiers playing sandlot games during the downtime between battles and campaigns. In part remembering the war in that way offers a peaceful alternative to the war’s most dominant images, a way to imagine and contemplate Civil War soldiers that doesn’t focus solely on the conflict and violence and loss that so defined the war years. But on the other hand, the images of Civil War baseball games could be read as a direct (if of course bloodless) complement to the war’s battles—in which, similarly, “teams” that might well have been friendly or even related off of the diamond became bitter adversaries once they stepped onto that field, one from which only one side could emerge victorious (there are no ties in baseball, as the saying famously goes).

Both sides to baseball and the Civil War are captured in the best historical novel about that subject (and one of the best baseball novels period), Thomas Dyja’s Play for a Kingdom (1998). Dyja’s novel imagines a chance 1864 encounter between Union and Confederate soldiers engaged in the bloody battle of Spotsylvania, an encounter that turns into a series of baseball games contested alongside (and, gradually, intertwined with) the battle itself. Dyja nicely illustrates how the games serve not only as a distraction from the battle, but also and just as crucially as a parallel to it, one in which shifting relationships and allegiances, as well as the soldier’s individual personalities and perspectives, cannot ultimately lessen the harder and more absolute truths of war. Whatever its other starting points, baseball—like America—was created anew during the Civil War, and Dyja’s novel helps us contemplate those complex and vital points of origin.

Next SportsLitStudying tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Other sports literature or writing you’d highlight?

February 7, 2022: SportsLiteratureStudying: YA Lit

[For this year’s Super Bowl week series, I wanted to write about some of our great works of sports literature. Leading up to a special Guest Post from an FSU English Studies alum & budding sports journalist!]

How three very different but equally talented American authors can reveal the stages of a youthful AmericanStudier’s perspectives on sports, America, and life.

When I was a kid, my growing interest in the stories and dramas of sports, and especially baseball, found literary expression in the novels of Matt Christopher. Christopher’s novels focus on very believable and universal conflicts as faced, and eventually overcome, by their youthful protagonists; as illustrated by my favorite baseball book of his, Catcher with a Glass Arm (1985), such conflicts include the psychological effects of being beaned and peer teasing over an athletic weakness. While there may have been occasional details that revealed the particular setting or time period of the books, I don’t remember any, and my instinct is not: Christopher’s explicit goal was to create books that spanned places and times, to which any reader could connect with equal interest and meaning.

As I started to develop into a teenage AmericanStudier (kind of like a teenage werewolf, but more consistent and less scary), I started to want sports and baseball novels that engaged more overtly with those historical and social questions, that felt as if they were a part of our national narratives and stories. A book like Philip Roth’s The Great American Novel (1973) was funny and over-the-top and compelling, but the baseball was a bit too metaphorical for it to qualify as a sports novel; Ring Lardner’s You Know Me, Al (1916) was extremely realistic and biting but a bit too cynical for my young taste. For me, as apparently for many teenage AmericanStudiers, the pinnacle of these contextualized, real world baseball novels were the works of John Tunis, and specifically his classic The Kid From Tomkinsville (1940). Tunis’s novel exists in, and more exactly captures, its Depression-era America quite fully without losing a bit of its narrative excitement; indeed, by the end the Kid’s baseball story and the story of a damaged but resilient America seem very much to have merged.

I haven’t outgrown my love for Tunis—writing this post makes me want to reread Kid right now, actually—but I have to admit that I have in the years since discovered an author and novel that even more impressively exemplify what an American baseball story can be and do. David James Duncan’s The Brothers K (1992) might seem to be about much more than baseball—it’s a rewriting of The Brothers Karamazov that’s also a multigenerational family saga of the 1950s and 60s, Vietnam, the counter-culture, religion, writing, Eastern spirituality, sibling rivalries and bonds, humor, love, and more—yet at the same time it’s entirely about baseball, not as metaphor so much as metonym, as a representation of the worst and best of American dreams and identities and histories and possibilities. It might be both the great American novel (it’s definitely one of the greatest under-read ones) and the greatest baseball novel, and for this AmericanStudier that combination is most definitely, yes, a grand slam.

Next SportsLitStudying tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Other sports literature or writing you’d highlight?

February 5-6, 2022: Crowd-sourced Bill MurrayStudying

[To celebrate one of our strangest holidays, Groundhog Day, this week I’ve AmericanStudied that film as well as four others in the long and unique career of Bill Murray. Leading up to this crowd-sourced post featuring more MurrayStudying takes—add yours in comments, please!]

To start with a great overall take on Murray, Jeremy Ruby tweets, “Bill Murray is a rarity in American films. He’s gone from likable sarcastic slacker to serious actor, Lost in Translation and Hyde Park on Hudson are examples of his serious work. He’s done some problematic work & he’s done some amazing work. Time periods define much of his work.” He follows up the Lost post later in the week, adding, “Lost in Translation is his magnum opus. He’s a burnt-out movie star who goes to Japan for a marketing campaing. Along the way he discovers himself and slowly absorbs a culture much different to his own. Murray has moved into the cool older guy persona that Chive has tapped into.”

And on a different introductory note, Kait Tonti shares, “My favorite thing Bill Murray was when he used to show up at the Prudential Center or Madison Square Garden when Seton Hall played Xavier—because his son was the Assistant Coach for Xavier men's BB.”

In response to Monday’s Tootsie post, Candy Thomson writes, “I never thought of Les’s comment as vicious, more like the blustery blurting of a man born in the late 1930s/early 1940s bewildered by a unfathomable situation caused by his desire for companionship. I could hear my dad saying it. And you are right about the movie’s final lines. I walked out of the theater in 1982 feeling optimistic about man/woman relationships, which is saying a lot for a rom-com.”

And Paige Wallace shares, “I’m actually seeing Tootsie on Broadway (in Sacramento) in May!”

In response to Wednesday’s Groundhog Day post, some great conversations about that film in this thread.

Lydia Currie writes, “My mom feels that the existential horror of living the same day over and over again with no means of escape is WAY played down. I have heard that the original cut of the movie was much darker.” And on that note, Jeff Renye shares this unique take on Groundhog Day as a horror film from The Atlantic.

And Lito Velasco, one of the most passionate and thoughtful FilmStudiers I know, writes, “At risk of sounding like a two-cent phil-osopher (see what I did there?), I honestly consider Groundhog Day to be ESSENTIAL film viewing for anyone—and especially for those of us who find ourselves in an ongoing battle against depression, inner demons, and our ‘lesser’ natures and aspects of ourselves. To me, the film is a beautiful, hilarious, heartwarming, and sometimes heartbreaking (I dare anyone to challenge my saying that the visuals and music in the scene with Murray ‘letting go’ and falling from the tower isn't one of the most devastatingly-beautiful scenes in any film from that era) examination of what it means to be human—the daily struggles, the battle for self and identity, the wonder and beauty of common and everyday moments, the need to be there for our fellow man, and the importance of trying to be the best version of ourselves possible. I find it to be Ramis' best film, one of Murray's finest, most-nuanced and hysterical performances, and accessible to just about anyone and everyone, at any age, and every year. It's easily one of my favorite films of all time and one I return to, like clockwork, every February 2^nd—not just for the entertainment, but for the reminders and wisdom it imparts upon me every single time I watch.”

 

On Lost in Translation, Lito adds, “That's another one of my favorite films- and most definitely one of my faves from the early 2000s. It has such a quiet, bewitching, beautiful power to it that always leaves me quaking with tears at the end. That haunting feeling of loss, disconnect, and loneliness that lies beneath the moments and performances is just breathtaking. How we can be WITH people in the midst of such a busy setting and yet also feel so totally abandoned by those same people and our lives themselves... powerful, moving stuff. And Murray and Scarlett are both at the top of their games in that film, in my opinion, conveying what the script and film needs with such exquisite, subtle perfection.” He adds, “And, just to be sure I'm not misrepresenting the film: I should also mention that I adore the journey of self-discovery on the part of the two leads, but...there's something about that discovery that also brings with it this sense of loss, which I suppose is inherent in many sorts of evolutions.”

For a different take on Scrooged from that in my Groundhog Day post, here’s our best ChristmasFilmStudier, Gracie Vaughn Joy: “Scrooged is excessively violent to the point of absurdism. And you (and Roger Ebert) are right that it's unsettling, but contextually I think it's a brilliant use of slapstick. Slapstick meets the moment in every era it's used appropriately in, and Scrooged employs extreme violent slapstick in the 1980s which are an absolutely absurd decade. Politically, the domestic messaging is a false assertion of calm, serene status quo while foreign affairs are rapidly modernising and global threats are consistently rising from places that have never been global-powers before. It's absurd. Reagan's entire administration and 8-year term are absurd contradictions to the actual lived experience of many Americans in the 80s. That's why so many of the prominent comedians in the 80s are SNL alumni who relied on quick slapstick satirical routines that embraced absurdity. And it's why Scrooged conceptually makes sense as a grotesque caricature of slapstick. And that absurdity in the slapstick is precisely why I think the abrupt and excessively saccharine redemption speech works so well because it embraces the absurd atmosphere while telling the audience absurd isn't normal but we can find normality in absurdity and make it work for us. Slapstick is used in moments of political uncertainty and I think Scrooged is a perfect example of using slapstick to counter a rapidly changing world that the dominant political narrative refuses to engage with by presenting the status quo of the film as absurdist and then undercutting it all with a cloyingly sweet speech. And the speech itself I think is more effective than Scrooge's redemption. Scrooge changes on an individual level and it impacts his immediate contacts, but, as far as we are told, he never shares the message of his new philosophy. He never details why he has changed or how. He internalises the message of goodwill and generosity, which is great for the individual but is still selfish to a degree. He doesn't fulfill the other unspoken ask of Marley which is to cultivate the same generosity in others and pay his experience forward. He donates money and raises Bob's salary but he never apologises for how he has treated Bob. Frank, on the other hand, externalises his experience and shares his new philosophy with others in a plea for more people to join him in embracing compassion and the ‘miracle’ of generosity. Sure he has access to a live broadcast nationwide while Scrooge lives in Victorian England, but Scrooge doesn't even attempt to explain his change of heart.”

Other BillMurrayStudying:

One of our best young filmmakers, Melanie Mazzarini, writes, “My bf had the chance to work with him on Moonrise Kingdom and only has positive memories of him. As a child, for some reason Meatballs defined my life. He’s just a master of comedy while also pulling off such serious roles—just a darling actor.”

Dave Grubb notes, “Can’t say much about Groundhog Day, but Bill Murray single-handedly changed the course of the NBA, specifically the re-emergence and freedom of Michael Jordan. He is a hero.”

On Twitter, John Webb writes, “Big fan of his ventriloquist in Cradle Will Rock … more parallels with ‘Economic Anxiety’-inspired thoughts that came out of all those diners than I’m comfortable with yet remained human and frail. Because Murray always finds the humanity. And there’s something in that here.”

Nathaniel C. Green tweets nominations for Scrooged and Caddyshack, and adds, “Maybe an unpopular opinion, but I think Groundhog Day is waaay overrated.” (See the above thread for his further threads and other voices including mine!)

Jeff Renye nominates the criminally under-remembered What about Bob? And Melissa Kujala adds, “What about Bob? is one of my favorite movies!”

Anne Bean writes, “Quick Change is the funniest, most-underrated, Bill Murray movie.”

Anne Holub goes with Stripes!

Andrew DaSilva highlights “Bill Murray in serious roles, such as Maugham's The Razor's Edge. Or my personal favorite Lost in Translation. One done at the start of his career, the other done in his later career, both wonderful movies. Show he can do much more than just laughs. And of course who could forget his FDR in Hyde Park on Hudson I saw that 4 times at the cinema.”

Lara Schwartz writes, “Zombieland is a meta Bill Murray movie and so American.”

Francesca Lewis adds, “I know it’s only a small part, but Bill Murray in Zombieland cracks me up every time I watch that movie. His dramatic death and guilt tripping gets me every time.”

AnneMarie Donahue shares the documentary The Bill Murray Stories, calling it “freaking HILARIOUS and brilliant”!

And to end with an interesting context for the Groundhog Day part of the series, Ezekiel Healy shares, “‘America’s weirdest holiday’ brought to mind that Ireland celebrates right now; it’s called Imbolc/St. Brigid’s day. It’s a celebration of Spring, marked when Winter is half over. It was curious to me when I first learned about it, because our version of the seasons is marked pretty distinctly at the solstice and equinox. Halloween (our second weirdest holiday?) also lines up with a Celtic/pagan holiday (Samhain), which suggests that Groundhog Day has deeper roots than just the Pennsylvania Tourism Board. It’s a tentative celebration of the imminent arrival of Spring, which is finally inevitable if still unpredictable.”

Super Bowl series starts Monday,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Takes on other Murray films? 

February 4, 2022: Bill MurrayStudying: Hyde Park on Hudson

[To celebrate one of our strangest holidays, Groundhog Day, I’ll be AmericanStudying that film as well as four others in the long and unique career of Bill Murray. Leading up to a crowd-sourced post featuring your takes on these and other Murray classics!]

On what we can learn from three of the best dramatic portrayals of presidents on screen.

1)      Amistad (1997): I haven’t written much in this space about Steven Spielberg’s 1997 historical epic, other than this brief and complimentary reference. It’s fair to say that in the decades since, as we’ve finally started to see more historical films featuring Americans of color in central rather than supporting roles, even the better “white savior” stories (and Amistad is that to be sure) have come to feel less important as a result. But Amistad still has a great deal to recommend it, and high on that list has to be Anthony Hopkins as former President John Quincy Adams, who comes out of retirement more than a decade after losing his reelection bid to help the film’s Freedom Seekers successfully argue their case before the Supreme Court. What Hopkins’ Adams reminds us is that the arcs of presidents’ lives continue long after their time in office, and, in the best of cases, can evolve and deepen as a result.

2)      Lincoln (2012): As that hyperlinked post illustrates, I have dedicated multiple posts to Spielberg’s more recent and more successful historical film. Other than a very unnecessary ending (a hallmark of Spielberg’s best films, I’d argue), I think Lincoln is pretty perfect, and much of that is due to Daniel Day-Lewis’s truly stunning performance. And while the moments that endure in our collective memories of the film are likely the big ones like that “Now!” speech, I believe what makes Day-Lewis’s performance so great and so important are the many layers of humanity he brings to his Lincoln, including (nay, especially, says this DadAmericanStudier) his delight in Dad Jokes. This is a mythic figure brought back to earth in the best ways.

3)      Hyde Park on Hudson (2012): The misfortune of being released in the same year as Spielberg’s film is one of a few reasons why Roger Michell’s historical biopic of Franklin Delano Roosevelt (Bill Murray) and his 1939 relationship with his cousin Daisy Suckley (Laura Linney) didn’t make much of a splash and isn’t well-remembered today. I’m not here to challenge those trends, as I don’t think the film ultimately adds up to much and too often feels like salacious gossip about FDR’s rumored extramarital affairs. But it is a shame that Murray’s performance has been likewise overlooked, as I think it’s one of his best, capturing so much of the wisdom, humor, frailty, and humanity of a president and man dealing with countless challenges (internal as well as external). In particular, Murray quite literally embodies the toll of FDR’s long and ongoing battle with the polio-caused paralysis that afflicted him for the final few decades of his life. Another highlight in Murray’s long and profoundly impressive career.

Crowd-sourced post this weekend,

Ben

PS. So one more time: What do you think? Takes on other Murray films? 

February 3, 2022: Bill MurrayStudying: Lost in Translation

[To celebrate one of our strangest holidays, Groundhog Day, I’ll be AmericanStudying that film as well as four others in the long and unique career of Bill Murray. Leading up to a crowd-sourced post featuring your takes on these and other Murray classics!]

On a beloved character who both embodies and challenges the “ugly American abroad” stereotype.

When an actor has worked for as long and as well as Bill Murray, the list of most famous and beloved scenes is of course quite competitive, and I’m sure every fan would have their own choices. But I’d say high on that list for most viewers would have to be the sequence in Sofia Coppola’s Lost in Translation (2003) where Murray’s fading movie star Bob Harris is doing his best to record a TV commercial for Japanese whisky Suntory (a real product, which I wouldn’t have expected until researching this post) with sincerity. Well, maybe not his best, but perhaps the best he can do at that moment—which is what makes the scene and performance so iconic, as Murray truly captures the falling star’s bitterness and self-loathing (and barely contained sarcasm) through the smallest of choices as he struggles to record the ad and its famous catchphrase.

Much of that might be the same if the scene were set in Harris’s native United States—the timing of this stage of his career would be the same anywhere, after all—but I’d say it’s all amplified by the fact that he’s recording the commercial in a foreign country, for a product with which he assume he’s much less familiar, working with a director and crew who speak a different language than he, and so on. Some of that is specific to the acting profession, and specifically the longstanding image of actors who need money (or just work) performing in ads in other countries (or, in one recent famous headline, turning down a stunningly large such paycheck for ethical reasons). But it also plays into another longstanding image and narrative: the “ugly American abroad,” the way in which American travelers or tourists can treat everything about the countries they’re visiting—including their whiskeys, presumably—as at best a step down from what they’re used to in their “exceptional” home country, and at worst deserving of thinly disguised scorn.

As I mentioned above, however, the true object of Bob Harris’s scorn is clearly himself, a fact which differentiates him from the unwavering and undeserved self-confidence that’s typically part of the ugly American’s attitude. And while there are various ways to interpret the movie’s central, deeply ambiguous relationship and arc between Harris and Scarlett Johansson’s young newlywed Charlotte, I would say that one layer to their dynamic is the way in which both Charlotte and Japan offer Harris a chance to reflect on where he’s come in his career and life and, potentially, chart a new course from this moment forward. It’s quite telling, after all, that the movie’s other, far more serious and moving most famous scene takes place at that most Japanese of institutions, a karaoke bar. Harris’s performance there of Roxy Music’s “More Than This” (to my mind one of Murray’s single best moments as an actor) starts as another moment of silliness and self-parody but turns into something quite different and far more sincere, which could describe his entire experience of Japan (thanks in no small measure to Charlotte, of course).

Last MurrayStudying tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Takes on other Murray films? 

February 2, 2022: Bill MurrayStudying: Groundhog Day

[To celebrate one of our strangest holidays, Groundhog Day, I’ll be AmericanStudying that film as well as four others in the long and unique career of Bill Murray. Leading up to a crowd-sourced post featuring your takes on these and other Murray classics!]

On two layers to the crucial lesson at the heart of a unique cinematic comedy.

One of the more divisive films in Bill Murray’s long and multi-stage career has to be 1988’s Scrooged, a darkly comic modern retelling of Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol. I tend to agree with Roger Ebert’s highly critical review, where he called the film “one of the most disquieting, unsettling films to come along in quite some time”; like Ebert I find that the film’s comedy is rooted in a consistently aggressive and angry tone (Carol Kane’s Ghost of Christmas Present abuses Murray’s Frank Cross relentlessly, for example), and don’t find the saccharine ending sufficient to counter that feel. But over the years Scrooged has become not just a cult holiday classic (which it definitely is), but also a critically praised one, with Empire magazine calling it the 7^th-best Christmas film and Time Out listing it as the 13^th-best, among other such accolades.

I’m dedicating a paragraph in this post to Scrooged for a very particular reason: whatever you think of that film, it’s at least ironic that another and far more universally acclaimed and beloved Murray movie, 1993’s Groundhog Day, presents a very similar central lesson to A Christmas Carol in all its many iterations and adaptations over the centuries: that a successful and happy life is defined first and foremost by doing good for others. Moreover, Groundhog Day’s initially and profoundly self-centered protagonist Phil Connors (he’s not as overtly greedy nor as mean-spirited as Scrooge, but they share a fundamental selfishness at the outset of their stories to be sure) learns that lesson through a supernatural conceit that is at least as unique and compelling as Dickens’ three Spirits—and perhaps even more so, since Groundhog Day makes it impossible for Phil to escape his endlessly repeating day, to move on with his life, until he truly learns and exemplifies that lesson. As that clip illustrates, the Phil at the end of the film is one of the most genuinely selfless and civic-minded characters in any cultural work (much less any comedy), one for whose happiness we are truly able to root.

Thinking through that lesson for this post has also helped me finally come to an interpretation of what has always been for me the film’s most ambiguous and confusing section: the sequence around the midpoint where Phil repeatedly tries (and fails) to save the life of a dying homeless man. Phil calls the man “father” multiple times, so my general take has been that it’s about making some sort of peace with his parents and past (about which we hear nothing otherwise). But seen through the lens of the film’s overarching lesson, this complex sequence can be read as offering two interconnected epiphanies: that even when we selflessly do for others, we can’t always save them from the worst of the world (I’m glad Tiny Tim lives at the end of Christmas Carol, but Scrooge’s change of heart would never be enough to guarantee that outcome); but also and even more importantly that, even or perhaps especially in those moments, the doing itself comprises a powerful and vital act. Indeed, I can think of few more powerful embodiments of hope and optimism than taking actions toward a more ideal future even when there’s no reason to think that they’ll succeed.

Next MurrayStudying tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Takes on other Murray films? 

February 1, 2022: Bill MurrayStudying: Ghostbusters

[To celebrate one of our strangest holidays, Groundhog Day, I’ll be AmericanStudying that film as well as four others in the long and unique career of Bill Murray. Leading up to a crowd-sourced post featuring your takes on these and other Murray classics!]

On two distinct ways to analyze science and the supernatural in the classic scary comedy.

First things first: Ghostbusters (1984) is a really fun, funny, scary, entirely successful film, full of great performances, great music, and lines and moments that have stuck with me to this day, and that seemed to hit my sons equally hard when we watched it for the first time a couple years back. (The less said about Ghostbusters II [1989], the better; I’m not even gonna hyperlink that one.) It’s important, in the course of these kinds of analytical series, not to lose sight of the fact that both comic films and summer blockbusters are designed and intended, first and foremost, to entertain—that doesn’t mean that they can’t or shouldn’t also be smart or interesting (none of that “It’s not supposed to be Shakespeare” crap here, bud), just that we can’t overlook the qualities that make them fun and make them endure. And Ghostbusters has endured as well as any summer blockbuster I know, and indeed largely created (and certainly popularized) a new genre—the horror comedy—that to my mind has never been done any better than it was done here.

But if you think that means we can’t also analyze Ghostbusters—well, you clearly didn’t read my post on Baywatch! And when we start to turn our analytical attention to the film, it seems to clearly take a side within the longstanding and ongoing debate between science and the supernatural (or spiritual). The film opens with our heroes getting fired from their university research job because of their focus on the supernatural. Its main antagonist (yes, Zuul is the climactic villain, but this guy’s hostility drives much of the film) is William Atherton’s incredibly annoying EPA agent Walter Peck. And when the Ghostbusters convince the Mayor to side with them over that EPA agent, they do so by arguing that what’s going to happen to New York is “a disaster of Biblical proportions… Old Testament, real Wrath of God type stuff.” Just as Weird Tales did in their own era, the film suggests that all our modern science isn’t sufficient to engage with another side of the world, an older and perhaps more primal supernatural side that demands its own understanding—and its own heroes to combat it.

Yet at the same time, the way those heroes combat the supernatural is precisely through science: their energy streams and containment units, all that they had been working on in that university research role and brought with them to their “private sector” alternative. That is, we could read the film’s attitudes as divided not between science and the supernatural, but rather traditional vs. experimental science, cautious and bureaucractic perspectives such as those of staid academics and the buttoned-up EPA vs. the more liberated and forward-thinking ideas of Egon and his partners. Those latter perspectives are certainly willing and able to engage with the world’s oldest and deepest spiritual truths, but they are also much better equipped to come up with modern answers for those supernatural threats. In that way, we could see Ghostbusters as an example of a modern American Gothic—recognizing a world full of darkness and the supernatural, but ready to push back with courage and rationality. Who else you gonna call?!

Next MurrayStudying tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Takes on other Murray films?