The sound of suspense: Hitchcock and Herrmann [playlist]

Listen to Bernard Herrmann’s eight scores for the films of Alfred Hitchcock. You’ll hear, in music, a mirror of how the duo’s personal relationship evolved, from its joyous start in late 1954 to its bitter end in 1966.

At the recording session for their first collaboration, The Trouble with Harry (1955), Hitchcock chuckled with delight. Herrmann had translated Harry’s darkly comic tone into music. His new friend “Benny” also captured in the score the director himself—his anxieties, his wit, his romantic fantasies. So much so that in 1968, when Herrmann crafted a concert suite from Harry, he titled it “A Portrait of Hitch.”

Their second pairing shows how quickly Herrmann joined Hitchcock’s inner circle. In 1956’s The Man Who Knew Too Much, Benny didn’t just write the score. He appears onscreen as himself, conducting the London Symphony in the film’s most famous set-piece: an attempted assassination in the Albert Hall. Herrmann’s main title “Prelude” is barely two minutes long; but it contains the seeds of all the main themes he’ll develop in the score. The “Prelude” also foreshadows the Albert Hall sequence with its concert-hall grandeur.

The Wrong Man (1956) may be their most surprising collaboration. To tell the true story of a jazz musician’s wrongful arrest, and the tragic impact it has on his family, Hitchcock used a more realistic visual style, and filmed in the story’s actual locations. For its “Prelude,” Herrmann delivers a surprise of his own: a lively samba tune that seems far removed from his usual style. But its sunny first measures are repeatedly answered—arrested?—by an ominous phrase for woodwinds that hints at the darkness to come.

Director and composer were at their best when depicting romantic obsession, and 1958’s Vertigo may be the summit of both artists’ careers. The psychological disorientation felt by James Stewart’s protagonist is conveyed by Herrmann’s famous “Prelude,” with its relentlessly repeating figures and orchestral swells. Hitchcock tailored the movie’s edit and its sound design to accommodate the music, most famously in Vertigo’s emotional climax. As Robert Burks’s camera glides 360 degrees around Scottie Ferguson (Stewart) and Judy Barton (Kim Novak), there is no dialogue—only Herrmann’s passionate “Scene d’amour.” As Hitchcock told his composer, “We’ll just have the camera and you.”

1959’s North by Northwest gave Herrmann his best opportunity to blend thrills with humor (he regretted that he was never asked to score comedies). Like Vertigo, the main titles of North by Northwest are a miniature movie in themselves, as designer Saul Bass’ perpendicular lines streak across Manhattan skyscrapers and bustling commuters.

Someone at MGM suggested that since the movie begins in New York City, the main title music should be “Gershwinesque.” What Herrmann did instead reflects his lifelong gift for thinking outside the box. His “Prelude” is based on the rhythm of a Spanish fandango—because, as the composer observed, the movie isn’t about New York: it’s about the “crazy dance that was going to happen now between Cary Grant and the world.”

When Grant’s man-on-the run meets a sexy blonde (Eva Marie Saint) on a train, the actors have just a few minutes to establish that this relationship is more than a casual one-night stand. Herrmann’s shimmering “Conversation Piece” is among his finest love themes, and convinces us in seconds that this couple is destined to share train berths for years to come.

If not for Herrmann, Psycho might survive today only in massively shortened form. After viewing a rough cut without music, Hitchcock decided that he had failed in his biggest gamble: a self-financed, low-budget shocker, targeted at young moviegoers hungry for edgy content. Hitch mused about cutting it down and putting it on his TV series. Herrmann watched the cut and saw what the director didn’t. He transformed the film with his all-strings score, “a black-and-white sound” to complement the black-and-white photography. His nerve-shredding “Prelude” was composed with one goal in mind—to tell moviegoers that, despite Psycho’s leisurely first scenes, “something terrible is going to happen.”

Hitchcock made only one request of his composer: no music for the murder scenes. Herrmann felt differently, leading to the ultimate validation of his film career. When Hitchcock heard the shrieking strings his composer unleashed for Marion and Arbogast’s killings, he admitted he had been wrong.

By the time Herrmann completed Marnie (1964), the onscreen tension was matched by a growing division between director and composer. Herrmann’s abrasiveness, and movie studios’ appetite for pop/rock soundtracks, were two of the factors that drove a wedge in what had been the closest of partnerships. Finally, on Torn Curtain (1966), Herrmann dared to write what he thought was best for the film—a brutal, dissonant score—even though it was the opposite of what Hitchcock had asked for. (Hitch wanted music that was “light” and with a “beat.”) Minutes after hearing Herrmann’s “Prelude,” their partnership and friendship came to an ugly end. The composer was fired, his score rejected.

Some of that music reached movie screens in 2019, when Quentin Tarantino featured two Torn Curtain cues in Once Upon a Time…in Hollywood. Nearly all of the scores represented here have surfaced in other media, re-used in Best Picture winners (The Artist), music videos (Lady Gaga’s Born This Way), TV (The Simpsons, Wednesday), plus commercials, pop songs and ringtones.

It’s easy to understand why. Herrmann remains unmatched in writing music that evokes timeless emotions—fear, love, hate, dread. And just as the gorgeous nightmares of Hitchcock’s cinema remain universal, the music of Bernard Herrmann is the fitting soundtrack of our own, anxious times.

^{Photo by Gary Meulemans on Unsplash.}

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John Williams and the two notes that changed cinema

Two notes. Probably the most famous two-note unit of music in modern history.

When a composer has a hit song or an instantly iconic tune, it can be a blessing and a curse. That tune becomes eternally attached to you—and sometimes it can eclipse the rest of your work.

John Williams is no one-hit wonder, and he is culturally affiliated with more than a dozen melodies—the many themes in the Star Wars series, the “Raiders March” from the Indiana Jones movies, the flying theme from E.T., the anthem from Jurassic Park, “Hedwig’s Theme” from the Harry Potter films, and so many more. An embarrassment of earworms.

And it all started with his theme from Jaws, his first “hit” and arguably the two notes of his that almost everybody around the world recognizes, even fifty years later. Jaws itself was a phenomenon: society, en masse, was scared out of its wits and out of the water—and so much of their terror was owed to Williams’ obsessive, predatory score. That film and its score took Williams, who had been toiling as a mostly anonymous film and TV composer for nearly twenty years, into the stratosphere of success and pop culture omnipresence. It cemented his partnership with Steven Spielberg and led directly to Williams scoring Star Wars.

The long, fruitful phenomenon of his career—more Oscar nominations than any individual in history, acclaim from world leaders and cultural icons and audiences around the globe—can be traced back to those ominous, oscillating E and F bass notes that signaled the first appearance of the famous great white shark.

But the Jaws score is so much more than the famous “two-note” signature; it’s an entire symphony of primal tension, tender character notes, and adventurous sea shanties. Those “two notes”—the motif actually includes a third note, D—are undeniably the score’s almost literal heartbeat, its unforgettable signature. This thematic motor is not only memorable, it’s also a powerful and clever narrative device; Williams’ concept was to have the theme stand in for the shark, which is often unseen, to speed it up and slow it down as a way of conveying its proximity to the human protagonists. Without ever feeling cartoonish, it is scoring as storytelling, music as both narrative and mind control—a gift at which Williams would prove to be a wizard.

However, to only remember the two notes is to reduce a masterpiece—a veritable symphony—to its simplest denominator. We do something similar with the opening notes in Beethoven’s fifth symphony, but both compositions are large-scale works that develop a central, hummable theme into an epic musical drama. Williams would never claim that his film scores are symphonies. Technically they are not: they don’t follow strict sonata form, and they are necessarily constructed around the architecture of movie scenes, their durations and interruptions and moods at the mercy of the filmmaker’s blueprint.

But Williams, for several years leading up to 1975, had been on an unspoken stealth mission to elevate his film scores above the perfunctory gebrauchsmusik that Hollywood film music so often was, and to approach each scoring assignment like a symphonist. He adopted the leitmotif tradition from opera—assigning a melody or motif to individual characters and story elements—and he honed a way of serving a film’s needs and all its synchronizations while simultaneously developing themes across the length of an entire score, giving each score its own compositional arc and having individual cues inherently connected to one another. Where movie music had so often been disjointed and reactionary, he labored at giving his scores internal logic and developmental integrity.

The turning point for Williams was a 1968 TV movie, Heidi, and he matured this art even further in two films for director Mark Rydell: The Reivers (1969) and The Cowboys (1972). These were the same two scores that alerted a young, soundtrack-collecting Spielberg to Williams, and that made him want to hire Williams the moment he started directing features. (Their first collaboration was The Sugarland Express, in 1974.)

It was an incredible lightning strike. Spielberg, 29, going against the grain of his peers, wanted old-fashioned, symphonic, explicitly narrative scoring in his big throwback movies—which were already like visual music and primed for big, romantic accompaniment. Williams, 43, was a veteran, trained in the old ways of orchestral scoring, and chomping at the bit to run free with his newfound self-directive. It was a match made in cinematic heaven, and Jaws was the moment when these two artists alchemized and became luminous.

Listen again to the Jaws score—the whole score. It begins with fear and, yes, those two notes—aptly swimming, churning with a brainless, relentless appetite for flesh. The theme proper, which expands from that seesaw motor into a rising-falling melody on solo tuba, a ghostly string line, watery harp arpeggios, and a lot of orchestral angst, evokes the paganistic dance of Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring, and Williams goes primal with it in the many scenes of violent dismemberment.

He also introduces, in just one scene, a short passage of humanistic poetry. When Chief Brody (Roy Scheider) is sitting at his dinner table one evening, gloomy after being slapped in the face by a mother who blames him for the grisly death of her child, Brody’s own son lifts his spirits when he begins to imitate his father’s hand gestures and facial expressions. Williams scored this poignant grace note with a low pedal tone on double bass and halting, gossamer figures played by piano, harp, and vibraphone. It’s one of the earliest examples of Spielberg and Williams creating a sacred moment in the midst of popcorn action and adventure, and it’s one of the elements that makes Jaws so much more than just a “scary shark movie.”

When Brody, Quint (Robert Shaw), and Hooper (Richard Dreyfuss) go out to sea for the film’s second half, Williams scored their adventure like a swashbuckling, seafaring ballet—using the language of singalong sea shanties and Old Hollywood pirate movies. All the while the main Jaws theme remains an active participant, and none of this feels incongruous or out of place. Williams deftly mapped a musical story to the needs of the film’s narrative, but one that listeners can also follow as its own exquisitely satisfying journey.

It wasn’t the first time he had done this, but Jaws was by far the best film he had ever scored—and it signaled a new era not just in his career, but in film music as an art form. Working with two young directors with old-school tastes (Spielberg, and soon George Lucas), Williams revived an ancient way of composing and perfected the art of film scoring. His music ennobled and transcended the films themselves, and with Jaws he began his reign as arguably the finest composer for cinema who has ever lived.

And it all started with two notes—but really, it was a whole damn symphony.

^{Feature image: Photo by Noah Negishi on Unsplash.}

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Crafting the queer citational turn

It’s a crisp summer morning, and I’ve just made the half hour walk from Sommerville, Massachusetts, to Harvard University. The grounds are majestic, as you’d expect, but everything is fragmented by iron fence railings (gates all locked or staffed by security) and garish white tents that have been installed for graduation festivities. I show my ID and make my way into the Houghton Library reading room where I’ll continue my research on craftwork for a project on queer modernist materialities. As a fan of the show Dickinson, which aired on Apple TV+ for three seasons from 2019-2021, I’ve asked to see the scrapbook set designer Marina Parker made for the archive. I’m fascinated by contemporary adaptations of literary pasts, and Parker’s scrapbook suggests how craft itself might be fundamental to those queer reworkings. 

As I carefully flip through the scrapbook’s pages, I’m struck by the care Parker has taken in assembling a material record of the show, which pays particular attention to Emily Dickinson’s queerness and the cultural and literary pasts of American activism. Wallpaper swatches are pasted in alongside sources of flooring inspiration, such as the checkered black and white floor she discovered while on a meditation retreat held in an old Massachusetts mansion. Correspondence with some of the oldest continually operating artisan design businesses (like lacemakers and carpet weavers) intwine with Parker’s record of her research rabbit holes. These imbricated textual and material records form a kind of citational archive—in recording her sources, Parker shows in very real terms how the work of a single set designer depends on a network of collaborators.

One particularly unique set of citations emerges in the various “shout outs” Parker records in the scrapbook. For example, on one page she writes about the task of curating the artworks in Dickinson’s brother and sister-in-law’s house, The Evergreens. She names the Assistant Set Decorator, acknowledges her specific contributions, and writes, “SHE DID A FANTASTIC JOB!” 

In an email (my gratitude to curator Christine Jacobson for connecting us), I asked Parker to reflect on the place of these notably enthusiastic scrapbook citations. In her reply, she described her difficulty finding a place in the film industry earlier in her career and moving towards collaboration as a core principle: 

The path to creative satisfaction seemed to be to seek as much creative control as possible. The reality though, is—the pace, breadth, & scope of film work, makes it unrealistic and impossible to truly work alone. And inspiration is often nurtured by exchange. In subsequent years I’ve slowly discovered / am discovering a community of people whose inspired ideas & work ethic I admire. Collaborating with talented, generous, delightful people has become one of my favorite parts of working in film; I now consider collaboration a real gift. I very much want to lift up, acknowledge, and appreciate the many hands and hearts behind the work.  

This scrapbook, in addition to Parker’s ethical and artistic commitments to generous citation, align with larger trends in feminist and queer scholarship. In more particular terms, this approach to not just acknowledging—but actively celebrating—a collaborative process takes its cues from the history of craft. While writing Crafting Feminism from Literary Modernism to the Multimedia Present, I also aspired to represent the “many hands and hearts” that contributed both practically and intellectually to what is ultimately a single-author monograph.

Sara Ahmed has described her own citation practices (not citing any white men in Living a Feminist Life, for example) as a way of building new structures for belonging. She suggests that, “Citation is feminist memory,” a way to craft community when departure seems like a necessary path. The theorist becomes a craftsperson as “Citations can be feminist bricks: they are the materials through which, from which, we create our dwellings. My citation policy has affected the kind of house I have built.” Ahmed describes the intellectual work of feminist writing as deeply predicated on her own willingness to be vulnerable and to respond reciprocally in encounters with readers or audiences of various kinds. In that way, she changes the materials of her craft to capture this dynamic of exposure: “Perhaps citations are feminist straw: lighter materials that, when put together, still create a shelter but a shelter that leaves you more vulnerable.” The house of scholarship, therefore, seems made of bricks—and other times, straw strikes Ahmed as the more appropriate material. 

The artisanal properties of citation emerge in Susan Howe’s work on archives as a kind of serendipitous encounter with craft. She describes the processes by which “Often by chance, via out-of-the-way-card catalogues, or through previous web surfing, a particular ‘deep’ text, or a simple object (bobbin, sampler, scrap of lace) reveals itself here at the surface of the visible, by mystic documentary telepathy.” To illustrate the dynamic interplay of this telepathy, Howe engages in rigorous citation across texts and archives, both public-facing and personal. In one section, Howe quotes Stein’s invocation to “Think in stitches,” prompting the reader to understand the queer encounter at play in the archive, mediated by craft: “In looking up from her embroidery she looks at me.” Instead of bricks or straw, textile knots become her source material for crafting a creative-critical text such as Spontaneous Particulars: The Telepathy of Archives. She writes: 

Quotations are skeins or collected knots. “KNOT, (n., not…) The complication of threads made by knitting; a tie, union of cords by interweaving; as, a knot difficult to be untied.” Quotations are lines or passages taken at hazard from piled up cultural treasures. A quotation, cut, or closely teased out as if with a needle, can interrupt the continuous flow of a poem, a tapestry, a picture, an essay; or a piece of writing like this one. “STITCH, n. A single pass of a needle in sewing.” 

Howe’s vision of the quotation-as-knot both interrupts the flow of an essay or poem while also holding it together—like a binding. (Here I must admit to checking the Index of my book for my own reference to Virginia Woolf’s “heaped up things” in The Years, which in a footnote I describe as “a temporal phenomenon and a record of trauma recall[ing] Walter Benjamin’s Angel of History […] in which ‘His face is turned toward the past. Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage.’ It reminds me of Howe’s “piled up cultural treasures”…This line of quotations, or knots, extends between disparate texts, connecting them—stitching these references in a row.)

Multimedia scholars such as Storm Greenwood are crafting the queer citational turn quite literally through the project of “Devotional Citation,” a praxis Greenwood started in 2017 at the “intersection of visual art and decolonial feminist scholarship.” “Devotional Citation” is predicated on a praise framework that is reciprocal and resists the “commodification of study.” Many of Greenwood’s Citations are circulated in a gift economy of stitched quotations that are given back to the author, their words transformed into a new textual artwork. As the recipient of a Devotional Citation that quotes Crafting Feminism, I am struck by the ways in which quotes are remade through contact with Greenwood’s craftwork. Not only are the pieces illuminated—as in, illustrated and decorated with gold metallic pigment—they are illuminating; this citational practice reveals new dimensions of writing on craft through the very stitched nature of each word. 

Scholars are increasingly thinking about the shape their work takes, with citation as a collaborative process that can be made visible or even ritualized—such as the authors of “Feminist Citational Praxis and Problems of Practice” who describe the process of co-authoring a dissertation and engaging in citation practices, or rituals, that “provide an opportunity to ‘flip the scrip’ on CisHeteroPatriarchy.” Or on the topic of “Collabowriting,” Suzanne Churchill and Adam McKible argue that, scholarship is “collaborative in nature: the term ‘monograph’ actually belies the exchange of ideas that occurred through print and over time to produces the work. Collaboration animates and personalizes the scholarly exchange.” Or, one final example: I was recently delighted to see that Danielle Taschereau Mamers had taken visual notes of my exchange with a group of graduate students at the University of Toronto (thank you to Claire Battershill for this joyful invitation). In these notes, Mamers cites me as the speaker but also interweaves her own perspective on the conversation and represents the students’ various questions and prompts, too. The topic of craft and scholarship is enlarged by the visual-verbal patchwork. 

Writing a book is a process of encounter between voices and ideas throughout history—and our citational rituals form a thread, stitching the project together as a crafted object. As those conversations become more intentionally oriented towards variously inclusive methods, craft’s tactile, transhistoric metaphors and practices will form an important stitch in the future of scholarship.

_{Featured image by Mel Poole via Unsplash.}

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Elizabeth Taylor’s working women

In the 1950s and 1960s, actress Elizabeth Taylor (1932-2011) was one of the most famous women on earth, someone to put alongside Queen Elizabeth II and Jackie Kennedy. Her complex marital history, many health crises, and love affairs were the stuff of front page headlines. She was, by any standard, the personification of the larger-than-life celebrity movie star. As a result, her long film career, for all its highs and lows, has not received the attention given to her private life.

When her career is unpacked, the results are surprising. Despite her long grip on media and public fascination, her acute business sense, native intelligence, and unflagging ambition, Taylor did not often play women of social or political power. In fact, her characters were rarely even employed. As the daughter of a well-connected Beverly Hills art dealer, Taylor was always privileged, and the public’s knowledge of that spilled into expectations of her film roles. Following her childhood stardom as plucky young heroines in such films as Lassie Come Home (1943) and National Velvet (1944), she blossomed into a young woman ready for suitors or husbands, if not careers, in Life with Father (1947), Julia Misbehaves (1948), Little Women (1949), and Father of the Bride (1950).

Taylor was a mere 17 when her home studio, Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, cast her as a married woman in Conspirator (1949). She was heartachingly beautiful as a socialite in A Place in the Sun (1951) and as expatriated brides in Elephant Walk (1954) and The Last Time I Saw Paris (1954). Still she was somebody’s wife in many of her most acclaimed performances, including Giant (1956), Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (1958), and Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (1966). The trend continued, often accompanied by a neurosis or two, in Reflections in a Golden Eye (1967), The Comedians (1967), X Y & Zee (1972), and Ash Wednesday (1973).

None of this is to say Taylor’s characters were idle, housebound, or subservient. Her fiery spirit and tendency toward confrontation wouldn’t allow it. Her women usually or always found ways to maximize their power and self-determination in a society hellbent on their subjugation. As early as National Velvet she was gleefully breaking rules, even cross-dressing for the film’s climactic scenes, and audiences cheered her for it. In Conspirator, when she learns her husband is a spy, she brazenly taunts him for his ethical misconduct. She rolls up her sleeves and risks everything during a cholera outbreak in Elephant Walk. In Giant, she plays the wife of a wealthy rancher and sets about to reform all of Texas in the ways of sexism, racism, and classism, joking with her husband that he “knew what a frightful girl I was when you married me.” Taylor never made her characters self-righteous or smug, but rather wholly committed to fulfilling their beliefs. Even in Suddenly, Last Summer (1959), she plays a quite sane mental patient who exposes the insanity and avarice in others.

What, then, did Taylor’s “working women” actually do when they were getting paid? A quick survey is telling. She played a dance instructor in Love Is Better Than Ever (1952), patiently guiding her young pupils in the art of rhythm and motion. She was a painter-sculptor in The Sandpiper (1965), defiant against the prescriptions of a restrictive society. She played a chorus girl in The Only Game in Town (1970), a waitress in Hammersmith is Out (1972), and an opera singer in Young Toscanini (1988), the later role accompanied by the expected preening and ego flares.

Taylor won an Oscar as a prostitute in BUtterfield 8 (1960), though she refused money from her johns in an ultimately futile effort at autonomy. She again played prostitutes in Secret Ceremony (1968) and Under Milk Wood (1971), though both were more gothic and poetic than her rather more lurid turn in BUtterfield 8.

On at least six occasions she played an actress: The V.I.P.s (1963), singing “Send in the Clowns” in A Little Night Music (1977), The Mirror Crack’d (1980), There Must be a Pony (1986), and Sweet Bird of Youth (1989), the last two made for television. Something about performing and her unending role as celebrity made actresses a good fit for Taylor. In her amusing cameo in the political thriller Winter Kills (1979), she plays a brothel madam and an actress-movie star. 

Taylor’s eponymous epic Cleopatra (1963) was her one spectacular exception in a film that allowed her to negotiate and out-maneuver men on the highest level. But she is brought down by her fragile womanliness and her capacity to fall in love. “Without you, Antony, this is not a world I want to live in, much less conquer” she says soon before that fatal bite of an asp.

It’s remarkable that this protean actress and ultimate movie star so often played women lacking authority outside their domestic sphere. Yet Taylor’s film legacy includes a general memory of her characters’ ferocity, moral certainty, and sheer charisma. Many of her characters chafed at entrenched sexism and social inequities, but neither they nor Taylor herself were defeated by them.

_{Featured image of Elizabeth Taylor and Spencer Tracy in Father’s Little Dividend (1951). Public Domain via Wikimedia Commons.}

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The unknown <i>A Complete Unknown</i>

Folk music is still and always with us. It is in the tap of the hammer to the music on the radio or, in older days, to the workers’ own singing. It is the rhythmic push of the cabinetmaker’s saw, the scan across the checkout station to the beat of songs inside the checker’s head. “Folk music is a river, always flowing, steady and heedless. It has always been the underground stream of American musical culture: the rhythms of daily life.”

In the Academy Award-nominated film A Complete Unknown, Bob Dylan stalks off the stage at the 1965 Newport Folk Festival as the crowd boos. The filmmakers present this as a momentous turn for American culture, when rock’n’roll (factually, folk-rock and blues) trounces the feel-good, all-together-now world of American folk music. The significance of this event, which climaxes the film, is far more subtle. And the private reactions from Pete Seeger, whom Dylan once revered, have yet to be told.

The folk music revival of the 1950s and 60s emerged from eighteenth-century religious revivals, emphasizing individual honesty and spirituality, such as the Great Awakening. In the twentieth century, the first folk music revival was led by researchers and collectors, as in Germany, inspired by nineteenth-century Romantics. Preservationists of stories, jokes, or tunes visited libraries; tromped out in the hills and hollers of Appalachia, down the damp and dusty byways to find a local storyteller or that “fiddler in the woods.”

Out of these efforts came a cultural preservation movement pioneered by John Lomax, a collector of cowboy ballads, and particularly by his son, Alan Lomax. When Alan met Pete Seeger, son of musicologist Charles Seeger (who was the first to teach a course in folk music at an American university), they shifted that movement from cultural antiquarianism to activism, to reflect their desire to use songs for social equality. This fusion of folk music and social justice is what the filmmakers characterize as dissolving in the chaos of “Dylan goes electric” in July 1965. At this point, many of what could be called his followers were disaffected by his apparent turn from liberal politics and from traditional songs in his compositions.

Though depiction of the scene in Greenwich Village is accurate, the film misreads both traditional music and its profound influence on all of Dylan’s tunes and lyrics. Anyone listening to his adaptation of “900 Miles,” or how he turned “The Twa Sisters” (tenth in the collection of traditional ballads of Francis J. Child) into a deeply personal tale, or the traditional ballads and songs on his first album, Bob Dylan, (dismissed here as “other people’s songs”) can only marvel at his genius of reworking tradition. This corresponded to the purpose of the Newport Folk Festival which, instead of a parade of “stars,” devoted most of its stages to songs originating hundreds of years prior.

Dylan, however, was far more than a folk purist. Many do not realize that his first single had a rock band playing behind a rockabilly cut (“Mixed Up Confusion” in 1962), or that soon after that, he released a country-rock tune, “Rocks and Gravel,” also with a band. Dylan didn’t “go electric.” He’d been there for years. The film also disregards the aegis of that festival, directly traceable to the Romantic belief in the music of down-home, everyday folks and its uncommercial roots. The Newport board included Pete Seeger (and his wife and de facto manager, Toshi Ohta), and it had long allowed electrified instruments, though this was usually reserved for traditional blues musicians who had always played that way.

The question at the heart of the film then becomes one of Dylan’s motivation at provoking the citadel of American folk music: was he interested only in headlines and establishing himself commercially? Was he serious about singing out for social justice? (No careful listener to “The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll” or “Masters of War” can dispute this.)

In the film, viewers watch Dylan develop his chops—learning to work a mic, provoking interviewers, handling and at times dismissing baby boomers who sought him out as an oracle, singing alongside Seeger and Phil Ochs against injustice. We see him develop his performative, rebellious persona: mercurial, sullen, snarly, confrontational. Alongside him, we see his mentor Pete Seeger, here presented as benign but authentic, a citybilly singing hillbilly songs to syncretize them for urban audiences. Seeger was the Pied Piper of the folk revival introducing folk music, in one concert, to Dave Guard (Kingston Trio) and Joan Baez (for years Dylan’s partner to folk music). Seeger’s goal diverged from the commercializing instincts of Albert Grossman, Dylan’s manager, instead being rooted in the inherently democratic nature of folksong. And this is where A Complete Unknown stumbles. It captures the dress of folkies (Beat meets Hip) and their clubs: the Café Wha, Folk City, the Gaslight; but it fails to present folksongs as carriers of an important, centuries-long process. It presents Dylan as if he was unknowing and uncaring of folksong and the democratic, ground-up socialism implicit in them.

Finally, we arrive at the dramatic climax, with Dylan in leather jacket and boots (in contrast to Seeger’s flannel shirts) daring the folkies to accept him in his new coat of many colors. As usual, the search for truth through historical fiction requires fact separated from context and characters isolated from their motivation.

In this case, we must examine two issues with Dylan’s performance: a sound system unaccustomed to bands; and the distinctly non-folk, non-protest lyrics he sang. From the first booming chords of “Like a Rolling Stone,” conveniently released the week before this provocation, we hear the boos; objects tumble toward the stage. (Though the film presents audience reactions as mixed, in recordings derision clearly outnumbers cheers.) Seeger implores the sound mixers to turn down the volume; he wants the audience to hear Dylan clearly. “I just want to hear the words,” he kept repeating. Nevertheless, these were drowned out either because of the mix or because the sound system was never set up to handle instrumentation this loud. Add to this Dylan’s abandonment of civil rights and peace songs in favor of angry pop, and you have an audience and its leaders betrayed. That much is true. To many listening, Dylan should no more have a pop song on AM radio than Pete Seeger should replace Johnny Carson on late-night television.

There exist more published interpretations of this performance than of any other concert. (I’ve written mine in a biography of Seeger, How Can I Keep from Singing?) Some accused Dylan of prostituting himself for commercial success; or “I come to hear Dylan, not a pop group,” or, ineloquently: “Play folk music: You stink.” Dylan closed by returning to the stage with an acoustic guitar in place of his shiny Fender and played the prophetic, “It’s All Over Now, Baby Blue.” He charged off the stage with the Paul Butterfield Blues Band, passing Toshi, who at this juncture is allowed one of her disgracefully few comments in the film: “Bob!”

In private, Seeger was far more upset by Dylan rejecting traditional song than he was about the sound system massacring the lyrics: “Last week at Newport, I ran to cover my ears and eyes because I could not bear either the screaming of the crowd nor some of the most destructive music this side of hell,” he wrote in a letter to himself.In this never-published critique, he referred to Dylan’s new career as a cancer eating away at the musician he had introduced to the world. Later, he would return to this moment repeatedly, trying to understand what had gone wrong.

The last word about his disassociation with folk music—though in later albums he repeatedly recorded traditional songs—comes from Dylan himself at the close of his autobiography, Chronicles: “The folk music scene had been like a paradise that I had to leave, like Adam had to leave the garden. It was just too perfect.”

_{Featured image by Dave Gahr, used with permission.}

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“But you got to have friends…”: A Bette Midler playlist

Bette Midler began her recording career back when Richard Nixon (“Tricky Dick,” as she liked to call him) was still President, and her range and versatility were obvious from the very beginning. Since she first entered a recording studio, she’s tackled just about every genre of music. This tour through her recorded output reveals not just the familiar best-selling hits but five decades of deep cuts and delightful discoveries. Take a listen for yourself:

1. “Boogie Woogie Bugle Boy” (1972)

Midler’s affinity for 1940s music resulted in her first top ten hit: a period-perfect recasting of this Andrews Sisters’ World War II boogie woogie smash. Multi-track layering gave us Midler as Patty, Maxene, and LaVerne, all in perfect harmony.

If you like that, try this: “It’s the Girl” (2014): Decades on, Midler’s harmony chops were undiminished as she revisited this swinging 1930s hit by the Boswell Sisters, one of her childhood favorites.

2. “Do You Want to Dance?” (1972)

This sultry, slowed-down version of the Bobby Freeman hit opened Midler’s debut album, The Divine Miss M—no album ever got off to a better start. Midler has never sounded more sensuous as she pleads for one more dance in an arrangement that remained a staple of her live concerts into the twenty-first century.

If you like that, try this: “Under the Boardwalk” (1988): Midler brought a similar sexy vibe to this remake of the 1960s Drifters’ hit for the soundtrack of Beaches.

3. “Friends” (1972)

This jaunty sing-along ode to the importance of friendship became Midler’s unofficial theme song when she worked at the Continental Baths in the early 1970s and it’s been part of her act ever since. Its lyric, “I had some friends but they’re gone/Something came and took them away,” has meant different things at different stages of her career. In the 1970s it was a promise of solidarity with the gay men who made up her first audiences. During the AIDS epidemic, it acknowledged the unfathomable losses of the gay community. In later years, it marked the passage of time and the inevitable loss of aging friends.

If you like that, try this: “Samedi et Vendredi” (1976): Midler wrote lyrics to many of the songs she’s recorded over the years, and this captivating burst of witty wordplay and infectious rhythms is one of her best. Singing all the voices––and doing it entirely in French––Midler sounds like she’s gathered all her friends into one room and let them run wild.

4. “Hello in There” (1977)

Midler the actress made a meal out of John Prine’s poignant ballad about an old couple facing the end of an uneventful life. On her 1977 Live at Last album, she prefaced the song with an outlandish monologue about a giant, bald-headed woman on the streets of New York wearing a fried egg on her head, turning the fried egg into a metaphor for the existential anxieties of our era. After that introduction, “Hello in There” was more heart-wrenching than ever.

If you like that, try this: “Waterfalls” (2014): Midler turned TLC’s rambling scenario about mothers’ inability to keep their sons safe from the horrors of street crime and AIDS into a stripped down, mournful ballad.

5. “I Shall Be Released” (1973)

Midler claimed ownership of every song she ever sang. In the case of Bob Dylan’s classic lament for an incarcerated man, she turned it into a furious feminist cry. Barry Manilow’s piano arrangement slowly builds in intensity as it takes Midler from quiet resignation to righteous anger.

If you like that, try this: “Beast of Burden” (1983): Midler did a similar renovation of Keith Richards and Mick Jagger’s teasing riff aimed at a reluctant lover, redefining it as a woman’s demand for respect.

6. “Cradle Days” (1979)

Possibly the greatest vocal Midler ever laid down. In this slow-burning soul shouter, she’s a modern-day Medea pleading with a departing husband to restore both their relationship and their shared children. Her singing is equal parts untamed and tightly disciplined, all of it cushioned in creamy backing vocals led by Luther Vandross. Sublime.

If you like that, try this: “Birds” (1977): Midler’s take on Neil Young’s gentle breakup song gives it a driving R&B edge and features fierce vocal back-up from the Harlettes.

7. “Stay With Me” (1979)

Midler’s film debut as a tortured Janis Joplin-like star in The Rose gave her plenty of opportunities to rock. But her best moments demonstrated her (and Joplin’s) feel for combining rock and soul, as in this staggering plea to a lover as he heads out the door.

If you like that, try this: “When a Man Loves a Woman” (1979): The other great performance number from The Rose. Midler sings the old Percy Sledge ballad as a recognition of the difficulty a woman rock star can have finding love. For maximum impact, watch the performance clips of “Stay With Me” and “When a Man Loves a Woman” rather than only listening to the audio.

8. “Wind Beneath My Wings” (1988)

Midler’s first and (so far) only #1 hit demonstrates her skill at stirring in a bit of vinegar to cut the sticky sweetness. She rides the song’s anthem-like waves, but never falls off into bathos. Even if you’re immune to its message, it’s hard not to be moved by Midler’s sincerity.

If you like that, try this: “Laughing Matters” (1998): This rueful call to keep a sense of humor in a world gone increasingly mad gets a ravishing orchestral backing for one of Midler’s most reassuring vocals.

9. “The Rose” (1979)

Just about perfect. The hushed power of Midler’s voice captures the “endless aching need” so vividly evoked in Amanda McBroom’s evergreen hymn—a classic pairing of singer and song.

If you like that, try this: “Lullaby in Blue” (1998): Midler holds back on the emotion and her restraint makes this tender remembrance of a teenage pregnancy deeply affecting.

10. “(Your Love Keeps Lifting Me) Higher and Higher” (1973)

Another great Barry Manilow arrangement, this one starts soft but gathers force as Midler and a stentorian choir take it to church. Just when you think she can’t go any higher––or wilder––she reaches even more frenzied heights.

If you like that, try this: “Bang, You’re Dead.” (1977): Midler was known to dabble in disco, and this propulsive Ashford and Simpson production is one of her best in that genre. It’s impossible to stand still when Midler’s scorching vocal rides that four-on-the-floor beat.

11. “Mele Kalikimaka” (2006)

Midler frequently evoked her background growing up on the island of Hawaii, and this holiday song, based on the Hawaiian derivation of the phrase, “Merry Christmas,” is an affectionate tribute to her home state.

If you like that, try this: “In the Cool, Cool, Cool of the Evening” (2003): Midler at her good-humored best, swinging lightly through Johnny Mercer’s dense, savory lyrics.

_{Featured image by Rob Bogaerts / Anefo. via Wikimedia Commons. Public Domain.}

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Better together: coupling up to watch TV and talk synchronizes brain waves

Scientists are a step closer to finding out just why watching TV together and talking is such a popular pastime. Watching the same movie stimulates similar neural activity across brains: a phenomenon referred to as inter-subject correlation. Subjects sitting in the same room and talking over the content have been shown to increase various other measures of brain synchrony.

Now it turns out that we don’t even need to be discussing what’s on the screen to get more in tune with each other during the next show.

Lead author Dr. Sara De Felice, Professor Antonia Hamilton, and other colleagues at University College London used functional near-infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS) to measure brain activity in 27 pairs of adults as they each watched two different episodes of the short BBC children’s cartoon Dipdap. In between the episodes, the subjects talked over trivial facts unrelated to the show, such as exotic animals and musical instruments. The researchers then compared the data on brain activity recorded during each episode to see if the non-relevant chatter had affected mental synchrony.

Their results, published in Oxford Open Neuroscience, showed increased brain synchrony over the right dorso-lateral pre-frontal cortex (DLPFC) and right superior parietal lobe (SPL) in familiar pairs (housemates, friends, or partners) watching the cartoon together compared to pseudo pairs who had not met, and who watched the short film alone. These results are in line with previous studies into these brain regions which indicate that the DLPFC is associated with functions like working memory, abstract reasoning, and cognitive flexibility while the SPL receives significant visual input, and is also associated with reasoning and memory, as well as attention.

The study also found that co-watching after a conversation was associated with greater brain synchrony over the right temporoparietal junction (TPJ)–an area of the brain famous for allowing other perspectives (theory of mind)–compared to co-watching before a conversation. This effect was significantly higher in familiar pairs engaging in conversation with each other than in pseudo pairs who talked to someone else.

“Two things are surprising and novel here,” says Dr. De Felice (now at the University of Cambridge). “First, having a chat resulted in brains also synchronising afterwards. Second, the chat didn’t have to be related to the movie to see this effect.”

Brain games

The scientists selected fNIRS for this research as it uses light to map blood flow in response to neural activity at sites across the head, allowing the study of natural face-to-face interactions because subjects aren’t physically confined in a noisy fMRI machine.

“fNIRS is non-invasive and robust to movement, allowing the measurement of brain activity from people as they act and interact normally,” says Dr. De Felice. On the downside, its lag time of around five seconds makes it much less spatially and temporally accurate than other techniques.

The researchers found no significant differences in the other five brain regions selected for measurement.

“Brain synchrony was observed in three areas (the DLPFC, SPL, and TPJ) which play a key role in our ability to interact with others, understand intentions and emotions, and interpret other people’s perspectives,” explains Dr. De Felice. “It makes sense that we observe synchrony over these areas during co-watching of the BBC Dipdap cartoon, where the watcher is encouraged to follow and predict what the puppet will face next.”

She suggests the findings, along with those from numerous other studies, could indicate that brain synchrony extends to and from further behaviours: “This might explain why people who spend considerable time together often find themselves in greater agreement with each other than with those they’ve never met. Through such interactions, individuals can develop a shared reality, both physically and mentally.”

The next challenge is to better explore the causal relationship between synchrony and social interaction, examining if altering this synchrony using brain stimulation would alter the parameters of interaction, she says.

_{Featured image by Sarandy Westfall via Unsplash.}

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Here’s Johnny––and Bette!

New York-based talk shows in the 1970s offered plentiful opportunities for quirky young talents like Bette Midler to sing a song or two and maybe kibitz with the host, regardless of whether they had a Broadway show or film or new record to promote. Midler had none of these when her manager Budd Friedman got her booked on The Tonight Show starring Johnny Carson not long after she began her legendary run at the Continental Baths. Her bawdy alter ego, the Divine Miss M, was birthed during late night performances for an audience of gay men sitting at her feet, naked but for skimpy bath towels. The Divine Miss M brought together gay, Jewish, feminist, and show business sensibilities in a package that combined raucous comedy, a jukebox’s worth of old songs re-energized, and devastating ballads that brought tears as well as cheers. Midler immediately became the most celebrated new star New York’s gay cognoscenti. 

Carson’s flirtatious/fatherly chemistry with Midler continued during her frequent visits over the next twenty years. In 1973, now a best-selling recording artist and concert star, Midler made a triumphant return in all her curly, red-haired glory. Midler, musical director Barry Manilow, and her backing trio, the Staggering Harlettes, tore the place up, with the Harlettes’ “Optimistic Voices” leading into Midler’s grand entrance for “Lullaby of Broadway” and a sizzling “Boogie Woogie Bugle Boy.” They were a sight: Midler spilling out of a garish evening gown, accessorized with stone martens and platform shoes, and the Harlettes in vintage tie-and-tails harmonizing and dancing their stylized 1940s moves like contemporary women giddily discovering a new/old musical world. Manilow and the band in their 1970s long hair and street clothes jammed in the background. If any single performance exemplified the musical and sartorial fun of the early 1970s nostalgia trend, it was surely this one.

In 1980, publicizing her new book, A View from a Broad, Midler looked remarkably subdued, wearing what she might sardonically call a “tasteful” ensemble of slacks, jacket, and high-necked blouse, with her now-blonde tresses pulled back behind her ears. But she’s as vivid a conversationalist as ever. When Carson asks if she ever envisioned she would be as big a star as she has become, her answer is a straightforward, sincere, “Yes.” But she’s quick to point out that her early view of stardom was superficial. “I didn’t realize that the one thing that’s worse than not being looked at is being looked at,” she says, before launching into a comic riff on being followed in the grocery store by fans who judge her food choices. “I can only go to the fancy food section now.” It was a perfect Midlerian anecdote: outlandishly funny, told with mock horror, but with an underlying seriousness that made it entirely plausible.

In 1983, she was pushing her new single, “Beast of Burden” and her new book, The Saga of Baby Divine, a lavishly illustrated children’s book with adult appeal. Her savage re-envisioning of the Rolling Stones’ hit began with her on the floor, crouching like a caged animal. A tight, spaghetti-strapped cocktail dress and spike heels didn’t inhibit her from dropping to her knees and “humping the floor,” as she liked to call it. The performance ended with a full round of microphone swinging that threatened to destroy the set. The topper was her ad lib as she took her seat next to Carson: “And she writes books too!”

Midler had just turned forty when she returned at the end of 1985, and unlike so many other women in show business, she wasn’t afraid to joke about getting older and trying to stay in shape. A bit more zaftig than usual, and ruing her love of food, she launched into “Fat As I Am” while seated between Carson and sidekick Ed McMahon and proceeded to take over the set, lounging on Carson’s desk, kicking off her shoes, and pulling every laugh out of the comic torch song.

Then she turned around and offered a heart stopping “Skylark” that surpassed her recording from the 1970s.

By her next appearance at the end of 1988, she was one of the most successful and highest paid women in films following a string of hit Disney comedies. She was there to promote her latest film, the dramatic musical Beaches, and was very much the regal film star, complete with an opulent mane of auburn hair cascading around her shoulders while performing “Under the Boardwalk,” from the film’s soundtrack album.  

Midler was on another upswing when she returned just as For the Boys was opening in November 1991. The expensive and ambitious movie musical had good buzz and Midler, coming off big record and film hits, was in high spirits and looking splendid. It seemed more like The Bette Midler Show than The Tonight Show, with the star showcased in several songs from the film, including another impromptu (but not really) comedy number from her guest chair, making “Otto Titsling” a hellzapoppin’ history lesson about brassieres that even for her was wildly, comically flamboyant.

For the Boys was a high-profile failure for Midler and she laid low for months, finally reappearing, at Carson’s request, on his penultimate episode as host of The Tonight Show. After nearly thirty years, Carson was retiring from the show that had come to define late night television. His last guests were Midler and Robin Williams on 21 May 21 1992. It was rare for Robin Williams to be relegated to the role of second banana, but that night Midler left him in the dust. She pulled off one more sitting-on-the-chair song––this one for the television history books––with a specially-tailored version of “You Made Me Love You” and its introductory “Dear Mr. Gable,” first performed by Judy Garland to the movie heart throb, Clark. “Dear Mr. Carson” and “You Made Me Watch You,” with new lyrics co-written by Midler, Marc Shaiman, and Bruce Vilanch, hit all the comic bases, from Carson’s personal life (“I watched your hair turn slowly from dark to white/And when I can’t sleep I count your wives at night) to jokes about Ed McMahan and even Carson’s longtime producer Ted DeCordova (“Before you bid adieu/Don’t be cheap/Put DeCordova to sleep”). Midler was known for her razorlike timing, but her every slow take, grimace, and pause was delivered with comic perfection that was deepened by her genuine affection for and gratitude to Carson.

It was hard to imagine Midler topping that moment. But returning from a commercial, Midler sang Carson one last song. On a stool in the center of the soundstage, she delivered Johnny Mercer and Harold Arlen’s “One For My Baby (And One More For the Road),” turning this boozy barroom standard into a final, loving tribute, as if standing in for the millions who had watched him over the years. Midler could sometimes overdo the pathos, but here her smiling warmth was even more affecting because it kept the tears at bay. It was Carson who grew increasingly misty-eyed as the camera captured him over Midler’s shoulder while she bid him farewell on “that long, long road.” The moment was instantly iconic, a prime example of live television at its best.

The night was as much a milestone for Midler as it was for Carson. The eager, anxious-to-outrage young chanteuse had matured into an evergreen entertainer who could effortlessly toggle between uproarious comedy and deep emotion. All her Carson appearances had been notable, but this night it was impossible to imagine anyone in show business other than Midler creating this final moment for him.

_{Featured image credit: Publicity photo of Bette Midler from 1973 by Aaron Russo-manager. Public domain via Wikimedia Commons.}

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Society was to blame for the letters, not twisted psychologies

In complex ways, social inequalities create the conditions for people to feel that writing anonymously might be useful for them. On top of this, social crises create anxious contexts, when the receipt of a threatening, obscene, or libellous anonymous letter might seem especially hazardous. Throughout history, ‘experts’ have put out careless suggestions about the types of people likely to write these letters, with poor people, busybodies, menopausal, repressed women being identified as likely ‘types’. I do not think that particular personality types are more or less likely to write anonymously, but that some people, for various reasons, respond to moments in their lives, or react to social or personal situations by writing such letters.

We must be careful, when discussing anonymous letters, to not assume we have a full or typical sample. The anonymous letters that were considered sensational by the press, or actionable at law, were probably atypical. Very many were disregarded, burned, ignored, or thrown away. In the twentieth century, for example, the media and the police became particularly focused on letter campaigns where there was a female suspect and where letters were sent within a tight neighbourhood, especially if these letters were deemed to be obscene or threatening. Similar letters with an obvious male suspect, or sent to workplaces and not homes, were, in contrast, not the focus of significant legal attention.

In only 39 of the 105 cases I examine in Penning Poison do we have a known writer. Despite the fact that men would have written the vast majority of anonymous letters throughout history (often because of disparities regarding available time, resources, abilities, and money), 17 of these ‘unmasked’ writers were women and 22 were men, implying a much greater focus on identifying female writers. One suspect, Annie Tugwell, was watched around the clock by three policemen for over three weeks in the summer of 1913. This seems to be a disproportionate response. It also appears that material evidence was planted by the police in that case to secure a conviction.

In the Victorian period, there were many assumptions that only the poor would write anonymous letters. In 1870 attention was drawn ‘to the nuisance that the new half-penny post was likely to become by mischievous persons sending obscene, slanderous, or grossly offensive remarks on the open cards’. This came with the assumption that a cheaper delivery system would encourage poor people to write anonymously. However, until the early twentieth century, most of the convicted writers of anonymous letters were affluent men who appeared to be respectable members of their communities. The people in control of the medium—the male, the respected and the rich—were those who appeared to abuse it. In the book, I include the case study of Rev Robert Bingham, the curate of Maresfield in East Sussex, who in 1810 wrote fake threatening letters, penned as though from the ‘Foresters’, local people connected to enclosures in nearby Ashdown forest. These letters threatened arson, and in January 1811 Bingham’s parsonage burned down. Eventually suspicion settled upon the curate himself; Bingham was seen moving stacks of wood the day before the fire, and had planted a flower over his books, buried in the garden. Despite very weighty evidence against him, Bingham was acquitted.

In later cases, the local police, juries, and judges refused to accept that respectable people accused of letter-writing episodes were actually the most likely culprits (unless the accused person was a menopausal woman). In many cases, the legal system first prosecuted a person who seemed to be rough or uneducated, before finally convicting the actual perpetrator, often a person with education and cultural capital who was pretending to be less respectable in their letters. This happened in Redhill, Surrey, in the 1910s, when greengrocer Mary Johnson was repeatedly accused (and twice convicted) of writing letters that were actually penned by her more respectable neighbour, Eliza Woodman. Johnson was hounded out of the town, and settled in Croydon, despite being proven to be innocent. In Littlehampton in the 1920s a similar situation occurred, with Rose Gooding imprisoned for letters written by her more outwardly respectable neighbour, Edith Swan.

Something like what social psychologists call ‘the fundamental attribution error’ pushes us to seek individual psychological explanations for letter-writing campaigns when social contextual explanations could be much better. The majority of speculation as to the mental dispositions of writers (their ‘personality types’), hinged on perceptions of respectability and preconceived ideas about the particularity of feminine malice. An unbalanced fascination with female letter-writers in the twentieth century was influenced by a wider cultural and social fascination with deviant women. It was not an epidemic of female mental illness, but British society was not interested in complex societal explanations and instead sought psychological factors—being uptight, sexually repressed, menopausal, having a ‘dual personality’, enviousness. No doubt some of the writers discussed in Penning Poison could have been diagnosed with psychological disorders if they were assessed today, but the fact of the matter is that, in most cases, their mental states were not assessed properly at all and cannot now be reconstructed.

Anonymity creates disinhibition—people feel freer to write because they are less likely to be challenged about their words. Many anonymous letters show the author to be play-acting a role—as a member of a gang or even as the moral voice of the community itself. Social psychologists call this deindividuation. In particular, it is noticeable that in quite a few of the cases discussed in Penning Poison, the writers lived marginalised and often powerless lives within their respective communities. Not signing their name permitted these writers to create an entirely new persona for themselves: they became powerful not powerless; popular not lonely; racy not mousy. They had (at least in their own imaginations) a crew, a gang, a village, a street, a housing estate, behind them. Seen this way, anonymous letters share many similarities with online anonymity, apart from the potential size and scope of the audience.

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Napoleon’s cinematic empire: a fascination with film

People around the nineteenth-century Atlantic world were fascinated by Napoleon Bonaparte. One way to measure this enthusiasm is to look to the poems, novels, plays, paintings, lithographs, souvenir objects, as well as memoirs, histories, and biographies in which he appears. Often, he is front and center, but the emperor also lurks on the margins or pops in momentarily. Some factual, many fanciful, these works created a new kind of Napoleonic empire that continued to conquer the imagination long after his armies disbanded. Indeed, Napoleonic spectacles were a feature of nineteenth-century life, from the Napoleon plays that entertained audiences in cities large and small, the elaborate festivities arranged to honor the return of his body from Saint-Hélène on 15 December 1840—the retour des cendres—or the great parade route at the St. Louis World’s Fair of 1904, where a lounging young Napoleon oversaw the activities.

Given his decided penchant for spectacle—he crowned himself emperor, after all—there is no reason to be surprised that Napoleon’s empire soon included the cinema, a medium his visual ubiquity made ripe for conquest. To prepare for our newest Napoleon, it is worth looking back on some of his prior celluloid incarnations, some great and others less so. Sometimes Napoleon is granted center stage, while other times he tries to steal it, but there is no lack of Napoleon content in the history of film.

Napoleon’s familiarity is key to one important category of movie, what I’ll call the famous people across time film. Whether the goal is plundering historical treasures as in Time Bandits (dir. Terry Gilliam, 1981) or to saving humanity from extermination, the premise of the panned The Story of Humankind (dir. Irwin Allen, 1957), Napoleon inevitably is among the cast of characters. In the best of these movies—Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure (dir. Stephen Herek, 1989)—as in Time Bandits, Napoleon is the first historical figure viewers encounter, his familiar face launching viewers into the romps to follow. (Despite the Marx brothers and Dennis Hopper as Bonaparte, there isn’t much of a romp to The Story of Humankind, however.)

Poet Pierre-Jean de Béranger penned some of the most famous iterations of a familiar nineteenth-century fantasy: what if Napoleon escaped again? In poems like “Il n’est pas mort” [He is not dead], Béranger gave voice to the collective belief in Napoleon’s ability to defy normal, including mortal, expectations. Alan Taylor’s 2002 The Emperor’s New Clothes updates this genre as it follows Napoleon off St. Helena and into a quotidian, but happy, life. The moments when the fantasy intersect with fact, as Napoleon’s belief that he is Napoleon lands him in a mental asylum, is a fine, ironic touch.

The Napoleonic era provides the backdrop for many movies in which the emperor seldom wanders on stage—Austen, Dumas, and Dickens films, Vanity Fair, various versions of War and ­Peace—as well as an array of battle movies (Waterloo [dir. Sergei Bondarchuk (1970)], Abel Gance’s Austerlitz (1960), or the more recent Portuguese film, Lines of Wellington [dir. Valeria Sarmiento (2012)]), in which he more often does. But these are less engaging, finally, than the movies about Napoleon that aren’t watchable. The first, with apologies to fans of long silent films, is Abel Gance’s 1927 epic, Napoléon. At 330 minutes, it is an odyssey full of technical innovations, if one can find it.

No matter how hard one looks, however, it is not possible to see what may be the most famous of all Napoleon movies—Stanley Kubrick’s planned, but unmade, Napoleon biopic. Planned around the Felix Markham biography of the emperor, for which Kubrick attained the rights, Kubrick’s screenplay emerged with the aid of a corps of Oxford graduate students, who carefully surveyed Bonaparte and his world. Kubrick claimed there had “never been a good or accurate movie” about Napoleon and his project, no mere “dusty historic pageant,” would fill the gap (The Stanley Kubrick Archive, 787). But it didn’t happen. Still, given that Jack Nicholson was Kubrick’s choice for Napoleon, there are hints of it in both Barry Lyndon, the historical work he made instead which romps into the Napoleonic era, and The Shining, with a deliciously maniacal Nicholson unleashing his own tidal waves of blood. Surely Steven Spielberg version of Kubrick’s plan, currently being created for HBO, won’t be any closer than this combination.

Neither previews nor interviews with Ridley Scott have convinced me, though, that the new Napoleonic spectacle will shake my enthusiasm for a shimmering Cinemascope account of Napoleon’s life and loves, Henry Koster’s 1954 Désirée. Adapted from a best-selling novel of the same title by Austrian author, Annemarie Selinko, Désirée tells the story of Napoleon’s first—and purportedly enduring—love of a young woman from Marseille. To assert that his fleeting romance with Désirée Clary is more important than his subsequent romance with Joséphine de Beauharnais already establishes that this is no documentary, as does its conclusion suggesting that it is Désirée who convinces Napoleon to accept defeat (again) in 1815. Lush cinemascope, brief vignettes, and melodramatic acting all combine to make this movie an odd choice for enthusiasm. Certainly Bosley Crowther, who reviewed the film for the New York Times, thought so. The excellent cast, he sighs, “merely fill out the plushy décor of this Twentieth Century-Fox spectacle, which at times Henry Koster has direct as though it were a satire on suburbia. For the most part, however, he has made it what it is—just a colorful vehicle for a pseudo-Napoleonic outing, a streetcar named ‘Désirée.’”  Had Crowther read Ralph Waldo Emerson’s essay on Napoleon he might have realized just how many pseudo-Napoleonic hearts beat in suburbia—and it may well be this aspect of the movie that speaks most powerfully to me.

And then there’s Marlon Brando’s Bonaparte. Juxtaposed against his performance as Terry Malloy in On the Waterfront, Brando’s turn as the emperor is flat, wooden, sometimes silly. If in On the Waterfront, Brando brings to life the frustration of a character who realizes that he could have been somebody, in Désirée he turns to a historical figure who, unbelievably, is not just a contender but an emperor. It may not be a performance to win awards, yet Brando captures the naked ambition and awkward unease that is said to have characterized the young Napoleon off the battlefield. Perhaps Rod Steiger, who plays Joseph Bonaparte, thought so, for he would go on to play Napoleon in Bondarchuk’s Waterloo. It is neither a good nor an accurate movie—but I think it is impossible to make a good and accurate movie about Napoleon, a figure weighted with expectations and fantasies and facts and fictions. So why not have Marlon Brando, in white knee breeches, dancing?

_{Featured image: “Napoleon I” by Louis Philibert Debucourt, 1807. Via Wikimedia Commons (public domain).}

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Exploring language and masculinities in the media landscape

We all engage with different media formats on a daily basis. From watching television shows and movies, to catching up with the news, playing videogames, reading a blogpost from a favourite author, downloading the latest app, or discussing current events with people on social media, the media is an integral (and inescapable) part of our lives. While there is some evidence to suggest rates of use across commercial media platforms is declining, a recent Ofcom report found that over 90% of the British adult population are regular users of the internet and British viewers are still watching over five hours of television per day, even as overall media consumption is now fragmented across smart phones, online platforms, radio stations, television, streaming services, and print. 

Men in the media

What is also clear across a variety of news reports, television shows, social media sites, computer games, and other media formats is that men appear to dominate, both in terms of focus and the number of contributions they make. In the case of televised and printed media, this dominance raises questions of representation, equity, and the shape of contemporary gender relations. In other spaces, such as the manosphere (a loose collection of blogs, websites, Twitter accounts, and Reddit communities dedicated to a variety of men’s issues), this dominance is inflected by a virulent strand of networked misogyny, anti-feminism, and male supremacism. 

This intersection of men and media has been a research focus in academia, public policy work, and the charity sector for some time now. This research highlights how the media sets out cultural scripts of what’s “normal” and “accepted.” Media outputs give audiences exemplars and models they can compare themselves against, offering aspirational goals to strive for or images of self-hood to avoid. The media can also subvert these scripts, pushing gender discourses into new territory, challenging established wisdoms, and destabilising conventional stereotypes. By virtue of their interactivity and sense of community, manosphere spaces bring an added layer of complexity to proceedings, with research suggesting that their technological affordances play a key role in driving online radicalisation. 

And it is clear that the diversity of media influences can have substantial real-world effects. For instance, a recent survey commissioned by BBD Perfect Storm found that 51% of men believe that the media negatively impacts how successful they feel, while a joint UN Women/UNICEF report from 2022 notes “the particular role of news media reporting in perpetuating discriminatory gender norms and stereotypes, and bolstering the social permission structures that normalize this violence.” The arrest of Andrew Tate, the self-proclaimed “king of toxic masculinity,” in December 2022 brought some of these issues into ever clearer focus, with a number of teachers, educators, charity leaders, parents, and counsellors expressing concerns about how Tate’s controversial talking points around consent, respect, dating, gender relations, and women were being parroted by male pupils in school hallways and classrooms up and down the country.  

Exploring the language of men in the media

Given the ubiquity of men in the media, it would seem to be an obvious place to look at how language relates to issues of contemporary masculinities. But while masculinities studies is a well-established field, the empirical analysis of the language used by (and about) men is a relatively new part of language and gender research. In my own work in this area, I explore how language is used by men across a range of media contexts, including fatherhood forums, television comedy shows, newspaper articles, manosphere communities, and alt-right spaces. More specifically, I’m interested in the history of “tough” masculinity in the British press, evaluations of “ideal” masculinity in the manosphere, the role of the media in promoting “positive” masculinities (with specific focus on the comedy show Brooklyn Nine-Nine), and the representation of caring models of fatherhood in online forums.

Why might we want to apply a linguistic lens to men in different media spaces? First and foremost, language is the primary means through which we relate to one another and (dis)align ourselves from other groups and categories. By paying close attention to linguistic practice, we can learn more about contemporary gender dynamics and how language is used to structure these relations. Second, by analysing the kinds of linguistic strategies used in manosphere and alt-right spaces, we can better understand how these strategies become part of a system of persuasion and manipulation to recruit young men to male supremacist ideologies. In the context of the growing threat posed by networked misogyny (captured in the toxic narratives promoted by Tate and other “manfluencers”), challenging these strategies becomes an important pedagogical intervention. Finally, it is clear that some media outputs offer a more positive and healthier configuration of masculinity and we can do a lot to learn about how these outputs use language to disrupt some of the more damaging aspects of masculine behaviour.  

For many people, language is an unremarkable part of everyday life, yet it is through this mundanity that language retains its power to shape society in subtle and indirect ways. The job of a linguist is to bring to light these hidden systems of differentiation and alignment, in order to show how language contributes to ongoing processes of discrimination, bias, and prejudice. The media reflects (and influences) both the good and the bad of who we are and what we stand for and, because of how it sits within a broader system of gender discourses, different media forms are ideal spaces for exploring the contemporary construction of modern-day masculinities (and of gender relations more generally). With the media so deeply integrated into our everyday lives, and substantial concerns being expressed about the problems of networked misogyny, gender representation, online radicalisation, male supremacism, and a whole host of other social ills, we need to use all the tools at our disposal to try to address these problems.

_{Featured image from the book cover of Language and Mediated Masculinities: Cultures, Contexts, Constraints (OUP 2023)}

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On specters and spectacle: tales of two Eurovisions, Liverpool-Ukraine 2023

Phantoms from the past, ghosts of the present, specters of the future, all gathered on 13 May to haunt the Eurovision Song Contest, cohosted in 2023 by the United Kingdom in Liverpool and by Ukraine in the spectral spaces of a Europe divided by war, but singing in concert under the banner, “United by Music.” Two Europes and two Eurovisions were on full display, each summoning its many specters in the chorus of the nation at its most spectacular: three minutes of song, dance, and theater in the most widely-viewed annual cultural event in the world.

One Eurovision was the temporary safe space of competition among a community of nations. The annual run-up to Eurovision Week in Liverpool unfolded according to well-worn tradition, the internet flooded with videos from national song contests and their winning entries, the full range of genres from intimate love songs to no-holds-barred extravagance. Fans would gather in Liverpool in the thousands (estimates claimed ca. 100,000, a figure significant only because of its symbolic excess).

The other Eurovision was Ukraine, the nation as a whole rather than a host city, a place of precarity, whose life as a European nation was under siege. The annual run-up to Eurovision Week in Ukraine was one of war and suffering, of pride in the long history of Ukrainian sovereignty to which song and music had borne witness, chronicled by the Ukrainian entries in the Eurovision over the past two decades, three first-place finishes among them, most recently the 2022 winner, Kalush Orchestra’s “Stefania.”

The tale of two Eurovisions in 2023 is the story of a Europe riven by the conflict between East and West, unsettled by migration and unabated refugee crisis, and staggered by the threats of rising fascism, antisemitism, and anti-LGBTQ politics. Europe has been here before, and far too often. So, too, had the Eurovision Song Contest, first established in 1956 at the height of the Cold War, and on the eve of the Soviet military intervention in Hungary and Czechoslovakia, and the establishment of the European Commission, the precursor of the European Union. The phantoms of the past are all-too-familiar, the specters of the future once-again-threatening. 

This year’s competition witnessed a substantial retreat in the number of nations competing, only 37 after a decade and a half when the numbers hovered between 42 and 43. Recently competing nations choosing not to enter this year came entirely from Eastern Europe: Belarus, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Hungary, Montenegro, North Macedonia, Russia, and Slovakia. There are many explanations for the retreat of Eastern European nations—Russia was banned from entering—but the most common one claimed that costs for smaller nations were prohibitive. The investment in sending a national team to the Grand Prix are not insignificant, but smaller nations in Western Europe routinely manage them, among them San Marino (population 33,745) and Luxembourg when it re-enters the Eurovision next year.

There is much about the two Eurovisions in Ukraine and Liverpool in 2023 that seems hard to reconcile. Though I have written about the Eurovision Song Contest since the 1980s, from the multiple perspectives of ethnographic fieldwork, close analysis of the songs themselves, and active integration of Eurovision courses into university curricula in the United States and Germany, I am unable, in 2023, to write about the two Eurovisions as one big party, conjoined by kitsch and camp. The phantoms and the ghosts are too haunting. Public celebration takes on more spectral meaning in the Ukrainian Eurovision when public curfew sends viewers to their homes and shelters after 8:00 pm.

At the Liverpool Eurovision the desire to celebrate by no means disappeared. It was the spirit of celebration that lifted the Swedish popstar Loreen to first place after she garnered the largest number of votes from the professional juries in each competing nation for her song, “Tattoo.” As she had in 2012, when she won the Eurovision in Baku, Azerbaijan with “Euphoria,” Loreen brilliantly captured the magic of the Eurovision stage with a Eurosong par excellence. When I wrote about her in my 2012 blogpost, I claimed that, as a child of Moroccan immigrants in Stockholm, Loreen (Lorine Zineb Nora Talhaoui) “represents the New Europe, with a multiculturalism and religious diversity that undoes the nationalism of the Old Europe.” In the 11 years since her first Eurovision—much rejoiced as the first woman to do so, and on the fiftieth anniversary of Sweden’s greatest Eurovision victory, ABBA’s “Waterloo”—Loreen’s performance relies on an earlier history, comfortably situated in the Liverpool Eurovision.

The favorite of the public voting was, however, not Sweden’s Loreen, but Finland’s Käärija, whose “Cha Cha Cha” successfully cobbled together the Eurosong’s tried-and-true formulae of over-the-top spectacle, with a refrain of countless iterations of “cha cha cha,” to which ecstatically entertained fans in the Liverpool arena and on the internet could sing along. Käärli’s public could not, in the final moment, outweigh Loreen’s media professionals.

The spectacle of the Liverpool Eurovision was plentiful, and yet the specters of the Ukrainian Eurovision were present, and painfully so. These were the specters that drew me to the other Eurovision, the one haunted by the phantoms tearing apart Europe along its very borders. These were the ghosts of misogyny and physical violence. The Czech entry—and my overall favorite—Vesna singing “My Sister’s Crown,” placed tenth in the Grand Finale, singing proudly of the resistive power of sisterhood, every verse framed by the couplet, “My sister won’t stand in the corner / Nor will she listen to you.”

It was the call to listen that most powerfully opened the spaces of the Eurovision that took place in Ukraine on 13 May 2023. We were reminded that song and sound draw us to places we cannot be, spectacle transformed to oracle, amplified by the beauty and horror of the sirens, past and present. If we watched one Eurovision on the stage in Liverpool, the sounds of the other Eurovision in Ukraine refused to be silent. I had the good fortune to watch the Grand Finale with my friend, colleague, and visiting professor at the University of Chicago, Olha Kolomyyets, who holds a professorship in ethnomusicology at the Ivan Franko National University of Lviv, Ukraine. Even as the spectacle in Liverpool was broadcast, the air raid sirens in Ukraine were sounding through Olha’s cellphone, fully in disharmony with a contest professing “Unity in Music.” The ensuing Russian missile attacks, not least among them a strike on the home city of Tvorchi, the two singers of the Ukrainian entry, Ternopyl, immediately prior to their performance. It is to Tvorchi, then, whose song, “Heart of Steel,” placed sixth in Liverpool, that I give the final words for the Eurovision in Ukraine:

Don’t be scared to say just what you think,

‘Cause no matter how bad, someone’s listening.

_{Featured image: Tvorchi performing the song “Heart of Steel” on stage by Michael Doherty via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)}

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<em>Music for Prime Time</em>: 15 of the greatest TV themes

Music composed for television had, until recently, never been taken seriously by scholars or critics. Catchy TV themes, often for popular weekly series, were fondly remembered but not considered much more culturally significant than commercial jingles. Music for Prime Time is the first serious, journalistic history of music for American television. Jon Burlingame, author of Music for Prime Time and one of the nation’s leading writers on the subject of music for films and television, has selected his favorite TV themes through the years for this playlist.

Listen to his selections for TV’s greatest themes and read on to learn about the composers and their creations.

1. “Peter Gunn” by Henry Mancini (1958)

“Peter Gunn” is among the first well-known, widely recognized themes for television. The jazz approach for a suave private detective (who happened to hang out at a jazz club) immediately became the only acceptable music for practically every cop and private eye series (and movies) for the next few decades.

2. “Rawhide” by Dimitri Tiomkin and Ned Washington (1959)

Dimitri Tiomkin, who wrote such famous western movie scores as “High Noon” and “Gunfight at the OK Corral,” wrote this cowboy song for a cattle-driving drama for TV starring Clint Eastwood long before he became a movie star. It became one of singer Frankie Laine’s biggest hits and made a fortune for its composer because he insisted on owning the music publishing rights.

3. The Andy Griffith Show theme by Earle Hagen (1960)

The best-known and most fondly remembered theme by one of the pioneers of TV music; Hagen would go on to write themes for The Dick Van Dyke Show, I Spy, That Girl, The Mod Squad, and many others. Incidentally, he whistled the tune himself and often said that was the one and only time he ever whistled at a recording session.

4. The Twilight Zone main theme by Marius Constant (1960)

The great Bernard Herrmann composed the original theme for Rod Serling’s first season, but it was replaced for season two by this strange tune by an obscure French classical composer—who wasn’t even consulted and didn’t know his musical snippets (written for the CBS music library) were being turned into a TV theme. It has, over time, become musical shorthand for “something weird is happening here.”

5. Jerry Goldsmith TV themes (1961-1995)

One of the all-time great Hollywood composers, Jerry Goldsmith started in TV and, while he became an Oscar-winning film composer, he often returned to TV to write themes for old friends who helped start him in the business. In order, they are the spy show The Man from U.N.C.L.E., medical series Dr. Kildare, high-school sitcom Room 222, sci-fi series Star Trek Voyager, homespun period drama The Waltons, and ’70s detective drama Barnaby Jones. Some of these were among the most popular shows of their time.

6. The Addams Family main theme by Vic Mizzy (1964)

Vic Mizzy was a funny songwriter who wrote funny comedy themes (“Green Acres” was also his); he came up with the finger-snapping incorporated into the titles of this offbeat half-hour. The show only lasted two seasons, but the theme outlived the original to become a part of the 1990s movies and the ongoing animated series. The harpsichord accompaniment of this theme now resonates in the harpsichord of the Netflix series Wednesday, based on one of the ’60s characters.

7. “Secret Agent Man” from Secret Agent by P.F. Sloan and Steve Barri (1965)

This was the first successful rock ‘n’ roll theme for TV (The Beach Boys had done a sitcom theme the year before, but the show was cancelled and the boys never issued a single). Johnny Rivers sang it and it became a top-10 hit on the radio. The show was a British import, and CBS thought it needed a musical update to attract a younger demographic. The guitar hook became the first thing that young guitar players learned to play back in the mid-1960s.

8. “Mission: Impossible” by Lalo Schifrin (1966)

Maybe the most famous spy theme ever. Schifrin turned this into a top-40 hit in 1967. It’s one of the reasons there’s now a series of movie thrillers starring Tom Cruise—the theme is so identifiable that it became a marketing tool for Paramount to “sell” viewers on its big-screen franchise. Schifrin became a well-known film composer after that (Dirty Harry, Rush Hour) but this remains his best-known work.

9. “Hawaii Five-0” by Morton Stevens (1968)

This was one of the ’60s most dynamic themes, an exciting musical backdrop for a long-running cop show starring Jack Lord. Its original main-title imagery is so iconic that it was largely replicated by the creators of the reboot decades later. And the theme was so crucial to the reboot that composer Brian Tyler made CBS dig out the original arrangement to re-record for the new series.

10. The Persuaders! theme by John Barry (1971)

Widely considered among the greatest themes in the history of British television, this hummable waltz-time theme for offbeat percussion instruments was written by the veteran James Bond composer John Barry, whose “Goldfinger” and “Thunderball” were big hits in both the US and UK. The series starred Roger Moore (before he was 007) and movie star Tony Curtis, and it remains a favorite of action-adventure TV buffs of the era.

11. Hill Street Blues theme by Mike Post (1981)

Mike Post is responsible for some of the best-known TV themes in history (LA Law, Magnum P.I., The A-Team, The Greatest American Hero, Law & Order) but this is probably my favorite. The Hill Street Blues theme was written for the legendary Steven Bochco series, an ensemble police drama that won many Emmys and remains one of the great cop shows of all time.

12. Dynasty theme by Bill Conti (1981)

Along with Dallas, this was one of the top-rated prime-time soaps of its time, a drama about the rich and famous. Bill Conti of Rocky fame composed this very regal theme for the series. He always said that he could never be inspired by the original title, “Oil,” but when they renamed it “Dynasty” this tune came right away.

13. “Where Everybody Knows Your Name” from Cheers by Gary Portnoy and Judy Hart Angelo (1982)

This is merely the greatest song about a bar ever written. It’s a sitcom theme, yes, but one that conveys the locale, the people, the mood, and is so catchy and memorable that, decades later, it still resonates. The two-minute version has extra verses and it’s sung by one of the songwriters.

14. Game of Thrones main title by Ramin Djawadi (2011)

This theme for the HBO fantasy became a sensation with millions of YouTube—an earworm for cello, tribal drums, and orchestra that introduced us all to a dark and dragon-filled world. The composer won two Emmys for his music, and he redid the main theme for the prequel House of the Dragon.

15. Succession main title theme by Nicholas Britell (2018)

A brilliant fusion of classical and hip-hop influences, this Emmy-winning theme by popular composer Nicholas Britell (Moonlight, Andor) serves as a great accompaniment to one of the most popular cable series of our time.

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A Black Irish-American rejoinder to <em>Gone With The Wind</em>: Frank Yerby’s <em>The Foxes of Harrow</em>

The Foxes of Harrow (1946), a Southern historical romance by Black Irish-American author Frank Yerby (1916–1991), writes back to Margaret Mitchell’s bestselling novel, Gone with the Wind (1936; hereafter GWTW). Although Yerby and Mitchell were both raised in Georgia during segregation by mothers of Irish descent, their socially assigned racial identities created divergent approaches to representing the pre- and post-Civil War South in their respective novels. 

GWTW was (and remains) controversial for opening with a vision of an antebellum world of grace and for a plotline that justifies the KKK as needed protection from the sexual predation of white women by formerly enslaved men in the Reconstruction South. A break-out bestseller, Foxes kick-started a historical novel-writing career that made Yerby America’s highest-earning novelist by 1954. As with GWTW, Yerby’s novel covers the rise and fall of white Southern fortunes, but markedly departs from Mitchell in centering three-dimensional African-American characters and in its positive depiction of Reconstruction. Nevertheless, both romances feature penniless, “off-white” planters of Irish birth who transform themselves into the white exploitative landowner class to whom they themselves had once been subject: Gerald O’Hara in GWTW and Stephen Fox in Foxes. Only Yerby’s Irish planter ultimately understands the connections between these contexts, however.

As a young man in Ireland, Mitchell’s Gerald murders an oppressive landlord’s agent in disordered colonial Ireland and subsequently flees. Arriving in the South in the 1820s, O’Hara acquires both his first enslaved man and a neglected plantation in Georgia in games of poker, and further “whitens” by marrying into the local elite. These plot points almost all repeat in Foxes, but in an insightful departure from the easy interpretation of Yerby as merely derivative, Mark C. Jerng calls his novel “a prequel to GWTW that centers on the Gerald O’Hara figure.” (Mitchell moves from an opening emphasis on Gerald to center his daughter, Scarlett, for much of the action.)

Yerby’s negotiation of his dual heritages is apparent in Stephen’s “guttersnipe” Dublin street urchin beginnings, which challenges the certainties of the South’s black-white binary as much as the novel’s many mixed-race and racially ambiguous (“swarthy”) French characters. Yerby writes accessible fiction in the Mitchell mode, but simultaneously debunks what Du Bois had indicted as the “southern white fairytale” of graceful plantation life. In a Foxes scene that anticipates a similar event in Toni Morrison’s Beloved (1987), the unfree Sauvage attempts to take her baby with her when she commits suicide, exposing the stark reality of the desperation created by enslavement. By contrast, Mitchell propounds the “cherished darky” myth by having Scarlett claim that “house slave” Peter is “‘family,’” though this claim is certainly not meant to suggest interracial ties of the sort depicted by Yerby! (Indeed, the impossibility of Irish-African hybridity in GWTW’s sealed white supremacist universe is mocked by Alice Randall’s 2001 parody, The Wind Done Gone, in which Scarlett turns out to be mixed-race.) Although Yerby had a predominantly white mainstream readership and his marketing in the South evaded the issue of his racial identity, he deviates most from Mitchell in depicting rebellious, articulate, and prominent African-American characters, particularly those on the enslaved Caleen’s matrilineal line. 

When read without the blinders of caste, gender, and the patrilineal, Foxes turns out to be a novel of Caleen’s surname-less matrilineal line as much as Stephen’s “legitimate” line. Caleen, the shrewd materfamilias of Harrow’s enslaved cohort, upon whose knowledge of weather and medicine Stephen relies, is everywhere in the action and is its seditious centre: she teaches her grandson, Inch, reading and passwords for the Underground Railroad, and he ultimately makes a bid for freedom. Caleen makes herself indispensable to Stephen, but all the while she strategizes for her family and its future, as protective of bloodline as any white planter. The dynastic lines of Caleen and Stephen converge at the close with Cyrus, Stephen’s son by his mixed-race Creole mistress, Desiree. Young Cyrus becomes Inch’s stepson when the latter marries the boy’s mother in the Reconstruction era, a repudiation of the racially “pure” bloodline that underpins the antebellum logic of Mitchell’s novel.

Mitchell’s planter sees no connection between the sectarian oppression in Ireland that he had fled and the South’s slave system. Fox’s street origins, by contrast, are an implicit source of his ambivalent view of that way of life. Indeed, Yerby puts words in his planter’s mouth of the sort likely never before uttered by “the master” in a Southern plantation romance: “‘slavery is a very convenient and pleasant system – for us…I have my leisure, which I haven’t earned, and my wealth, which I didn’t work for…’” Mitchell’s Gerald justifies his acquisition of plantation and human chattel as the hunger “of an Irishman who has been a tenant on the lands his people once had owned.” Likewise, Stephen flees Ireland to gain “freedom,” but his final words in Foxes—as his plantation is threatened by the war and the hunger of his Dublin street days returns—suggests a reluctant understanding of the costs paid by others for his freedom that is entirely absent from GWTW: “‘For a little while, we lived like gods. I’m not sure that it was good for us.’” 

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Marilyn Monroe goes to the Oscars

If the Academy Awards were very much a Hollywood institution in 1951, the awards ceremony itself, on 29 March of that year, was a far cry from the mega-productions of later years and today. The 23rd Oscar ceremony was held at the RKO Pantages Theatre—now known as the Hollywood Pantages Theatre—with a sort of “satellite” location at a New York restaurant to accommodate the nominees then on the East Coast. The ceremony was broadcast on radio but not television, a situation which would change with the first Oscar telecast two years later. Fortunately, the ceremony is not lost to us, since for years the Academy had been seeing to it that its awards presentation was filmed. Even better, the 1951 show was the first to be filmed in color and is available for viewing online.

In many ways, it was a capsule summary of the Oscar shows we still watch more than six decades later: a famous and well-liked host (in this case, Fred Astaire) reading scripted jokes, celebrity presenters, “Best Song” performers, and a buildup to the main events of the acting and Best Picture winners. In short, it’s never changed, except that it has: no big production numbers, a very modest set, and winners in so-called lesser categories not giving acceptance speeches. This, needless to say, kept the ceremony quite short.

The big winner that year was All About Eve, with six awards. One of those, Best Sound Recording, was the only Eve prize handed out by one of the film’s cast members. Although she’d had limited—if flashy—screen time in All About Eve, Marilyn Monroe was starting to launch a major career and had been spotlighted in the 1 January 1951 Life magazine as one of Hollywood’s “Apprentice Goddesses.” Six of those deities-in-waiting were called on to be Oscar presenters that year, and besides MM the roster included Debbie Reynolds, Arlene Dahl, Debra Paget, Phyllis Kirk, and Jan Sterling. For MM, then in the first year of her contract at Twentieth Century-Fox, it was a signal moment. With no further films yet on the professional horizon, she was feeling ignored by her studio and eager for opportunities. An Oscar appearance, even on the radio, would be great exposure, and Monroe was determined to make a major impression. 

Unfortunately, a couple of factors could be seen as a hindrance. One was the evening gown Fox lent her to wear—a black concoction with an enormous full skirt and a rather strange network of netting that draped around her shoulders and, in the back, rose halfway up her head. It was, in fact, a hand-me-down, previously worn by Valentina Cortese in Fox’s The House on Telegraph Hill. Despite a smattering of sequins and the expected low neckline, it wasn’t what we think of as a vintage-Marilyn dress, not with that skirt. (She always wanted them much, much tighter.) A pair of dangling earrings and a couple of black hair clips completed the ensemble, and her hair was a few shades darker than the familiar color seen in Gentlemen Prefer Blondes and The Seven Year Itch. 

And, because it was Marilyn Monroe appearing before a live audience, there was also a major case of nerves. Backstage, as the show commenced, her panic ratcheted up to the crisis point when something (or someone) caused the net trim on her gown to rip. As her fellow presenters watched in horror, MM came close to falling apart completely. Gloria De Haven, Jane Greer, and Debra Paget rushed over to console her and, since malfunctions were as much of an issue in 1951 as in 2023, there was a wardrobe woman nearby with a needle and thread. After a hasty repair, MM found the means to pull herself together before Fred Astaire called her name.

As the orchestra played “Oh, You Beautiful Doll,” Monroe glided serenely out onto the Pantages stage, deftly maneuvering the oversized skirt and giving no indication of the terror she’d been feeling. In her familiar throaty murmur, she carefully read the scripted list of nominees, her nervousness apparent only to those who wondered why she looked up only briefly in the course of her presentation. After calling the winner as All About Eve, she looked out at the audience with a big MM smile and walked over to greet Thomas C. Moulton of the Fox Sound Department, hand him his Oscar, and stride offstage with him arm-in-arm. Backstage, she posed with Moulton and alone, looking every inch the professional and, indeed, an Apprentice Goddess. 

As in other moments in her career, Monroe had scored a public triumph after a rough private start. Yet, despite her successful appearance and the legendary stardom that would soon arrive, it would be the only time she ever attended the Academy Awards. It is, without question, Oscar’s loss.

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Five classics to read if you enjoy shows like Bridgerton or Sanditon [reading list]

“It is a truth universally acknowledged…” that there is no such thing as too many period dramas—at least, this remains true for those of us who are drawn to them, time and time again. Watching period dramas bring with them a sense of comfort as they transport the viewer to a world that is so unlike their own, where intense emotions are given space to breathe. In the same manner, reading books about such drama and emotion provides the reader an opportunity to closely reflect on how these situations relate back to real life. 

With the start of the new seasons of Bridgerton and Sanditon—the former based on the book series by Julia Quinn and the latter based on Jane Austen’s last but unfinished novel of the same name—readers may find that they are drifting toward reading books, particularly classics, of the same nature where themes of love, betrayal, innocence, jealousy, and so much more are explored. 

With that in mind, here are five books that we recommend you read if you enjoy shows like Bridgerton and Sanditon:

Wives and Daughters by Elizabeth Gaskell, edited by Angus Easson

Wives and Daughters is Gaskell’s last novel that is regarded by many as her masterpiece. Subtitled as “An Every-Day Story”, the reader is presented with observations of early nineteenth-century English life—about the hierarchies, social values, and social changes—through the eyes of Molly Gibson, daughter of the doctor in the small provincial town of Hollingford. In essence, the novel is a timeless representation of human relationships and judging people for what they are, not what they seem.

Read: Wives and Daughters

Middlemarch by George Eliot, edited by David Carroll and David Russell

Middlemarch is considered the greatest “state of the nation” novel as it is about living with others, about growing up, losing one’s ideals, and finding them again. Set in a fictional English Midland town, the story follows the lives of many characters whose distinct stories intersect with one another’s. The novel grapples with issues such as the status of women and the nature of marriage, and explores themes of self-interest, idealism, hypocrisy, and education. 

Read: Middlemarch

Shirley by Charlotte Brontë, edited by Margaret Smith, Herbert Rosengarten, and Janet Gezari.

Shirley is Brontë’s only historical novel and her most topical one, and it expresses Brontë’s sense of bereavement following the deaths of her three siblings. Set against the backdrop of the Luddite uprisings in the Yorkshire textile industry, Shirley is a social novel set in 1811-12 Yorkshire where the residual effects of the industrial depression due to the Napoleonic Wars and the War of 1812 is greatly apparent.

Read: Shirley

Lorna Doone by R. D. Blackmore, edited with an introduction and notes by Sally Shuttleworth

A story set in seventeenth century rural bliss around the East Lyn Valley area of Exmoor, Lorna Doone is a tale of love and high adventure based on a group of historical characters. Sally Shuttleworth’s introduction finds a startling sub-text that rigidly defends Victorian values and portrays a “manly” hero constantly having to prove his masculinity to himself. This edition is the only critical edition of this perennially popular story. 

Read: Lorna Doone

Evelina by Frances Burney, introduction by Vivien Jones and edited by Edward A. Bloom

Evelina is Burney’s first, shortest, and most popular novel as it deals with themes still relevant today, such as the position of women in society and social ambition. This richly comic and entertaining novel delves deep into how young women navigate across the complex layers of eighteenth century society. Burney satirizes the society in which the story is set and is a perfect read for people who enjoy the work of Jane Austen whose novels explore many of the same issues. 

Read: Evelina

_{Featured image by Joyce McCown on Unsplash}

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<em>The Piano</em> meets <em>The Power of the Dog</em>

In Jane Campion’s 1993 film The Piano, a crated Broadwood grand sits abandoned on a remote and desolate beach, then later it gets carried through the muddy overgrown New Zealand jungle to a settler’s home. In Campion’s new film, The Power of the Dog, a Mason & Hamlin grand is carried by ranchers into the Burbank house in remote Montana so that Mrs Burbank can play it when the Governor comes for dinner. “No, it’s too good for me,” Rose modestly protests when the fancy instrument arrives. “I’m just very average, I only know tunes.”

In both films the grand piano serves as more than the emblematic instrument of feminine domestic music-making and of European bourgeois culture transported to the hinterlands of the nation or empire; it also functions as a gender technology because it regulates the metaphorical sound-body of the woman who plays it. As composer Michael Nyman explains about how his music for The Piano represents the character of Ada (Holly Hunter), “The sound of the piano becomes her character, her mood, her expressions, her unspoken dialogue, her body language.” Self-willed and temperamental, Ada is depicted as a “forte” woman whose passionate playing threatens her marriage and the patriarchal social order around her.

Rose (Kirsten Dunst) in The Power of the Dog, in contrast, is a meek and dutiful “piano” woman who tries to play gracefully within the constraints of society, marriage, and motherhood. As explained in Dreams of Love, “The piano woman’s playing is often overseen by a figure of patriarchal authority who represents the regulation and containment of her sound-body” (186). Rose’s nemesis in this story is her brother-in-law Phil (Benedict Cumberbatch), a talented but cruel and manipulative rancher who humiliates her and effectively silences her playing. When she hesitantly practices Strauss’s “Radetzky” March, which she played for silent picture shows before she got married, Phil maliciously mimics her efforts on his banjo from his room upstairs. Dunst explains that she held ice cubes in her hands before filming the dinner party scene so her fingers would be stiff and shaky with a trembling nervousness. Petrified by anxiety, Rose barely plays two notes before quickly pulling her hands off the keys. “I’m so sorry,” she apologizes to her disappointed guests, “I can’t seem to play.”

This moment in the film doesn’t seem to cohere with the backstory. Rose admits that she had once “played in the cinema pit for hours and hours,” a job which would involve improvising to whatever might be happening on the screen for an extended length of time, but now she can’t bring herself to play something, or even fake it, for a minute or two at this dinner in her home?

Campion’s film adheres to the original novel by Thomas Savage, first published in 1967, but the screenplay diverges from the novel in this scene. In the novel, Rose admits to her guests that “I’m terribly out of practice,” but she does play an entire piece, even if it is with an anxious detachment. “Somehow she got through an easy Strauss waltz, not daring to do more than play it mechanically as a child might repeats ABC’s, mindlessly” (154). When she next tries to play her husband’s favorite piece, however, she just freezes up, “appalled that her fingers had no feeling whatsoever, no knowledge. She folded her hands in her lap, and looked at them. … ‘I’m sorry,’ she said, ‘but I can’t remember it.’” There is a more complicated psychological dynamic at work here in the novel as Rose is torn between her love for her husband and her fear of her brother-in-law, who has deliberately skipped the dinner gathering. “It hadn’t been stage fright at all. Playing before a governor no more exposed oneself to criticism than playing before an audience in the pit of a motion picture palace or for a group of diners. Would he think it queer than she had simply been paralyzed by the eating utensils of someone not present?” (156)

While this portrayal of Rose conforms to established cinematic tropes around the “piano” woman who is self-deprecating about her talents and whose playing is constrained by patriarchy, these notions are also evident in real-life discussions about the film scene and the acting involved. In one interview, Dunst describes how she took lessons from piano coach Jeff Kite and practiced the Strauss march for this scene insistently, though her regimen was rather disruptive to domestic tranquility. “So that was really annoying in our household,” Dunst relates, “our friends hearing the same piece of music over and over every night.” Even her real-life husband (Jessie Plemons) found it somewhat tiresome, Dunst admits. “Every time after I’d put the kid to bed, I’d just work on the piano, work on the piano—they were so sick of these pieces.” In another interview, Dunst notes that she had to learn to “play piano badly” for the film, and her description of the dynamics of the playing scene in the film mirrors her practicing at home: “I think whatever’s happening in the house is really making her feel so insecure about even, like, working on her stuff.” Her NPR interviewer Terri Gross even recalls her own similar experience: “I was just, like, your average kid who took piano lessons and didn’t play very well. But I did sometimes have to play in front of the auditorium. … I’d get so nervous and so uncomfortable and always feel like I was going to blow it.”

In one scene in Campion’s The Piano, the weather-beaten Broadwood grand gets tuned after its arduous journey through the jungle, and Ada and her daughter are surprised to hear its newly harmonious scales. The “temperament” of a female pianist character can be represented sonically in a film by the strains of an (un)tuned piano, with those consonances or dissonances and the “regulation” of the instrument conveying her sound-body identity. Jonny Greenwood’s soundtrack score for The Power of the Dog includes a track titled “Paper Flowers” that utilizes an out-of-tune mechanical piano. The dissonant clanging timbres of this detuned pianola evoke the psychological condition of Rose’s character, as Greenwood explains: “Not only is her story wrapped up in the instrument, but it was also a good texture for her gradual mental unraveling.” The perpetual “piano woman” trope lives on in Campion’s most recent film both musically and visually, helping viewers understand this character and her condition even when she can’t play.

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The VSI podcast season three: ageing, Pakistan, slang, psychopathy, and more

The Very Short Introductions Podcast offers a concise and original introduction to a selection of our VSI titles from the authors themselves. From ageing to modern drama, Pakistan to creativity, listen to season three of the podcast and see where your curiosity takes you!

Ageing

In this episode, Nancy A. Pachana introduces ageing, an activity with which we are familiar from childhood, and the lifelong dynamic changes in biological, psychological, and social functioning associated with it.

Listen to “Ageing” (episode 43) via Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or your favourite podcast app.

Pakistan

In this episode, Pippa Virdee introduces Pakistan, one of the two nation-states of the Indian sub-continent that emerged in 1947 but has a deep past covering 4,000 years.

Listen to “Pakistan” (episode 42) via Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or your favourite podcast app.

Henry James

In this episode, Susan Mizruchi introduces American author Henry James, who created a unique body of fiction that includes Daisy Miller, The Portrait of a Lady, and The Turn of the Screw.

Listen to “Henry James” (episode 41) via Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or your favourite podcast app.

Secularism

In this episode, Andrew Copson introduces secularism, an increasingly hot topic in public, political, and religious debate across the globe that is more complex than simply “state versus religion.”

Listen to “Secularism” (episode 40) via Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or your favourite podcast app.

Demography

In this episode, Sarah Harper introduces demography, the study of people, which addresses the size, distribution, composition, and density of populations, and considers the impact certain factors will have on both individual lives and the changing structure of human populations.

Listen to “Demography” (episode 39) via Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or your favourite podcast app.

Psychopathy

In this episode, Essi Viding introduces psychopathy, a personality disorder that has long captured the public imagination. Despite the public fascination with psychopathy, there is often a very limited understanding of the condition, and several myths about psychopathy abound.

Listen to “Psychopathy” (episode 38) via Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or your favourite podcast app.

Modern drama

In this episode, Kirsten Shepherd-Barr introduce modern drama, the tale of which is a story of extremes, testing both audiences and actors to their limits through hostility and contrarianism.

Listen to “Modern drama” (episode 37) via Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or your favourite podcast app.

Slang

In this episode, Jonathon Green introduces slang. Slang has been recorded since at least 1500 AD, and today’s vocabulary, taken from every major English-speaking country, runs to over 125,000 slang words and phrases.

Listen to “Slang” (episode 36) via Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or your favourite podcast app.

Creativity

In this episode, Vlad Glăveanu introduces creativity, a term that emerged in the 19th century but only became popular around the mid-20th century despite creative expression existing for thousands of years.

Listen to “Creativity” (episode 35) via Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or your favourite podcast app.

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François Truffaut: why we crave great fiction

François Truffaut is among the few French directors whose work can be labeled as “pure fiction.” He always professed that films should not become vehicles for social, political, religious, or philosophical messages. As Bunuel used to say: “My cinema is not meant to be understood. When you understand, you reach a meaning. If you reach a meaning, there is no use for images.” Martin Scorsese flatly declared: “If I could put it in words, I would not have to put it in films.” The specificity of images is to transpose something that goes beyond the linguistic and the cognitive. Truffaut called it emotion as opposed to ideas and he was supremely gifted at delivering this precious good in his work. What exactly is emotion? This innocent word covers a fearfully complex process.

Truffaut grew up in an atmosphere of secrets and lies. He was unwanted child and found out when he was 10 that his father was not Monsieur Truffaut, but another, unknown, man. Early on, he confronted a world where words could not be trusted and learned to rely on the accuracy of non-verbal signs. His fictions expertly reactivate the silent grasp of the external world associated with pre-linguistic perceptions and create a pregnant reality alive with telling gestures, lights, colors, motions, sounds, music. A brilliant film critic and script writer, Truffaut also worshipped the formidable power of language. His films abound with letters and literary texts and cultivate elegant dialogues. He devoted one of his most beautiful films to the duality of language, verbal and non-verbal. In The Wild Child, he confronts a scientist—played by himself—writing his diary and a little savage who will never master the use of words, but still displays a natural gift for deep connections. 

Truffaut translated a rich perceptual world into hallucinatory landscapes. Under a deceptively realistic guise, images of his heroes chasing magical women in the streets of Paris become beautiful and universal metaphors for human destiny. His fictions give a geographic reality to emotions, memories, perceptions we cannot grasp or control. These metaphors suggest a hidden order organizing this buried material and bring it to light with exhilarating clarity. We are suddenly face to face with subterranean passions and we love what we see, instead of experiencing them amidst fear and confusion. 

Truffaut often declared that human destiny is imprinted by what happens to a man between the ages of 8 and 12. To illustrate how his metaphoric constructions are charged with deep autobiographical overtones, I want briefly to compare two films dealing directly with these years in his life: The 400 Blows (1959) and The Last Metro (1980). More than 20 years separate these works. The 400 Blows is Truffaut’s first film and The Last Metro his antepenultimate one. He would only make two more films before his death in 1984. Besides covering the same time-period, they share another characteristic: both were his two biggest financial successes. They obviously delivered a powerful emotion to audiences. In every other respect, however, they completely differ. 

First, style: realistic in The 400 Blows filmed in black and white and natural decors; elliptical and allusive in The Last Metro, which uses a studio-like set and a rich palette of colors where a deep red dominates. Second, narrative: The 400 Blows follows the social exclusion of a lonely 12-year-old boy who is successively expelled from school, home and Paris, and is ultimately locked up in a center for delinquents in Normandy. The Last Metro depicts the life of a theater during the German occupation, with a large cast of characters who closely interact in a series of subplots dealing with secrets, transgressive love, and creativity. A third difference sends us back to dates. Truffaut, born in 1932, was between 8 and 12 years old during WWII. He chose to film The 400 Blows in a 1959 setting, while The Last Metro is set in the Paris of the French Occupation. In The 400 Blows, we have the child, but not the décor; in The Last Metro, the décor but not the child. 

Or so it seems. One feature common to both films is the presence of a formidable woman: in one, the child’s mother; in the other, Marion Steiner, played by Catherine Deneuve. Enigmatic, lonely, distant, somewhat scary but totally fascinating, both women harbor a secret: the former is hiding a lover; the latter a husband. The main dramatic twist in both narratives will be the unveiling of this secret by the hero: Antoine Doinel, will run into his mother and her lover in the streets; Bernard Granger (Gérard Depardieu) will discover Marion’s hidden Jewish husband in the cellar of the theater. From the beginning, Granger is associated with a young boy, the concierge’s son— who will be Deneuve’s illegitimate son in the play the theater is rehearsing. In The Last Metro, we also have a second major male figure: Deneuve’s husband, the creator in the cellar. In other words, in The Last Metro, Truffaut is present under three different personas: as a child, as a lover, as a celebrated creator.

Like Antoine Doinel, the creator is in jail, hiding and threatened because he is Jewish. Truffaut suspected that his unknown biological father was Jewish, and Catherine Deneuve was one of his great loves after their meeting on the set of The Mississippi Mermaid in 1969. Their break-up broke his spirit in 1971. “Love hurts” a line from The Last Metro, is a quote from The Mississippi Mermaid. The 400 Blows and The Last Metro form a diptych; they’re two complementary facets of Truffaut’s childhood. The 400 Blows evokes the loneliness of a rejected child, The Last Metro the healing art can dispense. The theater it depicts, with its red velvet seats, is a wonderful space, protected from the threats of the outside world (the Gestapo) and dominated by a radiant star figure in a splendid red dress (Marion Steiner). This is Truffaut’s everlasting image of the cinemas of his childhood.

Autobiographical material in The Last Metro is ubiquitous, albeit most cryptic—

so cryptic that it eluded even Truffaut’s directorial eye. I wrote my first essay on The Last Metro while Truffaut was still alive. He read my analysis and told me he was “staggered” by it. Knowing nothing about his illegitimate birth and his Jewish father, I was explaining that Bernard was in the position of a child who explores the maternal space and discovers the hidden father. Under the guise of a historical film, Truffaut had unknowingly projected, within a beautiful metaphor, the secret of his birth. This anecdote is meant to make an essential point: metaphors belong to the pre-linguistic perceptions; they escape the control of the cognitive mind. This is true for both the creator and the spectator. 

Metaphor seems to be a key word to define Truffaut’s art. In each of his films, he seems to craft a new one almost more elegant, arresting, and poignant than the one before. The metaphoric constructions are embedded in formal elements that are peripheral to the main narrative. While analyzing The Last Metro, I decrypted the metaphor by focusing only on spaces, colors, and movements and ignoring the plot. Truffaut’s first film, The 400 Blows, is already profoundly metaphoric. Jean-Pierre Léaud was instructed not to express any explicit emotion while acting. The film’s form, in appearance naturalistic, furnishes secretly, through images, the key to the child’s inner rift. One example: the camera work sets up a contrast between the streets of Paris filmed in long mobile tracking shots and the inside scenes where fixed close ups dominate. The use of space captures a fantastic vitality frozen by the constraints of school and family life. Antoine’s long run at the end of the film brilliantly picks up both this spatial energy and its counterpoint in the last frozen shot by the sea.

Truffaut’s metaphoric constructions have a double function. While displaying a subterranean reality through formal arrangements, they generate a light hypnosis in the spectator. This perceptual mode differs radically from our normal ways of perceiving. It is not only different, it is accessible only through fiction and its metaphoric language. Emotion is hypnosis. Fiction opens a perceptual experience otherwise unreachable except, possibly, with alcohol and drugs, which however both lack the harmony inherent in art and, clearly, its safety. Mystical rapture would be another avenue, albeit much less within everyman’s reach than a film ticket. As the anthropologist Gregory Bateson writes: “What unaided consciousness (unaided by art, dreams and the like) can never appreciate is the systemic nature of the mind.” Art, in all its forms through the centuries, is not a luxury, but an adjuvant, an ancillary to our equilibrium and even survival, as Bateson suggests: “Unaided consciousness must always tend toward hate.” The systemic mind fosters empathy.

Great films also have moments when the hypnotic process breaks down because the images suddenly concentrate, in a fantastic coda, all the formal elements of the metaphor. This overload of effects wakes up the viewers and imprints the scene forever in their memory. It becomes what we call “an iconic scene”: Marilyn Monroe on the subway grate; Anita Ekberg in the fountain of Trevi, De Niro in the “You’re talking to me” scene of Taxi Driver and, of course, Antoine Doinel facing the viewer, his back to the sea, at the end of The 400 Blows. This last image is, by general consensus, one of the most memorable shots in the history of cinema. 

At this point we may well ask two questions: Did Truffaut know he was putting this architecture in place? Do viewers realize it exists? As I suggested earlier, the answer to both questions is almost certainly no. Knowledge implies a conscious, deliberate cognitive operation, one that is lacking on the parts of both creator and spectator. Truffaut conceived his films as a trajectory in space, as rhythms and forces in movement. The logic of this vision instinctively guided his creation of the mise en scène; the viewer responds unknowingly to the call of these forms. They trigger the pleasure of the film, which becomes the locus of a passionate dialogue between two unconscious minds, one forcefully leading the other. Such is, in fact, the film’s raison d’être. When we go to the movies, this is what we crave. Basking in the dim light of great films, we rejoice in this pause in our daily routine—a pause as indispensable as it is blissful.

_{Feature image: from Nationaal Archief via Wikimedia Commons.}

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Charlie Chaplin and the art of metamorphosis

Frogs that become princes; Lot’s wife turned into a pillar of salt; a host of Greek and Roman mythical characters transformed into spider, wolf, tree, rock, or what have you: ever since classical antiquity, astonishing transformations have been powerful vehicles of thought and feeling in folklore, myth, religion, and imaginative literature. And they continue to be so, from Kafka’s The Metamorphosis to Marie Darrieussecq’s novel Truismes, whose protagonist turns into a sow. In the movies, too, the theme plays an increasingly central role, not least in science fiction and fantasy, from The Fly to Terminator to countless werewolf films. But the doyen of all the moviemakers who have exploited the idea of transformation is Charlie Chaplin (CC).

Chaplin was certainly the greatest mime, probably the greatest actor, and arguably the greatest artist in any medium in the twentieth century. (Perhaps only Picasso runs him close.) As self-transformations go, his personal rags-to riches story is hard to match. But the theme of metamorphosis also permeates his movies.

In his definitive biography of Chaplin, David Robinson analysed CC’s use of “the comedy of transposition,” whereby objects seem to turn, consistently and irrepressibly, into other things, in virtue of the ways in which CC treats them. In The Pawnshop (1916), for example, Chaplin, as the pawnbroker’s assistant, has to value a clock brought in by a customer. First, as a doctor, he performs auscultation on the “patient” through a stethoscope. The clock then turns implicitly into a container of food, as Chaplin uses a can-opener to gain access, sniffs it, and finds the contents to be rancid. Morphing from chef to dentist, he extracts the contents with a pair of forceps, before sweeping the whole pile of debris into the customer’s hat, conveying with a shake of the head that this is a hopeless case.

In The Gold Rush (1925), the comedy of transposition is still in full flow, as when hunger-stricken CC boils and meticulously fillets his boot, converting it into a gourmet dish including a wishbone (bent nail), with spaghetti (shoe laces) on the side (the boot and laces were really made of liquorice—a third level of transposition). At another moment, Charlie performs the legendary “Dance of the Rolls,” in which two bread rolls impaled on forks assume the identity of balletic human feet. But metamorphosis can also be a pernicious delusion. In famine-induced delirium, his fellow prospector in the frozen wastes imagines Charlie as a colossal and eminently eatable chicken. This time the transformation is visual as well as mental, as CC’s gestures and costume enact his temporary change of species.

Even these flights of transformative fancy pale beside the achievement of City Lights (1931). In his role as the Tramp, CC meets a blind girl (played by Virginia Cherrill) who earns a living selling flowers. Learning that her sight can be restored if she can go to Vienna for an operation, the Tramp tries everything to get cash to pay for her trip. Finally, he renews acquaintance with a millionaire; the man is prone to bouts of maudlin drunkenness, during one of which Charlie had previously rescued him from a suicide bid. The millionaire gives the Tramp the money he needs, and the Tramp then hands it to the flower girl; but the episode coincides with a burglary on the millionaire’s house, for which the Tramp is wrongly arrested and jailed. 

While CC is in prison, the girl has her operation; now, her sight restored, she runs her own flower shop. Her one thought is to meet and thank the benefactor who transformed her life, and whom she idealises as handsome and wealthy. After his release, the Tramp wanders the streets, down at heel but still resilient. Happening to pass the flower shop, he stares enraptured at the flower girl; when he smiles, she smiles back, with a mixture of amusement at his antics and pity for his scruffiness—whereas the Tramp has instantly recognised her, she, for her part, sees him as no more than a highly implausible admirer. When she offers him a coin and a flower, he first shuffles away in embarrassment, then hesitatingly returns to accept the gifts. As she presses the coin into his hand and strokes his skin, the sense of touch that she used to rely on leads her, gradually and heart-stoppingly, to recognise the man whose generosity restored her sight. ‘You?’, she asks. ‘You can see now?’, he replies. ‘Yes, I can see now.’ 

As the scene fades and the film ends, the audience has witnessed, during one minute of screen time, an unsurpassable distillation of multiple metamorphoses. For the Tramp, the way the girl initially looks at him reveals the change in her condition from blind to sighted; later, he witnesses her expression shifting from amused insouciance to astonished awareness. As for the girl herself, the wealthy aristocrat she has been yearning for morphs, at the moment of recognition, into a dirty, derelict vagabond. Yet, at the same moment, the down-and-out she sees before her is transformed into a selfless hero, to be admired and loved.

From the idea of metamorphosis profound questions may arise, regarding, for example, form and substance (the Christian Mass) or the boundaries of the human and non-human (Arachne and all the rest). But sometimes the mood is lighter, when human beings turn into other species with hilarious consequences (Aristophanes’ Birds and Wasps). Rarer still are cases of transformation where comedy and pathos magically merge (A Midsummer Night’s Dream). This is Chaplin’s realm, where uncontrollable laughter and unstaunchable tears cohabit. The film critic James Agee described the ending of City Lights as “the greatest piece of acting and the highest moment in movies.” He was, if anything, understating the case.

_{Feature image: The Tramp and the Blind Flower Girl, City Lights still, via Wikimedia Commons.}

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Beyond “Copaganda”: Hollywood’s offscreen relationship with the police

Do Hollywood’s portrayals of policing matter as much as the industry’s material entwinement with law enforcement—as much as the working relationships pursued beyond the screen? 

Instead of conceding that the consumers of popular media are eminently capable of thinking for themselves (and thus of resisting flattering depictions of power), more and more commentators are calling for the complete elimination of cop shows, cinematic police chases, and other, ostensibly entertaining images of law enforcement. In the wake of George Floyd’s killing, the journalist Alyssa Rosenberg, writing in the Washington Post, called on Hollywood to “immediately halt production on cop shows and movies.” “Like policing itself,” tweeted the journalist and academic Steven Thrasher earlier this year, “copaganda”—a popular neologism describing the perceived capacity of screen representations to promote law enforcement—“must be abolished. It can’t be reformed.” For Thrasher, any representation of policing simply “blunts our imagination.” 

Never mind that media scholars have, since at least the 1970s, insisted that film and television do not necessarily determine human behavior, whatever our moral opposition to simulated bloodlettings and other odious scenes. Today, proclaiming that commercial entertainment strictly dictates our emotional as well as political responses is very much in vogue, as anyone who consults social networking services can readily attest. Get rid of “cop content,” goes the Twitter-friendly premise, and you will immediately weaken the power of public police departments. Without popular media telling Americans to admire law enforcement, such departments will lose the fuel they need in order to promote social inequality. They will be starved of “prestige,” forfeit the eyes and ears of the polity, and wither away as a result. 

Yet representation is not, of course, the whole story, and the disproportionate attention that it receives surely distracts from other avenues through which popular media empower and expand law enforcement in the United States. Those who proudly peddle the censorial argument would do well to ask themselves why, for instance, corporate giants have been so swift to consent to it, banning certain long-running programs, publicly apologizing for others, and generally appearing to accede to the Twittersphere. Today, those giants have as vested an interest in superficially responding to calls for social justice as they have in pursuing unchecked corporate power behind the scenes. Cops can be cancelled without much risk to the Paramount Network’s bottom line. But Viacom’s holdings are vast, materialized everywhere from the iconic Paramount Pictures studio lot in Los Angeles to corporate offices in Manhattan. Media are more than just sounds and images, messages and artistry; they are also real estate—privately owned properties that depend on public as well as private police forces for their protection, and that, as concentrations of capital, only contribute to the social inequalities so frequently at the center of collisions between cops and citizens. Whether Warner Bros. depicts “good cops” or “bad cops” on screens big and small does not, after all, affect its capacity to retain immense power over labor.

Hollywood’s intimacy with public policing is longstanding, as Rosenberg and others have shown. Yet that relationship has not been nearly as smooth or as consistent as is generally assumed; it is not reducible to the synergetic Dragnet. Police censorship of motion pictures was, as early as the first decade of the twentieth century, an object of growing public disdain, and it spoke to a tension—or paradox—at the heart of Tinseltown’s intersections with the cops: in several states, and for over five decades, police officers were empowered to ban or re-edit costly productions, even as they worked as paid advisors to movie companies. As Hollywood learned early on, the vast discretionary powers of public policing could turn on a dime; in the industry’s favor one day, those powers could mobilize against it the next. 

Today, banning the representation of policing—offering no images of cops whatsoever—is considered, by some, one possible solution to the conundrum, a way of ensuring that police departments cannot use movies and television programs for propaganda and recruitment purposes. Yet this extreme dispensation, with its promise of radical change, invokes an even broader form of social engineering—a way of remaking our minds so that we may perceive, through a certain sanitization of media, a world without cops, as if our imaginative faculties were somehow lacking on their own, our morals desperately in need of blinkers. “There is a world of stories beyond cop stories,” Thrasher has assured his readers, and until we eliminate all representations of law enforcement, policing will surely be “perceived as a necessity via Hollywood”. Such a simplistic position, which implies a passive mass audience, also ignores policing’s capacity to appropriate unexpected cultural products—to mine the movies for anything of value. 

For example, John Huston’s The Treasure of the Sierra Madre (1948), one of the most cynical of all American films—an exploration of humans’ capacity for greed and brutality, made by a liberal who was himself critical of the police (one writer called him “an anti-authoritarian cop-hater”), and not at all a “cop story”—was nevertheless generative for law enforcement. Some sixty years after its initial release, the film in fact inspired “Operating Stinking Badges,” a joint federal-city policing policy that criminalized, among other offenses, the possession of counterfeit police gear. Named after a famous line (“I don’t have to show you any stinking badges!”) uttered in the film by a Mexican bandit bent on impersonating an officer of the law, Operation Stinking Badges was challenged in 2010 by a class-action lawsuit filed on behalf of those arrested, incarcerated, and prosecuted under the policy, which empowered all manner of police personnel to determine, at a glance, exactly what articles of clothing or modes of comportment constituted imitation. The plaintiffs noted that this post-9/11 security measure—the brainchild of Homeland Security and the NYPD—traded on the fame of Huston’s celebrated film, and thus lent the violation of civil liberties a certain Hollywood panache bound to appeal to the general public. A federal judge in Manhattan eventually ruled that the suit, which alleged widespread violations of First, Fourth, and Fourteenth Amendment rights, lacked merit, and the federal appeals court agreed, upholding the constitutionality of a policy partly inspired by a Hollywood movie in which no American cop actually appears.  

Today the conglomerated makers of popular media have also learned to appease certain protestors, who might look away as soon as a show is cancelled or a film’s production suspended—or, for that matter, cheer the contemptuous representation of “bad” cops. The latter are central to Alexander Mackendrick’s Sweet Smell of Success (1957), which accordingly received positive attention from various anti-carceral factions—and negative attention from conservative commentators who felt that its defamatory portrayal of the NYPD was practically Soviet propaganda. Amid these debates about representation, however, the NYPD was busy expanding its special “youth squad”—recently formed to “control the fanatical fans of James Dean” (and increase drug arrests)—in order to police the film’s premiere, as it had policed the film’s production on location in “unruly” Manhattan. The independent companies behind Sweet Smell of Success (including that of liberal icon Burt Lancaster) cut costs by relying on the NYPD, which used its own resources to assist the shoot—a siphoning of public monies away from the public and toward private enterprise, a process that we do not necessarily see on the screen, that we cannot necessarily discern through attention to cinematic style alone, and that will scarcely cease once “cop stories” are banned.

Even earlier, on the opposite coast, the LAPD consented to certain “negative” representations of policing while its members, addressing closed Congressional hearings, testified to the Communist Party’s penetration of Hollywood studios. Liberal moviegoers might have been relieved to see defiantly anti-carceral films like MGM’s Faithless (1932), in which a beat cop, discussing alternatives to policing with Tallulah Bankhead’s desperate sex worker, decides not to arrest the woman but to find her a job as a waitress instead. What happened offscreen, however, was of far more consequence, both to the industry and to its audiences. Nearly four hundred miles north of the MGM lot, the Sacramento Police Department, which had a special anticommunist squad, claimed to have found evidence of the Communist affiliations of the Mexican-born Hollywood stars Lupe Vélez, Dolores del Río, and Ramón Novarro, who all faced deportation as a result—a cop-initiated harbinger of McCarthyism, which would, of course, offer its own prescriptions for “fixing” popular media and allowing audiences to imagine a world without communism. Produced during the Depression, Faithless directly depicts what many of today’s left-leaning activists would like to see—namely, the displacement of mass incarceration by a jobs guarantee. But the film’s representational turn to the left could in no way guarantee protection for actual leftists. 

What else might we miss by brooding over representation—by what does or does not show up on the screen? Today, we need not pretend that massive entertainment companies are ever on the side of social justice, or that, by micromanaging the stories they tell, we can somehow control their material and ideological ties to police departments. A high-profile cancellation (like that of Cops or Live PD) can be celebrated in a tweet about the sanitization of our screens. What happens behind those screens, however, may be harder to identify—and thus to oppose. It’s a bigger story than some would like to concede. Indeed, Hollywood’s long, jagged history of encounters with public policing has much to teach us about the lives of institutions—and individuals—under capitalism. 

_{Feature image: Police car belonging to the US Secret Service Uniformed Division patrols in Washington, DC. Photo by Matt Popovich, public domain via Unsplash.}

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A Charlie Brown Christmas: the unlikely triumph of a holiday classic

A Charlie Brown Christmas was never supposed to be a success. It hit on all the wrong beats. The pacing was slow, the voice actors were amateurs, and the music was mostly laid back piano jazz (the opening theme, “Christmas Time is Here,” carried a strange, wintery melody built on unconventional modal chord progressions). It was almost like the program was constructed as a sort of anti-pop statement. In many ways, that’s exactly what it was. And that’s exactly why it so worried the media executives who had commissioned it.

Incredibly, however, A Charlie Brown Christmas emerged from the holiday season of 1965 an unlikely and instantaneous classic, beloved by both the hip and the square in the United States. It did the incredible work of bridging the vast cleavage between the conservative and increasingly radical elements of the nation. The story of how this off-beat children’s program became a staple of modern American pop culture reveals much about the moment in which it was created and the people who fell in love with it.

The Christmas special had its origins in a television documentary that no one wanted. A young California filmmaker named Lee Mendelson had first met Charles Schulz in the early 1960s while shooting footage for a television program about Willie Mays, the famed centerfielder for the recently transplanted (1957) San Francisco Giants baseball team. Schulz, himself a recent migrant to northern California, had been at the ballpark to celebrate a Peanuts-themed event at the Giants’ Candlestick Park. After an enjoyable introduction, Mendelson had reached back out to Schulz with the idea for a documentary on Peanuts that he eventually titled A Boy Named Charlie Brown. The television documentary depicted the unassuming daily life of America’s hottest new cartoonist, from the school carpool to the drawing board to the evening at home with all his kids. Try as Mendelson might, however, he could not find a network interested in buying the program. After a year and a half of searching, it seemed that A Boy Named Charlie Brown was a loser like its namesake.

Despite this bump in the road, filming the documentary had sparked a strong working relationship between Schulz and Mendelson. During the first half of the 1960s, Peanuts grew into a national sensation thanks to big advertising deals with Ford Motor Company, a best-selling children’s book called Happiness is a Warm Blanket, and a rapidly expanding national syndication. All of this success led to a phone call in 1965. John Allen, an advertising man from McCann-Erickson, reached out to Mendelson. Allen had known Mendelson from his many attempts at selling A Boy Named Charlie Brown. This time Allen wanted to talk about a new idea for Schulz. Coca-Cola was in search of a television special for the holiday season. Did Schulz have anything, Allen inquired. “Of course,” Mendelson lied.

Mendelson immediately telephoned Schulz. “I think I may have just sold a Charlie Brown Christmas show,” he breathlessly announced. “What show might that be?” Schulz replied a bit stunned and entirely confused. “The one you need to make an outline for tomorrow,” Mendelson replied without missing a beat.

That weekend Schulz, Mendelson, and animator Bill Melendez typed and retyped and cut and pasted a draft of the script for A Charlie Brown Christmas. By Monday morning it had reached Atlanta where it received immediate approval from Coca-Cola and was soon picked up by CBS. Now the truly difficult work began. These three men had to make a promising idea into a reality.

A Charlie Brown Christmas would later become famous for its embrace of authentic child actors, smooth jazz soundtrack, and deliberate pacing. Unmoved by the flashy, multi-colored aluminum Christmas trees in fashion at the time, Charlie Brown’s Christmas tree was a spindly, crooked sprout that could not stand up to the weight of the single ornament placed atop it. Love and teamwork (and the comfort of Linus’s security blanket wrapped at its base) transformed the pitiful sprig into just the right tree for the Peanuts kids. Fans of the program found the whole thing instantly heartwarming and refreshingly genuine. That’s not how the CBS and Coca-Cola executives initially saw it, though.

In a pre-release screening, moods could hardly have been more dour. “The network thought it was awful,” Mendelson remembered afterwards. None of it had the polish, flash, pizzazz they had hoped for. Most troubling of all was a section Schulz himself had insisted on adding to the final act of the program. In it Linus finally answered the question that had plagued Charlie Brown throughout the special: “Isn’t there anyone who knows what Christmas is all about?” Linus then stepped into a spotlight on the Christmas pageant stage and recited a passage from Luke 2 about the birth of Jesus. The CBS executives minced no words about the scene after their screening. “The Bible thing scares us,” one admitted.

While this might seem like a bit of surprising response to us today as we imagine the quainter times of the long 1950s, it is important to understand just how different the television landscape was in 1965. With only three national networks, television programs competed for the broadest audience possible with their programs. This meant that television executives wanted their content to be inoffensive both to viewers and advertisers (unlike our fragmented media landscape today which thrives on polarization and controversy to sustain loyal subsets of American viewers). Religion, then, was suggested in the vaguest and most ecumenical ways so as not to stir sectarian differences. This is why Linus’s monologue put knots in the executives’ stomachs. It is also why Schulz insisted on keeping it in the program despite repeated concerns from Mendelson and Melendez. “If we don’t do it, who will?” Schulz asked.

So in December 1965, A Charlie Brown Christmas ran for the first—and, CBS executives assumed, last—time. The audience response could hardly have been more surprising or overwhelming. In the days following the program, thousands of letters and postcards flooded the offices of Coca-Cola, CBS, and Charles Schulz. Viewers praised the authenticity of the special, the message of finding deeper meanings in the season’s traditions than crude consumerism, and—for the Christian subset of the audience—explicit reference to Jesus. By juggling a broadly popular message of anti-consumerism with a more niche message of religious exclusivity, Charles Schulz and his collaborators created one of the most unlikely Christmas television classics of all time.

Feature image by Lucas Hoang on Unsplash

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A pre-9/11 action movie with a Muslim hero shows what could have been

In the fall of 1999, another action movie came and went, garnering disappointed reviews and a pittance in ticket sales. Adapted from Michael Crichton’s novel Eaters of the Dead, The 13th Warrior offered a surprising premise: a tenth-century Abbasid ambassador is recruited to join a band of Vikings(!) against an army of mysterious, monstrous creatures. Crichton’s idea thus combined the Beowulf epic with the writings of Ahmad ibn Fadlan, who travelled from Baghdad to Russia in the tenth century.  

The 13th Warrior isn’t a great movie, nor is it even very good. The opening credits give a clue as to why: at one point, the job of director shifted from John McTiernan (Die Hard) to Crichton himself, which gives the narrative a disjointed feel. But while the movie isn’t great, there’s no denying how cool it is, which is why viewers continue to revisit it. The Vikings are intimidating, the bad guys are scary, the hero rises to the occasion, and there are some intense action sequences, including a death-defying underwater escape from a cave. At its heart, it’s a story of people from different backgrounds learning to respect and value one other.

What has added to the film’s appeal over the years is its choice to center a devout Muslim in a macho American action movie. The ibn Fadlan character is like so many other Hollywood tough guys: handsome (it’s Antonio Banderas!), brave, resourceful, and guided by a code of honor. Throughout the movie, we see how his background has made him into a hero worth following. When the Vikings make fun of his small horse, he shows off his equestrian skills. When the Vikings give him a broadsword too heavy for him to lift, he sharpens it into a scimitar, wielding it like their best warriors. When the Vikings leave him out of their conversations, they soon discover that he has already mastered their language.

These breakthroughs always follow a zoomed-in shot of Banderas’ face. He focuses, eyes scrunched up, and suddenly understands. We can almost see the gears turning in his mind as he cracks their codes. Early in the movie, he says, “I am an ambassador, dammit… I am supposed to talk to people.” Diplomacy is a higher calling that aligns with his cultivation as a man of piety. 

The main motivation for making this film was to cash in on Crichton’s earlier success with blockbusters like Jurassic Park. At no point did the filmmakers claim that they were trying to create a positive portrayal of Muslims. And yet, by some curious accident, they arguably succeeded in doing just that. Ibn Fadlan’s belief is the bedrock of the character’s motivation. There is a touching scene in which he teaches one of the Vikings to write by scrawling a line in the sand: “There is only one God, and Mohammad is his prophet.” Later, in the moments before the climactic battle, ibn Fadlan kneels in sajda, asking God for guidance in what may be his final hour. And at the end of the film, ibn Fadlan’s voiceover tells us that his time with the Vikings has made him a better servant of God. Perhaps most important, Ibn Fadlan neither questions his faith nor performs rhetorical defenses of it. He’s noble because of it, not because of an anachronistic secular humanist take on his religion.

Following 9/11, the declaration that ibn Fadlan teaches the Viking, the Shahada, would be framed as suspicious or worse. But here, the Viking re-writes the statement with all the chill in the world. When he makes a mistake, ibn Fadlan gently corrects him. The art historian Stephennie Mulder has suggested that this kind of imperfect copying was a sign of the times. She writes, “The presence of pseudo-Kufic [early Arabic script] tells us something important: that Arabic was valued by the Vikings as a mark of social status or capital, much in the way we might today buy a perfume with “Paris” written on it.” For this reason, Mulder adds, the Shahada may be the most common inscription in Viking Scandinavia. It seems that Crichton’s flight of fancy inadvertently captured historical truth. 

The depiction of ibn Fadlan is not without its flaws. One could argue that the portrayal relies on a surface level understanding of Islam. The visual cues are certainly quaint. For one, Banderas’ character wears exaggerated and even clumsily applied kohl. Confusingly, he rides a camel through a landscape that resembles the well-irrigated hills of the Cotswolds. And had Banderas been a Muslim himself, he might have noticed that addressing God as “Father” in the prayer scene is more of a Christian practice than an Islamic one.

Still, there is an odd innocence to this movie, given where it sits in history. Just a few years before, another medieval action flick—Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves (1991)—included a scene in which Muslims during the Crusades appear as savages, no better than the monsters that ibn Fadlan faces. James Cameron’s True Lies (1994) pitted Arnold Schwarzenegger against a terrorist organization with the unsubtle name of “Crimson Jihad.” The film rightly drew protests.

And of course, less than two years after The 13th Warrior, the US response to 9/11 obliterated any chance of a positive portrayal of Muslims in a mainstream film or TV show for a long time. When Muslims did appear in an action movie, they were often depicted as either terrorists or victims of terror (presumably from other Muslims). There were a few films that tried to be evenhanded, like Ridley Scott’s Crusader epic Kingdom of Heaven (2005), which earned praise for its sympathetic portrayal of the sultan Saladin. But these were few and far between, and virtually never placed a Muslim at the center of the story. Even the 2007 Syrian TV series Saqf al-Alam, also inspired by ibn Fadlan’s travelogue, centered on post-9/11 geopolitics. 

Though long delayed, Hollywood has finally begun to address this problem, though it has a way to go before correcting it. A planned Ms. Marvel project features a Muslim woman as a superhero, at last catching up to the long tradition of Muslim women as leaders and public benefactors. The actor Riz Ahmed has launched a mentorship scheme offering $25,000 grants to Muslims in entertainment. 

Maybe The 13th Warrior, like the Viking’s attempt at writing, is a pastiche that can open the door for more. Through the vehicle of an exceptional hero, the movie’s major statement is one that sci-fi is well poised to make. Suspending disbelief ironically adds believability to the idea of characters crossing borders with ease. Thus the classic molds of oriental wonder and sci-fi camp dissolve into a strangely heartwarming story of people overcoming their differences and working toward a common goal. 

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10 books on magic, monsters, and myths to read for Halloween [reading list]

From its origins as an ancient Celtic festival celebrating the end of the harvest, over time Halloween has evolved into a day of trick-or-treating, scary films, costumes, and carving pumpkins.

From witches to werewolves, explore a range of titles selected by the OUP Arts & Humanities team for you to read in the lead up to Halloween.

The Dragon in the West: From Ancient Myth to Modern Legend by Daniel Ogden

How did the dragon get its wings? Everyone in the modern West has a clear idea of what a dragon looks like and of the sorts of stories it inhabits, not least devotees of the fantasies of J. R. R. Tolkien, J. K. Rowling, and George R. R. Martin. A cross between a snake and some fearsome mammal, often sporting colossal wings, they live in caves, lie on treasure, maraud, and breathe fire. They are extraordinarily powerful, but even so, ultimately defeated in their battles with humans. What is the origin of this creature? A creature popular in contemporary fiction and cinema, Ogden reveals how the dragon was known to the ancient Greek and Roman worlds, and came down to us through early Christianity, Anglo-Saxon, and Norse legends.

Read The Dragon in the West: From Ancient Myth to Modern Legend

The Ghost in the Image: Technology and Reality in the Horror Genre by Cecilia Sayad

Our century has seen the proliferation of reality shows devoted to ghost hunts, documentaries on hauntings, and horror films presented as found footage. The horror genre is no longer exclusive to fiction and its narratives actively engage us in web forums, experiential viewing, videogames, and creepypasta. The Ghost in the Image offers a new take on the place that supernatural phenomena occupy in everyday life, arguing that the relationship between the horror genre and reality is more intimate than we like to think.

Read The Ghost in the Image: Technology and Reality in the Horror Genre

The Oxford Illustrated History of Witchcraft and Magic edited by Owen Davies

This richly illustrated history provides a fresh approach to the complex story of witchcraft and magic. From spells written on clay tablets to the boy who lived, magical beliefs and practices have been woven throughout our history and culture for over 4,000 years. The Oxford Illustrated History of Witchcraft and Magic explores the anthropology of magic around the globe, investigates what the archives really tell us about the sixteenth- and seventeenth-century witch trials, and looks at witches in film from The Wizard of Oz to Buffy the Vampire Slayer.

Read The Oxford Illustrated History of Witchcraft and Magic 

A Very Nervous Person’s Guide to Horror Movies by Mathias Clasen

Horror expert Mathias Clasen delves into the psychological science of horror cinema to bust some of the worst myths and correct the biggest misunderstandings surrounding the genre. In short and highly readable chapters peppered with vivid anecdotes and examples, he addresses the nervous person’s most pressing questions. 

Read A Very Nervous Person’s Guide to Horror Movies

The Werewolf in the Ancient World by Daniel Ogden

Tales of the werewolf are well established as a sub-strand of the popular horror genre; less widely known is how far back in time their provenance lies. This is the first book in any language devoted to the werewolf tales that survive from antiquity, exploring their place alongside witches, ghosts, demons, and soul-flyers in a shared story-world.

Read The Werewolf in the Ancient World

Horror: A Very Short Introduction by Darryl Jones

Four o’clock in the morning, and the lights are on and still there’s no way we’re going to sleep, not after the film we just saw. The book we just read. Fear is one of the most primal human emotions, and one of the hardest to reason with and dispel. So why do we scare ourselves? It seems almost mad that we would frighten ourselves for fun, and yet there are thousands of books, films, games, and other forms of entertainment designed to do exactly that. Exploring the key tropes of the genre, including its monsters, its psychological chills, and its love affair with the macabre, Horror: A Very Short Introduction discusses why horror stories disturb us, and how society responds to literary and film representations of the gruesome and taboo.

Read Horror: A Very Short Introduction

A Supernatural War: Magic, Divination, and Faith during the First World War by Owen Davies

A Supernatural War reveals the surprising stories of extraordinary people in a world caught up with the promise of occult powers. Uncovering and examining beliefs, practices, and contemporary opinions regarding the role of the supernatural in the war years, Owen Davies explores the broader issues regarding early twentieth-century society in the West, the psychology of the supernatural during wartime, and the extent to which the war cast a spotlight on the widespread continuation of popular belief in magic.

Read A Supernatural War: Magic, Divination, and Faith during the First World War

Monstrous Forms: Moving Image Horror Across Media by Adam Charles Hart

It makes us jump. It makes us scream. It haunts our nightmares. So why do we watch horror? Why do we play it? What could possibly be appealing about a genre that tries to terrify us? Why would we subject ourselves to shriek-inducing shocks, or spend dozens of hours watching a television show about grotesque flesh-eating monsters? Monstrous Forms offers a theory of horror that works through the genre across a broad range of contemporary moving-image media: film, television, video games, YouTube, gifs, streaming, and virtual reality.

Read Monstrous Forms: Moving Image Horror Across Media

Cyclops: The Myth and its Cultural History by Mercedes Aguirre and Richard Buxton

A Cyclops is popularly assumed to be nothing more than a flesh-eating, one-eyed monster. In an accessible, stylish, and academically authoritative investigation, this book seeks to demonstrate that there is far more to it than that—quite apart from the fact that in myths the Cyclopes are not always one-eyed! This book provides a detailed, innovative, and richly illustrated study of the myths relating to the Cyclopes from classical antiquity until the present day.

Read Cyclops: The Myth and its Cultural History

Old Norse Mythology by John Lindow

Old Norse Mythology provides a unique survey of the mythology of Scandinavia: the gods Þórr (Thor) with his hammer, the wily and duplicitous Óðinn (Odin), the sly Loki, and other fascinating figures. They create the world, battle their enemies, and die at the end of the world, which arises anew with a new generation of gods. These stories were the mythology of the Vikings, but they were not written down until long after the conversion to Christianity, mostly in Iceland.

Read Old Norse Mythology

^{Feature image by Ganapathy Kumar from Unsplash}

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SHAPE and societal recovery from crises

The SHAPE (Social Sciences, Humanities, and the Arts for People and the Economy) initiative advocates for the value of the social sciences, humanities, and arts subject areas in helping us to understand the world in which we live and find solutions to global issues. As societies around the world respond to the immediate impact of the COVID-19 pandemic, research from SHAPE disciplines has the potential to illuminate how societies process and recover from various social crises.

In recognition of the essential role these disciplines play for societal recovery, we have curated a hub of SHAPE research which looks back on how we have rebuilt from social crises in the past, how societies process living through extraordinary times, and considers the next steps societies can take on the road to recovery.

Lessons from the past

Throughout history, individuals and societies have encountered periods of crisis caused by factors including war, natural disasters, and health pandemics. Responses to these crises can provide a vital insight into how we respond to future global threats.

In a review of how societies respond to peril, Robert Wuthnow suggests that, “nothing, it appears, evokes discussion of moral responsibility quite as clearly as the prospect of impending doom.” Wuthnow examines how societies have responded to four major threats: nuclear holocaust, weapons of mass destruction, concern about a global pandemic, and the threat of global climate change, and finds that, “the picture of humanity that emerges in this literature is one of can-do problem solvers. Doing something, almost anything, affirms our humanity.”

Looking further back, the US Civil War also had a profound impact on many people and touched women’s lives in contradictory ways. Hannah Rosen’s chapter “Women, the Civil War, and Reconstruction” examines the wartime and postwar experiences primarily of black and white but also Native American women and provides insights into how we can reconstruct a fairer society following conflicts. Meanwhile, in Total War: An Emotional History, Claire Langhamer examines the role emotions played in the immediate aftermath of WWII, approaching our relationship to feeling through the lens of social, as well as cultural, history.

How we choose to commemorate the past is also a key question, explored by Joshua Gamson in an article published in Social Problems about the US National AIDS Memorial Grove.

Looking back on the economic implications of social crises, Mark Bailey discusses how the plague acted as a catalyst for the vast transformation of trading routes in North Sea economies. This economic shift has been reflected in the COVID-19 pandemic and, in response, authors from the Journal of Consumer Research have created a conceptual framework for understanding how consumers and markets have collectively responded over the short term and long term to threats that disrupt our routines, lives, and even the fabric of society.

Literature, classics, and the arts also provide an avenue to explore the effects of social crises. Laura E. Tanner’s blog post explores the works of author Marilynne Robinson. According to Tanner, these works provide us with tools for coping during lockdown by exploring the familiar, whilst her characters also navigate the threat of mortality and how trauma disrupts the comforts of the everyday.

In her chapter “Post-Ceasefire Antigones and Northern Ireland”, Isabelle Torrance traces the evocation of Antigone in the context of the Northern Irish conflict. In this way, literature provides a mirror to explore and process contemporary social crises.

Music history also provides a window into past responses to social traumas. In her chapter “Embodying Sonic Resonance as/after Trauma – Vibration, Music, and Medicine”, Jillian C. Rogers shows that interwar French musicians understood music making as a therapeutic, vibrational, bodily practice which offered antidotes to the unpredictable and harmful vibrations of warfare.

Living through extraordinary times

As the COVID-19 pandemic and its effects have spread across the globe, nations and individuals have adapted rapidly to dramatic shifts in how we experience the world.

Recent history can provide a fascinating insight into how communities have lived through extraordinary times in the past. In Pandemics, Publics, and Narrative, the authors explore how the general public experienced the 2009 swine flu pandemic by examining the stories of individuals, their reflections on news and expert advice given to them, and how they considered vaccination, social isolation, and other infection control measures.

During the COVID-19 pandemic, historians have considered how we will write the histories of 2020. In “Documenting COVID-19”, Kathleen Franz and Catherine Gudis explore people’s keen awareness of the “historic” moment in which we are living, and the questions it poses for historians: how do we ethically document our current social, public health, and economic crises, and in doing so help to dismantle structural inequalities?

In her article “Slow History”, published in The American Historical Review, Mary Lindemann asks whether the pandemic provides an opportunity to evaluate the “doing” of history and to isolate what really matters in research, writing, and instruction. Arguing that we should learn to value a slow, painstaking approach to our work, Lindemann argues that “historians are, after all, long-distance runners not sprinters.”

Among the many frontline workers enduring the COVID-19 pandemic are social workers, who continued to support people through a period of unprecedented change. A 2020 article from Social Work—“Voices from the Frontlines: Social Workers Confront the COVID-19 Pandemic”—explores how these key workers operated in the US, how they were coping with their own risks, and how social work as a profession anticipated the needs of vulnerable communities during the early stages of the US health crises. The pandemic has also presented specific challenges for social workers interacting with children; a paper from Children & Schools delves into nine ethical concerns facing school social workers when they must rely on electronic communication platforms.

A philosophical approach allows us to explore human emotions and ethics during major world threats. In their chapter on “Emotional resilience”, Ann Cooper Albright explores resilience in the face of threats—from natural disasters to school bullies—finding that emotional resilience provides the opportunity for lasting transformation: “often in returning and remembering, we find that we no longer want what we had before.“

The road to recovery

Living through these extraordinary times, the COVID-19 pandemic poses some important questions for the future. How do we rebuild from the economic, social, and emotional traumas of the past?

Charlotte Lyn Bright’s Social Work Research article considers the vital role social workers play in supporting society and individuals by looking at the unique skills they employ in their work during difficult times. Meanwhile, in her paper on “Community development in higher education”, Lesley Wood explores how academics can ensure their community-based research makes a difference by discussing the socio-structural inequalities that influence community participation.

In piece for the OUPblog, Nicole Hassoun calls for universal, legally enforced human rights access to essential medicines and healthcare, arguing that, “protecting human rights can help us increase our Global Health Impact.”

The study of the past provides a vital tool to help societies rebuild in the future. In “Making Progress: Disaster Narratives and the Art of Optimism in Modern America”, Kevin Rozario examines the role of disaster writings and “narrative imagination” in helping Americans to conceive of disasters as instruments of progress, arguing that this perspective has contributed greatly to the nation’s resilience in the face of natural disasters.

In this blog piece “Listen now before we choose to forget”, oral historian Mark Cave describes how memory is pliable; our recollections are continually reshaped by our own changing experiences and the influence of collective interpretations. In 2020, Cave writes, the Black Lives Matter protests, divisive partisan politics, and anger over extended lockdowns were all influencing our memories of the pandemic. Cave further explores an oral history project conducted among New Orleans residents following Hurricane Katrina in 2005, which “filled a deep need within our community to reflect and make sense of the experience of the storm and its aftermath.” Cave’s research will be vital for future historians considering how to study and understand the COVID-19 pandemic “at a time when history is clearly ‘in the making’.”

Literature continues to provide our society with a tool to understand and process trauma. In her blog post “Why literature must be part of the language of recovery from crisis”, Carmen Bugan explores trauma and social recovery in poetry, and its pertinence during the COVID-19 crises.

Pandemic life has underscored how digital technology can foster intimate connections. Research from Nathan Rambukkana discusses how this influx of digital connection has fostered a mode of interaction know as “distant sociality,” and asks whether this is here to stay following life under lockdown.

Looking much further to the future, Pasi Heikkurinen discusses the end of the human-dominated geological epoch and the potential technological advances needed to make a non-human dominated planet sustainable. Heikkurinen’s chapter provides sustainability scholars and policymakers with an opportunity “to deliberate not only on the proper kind of technology or the amount of technology needed, but also to consider technology as a way to relate to the world, others, and oneself.”

The impact of COVID-19 on the global economy is profound, and yet economists must grapple with how this impact will shape the future. In their chapter “The Interactional Foundations of Economic Forecasting”, Werner Reichmann explores how economic forecasters produce legitimate and credible predictions of the economic future, despite most of the economy being transmutable and indeterminate. Meanwhile, in “Why we can be cautiously optimistic for the future of the retail industry”, Alan Treadgold explores the new retail landscape following the COVID-19 pandemic. Although there is unprecedented uncertainty for retail outlets, Treadgold argues “there are substantial opportunities for reinvention also.”

Music also has the power to enact social healing and transformation following crises. In their chapter “Unchained Melody: The Rise of Orality and Therapeutic Singing”, June Boyce-Tillman explores therapeutic approaches to singing, finding that “singing has the ability to strengthen people physically and emotionally,” which brings “individuals and communities together in order to provide healing at the deepest level.”

SHAPE research

SHAPE research is an essential component of all societies and will be critical for rebuilding from the global COVID-19 crisis. In “Humanities of transformation: From crisis and critique towards the emerging integrative humanities”, Sverker Sörlin evaluates the efforts to enhance and incentivize the humanities in the among Nordic countries in the last quarter century, finding a far richer and more complex image of quality in the humanities following structural education reform in 1990.

Meanwhile, Jack Spaapen and Gunnar Sivertsen assess the societal impact of SHAPE subjects, arguing that the social sciences and humanities have an obligation to assist the main challenges faced by people and governments.

As governments, universities, and research institutions consider where and how they focus their efforts as the world tentatively begins to explore the idea of recovery, the range of research that we’ve gathered here demonstrates that, while science and technology must play a crucial role, a recovery without SHAPE will be no recovery at all.

Featured image by Ryoji Iwata via Unsplash

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