Daft Taft

In Taft, first-time novelist Jason Heller tells an old-fashioned time traveling tale

The following review was posted today the Books page of the History News Network site.  

The wacky premise of this novel merits a look. On March 4, 1913, on the final day of a presidency wedged between the more commanding Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson, the outgoing president William Howard Taft -- all 300+ pounds of him -- somehow slips through a time portal and reappears on the White House grounds in late 2011. Shot by a secret service agent terrified by the muddy beast, Taft, he of stuck-in-the-bathtub lore, is nursed back to health and introduced to the 21st century, where there's a lot more affection for the 27th president than there ever was a century ago.

There's some entertainment to be had in this fish-out-of-water story. "Good God, man. Is this all truly necessary? I must look like a cut-rate Manila harlot," the one-time administrator of the Philippines says. He wonders what ever happened to good old tap water, and expresses surprise that cell phones didn't come along sooner.

First-time novelist Heller, a journalist and writer of genre fiction, renders Taft as colorful cartoon, which is mildly amusing, though all the attention to his gargantuan appetite and handlebar mustache becomes tiresome after a while. (Other characters are a good deal less compelling.) We watch Taft as he visits familiar places, gets drunk, gets laid, and passively finds himself drawn into presidential politics (just as he was the first time around).  Heller augments his traditional storyline with a series of mock documents -- television talk show transcripts; Secret Service memos; twitter feeds, polling data -- that contextualize the story.

In this fictional world, Barack Obama is still president, running against an unnamed Republican. Taft's politics are a bit of a cipher, which is at least partially Heller's point. One of the great ironies here, of course, is that the trust-busting, good-government policies of a man who was perceived as a conservative Republican then puts him far to the left of anyone in the GOP now, and indeed far to the left of many Democrats. But libertarians are quick to note that his tax rates were lower than any today, and a dissatisfied general electorate rallies to anyone who seems authentic. So it is that we witness the birth of the Taft Party, an apparent satire of the Tea Party in all it incoherence (we get a particularly wrong-headed discussion about immigration from a surveillance tape of two men discussing Taft while standing in front of their respective urinals).

Heller weaves in a subplot involving Big Agriculture that figures in the climax of the story. But having seized on an arresting premise, he has a little trouble maintaining control of his material, which takes a bit long to develop and which fizzles a bit. But it's nevertheless a fast, light read.

Taft is revealing in the way it taps a longstanding American nostalgia that goes back at least as far as Mr. Smith Goes to Washington. We want straight shooters, until they start telling us things we don't want to hear. The difference now is that we literally can't (as opposed to won't) afford the pretty promises of a military that will always remain powerful, services that will always be adequate, and taxes that will always be low. I suspect that the longings Heller describes are real enough and available to be exploited by those whose with less scruples than Taft, one of the few good men to be president, and, not coincidentally, like other good men -- a pair of Adams, an elder Bush, Gerald Ford, Jimmy Carter -- were also one-term presidents. Maybe we need an Iron Lady (with Meryl Streep's wit) instead.

Note: There is an accompanying website for Taft 2012, and a Facebook page worth a connection. It's fun to see updates like, "Time lauded Mitt Romney for using "clear, concise, declarative sentences" in this week's debates. We don't expect much today, do we?" Sound like he might be a good commentator to have around for the presidential campaign.

Mystery Brain

The Doors: A Lifetime of Listening to Five Mean Years is vintage Greil Marcus -- for better and worse

The following review was posted last week on the Books page of the History News Network site.  

Greil Marcus is the Ernest Hemingway of cultural criticism. I don't mean that in terms of style -- Hemingway's laconic prose is light years away from that of the effusive, endlessly analogizing Marcus -- but rather that Marcus, in a manner perhaps only paralleled by Pauline Kael, has inspired a generation of bad imitators. Myself among them.

I discovered Marcus somewhat belatedly, at the time of the second (1982) edition of his classic 1975 study Mystery Train: Images of America in Rock 'n' Roll Roll Music. I read the book multiple times in ensuing iterations, enchanted by its intoxicating prose, despite the fact that it would be years before I heard much of the music on which it was based. I was thrilled by the idea that popular music could be a subject of serious fun. It's hard to imagine that I would have ever received a Ph.D. in American Civilization, specializing in the history of popular culture, had I not encountered that book at a formative period in my life.

Though he has been a consistently productive magazine journalist, Marcus's output as a writer of books was relatively modest in the twenty years following Mystery Train, notwithstanding that his 1989 book Lipstick Traces: A Secret History of the 20th Century has had the heft and durability of a major study. But in the last two decades -- and in the last five years or so in particular -- his pace as a writer, editor and collaborator has picked up. He's taken to writing quick, impressionistic books on subjects like Bob Dylan and Van Morrison. The Doors: A Lifetime of Listening to Five Mean Years represents relatively fresh territory, not only because the band has not really been a long-term fixture of his writing, but also because the group has always had a mixed critical reputation. Conventional critical wisdom holds that while the Doors produced a few deeply suggestive songs that have had a remarkably durable life on FM radio, lead singer Jim Morrison in particular was, in the main, undisciplined at best and boorishly pretentious at worst. Though his overall stance toward the band is positive, Marcus does not fundamentally challenge this view, instead focusing on what he considers the band's best work in its brief life in the second half of the 1960s.

I use the word "focusing" loosely; Marcus has never been an especially tight writer. Indeed, as a number of impatient readers have complained, the Doors are less the subject of this book than a point of departure for a series of riffs on subjects that seem loosely connected at best. A chapter whose locus is generally on the 1991 Oliver Stone biopic The Doors jumps (or perhaps lurches) from there into an extended analysis of the now obscure 1990 Christian Slater film Pump Up the Volume for reasons that are never entirely clear. If you look up Slater in the index of the book, you'll find him sandwiched between The Situationists, Tennessee Ernie Ford's "Sixteen Tons" and Josef Svorecky on one side, and Grace Slick, Bessie Smith and Peter Smithson on the other. As one who considers himself about as well read as anyone in 20th century cultural history, I find myself wondering if Marcus could possibly expect anyone to keep up with him as he leaps from pop music to architecture to crime fiction and back again.

He can exasperate at the level of individual sentences as well. He writes of "The End," one of the better-known songs in the Doors canon, that "The furious, impossibly sustained assault that will steer the song to its end, a syncopation that swirls on its own momentum, each musician called upon not just to match the pace of the others but to draw his own pictures inside the maelstrom -- in its way this is a relief, because that syncopation gives the music a grounding you can count on, that you can count off yourself." To which I say: Huh? He describes "Roadhouse Blues" "not as an autobiography, not as confession, not as a cry for help or a fuck you to whomever asked, but as Louise Brooks liked to quote, she said, from an old dictionary, 'a subjective epic composition in which the author begs leave to treat the world according to his own point of view." Marcus has long been lionized as a founding father of rock criticism, and one can't help but wonder whether he and others regard him as beyond the quotidian vagaries of line editing.

But there's a reason Marcus is lionized. At his best he opens cultural windows that can only be jimmied open with unconventional prose. Of the long shadow cast by his generation, he writes, "This is what is terrifying: the notion that the Sixties was no grand, simple, romantic time to sell to others as a nice place to visit, but a place, even as it is created, people know they can never really inhabit, and never escape." (Coming of age in the seventies, I certainly had that oppressive feeling.) He describes the prescient dark mood of the Doors by noting that "After Charles Manson, people could look back at 'The End,' 'Strange Days,' 'People are Strange,' and 'End of the Night' and hear what Manson had done as if it had yet to happen, as if they should have known, as if, in the deep textures of the music, they had." Yes: the Doors did ride a curdling cultural wave as the promise of the early sixties gave way to the kind of mindless violence of the Manson murders. Marcus distills the essence of the band better than they ever had themselves: "They didn't promise happy endings. Their best songs said happy endings weren't interesting, and they weren't deserved."

Marcus is like a stand-up comedian who only speaks in punch lines, refusing to set up the payoff (in this case, brief biographical sketches, career overviews, and something resembling a systematically offered sense of context). Such omissions appear to be an avowed (Beat) aesthetic, even a moral principle: You don't get to the old weird America by traveling down familiar highways. The problem, for him no less than the pop artists he writes about -- Jim Morrison in particular -- is that in the negotiation between reader and writer there's a thin line between bracing challenge and alienating self-indulgence, and it's hard to avoid concluding, as much as I hate to, that there are times when I feel Marcus crosses it.

I find myself thinking about Marcus the way he felt about Elvis Presley: awed by his talent but dismayed by his lack of constancy. I've got this idea that asking him to be different would be ungrateful at best and stupid at worst, failing to value the very devil-may-care quality that made him special in the first place. And I'm not sure how much in the way of evolution I should expect of any person old enough to have earned social security benefits, among other benchmarks. But I also feel not to ask would also be a betrayal of sorts, a willingness to settle that Marcus taught me long ago is a seductively dangerous temptation in American life. So I'll say: thank you, Greil Marcus. You changed my life. And I'll ask: Should we go somewhere else now?

Box office balloting

In Hollywood Left and Right: How Movie Stars Shaped American Politics, Steven J. Ross traces the political arc of figures from Chaplin to Schwartzenegger

The following review was posted recently on the Books page of the History News Network site.

I didn't really want to read this book. I'm finishing one on a related topic, and have reached that point in the process where I just want to be done with it already. But my editor sent Hollywood Left and Right along to me, as good editors do, as a way of nudging me a little bit farther. I'm glad he did. It's a good piece of scholarship. And, I'm happy to report, an entertaining one.

A seasoned film historian, what Steven J. Ross offers here is a set of ten biographies that function as case studies in the way movies stars and impresarios -- sometimes the same person -- have used their cinematic careers for the purposes of political activism. With a sense of judiciousness and empathy toward all his subjects, he renders  five careers on the left (Charlie Chaplin, Edmund G. Robinson, Harry Belafonte, Jane Fonda, and Warren Beatty) and five on the right (Louis B. Mayer, George Murphy, Ronald Reagan, Charlton Heston, and Arnold Schwartzenegger). That said, Ross gently suggests that while we tend to think of Hollywood as a liberal bastion, it has had a series of prominent conservative champions, who on balance have been more successful than liberals in actually realizing their political goals. To that extent, at least, the book has a revisionist air.

Ross does a lot of things well. Each of his chapters offer skillfully limned portraits (Murphy and Reagan, whose careers coincided and interests overlapped, are treated as a pair). In some cases their stories are familiar, but Ross is able to season them with an eye for relevant, sometimes first-hand, observations. He managed to get on interviews with many of his principals, among them reclusive subjects like Beatty, as well as their associates like George McGovern and Gary Hart.

Ross is also a deft analyst. He weaves in close readings of particular films, contextualizing them in their immediate sociopolitical environments. There's very good stuff, for example, on the complexities of anticommunism and Hollywood unions at mid-century and its impact on the careers of Robinson and Reagan. He's also able to stitch together his subjects by periodically comparing and contrasting them with each other, allowing their nuances to come into focus.

Indeed, one of the more interesting aspects of Hollywood Left and Right are the varied ways stars have actually exploited their star power. Some, like Chaplin and Fonda, formed their political consciousness only after they became celebrities, and channeled that celebrity into potent fundraising machines. Others, like Belafonte and Schwartzenegger, had already formed their convictions before entering show business and then applied their personal skills to political activism. Still others, like Reagan and Heston, underwent political transformations (which always seem to go from left to right). Murphy, Reagan, and Schwartzenegger, of course, eventually won elective office. Yet many of these people -- Fonda in particular -- had a surprisingly durable impact in their behind-the-scenes organizations. These and other permutations give the book a kaleidoscopic quality.

At the end of this study, Ross poses the necessary question of whether it's all that healthy for the democratic process to have such outsized figures exercising their influence on the body politic. He notes the reasons why the answer might actually be no, but makes the important point that many of these stars serve an important purpose in mobilizing otherwise indifferent segments of the electorate. In a perfect Hollywood world, such people might be undesirable. But in the sometimes benighted political world in which we live, we may need the stars to see.

Ideas whose time came -- again

In The Swerve: How the World Became Modern, Harvard professor Stephen Greenblatt takes his reader on a thrilling journey of time travel

The following review was yesterday on the Books page of the History News Network site.


It's always a surprising pleasure to find an English professor able to write about literature in comprehensible English. It's even more surprising when that professor can write narrative history better than most historians do. What's stunning is an English professor who writes good history that spans about 1800 years and who manages to ground his story in a set of richly contextualized moments that he stitches together with notable deftness. But then, this shouldn't really be all that surprising: we're talking about Harvard professor Stephen Greenblatt here. This New Historicist extraordinaire -- author of Will in the World: How Shakespeare Became Shakespeare -- has just won the National Book Award for his latest book, The Swerve: How the World Became Modern.

The point of departure for The Swerve is the year 1417, when an obscure former papal scribe named Poggio Bracchiolini enters a German monastery.  Greenblatt manages to capture both the way in which Poggio is a figure of his time even as he explains the novelty, even strangeness, of this bibliophile's quest to discover ancient works and the practical difficulties involved for a man of his station to do so. He then describes how Poggio encounters On the Nature of Things, a poem by the Roman poet/philosopher Lucretius, written in the first century BCE. Lucretius was deeply influenced by the Greek philosopher Epicurus (341-270 BCE). In the context of its pre-Renaissance recovery, the poem represented a radical challenge to the common sense of its time in its emphasis on pleasure as an end unto itself, as well as its de-emphasis on the role of the divine in human aspiration and fate.

Greenblatt's analysis leads to some deeply satisfying digressions, among them an explanation of Epicurean philosophy and the place of Greek thought in the Roman republic and empire. It also includes an explanation of the ongoing scholarly significance of Pompeii as a source of understanding ancient life in the 250 years since its discovery under the mountain of ash spewed by Mt. Vesivius in 79 CE. (On the Nature of Things was discovered in an impressive library in a house there.) And, most hauntingly, it includes an explanation of the process whereby the classical legacy was gradually erased from the human record by a combination of disasters, neglect, and active forgetting by an ascendant Christianity determined to eliminate epistemological rivals. It's difficult to finish reading this segment of The Swerve without having one's confidence shaken that our current state/memory of civilization is destined for permanence, especially when one considers the utter fragility of electronic information when compared with the strength, never mind beauty, of vellum.

From here, Greenblatt resumes telling the story of what happened when On the Nature of Things was re-injected into the bloodstream of western civilization. This was by no means a straightforward process. Ever a man of the world even amid his classical studies, Poggio skillfully navigated papal politics even as he grew exasperated by a friend's unwillingness to return the book. Eventually, however, On the Nature of Things was re-copied and distributed all over Europe, where its Epicurean vision laid the foundations for the Renaissance in Italy and beyond. Greenblatt traces its influence across sources that include Montaigne, Shakespeare (of course), and Thomas Jefferson.

Readers with intimate familiarity with these subjects will no doubt quibble with aspects of Greenblatt's account, among them the centrality of Lucretius or Epicurus in kick-starting modernity. Whether or not they're correct, The Swerve is simply marvelous -- emphasis here on simply -- in illustrating cultural disruption and transmission as a deeply historical process even as ideas partially transcend the circumstances of their articulation. In some sense, Greenblatt is playing the role of popularizer here, but he could never mesh his subjects and analyze them as well as he does without a lifetime of immersion and first-hand observation. One can only hope that this book will be among those that survive fires, floods, microbes and sheer human cupidity so that others will know what the finest flower of our academy could produce.

Jim is observing the transition to the new year. This moment finds him in shameless entertainment mode: he's currently reading Sue Grafton's V Is for Vengeance, the 22nd installment of her abcedarian series featuring Kinsey Millhone. Grafton has slowed her pace; after publishing one a year in standard detective novel fashion, they're now coming every other year. But, surely not coincidentally, there's been no diminution in quality. Indeed, the sense of texture and emotional resonance in these books may well be greater than ever. (Part of the reason for this may be that Grafton has not elongated the sense of time in the stories themselves, which are still firmly planted in the 1980s, back when A is For Alibi was first published.) V is for Vengeance features a series of interlocking stories that gradually converge, thanks to shoe-leather gumption on the part of the tireless Kinsey. Not sure how it ends, but the brio with which it begins gives a reader reassurance that he's in good hands.

A trip to a bookstore while vacationing in Massachusetts resulted in the acquisition of Michael Connelly's The Reversal -- another genre writer at the height of his powers -- and Roger Ebert's autobiography Life Itself. May have more to say about those in the coming days.

Best to all for a relaxing interlude -- and a satisfyingly productive 2012.

Shades of gray blues

In Remixing the Civil War: Meditations on the Sesquicentennial, a group of scholars looks at the receding legacy of a great national drama

The following review was posted recently on the Books page of the History News Network site.

To say that the Civil War ain't what it used to be is to indulge a postmodern cliché: by this point, we all understand that what we "know" is socially constructed -- and contested. The takeaway from this anthology edited by Tom Brown at the University of South Carolina seems more prosaic but is actually a good deal more pointed: the Civil War is not what it used to be because it matters less than it once did. Which is not to say it's unimportant; the war continues to be engaged, in some cases with real intensity. But these essays collectively assert that it is now less a defining touchstone of national identity than a point of departure or iconographic warehouse for cultural productions that invert, bend, or reconfigure the conflict in ways that previous generations would hardly recognize, much less endorse.

Significantly, this cultural shift is not simply that of the avant garde. One of the more compelling pieces in the collection is Brown's own contribution, which looks at the lingering contemporary obsession with the Confederate flag. He notes that in the century following Appomattox, the flag was a rallying point for a sense of shared Southern identity, one whose resonance intensified in the mid-twentieth century as a response to the Civil Rights movement. Now, however, he argues that the Stars & Bars, along with related iconography, have become emblems of a self-conscious white minority that defends its civil right of self-expression with consumerist logic that would appall earlier guardians of Confederate identity, who regarded selling flags or t-shirts as a form of sacrilege. Insofar as the Southern experience of defeat has any compelling moral or psychological legitimacy, it's via a Vietnam analogy that is itself fading into history.

One also sees the recession of the Civil War in Robert Brinkmeyer's piece on contemporary Southern literature. Brinkmeyer notes that for African-Americans in particular the military conflict seems far less important than the antebellum decades leading up to it, and the battles are less important than various aspects of the home front. (The Wind Done Gone, Alice Randall's 2001 parody of Gone with the Wind is discussed by a number of essayists.) And for many white writers such as Bobbie Ann Mason or Ron Rash, the Civil War is a tangent, even a dessicated husk.

In many of these essays, local, even private, concerns trump national ones. In his piece on the growth of Juneteeth celebrations marking the anniversary of emancipation's arrival in Texas, Mitch Katchun observes that February 1, the day Abraham Lincoln signed the joint resolution that led to the Thirteenth Amendment, would be an apt candidate for a national holiday, especially since it comes at the start of Black History Month.  But it has been only one of many, and not a particularly beloved one.

Even the stock of the blue-chip Lincoln has sunk a bit. Amid his analysis of how the Left in general and Barack Obama in particular have tapped into the mythology of the Great Emancipator, C. Wyatt Evans notes that the contemporary Right has largely given up on him, uncomfortable with his Big Government reputation and awkward in invoking his Civil Rights legacy. The Tea Party invokes the Revolution, not the Civil War, as the source of its power and legitimacy.
 
The primary focus of Remixing the Civil War, however, are the visual arts, where collective memory of the conflict functions as a postmodern closet that gets raided for varied acts of bricolage. Essays by Elizabeth Young, Gerard Brown, and W. Fitzhugh Brundage all look at the way images, particularly photography, have been used to destabilize inherited notions of what the war was about. Sometimes contemporary artists complicate racial hierarchies or essentialized notions of blackness; other times their work involves the expansion or projection of alternative notions of sexuality or gender into nineteenth century settings. Ironically, some art carefully uses patiently recreated artifacts or settings to call attention to the artifice involved in remembrance.

Such work can be impressive in its passion, creativity, and intelligence. But it's a little depressing, too. In part that's because written history, scholarly and otherwise, seems to lack some of the same spark these artists show, as even the most avowedly transgressive or revisionist scholarly writing remains helmeted in academic convention. Conversely, the deeply fragmented quality of contemporary Civil War remembrance suggests a larger crisis of confidence in which grand unifying themes or aspirations can only be looked on with a sense of irony or suspicion. It's remarkable to consider that the versions of the Civil War that do evince such confidence, like Ken Burns's celebrated documentary or the 1989 film Glory are now (already!) a generation old. In becoming what can plausibly considered the first real 21st century rendition of its subject, this book provocatively suggests that the Civil War may really be running out of time.

Small blessing

In Religion in America: A Political History, Denis Lacorne provides an overview of God in America with a French twist

The following review was posted recently on the Books page of the History News Network site.

This little book manages to do a lot in the space of 170 pages. First published in France in 2007, with an evocative introduction by the late Tony Judt, it surveys its subject with grace and insight, as well as a lot of information.

Lacorne's point of departure in conceptualizing religious history rests on the work of John Murrin, who observed that in the United States "the constitutional roof" was built before the "national walls." As Lacorne is well aware, this assertion is contestable, particularly by those -- from Alexis de Tocqueville to Samuel Huntington, among others -- who have argued that American religious culture, like many other kinds, was well in place by the time of the American Revolution. But an important dimension of this even-handed study is an attempt to balance what he plausibly sees as too much emphasis on the Puritan roots and influence in American society. For Lacorne, an entirely separate strand of U.S. evangelicalism has also been part of the picture. So has, at least as importantly, a largely secular one centered in the thought and legacy of the Founding Fathers. This latter one, whose institutional locus has been the Supreme Court, has been decisive in his (generally approving) view.

There are three separate dimensions to Religion in America, all of them arresting. The first is its function as a overview survey, which begins with the Quakers and runs through an epilogue of the Obama years. The second is as a historiographic account of the shifting reputations of evangelicals, Catholics, and other religious movements in the United States, both among their contemporaries and subsequent historians. A related, but discrete, third dimension looks more specifically at the French perspective (Lacorne is a senior research fellow at the Centre d'Etudes ed the Recherches Internationales in Paris). France is an especially valuable lens for such a study, given its constrast with Anglo-American tradition, its own republican tradition, and the long love-hate relationship between the two countries. Naturally, de Toqueville looms large here, but Lacorne is nuanced in giving him his due even as he points out his limitations.

Lacorne's skill in juggling these three interpretive balls makes the book a notably versatile volume for teaching purposes. It's an edifying read for someone seeking grounding in the subject as well as a user-friendly course adoption. The individual chapters are also well-segmented, allowing them to be slotted into general survey in addition to religion courses. Rarely does one encounter such effective one-stop shopping on such a large important subject. One hopes and expects it to become a perennial.

False fantasies

Streep's early '90s movies deconstructed notions of gender
 

The following post is part of a series on Meryl Streep's vision of American history, part of a larger set of case studies.

  Streep followed-up She-Devil with the more upscale comedy Postcards from the Edge (1990), Carrie Fisher’s 1987 autobiographical novel about recovery from addiction set among the Hollywood elite. Though it’s less pointed in its gender politics than She-Devil, the Mike Nichols-directed Postcards is nevertheless a departure for Streep. For the first time—and surprisingly late at that—she is a daughter rather than a mother, as the struggling adult child of a major star, presumably Fisher’s famous mother Debbie Reynolds, played by Shirley MacLaine.

There’s a pleasant postmodern fizz to Postcards, in that it calls attention to its own artifice. The film opens with a dramatic sequence about a drug cartel that turns out to be a movie-within-a-movie, though the drug angle is real enough: Streep’s character, actor Suzanne Vale, is fired for taking a snort in her trailer. At other points in the movie, we learn a city street is actually a movie set, and Streep spends a long stretch of the movie ironically wearing a policewoman’s costume.

Though much of the plot turns on her relationship with a wayward playboy producer (Dennis Quaid), her character’s struggle is typical of that facing the boy who seeks to become a man: What will I do with my life professionally? How do I emerge from the shadow of a powerful parent and gain my own public identity? How will romance fit into, as opposed to define, this picture? The script (also written by Fisher) suggests Suzanne has begun to resolve these questions by making the movie’s closing sequence the shooting a music video, which allows us to see a truly fabulous Streep performing a country tune, “I’m Checkin’ Out,” written by Shel Silverstein, a remarkably versatile author and illustrator who also wrote the Johnny Cash classic “A Boy Named Sue,” among other country hits.

Postcards, then, had some serious currents running it, notwithstanding its decisively comic tone. By contrast, Streep’s next movie, Defending Your Life (1991), proceeds from a presumably grave question—what happens when we die?—but is so light it almost floats off the screen. Writer/director Albert Brooks has long been a kind of cut-rate Woody Allen, an auteur with a real sense of humor whose movies are rarely fully satisfying (he’s better as an actor). In Defending Your Life, he plays Daniel Miller, a morose Los Angeles advertising executive who drives his brand new luxury car into an oncoming bus and dies. He awakens in “Judgment City,” a kind of purgatory where the events of his life are reviewed through a judicial hearing that will decide whether he will graduate to a higher form of consciousness or be forced to repeat human life in what amounts to a kind of Southern California Hinduism. Fortunately, Judgment City is a pleasant place to pass the time; you can eat all you want for free and never gain an ounce. While in Judgment City, Daniel meets his dream girl, Julia (Streep), who is charmed by Daniel’s jokes. There are lots of comic bits about Julia’s higher standard of living in Judgment City, owing the fact that she was a nicer person than Daniel was. But despite their divergent verdicts, true love conquers all, even in heaven.

Streep agreed to act in Defending Your Life because she was charmed when Brooks pitched it to her, poolside, while she was filming Postcards from the Edge. But her motives in taking the part seem to have been at least in part a matter of playful experimentation with gender expectations. “I know Albert feels he’s written a whole woman, a completely full-blown person,” she said in a 1991 New York Times profile. “I didn’t know how to break it to him, he’s really not done that. He’s written an idea of a woman. And I did my best to fill those silver slippers. But it was also fun. I thought, ‘Ah, the hell with it. You’re dead. You can do whatever you want.’ ”

Streep’s next movie, Death Becomes Her (1992), was a black comedy on the order of She-Devil. As with She-Devil, this is a story of romantic rivalry, but its main theme is a veritable American obsession: aging, a subject whose gender dimensions are especially vexing for women. Streep is Madeline Ashton, an aging actress who steals and marries Ernest Menville, the plastic surgeon boyfriend of her frenemy, Helen Sharp (Goldie Hawn). Helen, plunged into a despair gauged by a grotesque weight gain, ends up in a psychiatric ward, but as with Ruth Patchett, gets rejuvenated by the prospect of revenge. Madeline, meanwhile, has also aged and gained in weight, while the alcoholic Ernest has been reduced to working as a mortician. Unbeknownst to the other, each of the women learns of, and imbibes, a magic potion that reverses the effect of aging, purveyed by a woman named Lisle von Rhoman (Isabella Rossellini). A newly svelte Helen seduces Ernest, and convinces him to kill Madeline. Madeline learns of the plot, and the movie moves into slapstick overdrive as the women commit grotesque acts of violence against each other that result a twisted heads for Madeline, holes in the Helen’s abdomen, and the like, none of which are of course fatal. (Death Becomes Her, which Streep described as taking longer to make than any of her movies, won an Academy Award for its special effects.) Ironically, though the two women reconcile, they find themselves dependent on Ernest to spruce up their brittle, if immortal bodies, until, even more ironically, they find themselves dependent on each other. (Sisterhood may be powerful, but it’s very often exasperating.) As such, the movie ends on a comic, though not particularly satisfying, be-careful-what-you-wish-for note.

It’s a message, however, that’s consistent with Streep’s own thinking, particularly in terms of the movie’s critique of the cult of beauty. “My son, Henry, who’s 12, asked me, Who do you think is the prettiest girl in my class?’ ” she reported in a 1992 interview.  “And I said, ‘Who cares?’ ” Streep also professed to comfort with aging. “I felt 40 years old since I was eight,” she said. “And so when I became 40, I felt suddenly like I could fit into my clothes. I could say whatever I damn well please.” Of course, one might well reply, such things were easy for a woman as attractive and powerful as Streep to say. But her subsequent track record as an actor does indeed suggest a sense of personal liberation and a more relaxed persona in many of her roles. While few of them have had the searing intensity of Sophie’s Choice or Cry in the Dark, many have proven to be deeply satisfying. It’s hard not be moved, for example, by the tremendous affection that Streep pours into her portrayal of the aging Julia Child in Julie & Julia (2009), and the palpable joy that infuses the performance itself, which feels not showy in that “our lady of the accents” way critics like Pauline Kael disliked—even as her mastery of Child’s unique voice can make you laugh out loud—but rather as an affirmation of life itself.

---

 Next: Streep in flux.

 

Maternal care

Streep's greatest roles have been as (tragic) mothers.


The following post is part of a series on Meryl Streep's vision of American history, part of a larger set of case studies.

At the risk of belaboring the point, I want to be clear that I’ve been applying a specific litmus test to Meryl Streep movies, measuring them in terms of whether the women she portrays have an autonomous life apart from any specifically gendered one of wife, lover, or mother. I’ve done so to argue that Streep’s brand of feminism, neither unique to her nor entirely shared, had a specific tenor in the first decade of her career, one that both suggested the possibilities as well as the limits of that feminism in the mainstream popular culture of the Reagan era.

That said, I remain aware of Streep’s injunction about reading too much into her choices. The line I’m drawing is not exactly straight. Still, it is real. Actually, the Streep roles I’ve found most intriguing are the more ambiguous ones that blend private and public feminism. But even those ambiguous ones tend to run toward the private side of the spectrum. As we’ll see, that would change.  

The other thing I need to say before we move on is that Streep has never been particularly ideological in these matters. She’s an artist, not an intellectual. And one who has been committed from the outset to capturing the realities of women’s lives from multiple perspectives, whether or not they happen to be her own.

It’s notable, then, that two of Streep’s greatest performances were a matter of embodying women whose gender identities—particularly the gender identity of mother—are avowedly at the center of who they understand themselves to be. The first is what for a long time was Streep’s signature role, that of Polish émigré Sophie Zawistowski in Sophie’s Choice (1982), for which she won her second Oscar, this time for Best Actress. The movie, based on the semi-autobiographical 1979 novel by William Styron, is presented from the point of view of an aspiring novelist named Stingo, who moves to Brooklyn in 1947 after finishing his education at Duke. He rents a room in a large house whose residents include a vivacious couple, a dashing Jew named Stingo (Kevin Kline) and Streep’s mysterious and alluring Sophie, a Polish-Catholic refugee who fled Nazi Germany. The three enjoy each other’s company immensely, but it becomes increasingly apparent to Stingo that Nathan, who presents himself as a high-powered chemist, is a fraud, and a schizophrenic prone to flying into jealous rage.

Though Nathan is demonstrably insane, he is right in one respect: Stingo is falling in love with Sophie. She, too, is not who she appears to be: she claims her father was an anti-Nazi professor, though we later learn he was Anti-Semitic apologist for the regime. Sophie had a lover in the resistance movement in occupied Poland, who was caught and executed. Sophie herself was caught smuggling a ham for her dying mother and sent to Auschwitz with her children. In about the worst kind of cruelty imaginable, a camp official tells her she must choose which of her children should live. She chooses her son, who is sent to a children’s camp (we don’t learn anything beyond that), while her daughter goes to a crematorium. It is a scene about as wrenching as any in modern cinema, and must have been very difficult to execute.

Streep’s performance is awe-inspiring on many levels, most obvious in the way she reverse-engineered her way to English as a second language, by learning Polish (a language she did not master) and its accent (which she did). As with the French Lieutenant’s Woman, she conveyed a sense of alluring mystery in her character by managing to hold something in reserve that you can sense without ever being told. We also sense a tragic outcome, even as Stingo tries to flee Nathan’s murderous rage by taking her with him to a hotel, from which he hopes to return to the South and marry her, where they can live on a farm he has inherited. But Sophie simply cannot relinquish the horror of her motherhood. Indeed, one suspects her decision to cast her lot with Nathan after the war, a man who abuses her and with whom she can never finally be happy, is an act of self-sabotage.

In a 1983 interview, Streep responded to a journalist’s question about whether Sophie worked while living in New York by saying, “Yeah. Not that we ever saw. But yeah, she worked. Still, that wasn’t what that movie was about.”  Instead, what it’s about is a mother’s grief. Sophie indulges Stingo with a night of fantasy, but returns to Nathan, with whom she commits suicide. Her death, like her life, can only be defined in terms of others.

 Sophie’s Choice was a tour de force showcase for Streep’s talents. But her acting in A Cry in the Dark (1988) is all the more powerful for its understated quality. Here she’s another true-life character, Australian Lindy Chamberlain, who became ensnared in a media maelstrom in 1980 after she was accused of murdering her infant daughter despite her insistence that the child had been killed by a dingo, a wild dog indigenous to Australia, during a camping trip. Streep mastered yet another accent for this role, one she said she found more difficult because unlike Isak Dinesen or Karen Silkwood, Chamberlain was still alive and still in the public eye, and someone whose idiosyncratic expression required more precise emulation. But it’s the helmeted quality of Chamberlain’s expression, the Puritanical mien of a committed Seventh-Day Adventist married to a minister (Sam Neill), that badly damaged her public image, and which Streep captures in her performance.

Cry in the Dark was directed by Australian Fred Schepisi, who also directed Streep in Plenty. It performed poorly at the U.S. box office, probably because American viewers were not widely familiar with the scandal, and because the material is so wrenching. But Streep nevertheless earned yet another Oscar nomination for the role. Since nominations come from fellow actors—winners are chosen by the membership of the Motion Picture Academy of Arts and Sciences as a whole—such recognition is an honor in its own right, and a testimonial to Streep’s realized ambition to represent the reality of a woman’s life on her own terms, in this case a woman who saw herself first and foremost wife and mother.

By the end of the 1980s, then, Streep was not simply a movie star, but a cinematic brand—a virtuoso known for high-wire characterizations in artistically challenging dramas. Asked by a film professor at the University of Kansas in 1988 whether she still takes a secret delight in jumping into a movie with a new face on, Streep said yes with a laugh. “It’s part of what I get criticized for,” she noted. “But that’s what the joy of it is for me.”

In the years that followed, however, Streep began seeking out somewhat different joys.

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Next: Streep in (comic) transition.

"Skin," Deep

With Memory of Lost Skin, Russell Banks provokes his readers to confront the implications of an intensifying national taboo surrounding sexual deviance

The following review was posted earlier this week on the Books page of the History News Network.

When a psychiatrist friend in our reading group recently suggested that our next book discussion focus on the topic of sexual deviance, my instinctive reaction was one of aversion. (Not that there's anything wrong with that. Is there?) I did recall, however, that the latest Russell Banks novel deals with that subject. I've long been a Banks fan -- his 1995 novel Rule of the Bone was a rich re-imagining of an unlikely interracial friendship spanning North and Latin America, and his 1998 novel Cloudsplitter helped me understand the 19th century abolitionist freedom-fighter/terrorist John Brown in a way no else ever had -- but again, the topic of sex offenders was not particularly appetizing. Still, I figured that if anyone could make that subject compelling, Banks could, and the group agreed to adopt it as our next title.

I took for granted that it was going to take a while to get into Memory of Lost Skin. But from the opening page, when its fearful young protagonist -- known only as the Kid -- goes into a public library in order to ascertain whether he could be found on an Internet site listing local sex offenders, I was riveted. Here as in his other fiction, Banks demonstrates a remarkable ability to make us care about people in situations we are unlikely to understand, much less sympathize with, were we to encounter them in real life. But I found myself with an instant attachment to this character in his unselfconscious affection for his pet iguana, the only living creature in his life with which he experiences anything resembling emotional reciprocity. Instinctively smart and yet profoundly ignorant, I was stunned by the intensity of my desire that this homeless, fallible human being get a second chance after a foolish mistake. And my anxiety that he would not.

The Kid, who never knew his father, grew up with a mother whose stance toward him was one of benign neglect (emphasis on the latter). Since she was largely concerned with a string of disposable sexual liaisons, the socially isolated Kid viewed online pornography as his primary window on the outside world. A stint in the army was cut short by a maladroit act of generosity, sending him back home again to South Florida. We eventually learn what he subsequently did with a minor that resulted in a three-month jail sentence. More punishing than the jail stint is his ten-year prohibition against living less than 2500 feet from any public setting in which there are children, which effectively makes it impossible to do much else than pitch a tent under a highway in a makeshift community of other convicts. We meet various members of this community, whose appeal and moral stature vary widely.

We also meet another mysterious character who, like the Kid, is known by the similarly enigmatic name of the Professor. A sociologist of immense girth and intellect, the Professor enters the Kid's life just after the young man experienced a series of setbacks involving his job and makeshift residence. But the Professor's motives are murky, something the Kid knows just as well as the reader. The omniscient narrator allows us to see more of the Professor's life than the Kid does, and we sense decency in his motives, even as we know that there's a lot of his story that's missing. Over the course of the tale we learn more (not everything, but more) about him. The Kid, meanwhile, finds himself ever more dependent on the Professor. There's irony in this, because the Professor helps the Kid adopt new pets for which he can exercise responsibility, and he aids the Kid in assuming a role of leadership among the sex offenders in their efforts to survive in the face of community hostility and poor living conditions. But there's another irony as well, because in the key plot twist of the novel, the Kid finds himself in a position to help the Professor, though he's not sure he should.

Like Rule of the Bone, Lost Memory of Skin -- the title has reptilian, sexual, and other connotations -- resonates with the spirit of Mark Twain's The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, whose name is invoked a number of times here.  In all three cases, we have an unlikely friendship between an older man and a younger one in a world that regards both with suspicion. But Lost Skin is a bit different than the others in that it's less a story of flight than a quest for its main characters to keep a home despite pasts that make this seemingly impossible. There is no territory for the Kid to light out for; as for the Professor, unseen walls are closing in. That's what makes their tale so gripping, and so sad.

In a more important sense, however, this novel really is consonant with Huck Finn. Banks, like Twain, believes that we are all born with varying forms of decency independent of the circumstances of our birth. At the same time, however, our notion of morality is shaped by those circumstances, which can lead us to tragically misguided notions of of right, wrong, and our capacity to know the truth. Yet the belief -- and we are, in the end, in the realm of faith -- that we can find a justifiable reality gives the novel a sense of earned hope. Not optimism, mind you, but hope.

I understand -- insofar as anyone who hasn't experienced sexual abuse can ever really understand -- the imperative to protect people from a real evil, even as I wonder about the costs of what appears to be an intensifying taboo (perhaps not coincidentally, our last taboo). I sometimes find myself wondering whether my appetite for reading is simply one more form of addiction, albeit one in which I am fortunate because my predilections don't afflict anyone beyond loved ones who may wish they had more of my undivided attention. But I experienced Lost Memory of Skin not as a fix for a bad habit, but rather an an experience that widened and deepened my understanding of the world. I'm grateful for the compassion of Russell Banks. And I'll try to keep an eye out for the Kid.

Engendering humor

Streep's comic approach to middle-aged womanhood


The following post is part of a series on Meryl Streep's vision of American history, part of a larger set of case studies.

In 1989, Meryl Streep turned 40. By that point, she had crossed into “woman of a certain age” territory, at least in Hollywood terms, and as such had entered rocky shoals. It has long been the conventional wisdom that female stars fade in Hollywood, and while there have always been exceptions (Sally Field, Susan Sarandon, and Helen Mirren come to mind), illustrations of the rule (Meg Ryan, Michelle Pfeiffer and Melanie Griffith, all a decade younger than Streep) are not hard to generate. Though she never has never gone more three years without appearing in a movie, and has appeared in two or more movies in the same year a dozen times, there is a general perception that Streep’s star power dimmed in the 1990s, when she typically surfaced annually. Partly this is a matter of choice; these were years when she was actively raising children, and logistical considerations, like the locale of a shoot, have often been factors for her. But the quality of the roles she took was sometimes weaker, principally when the women she played were so saintly as to lack the edgy interest of a Joanna Kramer, Lindy Chamberlain, or even Karen Blixen. Still, Streep was never a passive recipient of parts, and while it’s clear that she acted on instinct, there’s surprising consistency in batches of choices that she made in the second decade of her career.

The first such batch of choices involved a set of roles that satirically deconstructed the idea of womanhood itself. The conventional wisdom is that after ten years of appearing in serious drama, Streep made leap into comedy. This was indeed a shift, and while critical and commercial reception was initially mixed, it proved to be a durable one: Streep has been a reliable cinematic source of laughter ever since, particularly in the last decade. But it’s those first few movies, a quartet of films she made between 1989 and 1992 that I want to focus on here. Though they were not highly regarded, they’re surprisingly coherent in the way they play with notions of gender.

The first, and perhaps most obvious example is She-Devil (1989). In what was widely regarded at the time as an odd piece of casting, Streep’s co-star was Roseanne Barr, a stand-up comedian who was approaching the peak of her cultural status as a working-class icon of feminism on the strength of her hit TV series Roseanne (1988-1997). But the dramatic contrast between the aristocratic-looking Streep and dumpy-looking Barr, which was played to the hilt, is essentially the core premise of the movie. She-Devil, based on the 1983 novel The Life and Loves of a She-Devil  by British writer Fay Weldon, had been made into a four-part BBC television series in 1986.  The main storyline of all iterations involves a housewife and mother named Ruth Patchett, whose accountant husband (Ed Begley Jr. in the movie) leaves her for a famous romance novelist named Mary Fisher (Streep). Patchett then systematically responds to this betrayal by dismantling the public and private pillars of her husband’s and Mary’s, life. In its literally explosive garishness, the film version of She-Devil makes the BBC series seem downright prim by comparison. Barr goes out of her way to accentuate her ugliness as Ruth (as in ruthless), though she’ll undergo a transformation before it’s all over. But it’s Streep’s performance that endows the movie with a comic zing by giving us a Mary Fisher who’s both sharply observed and almost impossibly over the top at the same time. The funniest scene in the movie is a Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous profile by the real-life host of the series, Robin Leach. “They find ways to make the man feel important and comfortable,” she says of her novels in a breathy voice, her blond tresses framed by a pink dress, pink nails, and poodle with pink ribbons.  “To let him know that he is—pregnant pause—the man. You know, so, there’s no confusion.” Mary later condescendingly marvels about “all the little families, mommies and daddies and dear little children tucked away for the night. How lucky they all are.” She will of course get her comeuppance, and Streep is as least as game in playing her descent, already underway when she snappishly evades being caught in a lie about her age. Ruth, for her part, begins her revival by dumping the kids at Mary’s house end entering the work force, something she does in the service of her master plan, but which results in a promising new career. These strongly feminist accents are undercut a bit, in that the story ends with Ruth’s husband rejoining the family after his release from prison for embezzlement, which she helped expose: Why would she want the lout back? Mary, for her part, recovers from a tepidly received final novel (she’s seen painfully ignored at a mall book-signing) to reinvent herself as a Serious Writer with a memoir, Trust and Betrayal: A Docu-novel of Love, Money and Skepticism (our last view of her is at a bookstore signing flirting with a charming Frenchman). Revenge may be sweet, but it need not be complete. Besides, the Other Woman was never the primary problem anyway; the feckless man is.

Next: Other Streep deconstructions of gender.

Woman at work

Some of Streep's feminism in the 1980s integrated public and private life.


The following post is part of a series on Meryl Streep's vision of American history, part of a larger set of case studies.

There were some Streep projects of the 1980s in which the non-gendered aspects of her characters life were truly important. In Plenty (1985), based on the David Hare play, she is Susan Traherne, a British woman whose small but dramatic role in the French Resistance during World War II, depicted in the opening sequence, makes everything that happens in her life subsequently pale by comparison. We see her in a number of jobs, among them a “good” one in advertising, whose mindlessness infuriates her. Traherne has a tryst with another operative (Sam Neill) early in her life, from which she never recovers, subsequently marrying a diplomat (Charles Dance) whom she treats with indifference that sometimes crosses the line into cruelty. The same can be said of a prior relationship with a young working-class man (Sting) with whom she seeks to father a child without attachments.

In the context of her career, Plenty is a fascinating experiment for Streep: she plays a stunningly unpleasant character. There’s an excruciating dinner-party scene in which Traherne manages to make us sorry for a stuffy senior Foreign Office operative (John Gielgud) grieving over British ineptitude in the Suez crisis. Streep’s capacity to incite anger in viewers usefully poses questions about the standards, gendered and otherwise, by which we judge people, something she would do repeatedly over the course of her career.

Streep did make a couple movies in which the synthesis of public and private feminism was far more successful from both an ideological as well as artistic standpoint. The best example is Silkwood (1983), the first of a series of collaborations with director Mike Nichols, screenplay by Ephron and Alice Arlen. Streep is Karen Silkwood, the real-life metallurgy worker at a nuclear power plant in Oklahoma. Divorced with children who live with their father, Silkwood shares a house with two co-workers, her lover (Kurt Russell) and a lesbian friend (Cher).  The rhythms of their everyday life, both in terms of casual humor and domestic tensions, seems more authentic and contemporary than that of The Deer Hunter. “If anything that’s the thing I’m most proud of in this movie, it’s that it accurately depicts the work force and how people keep their sense of humor no matter how bad things get,” Streep said in 1983.

 She plays Silkwood with a low-grade anti-authoritarian attitude, rendering her as an appealingly profane, pot-smoking good-ol’-girl who at one point flashes her breast on the job as a riposte to some heckling men. That anti-authoritarian disposition hardens as she gradually comes to realize that inadequate safety measures endanger workers at the plant, danger that ultimately engulfs Silkwood herself. Her growing labor activism attracts attention in Washington, but at the cost of multiple personal relationships, with men and women, among them Russell, who nevertheless still loves her.

The real Karen Silkwood died in murky circumstances in a 1974 car accident, just as revelations at the plant where she worked would go public and ultimately force its closure. Some critics disliked the ambiguity of the film’s ending, which was aesthetically as well as politically unsatisfying. But Silkwood herself belongs in the pantheon of Streep characters for the fully integrated quality of her life, a truly three-dimensional feminism of the kind one rarely sees in movies.

My personal favorite example of such three-dimensionality, however, is Streep’s turn as Helen Archer, a fictional character in the 1987 film Ironweed, based on William Kennedy’s Pulitzer-Prize winning novel. This may seem like an odd statement, in that the movie is about a couple of homeless alcoholics in the Depression-era Albany of 1938.    (Streep is paired again with Nicholson, an impressive piece of teamwork when one considers they played a Washington DC power couple the previous year in Heartburn.) Helen, cut off from her family, is jobless and nearly hopeless. But we learn she was once a singer in concerts and on the radio. At one point she, Nicholson and a friend (Tom Waits) wander into a local saloon and chat up the bartender (Fred Gwynn), a former singer and recovering alcoholic himself. When Helen ingenuously gushes about his singing and mentions that she too once performed, he genially insists she take the stage at the back of the room and sing a tune. Helen tentatively begins a version of “He’s Me Pal,” a pop standard circa 1905, which she dedicates to Nicholson. But her performance gains in intensity—Streep’s singing talents are put to very good use here—and the room takes on a remarkable glow, even if her teeth are blackened and her clothes tattered. Helen finishes to rousing applause, and Nicholson, who had bought her a flower for her coat moments before, now comes over for a kiss. “My God, Helen, this is as good as it gets. You were born to be a star,” he tells her. “You think so?” she replies, tentative pleasure in her voice, and the two embrace, protected from view by their hats, the iconic image that became the movie’s poster.

As we’ve been suspecting, though—how is it that her voice is projecting even when she’s not in front of the microphone, and where did band accompaniment we hear come from?—it’s all been an illusion. The camera cuts to Helen finishing her song, much less impressively than imagined, to a crowd that less impressive, and less impressed, than imagined. (Her man is still waiting for her, though, and the kind bartender, ironically, buys her a drink.) It’s a beautifully heartbreaking moment in a vivid but painful movie. It also represents a rare moment of fusion in a woman’s life, where she is doing something she loves in a public setting for a man she loves, and that man is there to support and savor labors that generate positive attention from the crowd, even if not as much as we wish for her.  Helen is a tragic figure—she had explained the bartender before she sang that her Nicholson’s drinking problem had forced them to sell off her piano and other prized musical possessions—precisely because her vision of a career was not a mere illusion. Just as Nicholson’s love of her is both real and destructive.

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Next: Streep as mother.

 

Watching music

In I Want My MTV: The Uncensored History of the Video Music Revolution, Craig Marks and Rob Tannenbaum chart the rise and fall of a cultural movement

The following review was posted last weekend on the Books page of the History News Network.

Before there was Facebook, before there were iPhones, there was MTV. After an unprepossessing launch in 1981, the cable network became a powerful force in American popular culture, exerting a much-noted impact not only on the music and television industries, but also on film, fashion, and even politics. Some of the attention MTV got was celebratory; some of it highly critical (from a variety of directions). About the only thing more striking than the network's dramatic impact is the degree it has receded since its first decade of cultural dominance. So the time seems right for an assessment of its trajectory.

Former Billboard editor Craig Marks and music journalist Rob Tannenbaum make a shrewd choice in rending the MTV story as an oral history, taking a page from Live from New York, the 2003 Tom Shales/James Andrew Miller history of Saturday Night Live (and before that, George Plimpton's ground-breaking 1982 biography of Edie Sedgewick, Edie). Tannenbaum and Craig conducted hundreds of interviews that that they arrange in a kaleidoscopic array of voices that include corporate executives, performers, video directors, and so-called "VJs" like Martha Quinn and Mark Goodman.

From its inception, MTV was a slick corporate product. Underwritten by the somewhat unlikely duo of Warner Cable and American Express -- which at the time hoped to sell financial services via interactive television -- the network's commercial premise rested on an audacious concept: to use one kind of advertising (musical acts promoting themselves) in order to sell another (ads that would be sandwiched between the videos). Even more audacious is that MTV got programming, at least initially, free, as it expected record labels to supply the material it broadcast, though the actual cost of the videos was typically charged to the artists in the form of an advance against royalties. There was widespread skepticism in just about every direction that this business model would actually work, but it proved to be spectacularly successful.

Like the advent of sound in motion pictures, the rise of music video rearranged the power structure of the music business. British musicians, who had long been using video clips for shows like the much-beloved Top of the Pops, were better prepared, both in terms of having content at hand and their willingness to produce more, in exploiting the opportunity, spawning a second British invasion in the early 1980s that included acts like Flock of Seagulls, Culture Club, and the Human League. Similarly, established acts with photogenic and/or charismatic lead singers, such as the Police and U2, were also able to exploit the potential of the new genre. By contrast, those without such assets or an inability to fully understand it suffered; there's an amusing chapter in I Want My MTV that chronicles the way rock star Billy Squier's video "Rock Me Tonight" was directed in a gay-friendly manner that wrecked his credibility among his core audience.

In aesthetic terms, music video evolved with remarkable rapidity, its development greatly accelerated by Michael Jackson, who overcame early resistance to having his videos broadcast and took the form to a whole new level. Madonna was similarly successful in bending the channel to showcase her talents, not the least of which was creating a sexual brand. But MTV was finally a director's medium, and was important in launching a series of careers, among the most important of which was that of David Fincher, whose apprenticeship in music video became the springboard for a distinguished, and ongoing, Hollywood career.

But almost from the start, MTV had a remarkably decadent corporate culture that over time sapped its vitality. In part, it was corrupted -- insofar as the term makes any sense in the music biz -- by an unholy alliance between executives and artists, who collaborated in a regime of sex, drugs, and rock & roll that made the counterculture of the 1960s seem tame by comparison. But MTV's indulgences were not only sybaritic. The network cultivated incestuous commercial relationships with certain performers, as well as indulged in racist, sexist and other questionable practices. Above all, it was corroded by money, chiefly in the form of inflated video budgets that gave accounting precedence over art.

Marks and Tannenbaum chart these developments at the network with surprising detail and clarity, the panoply of voices showing both multiple perspectives on the same video as well as the way in which prevailing perceptions were widely shared. The authors also document the many memorable highlights and byways of MTV's history, like Madonna's notorious appearance in a wedding dress at the 1984 MTV Awards ceremony, for example, or Tipper Gore's notorious crusade against Twisted Sister and other bands with the Parents' Music Resource Coalition (PMRC) in the late eighties. They also chart the network's gradual move into hip-hop, which revived the vitality of pop music as well as video in the early 1990s, and the role of MTV in electing Bill Clinton president in 1992.

By this point, however, the vast center MTV had created -- for much of the eighties it was the de facto national radio station, creating and/or sustaining huge mass audiences for the likes of acts like Prince and Bruce Springsteen -- was beginning to crack. A rotation that included R.E.M., Debbie Gibson, and Public Enemy was intrinsically centrifugal, and as such less attractive to advertisers. The rise of grunge rock, particularly that of Nirvana and Pearl Jam, represented a bracing new chapter for MTV, but that's because such bands overtly challenged much of what the network stood for. At the same time, the channel found other sources of cheap programming, like The Real World, that squeezed time for music videos, which gradually but inexorably disappeared from sight. Finally, the advent of the Internet, which empowered viewer choice to an unprecedented degree, balkanized audiences to the point of no return. As Marks and Tannenbaum note, "Offering MTV to a kid in 1993 was like offering a board game to a kid in 1981."

Today, MTV is just another cable channel, albeit one that enjoys commercial success with Jersey Shore, a tawdry show that honors the network's brash roots in style, though not in content. Music video lingers, chiefly on Internet sites like You Tube, where it remains the marketing tool it always has been. It's much less important than it used to be, but something closer to what its more modest champions imagined three decades ago. Reliving the glory days of MTV in this book is entertaining but sobering: the things that once seemed to matter so much now seem so small. Sic transit gloria mundi, Facebook. As Elvis Costello put it so memorably way back "Girls Talk," his 1979 song from before the MTV era "You may not be an old-fashioned girl but you're gonna get dated."

Jim is observing the Thanksgiving holiday weekend. His recent reading has included The Big Short: Inside the Doomsday Machine, Michael Lewis's 2010 account of the how reckless behavior in the mortgage business wrecked the U.S. economy. The Big Short is an emperor has no clothes tale, in which a small groups of attentive people pay enough attention to opaque financial documents most people are too lazy or ignorant to understand. When they do so, they realize that the economic foundation of the nation is actually built on sand. Their challenge is to maintain their confidence in the face of apparently intelligent people who work for investment banks and pretend -- or, worse, actually seem to believe -- that the business they're in is actually sound.

Though the information Michael Lewis provides becomes increasingly more arcane, the narrative arc of the book is such that you have a growing sense of suspense as these people steel themselves to maintain their nerve as pressure on them grows on the very cusp of success. And yet there's an unreality about their story, in that the catastrophe they predict both finally arrives and yet doesn't quite prove catastrophic enough to fundamentally change the way financial speculation continues to work in this country. Though the consequences would probably be bad for everyone, you find yourself wishing that the financial titans at places like Morgan Stanley and Goldman Sachs paid a higher price. Alas, we still seem addicted to an economy predicated on making money on nothing rather than producing real things that improve the lives of ordinary people.

For the moment, however, we can be thankful that an experiment that began 391 years ago in Plymouth, Massachusetts continues to bear fruit. A happy Turkey Day-- and Turkey Day leftovers -- to all.

--J.C.

'Glass' Window

In The Glass Harmonica, Dorothee Kocks depicts the pursuit of happiness as a metaphysical principle

The following review was posted recently on the Books page of the History News Network

Dorothee Kocks has had an intriguing career. A graduate of the University of Chicago, she went on to pursue a doctorate in American Civilization in the decidedly different climate of Brown (where our paths crossed almost a quarter-century ago). She got a tenure-track job at the University of Utah, proceeding to publish a richly suggestive piece of scholarship, Dream a Little: Land and Social Justice in in Modern America (California, 2000). Then she ditched her teaching post, took up the accordion, and began traveling widely, supporting herself with odd jobs. Last year, she made a foray into fiction by publishing her first novel, The Glass Harmonica, as an e-book with a New Zealand-based publisher. It has just been published in a print edition.

Kocks's unusual vocational trajectory is worth tracing here, because The Glass Harmonica is an unusual book. A work of historical fiction that bridges the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, it also sprawls across Europe and North America. Napoleon Bonaparte makes a cameo appearance, but its core is a love story between a commoner Corsican musician, Chjara Valle, and an entrepreneurial American purveyor of erotica, Henry Garland. The two lovers encounter any number of obstacles -- principally in the form of spiteful people on either side of the Atlantic -- but nevertheless manage to build a life together,  one animated by the mysteriously alluring (and thus to many threatening) glass harmonica, a musical instrument which enjoyed a vogue in the age of its inventor, Benjamin Franklin.

Such a summary makes the book seem simpler than it is. For one thing, The Glass Harmonica is rich with historical texture. Brimming with research, it vividly recreates any number of subcultures, ranging from continental drawing-room entertainments to the feverish intensity of revivial meetings. As one might expect of a writer who has spent much of her life, and much of her work, exploring the concept of place, Kocks also evokes varied geographies -- urban Paris and Philadelphia, rural upstate New York, coastal New England;  et. al. An afterword limns her sources and provides set of footnotes worth studying for their own sake.

Kocks also boldly trespasses over contemporary convention in realistic fiction, eschewing the spare, lean quality of modern prose in favor of lush, omniscient narration. "On the morning Chjara Valle quickened in her mother's womb, the sun reached its red fingers over the Mediterranean Sea," the novel opens. The book is engorged with such biological/anthropomorphic motifs.

But at its core, The Glass Harmonica is a novel of ideas. Sometimes those ideas are suggested in deceptively simple language, as in this exchange with her mother that suggests the paradoxes built into the the very notion of an autonomous self:

"My destiny is here," Chjara said.
"Your destiny is not yours to decide."
"Who decides then?"
"Don't be impertinent."

Other times, characters engage in explicitly philosophical discourse, discussing theology, politics, and other topics.

But for all its its intellectual sophistication, the argument of the novel -- part of its hybrid quality is that one can speak of it having a thesis -- rests on a simple idea: the pleasure principle, expressed most consistently in sexual terms. (The libertarian ethos of the book extends secondarily to economics as well.) Over and over again, her characters affirm it. "She wondered at this idea -- we are God's instruments -- and she vowed to live by the principle that would make us feel more alive was good," Chjara declares at one point. Henry, for his part, "understood that his father's [Puritan] religion was not the only one in the world; Jefferson's deists gave [him] the confidence that the world had been made to work well regardless of his breakfast." The lovers will be forced to question this conclusion repeatedly over the course of the novel, most seriously in its when it appears their choices have damaged their children. Faced with trauma, they look to themselves: when, in a desperate moment, Henry feels compelled to pray, it's not to God but to Chjara. Later their son prays to himself. And yet for all their intimacy, Chjara and Henry also have the secrets, a challenge to their fidelity more vexing than any adultery.

Kocks's libertine stance is both consistent and subtle (no mean trick). As such, it's hard to contest; though her protagonists encounter resistance, some of it internal, to their way of life, she makes a convincing case that that their quest for self-actualization is a bona fide American tradition with deep roots in the Enlightenment. The problem I have with it is less one of contradiction -- or a disposition of intolerance reflected in characters who block the couple's path to bliss -- than insufficiency. The fuel of happiness ultimately depends on sources of power such as money, looks, smarts, health, or the admiration of others (reflected here in the proto-celebrity culture that springs up around Chjara, who exults in adoration), which are in short supply under the best of circumstances. Notwithstanding their obstacles, the couple is suspiciously well endowed in these categories. Lacking them, most of us try to find ways to redeem our lives beyond ourselves, which typically involves some sort of self-sacrifice, beginning with raising children, truly an electric transfer of energy at least as transformative, if not always as felicitous, as procreation (or sexual recreation). But beyond such private leveraging of personal resources, a libertarian sensibility seems like a thin reed on which to build a community life, too; it seems no accident that the Chjara and Henry are itinerant. Nor is it easy to see, beyond a sympathetic disposition, how constructive their approach might be in other life-affirming quests, like the struggle to end slavery, for example.

As someone of who pledges his loyalty to Adams more than Jefferson, as it were, I'm not sure how much better a life of duty, variously constituted, really is. To be sure, it has evident costs, often paid by others than those who make such a pledge. It is a strength of this book that it forces one to consider such questions. The Glass Harmonica is a provocative novel by an elegant writer who has blazed her own path. It's a path worth surveying, whether or not one takes it.