Here's a sneak preview of the cover of my forthcoming book, to be published by Oxford University Press later this year. The
book looks at the way
trajectories of American history are embedded in the careers of movie stars. It
surveys the careers of six actors and how each body of work as a whole offers a
coherent vision of U.S. history. These versions are not necessarily conscious,
are never incontestable, and indeed may be marked by any number of internal
tensions. But for better and worse
they reflect and project collective understandings that are quite powerful and
often independent of scholarly opinion (which will be a point of reference
throughout). One chapter, “Tending
to the Flock,” traces the surprising strain of Jeffersonian-styled communitarianism
that runs through Clint Eastwood’s apparently individualistic corpus. Another,
“Shooting Star,” explores the way Daniel Day-Lewis reconfigures Frederick
Jackson Turner’s vision of the frontier.
A third, “Rising Sons,” focuses on Denzel Washington’s recurrent choice
of roles involving parenting and mentoring in the context of African American
history (a motif with an often religious subtext). A fourth, “Company Man,”
looks at Lincolnian accents in the movies of Tom Hanks, the generational heir
of Jimmy Stewart. A fifth looks at the feminist trajectory of Meryl Streep, and the final chapter explores the career of Jodie Foster as an American loner. These are all people with considerable power to choose their
roles, and thus to register patterns that would be otherwise difficult to trace
among more workaday actors. The generational thread that connects these people,
all born in the middle third of the twentieth century, is the climate of
institutional skepticism that has dominated American life in the decades since
they came of age.
There are thus three
concentric circles of argument in the project: one about specific actors and
the often surprising cohesion in their bodies of work; one about the
generational tenor of American life in the late 20th and early 21st
centuries; and one about the way a notion of history – defined here as a
belief, rooted in perceptions of collective experience, about the way society
changes – that threads through the work of people who are often thinking about
other things, an existential condition that applies to many of us.
