The Right Wing Bullshite Machine: The Myth of Nazism as Socialism

The right wing, which is, historically speaking, quite distinct from traditional conservatism and laissez faire liberal conservatism, has spewed a lot of truly bizarre demagoguery over the years. One of its most spectacular species of demagogic bullshit, however, is its equation of National Socialism or Nazism with Socialism.

Nazism, empirically speaking, was ethnicalist in the extreme. Nazis believed that the Aryan race would and should rule the world. It was romantic looking backward at a golden age of Aryan knights and corporate hierarchy. It was, in other words, a revival of corporate feudalism. It was utopian in that it wanted to bring back the gold old days when Aryans were Aryans and Jews were non-existent. It was capitalist making its peace with German corporations like the capitalist corporation Krupp. It was ethnocentric in that it ranked humans hierarchically with Aryans at the top and Gypsies, Slavs, and Jews at the bottom. Jews were to be annihilated, Slavs enslaved. It was eugenicist in that the disabled were to be eliminated while the decadent, including leftists, were to be purged from the corporate body or eliminated.

Socialism, in general. on the other hand, was internationalist at least initially. It wanted to, at least initially, destroy capitalism. It believed the global working class would play the leading role in transforming the world. It was romantic, but in a future directed way. Socialists preached that, at some point, socialism would bring about a new world. It did not look backward. It was inclusive in that it believed the working class with all its diversity would create a new and better world and finally bring about true liberty, true freedom, true democracy, true equity, and the true pursuit of happiness.

When Nazis used the term socialism they used it as a synonym for national corporatism, the national state hierarchically structured. This means that Nazis borrowed and adapted their idea of the state, the state as corporation, from the mediaeval Catholic Church.

There were, of course, a variety nationalist fascisms. Nationalist corporate facisms were found in Germany, in Italy in Spain, and in Argentina, to note a few examples. Both the Nazis and Francoists, by the way, and this is a historical fact, hated socialism, communism, and anarchism and actually engaged in the mass murder of socialists, communists, and anarchists during the Spanish Civil War and WWII/the Shoah.   

Socialism, of course, like another internationalist movement, Christianity, would eventually make its peace with the religion of nationalism and succumb to the nationalist faith, in France, in Germany, in Britain, and in the USSR, where it was called socialism in one country, after WWI, showing, once again, how strong and popular the religion of nationalism is. As I write a potential candidate for the leadership of the British Labour Party is preaching the gospel of patriotic, translation, British, progressivism.

Anyway, that the right wing bullshite machine can equate Nazism and Socialism is a marker of how Monty Pythonesque, how absurd, the right wing bullshite machine became in the wake of World War II. I would hate to think that those who propigate this myth actually believe it but humans, as history shows, have believed a lot of bullshite over the years. And so it goes.

The Books of My Life: The World at War

I don't recall when I first saw Thames Television's Second World documentary The World at War. I must have seen it sometime in 1973 on American television. It was first broadcast in the US in September and in October on ITV in the UK. I do recall being very impressed by the show. I remain impressed with The World at War some fifty years later. it remains one of the best documentaries I have ever seen.

Taylor Downing's The World at War (London: BFI, BFI TV Classics series, 2012) uses interviews with those who made the documentary, including The World at War's general Jeremy Isaacs, archival research, much of it in the archives of the Imperial War Museum, which provided extensive help for the programme, and memoirs to explore the origins, personnel who worked on the documentary, production, narrative structure, music, footage used in the show, and critical and public reaction to the The World at War. Downing argues that The World at War, one of the first British documentaries to move away from the historical recreation model of documentary, remains much watched today because of its use of oral histories, many of them with common men and women who survived the war, its multi layered narrative form, and, in particular, its escape from the typical structure of many war documentaries, that manichean binary of heroes and villains.

Recommended for those interested in British television, British television documentaries, World War II, documentaries, and World War II even if, for me, there is to much of the anecdotal in the monograph.

In the Land of the Gobshitters...

 So, there I was television channel hopping on Thanksgiving Day in Albany, New York. I had heard that venerable local television station WRGB, channel 6, one of the oldest TV stations in the US and once connected to Thomas Edison's GE, and local channel 45, WCWN, once owned by the local PBS station, had been taken over by the radical right wing Sinclair Broadcast Group. On this Thanksgiving day I finally got to see the "fruits" of this takeover as I stopped clicking at Channel 45 to watch the news.

There, staring me in the face, was Boris Epshteyn, chief demagogue, chief ideologue, chief Republican polemicist and apologiest, and chief gobhsitter of the Sinclair Broadcasting Group. Epshteyn was going on about how socialist elitists in the form of Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren were trying to and turn the US into the USSR of Epstheyn's youth.

Leaving aside the fact, that this USSRing of the US is an old refrain in the radical right and goes back at least to the popular New Deal of Franklin Delano Roosevelt, there was so much delusional fiction in Epshteyn's rant and in Epshteyn's person that one cannot help but remark on it. Take in the idiocy of elite Epshteyn himself. This populist raving about American elites went to the elite Georgetown University where he took an elite bachelor's degree in Foreign Affairs and an elite postgraduate degree in law. Take in the fact that the populist anti-elitist demagogue Epshteyn works for an elite and wealthy media firm that exerts much political influence on the Trump administration. Take in the fact that demagogue Epshteyn is calling Sanders and Warren propagandists when he is one of the chief ideologues and propagandists for a network that offers no, as far as I can see, opposing, and more empirically grounded, voices, something once mandated by the fairness doctrine of the FCC until Republicans eliminated it, a reflection of right wing self righteousness and intolerance of opposing American voices. Take in the bizarity of a media elitist calling out the media for its supposed "liberal bias" when in reality the commercial media's one god is mammon and its way of getting more and more mammon is to sensationalise, emphasising, or better over emphasising in the process, as the modern mass media always has, murder, celebrity, fires, cruelty to animals, and the lowest common denominator.

Take some time to take in the lunacy at the heart of contemporary America, a land where elitists whinge and whine about elitism, where demagogues whinge and whine about demagoguery, and where propagandists whinge and whine about propaganda. In closing let me note that the bullshite such as that uttered by gobshite Epshteyn is akin to yelling fire in a crowded theatre where there is no fire. Let me also note that such bs is eaten up by true believing groupie masses as if it were the best Russian caviar. Ain't that delusional right wing America?

The Books of My Life: Bonnie and Clyde

Lester Friedman in his brief monograph on the 1967 American film Bonnie and Clyde (Bonnie and Clyde, London: BFI, BFI Film Classics series, 2000) claims that the film Bonnie and Clyde was one of the seminal films of the auteurist oriented New Hollywood movement of the 1960s and 1970s. Looking backward, it is hard not to agree with Friedman's assessment.

Friedman's excellent monograph puts Bonnie and Clyde in the broader historical, social, and cultural context of the  breakdown of the studio system in the post World War II era and in the traditionalist versus counterculture culture war of the 1960s and early 1970s arguing that Bonnie and Clyde's outlaws against "traditional" authority resonated with many of America's young. Many of America's young, Friedman argues, found in Bonnie and Clyde, as fighting against America's restrictive moral code and its repressive social institutions if in a different era, the Great Depression of the late 1920s and 1930s.

Friedman also does an excellent job of exploring the production contexts of Bonnie and Clyde, thanks, in part, to interviews with the films director Arthur Penn, who began his directorial life in theatre and the new medium of American television, and with David Newman, one of the writers of the film along with Robert Towne, neither of whom had screenwriting experience or credits when they first wrote the script to Bonnie and Clyde. Friedman notes something that virtually everyone speaks of when they write about the film these days, that two heroes of the French nouvelle vague were asked to direct the film, Jean-Luc Godard and François Truffaut, and that Truffaut helped give the film a narrative structure.

I was impressed with Friedman's exploration of the contexts, production history, and analysis of Bonnie and Clyde, particularly its attention to the historical context of the film. I recommend the monograph to anyone interested in film, interested in American film, interested in the brief revolution in American film in the 1960s and 1970s.

The Books of My Life: Eyes Wide Shut

As I have mentioned previously in these blogs the films of Stanley Kubrick often leave me cold. That--leaving me cold--sometimes seems to me the very essence and meaning of Kubrick's chilly, mechanical, and ultimately misanthropic and perhaps misogynistic films. They show, it seems to me, in a mechanical way, the absurdity of the human condition.

I have long admired Kubrick's Doctor Strangelove (1964), A Clockwork Orange (1972), a film in which Kubrick's decision not to end the film with the last chapter of the book and which, as a result, tells us much about Kubrick's themes, and Full Metal Jacket (1987), but his other films have generally left me both impressed and unimpressed at the same time. Additionally, his films often seem to me to be very much of their time to their detriment. 2001 (1968), for instance, seems, to be aimed at the psychedelic wow that is far out generation.

Eyes Wide Shut, the subject of film critic Michel Chion's monograph Eyes Wide Shut (London: BFI, Modern Classics series, 2002) is not one of my favourite Kubrick films. It is, however, one of the favourite Kubrick films of critic Chion as he makes clear in the opening segments of the book. Chion explores the differences between the film and the Arthur Schnitzler novella on which it was based (Traumnovelle, 1925/26), narrative form, camera shooting strategies, colour scheme, sound picture, something Chion specialises in in his film criticism and analysis, music, and editing of Eyes Wide Shut. Chion argues that words, words parroted and words first said, are at the heart of the meaning of the film. It is only, Chion argues, when the characters awake from their repetitious parroting slumbers that their eyes are opened if only in a non-Hollywood happy happy ending way.

Recommended for students of Kubrick.

The Books of My Life: In the Realm of the Senses

For film scholar Joan Mellen the films of Oshima Nagisa, including Ai no corrida/In the Realm of the Senses, the subject of Mellen's book in the BFI Film Classics series (In the Realm of he Senses, London: BFI, 2004, are rebellious and even revolutionary. Oshima's films, argues Mellen, are reactions to modern Japan, the Japan of industrialisation, the Japan of militarism, the Japan of nationalism, and the Japan of feudal victimisation.

Mellen explores the mise-en-scene, particularly Oshima's use of colour, camera angles, close-ups, and real sex in In the Realm of the Senses. She nicely, as I mentioned earlier, puts Oshima's work in its Japanese contexts, specifically, Oshima's student radicalism and his opposition to modern Japan's militarism, nationalism, and sense of victimhood, a perspective not every student of Japanese film agrees with. She discusses the films of Luis Bunuel and their impact on Oshima. She nicely explores other films that came out of similar the same post-war atmosphere, namely Imamura Shohei's The Insect Woman (1963) and History of Postwar Japan as Told by a Bar Hostess (1970), Dusan Makavejev's WR: Mysteries of the Organism (1971), one of my favourute films,  Bernardo Bertolucci's Last Tango in Paris (1972), which she rightly, in my opinion, notes doesn't go as far as Oshima (and I would add early Makavejev) in subverting gender ideologies, and Robert Altman's McCabe and Mrs. Miller (1972). She explores the controversies that followed the film particularly in Japan where it was censored.

I found Mellen's discussion of the social and cultural contexts of Oshima's works and his Ai no corrida fascinating. I recommend Mellen's book to anyone interested in radical cinema and Japanese cinema.

The Books of My Life: Lolita

When I was a teenager and a twentysomething lover of cinema, Stanley Kubrick was one of the great auteurs of the cinephilic world. I have long had a kind of comme ci comme ça relationship with the films of Stanley Kubrick. On the one hand, I recognise the incredible beauty and studied composition of the Kubrick cinematic image and frame. Kubrick was once a photographer after all. On the other hand, I have long thought that Kubrick's characters were too stereotypical and cliched and that he (and most of his collaborators) could not write well rounded female characters to save their lives. In Kubrick films women are femme fatales, pin up girls, screamers, or the objects of male hatred. Finally, I have never quite been able to look past the studied and unleavened misanthropy of Kubrick's films and their often far too sophomoric humour.

Richard Corliss's monograph for the BFI Film Classics series on the 1962 Stanley Kubrick film Lolita (London: BFI, BFI Film Classics series, 1994), offers an interesting exploration of that film through a series of related fragments. Corliss explores the adaptation of Vladimir Nabokov's Lolita from novel to film, gives readers a brief biography of both Nabokov and Kubrick, explores the visual qualities of the Kubrick film, explores how the adaptation of Lolita by Kubrick fits with the themes of Kubrick's other film work, explores the casting of the film, explores acting in the film, and engages the issue of censorship, which limited what Kubrick could do in his film adaptation of Lolita.

Corliss's monograph is an interesting study of a film seems to have been caught in the no man's land of that era just before the censorship regime of Hollywood broke down under the impact, at least in part, of foreign cinema in the US. I recommend it to anyone interested in Kubrick and Nabokov.

The Books of My Life: The Office

Drawing on interviews with creators and production personnel and historical and cultural analysis Ben Walters (The Office (London: BFI, BFI TV Classics series, 2005)) explores the origins of the BBC Two docusoap The Office, a television which was transmitted for two seasons and a two part Christmas special between 2001 to 2003.

Like any social and cultural phenomenon The Office, as Walters notes, did not originate in a vacuum. Walters argues that on one level The Office is a product of the dog eat dog world of neoliberal corporate capitalism and the fears, anxieties, alienation, and absurdities of clerical office work in that brave new postmodern world of neo Ebenezer Scrooge capitalism. On another level, as Walters notes, The Office is the product of the merging of situation comedy and the documentary, a trend that can be seen in the rise of narrative form reality TV stretching back to An American Family (PBS, 1971) and its British cousin The Family (BBC, 1974) and the impact of these docudramas on films like the mockumentary This is Spinal Tap (1984), situation comedies such as The Royale Family (BBC, 2006-2012), and and mock news shows like Brass Eye (C2, 1997, 2001). On still another level, as The Office co-creators Ricky Gervais and Stephen Merchant, note in interviews, The Office is the product of the movies of Woody Allen--one presumes Take the Money and Run (1969) in particular--and American situation arc comedies such as Seinfeld (NBC, 1989-1998).

Though The Office has always left me somewhat cold Walters books is an interesting book on an interesting TV series. I recommend it to anyone interested in documentaries, situation comedies, the history of television and film, and the impact of neoliberalism on the media.

The Books of My Life: Edge of Darkness

Between the 1970s and 1980s British television drama changed, writes John Caughie in his book Edge of Darkness (London: BFI, BFI TV Classics series, 2007). The 1970s saw the decline of the single play with its theatrical look and which had been a prominent part of British TV since its beginnings and the subsequent rise of the quality television serial with its more filmic look. Among these new dramatic quality serials was Troy Kennedy Martin's Edge of Darkness.

Edge of Darkness was first transmitted between 4 November and 9 December 1985 on BBC Two and almost immediately rerun on the more popular of the BBCs channels, BBC One. Caughie's book explores the production contexts of the serial and what writer Kennedy, director Martin Campbell, producer Michael Wearing, designer Graeme Thomson, musicians Eric Clapton and Michael Kamen, and the actors, among them Bob Peck, Joe Don Baker, and Joanne Whalely, brought to the show.  It explores the broader political and economic contexts of the show including Thatcherism, worker strikes, tensions between the great powers, anti-nuclear activism, environmental activism, and ecological theory. It explores the generic contexts of Edge of Darkness noting that the show novelly mixes the spy thriller with the ecological theory of Gaia and its almost magical conception of the planet.

For Caughie Edge of Darkness is, as the name of the series of which Caughie's book is a part, a television classic. Edge, Caughie notes, has been a critical favourite and was listed by a panel of TV professionals as the "third greatest TV drama of all time". The response of viewers at the time, including Caughie, to Edge, claims Caughie though with little qualitative evidence and no quantitative evidence, was one of telephilia. The show had an emotional and intellectual impact on viewers making it memorable to them in the process, so memorable that Edge carries with it the political tenor of its time in the minds of those who watched it when it was first transmitted and who rewatch it on DVD or in rerun.

Caughie's Edge of Darkness is an interesting book about a very interesting television serial. Recommended to those interested in the history of British television, quality television serials, the spy thriller, and the impact of great power tensions and the environmental movement on television.

Picaresque Adventures Among the Amazon Slag: The Trials and Tribulations of Buying from Amazon

Until recently I shopped at Amazon and Amazon UK almost exclusively. I bought CDs, DVDs, Blu rays, and even shoes from Amazon. Now all of that has changed.

There are a number of reasons why I broke my Amazon addiction. I used to sell on marketplace and over the two years I was there Amazon raised the percentage they took from each sale, they added an additional straight fee charged to each seller on Amazon Marketplace, and they mandated that all sellers provide invoices for the goods they sold, something easier for large sellers than small sellers selling used items often bought many years before like myself. To top it off Amazon even refused to accept their own invoices for items I had bought from Amazon years earlier and was reselling on Amazon Marketplace.

The straw that broke the proverbial camel's back, however, was a Russian classic. Earlier this year I purchased the Alma Classics translation of Mikhail Yurevich Lermontov's A Hero of Our Time from Amazon. When I got this item through the mail, however, there was a clearly noticeable weirdness about the book. First off, it was larger than the typical Alma Classic. Second, there was no title page. Nor was there a table of contents page. The chapter list was right above the beginning of the book on the very first page of the novel. Third, on the last page of the book I found a barcode (3797508R00049) and a statement notifying me that the item was "[p]rinted in Poland by Amazon Fulfillment Poland Sp. z.o.o Wroclaw.

It took me awhile but with the aid of the publisher I discovered that Amazon had sold me a pirated edition of their book and had even blocked the Alma Classic of A Hero of Our Time from Amazon's website preferring, apparently, to sell the pirated version of the book rather than the book as published by Alma, the original publisher. The book Amazon sold me as the Alma Classic of A Hero of Our Time translated by Martin Parker and Neil Cornwell is not the Parker and Cornwell translation of A Hero Our Time. In fact, there is absolutely no information about who  the translator or translators of this pirated edition are, though it is clear it is neither Parker or Parker/Cornwell. According to the electronic version (which can be found here) this reprint is an adaptation of the Parker translation (which was originally done for the Soviet Foreign Language Publishing House) that Americanises the text and corrects, or so the unknown translators claim, the translation though who the translators are ("we have") is unclear. Additionally, the translators claim that the Everyman version, an earlier revision of the Parker translation by Cornwell, was not copyrighted, an assertion one might find questionable given the evidence of the Alma edition and revision of the Parker translation. What is not questionable is that Amazon is selling a cover copyrighted by Alma and this is not only a questionable practise but likely a violation of copyright. By the way, the Amazon faux version has some excellent notes presumably by the anonymous translators. 

I had read in The Atlantic, Forbes, and in the New York Times that Amazon sold pirated goods. This was the first time, however, I had ever seen one in the proverbial flesh. I immediately wrote a review of the item on Amazon noting that the version of Alma's A Hero of Our Times Amazon was offering for sale was a fake. Then I contacted Amazon to tell them about the scam. When I did this, however, I discovered that the scammer was not some Eastern European scam artist but was Amazon itself. Amazon's poorly paid chat clerks denied that I bought the book from them--something the empirical evidence noted above shows is a lie--and they refused to explore the issue further. Once again I was reintroduced to that well known and well worn phrase caveat emptor, a phrase I was quite cognizant of thanks to buying items from Amazon Marketplace where descriptions of books for sale are often misleading at best and which Amazon does nothing about thereby allowing flim flam con sellers to fleece consumers again and again.

Given Amazon's intransigence and its elimination of evidence that showed that customers were sold a pirated version of a Russian classic I immediately cancelled any preorders from Amazon including the Beatles deluxe edition of Abbey Road and I began searching for alternatives which, compared to Amazon, are ethical and moral giants (something not very hard to do). I began buying books from Blackwell, an old brick and mortar store, and highly recommend buying books from Blackwell. I bought Abbey Road and other items I originally intended to buy from Amazon from Walmart, a corporation that, compared to Amazon, is  akin to Perceval. I started buying classical CD's from HBDirect and Presto Classica and can recommend both to potential customers. Additionally, I still have the pirated A Hero of Our Time with its Amazon Fulfillment statement in the back of the book and I intend to present this data to the New York State Attorney General. Amazon, it really hasn't been nice getting to know what a slag and skank ye truly are.

Speaking of Skankazon, I recently discovered that Amazon also sold me three other Alma Classics (Bunin's Dark Avenues, Chekhov's The Woman in the Case, and Turgenev's Faust) that are Amazon reprints (printed in Delaware) rather than the Alma Classics themselves. I assume Skankazon makes more monies off of these fake books--they are printed by the Amazon owned CreateSpace--and this is the reason they sell reprints like these. I would, by the way, return all of them if I could-- I was only able to return Faust (which they sent with a different cover than advertised on their site)-- because first, I ordered the Alma Classic not the Amazon knockoff, and second, I don't trust Skankazon. I will thus only be buying Alma's from Powell's or Blackwell's in the future.

The Books of My Life: The Likely Lads

In 1964 The Likely Lads, written by Dick Clement and Ian La Fresnais, was first transmitted on BBC Two. Later, when it was rebroadcast on BBC One, Clement's and Le Frenais's realistic and naturalistic comedy about two Northern working class best mates, Terry Chambers (James Bolam) and Bob Ferris, (Rodney Bewes), became, according to Phil Wickham, one of Britain's best loved situation comedies running for three series, ending in 1966. The likely lads, in fact, became so popular with TV audiences that BBC One, Clement, and La Fresnais brought Terry and Bob back to the small screen in 1973 in a second programme, Whatever Happened to the Likely Lads, which ended in 1974. In 1976 the lads made their last appearance in the film The Likely Lads.

Phil Wickham's The Likely Lads (London: BFI, 2008) explores the Northern setting of The Likely Lads and Whatever Happened to the Likely Lads, the depiction of class and the dramatic changes that impacted class throughout the the 1970s in both shows, the representation of gender in both shows, the structure and form of both shows, and the reasons why The Likely Lads and became so successful. Wickham argues that class is portrayed sympathetically but not sentimentally by Clement and La Fresnais, that Terry was more of a fatalist when it came to class status than Bob while Bob was more of a striver trying to achieve a middle class life, something he achieved to some extent in Whatever Happened to the Likely Lads, that both shows were more fair in their depictions of women than critics historically have been willing to admit, that the show is character driven, and that the success of the The Likely Lads and Whatever Happened to the Likely Lads was due to both shows mix of realism, fatalism, sense of place, drama, and comedy, comedy that audiences could laugh with rather than at, comedy that worked in such a way that viewers recognised themselves in the show.

Sadly half of the 20 episodes of The Likely Lads--two were found recently--are missing due to the BBC policy of wiping. I recommend Wickham's book for anyone interested in television, television situation comedy, British comedy, class, and best mateship in 1960s and 1970s England.

The Books of My Life: Alfred Hitchcock and the British Cinema

Tom Ryall's Alfred Hitchcock and the British Cinema (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1986) explores the history of British--British film historian Charles Barr prefers to call it English--cinema in the 1930s and 1930s. Ryall also uses the films of British or English filmmaker Alfred Hitchcock to explore the economic, political, cultural, and geographic contexts of English cinema in the 1920s and 1930s.

Ryall explores the development of a bifurcated film culture in England in the 1920s and 1930s, a divide that, as Ryall notes, only a few crossed, between the English entertainment cinema, a cinema heavily influenced by Hollywood, and the English art cinema, a cinema heavily influenced by German, French, and Soviet films and film theory with its network of film clubs, film journals, and art film houses. Ryall explores how the Quota Act of 1927 gave impetus to the development of an English cinema heavily influenced by Hollywood studio techniques and practises and drawing on English popular culture (the English music hall, the English theatre, English literature, English crime and spy novels). Ryall explores how the growth of the English cinema was limited-Britons continued to prefer Hollywood cinema--and its inability to regularly break into the American market, something necessitated by the small size of the English market compared to that of the United States.

Ryall places the films of Alfred Hitchcock into all these contexts. Ryall notes that Hitchcock was one of those few who straddled the divide between the entertainment cinema and the popular cinema, something evidenced, Ryall argues, in his films, films that are often simultaneously influenced by Hollywood and aimed at a mass audience, while also characterised by aural and visual experimentation that Hitchcock drew from Germany, France, and the Soviet Union. Ryall explores how Hitchcock's career benefited from the Quota Act and how the decline of the English film industry in 1937 led Hitchcock to move to Hollywood to make films. Ryall explores how Hitchcock's films reflect the popularity of certain British genres, particularly the thriller and spy genre, a genre with which Hitchcock became synonymous from the 1940s on, and explores how the theme of ordinary people impacted by extraordinary circumstances, a theme that became central to his thrillers, also became central to Hitchcock's auteurist image.

Ryall's superb book is essential to anyone interested in the relationship between society and film, culture and film, English society and culture in the early 20th century, and the films of Alfred Hitchcock. It offers an approach to culture and film that is more sociological than psychoanalytic and is far the better for it and should be emulated by other film scholars far more than it has been.

The Books of My Life: Russian Writers and Society in the Nineteenth Century

As Ronald Hingley notes in his Russian Writers and Society in the Nineteenth Century (London: Weidenfeld and Nicholson, second edition, 1977) one can read the classics of Russian literature between 1825 and 1904 without knowing much about Russia economically, politically, culturally, and demographically. It helps, Hingley rightly argues, to know something about Russian economics, politics, culture, and demographic to truly understand and appreciate the classics of nineteenth century Russian literature.

Hingley's Russian Writers and Society in the Nineteenth Century does just that. It gives interested readers an understanding of Russian geography, communications, ethnic groups, the economy, its estates--its monarchy, its aristocracy, including landowners and the gentry, its peasants, its middling crafts people and merchants--its religion, its towns and cities, its legal system, its officials, its military, and its censorship apparatus, all in brief and straightforward compass and often with examples drawn from the classics of nineteenth century Russian literature.

Hingley's introduction to Russian society and Russian literature in the nineteenth century is an excellent guide, for the educated reader, to the interrelationships between Russian literature and Russian society and I highly recommend it to anyone wanting to know something about the broader contexts of Russian literature between 1825 and 1904. Not everyone will agree with Hingley's canon of the greatest of Russian literature during the era--Pushkin's Yevgeny Onegin, Lermontov's A Hero of Our Time, Gogol's Dead Souls part one, Turgenev's Rudin, A Nest of Gentlefolk, On the Eve, Fathers and Children, Smoke, and Virgin Soil, Goncharov's Oblomov, Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment, The Idiot, Demons/Devils/The Possessed, and Karamazov Brothers, and Tolstoy's War and Peace and Anna Karenina. Some might want to add further "classics" to Hingley's list.

The Books of My Life: The Red Flag

Most people of a certain age, particularly in the West, when they think of communism today,  think of it as an utter failure, as the evil empire, and as something that defeated by the capitalist and democratic West, and particularly by America, during the Cold War from the late 1940s to the 1990s. Communism was, however, more than the demonic force of polemicists and more than the last great hope for humankind of its apologists. It was a social movement that was at the heart of global economics, politics, and culture during most of the twentieth century.

David Priestland in his The Red Flag: A History of Communism (New York: Grove, 2009) explores the history of communism from its beginnings in the late 18th century to today. Just as sociologists of religion have tried to escape the iron cage of orthodox and heretical polemics and apologetics via dispassionate typology, Priestland tries to escape the iron cage of polemics and apologetics about communism since the 19th century. Priestland delineates several ideal type forms of communism. There is, he argues, the romantic communism of the barricades with its romantic revolutionary hero. There is the science and industrialisation as progressive and history as teleological modernist communism. And there is pragmatic communism or socialism with its compromises with bourgeois "democracy" and nationalism, another very prominent cultural meaning system in the modern and postmodern world.

These varieties of communism are, Priestland argues, ideal types--an approach Max Weber pioneered in--varieties of communism that can be isolated in theory but often succeeded or proceeded one another, interacted with, and were often interrelated in practise, something Priestland nicely shows in his explorations of the history of communism in all its varieties from the 19th century on. Needless to say the empirical fact that there were multiple forms of communism and socialism was lost on many anti-communist polemicists and pro-communist apologists, like the Bolsheviks, who argued, similarly to the Catholic Church when it maintains that it is the only true variety of Christianity, that there was only one true variety of communism, For the Bolsheviks and for those who demonised Bolshevism, the only variety of communism was Marxism-Leninism-Stalinism.

There are a number of points about communism that Priestland makes in his synthesis that I wholeheartedly agree with. Priestland rightly emphasises that war played an important role in the rise of revolutionary, modernist, and pragmatic varieties of communism and that communism was a reaction to the hierarchies and inequalities of the modern world.

Priestland notes that communism was and is a meaning system and that as a cultural meaning system it has similarities to religious meaning systems that originated in the Mediterranean world and which are still with us today, Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. Revolutionary communism, for example, whose cultural or meaning system developed in the context of war, initially the French Revolution and the European revolutions that followed, in the context of great economic change--the advent of mass capitalism and mass industrialisation--in the context of political change--the coming of mass politics and mass bureaucracies--and in the context of cultural change, created a social movement around a culture opposed to hierarchies and inequalities associated with industrialism and capitalism (and later imperialism) along with a cult of the romantic hero manning the revolutionary barricades a la Hugo. Modernist communism developed a culture that saw industrialisation and science as progressive and the triumph of communism as historically inevitable, a triumph that would result, modernist communists believed, in the end history (teleology). Revolutionary and modernist communisms even had their own catechism, Stalin's Short Course, for example.

By looking at communism as a social movement with a culture that creates a sense of identity and a sense of a community with a mission, it is clear that communism shares a lot with Western Christianity and Islam. Looking at communism in this way also allows us to see how communism shares a lot with a Weberian understanding of the sectarian process. Weber argued that most religious groups or culturally oriented social movements began in charisma, the charisma of a charismatic leader. As a result a sense of identity arose out of a common perception of that charismatic leader, and a strong sense of community with a mission to evangelise the message of that charismatic leader arose. Over time, Weber argued, particularly with the death of a charismatic leader, the charismatic sect morphs into a paternalistic church or denomination, and eventually, with the coming of modernity, into a rational bureaucratic church or denomination. With bureaucratisation, however, Weber argued, came dissent and the claim that the bureaucratic church or denomination was only a shade of what it originally was. As a result new sects seeking to capture the primitive or original spirit of the charismatic sect arose setting in motion the sect/church/denomination cycle anew. As Priesland makes clear communism of the romantic and modernist varieties with their conviction that they and they alone had the truth (ethnocentrism) and that others needed to be told of this truth (evangelisation) led to periodic purification or inquisitional campaigns, periodic renewal campaigns, and periodic sectarianisation within the communist movement. Think of all the varieties of Trotskyism over the years.

Ironically, as Priestland points out, this sense of ideological purity, the need for renewal, and evangelical fervour, is not only found in Christianity, Islam, and communism. It can also be readilly discerned in the neo-liberalisms of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.  Like Christianity, Islam, and communism neo-liberals, particularly in their revolutionary and modernist forms, claim to have a monopoly on the truth--free markets as god's or nature's economic system--tend to be exclusive and purificationist thanks to their I'm OK, you are not OK, if you want to be OK you need to be like me mentalities, and tend to have a belief in the necessity of bringing their one truth message to the rest of world via evangelisation. Neo-liberals, in other words, as Priestland notes, are somewhat inverted communists.

Priestland rightly notes that communism in comparison with capitalism was more transparent. Capitalism thanks to its almost occult and magical take on the workings of the market, was and perhaps is a more powerful ideology and opiate than communism. Those in the communist world could more readily see, particularly after the Soviet invasions of Hungary and Czechoslovakia, that the equality and radiant future that communism preached seemed at odds with the realities of inequality, perks for the powerful, and the seemingly endless putting off of the utopia at the end of the communist radiant rainbow. Neo-liberalism, in other words, with its ideology that inequality is inevitable thanks to the workings of the free market and variations in how hard one works and its messianic utopianism--everyone will benefit from the free market--is a more difficult drug for the masses to see through, claims Priestland. It is so difficult to see through that many believe, despite the oligarchic republicanism present in the West to varying degrees, despite inequalities and increasing inequality between rich and poor in the West and particularly in the US and UK, that individuals are responsible for their own destinies, that individuals make their own beds and must, as a result, lie in them.

While there are other equally dispassionate ways to typologise communisms--one might distinguish between utopian, scientific, and communal forms of communism--Priestland's approach is not only helpful but, and this is critical, more dispassionate than the capitalist "democracy" versus evil godless commie approach, an approach that parallels the religious orthodoxy versus religious heresy typology that has has dominated popular and even intellectual and academic approaches to communism. As Priestland notes it is absolutely essential to put the polemical and apologetic approach to rest if we are to truly understand the "nature" of socialisms and communisms of all types and communist dynamics.

Priestland's book doesn't, by the way, simply give us a glimpse into the social movements of the left. It also gives us an analogical glimpse into the social movements of the right. We currently live in an era of vast inequalities, of periodic conflicts, and of hardening hierarchies, all of which have led to the revival of the romantic capitialist nationalism of the American, Polish, Austrian, British, Hungarian,  Philippine, and British varieties. Given this reality, Priestland's superb book should be self-recommending not only to those interested in social movements of the left but to those concerned about the revival of the romantic right and who are interested in social movements of the right. The more things change...

The Books of My Life: Ten Lessons in Introductory Sociology

Given that I have taught history, communication, cultural anthropology, and sociology over the years I have had ample opportunity to read several textbooks books in each of those disciplines. Recently I used Kenneth Gould's and Tammy Lewis's (editors) Ten Lessons in Introductory Sociology (New York: Oxford University Press, second edition, 2018) in my Introduction to Sociology class and so I thought I would briefly share my thoughts about the book.

Ten Lessons in Introductory Sociology is made up of ten chapters ranging through Sociological Theory, Sociological Methods, Culture, Society, Inequality, Race, Gender, Social Change, Globalisation, and Applied Sociology, the last a rarity in introductory sociology texts but a nice addition given student interest in doing something practical with their academic major. As an introductory textbook ten lessons has several advantages. It is inexpensive in an era when introductory textbooks can cost an arm and a leg, a concern particularly important to students who are from middle and working class backgrounds. It goes for a topical and integrative approach instead of the encyclopedic approach of many introductory textbooks which can be confusing and mind numbing for many students. The topical chapters are written by specialists in the subfield. The topics selected for the book--all textbooks are inevitably selective--seem reasonable and rational. The boxes on food for thought in the chapters are often superb and relevant to students in their everyday lives allowing them to learn about sociology by putting everyday things into sociological context. The index also serves as the glossary which will be a plus for many.  On the downside--every introductory text has a downside--I wasn't always clear about the source of the data referenced within the topical chapters. The text is more applied and hence ideological than many other introductory textbooks and this may be a problem for some. The book's Introduction is far more selective than I would have liked it to be. Recommended.

The Books of My Life: Russian Literature (Wachtel and Vinitsky)

One of the loves of my life has been literature, particularly Russian literature. Andrew Baruch Wachtel and Ilya Vinitsky argue in their Russian Literature (Cambridge, Eng., Polity, Cultural History of Literature series, 2009) that there are two broad ways to approach a national literary tradition. The first is the traditional approach which explores the internal development of a literary tradition and concentrates on single authors. The second is the cultural approach which puts art--literature, poetry, theatre, art music, opera, ballet, painting, architecture, and sculpture into its broader environmental--national and international--cultural and social contexts.

It is the latter approach that Wachtel and Vinitsky take in their superb book, Russian Literature. By taking this broad approach, however, Wachter and Vinitsky do not ignore the internal development of Russian literature from the Kievan Rus period to the 21st century, a literary tradition which, along with art in general in Russia and the Soviet Union, was at the heart of questions associated with Russian and Soviet identity and Russian and Soviet social issues. Each chapter, which is largely chronological, puts Russian literature in its broader cultural and social contexts by exploring a key author of the era, a key literary work of the era, and a key event of the era. By taking this approach Wachtel and Vinitsky are able, through the microcosm of key authors, key works, and key events, to get at the macro level of Russian literature and Russian culture.

There is a lot to admire in Wachtel's and Vinitsky's book. I liked how they put culture or meaning at the heart of their analysis of Russian literature. I appreciated how they explored the cultural messianism, apocalypticism, and exceptionalism at the heart of Russian and Soviet culture and literature, a messianism, apocalypticism, and exceptionalism that is hardly a monopoly of Russia and the USSR and which can also be found in American culture, Canadian culture, Australian culture, Kiwi culture, and Israeli culture. to pick but a few of many examples. I liked how they showed interconnections between European cultural and artistic movements and those in Russia and the USSR and vice versa. I appreciated their ability to explore how broader economic and political factors affected Russian culture, art, and literature. I liked their often incisive analysis of Russian and Soviet art and literary works. Their discussion of Andrey Platonov's Kotlovan (English translation: Foundation Pit), for instance, was fascinating and made a lot of sense. I greatly appreciated that they moved beyond the manichean rhetoric of so much romantic Western Sovietology of good outsiders and bad insiders in the post-Thaw USSR by recognising that there were insiders, outsiders, insider-outsiders, and outsider-insiders in the Soviet Russian art community.

I can't recommend Wachtel's and Vinitsky's book more highly. This is one of the best books I have ever read on Western culture, Western art, Western literature, Russian culture, Russian art, and Russian literature. I highly recommend it to anyone interested in any of these subjects and in culture and culture theory in general.

The Books of My Life: Russian Classics in Soviet Jackets

The Russian literary tradition, of course, is one of the great literary traditions in the world. In the book Russian Classics in Soviet Jackets (New York: Columbia University Press, Studies of the Russian Institute, Columbia University, 1962) Maurice Freidberg explores what happened to the Russian classics in the USSR, the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, after the October Revolution of 1917.

Friedberg explores the history of publishing in the late Tsarist era and in the USSR to the 1960s. He explores the publication of books that became classics in 19th century Russia, their afterlives in the USSR, the attitude to and use of them by the Communist powers that be, how Soviet readers responded to or may respond to the Russian classics, and the impact the reading of the Russian classics may, in the future--for Friedberg the future was post 1960--on the survival of the USSR as an autocratic state.

I found a lot to admire in Friedberg's Russian Classics in Soviet Jackets. Friedberg is sensitive to history exploring how political changes and economic changes such as cosmopolitanism and nationalism affected the official interpretations of the Russian classics. He is sensitive to the dynamics and contexts of, in some cases, hypothetical readings of the Russian classics by the intelligentsia and the middlebrow and low brow masses. He makes several apt observations on the cross cultural similarities and differences between book publishing, literary genres, and reading habits in the USSR and in the West. He nicely uses quantitative data to explore the publication numbers of the Russian classics in the Soviet Union and the reading habits of Soviets and comparisons of Soviet reading habits with those of the West, though these would probably have been more useful had they been put in per capita terms. Additionally, one has to wonder about how, particularly when the data is derived from interviews with dissidents, representative the data is.

There are a few qualms I had about Friedberg's book. While Russian Classics in Soviet Jackets is still essential to an understanding of publishing in the USSR--Jeffrey Brooks's When Russia Learned to Read updates the story in late 19th century Russia and the years before the Revolution--the publication of Russian classics in the USSR, and reading of Russian classics in the USSR to the 1960s, it is now somewhat outdated. Friedberg, for example, mentions that detective and science fiction literary genres had not become widespread in the USSR. They did, however, become prominent and popular in the 1960s--science fiction had actually been popular earlier, Aleksey Tolstoy's Aelita, for instance, was popular in its literary and film forms in the 1920s--thanks to the Yulian Semyonov and the Strugatsky Brothers. Friedberg rightly notes how formulaic, paternalistic, puritanical, and moralising Soviet realist fiction was. Much of the popular fiction of the West, however, is as formulaic and both Soviet and Western children's literature is formulaic, paternalistic, and moralising as their Soviet counterparts. Friedberg only limitedly explores the differences between official and unofficial Soviet popular literary cultures, something that problematises, as Friedberg seems to admit at times, the totalitarian top down theoretical understanding of the Soviet Union. Friedberg reflects some of the cultural prejudices of his time as when he characterises Soviet mass culture in the same way that Frankfurt School Marxists and Conservative cultural critics in the West saw mass culture in the West, as the opiate of the masses and bread and circuses with little artistic merit. Instead, of course, as many have come to increasingly realise, beauty and value are in the socialised eyes of the beholder.

Reading Russian Classics and Soviet Jackets was an enlightening experience. I highly recommend it to anyone interested in late Tsarist and Soviet highbrow, middlebrow, and lowbrow culture, Russian literature, Russian reader dynamics, and literary cultures.

The Books of My Life: Image and Reality of the Israel-Palestine Conflict

There is a proverb which says it is money that makes the world go around. While money does indeed make the world go around it is not the only thing that makes the world go around. Ideology with its polemics and apologetics also makes the world go around as Norman Finkelstein's Image and Reality of the Israel-Palestine Conflict (London: Verso, second edition, 2003) shows. Finkelstein's Image and Reality of the Israel-Palestine Conflict explores, through a series of related critical historiographic essays, Zionist ideology, the settlement of Palestine by Jewish migrants and refugees, the birth of the state of Israel and the 1948 war, Israeli perceptions of Israeli-Arab relations, the 1967 war with the Arabs, the 1973 war with the Arabs, and the attempts at brokering a peace treaty between the Israelis and Palestinians, the Oslo Accords.

Despite the fact that the interpretation (hermeneutics) of social facts is never as straightforward as some think, Finkelstein offers theoretical critiques grounded in empirical evidence of several Israeli self-perception myths rather than realities and the polemics and apologetics surrounding them. Finkelstein, for instance, critiques the myth that Zionist ideology was not an ethnic form of nationalism, that Palestine was largely empty when Jews settled in Palestine, that the 1948 and Six Day wars weren't about the planned displacement of Palestinians from "Judea and Samaria", that with Oslo Israel did not put into place an apartheid solution to the Arab problem, and that Israel rather than the Arabs has not been the primary impediment to a settlement of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

Finkelstein also nicely puts Israeli history and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict into comparative contexts. Finkelstein notes that Zionist ideology was born in the context of nineteenth century European ethnic nationalism, that the notion that the part of Palestine that was empty was part of parcel of the European and particularly English and British notion, evident in US, Canadian, Australian, South African, and New Zealand as well, that since the indigenous populations were not using the land--an ideology grounded in modern presentism--it was morally acceptable to take it, that indigenous peoples were not "civilised", an ideology grounded in European ethnocentrism.

I highly recommend Finkelstein's Image and Reality of the Israel-Palestine Conflict for those interested in the 20th and 21st century Middle East, Israel and Palestine, ideologically driven polemics and apologetics, the social and cultural construction of reality, European and particularly English and British settler societies, and historiography. Whether or not you agree with Finkelstein's conclusions and his occasional apologetics and polemics this is an important book that everyone interested in the Israeli and Palestinian conflict should read.

The Books of My Life: We'll Always Have Casablanca

I can no longer recall when it was that I first saw the Warner Brothers film Casablanca (1942). It was probably sometime in the late sixties and I probably saw it on TV. In the 1960s and 1970s one could, after all, see Hollywood classics on the television, particularly on independent TV channels, late at night and on the weekends. Needless to say I have seen Casablanca many times since and I never grow tired of it.

Like so many others who have talked about Casablanca and what it meant to them I became enamoured of Casablanca and Bogart. I grew up in the cinephilic and countercultural sixties and seventies after all and saw as many classic Hollywood and Bogie films as I could throughout my teenage and twentysomething years. I marveled at Bogart's acting and identified with his character Rick Blaine and that characters romanticism masquerading as cynicism. I marveled at Ingrid Bergman's acting, beauty, and commitments. I wanted to kill Nazis when the refugees haunting Rick's Café Américain sang La Marseillaise during a musical war against the Nazis at Rick's, a scene that proves to be a turning point for Rick and for the film.

Noah Isenberg's We'll Always Have Casablanca: The Life, Legend, and Afterlife of Hollywood's Most Beloved Movie (New York: Norton, 2017) takes readers on a nostalgia tinged excursion through the writing process, casting decisions, legacy of, and meaning of the film to many, undermining several myths and legends that have grown up around the film since it was made in the process. Isenberg's book, which is aimed at a broad audience, will appeal to those interested in cultural history and in Casablanca. I hope some academic will, at some point, build on Isenberg's work on the meaning of Casablanca to film goers over the years and do a more extensive systematic and analytic exploration of the meaning of Casablanca across time and across space. Recommended.

The Books of My Life: The Social Transformation of American Medicine

Modern social theory often had in the 18th, 19th, and,  early 20th centuries a historical component at its heart. Henri de Saint-Simon, Auguste Comte, Karl Marx, Ferdinand Tönnies , Max Weber, and Emile Durkheim all attempted to understand the changes in society and culture that they saw taking place as they wrote. They were, after all, living in an era when traditional societies were being replaced bit by bit by modern ones.

Historical sociology may have declined in the era when academic disciplines were being segmented and their labour specialised but historical sociology, even if negatively impacted by specialisation, did not die. Robert Merton wrote about the rise of science. Barrington Moore explored the roles lord and peasant played in the rise of "democratic" and "autocratic" modern societies. Keith Thomas, in his magnificent, Religion and the Decline of Magic--a book that had a massive influence on my intellectual life--explored demagicification in 16th and 17th century England. Even Talcott Parsons, probably the leading social scientist from the 1930s to the mid-1960s, got into the act publishing two volumes late in life in an attempt to provide functionalism with a historical frame. Paul Starr published his sociological history of American medicine in 1982.

Starr's The Social Transformation of American Medicine: The Rise of An American Profession and the Making of a Vast Industry (New York: Basis, updated edition, 2017) explores the history of American medicine, its doctors, its hospitals, its insurance companies, and the impact of public policy and governmental action had on all three. Starr argues, rightly in my opinion, that a historical methodology is essential to understanding the changing fortunes of the power, authority, and influence of American doctors (decline in Jacksonian America, rise of monopoly power in the Progressive Era thanks to the increasing authority of science; under threat beginning with the New Deal, increasingly corporatised and specialised), the transformation of hospitals (from charities to places of healing, increasing corporatisation), the history of medical insurance (the rise of non-profits, for profits, Medicare and Medicaid), governmental policy toward doctors, hospitals, and the insurance industry, the impact the private economic sector on the American medical system, and the interrelationships between all of these that gave rise and helped to create and bring about changes to the American medical system economically, politically, culturally, geographically, and demographically.

When Starr's book was first published University of Wisconsin historian of science and medicine Ronald Numbers said that it was the book that those interested in the history of American medicine needed to read. Thirty-seven years it still is. Starr's book shows quite clearly that a historical approach is necessary to understanding the American medical system. He also shows that a social theoretical approach is also necessary to an understanding of how the American health system works. Very highly recommended to those interested in how American medicine and the satellites that surround it became what they are today. It is a pity that those who most need to read Starr's book won't since they prefer the ideologically and politically correct myths they parrot to reality. What also is not likely to change is the American care cycle of the recent past, a cycle in which the American health care system lurches from crisis to crisis with bandaids being put on its many sores by the powers that be, bandaids, which, in the final analysis, do little to solve or salve the long term disease at the heart of the American health care system.

The Books of My Life: Russian Popular Culture

Culture, a word social scientists have defined in several ways since the eighteenth century, has been at the heart of social and cultural anthropology since the nineteenth century and became a prominent part of sociology in the mid and late twentieth. Alfred Kroeber and Clyde Kluckhohn, for example, delineated 164 definitions of culture in their historically sensitive book Culture: A Critical Review of Concepts and Definitions of 1952. Kroeber and Kluckhohn argued, however, that all of these definitions could be boiled down, in the final analysis, to three: the high culture notion of culture in which culture was excellence in taste in the fine arts and the humanities and two definitions of culture that attempted to escape the iron cage of normative description, culture as the integrated pattern human knowledge, belief and behaviour grounded in human symbolic thought and social learning and culture as the shared attitudes, values, goals, and practises that characterise an institution, an organisation, or a group.

The last two definitions of culture, culture as a meaning system that over time fossilses, routinises, and is fetishises into, as social constructionists note, the institutions, organisations, goals, and practises of a society, are at the heart of Richard Stites's book Riussian Culture: Entertainment and Society Since 1900 (Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 1992). In his selective introduction to Russian popular culture Stites explores the popular culture--I would prefer to call it the mass popular culture--of Russia from 1900 to the 1990s just as the Soviet Union was disintegrating. Stites looks in brief at Russian light reading material, Russian variety entertainments, Russian popular movies, Russian sports, Russian popular entertainments, Russian popular dances, Russian popular music, Russian popular television, and Russian popular radio.

Given that both culture and popular culture is dynamic--a fact that adds another dimension to the difficulty of defining culture--Stites delineates several stages in modern mass Russian popular culture. Russian mass popular culture, as was the case all across the modern Western world, arose with the coming of modernity with its industrialisation, its bureaucratisation, its mass politics, its mass economic systems, and its mass culture, in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Russia's first mass popular culture, according to Stites, a popular culture that gave rise to new cultural forms and new inflections of "traditional" cultural forms in Russia, arose in a mass industrialising and mass bureaucratising Russia, in the 1900s under the last of Russia's Tsars. The second stage of Russian mass popular culture, a mass popular culture that gave more new inflections to Russian popular culture, ran from the Bolshevik Revolution to the rise of Stalin to power in 1928. The third stage of Russian popular culture, a mass popular culture which saw the attempt to create the New Soviet man, the new Soviet proletarian culture, and the cult of Father Stalin, though it didn't eliminate mass cultural aspects of the past, ran from 1928 to the Great Patriotic War. The fourth stage of mass Russian popular culture, a mass popular culture that saw the return of repressed aspects of "traditional" popular culture from before the Stalin era during the war and a return, after the war, of the Stalin era popular culture of the previous stage, ran from 1941, the year the Nazis and Germans invaded the USSR, to 1953, the year Stalin died. The fifth stage of Russian popular culture, the stage of Khrushchev and the cultural thaw, ran from 1953 to 1964, the year Khrushchev was removed from power. The sixth stage of Russian popular culture was the era of Brezhnev and his successors and ran from 1953 to 1984. In these years the thaw was slowed down but a return to Stalin era popular culture did not occur. The seventh stage in Russian popular culture was the era of Gorbachev with its openness and reform from 1985 to 1990, when the Soviet Union was dissolved and Russian and other nation-states arose out of its ashes. A concluding chapter makes educated speculations about where diverse Russian culture is going.

Stites does something in Russian Popular Culture that is critical for those wrongly obsessed with the concept of totalitarianism, autocratic rule from above, and for students of Russia and the USSR to understand. When I lived in Moscow, for instance, what I heard and what most Russian talked to me about was not the historical inevitability of communism, the joys of Mikhail Bulgakov, or the joys of Dmitri Shostakovich, though a few intelligentsia did talk to me about them. What I heard a lot about instead was the film Volga Volga, the heroes Chapaev and Zoya, the bard Vladimir Vysotsky, and the singer Alla Pugacheva, among others. What I heard a lot about, in other words, was Russian and Soviet popular culture and popular culture figures, mass popular culture and popular culture figures that most in the West, including many Western Sovietologists, had never heard of. The twentysomething daughter of the family I lived with when I was in Moscow, relatives of Mikhail Kalinin, head of the Russian SSR from 1919 to 1946, was a Beatles fan and had an Abba album released on the official Soviet record label, Melodiya. Another lesson I learned from Stites is that Russian and Soviet popular culture has always had subcultures and countercultures. Still another lesson Stites teaches, one I learned very early on in my studies of the USSR, was the puritanical nature of Russia's cultural mediators. Such paternalism, of course, is hardly the monopoly of Russia or the USSR. Still another important lesson Iearned from Stites is that Russian mass popular culture had a number of formal similarities to the popular culture of the masses throughout the modern world. Russian popular culture, like modern popular culture throughout the modern West, was romantic, escapist, sentimental, manichean, and nationalist. Finally, the important moral lesson I learned from my experiences in Russia and from Stites is that the Soviet Union was far more complicated and complex than many Western Sovietologists and mandarins allowed.

I highly recommend Stites's book for the reader with some knowledge of Russian and Soviet history and culture. The reader without an understanding of Russian and Soviet history and culture is likely to get lost in the rather large tangle of Russian and Soviet cultural figures and popular culture movements Stites tells us about. I also highly recommend the book to those interested in modern Western culture and its forms and contents
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The Books of My Life: Alfred Hitchcock (Cohen)

The films of Alfred Hitchcock have been at the very heart of film criticism and at the very centre of of the development of academic film studies in the West in the wake of World War II. While I don't have the numbers here, it is clear, just by a quick perusal of writings on Hitchcock, that no one, apart, perhaps, from Orson Welles, has generated the amount of film criticism and film studies Alfred Hitchcock and his films have.

The films of Alfred Hitchcock, particularly the American films he made after coming to the US in 1939 to work for producer David O. Selznick, have been subjected to a variety of approaches to film: "humanist", auteurist, semiological, marxist, psychoanalytical, feminist, queer, and some hybrid of all the above. Roberta Morantz Cohen's Alfred Hitchcock: The Legacy of Victorianism (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1995) takes a historical, sociological, and cultural approach to the films of Alfred Hitchcock. Cohen argues that Hitchcock's films correspond to Hitchcock's movement from modern Victorianism to postmodern postmodernism.  Hitchcock films to 1939, Cohen argues, reflect a Victorian reaction to the complex novels with complex characters, particularly female characters, of an earlier era, something she traces to,  Hitchcock's marriage to his wife Alma, the family they created, and Victorian family ideology. His films from 1939 to the early 1960s reflect an attempt by Hitchcock and others to recapture the complex novels of an earlier era and adapt them to film. Cohen calls this the daughter effect and traces it to Hitchcock's case relationship with his daughter Patricia. His films from the late 1970s to his last film in 1975, reflect postmodern cultural currents that sought to eliminate characterisation and critique dominant cultural and social norms.

While Cohen's attempt to historicise psychoanalysis and feminist theory is to be admired several issues beyond the questionable universality of psychoanalytic concepts and the sometimes confusion of psychoanalysis as a way of understanding the world and as a cultural phenomenon that impacted the arts and beyond, must be raised. Isn't it better to utilise the more viable approach of sociology and sociological socialisation than that of problematic psychoanalysis? Isn't it important to explore economic and institutional contexts of action along with cultural ones? Should homiletics, the quality of a film, be judged on the basis of ideology of the analyst? While Hitchcock certainly tried to manipulate his audience in certain directions via suspense, for example, did all those who watched Hitchcock films react to them in the same way or the same general ways? Isn't it important for scholars of film to undertake quantitative and qualitative studies of film response and explore, in the process, the broader contexts of film hermeneutics? Are academic readings of films and film directors impacted by their historical economic, political, cultural, geographic, and demographic contexts?

And The Hype Goes On: More Musings on Game of Thrones

 So I have finally gotten around to watching the HBO television show Game of Thrones again. I blogged earlier about my reactions to season one. Now that I am halfway through season four I thought I would briefly revisit the show and share some of my thoughts on the series.

Game of Thrones seems to me, at this point in my viewin sojourn, to be a cliched retread. It seems to me to contain bits of I Claudius, bits of Mediaeval power struggle tales, bits of Alexandrian, Roman, Byzantine, and Mediaeval conspiracy tales, bits of the history plays of Shakespeare, bits of HBO's Real Sex (with the "real sex" left out), bits of sophomoric scatological humour a la Caddyshack (with much of the frat boy humour left out), and bits of Ray Harryhausen postmodernist bricolage, making Games a pastiche of a pastiche. Games appears to me to be the perfect TV show for the postmodern set, those twenty and thirty somethings with little knowledge or sense of the history of television, films, literature, and the genres that underlie all three. 

There seem to be a number of problems with Game of Thrones. It has way too many characters and narratively it is far too sprawling. Epic films and TV adapted from books are typically much better when they are honed down. Additionally, narratively and visually speaking Game of Thrones seems to me to work largely on a literalist or fundamentalist level of filmmaking and television making. It is as though a bunch of fundamentalists with their literalism and misogynism decided to get together and make an x rated film in which a stiptease joint/brothel was an important setting and surface level vulgarity, in its many forms, abounds. Needless to say, subtlety is not one of  Game of Thrones' strong points.

I am not sure why the makers of HBO's Game of Thrones decided to bring the vulgarity for vulgarity's sake. Is it because the TV show parallels the books the show is adapted from and the books of George RR Martin are vulgar?  It is because the vast majority of contemporary filmmakers, including those who made Game of Thrones, do not have the ability to move beyond the simplest and most literal and unsubtle levels of film making?  It is because the show wants to be "realistic", though how a fantasy can be realistic is a question that also needs to be asked? Is it because the target demographic for the adaptation is young males who like their television and films to be vulgar seeing genius in low humour and who get vicarious joy from seeing lots of blood, breasts, and pubic hair? Or is it some of the above or  all of the above?


Given the levels of female nudity in Game of Thrones, given that female nudity is in every episode save, if memory serves, only three between seasons one and four, and given that female nudity far outnumbers that of male nudity in show, one has to ask why there is so much female nudity in Game of Thrones. Is it institutional? Did the suits at HBO demand the female nudity? Were and those who made Game of Thrones misogynous? Was the audience Games was targeting misogynous so the makers of the show decided when in Rome? All of the above?

The reason there is so much female nudity in Games certainly isn't because, as some apologists for the show have suggested, that that was how it was during the time in which Games is set. Presumably those who make this argument mean that Games is set during the Mediaeval era since Games is obviously, at least in part, grounded in notions of what the Mediaeval era with its power struggles, violence, patriarchy, and sexism was like. The problem with such an argument should be obvious to anyone, however. Games is  is not set in the Mediaeval Era in Europe. It is a fantasy, a fantasy with dragons and female leg and underarm shaving, things all that were hardly common in the Mediaeval Era despite the fact they are common in Game of Thrones.

One gets the impression that many of the female actors, particularly females playing minor roles, were hired less for their acting chops in Games, which seem to have been minimal in the case of most of the female actors who appeared in the nude. Some of them don't even say a word. Others do little but moan. They are essentially part of the mise-en-scène of the show, a rather perverse and nasty mise-en-scène at that, in which the camera, like many, one presumes watching, leer over female tit, pussy, and arse (female nudity for female nudity's sake). One instead gets the sense that females playing minor characters were hired--cheap European female labour willing to take it off for profit?-- instead for how they would look naked bathed in a kind of softcore Penthouse and Hustler ish like "period" lighting scheme that dominates the shows nude scenes which brings us back to the question of misogyny again. 

It seems likely that the copious amounts of female nudity in Game of Thrones has something to do with economics, demographics, and culture. Sex sells, as I am sure we don't need to be reminded of at this point. What director and writer Howard Ramis's said in the featurette on the making of Caddyshack on the Caddyshack DVD seems as relevant today as it was for Caddyshack when it was made in 1980. Ramis, in the featurette, notes that when he asked Cindy Morgan if she would appear nude in the film she said she preferred not to. When producer Jon Peters found out that Morgan did not want to do nude scenes, according to Ramis, he found a way to make sure that Morgan did do them. While Ramis doesn't say flat out that the reason Peters wanted Morgan to get naked was to put dudes in the seats of the cinemas showing Caddyshack. That seems to be the same reason for the female nudity in Game of Thrones.

Whatever the reason for the substantial levels of female nudity in Game of Thrones the show seems to me to to be a Charlie's Angels, Three's Company, and Police Woman for the brave new millennium. Game of Thrones, thanks to its significant amounts of female nudity and its going through the symbolic women's power motions, wants, just like Charlie's Angels, Three's Company, and Police Woman, to have its cake (faux female power and eat it too (female nudity for the boys in the watching band). 

Given Game of Thrones penchant for a literalist and surface approach to film making, its vulgarity, and the fact that it is like watching a movie made in the era before MeToo--think Caddyshack again--I am not sure I can make it to season eight of Games. What I am sure of is this. When I watch Game of Thrones I hear a voice telling me that Game of Thrones season two, episode three contains four breasts and one large bucket of blood. I hear, in other words, the voice of Joe Bob Briggs telling me that Game of Thrones melds the low brow drive in slasher film (without the horror), frat boy soft core porn, low brow Animal House and Caddyshack sophmoricism (without the limited humour), and high brow or middle brow aristocratic romance (with but little of the chivalry left in). All that sells, Joe Bob tells me. We really haven't come a long way baby.

Postscript, More Musings, 29 August 2019
I have finally gotten somewhat interested in Game of Thrones during season seven. It seems to me that the measure of interest I have in the show goes up when the misogyny and female nudity quotient goes down and it goes down as the number of female breasts and the misogyny of the show goes up.

Since what goes down must go up, I have it from a reputable source that the brothels and female nudity are back again in season eight, the final season of the show. What that shows quite clearly to me is the lack of imagination of those involved in the making of Game of Thrones, something that probably explains the fact that the show is, in the final analysis, a rather mediocre or average one with a significant touch of misogyny in it. I suppose we could debate why the misogyny in the show. I assume those involved thought lots of tits, cunts--a term this often vulgar and hence often unimaginative throws around so much one wonders if it was meant to break a taboo on American screens--and mostly female asses would sell the show to the young adult nerds who never met a tit, a pussy, or a female arse they didn't like.

What can't be debated, it seems to me, is the widely variable quality of the writing and acting of and on Game of Thrones. Some of it is not bad; the show uses a slew of British actors after all. What is less good is the fact that I can't help think that many of the actors, perhaps from poorer semi-peripheral countries or peripheral countries who are trying to make some money and get some attention, are being used simply as nude get those demographics to watch bait geek bait. I can't help think, in other words, that these actors are being exploited once again by a core nation corporation. And that makes Game of Thrones both a purveyor of tragedy and farce.