When A Quack is Not a Quack But is Still a Quack: Musings on The Epoch Times

 

One day when I picked up my mail from my post box I found, to my surprise, since I don't subscribe to any newspapers, a copy of a news journal in my mailbox. That newspaper was The Epoch Times.

The Epoch Times, as I soon discovered, while not officially owned by the Falun Gong, as far as we can tell, has so many members of that movement on its staff that it is, some have argued, an official unofficial mouthpiece of the Falun Gong movement.

The Falun Gong movement, which some describe as a Chinese cult, mixes breathing exercises, Buddhist inspired meditation, elements of Taoism, moral philosophy, and eschatology. According to those who have studied it, the Falun Gong movement, grew throughout the 1990s and by the late 1990s had come to be seen as a threat by the China's communist leadership after members of Falun Gong held a large demonstration in Beijing in 1999 asking for recognition of the group by the government.

The Falun Gong movement wasn't peculiar to China. According to David Ownby, a professor of East Asian Studies at the Universite de Montreal, there were, by 2008, around 40,000 members of the movement outside China, including in the United States. Given the crackdown of the Falun Gong in China, the English language version of The Epoch Times has, not surprisingly since its founding in 2000, been very critical of the government of the People's Republic of China, the PRC. It also, according to sources, has connections to right wing money men who have played an important role in funding the parent body of the newspaper, the Epoch Media Group. With the election of Donald Trump to the presidency of the United States in 2016, someone who was very critical of the leadership of the PRC, the newspaper became a staunch defender of The Trumpian faith.

What was so interesting about the sample copy of The Epoch Times I received in my mailbox was its heavily apologetic and polemical quality. The sample copy I received, for example, contained an article in the "Opinion" section criticising the Black Lives Matter movement arguing, in a replay of so many moral crises in the western world, that BLM represented a threat to "western civilisation". What was so fascinating about this polemical rhetoric, other than the fact that we have heard it so many times since the early twentieth century when so many of the defenders of "western civilisation" regarded jazz as a threat to "western civilisation, was that the same "newspaper" contained several articles defending or apologising for Donald Trump and his policies.

That a journal that was quick to defend "western civilisation" from those it regarded as its critics and devoluters, simultaneously defended Donald Trump, I found both ludicrous and absurd. Trump, after all, as mountains of evidence since 2016 has shown, is someone who speaks in the dumbed down rhetoric of the schoolyard. He is the man who has made fun of many who disagreed with him. He is the man who has made fun even of the disabled. He is the man who has probably never read many if any books in his life, including the classics of western civilisation, who certainly doesn't have much of a grasp of the liberal arts, and who has probably done more than any other person to take "western civilisation" back to the seventh-grade schoolyard stone age.

So, while The Epoch Times may look like a typical America newspaper with its "News", "Life and Tradition", "Mind and Body", and "Opinion" (one of the largest sections and a section that contained much on China in my sample edition)--it kind of quacks and it kind of mimics a mainstream American newspapers--in the end it is more akin to one of those French journals from the twentieth century that wore its ideology on its sleeve. It is a newspaper that seems more like Rupert Murdoch's Fox News from the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. The Epoch Times, in other words, is an opinion oriented journal, a journal where apologetics and polemics guides the selection of what that it covers and how it covers them. It is a "newspaper" that creates or recreates its "news" in its own politically and ideologically correct image. So, while The Epoch Times wants us to believe that it quacks--why else does it physically look like a typical American newspaper?--it really doesn't. Instead, it shills, just like all those other quacky demagogues and dogmatists of the past and in the present.

Musings on Billy Graham and the Religion of American Nationalism...

As someone interested in the study of religion and American Protestantism in particular, I, of course, had to watch the documentary on Billy Graham on PBS's American Masters on Monday night. As I watched this excellent documentary, I found myself thinking about how Billy Graham was a prime example of American priestly and theocratic civil religion, of a civil religion that has existed at least since the early nineteenth century. Graham, I realised, was a high priest of the civil religion of the American establishment and for what he saw as the American status quo. He was a high priest of an American civil religion that emphasised the sacredness of the status quo social order.

Additionally, I mused on the fact that the American priestly civil religion was not the only civil religion that the US has had since it became a nation. There is another, if a very much smaller, civil religion in the US, the American prophetic civil religion. The American prophetic civil religion is a civil religion that "speaks truth to power", that critiques and often condemns the status quo social order just as the prophets or Nevi'im of the Tanakh criticised and sometimes condemned the priestly civil religion and high priests of the priestly civil religion of their time for the injustices they wrought. Quakers, of course, have long been prominent purveyors of this smaller American prophetic civil religion.

Both American civil religions, of course, have been engaged in a hot and cold culture war with each other for some time. Currently this culture war seems to be heating up once again as the devotees of the priestly civil religion, a civil religion steeped in manicheanism, increasingly see anyone who doesn't share their faith as "un-American". Let's hope we all get out of this priestly theocratic civil religious holy crusade alive.

Musings on Fascism and the American Right: The Radiant Future as a Return to Eden

 

Historically speaking fascism, like European conservatism, was, on one level, a movement that looked to the past. It saw aspects of the past as a golden age. For the Nazi strain of fascism that glorious past lay in the mediaeval era (the Hitler as chivalrous Teutonic knight in Nazi iconography). It was thus no accident that Wagner, who likewise romanticised aspects of the past, was Hitler's favourite composer. It was no accident that Hitler's artistic and architectural vision was romantic rather than avant-garde. It was no accident that Nazism was a product, in part, of mediaeval Christian anti-Semitism. Mussolini's Italian fascism, on the other hand, was grounded in a romantic vision of the Roman imperial past.

While Nazism looked to a golden past it also looked forward to a radiant future, a golden future that saw the future through the prism of its ideology of a golden past. Nazism was grounded in nineteenth century nationalist blood and soil ideologies, blood and soil ideologies that, as Christianity had done in the past, categorised the Jews as other. It spliced scientific racist ideologies into this blood and soil nationalism and into the Christian anti-Semitism that undergirded it to produce a virulently nationalist and nativist corporatism. Nazis believed that if only they could eliminate the disabled, the decadent, socialists, communists, homosexuals, Roma, and, of course, Jews from their midst, then Germany and Germans could and would achieve their utopian national destiny, a utopian destiny that was tied to lebensraum and empire, the Nazi Eden. 

The fascism that developed in Germany out of this mix of golden past and radiant future ideologies was, as I noted, nationalist and ethnocentric. Nazis wanted to cleanse the German nation-state of Jews, the disabled, Roma, socialists, and communists, all of whom they regarded as enemies of the German state and threats to German racial purity. It is this populist Nazi hyper nationalism and hyper ethnocentrism that ties German fascism to the contemporary American populist right wing. The contemporary American populist right, like German fascism, is nationalist, ethnocentric, xenophobic, backward looking (their notion of America is a nostalgic one) and racist (their image of America is a WASPish and modified White image of America). Both also tie this heroic and pure past to a glorious future. Just as the Nazis believed that what was needed to restore Germany to greatness, to make Germany great again after the horrors of post-World War I Weimar, was to revive the heroic Germany of the past and cleanse the German nation-state of its impure foreign elements in the present, the American populist right believes that in order to make America great again they need to return America to its glorious WASP past so that America can achieve its glorious and heroic future destiny. So, although contemporary right wing intellectuals want to tar socialism with the dreaded fascist label, assuming that it will help them in their holy crusade against "unpatriots" in their midst, it is the populist American right rather than American liberals or socialists that the black shoe of fascism really fits.

The Politics and Ideology of The Brady Bunch

 

Once upon a time not so long ago I met an individual who argued that American television was "liberal". All American television at all times and all places, he hypothesised, was "liberal".

Given that he made a general argument about the politics and ideology of American television my response to his general hypothesis was to ask him how the television show The Brady Bunch, which ran on the ABC television network from 1969 to 1974, an era in American television history dominated and monopolised by the three television network behemoths, CBS, the ratings leader, NBC, the perennial second place network, and ABC, the network typically at the bottom of the ratings at the time, was "liberal". His response was a pretty good one. He argued that since remarriage was at the heart of The Brady Bunch, the remarriage of Mike Brady (Robert Reed) and Carol Martin (Florence Henderson) to each other, each of whom brought three children into the new family--Greg, Peter, and Bobby from the Mike side and Marcia, Jan, and Cindy from the Carol side--The Brady Bunch was, in the context of a changing American marriage, divorce, and remarriage landscape--liberal.

There is no doubt that divorce was on the rise in the United States in the era of the culture war over Vietnam, government size, race, immigration, education, music, and drugs. Census data shows an increase in divorce during the Great Depression, a period of economic struggle, a period in which demographics are typically impacted by economic and political realities, World War II, a period where men had gone to war and significant numbers of American women were working, and in the 1960s (which lasted into the 1970s), the era of the counterculture and the culture war over it. It is not a straight-line increase in divorce, however. The American divorce rate rose from 7.9 per thousand in 1932 to 12.1 per thousand in 1940 to 16.4 in 1946. As America re-Victorianised after World War II, something reflected in American politics and ideology and in American television in the late 1950s and into the 1960s, the divorce rate fell to 8.4. By 1972 it had risen again to 10.9 per thousand. Several commentators have also seen The Brady Bunch as a response, on some level, to the rise in the rates or remarriage during the era. According to the Pew Research Center 72% of those who had divorced had remarried in 1960.

The problem for those who want to argue that The Brady Bunch, a sitcom of remarriage, was a response to the changing liberal divorce times is that The Brady Bunch does not have two divorcees remarry, the liberal scenario. It has two widows remarry, the conservative scenario. If we borrow Peter Biskind's typology of 1950s American films--liberal, conservative, left wing, right wing--The Brady Bunch is, to paraphrase Donnie and Marie Osmond, a little bit conservative--it has two widows rather than two divorcees remarry--and a little bit liberal--the show is conscious of changing American divorce and remarriage patterns. The Brady Bunch, like The Mod Squad (ABC, 1968-1973), The Mary Tyler Moore Show, All in the Family, and M*A*S*H* (CBS, 1972-1983), has its cake and eats it too. On the one hand, The Brady Bunch reflects the changing divorce and remarriage culture of the times, while, on the other hand, it reflects the more conservative nature of the entertainment apparatus of the United States, an entertainment apparatus, which, for obvious reasons, contains this reflection of the swinging sixties within the broader more Victorian culture that dominated American television from the late 1960s to the mid-1970s and which dominated American White and WASP culture since the birth of the nation. After all, at the time the three networks were the only game in town and each of them wanted to reach the largest total audience possible because, in an age where niche demographic television had not yet come to dominate the media world, more money could be made from advertising targeted at the biggest demographic possible across all groups.

Today, of course, the new digital media environment, like so much of life in the core nation world, is segmented just like the military and work and beyond is segmented. Since the age of cable TV and satellites ended the era of the dominance of the three big television networks, ABC, CBS, and NBC, networks each of who tried to reach the largest demographic possible, in the 1980s, radio and television stations and networks, and particularly the television stations and radio stations that once dominated a monopolistic market, have morphed from trying to reach the broadest demographic possible to trying to reach the segmented parts of the audience to which their programming is targeted. The cable "news" networks want to, after all, sell advertising, including ideologically correct and politically correct advertising, to its targeted demographic. Fox News, for instance, targets its propaganda, its ideologically and politically correct sensationalist product, at the angry White little schooled males in their market demographic. This means that, to use an analogy, Richard Milhous Nixon was the political equivalent of ABC, CBS, and NBC during the antenna age. He wanted to get the largest demographic possible and he wanted to do something for each of those demographics in a way that didn't offend anyone. It also means that Donald Trump is the political equivalent of Fox News. He targets his right wing demographic and he paints in sensationalistic and emotional hues, the sensationalism and emotions of the yellow press, in order to rev his demographic, his rageoholic demographic, up.

By the way, the first divorcee who would show up on network American television would show up four years after The Brady Bunch ended. It would be the same liberal lion who brought All in the Family (CBS, 1971-1979), an American remake of a British television show, to television, a TV show that gave equal time to right wing and liberal views, who would bring a divorcee to American television in One Day at a Time, Norman Lear. One Day at A Time (CBS, 1975-1984) centred around the life of a divorcee, Ann Romano, her two teenage daughters, and an absent father. Interestingly, and something that tells us about American television in the wake of the countercultural 1960s, Mary Richards (Mary Tyler Moore) of The Mary Tyler Moore Show (CBS, 1970-1977), was originally written as a divorcee who moved to Minneapolis looking for work. CBS, however, nixed this idea and this little story--CBS nixing Mary Richards the divorcee--says a lot about the politics of American television in the network or antenna era.

"Debating" Trond Noren Isaksen: A Prologue and Three Acts...

 

Prologue:
I have recently been debating Trond Noren Isaksen, the biographer of Princess Marthe of Norway, on the representation of history in the television show Atlantic Crossing running on Masterpiece on PBS, a television show that centres around the life of Princess Marthe during World War II. Recently Herr Biographer Isaksen removed a post filled with ad hominems directed at me from the PBS Masterpiece Facebook website so let me respond to that now cleansed and disappeared post. Before I do this, however, I should note that I can understand why Herr Isaksen wanted to cleanse his post from the Masterpiece Facebook site given its schoolboy and head boy tone. Still, for Isaksen to cleanse the post seems rather odd, at least to me, since he has repeatedly condemned a self-proclaimed fictional and dramatic television show for tinkering with history, something he now seems to be doing by removing his posts from the Facebook Masterpiece page. 

Now on to the dramatic yet non-fictional acts...

Act 1. My response to Isaksen's claim that I have engaged in normative analysis...
Hmm, I have not made a normative argument about Atlantic Crossing whatsoever. I have never said whether I liked Atlantic Crossing, didn't care about it one way or the other about it, or hated it because I try not to let emotions, which really muck up empirical analysis, get in the way of sound historical analysis. Since whether one likes, doesn't care about, or dislikes Atlantic Crossing is irrelevant to the issue under discussion, the relationship between history and television, what I have done is ground my arguments in descriptive facts (economic, political, cultural, demographic, geographic) and what I think are valid theoretical and methodological approaches. Perhaps Herr Biographer mistakes my descriptive analysis for a normative one because he seems to be stuck, at least in part and at times, in normative gear. Let me quote Herr Biographer from the now disappeared post to make this point. Isaksen's statement about Atlantic Crossing being "this salacious soap opera", is a marvelously obvious normative statement that demonises (now that is what I call a "historical" point) an entire genre with the swipe of a normative wand.

Act 2. My response to Isaksen's use of ad hominems...
Well, one of the wonderful things about Gore Vidal was that he managed to get William F. Buckley to reveal his "real" or "true" self on ABC TV in 1968. Your ad hominems, Herr Biographer, seem to do for you what Vidal did for Buckley. They seem to reveal that true, I would call it an almost seventh grade schoolboy or head boy self, hiding beneath the "scholarly" facade.

Act 3. My response to Herr Isaksen saying I have made no counter argument to his argument, of which there is only one, namely, that Atlantic Crossing is not a work of history...
Actually, it is you, Herr Biographer, who has offered nothing in counterpoint to my points. For example, I noted that a show that does not claim to be historical is clearly not historical and so noting that a show that does not claim to be historical is not historical is obvious and redundant. Is this a case of an individual who has written a book on Marthe and FDR marking and protecting his territory? Nor have you, Herr Biographer, responded to my point that criticism of Atlantic Crossing as non-historical is way off the critical mark because such a criticism is not a valid approach to a show that does not claim to be historical. To berate a television show that does not claim to be historical for its lack of historicity seems to me rather odd in an Alice in Wonderland sort of way. Such an approach, of course, is intsead a normative and ideologically correct approach to Atlantic Crossing and seems to be grounded in the notion that Herr Biographer Really Knows Best and that the show should have been made in the way he thinks it should been made. Note again that Herr Isaksen is engaging in a form of normative "criticism", a form of "criticism", that I would argue, is simply not a valid form of empiricism. It is a rather a type of "criticism" that is more dogmatic and theological--don't forget that nationalism is a form of religion--than empirical and historical. Needless to say, a lot of criticism of entertainment and artistic texts is grounded in the notion that the critic knows best, a form of "criticism" that seems to me to be fundamentally anti-historical, going at criticism backwards, and, I am sorry to say, pretentious.

The End:
I seem to waiting for valid historical analysis from Herr Isaksen...I have been waiting for what seems like forever and with Herr Biographer's posts disappearing from the Masterpiece Facebook page along with him it increasingly looks like I will be waiting for a response to my criticisms of his perspective for an eternity...Waiting, waiting, waiting.

Making Mountains Out of Molehills: The Representation of Norwegian History and the PBS Masterpiece Masses

There is a minor brouhaha brewing on the Facebook PBS Masterpiece website. Minor because not many people watch PBS. It is a brouhaha over the representation of history in the Norwegian, Swedish, Danish, and American TV show Atlantic Crossing. It has become such a brouhaha that the self-proclaimed biographer of Crown Princess Märtha and American president Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Trond Norén Isaksen, has made several cameo appearances at the Masterpiece website to teach us all about the real history behind the tale of Märtha and the Prez and presumably to protect the honour of the Crown Princess. While some may find this boundary dispute between history and a fictional television show entertaining, others may wonder what all the hub bub is about, it is not like we are debating interpretations about say the history of Weimar, and still others may grow weary of the yet again quality of this debate over history and fictional television shows and of the paternalism of said biographer.

Atlantic Crossing, as was the case with Downton Abbey and Seaside Hotel, and I really should not have to say this since it is quite obvious, is not a historical documentary. Rather it, and others of its ilk, in some way, shape, or form, represent reality. What Atlantic Crossing, Downton Abbey and Seaside Hotel, really are, are historical costume dramas. All three shows engage historical events. There really were, for instance, manor houses. There really were servants. There really were landed elites. There really was a World War I and a World War II. People really did shoot their hands to get out of World War I, Danes really did spend summers by the seaside. The Norwegian royals really did flee the Nazis and Germans and a Norwegian royal really did interact with an American president during World War II.

Historical costume dramas like Atlantic Crossing, Downton Abbey, and Seaside Hotel have over the years become quite prominent particularly on British and American public television because such shows often carry with them the cultural capital of prestige because they derive from literary sources that are now considered classics, literary works by Jane Austen, the Bronte's, and Charles Dickens. Like all fictions these shows all play in fictional strategies. All three shows use a variety of narrative and plot strategies including drama, tragedy, comedy, and melodrama  All three shows make use of camera angles, music, and editing to manipulate and play on and off of their narrative strategies.

That people mistake any of these TV shows for written, recorded, or retrieved history is quite odd because they are fictions, historical fictions, historical fictions inspired by real events. It shouldn't have to be said, but apparently it must, that if one wants history they should go read a book by a historian with credentials specialising in whatever one wants to learn more about. If you want to learn about the real Pocahontas, in other words, you might not really want to make the Disney film your first port of historical call. Or at least you should understand the obvious, namely, that Disney's Pocahontas, like the characters in Atlantic Crossing, Downton Abbey, and Seaside Hotel, contain fictional representations of historical characters or characters wrapped up in and enveloped in history.

There is, of course, a fundamental problem analysing Atlantic Crossing as history. The show states quite clearly at the beginning of each episode that it is "inspired by real events". The problem in applying the standards of empirical historical practise to a self-proclaimed fictional television programme, and here is where all those odd books and articles which mashup science, psychology, or philosophy with a TV show become relevant, is related to the issue of relevance. Fictional television programmes, unless they are claiming to be real history or documentaries about real history are simply not historical and applying historical standards to such shows is irrelevant and ultimately absurd because they don't make a claim to be histories. Welcome to the rabbit hole. Any attempt to apply the standards of historical practise to something that is not historical is simply missing the analytical mark. It is akin to expecting Bozo the Clown to become at will a walking talking Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus. What is, of course, relevant, in analysing fictional TV shows is contextual analysis, plot analysis, mise-en-scene analysis, and an analysis of editing strategies.

Speaking of manipulative strategies, history itself uses narrative strategies. One can find irony, satire, modern theoretical perspectives, nationalist ideologies, and ethical and moral claims, too chose five examples, in many works by historians and social scientists. One can, and many postmodernists have, argued that all history, like all historical costume dramas, are second order representations of reality. They note that while historians utilise economic, political, cultural, demographic, and geographic perspectives to understand, for instance, the rise of Mormonism, Mormons themselves didn't see themselves as products of the same deep historical forces historians did and do. They write instead that they became Mormons because they believed Smith was a prophet because he was receiving revelations and that Mormonism made sense to them.

A lot of the posts at the PBS Masterpiece webpage don't, of course, ask the question of whether it is appropriate to use historical methodologies to analyse a show that admits quite clearly that it isn't historical. What one finds masquerading as criticism at the Masterpiece web page instead is something that passes for criticism among a lot of posters in these brave new world digital days, the I don't like it approach. In this approach normative standards become the standard by which to judge, in fetishisting and presentist fashion, a television show, a film, or a novel. Of course, whether one likes or dislikes a show or a narrative strategy in the show is ultimately in the socialised eyes of the beholder. There is a lot of formulaic criticism of the great evil other among the PBS watching classes these days, the soap opera, a "criticism"  that doesn't seem to evidence any real understanding of the history or function of melodrama. I will simply note here the empirical fact that a lot of people seem to like melodrama, whether the melodrama of good and evil or the melodrama of romance, which is why it is in Atlantic Crossing, Downton Abbey, which is dripping with it, Seaside Hotel, Charles Dickens, and a host of other contemporary television shows, particularly American police shows with their all American superhero saintly comic book cops, documentaries, and films, both fictional and "factual". There is even a significant amount of the I don't like the way the show portrays FDR or Missy. This, however, is less a criticism than an expression of an emotional attachment to some character. Of course, in the end we all know the real reason there is so much obsession about the "real" "history" of the princess and the prez. Many in the PBS crowd are obsessed with "celebrities" and particularly "celebrity" aristocrats and royals, real or imagined (I give you the popularity of that mediocre soap Downton Abbey). Those obsessed with such "celebrities" seem to spend an inordinate amount of time obsessing about their imagined relationships with their "intimate strangers".

In the end I am left wondering about in relationship to all this huffing and puffing about historical representation on a TV show, a television show on a network watched by the a few million of the well heeled and/or well educated or want to be educated, is why it is so important and meaningful to some to come to a website to whinge and whine about a television show they apparently hate. Nothing better to do? Can't change the channel and watch another show? Can't distinguish between fiction and reality even when the show tells you it is not completely historically accurate? Offended in general by historical fiction? Shilling for the Norwegian royals? Protecting the "honour" of the poor poor royals? Bots?

The Eternal Whinging of the Right Wing Mind...

I see right wingers like Teddy Boy Cruz and Josh Silver Spoon Hawley are doing what they do best again, whinging and whining. This time they are whinging about social media's attempt to separate the truthful wheat from the bullshit chaff. What makes this whining ludicrous, of course, is the fact that Facebook, to take one social media example, is full of right wing chaff. I used to get that bullshite all the time until I used the hide ad mode to stop it. This is, of course, not the point of this right wing whinging, however. Right wing demagogues know that emotional whining works. It allows them to manipulate their equally rageoholic and equally deluded demographic who are hallucinating their way toward the apocalypse.

And the Pied Pied Pipers Go Pied Pied Piping Along: Civil Religion and Contemporary America

The pied pipers of the right, quite obviously, have convinced a significant number of the masses that unions (not to mention liberals...) are the spawn of Satan. They have tied their demagoguery very effectively to aspects of the American priestly (read the ideologies of the economic elites) civil religion, namely empty notions of freedom and liberty. They have managed to convince the right wing mobilised masses that unions are unfree and trample on individual liberty just as they have convinced them that taxes and the government at large inhibit freedom and liberty (translation: the freedom and liberty particularly of the rich). Quite a trick that I am sure Karl Marx would appreciate.

The liberal form of the priestly civil religion with its version of freedom and liberty isn't as emotive and hence as effective as the right wing civil religion. Playing on emotions, as we know (remember PT Barnum) is a highly effective strategy in mobilising the masses because it turns them into rageoholics. The US still has a prophetic civil religion but it is about as widespread as Quakerism, one of the major streams which fed into the American prophetic civil religion. Given the centrality of conformity in socialisation and what the masses are being socialised into it is likely never going to be widespread. It will always be the "religion" of some intellectuals and bohemians.

By the way, I have been getting a bunch of right wing jacko "ads" on my Facebook page because, apparently, Facebook believes I am one of them. Facebook's algorithms apparently aren't very good at understanding that words are multivocal and cultural. What have I found? I have found lies, damn lies, anger, rageoholism, historical ignorance, arrogance (holier than thouism), an inability to do research in real source material, mass delusion, the demonisation of any perspective that isn't theirs, and vast hypocrisy. If this is a random sample the US is in deep shit. Now know what it was like to live in Weimar before the Nazi takeover. Fasten your seatbelts darlings; it is likely to be a very bumpy ride.

The Books of My Life: Westerns (French)

 

Philip French's little book Westerns: Aspects of a Movie Genre (New York: Oxford University Press, Cinema One series, second edition, 1977) first appeared in the Cinema One series in 1973. A revised version with an "Afterword" appeared in 197. A further edition, with an added section entitled "Westerns Revisited" and published by Carcanet, appeared in 2005. The additions and republication of the monograph over the years suggests that French's little book is an important and seminal work on the Hollywood Western and it is.

French's monograph on the Western was one of the earliest scholarly works on the Western. Seminal books, particularly in French, had appeared before French's monograph on the Western but French's was one of the first book length treatments of the genre in English. 

 After an introduction French, in five interrelated chapters, explores various aspects of the post-World War II Hollywood Western. In chapter one French sets out the historical sociology of the post-World War II Western delineating, after briefly exploring the artistic and literary influences on the post-World War II Hollywood Western, the ideological forms the post-WWII Western too. According to French the the post-WWII Western came in the following forms: the Goldwater Western (for instance, Rio Bravo and The Alamo), which focuses on old Western frontiers and little on landscape, the Kennedy Western (for example, High Noon), which explores new frontiers and is characterised by landscapes that dwarf its characters, the Lyndon Baines Johnson Western containing Kennedy content and the Goldwater style (for instance, Two Rode Together), the William F. Buckley Western, which is characterised by the Kennedy style and Goldwater content (for example, the Budd Boetticher Westerns), and, if tentatively, the Nixon Western (for instance, Chisum). In chapters two through four French explores the characters and character types one finds in post-World War II Hollywood films, its heroes, villains, women, and children, the Western's representation of Indians and Blacks, the Western landscapes, Western violence, and the Western representation of poker, which, with its bluffs, poker faces, and incipient violence French sees as a microcosm of the Hollywood Western. In chapter five French explores the post-Western of the 1950s through early 1970s with their greater degree of psychologisation and the mudding of the Western hero and villain. An "Afterword" takes the story of the Western and the influence of the Western on contemporary vigilante films like Death Wish and Dirty Harry from 1972 to the mid-1970s.

While finding French's ideological typology of the post-World War II Western interesting, I think Peter Biskind's smilar delineation (was he influenced by French?) in his book on Hollywood films of the Fifties, Seeing is Believing (1983), of liberal, conservative, radical left-wing, and radical right-wing Hollywood films, ideologies he links to characterisation, is more useful and fruitful, if not without its problems as Jonathan Rosenbaum noted in his review of Seeing is Believing, than French's because it is more generalisable. While I agree with French that films have a socialisation and resocialisation function, I wish he had explored this aspect of the Hollywood cinema more, something that Jeanine Basinger's books do more extensively, because, as French notes, the West and the frontier became central symbols of America's myth about itself and Americans' myth about themselves. This, of course, that may not have been possible in a monograph of two hundred pages. Despite these criticisms, I really enjoyed re-reading French's work on the post-World War II Hollywood Western. I got a lot more out of it this time around. It remains a book that anyone interested in Hollywood films and the Western must read.

The Books of My Life: Horror in the Cinema

 

In many ways Ivan Butler's monograph Horror in the Cinema (London: Zwemmer and New York: Barnes, International Film Guide series, second edition 1970) and John Baxter's Science Fiction in the Cinema go together like a lock and key. Both Butler's and Baxter's monographs are companion pieces in that both often analyse the same films (Nosferatu, The Cabinet of Doctor Caligari, Frankenstein, and Dracula, to note a few common films they engage) and the similar plots, visual styles, and characters that they claim are typical of horror and science fiction cinema. 

Both Butler's and Baxter's monographs analyse horror and science fiction less as genres than as plots, visual styles, and character types. Both explore the heroes, villains, romantic pairs, mad scientists, monsters, there is something odd out there, there is something strange happening in the attic, shadows, and the often odd and weird worlds that characterise those films that utilise horror and science fiction plots, characters, and styles. Both approach the films they analyse in broadly chronological ways from their beginnings in the late 19th century until the late 1960s. And both are characterised by that mixture of film history and aesthetic film criticism, an approach which constructs a canon of masterpieces and not so masterpieces that dominated early professional film criticism. Butler, for instance, prefers subtlety in his horror films. He prefers horror films that play on the viewers imagination and sees the in your face horror of, for instance, the Hammer stable of horror films as aesthetically problematic because they leave little to the imagination. 

From the vantage point of the new millennium those reading Butler's monograph might wonder what Butler would make of the even more in your face horror films of today with their in your face cgi and the joy some in the audience get from such cinematic literalism. Others might find Butler's approach too aesthetic though much contemporary film criticism is equally aesthetic and equally politically and ideologically correct. The budding cinephile, might find in Butler's monograph a guide as to which horror films to watch and not to watch and why. As a guide, Butler's monograph, like Baxter's, is very helpful.