The Books of My Life: The Star Machine

 The Star Machine (New York: Knopf, 2007), by Wesleyan Film Studies scholar Jeanine Basinger, author of a previous book on silent era film stars in 1999, explores a number of aspects of the classic Hollywood star machine that arose in the 1910s and was at its zenith between the late 1920s and the 1950s. In The Star Machine Basinger looks at the economic and cultural workings of the studio era star making machine in part one, explores how the star machine dealt with stars who malfunctioned, stars who were disillusioned, and stars who were disaffected in a series of interesting case studies in part two, explores the oddities and character actors of the Hollywood studio system who occasionally took star turns again in a series of interesting case studies in part three, and, in a conclusion, looks at the similarities and differences between the classic sound era star system and the neo-star system of today.

There is a lot I found to like in Basinger's study of sound era Hollywood star system. The book represents a lifetime of watching Hollywood films and overhearing what those who went to cinemas to see Hollywood films thought about them and their stars. This adds a historical and audience response dimension to Basinger's work that is often missing from the film analysis of many ultimately ahistorical contemporary film scholars who haven't seem many films beyond the "classics", retrospective "classics" at that, and who do not do much if any analysis of how real audiences responded or respond to Hollywood films and Hollywood stars. Basinger's book explores both the economic and cultural aspects of the Hollywood star making machinery. She looks at how Hollywood "discovered" stars, schooled them, groomed them, remade them, when necessary, sold them, and branded them, and how, despite all this machinery geared to earn studios a profit, it was, in the final analysis, audiences, film goers who wanted to look like stars, live the lives of stars, and even be stars, and to some extent luck or fate, that ultimately made Hollywood's stars. Basinger's book is wonderfully attentive to things like costumes, camera angles, lighting that went into and were essential to the manufacture of a Hollywood star in the studio star making machinery. Basinger's book nicely notes that, given the retrospective nature of much modern film scholarship, that those who aren't seen as stars today and who aren't, as a result, extensively studied by so many modern day film scholars, a star like Deanna Durbin, for example, were stars in their era. Durbin, as Basinger notes, accounted for around 15% of Universal's box office in the 1930s. This economic fact alone means that contemporary film scholars should be studying Durbin. Basinger nicely explores the changes in audiences response to stars in the depression era differed from how they responded to stars in World War II. During the depression audiences revelled in the glamour and fashion of the films while in World War Ii audiences wanted to escape the fears and tensions of the era and so helped create zany, exotic, girl and boy next door, and democracy on the march film stars. Basinger nicely notes that Hollywood manufactured stars for both the female gaze and the male gaze, stars like Lana Turner and Tyrone Power, through schooling, grooming, remaking, clothing, and lighting. Basinger points out that films were often made with certain stars in mind. The star as auteur? Basinger nicely explores the role the Hollywood star machine played in creating younger stars in the 1940s, younger stars who became more prominent in the 1950s and lead, or so some argue, to the juvenilisation of Hollywood cinema in the 1980s and after.

I highly recommend Basinger's The Star Machine to anyone interested in film, Hollywood, the economics of Hollywood, Hollywood and culture, and the American economic system in general. One can certainly argue compellingly that stars and the notion common among film goers that they could become like stars and live like stars was and is one of the opiates of the consumer capitalist masses in the era of consumer capitalism. That alone makes the study of how Hollywood created and made stars important.

The Books of My Life: Restless Souls

The heart and the motivating force of Leigh Eric Schmidt's Restless Souls: The Making of American Spirituality from Emerson to Oprah (San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 2005), is a critique of the critics of contemporary American spirituality. Schmidt, a professor in the Department of Religion at Princeton, takes the critics of American spirituality to task, whether critics of the academic apologetic and polemical sort like Robert Bellah, Richard Madsen, William Sullivan, Ann Swidler, and Steven Tipton in their Habits of the Heart (1985), the critics of the political punditry sort such as David Brooks in his Bobos in Paradise (2000), or "critics" of the we are OK if you want to be OK you need to be like us "orthodox" Christian sort such as James Herrick in his The Making of the New Spirituality (2003).

Schmidt argues that despite their ideological differences the apologetic and polemical critics of the new American spirituality share similar views on the "otherness" of the new American spirituality. The new American spirituality, they maintain, is new or novel (I would add that they share the notion that American spirituality is not quite "American") and that it has, since its rise in the wake of the culture wars of the mid and late 1960s, resulted in an increase in mass narcissism and world rejecting mysticism that is undermining American values, American duties, the American community, and American authority and, as a result, is hazardous to the continued survival of America.

Schmidt, in his wonderfully written and nicely researched book, however, shows that the "new" American spirituality isn't that new. Schmidt traces this liberal and radical American spirituality back to mid 19th century Transcendentalists like Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, Margaret Fuller, and Walt Whitman, and through late 19th and 20th century spiritual seekers or wayfarers like Thomas Wentworth Higginson, William Rounseville Alger, Quaker John Greenleaf Whittier, Felix Adler, Ralph Waldo Trine, Sarah Farmer, founder of the Greenacre spiritualist retreat and school, Max Ehrmann, Quaker Rufus Jones, Quaker Thomas Kelly, both of whom played prominent roles in the Quaker retreat and study centre Pendle Hill, Christopher Isherwood, Gerald Hurd, Huston Smith, Howard Thurman, and Oprah. Schmidt finds the historical roots of this not so new American spirituality with its emphases on mysticism, solitude, the unity of all peoples and religions, and, worldly benevolence, not only in Transcendentalism but also in the metaphysics movement, mental healing, the new thought movement, Vedanta Hinduism, Buddhism, Liberal Protestantism, Liberal Social Gospel Protestantism, Unitarianism, Quakerism, Swedenborgianism, Reform Judaism, the health reform movement, the World Parliament of Religions held in Chicago in 1893, and nineteenth century anti-Calvinism.

In his sympathetic, empathetic, and "going native" history of American spirituality Schmidt is willing to concede to the critics of American spirituality that American spirituality is a product of a modernity and postmodernity characterised by globalisation, increasing narcissisms, increasing individualism, and its fetishisation of the status quo, factors that gave rise in the American spirituality, as Schmidt notes, to the seeming contradictions of mystical disciplines for quieting self-realisation versus mystical world changing ideologies and paternalistic particularism versus somewhat paternalistic intellectual openness. He does not concede and he amply demonstrates that the new American spirituality led to quietest world rejection, however. As Schmidt notes, many American spiritualists were abolitionists, health reformers, peace activists, activists promoting women's rights, critics of colonialism, and critics of capitalism.  I would add, by the way, that White American Conservative Evangelicalism with its universalisation of modern American capitalism, modern American nationalism, and modern American WASP culture is as modern if not more modern than American spirituality. American White Conservative Evangelicalism is also, I would argue, far more dangerous to the survival of the US and the globe as a result of these fetishisations than American spirituality will ever be.

I highly recommend this wonderful book to anyone interested in culture studies, intellectual history, the history of spirituality, and the history of religion, particularly in the United States.

The Books of My Life: Anna Akhmatova

I have mentioned before that I have a strong interest in Russian culture. It is not surprising, therefore, that at some point I would get around to reading Roberta Reeder's massive biography of Anna Akhmatova, Anna Akhmatova (New York: Picador, 1994). Reeder notes on page 484 of her biography, critical analysis of Akhmatova's poetry, cultural and intellectual history of late Tsarist and Soviet Russia, and study of those in the Russian and Soviet intelligentsia who intersected with Akhmatova over her life, that Akhmatova was not a saint but a human being. Despite this claim, however, Akmatova comes off as yet another one of those saintly suffering Russian women in Reeder's book.

On the plus side Reeder's book is the most thoroughly researched biography of Akmatova in the English language that I know of and her analysis of Akhmatova's poetry--and what wonderful poetry it is--is quite impressive and quite compelling. On the "bad" side, Reeder's book reads more like a dictionary of somewhat related chapters rather than a tightly woven biography and cultural history largely because Reeder seems to throw everything she knows about Akhmatova into the book regardless of whether it is significant or not. As a result Redder ends up falling prey to the historian's folly and fallacy of trivial pursuit. On the ugly side, Reeder gives us an Akhmatova who is a romantic and prophetic suffering servant making her book more akin to the hagiographies of earlier epochs than a critical biography of the 20th century. Reeder's saintly "realist" approach means that the author lacks the requisite critical distance from her subject that would allow her to write a critical biography of Akhmatova.

Despite all its warts I still recommend Reeder's book particularly if you are interested in Russian culture, Russian literature, and Russian poetry. Reeder's book is likely to remain the authoritative biography of Anna of all the Russias in the English language for some time.