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.

The Books of My Life: Godfather

Like the Hollywood films they are about, many of the auteurist studies of Hollywood directors are quite repetitive. Gene Phillips's Godfather: The Intimate Francis Ford Coppola (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2004) is yet another one of these repetitive explorations of a Hollywood director.

Phillips's book is a somewhat uneasy mixture of brief scholarly analysis--technological analysis, production information, plotting analysis, exploration of mise-en-scène, and box office success--and chatty trivial pursuit that is common in promotional material on Hollywood. Over the course of the book the Phillips's focus on Coppola's themes--family (an obsession that seems to be the reason why Coppola's relatives show up habitually in his films) and possible redemption--working methods--rehearsals, filming of rehearsals, utilisation of the newest technologies of filmmaking--and Coppola as both a maverick and director for hire, makes one often wish that the book was, as so many of the books of this genre should be, a 20 or so page synoptic article rather than a 300 plus page book.

Unfortunately, like many books of the auteurist genre, Phillips's romanticises Coppola as an artistic David versus the Goliath of corporate profit obsessed Hollywood. Simultaneously, however, Phillips's also seems to suggest that judicious editing by others of Coppola's films--he shot extensive coverage--helped these films become more coherent. Additionally, Phillip's study was completed before Coppola ceased being an active Hollywood director. Coppola has completed three unsuccessful films at the box office--Youth Without Youth (2007), Tetro (2009). and Twixt (2011)--after Phillips's book was published making Phillips's book somewhat incomplete. Recommended for those interested in post-60s Hollywood and Coppola.