The Books of My Life: The Dream Life

J. Hoberman's The Dream Life: Movies, Media, and the Mythology of the Sixties (New York: New Press, 2003) takes readers on an Alice in Wonderland like journey through the old and new myths of the American sixties from the late fities to the resignation of President Richard M. Nixon. Drawing on the work of Siegfried Kraucauer, Marshall McLuhan, Benedict Anderson, and Jean Baudrillard, Hoberman explores how American myths or American dreams fed into American films including those of Hollywood, and how those films in turn created and recreated American myths.

Starring in Hoberman's sixties film dream life and filmic waking life cosmic manichean American melodrama are a number of celebrity star-pols. There is John F. Kennedy, America's own James Bond, secret agent man whose mission it is to help save the third world from evil tyranny in his own version of The Magnificent Seven (1960). There is Barry Goldwater the Cowboy from Arizona, a waking life version of the paternalistic John Wayne in McLintock (1963). There is Lyndon Baines Johnson, the Cowboy from Texas who fancies himself in the John Wayne roles in The Alamo (1960) and The Green Berets (1968). There is Richard Milhous Nixon, the waking life's own General Patton of Patton (1970). And there are those scores of left wing, liberals turned conservatives, and right wing righteous outlaws and vigilantes who imagine themselves as Bonnie and Clyde in Bonnie and Clyde (1967) and the two drug selling bikers in Easy Rider (1969), Joe in Joe (1970), and Paul Kersey in Death Wish (1974), and Harry in Dirty Harry (1971) and the Stranger in High Plains Drifter (1973).

Hoberman's historical, sociological, and cultural anthropological approach to the American dream life and its moving mythic dreams is a welcome remedy to an academic film criticism obsessed with the Freudian dream life. I highly recommend it to anyone interested in American culture, the sixties, cinema, and nationalistic religion. Needless to say the dream life and the dreams that inhabit America's waking life are still with us today. President Donald Trump, for instance, seems to fancy himself a righteous cowboy wearing a white hat (pun intended), a righteous outlaw, and a righteous vigilante of the John Wayne persuasion, all at the same time. When you scratch beneath the ideological dream and find the reality, however, it is clear that Trump is actually Marion Morrison, the man who was lucky enough not to have to serve in any war other than a Hollywood war and the man who came to believe that he embodied the dream life myth Hollywood and America had him play in his waking life. We have truly gone down the rabbit hole.

More Musings on Free Speech...

The Legal Questions: US courts have, over the years, limited what they refer to as unlawful speech, the famous yelling fire in a crowded theatre argument, though Holmes's argument has been trimmed back a bit in the succeeding years, is often cited as an example of legal limits on free speech. The Courts have also limited so called obscene speech (they know it when they see it), as when they effectively banned XXX movies from the marketplace during the Nixon years and after.

I am not sure what college safe spaces mean in the context of court decisions regarding free speech. The courts have held, for example, that the Westboro Baptist Church can claim, at the funerals of American soldiers, that God is killing American soldiers because the US has rebelled against their God, if they do it from, if memory serves, 50 feet away. Is that what one means by safe spaces? How does all this work in the brave new digital age? Do we need an MPAA like rating system for college classes and social media? Students this Youtube video I am about to show you is rated R so feel free to leave if you need to? With respect to YouTube we already kind of have one for Youtube: confirm your age.

Academic Freedom: Generally speaking, the, often arguably more dream than reality idea at the heart of universities, is that they are arenas for the debate of ideas be these ideas Marxist, functionalist, sociobiological, semiological, feminist, etc. Since ideas are, in part at least, products of environments they are, as such, rent through with ideas about equality, inequality, and so on. Scholars, again perhaps more in theory than in practise, try to put ideas into context, economic context, political context, cultural context, geographical context, and demographic context. That seems to me to be one thing that should at the heart of serious systematic and analytical study and at the heart of academic teaching.

Those on the right wing who complain about the lack of freedom of speech on campus really aren't, by the way, defenders of free speech. In the 1960s right wingers shouted down speakers whose ideological views they disagreed with effectively cancelling their speeches and making them pioneers in what is today called cancel culture. That they whinge and whine about those allegedly doing to them what they have done to others is absurdly amusing. What hypocritical right wingers are concerned with is their freedom of speech. They could care less about the freedom of speech of those on the "other side" and they generally do nothing to defend a "leftist" whose freedom of speech is abridged in universities and beyond.

Protected Speech: I do get that some forms of speech are probably not worth legal protections. Should the courts, for example, protect schoolyard ad hominem "speech", forms of speech that have become ever more prominent thanks, in part, to social media? Are claims, some of which seem to be made without grounding them in evidence, unlawful or obscene? Are they examples of bully boy ad hominems? As far as I know, bully by ad hominems have not been ruled unlawful or obscene by the courts.

The Neoliberalisation of Academia: One of the things I find fascinating about speech codes and safe spaces is their possible relationship to neoliberal capitalist notions that the customer is always right. Since the "Reagan Revolution" universities and colleges have been taken over by neoliberal managers whose training, often, is in management. They are managers not academics, in other words. Department of Education data indicates that administrative positions at colleges and universities grew by 60 percent between 1993 and 2009. This increase in the numbers of administrative personnel was, according to an analysis by Bloomberg, 10 times the rate of growth of tenured faculty positions. An analysis by a professor at California Polytechnic University, Pomona, found that, while the total number of full-time faculty members in the California State University system grew from 11,614 to 12,019 between 1975 and 2008, the total number of administrators grew from 3,800 to 12,183, a 221 percent increase. To paraphrase a political proverb: A bureaucrat for every tenured faculty member.

As academia has been neoliberalised the managerial elite in academia have become obsessed about several things including keeping the customer satisfied and growing the customer base. As a result, assuring that the various targeted demographics are happy with what they are consuming has become one of the missions of academic managers along with assuring that they make lots of money. Is that what is going on with speech codes and safe places?