Los Alamos, New Mexico’s tourism website quickly clues visitors into what the city considers its two principal assets. There’s the national laboratory, represented by an illustrated atom, and there are three national parks, represented in an illustrated leaf. Underneath these symbols is the slogan “where discoveries are made.”

In 2021, New Mexico attracted 7.2 billion in tourist dollars. Many visitors come for the leaf: Outdoor recreation added $2.3 billion to the state’s economy that year. Meanwhile, the atom—the state’s nuclear past and present—attracts a subset of tourists who come to visit Los Alamos National Laboratory, the Trinity test site, and the National Museum of Nuclear Science and History in Albuquerque. The most hardcore might also check out the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant in Carlsbad.

New Mexico is famously the “Land of Enchantment.” “Enchantment” is an abstract noun that evokes remoteness, isolation, and emptiness. It’s easy to see how environmental tourism seeks this out: It’s about sunset-chasing and finding peace in vast expanses of open desert. Nuclear tourism, meanwhile, is an extension of the military’s expansion into civilian life—the cultural arm of a national mission to continue making bombs. It consists of attractions that erase the deathly realities of nuclear events in favor of mythologies of noble actors doing difficult things for the sake of the U.S.’s democracy. But while these two types of tourism might seem opposed, in seeking enchantment, New Mexico’s visitors are oddly alike. In New Mexico, ogling nuclear weapons and enjoying nature are two sides of the same coin: Both activities conjure the state as a blank slate.

New Mexico began calling itself the “Land of Enchantment” in 1999, lifting its moniker from a 1906 travelogue about the Southwest. Author Lilian Whiting wrote that New Mexico was “a territory…whose ethnological interest” in the “remains of Cliff dwellers and of a people far antedating any authentic records, enchains the scientist,” and that its future “promises almost infinitely varied riches.”

Whiting saw New Mexico as the one of most “uncivilized localities” of the Southwest, replicating 20th-century attitudes that assumed Indigenous people were on the brink of vanishing. She described the region as unpopulated, but what she meant was that it hadn’t been settled by Anglo-Americans.

The contemporary earthy tourists that come to see White Sands, the Gila National Forest, or Shiprock caption their Instagram posts with similar language to Whiting’s. They’re exposed to the language and imagery of enchantment and emptiness by the state’s tourism campaign. Today, the slogan is “NM True,” but the vision it’s peddling is the same: star-studded vistas, mountains, forest, and sand dunes all empty and isolated. Vacancy—as an assumption that erases racialized communities—is central to enchantment.

The more complicated reality is that these seemingly empty destinations are products of multiple, contradictory layers of history: resource extraction, the seizure of land for national parks, and military land uses. Nowhere is this most apparent than at the seemingly empty sites visited by nuclear tourists.

In the 70 years since the Trinity site—where the Atomic Age’s first blast melted the sand in an explosion 1.5 times hotter than the surface of the sun on July 16, 1945—first held an open house, New Mexico has become ground zero for nuclear tourism. Army officials installed the obelisk of igneous rock marking Ground Zero in 1965. Today, it is a favorite spot for tourists to snap pictures. Officials designated the site and its grounds a National Historic Landmark in 1975.

In 1969, Congress established Albuquerque’s National Museum of Nuclear Science and History “as an intriguing place to learn the story of the Atomic Age, from early research of nuclear development through today’s peaceful uses of nuclear technology.” Initially staffed by Air Force personnel, the institution is a testament to Cold War efforts to sustain curiosity and enthusiasm around nuclear science.

In Los Alamos, the operational laboratories are closed to the public, there are lots of visitor opportunities—including, since Christopher Nolan’s film, downloadable maps of filming locations and local “Project Oppenheimer” themed experiences that involve drinks, shopping, and sightseeing. Soon, the Los Alamos location of the new Manhattan Project National Historical Park—comprised of three sites across the U.S. that played a significant part in developing the bomb—will open to the public. The weekend of Oppenheimer’s premiere, local news reported a “swell” of calls to the Museum of Nuclear History in Albuquerque and tourists “flocking” to Los Alamos.

Seeing the state as a giant playground for recreation and experimentation is not so different from conceiving of it as an amenity for private enjoyment. In both the nuclear and outdoors tourist economies, it pays to be empty. You can see this in Oppenheimer, much of whose plot turns on the title character’s lifelong yearning: “If only I could combine physics and New Mexico, then I’d truly be happy.”

What is he yearning for? Emptiness, it seems. Emptiness offers Oppenheimer freedom from harm, guilt, and accountability. At times, the film feels like an ad campaign for New Mexico’s nuclear tourism: the empty landscape is both a source for finding the secrets of the natural world and a key to a scientific revelation that functions as spiritual enlightenment. But there is no such thing as the frontier freedom that Oppenheimer thought New Mexico’s landscape promised.

Even attempts to dissuade viewers from romanticizing the events of the film reinforce emptiness. In New Mexico, a somber 15-second public service announcement from the Union of Concerned Scientists preceded screenings of Oppenheimer, reminding viewers that nuclear tests contributed to high rates of infant mortality, cancers, and the poisoning of soil and water. The PSA showed a landscape viewed from a passenger train. It evoked Oppenheimer’s ride to the town of Lamy in Nolan’s film, but also could have been Alamogordo, near the test site. The lack of specificity established the scenery as abandoned: modest discolored buildings, absence of people, the toll of a single bell in ambient natural sound.

The concerned scientists likely didn’t intend to glance over the people of New Mexico, but the PSA nevertheless reaffirmed the idea that the state is empty. Is this a result of the bomb’s devastation, or was it always the case? Who used to inhabit this space? Who still does?

Indigenous and Hispano New Mexicans who were present in the region long before Oppenheimer have been the most impacted by the lab. Many New Mexicans know “Downwinders”— residents of the rural Tularosa Valley downwind of the blast who have borne the brunt of the ecological, economic, and negative health outcomes from nuclear testing, but who have yet to receive any formal recognition or reparation from the U.S. government.

Despite those who profit from silence and emptiness, New Mexico is a land of testimony. This state is full of life and full of people who have dedicated their lives to holding each other close. Organizations like Tewa Women United, an all-volunteer organization founded in 1989 that seeks to create and foster spaces that center Indigenous women’s knowledge and health practices, speak to the specific ways the bomb has affected Indigenous communities in the state. The Institute of American Indian Arts in Santa Fe held an entire exhibition devoted to the topic in 2022, orienting viewers toward the global connections and hazardous histories that arise from the first blast of the Atomic Age in New Mexico’s desert.

Telling stories like these is what makes New Mexico a real place—not the empty “Land of Enchantment” packaged for tourists. When you visit, work towards listening, and you’ll begin to see past the vistas.

The post The New Mexico <i>Oppenheimer</i> Erases appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

At the beginning of Society of the Snow, Spain’s entry for Best International Feature Film for the upcoming Academy Awards, there is a scene in a Catholic church in Montevideo, Uruguay, where a priest can be heard stating that “Man does not live by bread alone.”

It’s the first indication that the film, about the 1972 Uruguayan plane crash in the Andes, will be centered on the spiritual and explicitly religious dimension of the experience.

The story of the crash is, at this point, ingrained in the Uruguayan national memory: In October, 1972, a rugby team from Montevideo and their friends and family boarded a flight from Uruguay heading for a match in Chile. Severe weather in the Andes led the pilots to make a fatal mistake, clipping the top of a mountain and shearing off the plane’s wings and tail section, sending part of the fuselage sliding into a ravine. Of the 45 people who boarded the plane, only 16 survived 72 days in subfreezing temperatures before being rescued.

When the news broke in Uruguay that some passengers survived, reporters called what happened both “a tragedy and a miracle.” But after the survivors arrived safely in Chile, journalists started asking questions about how they lasted more than two months in the bleak environment without food. Papers in Chile and other countries blasted headlines of “cannibalism” across their front pages and printed stories insinuating that the “stronger” survivors overpowered and killed the weak, and that group solidarity had quickly devolved into selfishness and domination.

Only when the survivors made it home to Montevideo did one of them, Alfredo Delgado, finally address the accusations during a press conference. He framed it in religious terms. Amidst the silence of the mountains, he said, he and the others felt “the presence of God.”  Making a direct analogy to the Catholic Eucharist, he continued, “If Jesus at his last supper had shared his flesh and blood with his apostles, then it was a sign to us that we should do the same—take the flesh and blood as an intimate communion between us all.”

According to journalist Piers Paul Read’s book Alive, which inspired an earlier 1993 movie about the crash, what followed was stark silence—and then spontaneous applause from the audience. Back home among their fellow countrymen, Delgado and the others could speak honestly.

I was in the old city of Montevideo the weekend Society of the Snow premiered there, and I spoke with a number of people who had seen the new film, which was playing throughout the city. I was curious about their response to a new representation of an incident that is so well-known to all Uruguayans.

“At the end of the movie, people in the theater were crying,” Maya Smeding, a student at the University of the Republic in Montevideo, told me. “Uruguay is a small country and one of the important messages of the film is that if we don’t come together as a people, we cannot accomplish what we need to do.”

Sandra Henry, a landscape designer from Montevideo, was 12 years old when the crash occurred. “When I saw this movie, I understood with my soul what went into the choice they made,” she said.  “It was a human feeling that they needed to survive and return to their families.”

During my stay in Montevideo, I also visited the Museo Andes 1972, which is dedicated to the crash. Opened in 2013 and self-funded by Uruguayan businessman Jörg P.A. Thomsen, the nondescript museum is snuggled among the 19th and early 20th-century neo-classical and art-deco buildings that are common along the city’s narrow streets.

The Museo Andes 1972 exists for the survivors, but also to commemorate those who didn’t come home. “Some of those on the plane were rugby players,” said Thomsen, “but many were not. Many were Catholics, but others were not. Most were men, but Liliana Methol, who died in the avalanche, played a wonderful and important role.”

Thomsen told me that he wanted to document the story of what happened because it “says something positive about the Uruguayan national identity.”

Still from Society of the Snow (2023). Courtesy of Netflix.

In addition to the pictures, newspaper articles, and artifacts from the crash site held in the museum’s three floors are tools the survivors crafted out of the wreckage to survive. They turned shards of aluminum into water spouts to melt snow to drink and sewed cloth from the airplane seats into gloves and snow shoes. Insulation from the tail of the plane was sewn into a large sleeping bag that two of the men used on their ten-day trek over mountain peaks in search of help.

Their ingenuity, when menaced by the deadly cold, reminded me that there’s a connection between tool-making, survival, and the imagination. “To me,” Thomsen said, echoing Henry’s comment, “a key to their survival was knowing how their families would suffer if they did not return.”

Touring the museum, what seems to be left after more than 50 years is not condemnation or second-guessing of each other, which was common enough during their ordeal, but the solidarity and love that the survivors and those who died had demonstrated.

I finally watched Society of the Snow for myself when I returned home from Uruguay to Los Angeles. In the very first shot, the camera moves across a slate of vacant whiteness in the Andes, a suggestion that viewers, like the survivors, have the obligation to create our futures out of the emptiness that we will at times confront.

Uruguayan cinematographer Pedro Luque later told me he struggled with the fact that in a vast white landscape, visually determining distances was unreliable. “It was abstract because of the vastness of the landscape that entrapped them like a giant monster,” he said. “But at the same time, the whiteness allowed us to create striking compositions like Japanese calligraphy with simple but powerful visual strokes.”

If snow-bleached distances were abstract, living close to one another is what brought the survivors’ moral visions into focus, as they struggled to live after seeing their friends and relatives die.

Society of the Snow lingers on these spare moments, where survivors try to make sense of their extreme situation, and struggle to define what their values actually are, and how to make them real in their behavior toward one another.

In one of the scenes, Arturo Nogueira, who did not survive long enough to be rescued, explains that for him, God is not an abstraction but is present in the friends who try to keep him warm or bind his wounds.

I thought of a little red shoe in the museum that was brought back from the wreckage and donated. Purchased as a present for a relative’s newborn child, the survivors gave one shoe of the pair to anyone who was going on a dangerous search expedition with the idea that they would be sure to bring it back—a talisman of strength, memory, and return.

It’s still hard to imagine that this story took place, but it did. Society of the Snow’s director J.A. Bayona has spoken about it as a film about understanding that you and the other are the same, and about supporting one another for collective survival. He recently told the Buenos Aires Herald: “If you have the strongest legs you will walk for us, and if you need my body to survive, I will give it to you so you can return home.”

Biblical scholar John Dominic Crossan has written that if man does not live by bread alone, it is only because “bread is never alone.” The survivors of the 1972 crash have all asked themselves why they were spared, but also the unavoidable question of why the others were not. I think that Society of the Snow provides one among the many possible answers: They shared a faith in one another.

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It was October 5, 1945. The Conference of Studio Unions (CSU), a union representing craft laborers in Los Angeles, including painters, carpenters, set designers, cartoonists, and others, was seven months into a major strike that was causing Hollywood studio moguls to panic. Although major studios, including Columbia, RKO, and Universal, had over 100 unreleased films in the can, ready to be released, the CSU’s strike actions, as well as movie theater boycotts, were an effective blow against the post-war studio system.

Now, the strikers gathered at the Warner Bros. employee entrance to protest.

The violent standoff that followed, in which strikebreakers, armed with chains, hammers, pipes, and other weapons, descended upon the workers, with county police forces closely behind, would become known in Hollywood as “Black Friday.”

With moguls, Los Angeles Police, private police forces, and organized crime on one side and striking trade unionists on the other, the episode fanned the flames of anti-communism in Hollywood, and led directly to the union’s downfall the following year. In the years to come, the strike would be used as a cudgel against progressive trade unionism inside and outside of the film industry, leading to the blunting of it in Hollywood—and in the United States, more generally.

The strike of 1945 started after the CSU became embroiled in a dispute with a rival union, the International Alliance of Theatrical Stage Employees (IATSE). The conflict centered on 77 set decorators who had broken away from IATSE, and established their own group, the Society of Motion Picture Interior Decorators, in 1937. The CSU initially represented these breakaway set decorators during their independent contract negotiations with some studios. Eventually, IATSE began to dispute CSU’s jurisdiction, and after studio producers sided with IATSE—contradicting an arbiter appointed by the War Labor Board—the CSU went on strike.

Competing interests in Hollywood, from studio moguls like Cecil B. DeMille, to mobsters like John Roselli, saw the unions’ dispute as a threat. It wasn’t just about disrupting the flow of capital in and out of the film industry. They also understood that cinema served—and still serves—a vital role in shaping and massaging mass consciousness. Which is why, for moguls and organized crime organizations alike, combating the perceived infiltration of Moscow-backed Reds in Hollywood was as important as any financial concern.

Studio moguls widely alleged the strike of 1945 to be Communist-led—though the Communist Party was initially opposed to the strike. CSU president Herbert Sorrell personally faced accusations by Walt Disney, IATSE leadership, and others of being a Communist dupe. (Though when he was dragged before the California Legislature’s Joint Fact-Finding Committee on Un-American Activities a year later, there was scant evidence linking him to the Communist Party—his militant trade unionism was homegrown.)

Regardless of the facts, the anti-communist hysteria of studio moguls and state and federal investigators ultimately spelled the downfall of the CSU. The congressional investigations into the alleged infiltration of communism in Hollywood and trade unions like those in which Sorrell was interrogated, resulted in the Taft-Hartley Act of 1947, which sought to purge not only communists, but also class-conscious workers, from union leadership roles. The law severely limited the power of unions: It required union leadership to sign non-communist affidavits and outlawed jurisdictional strikes like the one enacted by the CSU.

Following on the heels of Taft-Hartley came the House Un-American Activities Committee hearings, which culminated in the well-known Hollywood blacklist and the eventual jailing of the “Hollywood Ten,” film industry members who refused to testify. The notorious Smith Act trials between 1949 and 1958 saw the jailing and deportation of Communist leadership, including Benjamin Davis Jr. and Claudia Jones, across the United States. The rise of Sen. Joseph McCarthy saw the persecution of the gay and lesbian community under the Lavender Scare as well as the continued attack on Black radicalism. From the ashes of the destruction of the CSU also came the ascendency of former B-movie actor Ronald Wilson Reagan. Reagan, who had formerly served as the president of the Screen Actors Guild, would go on to administer a mighty blow against unions. In 1981, as U.S. president, he fired over 11,000 striking air traffic controllers, locking them out of federal employment for life, employing strikebreaking tactics he may have rehearsed during his anti-communist tenure in Hollywood. The knock-on effects from the Red Scare in Hollywood would resonate for decades to come, setting back progressive trade unionism in the United States for generations of workers.

Today, we are witnessing a similar parallel: In tandem with the labor actions in Hollywood and elsewhere across the country, there is a new Red Scare heralding a burgeoning neo-fascism in the United States. Ron DeSantis’s “Stop Woke” campaign, the banning of critical race theory in Florida, Arkansas, and elsewhere, the persecution of the African People’s Socialist Party, Rick Scott’s “travel ban” for socialists traveling to Florida, bipartisan hysteria over the economic rise of China and the BRICS nations, as well as antisemitic tropes like the threat of “cultural Marxism” all point in this direction.

In Hollywood, specifically, we can look to right-wing hysteria over so-called “woke” films such as Barbie and other “culture war” trends perpetrated by pundits who flirt with, if not outright endorse, anti-Blackness, anti-trans ideology, and antisemitism—often in the same breath. The perceived threat of “wokeism” and “identity politics” bear a striking resemblance to the Red Scare tactics of the 1940s and 1950s, insofar as they function as coded attempts to discredit individuals and collectives alike by coding progressive politics as adjacent with Marxism or communism—only today, instead of Moscow, Beijing has become the primary boogeyman.

But this time, the tables may be turning. When Screen Actors Guild president Fran Drescher gave a rip-roaring speech dripping with the authority of class struggle this summer, nobody accused her of being a communist for speaking out against labor conditions. Likewise, Bryan Cranston, who portrayed Trumbo in a biopic of the same name, wasn’t labeled a “Communist dupe” when he delivered a fiery, pro-union speech in July.

And in a year of unprecedented labor actions throughout the nation, the Writers Guild of America’s (WGA) months-long strike, which secured better contracts for writers in a radical victory for labor last month, and the tentative agreement the Screen Actors Guild and the American Federation of Television and Radio Artists (SAG-AFTRA) just reached after 118 days on the picket lines, have highlighted the efforts of the working-class members of the film industry.

The efforts go far beyond the entertainment studios, too. In August, thousands of Los Angeles city workers engaged in a one-day strike to put pressure on Mayor Karen Bass. In recent months there have also been a hotel workers strike and job actions by Los Angeles Unified School District teachers. That’s why to talk about those struggling against the citadel of capital, disproportionately cited in Southern California, it’s important to understand that what is happening in Hollywood is part of a broader labor movement.

That’s why, though some onlookers, even on the political left, have not taken the Hollywood strikes seriously, to be dismissive of the gravity of the labor movement in Hollywood is to commit a fundamental political blunder. Tinseltown has a rich, though too often unacknowledged, history of class struggle that is intimately connected with the kickoff of Red Scare politics in the 1940s and 1950s. The CSU strike provides a sober reminder of how the violent proliferation of Red Scare hysteria and anti-labor sentiment in Hollywood in the middle of the 20th century were connected, and of how far the capitalist class is willing to take its moral panics.

As we heed the lessons of this previous era, it allows us to understand why the labor actions this time around—Hollywood culture workers, United Auto Workers, the 75,000 striking Kaiser employees, graduate students, contingent faculty, and other teachers across the country, and the others too numerous to mention—portend good signs to come for labor in the United States.

The post How Hollywood’s Black Friday Strike Changed Labor Across America appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

What does the tension between memory and history—both personal and shared, the “I” and the “we”—teach us about both remembering and documenting our time spent? How do we view and engage with the past? Are memory and experience and memory and context intertwined? And how might we reconcile these?

Annie Ernaux, the France-based 2022 Nobel laureate for literature, earned fame and renown as a writer who is deeply entrenched in the power of memory—as a repository of lived experiences, as a cistern of hope and hearth, as an existential paradigm. When announcing the honor last fall, the Nobel Committee cited “the courage and clinical acuity with which she uncovers the roots, estrangements and collective restraints of personal memory.” Her masterpiece The Years, from 2008, recounts her own history and that of post-World War II France, and explores how the two narratives intertwined and diverged.

The Super 8 Years, an essay film she made with her son David Ernaux-Briot, premiered at the New York Film Festival days before she was anointed the 2022 Nobel laureate. The Super 8 Years spans the 1970s and early 1980s and might be construed as a cinematic investigation into that period through home movies. The Years covers those decades within its exploration from 1941 to 2006.

Watching The Super 8 Years in tandem with The Years gave me a deeper insight into both works—and into Ernaux’s sensibility. Ernaux’s two works together, by overlaying images on her literary self-examinations, allow her to construct both a remembrance of things past and a reconstruction and reconsideration of their remembrance, resulting in, to this reader/viewer, a diptych-esque response to Proust’s masterpiece.

The Years is a reconciliation with the history of France as Ernaux lived it, observed it, and processed it—from her point of entry during World War II through the waning days of colonialism; from the presidential administration of Charles de Gaulle to that of Jacques Chirac; during teetering toward and away from socialism; amid persistent undercurrents of classism and racism.

Ernaux is ambivalent about herself; she refers to herself as “we,” rather than “I,” sublimating a part of herself and blending in with the collective. Hers is a foot soldier’s view of history, and a quest to find one’s role and assert one’s place within it.

The Years approaches memory as a fluid force. In a section that takes us to 1953 and 1954, for example, Ernaux lists:

-the great train strike of the summer of ’53

-the fall of Dien Bien Phu

-Stalin’s death announced on the radio, one cold morning, in March, just before children left for school

and juxtaposes these moments in world history with her own childhood memories, some idyllic:

-the Tour de France passing through her town

-embroidering a napkin ring

some bittersweet:

-reading the summaries of films she will not see and books she will not read

and some harrowing:

-The scene between her parents … when her father tried to kill her mother, dragging her to the cellar … where they kept the sickle planted.

In a way, The Years and Ernaux’s writing of it are acts of alchemy—making the past present and the present past, morphing them together with an artist’s light, illuminating the crevices, brightening the corners. It is not that she’s completely oblivious to the world as it turns; it’s that she is a work in progress—observing and engaging that parallel evolution, while reckoning her own. They are mirror and window.

It makes sense, then, that The Super 8 Years picks up so deftly where the book leaves off.  Ernaux and Ernaux-Briot stitched the film together using home movies chronicling family life: vacations, and the mundanities of middle class and middle age in 1970s and 1980s France. The movies are grainy, and they are silent.

Ernaux adds the music, environmental effects, and narration—again, using “she/her” and “we/us,” as if the Annie she beholds on celluloid is a doppelganger, filmed against her will. Philippe, her then-husband, documented the family’s domestic life and its attendant milestones such as birthday parties and holiday gatherings, as well as vacations to Morocco, pre-Pinochet Chile, Albania, Egypt, Spain, and the Soviet Union, among others. Fifty years later, Ernaux, as narrator, assesses her engagement with those places in Cold War history in the past—both as vacation destinations and as validations of her progressive leanings—and from her present perspective, where she questions her place in a postcolonial, vastly changed landscape.

Philippe operates the camera at all times. He is the scenarist, auteur, director, producer, cinematographer. Annie is the unwitting protagonist—mildly annoyed, always self-conscious. It’s an engagement that perhaps betrays the fragile state of their marriage. He would later leave the footage with her, and take the camera with him.

When one engages the home movies as sui generis, Annie is the subject, frozen in a moment in time when she was vulnerable to Philippe’s camera. Her truth lingered beyond the frame. But fortified by her discerning narration 50 years later, The Super 8 Years is a reclamation process—a sort of rescue by interrogation and recontextualization. Ernaux the narrator and future Nobel laureate considers her cinematic self, whose career as an eventual literary icon is in its nascent stages, as defined by a patriarchal apparatus. On film, she is a homemaker, wife, and mother, navigating her way through the trappings of womanhood.

These are images of an irretrievable past, of a context that no longer exists, within a disintegrating marriage. As in The Years, Ernaux is probing memories, of her narrative and of “our” broader history.

Ernaux’s memory of her experiences, these chapters in her life, do not always match what she beholds in the footage. The act of remembering and remembrance is an act of editing and subconscious omission, brought to fruition in film. It is also an affirmation of self. Ernaux has in the end reconciled history and memory, collectively and individually. She, as “we,” is the author, the writer, the scribe, the narrator/filmmaker. She, as “she,” in the photos and footage, is preserved in a past moment, yet beckoning the future self for a dialogue. “She” is past and everlasting, unrevivable, yet resurrected.

As the artist, Ernaux is an alchemist, a preservationist, a reanimator of a world that is just memory and history. She may not have answers to what the footage provides, to what the past beckons, but she has questions—for herself, for history, for us. And she leaves it up to us—the sum total of our personal narratives, our fictionalization of them, our collective history and our relations to and reconciliation with the filmed, written, and recorded records.

The post How a French Nobel Laureate Remembers Things Past appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Popularized by Charles Dickens in his 1843 A Christmas Carol, as well as in the yuletide editions of his literary magazine, All the Year Round, ghost stories were regular Christmas fare for the Victorians. “Nothing satisfies us on Christmas Eve but to hear each other tell authentic anecdotes about specters,” writes Jerome K. Jerome in the introduction to Told After Supper, his 1891 anthology of Christmas ghost stories.

In our contemporary moment, Halloween has supplanted Christmas in the popular imagination as the time of year best suited for tales of terror. However, as in bygone eras, there is no bad time for a good ghost story. We perennially delight in tales of the restless dead. But if ghost stories are scary and being scared is unpleasant, why consciously seek discomfort? What conjures our ghostly desire?

Scholars have many theories to explain the apparent paradox of what we might call the “pleasurable fear” of horror. Denial theorists, such as Kendall Walton, simply reject the proposition that we are ever actually scared—they posit that we know we are safe and it is all just make-believe. Competition theories of horror enjoyment, in contrast, suggest that scary stories elicit actual emotions—more than one of them. This is philosopher Noël Carroll’s proposition in The Philosophy of Horror, where he argues that the fear and disgust evoked by what he calls “art-horror”—artistic works that intend to evoke a horrified response—are offset by the enjoyments of narrative and the interest elicited by monsters. When consuming scary tales, our curiosity and fear compete. The emotion that wins determines if we keep reading or watching or call it quits and pull the covers up over our head.

And then there is Mathias Clasen’s “biocultural” approach. In Why Horror Seduces, he explains that the perpetual allure of scary stories is in fact evolutionarily conditioned. “The most effective monsters of horror fiction mirror ancestral dangers to exploit evolved human fears,” he explains, and we enjoy this because they evoke strong emotions in a safe context, and sometimes can prepare us for real-life horrors.

But these debates don’t quite capture the particular allure of the ghost story because they side-step our deep-seated desire for the supernatural. We need our ghosts, even if they frighten us.

Ghost stories are, of course, scary. In the way of all monsters, ghosts—even benevolent ones—threaten the stability of the conceptual categories we use to organize our experiences of the world. As Jeffrey Jerome Cohen explains in his important essay, “Monster Culture (Seven Theses),” monsters are “disturbing hybrids” that complicate our attempts to make sense of things. Ghosts are a perfect example: Neither living nor dead, fully present nor absent, they are remnants of the past intruding upon the present, scuttling notions of linear chronology in the process. From our contemporary perspective, which tends to disavow the actual existence of ghosts, vampires, and things that go bump in the night, they are things that should not be, yet are.

Nevertheless, beneath the dread of the ghost is our intense desire for them—even scarier than ghosts is the prospect of their absence. The diaphanous quasi-presence of the ghost testifies to the persistence of consciousness after death. For most, few things are more terrifying than the idea of simply winking out of existence at the moment life ends. The ghost consoles us with the possibility of an afterlife. It is the evidence that something of us persists beyond physical dissolution.

In a world riddled with injustice, our ghost stories also comfort us with the idea that justice will be served, even if the universe has to enable the violation of its governing principles to ensure it. This is the message of Shakespeare’s Hamlet, which begins with the appearance of the ghost of the murdered King, who returns to reveal the cause of his demise and spur his son to vengeance. It’s also the premise of Jerry Zucker’s 1990 blockbuster, Ghost, starring Patrick Swayze, Demi Moore, and Whoopi Goldberg, in which the ghost of the murdered Sam (Swayze) lingers to protect the love of his life, Molly (Moore), and to see that those responsible for Sam’s death are punished. In Guillermo del Toro’s 2015 Crimson Peak, it is the ghosts of murdered brides that haunt the isolated heroine, leading her to the revelation of their undoing and the outing of the culprit. “Murder will out” is the message of these stories and many others, even if a ghost has to do the outing.

These functions of ghosts—confirming the afterlife, ensuring cosmic justice, providing consolation for the living—are evident in the pop culture representations that saturate fiction, film, TV, and other media such as podcasts and videogames. In M. Night Shyamalan’s The Sixth Sense, for example, ghosts pester young protagonist Cole Sear (“see-er” of dead people, get it?) because they have a story to tell about abuse and murder. There is only one degree of separation between the living and the dead in Stir of Echoes, starring Kevin Bacon, in which a ghost leads the living to her bones in the basement and the murderer who buried them there.

The intense desire we have for ghosts is at the heart of a personal favorite film of mine: Mikael Håfström’s 1408 starring John Cusack. In this expanded version of Stephen King’s story of the same name, Cusack’s Mike Olin is a confirmed skeptic who disingenuously writes guidebooks to haunted places. What we discover though is that Olin never recovered from the death of his daughter and now travels from one purportedly haunted place to another desperately seeking confirmation of life after death. His encounters in a truly haunted hotel room leave him shaken, but also reassured.

At the end of Zucker’s Ghost, the murderers have been dragged to hell and Sam and Molly are granted what was denied them when Sam was murdered: a moment to say goodbye. Near the end of Shyamalan’s The Sixth Sense, Cole shares with his mother his grandmother’s answer to his mother’s question, “Do I make you proud?”: “Yes, every day.” And in a particularly devastating moment in Håfström’s 1408, Cusack’s melancholic Mike Olin is able to take his dead daughter in his arms once more and tell her that he loves her.

These moving moments illustrate the power and profundity of our ghost stories: They respond to the deepest of human needs. Ghosts are frightening, of course, but even more terrifying is the thought of their absence. With this in mind, one can do no better during the long hours of dark winter nights than to gather with family and friends, and invite along the ghosts.

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In the upcoming Thor: Love and Thunder, the titular protagonist sets out on a journey of self-discovery, trying to give new meaning to a life spent fighting errant gods, space elves, and other pseudo-mythological villains. After “saving planet Earth for the 500th time,” as the trailer for the film puts it, what is there left to do for Thor? The answer, the trailer suggests, will partly be more of the same. Love and Thunder will again have Thor face off with a nefarious antagonist, tussle with other gods, and punch out many monsters and henchmen in the process. At the same time, Love and Thunder also appears to claim new territory for future Marvel movies. It introduces a new female Thor portrayed by Natalie Portman and presents Chris Hemsworth’s version of the character going through a superheroic mid-life crisis and trying to stake out an existence beyond the established routine.

Thor’s attempts to reinvent himself (but not too much) mirror the challenges faced by the entire superhero blockbuster genre—as well as the reason why these films, much like Thor’s red cape, are not going anywhere. Disney’s Marvel Cinematic Universe is a 28-film franchise that has brought figures such as Iron Man, Black Panther, and Black Widow to the cinema. But it’s only a fraction of the roughly 100 superhero films to come to American theaters (and, more recently, streaming services) since the year 2000, including multiple big-screen incarnations of comic book favorites such as Batman, Wonder Woman, and Spider-Man, as well as lesser-known characters such as Valiant Comics’ Bloodshot. All of them play variations on similar themes and motifs, pitting more-or-less virtuous, more-than-human heroes against evil counterparts that threaten the fragile status quo of a social order that is not necessarily ideal, but that will be defended nonetheless.

Superhero blockbusters generally try to provide a well-calibrated mix of familiar pleasures and innovative ideas. The formula puts known characters into situations that are similar to what came before, but, ideally, even more spectacular—a task that is becoming more and more difficult as new entries are added to the genre. Against this backdrop, Thor’s mid-life crisis can be understood as a self-reflexive joke about a looming exhaustion of creative options and the fear that there might not be all that much left that’s worth telling stories about (not coincidentally, the specter of “superhero fatigue” among audiences has haunted coverage of the genre for some time now).

This challenge is not unique to the superhero blockbuster. Other film genres have faced it before—such as Westerns or “creature feature” horror movies, for example, both of which enjoyed significant popularity but eventually returned to the fringes of Hollywood production. Filmmaking trends like these are examples of an “aesthetics of seriality” that, as the semiotician and novelist Umberto Eco suggested, is more generally at work in modern mass media. Seriality here has a double meaning: On the one hand, it refers to cultural creators producing new material on the basis of established success formulas, stock scenarios, and character types, which are then invested with new meaning, combined with new ideas and interesting twists, or rearranged in unexpected ways. (Think the American Western being appropriated by Italian filmmakers like Sergio Leone, or Steven Spielberg’s Jaws inspiring Joe Dante’s horror comedy Piranha.) Eco understood trends, appropriations, and reinventions of this kind as the norm in commercial popular culture. These products, he wrote, would invariably be characterized by “a dialectic between order and novelty, … between scheme and innovation.” In other words, there’s nothing truly new under the sun (or multiple suns, as on Star Wars’ Tatooine—a setting that combines the Western’s frontier vibes with the desert planet aesthetics of Frank Herbert’s Dune, and thus presents itself as another example of Hollywood’s tendency to reuse and remix well-established ideas).

But seriality also refers to a mode of storytelling in which narrative information is doled out piece-by-piece and across multiple installments to engage audiences over extended periods of time. Disney’s Marvel Cinematic Universe and other contemporary superhero franchises embody this model of serial narration par excellence: A film like Love and Thunder, for example, might still have a relatively self-contained story at its core, but is clearly not meant to be watched outside of the larger context of the Marvel Cinematic Universe. Recent entries of the genre are furthermore riddled with in-jokes, callbacks, and other nods to earlier superhero properties and comic books—references which require more than a passing familiarity with the material to be understood.

The result can be a peculiar sense of narrative fragmentation—instances in which superhero blockbusters cease to tell self-contained and classically coherent stories altogether. In such moments, films appear to be constructed around conspicuous narrative gaps, as motivations for characters’ actions are implied rather than spelled out. In this year’s Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness, for example, one character’s transformation from hero to villain only makes sense if one also has seen preceding Avengers films and the 2021 Disney+ streaming series WandaVision (and even then it remains pretty implausible). This type of serial storytelling makes good sense for Marvel and parent Disney, who can use it to point consumers from one arm of their multifaceted entertainment offerings to the next. In fact, the superhero blockbuster’s strong reliance on serial narration is arguably a key reason why the genre has not yet gone the way of the Western or the “creature feature.” At the same time, such interconnectedness can also make it difficult to follow along if one does not want to invest the time. But in our contemporary media environment—thanks to sites such as Wikipedia, chatter on social media, and the ceaseless coverage of the genre on entertainment news fan websites—the necessary background information is usually just a quick Google query away.

The existence of lively surrounding discourse is another important reason for superhero blockbuster cinema’s enduring success. After all, serial storytelling thrives on the temporal gaps between installments, which offer audiences (including fans and journalists on the popular culture beat) ample time and opportunity to celebrate or criticize recent releases, pitch hot takes about films’ broader significance, trace references to source materials, share news about the production of upcoming features, and speculate about future plot developments. Ultimately, it is this multifaceted and ongoing public discourse about superhero movies that creates much of the genre’s cultural visibility, and thereby lays the groundwork for the continued profitability of this type of film (after all, audiences need to know about a film before they can go see it).

Like our celestial universe, the superhero universe continues to find ways to expand—it has, by now, grown so large that some of its entries deliberately position themselves against the humor, playfulness, and fragmentation of recent Marvel fare. This year’s The Batman, for example, offered gritty violence, corrupt cops, and civil unrest along with a 176-minute runtime that left enough room to flesh out even minor aspects of the backstory in great detail. In this tradition, we can expect that superhero movies will, in the coming years, continue to play through all possible variations of the underlying hero-vs.-villain theme—and, in the process, continue to combine the well-worn cliché with the unexpected twist.

Will audiences eventually tire of this continued reinvention of the already known? So far, superhero movie fatigue has not yet left a significant dent in the genre’s overall commercial success; likewise, the public discourse about the genre shows little signs of souring. Like Thor, the superhero movie probably will overcome whatever obstacles stand in its way.

The post Will the Superhero Blockbusters Just Keep Coming? appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

But despite its nearly three-hour run time, Elvis, the new Baz Luhrmann biopic, stays about as black and white as the racial divide it seems to suggest Presley alone could cross.

Most baffling is how incurious the movie is. It never engages on more than a surface level with the racism of the Mason–Dixon-lined country that catapulted Presley to fame. Nor is it interested in thinking deeply about the class and regional dynamics that shaped Presley, whose formative years were spent in poverty in the South.

Even the star’s own demons are given a cursory pass; the closest we get to pedophilia allegations is a mention of Priscilla Presley’s age, 14, when she meets the star. And though Presley reportedly struggled with substance abuse and was hooked on prescription opiates and sedatives, his addiction is treated mostly as a plot device.

The one clear point that the film (which has been rubber-stamped by Presley’s family) wants to make is that Presley was a peerless talent taken from us too soon, because he trusted the wrong people along the way.

There is a deeply sympathetic tale to be found in this, of course—it’s a truly American sadness watching a person commodified and used as a cash grab until they have nothing left to give. To see how little the dial has turned since Presley’s time, one only needs to look to what Britney Spears has endured.

But the film isn’t willing to do the real work of getting at who the complex figure beneath the sideburns was. Instead, Elvis’s creed seems to be borrowed from the personal philosophy of the star’s long-time manager, Colonel Tom Parker: “Don’t try to explain it; just sell it.” Parker, naturally, is the narrator of the film, where he’s presented as a carnival barker who’s found his meal ticket (the less said about Tom Hanks’ performance in the role, the better).

Through Parker’s point of view, Presley becomes just the attraction, a talented object whose strings Parker is pulling, which instantly absolves the young singer of any responsibility—or agency. That’s too bad, because the contradictions of race, class, power, and consumerism (the film does at least do a good job of showing how the Elvis brand understood there was a burgeoning youth market waiting to be tapped into through merchandise sales) that made Presley a megawatt star holds deep relevance today.

For a hint of a different film that could have been made, one only needs to listen to the Doja Cat song “Vegas,” which was released with the movie’s soundtrack. The song samples from “Hound Dog”—not Presley’s 1956 version, but the original—recorded four summers earlier by a 26-year-old Black rhythm-and-blues singer from Ariton, Alabama, named Willie Mae “Big Mama” Thornton.

In her rendition, Thornton growls after a man who sponges off of women—her voice: playful, angry, rich—sending him away after he comes “snoopin’ ’round” her door.

Jewish teenagers Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller had penned the empowering lyrics specifically for Thornton. “She looked like the biggest, baddest, saltiest chick you would ever see,” Leiber later told Rolling Stone, of the gender-non-conforming singer. “I had to write a song for her that basically said, ‘Go f— yourself.’”

In Little Labels-Big Sound music critics Rick Kennedy and Randy McNult dub the song rock ‘n’ roll’s first “multicultural experience,” noting that in addition to Leiber and Stoller, people involved with the recording included Black label owner Don Robey and Greek American band leader Johnny Otis.

Big Mama’s “Hound Dog” went on to inspire a number of artists before Presley, including Freddie Bell & The Bell Boys, a white lounge act at Las Vegas’ Sands hotel who turned the song into a comical account of a literal hound dog. Theirs was the version that spurred Presley to record his own track.

“Hound Dog,” the 21-year-old’s follow-up to “Heartbreak Hotel,” went on to go No. 1 on Billboard’s pop, R&B, and country charts, and would become one of the most recognizable songs of all time. But Presley never directly credited Thornton for her work, robbing her of name recognition and lucrative deals (she would later say in interviews that she made less than $500 off of “Hound Dog”).

None of this weighs heavily on Elvis. The only plot point around “Hound Dog” is when it is used to show how Presley himself was punished for reaching across the color line in his performances. We see Presley humiliated on stage for it, as he is forced to serenade a basset hound on “The Steve Allen Show” while wearing a tuxedo.

There’s a reason so many in power were so threatened by what Presley was doing and put pressure on him to show white America a “new” Elvis. His act “undermined the myths and stereotypes that sustained Jim Crow segregation,” as historian Michael T. Bertrand put it in the 2007 article “Elvis Presley and the Politics of Popular Memory.”

Still, as Doja Cat sings, “There’s more sides to the story.”

As honestly as Presley came by his own love of the music he performed, and though he regularly spoke about how rock ‘n’ roll was not something he started—“Nobody can sing that kind of music like colored people. Let’s face it: I can’t sing like Fats Domino can. I know that,” he said in 1956—his legacy is forever tangled in the racial politics that catapulted his mythic rise.

Later, after Presley’s death, the great author Alice Walker put words to this in her short story, “1955, or, You Can’t Keep a Good Woman Down.”

First published in Ms. magazine in 1981, Walker’s story fictionalizes what happened with “Hound Dog.” The author has the Presley character publicly recognize Thornton for the song, even bringing her on “The Tonight Show” to perform. Still, the fans only have eyes for him—and he is haunted by receiving the credit for someone else’s work.

Reading the story now, it’s as timely as when it was originally written.

After the Presley character dies young—“some said heart, some said alcohol, some said drugs”—the Thornton character learns of the public outpouring of grief, but doesn’t want to see it.

“They was crying and crying and didn’t even know what they was crying for,” she reflects in her final monologue. “One day, this is going to be a pitiful country, I thought.”

The post Elvis Is an American Tragedy. <i>Elvis</i> Is Just Tragic appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

In the film industry, when a new movie flops, the studio often responds with layoffs, in part to cover the stiff losses. Thus, in spring 2015, after 39 years with Columbia Pictures—by then Sony Pictures—I found myself with lots of free time at my disposal.

I decided to use that time in part to volunteer; I felt too work-oriented to abide being put out to pasture. While tutoring with the adult literacy program at my local branch library, a flyer for a neighborhood group called Westchester Playa Villages, later renamed Westside Pacific Villages (WPV), caught my eye. “Neighbor Helping Neighbor” and “Serving Your Community” and “Become a Friend”—the upbeat, dynamic, and thoroughly sociable tone intrigued me.

I learned that WPV matches aging neighbors (who pay a small fee) with local volunteers who help them in a number of different ways: making short visits, being a walking buddy, or driving to doctor’s appointments and the like. WPV is based in L.A.’s Westside but is part of a national “village movement” to help people age in place.

I knew the neighborhood well and enjoy in-city driving. Before long, I was signing into the Assisted Rides software that WPV uses in order to drive around my neighbors who no longer are able to drive themselves.

I am happy to offer myself as a responsible person and a comfort to someone who is nervous about their appointment and concerned about getting there promptly and safely. I’m usually available to stay with the person I’m driving during their visit and accompany them back to my car for the ride home.

These drives also can be ideal times for relaxing conversation. I’ve had many substantive discussions, discovered many common interests, and heard numerous extended stories of past travels and family histories.

I’ve even discovered that some neighbors have a connection with the early glory days of Hollywood. One, a soft-spoken grandmotherly sort, shared with me that she played a flower girl in the wedding scene in the movie Camille. She didn’t want to tell me how long ago that was, but since I knew that the film came out in 1936, I could easily do the math. Her other proud accomplishment: teaching English lessons to the actress Leslie Caron at the school for child actors on the MGM lot.

Another neighbor related to me her experience at the Japanese American internment camp at Heart Mountain, Wyoming in the 1940s. She had an incredible recall of the daily routines of camp life. One powerful recollection: getting a day pass to go into the local town to do shopping and seeing stores with “No Japs” signs in the windows.

Sometimes it’s challenging to make conversation, but for the most part I’ve found that my neighbors enjoy the opportunity to have a rich, unexpected, one-on-one discussion about a range of topics.

And I feel I’ve gained insight into how to listen to personal sharing, and how to share about myself in response to the openness neighbors show to me. Some folks are very expansive when talking about their family, and seem eager to share even casual details. Other members are more outward-oriented and want to discuss current events—in which case I prepare myself in advance with the latest breaking news and the political scene in general—which can be very challenging but does keep me on my toes.

There’s also the emotional state of the passenger to contend with. I often begin rides by reassuring a nervous neighbor by calmly saying, “I know where we’re going, the most direct route, and the best place to park. You’re in good hands with me.” But one day, I was driving someone for the first time, in a rush to see her doctor because she had run out of pain medication. She was in something of a nervous frenzy and stayed in an agitated state after she got into my car. I allowed her nervousness to make me nervous. In my haste, I scraped the side of my car against a water spigot jutting out from the back wall of her home. Nothing else went wrong that day—and my driving record (and car) have been pristine ever since.

These driving experiences also have afforded me opportunities for reflection and insight. I had always associated trips to doctor appointments, hospital check-ins, and lab testing with sick people or being sick myself. But after countless drives, these destinations have become normalized. They feel as natural as going to the library. Well, almost.

I’ve come to feel a oneness with the neighbors I have come to know, and a keener awareness of the aging process we all share. In living through so much time with them, I realize I’m going through the same stages. It’s the sensation of “We’re all in this together.” What an empowering realization, but it’s also a humbling one.

A final irony for this movie aficionado is that I no longer need to go to a darkened theater and gaze at a big screen in search of high drama. Whether it’s a World War II-era family story or anxiety about current events or good news from a doctor, I experience it all from a decidedly front row seat.

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Generations ago, in the parenthesis of years between Hitler’s 1933 rise to power and the end of World War II, a deluge of European artists and intellectuals came to the U.S., seeking refuge from the rising tide of fascism. Throughout the 1920s these men and women had enjoyed artistic freedom and prestige in cities such as Berlin, Vienna, Budapest, and Paris, where they helped define 20th century modernism.

They were writers, directors, actors, visual artists, architects, and musicians, and once they hit American shores, they flocked to three great cities. The writers and visual artists tended to gravitate to New York. The architects generally went to Chicago. And the musicians mainly settled in Los Angeles. Sunny California seems a quixotic, counterintuitive choice for artists who built their careers in epicenters of intellectualism and high culture. But most of them learned to live in this new sort of city, some even thriving here.

Like most wartime refugees, the émigré musicians who escaped Europe went where they knew people and where they could find work. And what better place to find work, especially as a musician, than Hollywood in its heyday of musical comedy—with its splashy sets, bloated budgets, and bottomless need for trained musicians who could work fast? And unlike writers or actors who faced the difficulty of speaking or writing in a foreign tongue, musicians had no language barrier.

These L.A. immigrants were an aggrieved, talented, witty and competitive bunch. The musicians included Erich Korngold, Igor Stravinsky, Arnold Schoenberg, and Hans Eisler. They were joined by luminaries such as novelist Lion Feuchtwanger and his wife Marta Feuchtwanger, Thomas Mann (the “emperor of exiles”) and his less successful novelist brother Henrich Mann, Austrian screenwriter and stage actress Salka Viertel, playwright Bertolt Brecht, writer Vicki Baum, philosopher Theodor Adorno, and film directors Otto Preminger and Fritz Lang. These exiled artists congregated and lived mainly on the westside of Los Angeles: Pacific Palisades, Brentwood, Santa Monica, and Beverly Hills.

Émigrés from all over Europe flocked to gatherings in homes like the Feuchtwangers’ Villa Aurora in the hills of the Pacific Palisades and Salka Viertel’s Santa Monica Canyon Sunday salons. There, over Sachertorte, rounds of ping-pong, and the occasional performance of an in-progress sonata or violin concerto, they compared whose English sounded the best, who had made the most American friends, who had secured a coveted seven-year contract at a movie studio, and who was still struggling to eke out a living.

Meanwhile, a deep current of melancholy ran beneath their sharp banter, a gaping sense of loss hovering all around. The exiles tried to forget their former lives—forgetting was a form of survival—and fit into their new strange identities. But many felt at odds with Los Angeles’s natural beauty and ceaseless sunshine, with its brash Hollywood glamour, and its lack of obvious culture. Even though they knew they were the lucky ones.

Perhaps the deepest manifestation of the musicians’ discomfort with their surroundings was their perception of the tension between “high” and “low” art— between “selling out” to compose for the pictures and the more vaunted, but less financially viable, alternative of composing symphonies or string quartets.

Austrian Jewish composer Arnold Schoenberg arrived in Los Angeles by way of Paris in 1934, and soon began teaching at USC and then UCLA. He was known for the intensity of his presence, often described as having burning dark eyes that pierced through his more faint-hearted pupils and fellow musicians. He played tennis on George Gershwin’s court, and socialized with Charlie Chaplin. Despite having invented the groundbreaking 12-tone system of composition—with its jarring dissonances and departures from familiar tonal music—by the time Schoenberg was in Los Angeles he had returned to tradition somewhat. He described feeling an “upsurge of desire for tonality” as Alex Ross explains in The Rest Is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century. In Los Angeles, Schoenberg wrote “Suite in G for String Orchestra,” “Variations on a Recitative in D Minor” for organ, and “Kol Nidre” for synagogue choir. The aim of these more tonal works, Ross writes, was to “create more marketable hits” whose profits would allow Schoenberg to pursue more advanced musical projects.

Schoenberg harbored a great desire to write for the movies, but could never abandon more high-minded pursuits. In a now infamous meeting with Irving Thalberg, then head of production for MGM, the composer discussed scoring the 1937 film The Good Earth—only to demand complete control over all sound, including the dialogue. This, Schoenberg told a stunned Thalberg, would mean that the actors “would have to speak in the same pitch and key as I compose it in,” Ross recounts. Schoenberg also asked for a fee of $50,000. Given such unrealistic demands, nothing ever came of his Hollywood aspirations.

Russian composer Igor Stravinsky fled to Los Angeles after the fall of France in 1940, and like Schoenberg, tried his luck with film composing, with little success. Stravinsky was famous around the world, and the industry was eager to slap his name on their films. But his music appeared in only one Hollywood movie—Disney’s animated Fantasia, which Stravinsky apparently hated. Stravinsky demanded too much time and too much control to really succeed as a movie composer, but he dipped into the commercial realm every now and then, composing “Tango” for Benny Goodman’s band and “Circus Polka” for the Ringling Brothers Circus. The latter was performed by 50 elephants (Stravinsky specified they must be “young elephants”) along with 50 ballerinas, all in pink tutus, and choreographed by George Balanchine.

Unlike Schoenberg and Stravinsky who yearned for silver screen glory but never quite got it, Erich Wolfgang Korngold, a musical prodigy from Vienna, became wildly successful in shaping the “sonic texture” of Golden Age Hollywood, as Ross calls it. Korngold’s lush, late Romantic opulence was well suited for studio fare. Among Los Angeles émigrés it was a putdown to say that something sounded like “film music,” and Korngold’s critical reputation diminished as a result of his commercial success. Today his work is getting some much-deserved reconsideration and recognition. La Scala put on his first opera, Die tote Stadt (The Dead City) in 2019. That same year, the Bard Music Festival performed his second major opera, Das Wunder der Heliane.

Displaced artists and musicians such as Schoenberg, Stravinsky, and Korngold clung to the Old World while struggling to adapt to a new one. Some despised Los Angeles and found it inhospitable to making art. But others loved Los Angeles and thrived here. Those who flourished artistically learned to carry home within themselves, despite the unimaginable loss of family and loved ones, of careers and identities, of all they had known to be true and beautiful. These refugees witnessed the world fall away from them, the ground shifting beneath their feet faster than they could run over it, all the while figuring out new ways to carry on, to adapt, to keep existing.

The post The Exiled Musicians Who Escaped Fascism for La La Land appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Like any great aphorism, the dramatist Anton Chekhov’s advice can be taken many ways. In our 21st century moment of constant and obsessive self-reflection, only exacerbated by the pandemic, the maxim rings truer than ever: Art and Life are not just connected—they reflect, permeate, and imitate one another.

This is great playwriting advice, but you don’t have to be a playwright to get the point. Life demands work if you want it to mean something, just as art demands work if you want it to truly play: that is, to happen in front of us, to engage and connect and challenge and jolt us into receptiveness.

I recently played hooky from work as a live artist to see Ryusuke Hamaguchi’s 2021 film Drive My Car. Based on Haruki Murakami’s eponymous short story, Drive My Car won the Palme d’Or at Cannes and has been nominated for four Academy Awards this year, including Best Picture. Like 2020’s Best Picture winner, Parasite, it has the chance to run the table.

But unlike Bong Joon-ho’s masterful cinematic provocation, this film plays on an entirely different strategy, burrowing down to the intertwined roots of its characters’ life and art.

Yūsuke Kafuku, the film’s main character, is an actor/director of international prominence who has a highly particular, even odd, method of staging plays—in this case, Chekhov’s Uncle Vanya. Not only does he seek a multinational company of actors, but he wants them to speak in their own languages. The actors come from all over the Far East. Although English is the default language in rehearsal, individual cast members speak the lines of the play in Mandarin, Korean, Tagalog, and Japanese. The effect is at first blush a headscratcher: How is this going to work for an audience? How are the players supposed to understand one another?

It is not quite as eccentric or exotic as it may seem. Since the middle of the 20th century, multinational companies of actors, dancers, musicians, and others have formed and traveled widely through the Middle East and Africa, Europe and the Americas doing plays that treat audiences as partners in a style that is sometimes called “a walking theater.” Among an array of legendary theater directors working in this style—Grotowski, Serban, Mnouchshkine, LePage— the preeminent practitioner is Peter Brook, known for his work at the International Centre for Theatre Research (CIRT).

Brook—like the film’s main character, named Yūsuke Kafuku—works with great texts, including those by Chekhov. And they both use non-directional directing, wherein an actor discovers on their own, without the director telling them, who or what they are. Rather, the director’s job is to attempt to call forth existing emotions and connections within the actor. As Brook has said repeatedly in discussing his acting and training techniques, “Human connection is the essence of good theater.”

In this style, the theater is not the art of imitation, but the art of suggestion. “A move from one creates a tremor from another; an impulse from a third, an immediate chain reaction,” Brook has said. What is interesting and ultimately of great importance is the relation between one thing and another. For Brook, truth in the theater is always on the move, and people from very different backgrounds can partake, understanding each other and coming together without losing their essential nature. We come to see not only the player but the audience member truly as an individual. The invisible is made visible, and we realize our fundamental humanity beyond surface differences.

Easier said than done. But the exercise of investigating classic texts in this manner has made for some of the great art of the late 20th century, climaxed by Brook’s productions of Chekhov’s The Cherry Orchard and Vyasa’s The Mahabharata at the Brooklyn Academy of Music.

These were emotional experiences as much as productions. For one thing, they were long; The Mahabharata ran well over five hours. With Chekhov, Brook cleared not only the stage but the entire theater space, leaving only the bare audience seats, thus creating a shell without artifice shared by the actors and the audience. In its 1988 review, the New York Times said: “By banishing all forms of theatrical realism except the only one that really matters—emotional truth—Mr. Brook has found the pulse of a play that its author called ‘not a drama but a comedy, in places almost a farce.’”

In this kind of work, categories fall away.

In the decades since those Brook productions, art has gone in different directions (as it should), and the experience of non-directional theater may well feel foreign for many people. Yet this kind of work creates powerful resonances in 2022, in the midst of our own present moment of polarity, around the world and in our own communities and families. It is harder than ever for us to simply sit together, breathe the same air, and enjoy our interconnectedness.

Our technology sorts us by category, separates our likes and dislikes, anticipates our choice-making based on past purchases and searches, and stresses our peculiar tastes, hermetically sealing us from new or different tastes. Our politics are tribal. Our economy is unbalanced. And nowhere is the wicket stickier than with the question of race.

The stress keeps separating us, striating our heart muscles. And that separation keeps us dependent on surface opinions and judgements of who is with us or against us, and of what is worthy of connection. All the resulting noise of our era leads us to facile conclusions and pat expectations. And so we find it more difficult to receive, harder to breathe, and nearly impossible to reconnect to our intertwining underground roots.

Perhaps that is why Drive My Car feels like an exercise in non-direction. In an age of movies running and trumping one another, this is very much a walking film, full of suggestion, breathing at its own pace, making the invisible visible, and stripping away artificial separations and categorizations. It may tonally be a drama, but it has elements of comedy and farce. It doesn’t tell you how to feel, but it does ask you to walk alongside—or, in this case, ride along in the car.

There is no real reason to do the kind of work Yūsuke Kafuku does, unless you want to learn something new—about yourself and the person sitting next to you, whether you know them or not—and unless you’re willing to let go of the wheel.

Letting go is precisely what happens through much of the film, particularly in the Uncle Vanya rehearsals. The work between the actors has gotten so minimal as to be telepathic. No one is telling them, or us, how the world works or how to feel about it. We are not being talked at. But we are being included directly in the investigation. We have been given license to enter the discussion.

“Umuntu ngumuntu ngabantu” is a Zulu phrase made popular worldwide by the likes of the late Desmond Tutu and Nelson Mandela in the 1980s and 1990s, as they broke down apartheid in South Africa and strove to forgive the sins of their former oppressors. Although it can be translated many ways, the phrase basically means that a person is a person through other persons: “I am because you are—and since you are, definitely I am.”

Shared aims, shared needs, shared loves, and shared losses. A certain light appears, and something special begins to happen, something we would never have thought of alone, on our own. We live it together.

Putting on a play, writing a short story, making a film, or forgiving the guilty, takes work—lots of it. But when we experience that work as play, then it doesn’t feel like work anymore.

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