“What do we do with Shakespeare?” “Who is Shakespeare for?” “What would it look like to reject Shakespeare?”

These were questions I put at the center of the Pop Culture Shakespeare class I taught in the summer of 2020, and which I’ll return to this fall. Four hundred and sixty years after the Bard’s birth (nearly to the day, we like to imagine), people have answered these questions many times over. But working with my students taught me that one powerful way to understand Shakespeare today is as a transmedia narrative—a story that plays out across many modes of expression, from historical documents, printed plays, and performances to graphic novels and games. We spent the semester framing Shakespeare as an idea we all participate in making.

The class was inspired by a 2019 episode of NPR’s “Code Switch” podcast that discussed Shakespeare and his plays’ racism, sexism, and antisemitism. “We have a narrative in the West that Shakespeare’s like spinach, right? He’s good for you. He’s universally good for you,” said ASU professor, theater practitioner, and Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies director Ayanna Thompson. “We have to make that a more complex narrative.”

Thompson and the advocacy of the RaceB4Race community, a conference series and scholarly network galvanizing conversations about Shakespeare’s digestibility, particularly around race, challenged my students and me to build a more nuanced relationship to the Bard. We read plays by Shakespeare alongside adaptations of his work, approaching the materials as more than plots or settings or characters and changes therein—and instead as complex processes of belonging.

We spent part of our first meeting examining our own identities and interrogating the stories past classes and popular media had fed us about Shakespeare and his work. What were the sources—play texts, narratives or rhetoric (from parents, teachers, friends, the news), and media (movie adaptations, performances, YouTube videos, etc.)—that shaped our relationship to Shakespeare? How did we feel about him?

This framing can be deeply meaningful for students, who are navigating multiple spheres of influence: professional aspirations, societal or familial expectations, their own interests and passions. They are also grappling with knowledge—career content knowledge, self-knowledge, communal knowledge—and responsibility. To whom am I responsible? In what ways? Shakespeare and those who adapt his plays offer powerful opportunities for thinking critically about such epistemological and ethical questions.

To prime my students for questioning Shakespeare and their knowledge of him, our first unit didn’t start with a play; instead, we focused on Shakespeare’s biography and historical record. I sent them on a treasure hunt through the amazing resources of the Folger Shakespeare Library’s collection of archival documents around the Bard’s life. My students got to build out the gaps in history, wrestling with what we don’t know about the life of Shakespeare and his authorial connection to his plays. We then used movies to visualize these holes; we asked if two very different fictional biopics, 1998’s Shakespeare in Love and 2011’s Anonymous, would exist if the historical record had different documents in it.

Framing Shakespeare’s history in part as a narrative that is created and interpreted allowed my students to think more expansively about his literary authorship and cultural power.

Then, throughout the course, we treated each play and adaptation like a helix, where both texts twist recursively back upon each other. But the texts also connect to other authors’ lives and work. We know that Shakespeare relied on numerous source texts for his plays and that he influenced his contemporaries. And adaptations do not solely rely on Shakespeare either—they draw on many literary and cultural connections. We traced textual belonging as well as different types of thematic and material belonging—political, familial, racial, historical, gendered, peer group—across primary documents, play texts, and adaptations in various media forms. Studying adaptions in this way places Shakespeare in a larger world—or rather, worlds—both his own and ours.

Oxford professor Emma Smith attributes our ongoing engagement with Shakespeare to “gappiness,” which she defines as “all the things that we don’t know, the space there is for our creativity.” She says, “These plays are really incomplete, and the thing that they need to complete them is us and our sort of inventiveness, our world, our experience.” In the classroom, attention to “gappiness” gave my students a feeling of agency. With this intellectual space, they could wrestle with whether they hated, loved, felt indifferent to, or were curious about Shakespeare, all at the same time.

Romeo and Juliet—a favorite in high school curricula—elicited an interesting range of reactions. Despite initial grumbles about having to re-read a play, my students enjoyed exploring how their own maturation and life experiences shifted their relationship to the story. Juliet tended to rise higher in their estimation than previously, while Romeo fared worse. The students, having now had the experience of choosing a college and leaving home, felt the stakes of Juliet’s decision to defy her parents and make a choice for her own life.

We next read Ronald Wimberly’s 2012 graphic novel Prince of Cats, which focuses on the character of Tybalt and is set in what the author describes as an “alternate universe New York where dueling is part of the [street] culture” that led to the hip-hop of the 1970s and 1980s. The comic has a racially diverse cast and a Black protagonist in Tybalt, and samples an array of influences, of which Shakespeare is just one.

Wimberly speaks about how some audiences consume Black artists’ work through a tokenizing gaze—seeing it as valuable only because it makes them feel that they are being inclusive. In Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet, the hot-tempered Tybalt (whom another character calls “the prince of cats”) sets off the violence that ultimately leads to the tragedy of the two lovers. But by focusing on Tybalt and his relationships, Wimberly shifts how we understand death in the story. Where Shakespeare focuses on the “star-crossed lovers” and their tragedy, Wimberly attends to the bonds within families and among community members. He also suggests that Shakespeare himself tokenizes his minor characters in this play—stereotyping them as barriers for his main characters to rebel against but refusing to “get more into the price of violence for all involved.”

Tybalt and Prince of Cats led us to one of our most powerful meta-explorations of how we should engage Shakespeare at the college level. We can treat adaptations as texts that are intricately intersected with Shakespeare, but refuse a hierarchy where their import only comes through that relationship. We can even choose not to discuss Shakespeare when talking about these texts. And throughout, we can interrogate the roles of white supremacy, sexism, ableism, and xenophobia in the plays, and explore our own and others’ agencies as authors of Shakespeare.

Ultimately, these choices give students the power to refuse the deference we are trained to give to this author. Framing “Shakespeare” as a process of belonging—one that we can reject, look askance at, accept wholly or in part—means we all can choose whether we want to eat this particular literary spinach—and in what ways Shakespeare belongs to each of us.

The post Who Is Shakespeare For? appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Last month, an “immersive” Willy Wonka event took over my news feed.

Normally, I’d keep scrolling.

Promoters market these voguish multisensory experiences—which are supposed to literally immerse you in an environment through projection mapping technology, virtual and augmented reality, sound, physical sets, and sometimes even actors—as “transformative,” “out-of-this-world,” and “sublime.”

I haven’t understood the appeal. The few I’ve tried out have fallen short of those ambitious statements. Far from offering a transcendent experience, they seemed gimmicky, not to mention overpriced.

But Willy’s Chocolate Experience got my attention, largely because the event, a debacle that reportedly ended in tears, could, in no credible way, pretend to sell awe by the $44 ticket price.

The company behind the production, House of Illuminati, had used generative AI to advertise a show where “dreams become reality.” But the projection equipment, the linchpin of these fantasyscapes that use light to turn any physical object or surface into a life-like display screen, didn’t arrive in time. That meant the kids who showed up for the event didn’t get to see “giant mushrooms filled with sweets,” “colossal lollipops,” or “candy canes that seem to touch the sky”—just a warehouse in Glasgow, Scotland, filled with a few props. Any illusion that they were taking a jaunt through Roald Dahl’s candy factory (or even its off-brand cousin) was shattered. Within hours, angry parents got the whole thing shut down.

The internet ate it up. For the next few days, visuals from the Wonkapocalypse, like a lonely plastic prop rainbow that resembled a Jeff Koons sculpture and an exhausted-looking actress hunched above a candy laboratory, were inescapable on my social media.

I watched as these posts about the breakdown of a constructed reality mingled alongside real news stories about the world we live in, at a historical moment where our shared sense of actual reality has catastrophically broken down. As all of this blurred together, it helped me to finally see what it is that people seek out in immersive entertainment.

I don’t think they believe they’ll find wonder there. But they know they’ll find a carefully curated escape from the present.

Our current immersive era, in this way, can be understood as the 21st century’s answer to the pleasure gardens of the past.

Commercialized pleasure gardens, seemingly natural spaces of leisure drenched in artifice, emerged in the 17th century as entrepreneurial English aristocrats opened up their private gardens to the public for the price of admission. Inside the walls of these manufactured Edens, artists created complex trompe l’oeil, which made two-dimensional surfaces on elaborate walking paths appear three-dimensional. Musicians played “fairy music” to establish a fantasy atmosphere, and over at Vauxhall, one of England’s grandest pleasure gardens, workers even imitated nightingale calls after the birds left the grounds in 1730. The ultimate act of fiction, of course, was that pleasure gardens created a space where commoners could brush elbows with the gentry.

Scottish author Tobias Smollett captured the feeling of entering one in his 1771 travel novel The Expedition of Humphry Clinker:

I was dazzled and confounded with the variety of beauties that rushed all at once on my eye. Imagine … a spacious garden, part laid out in delightful walks, bounded with high hedges and trees, and paved with gravel part exhibiting a wonderful assemblage of the most picturesque and striking objects, pavilions, lodges, groves, grottoes, lawns, temples, and cascades, porticoes, colonnades, and rotundas, adorned with pillars, statues, and paintings; the whole illuminated with an infinite number of lamps, disposed in different figures of suns, stars, and constellations.

Like today’s high-definition floor-to-ceiling projections, light, as Smollett observed, played a crucial role in creating the mirage.

Pleasure gardens boasted thousands of colored lamps, called illuminations, as well as painted linen canvases backlit by candle or lamp light, and endless fireworks of all shapes and designs, according to Anne Beamish, a scholar of pleasure gardens. I was struck by how modern the stylish pyrotechnic displays feel in Beamish’s descriptions. “Some involved attaching fireworks to structures or devices that moved,” she writes. “Others relied on sheets of paper that were pricked and backlit. As the paper moved, an optical illusion gave the appearance of movement, such as falling water.”

In the 18th century, pleasure gardens hit their peak popularity worldwide. They attracted a new, rising middle class with expendable time and income, eager to trade the smog and stench of industrializing city life for a few hours of gilded fantasy. Working people could enter these walls of pretend, roam curated pastoral grounds, and experience the latest technological wonders of the day, like the hot air balloon.

Not everyone could buy a ticket inside, however. In the U.S., pleasure gardens were predominantly white-only. Still, there are records of Black pleasure gardens in New York, such as the African Grove, established in 1821. Two hundred years later, for a 2021 MOMA exhibition, the artist Tourmaline characterized the Black pleasure gardens as “spaces where people dreamed up and then practiced versions of freedom during slavery.”

Black pleasure gardens show that these grounds of amusement held the potential to be revolutionary. But more often than not, pleasure gardens ended up bound by self-imposed limitations. As cultural anthropologist Deborah Philips reminds us in Fairground Attractions: A Genealogy of the Pleasure Ground, they were created for profit. Because of this, she argues, they were constructed as “unthreatening and contained” spaces meant to “reassure rather than challenge.”

This is worth remembering as we enter a new age of immersion today.

Our modern inheritors of commercialized pleasure gardens can offer a dreamy respite to people eager to leave behind their worries for a few hours. But though they will continue to promise the world—or at least sights out-of-this-world—they are not set up to achieve such feats.

The Wonka experience’s empty warehouse is a good reminder that, by design, these new pleasure gardens can offer us little more than a trick of the light.

The post What the Wonkapocalypse Can Teach Us appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Shell-adorned bikini tops. Fishtail skirts. Starfish accessories. Seafoam green eyeshadow. Expect to see all of this and more riding the waves of Disney’s latest live-action blockbuster, The Little Mermaid.

In other words, “mermaidcore”—the personification of aquatic glamor and physical beauty—is back.

Since antiquity, mermaids have embodied our fantasies of the briny deep. Inscrutable, various, and generally scantily clad, these half-fish, half-woman mythological creatures are shapeshifting female figures known the world over, from the sirens of the Aegean, to the jiaoxiao of the South China Sea, to Africa’s Mami Wata, often traced to the coast of Guinea. Historical accounts of mermaid sightings continued to flourish on through the 1800s. While none ever produced a real mermaid, hoaxes like P.T. Barnum’s “Feejee Mermaid”—a Frankenstein-ed monkey head sewn onto a fish’s tail—were plentiful, capturing the public’s attention and coin.

But as the industrial revolution’s rising tide traded wonder for rationality, “real” reports from the ocean began to quiet. Rather than disappear into myth, mermaids performed their next act of transformation: moving from the water to the stage and silent screen. The early 1900s productions that resulted popularized what I’d argue to be the first mermaidcore. And the skimpier and transgressive fashions inspired by them played a tangible role in helping girls and women traverse societal barriers in style and sport.

Of all the early mermaid tales, it was Neptune’s Daughter that might have captured the public imagination the most. Staged in the Hippodrome, the famed New York theater that boasted a stage 12 times larger than its Broadway counterparts, the show was an instant hit when it debuted in late 1906. Audiences flocked to see the actresses playing mermaids dive into an 8,000-gallon clear tank filled with water. People were astounded by how they were able to stay underwater for so long. While the “day of miracles and the belief in miracles is past,” as one reporter commented, the theatrical effect in Neptune’s Daughter kept the illusion intact. To maintain the fantasy, rehearsals were conducted with utmost secrecy, with management threatening to fire anyone who gave away the gimmick (submarine chambers) that allowed actresses to linger below the surface. Such precautions paid off. “No spectacular invention or innovation of recent years has aroused such popular interest or awakened such widespread curiosity as the mermaid scene,” observed the New York Times.

A silent film production of Neptune’s Daughter followed in 1914, shot on location in Bermuda, and starring champion swimmer and actress Annette Kellerman, “the Australian Mermaid.”

Swimming, long considered a “masculine domain,” had opened up to women relatively early in Kellerman’s home nation. Around the 1830s, middle-class women swam recreationally, and by the time a young Kellerman entered the pool at 9 years old, a burgeoning competitive scene had started up. Because Kellerman was bowlegged, her parents had put her in swimming lessons as a form of physical therapy. While she was weak on land, in the water, she found she was athletic and graceful. She began winning swimming and diving titles against girls and boys. By the time she made her way to the U.S., in 1906, she had already attempted to swim across the English Channel and was well on her way to achieving international fame.

But when Kellerman arrived in America, she found women’s swimming culture was stuck in Victorian times. Because there was no long-distance swimming to be had, she first made money doing water stunts in vaudeville performances. She also began campaigning to change American swimwear. As she reasoned, if women wanted to enter the pool, they first needed the freedom to abandon the cumbersome bathing costume of wool skirts, blouses, stockings, and swim shoes that was literally weighing them down.

The best costume is the cheap, ordinary stockinette suit, which clings close to the figure, and the closer the better. It should be sleeveless and there should be no skirts. Skirts carry water and retard the swimmer. They are very pretty and appropriate for the seaside, but not for the swimming pool. Stockings may be worn if they fit tightly, but under no circumstances should shoes be used.

That excerpt comes from the 1907 article “Swimming Hints,” one of many editorials Kellerman authored to encourage more women and girls to lose their bulky swim costumes and adopt a modern one-piece swimsuit.

But perhaps nothing did more to change the conversation than her mermaid motion pictures.

Kellerman made her U.S. film debut in 1911, starring in two Vitagraph shorts, The Mermaid and Siren of the Sea, which catapulted her to stardom. Because the fantasy scenes she starred in filtered her form-fitting swimwear “through a fictional layer,” as author Christine Schmidt put it in her 2013 book The Swimsuit: Fashion from Poolside to Catwalk, Kellerman was able to transcend the norms of the day. Through her mermaid persona, the star could help neutralize “any suggestion of indecency” that her outfits might have otherwise engendered had she appeared in them on screen.

The public watched with fascination. Kellerman was heralded by the press at the time as being “the most perfectly formed woman in the world.” And an audience hungry to be just like her followed her every move, eager to copy everything about her, including, in time, the trademark “Annette Kellerman suit.”

By 1914, the very same year Kellerman starred in Neptune’s Daughter, America’s premier amateur sporting league, the Amateur Athletic Union (AAU), officially permitted “mermaids,” as they called competitive female swimmers, to participate in sanctioned competitions. And by the time Kellerman’s film career wound down a decade later, most women were starting to wear the same one-piece “Kellerman suits” the star first championed at the turn of the century.

Mermaidcore, of course, wasn’t alone in opening up the waters for women, but it undeniably lent its sparkle to the cause, paving the way for them to transform their reality on land.

Today, this glamor can continue to offer us a way to shapeshift through fantasy. After all, as Kellerman herself once put it, to become a mermaid is to simply “see a woman make a fish out of herself.”

The post Welcome Back, Mermaidcore appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Whether you love or hate people speaking as their pets, using cutesy terms like “pupperinos” and “heckin’ good bois,” or sharing grammatically incorrect cat speak memes, the concept of a “pet voice” has become just as much a part of the social media landscape as images of furry and scaly companions themselves. Indeed, speaking with, and through, animals to convey our very human emotions and thoughts is one of the hallmark practices of internet culture.

But the pet voice phenomenon isn’t unique to the social media age. Media and pets have always been intertwined, and owners and animal fans alike have played with communication through them for hundreds of years.

As historian Katherine Grier details in Pets in America: A History, as early as the 19th century, people were exchanging letters to each other in the voices of their furry companions. Taking advantage of the rise in photographic technology, they also began printing out photo plates of their animals to distribute to their friends. Such interpersonal practices can be seen as the Victorian equivalent of sending cute pet pictures via messaging apps like Snapchat or WhatsApp.

But not all early pet practices were so innocuous. Fashion scholar Julia Long problematizes the way humans have used pets as props. She points to an 1886 Washington Post interview with a woman “lavishing her valuable affection” on the pet beetles she wore as a fashion statement. “When asked if the beetle ‘knew’ his owner,” the reporter notes, “this lady expressed extreme anguish and astonishment at the thought of her beloved pet not returning her affection.”

The thought of wearing a beetle like a brooch, let alone keeping one as a pet, may give many readers pause today. But as a communication tactic, the practice speaks volumes. The act of anthropomorphizing, or attributing human characteristics to non-human entities, is a distancing concept. By pretending to speak as another, particularly one that cannot actually speak for itself, the woman giving the beetles a “voice” becomes removed from their utterances. This distance, however slight, has immense implications in today’s mediated times. One of the most famous New Yorker cartoons features two dogs at a computer saying, “On the Internet, nobody knows you’re a dog.” The cartoon demonstrates how speaking through pets plays into the internet’s ambivalence, or the difficulty in ascertaining definitive meanings in online communication.

It’s especially important we understand this tactic today because the anthropomorphized pet voice has taken on new life in the era of Instagram and TikTok. And as I discuss in my new book, The Internet is for Cats: How Animal Images Shape Our Digital Lives, such animal imagery is often used to mask some of the more insidious parts of internet culture, such as hate speech and harassment.

The “chill amphibian meme” of Pepe the Frog, who the Anti-Defamation League declared a hate symbol in 2016, shows how malicious human posters can warp seemingly innocent images of pets and animals. Additionally, in speaking as an animal, even a cartoon frog, the human poster puts distance between themselves and what they have said. On the opposite end of the political spectrum from Pepe is Jorts the Cat, a popular Twitter account that tweets aggressively pro-union and labor rights sentiments from behind the veil of an orange tabby. And paradoxically, it hits harder when an internet cat critiques a governor over legislation.

The distancing of anthropomorphism also has become a lucrative benefit for businesses and brands. In recent years, pet influencers have skyrocketed in popularity—and become intertwined with sponsored posts and advertising deals. As internet scholar Sophie Bishop has discussed, brands engage in a “safety dance” when recruiting influencers, a process that involves the use of automated tools to gauge the potential risk of a prospective human influencer damaging the brand. Pets bypass that safety dance entirely. Even though there is always a human poster behind a pet influencer, the distance brought by the pet voice makes them “safer,” and in turn, more marketable.

When I attended 2020 PetCon, the annual pet influencer and internet celebrity convention, founder Loni Edwards told the room as much:

You get all the benefits of the human influencer with the cuteness of pets. Everyone loves pets. They’re joyful, they’re cute, they make us happy. But they’re not going to get drunk at a party and hurt your brand like a human influencer.

While pet voice is comforting and common, it does bring with it serious implications to think about in our accelerated and ubiquitous communication in the digital age. But all LOLz are not lost. As one person with a pet account told me, “[S]ocial media used to be this fun thing, but now it can come with a lot of negativity and stress. So, I have followed certain cute animal accounts as just a way to have a burst of positivity in my feed as I’m scrolling. Being able to add to that is nice, too.” As long as we remember the human behind the pet voice, pet images and videos can be a reprieve from the more cumbersome aspects of being online.

The post Pet Voice Isn’t All About the LOLZ appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

It spiraled from there, an easy escape from what was becoming an increasingly rough year.

Ever since the sitcom emerged in the late 1940s, the format has offered a bulwark against reality.

The first sitcom, short for “situation comedy,” featured real-life married couple Mary Kay and Johnny Stearns. The domestic comedy, characterized by its screwball sensibilities, drew from the couple’s own experiences as newlyweds. (As Stearns later explained, “If Mary Kay got stuck in an elevator, it would give me an inspiration for us getting stuck in an elevator.”) By the time Mary Kay and Johnny wrapped in 1950, the early sitcom ecosystem was flourishing as adaptations of American radio comedy programs began making the leap from the airwaves to television, with shows like I Love Lucy and The Goldbergs establishing the familiar lexicon of the genre we know today.

From the beginning, there was a reassuring sameness to the narrative structure. Turn on an episode, and you knew what to expect; should you have to step out for a moment, you could trust that when you returned, you’d find the same familiar faces interacting together on screen, like no time at all had passed.

Most importantly in sitcoms, there’s an implicit understanding: nothing will ever go that wrong. That’s because the sitcom is an episodic fantasy of life. Sure, the real world peeks and prods at the edges of the sitcom universe, but you know that here a resolution will always be forthcoming in 30 minutes or less.

It’s what makes the sitcom such an ideal comfort watch. Or at least that’s what it’s been for me the past few months, after some unexpected health issues led me to spend a good chunk of it in bed.

It was when I found myself rewatching the same episode of Frasier for the third time in as many months that I started to realize just how swept up in sitcoms I had become.

The season four episode is classic Frasier, with a stream of jokes, including a set up where Frasier’s brother, Niles Crane, takes out a magazine advertisement in hopes of expanding his private psychiatry practice. The script was intended to read: Jung specialist servicing individuals, couples… groups… Satisfaction guaranteed… Tell me where it hurts.

Niles is played by David Hyde Pierce, whose comic instincts verge on poetic, and the punchline comes when he learns that the magazine got the copy wrong. Flustered, he storms into the room to tell Frasier what happened. Rather than Jung specialist, they’d printed “hung specialist.”

Without missing a beat, Frasier asks, drolly, “Any calls?”

A white-faced Niles responds, “It’s a telethon.”

I could probably watch his delivery 100 times, and it would still make me smile.

Maybe, I told myself, this is me coping. Research does suggest that repeated exposure to positive distractions and familiar fiction can have beneficial health effects.

But it also felt a little too easy to get lost in this rosy glow of syndication—a gleam you can now live in perpetuity, thanks to streaming.

It made me think about the late French sociologist Jean Baudrillard. Toward the end of the 20th century, he argued that society was losing the distinction between the cultural products we consume and the real-life things that they are based on. He didn’t point to the sitcom, but surely, it’s an example of this—a simulacrum of American life. We’re watching a writers’ room’s idea of a make-believe U.S., drawing comfort from a false nostalgia of a world that was never really there in the first place.

The sitcom’s departure from reality is only becoming more pronounced with time. The genre has traditionally centered on the lives of “middle class” characters, but while the signifiers of class on television have always been aspirational, as the financial gulf widens between these characters and their real-life counterparts off screen, it has made sitcoms feel increasingly fantastical. For a point of comparison, at the start of the ’70s—the decade that brought us The Mary Tyler Moore Show, The Jeffersons, Laverne & Shirley, and the list goes on—61% of American adults were considered middle class, according to Pew Research Center data; by 2015, amid rising inequality, only half of the population fit the definition.

This could be one of the reasons why, today, there’s such a demand out there for classic sitcoms. We can’t live these lives in the real world, so we can at least live them second-hand on screen.

The escape into sitcoms increased in the pandemic, with Nielson reporting an audible uptick in viewership during COVID’s height, noting that “when audiences needed a break from reality, they traveled back in time to tried-and-true picks like Friends, Family Matters, The Golden Girls, and Two and a Half Men.”

In an unprecedented moment that wiped away so many of the things that sitcoms promise—connection, community, stability—is it any surprise that more people sought the comfort of these fables of what life could look like?

It’s certainly what’s drawn me to them now.

I’ve come to think of this year as my year of sitcoms, to crib off the title of My Year of Rest and Relaxation, the Ottessa Moshfeghi novel that’s neither restful nor relaxing.

Like Moshfeghi’s heavily medicated narrator who tries to escape her life through sleep, I know on some level, I’m hiding away in the well-worn grooves of these characters’ healthy, happy fictions.

But the pull of the sitcom is seductive. Watching them can feel like living in a day dream. You’re staring across the screen at lives that, on the surface, seem like they could resemble your own, except here, everything is shaped around human connection, and the worst thing that can happen to you is that you’ll learn a life lesson. 

I know life is not a sitcom. But the more of them I watch, the more I wish we could take inspiration from the worlds they’ve imagined and bring the best of them into our own. Because all I know is that I’m not ready to wake up yet.

The post My Year of Sitcoms appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

In the first episode of AMC’s superb television adaptation, the white, aristocratic Lestat propositions Louis, in this iteration a Black Creole business owner, to “be my companion … be all the beautiful things that you are and be them without apology for all eternity.”

This Black queer reimagining—still set in New Orleans, but in the Jim Crow rather than the antebellum era—isn’t some anomaly in vampire fiction, but rather follows the larger cultural transformation that the bloodsuckers have undergone over the last two centuries.

After all, vampires never really die (Rice, for one, wrote 13 Lestat novels), but each generation continues to reincarnate them based on the fixations of the present.

British writer and physician John William Polidori is often credited with kicking off the gothic subgenre in 1819 when he published the short story “The Vampyre; A Tale.” But it’s less remembered that the same year Polidori’s narrative debuted (famously modeling the titular vampire after his demanding hypochondriac patient, Lord Byron), an American author knocked off the concept, immediately linking vampirism with race.

Set just before the Haitian Revolution, the novella, “The Black Vampyre; A Legend of St. Domingo,” begins after a slave owner attempts to kill a boy who cannot be killed. At first, the vampire seeks revenge, but after marrying and turning the slave owner’s wife, the two not only form a family unit but eventually take a cure that enables them to return to their human forms and to Christianity. But their happiness can only go far in a world defined by skin color; the ending reveals that their mixed-race descendant, now a resident of Essex County, New Jersey, finds himself also experiencing “the thirst of a vampire.” As Katie Bray argues in her dissertation “Haunted Hemisphere,” the plot takes a wide view of race in America, questioning “not only putatively pure racial lines but also uncomplicated U.S. national narratives.”

Homosexuality, too, was present in early gothic vampire literature. J. Sheridan Le Fanu’s Carmilla, serialized from 1871-2, became the prototype for the lesbian vampire novel, told through the perspective of a young girl named Laura who catches the attention of a mysterious stranger who comes to stay with her family following a graphic carriage incident. LGBTQ scholar Ardel Haefele-Thomas’ analysis of Carmilla and 1897’s The Blood of the Vampire, Florence Marryat’s story about a mixed-race psychic vampire named Harriet, suggests that both plots vacillate between “demonizing and showing empathy” toward their undead characters. This ambiguity—epitomized by Laura’s torn recollection of her vampire companion Carmilla, remembering her as “sometimes the playful, languid, beautiful girl; sometimes the writhing fiend”—underscores how these stories were not intended to be read as clear-cut morality tales. But if Carmilla and Harriet aren’t wholly demonized, their vampirism still makes them, ultimately, a stand-in for society’s fears, rather than fully realized characters with whom the reader can sympathize and identify with.

As it so happened, the same year readers discovered The Blood of the Vampire, Bram Stoker’s immortalized the vampire trope as we know it today with Dracula. To the Victorians, the bloodsucker was still, above all, a gothic monster.

It would take another half century before the vampire could begin to be re-imagined as a romantic lead, and daytime television is partly to thank for our change in appetites.

Dark Shadows, the ABC daytime soap opera that ran from 1966 to 1971, acquired a cult following thanks in part to Jonathan Frid’s magnetic portrayal of the immortal Barnabas Collins, a vampire disgusted by his own habits. Then, five years after it off the air, came Interview with the Vampire, the debut novel of a 34-year-old graduate student in New Orleans. The novels in Anne Rice’s gothic horror series The Vampire Chronicles weren’t romances, but they humanized vampires, depicting them as three-dimensional characters.

Notably, Rice, who died in 2021, was a vocal champion of gay rights, and by treating her characters with care and giving them a clear homoerotic undertext, she invented a modern vampire. Joseph Crawford, a scholar who’s extensively researched the origins and evolution of the paranormal romance genre, argues that Rice helped to shift public mores, priming readers to be ready to accept this reimagining.

“The figure of the vampire has historically been used as a representation of marginalized and vilified social groups,” he writes in his definitive book The Twilight of the Gothic? and led by Rice, the “revisionist vampire fiction of the 1970s was, to some extent, a symptom of changing social attitudes towards such groups.”

Steamy vampire stories that were more sympathetic toward the undead skyrocketed in popularity, first in the U.S. and then abroad. Nearly a century after Stoker’s Dracula, even the Count was ready to be given a love interest by the 1990s with Francis Ford Coppola’s reimagining (a genre-shifting, queer-coded blockbuster that Coppola made at the same time he was working on a project on the AIDS epidemic).

Vampire romances have continued to be in hot demand in the 21st century with the rise of properties like The Twilight Saga, The Vampire Diaries, and True Blood. Over this period, the vampire may have picked up some new attributes (like being sparkly or “vegetarian”), but its basic DNA hasn’t changed; what’s changed is our perspective of the vampire’s condition. More and more, the public is considering what it means to date the other instead of demonizing it.

“Every age embraces the vampire it needs,” notes Nina Auerbach, a scholar of late 19th-century English literature.

Maybe there’s something especially hopeful, then, in the way AMC’s Interview with the Vampire continues to build on this context, bridging race, sexuality, and romance, with all their inherent nuance and complications.

Watching the show is a reminder that though the undead may be timeless, us mortals caught in their thrall are constantly changing. In this way, we, too, crave new blood.

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While the movie itself isn’t interactive (something that could have helped rehabilitate the plot), the release reflects Netflix’s growing interest in choose-your-own-adventure-style programming. Since the debut of Black Mirror: Bandersnatch back in 2018, the streaming service has been steadily investing in these titles. It’s easy to be a little cynical about this interactive programming push, which feels like a ploy for Netflix to find new relevance as a mobile gaming platform, especially now as it reports its first subscription losses in a decade. Nonetheless, I’m excited to see where it goes, because this format is ripe with the potential to break us out of linear narratives and democratize storytelling, giving each viewer the power to explore possible scenarios and decide what should happen next. 

A page from a Song Dynasty (960-1279) printed book of the I Ching (Yi Jing, Classic of Changes or Book of Changes). Public Domain.

The concept behind interactive storytelling isn’t new. Arguably, it goes all the way back to the I Ching or Book of Changes, the ancient Chinese manual of divination and prophecy that employs cleromancy (the tossing of lots) to read its predictive text. Before the computer age, contemporary scholars Anthony J. Niesz and Norman N. Holland make the case for expanding the definition of the rudimentary interactive form to include “alternate endings to any narrative, either from authorial revision (as in Great Expectations [1861]) or deliberately (as in The Threepenny Opera [1928])”.

But it’s American authors Doris Webster and Mary Alden Hopkins who get credit for pioneering the concept as we know it today with the 1930 publication of Consider the Consequences! The romance novel, which included 43 alternative endings, empowers the reader to decide the fates of Helen Rogers and her suitors Jed Harringdale and Saunders Mead.

Scholar James Ryan, who shed light on this forgotten novel in 2017, pointed out that while the concept of the plot may seem obvious to us now, Webster and Hopkins’ interactive branching narrative was revolutionary at the time. “It’s a radical idea,” Ryan said in an interview with KZSC Santa Cruz, “that you can pack multiple plot paths into a book and let the reader decide which paths to take.”

Another foundational text during this era was Argentine writer and poet Jorge Luis Borges’ 1941 short story “El jardín de senderos que se bifurcan” (“The Garden of Forking Paths”). While the philosophical work is not interactive itself, the paths and directions of alternative realities it suggests became an important early offering to the field of interactive fiction—and is even considered the earliest precursor to hypertext, as defined by computer programmer Theodor Holm Nelson, who coined the term more than two decades later, in 1965, as a form of non-sequential writing—or “a series of text chunks connected by links which offer the reader different pathways.” (Of interesting historical note, Borges’ contemporary, American scientist and policymaker Vannevar Bush, also foreshadowed the concept of hypertext with his fictional “Memex” machine, which used “trails” to link books, records, and other forms of communications in a kind of nonlinear narrative.)

Advances in technology continued to push interactive fiction out of the theoretical and into the conceptual. Jumps in movie-making, for example, led to the debut of the first interactive film, the Kinoautomat, in 1967. Premiering at the Czechoslovak Pavilion at the World’s Fair in Montréal, the film (which was originally titled Člověk a jeho dům: One Man and his House) was shown in a custom-built theater with green and red buttons installed on every seat. During the screening, the action was paused every so often, so that a moderator could appear on stage and ask the audience to vote on questions that propelled the plot forward, such as:

Should Mr. Novak let a woman clad only in a towel into his apartment, just before his wife arrives home?

Should Mr. Novak rush into an apartment despite a tenant blocking his way?

Should Mr. Novak knock someone out to bring attention to a small fire?

However they answered the prompts, the movie always ended in the same way: a building in flames. Was the film a political statement against fixed elections? A satire of determinism? These questions swirled as it became a smash success of the World’s Fair, and awakened filmmakers to the possibilities of interactive cinema. According to director Radúz Činčera’s daughter Alena, after its debut “all the big Hollywood studios” wanted to license the Kinoautomat, but the Czech government, which owned the film, refused to sell.

Dustjacket of the 1930 first edition of Consider the Consequences! by Doris Webster and Mary Alden Hopkins. Fair Use.

If things had gone another way, the Kinoautomat might have become a household name, pushing Americans’ idea of what interactive technology was capable of. It joined the ranks of other experimental literature emerging at the time, such as Julio Cortázar’s 1963 book Rayuela (translated to English as Hopscotch in 1966), which let the reader “jump” through 155 chapters with the help of a “table of instructions,” and Robert Coover’s disquieting 1969 short story “The Babysitter,” where a night of babysitting could be as mundane as a quiet night watching TV or end in increasingly disturbing scenarios, like the babysitter being stalked, raped, and murdered.

Instead, most Americans’ first encounter with interactive fiction came thanks to the mass-market success of the Choose Your Own Adventure novels. Lawyer Edward Packard thought up the concept in 1969, as he was telling his daughters a bedtime tale about a man on a desert island. “I couldn’t think of what should happen next,” Packard later recalled to Marketplace, so he asked his kids what they would do. The girls provided two different answers, and Packard saw a genre with potential. “They could not just identify with the main character, but they could be the main character,” he said.

Packard struggled to sell the concept at first—“It was just too strange and too new,” he later said—but publisher and author R.A. Montgomery, having worked in role playing-game design himself, finally recognized its potential. In 1979, the Choose Your Own Adventure series officially launched with The Cave of Time, where you might encounter a T-Rex or a UFO, depending on which route you opted to hike.

The series attracted a wide readership; however, its formulaic style gave the genre a bad rap. As one English scholar put it bluntly, “in terms of literary quality, many of the multiple-storyline books are true skunks.” But it’s important to remember that the series was marketed toward children, who loved the straight-forward simplicity of the questions, like, “If you take the left branch, turn to page 20. If you take the right branch, turn to page 61. If you walk outside the cave, turn to page 21.”

Today, books, video and computer games, television and films continue to push the boundaries of what interactive fiction can do. The potential control readers can have over the story can, at times, feel downright radical (take author Stuart Moulthrop’s mind-bending hyperfiction text Victory Garden). But the decisions don’t have to be extreme to make an impact; there’s something to be said for the more quotidian of the choose-your-own plots that continue to crop up (for me, one of the most anticipated offering on the horizon right now is the first interactive rom-com). After all, whatever weight the decisions carry in these plots, the act of choice remains central to each of them, and helps to remind us that not only is there a multiverse of possibility out there, but that each of our decisions can create a ripple effect.

As Consider the Consequences! argued back in 1930, “life is not a continuous line from the cradle to the grave.” Rather, the novel explained in its introductory text, our journeys are made up of “many short lines, each ending in a choice, and a branching right and left” that lead us on to ever more choices.

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But while the technology to share these images in Ukraine may be more advanced than ever before, the visuals of families in bomb shelters have always brought conflict to our doorsteps, making geopolitics concrete. A litany of photographs, government films, and Hollywood movies over the last 75 years communicates the public’s fears of nuclear war. These images offer us a nuclear temperature check of sorts, reflecting the shifting optimism, anxieties, and cynicism of the times.

It all started in Japan in the 1940s, in the immediate aftermath of the atomic attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, when images of hibakusha (Japanese survivors of the bomb) and of cities reduced to rubble first emerged. Since then, Japanese popular culture has always kept the atomic bomb front and center, from genbaku bungaku (atomic bomb literature), to the recognition of Godzilla (1954) as an atomic text, to the global success of anime films such as Akira (1988) and the work of Studio Ghibli.

Hiroshima, U.S.A. Collier 1950. Courtesy of Smithsonian Magazine.

Each nation had its own unique cultural reaction to the bomb. In the U.S., the Federal Civil Defence Administration, founded in 1951, set out to convince Americans that if the bomb did drop, they could survive the fallout. Over the course of a decade, the agency attempted to quell public anxiety over nuclear exchange with the Soviet Union through public education campaigns, school room drills, and exercises.

Nearly half a billion FCDA civil defence booklets depicted the All-American family in their fallout shelter—creating a key visual focal point for early conversation about nuclear war in the U.S. Decidedly suburban, heteronormative, and middle class in nature, this visual of white American families carefully lining shelter shelves with canned goods or taking their children by the hand as they walked toward their underground refuges broadcast a clear government-sanctioned message: A family that is together, well organized, and ready could survive the next war. Of course, the messaging had as much to do with domestic politics as with preparedness, reinforcing traditional ideas about marriage and family values.

Federal Civil Defense Administration Photograph Family Fallout Shelter. Courtesy of Digital Library of America.

Overlooking complex questions of class, race, and sexuality, this doctrine of DIY survival also shifted responsibility away from the state.  Putting the onus on the individual might have been a cheap and attractive policy for the government, but the notion of a nation of shelter builders taking survival into their own hands could only go so far. With the development of the hydrogen bomb and the knowledge that nuclear fallout caused cancer and cardiovascular disease, by the 1960s the first generation to grow up in the shadow of the bomb began to question whether nuclear war was winnable in a traditional sense.

Women’s Activities and Conferences [1958-1960]. Courtesy of Digital Commonwealth.

The anti-nuclear movement grew out of this, and with it, pop culture images of the family fallout shelter took a turn for the cynical. In a 1961 episode of the Twilight Zone, a quiet dinner party turned into a community tearing itself apart as fictional suburbanites scrambled to get access to the only fallout shelter in town. In the run up to the Cuban Missile Crisis, the Saturday Review covered a town hall meeting in Hartford, Connecticut, which descended into chaos when a community member threatened to shoot anyone who approached his private shelter.

Depictions of fallout shelters continued to reflect the public’s shifting moods as the Cold War continued to fluctuate in temperature. When Vietnam dominated headlines in the late 1960s and 1970s, cultural discussion around family shelters largely disappeared; the shift from atmospheric to underground testing of nuclear weapons, the passage of the Partial Test Ban Treaty in 1963, and a decade of easing U.S.-Soviet tensions also fostered an atmosphere of relative ease. But a generation later, the election of Ronald Reagan returned nuclear war to watercooler conversation. By 1984, politicians were obsessing over the “Evil Empire,” and pop group Frankie Goes to Hollywood topped the charts with “Two Tribes,” a single lamenting Cold War jockeying.

When the Wind Blows (1984). Courtesy of Wikipedia.

Fallout shelters re-emerged—though the family of the 1950s happily starting a new life underground had become a quaint relic of an already bygone past. In the 1980s, as global stockpiles of nuclear warheads totaled over 50,000, visual culture around shelters got increasingly bleak. With anti-nuclear activism heating up, the arts presented a society on fire, where the fallout shelter took on a new symbolic role: futile final bastion in a world devoid of hope. In the United Kingdom, where NATO stationed cruise missiles in 1979, filmmakers contributed two notable visions of bunkered families facing the end of the world. The animated feature When the Wind Blows (1986) told the story of an elderly couple, Jim and Hilda Bloggs, living in a tiny Cotswolds village after a nuclear strike rendered Britain a radioactive wasteland. The terrifying docudrama Threads (1984) dramatized the devastation of thermonuclear war in Sheffield and traumatized a generation.

The Cold War’s conclusion—the “end of history,” as Francis Fukuyama declared—repurposed shelters as historical relics, and in turn, they became objects of nuclear nostalgia in the culture. In the 1999 film Blast from the Past, for example, the family shelter became the perfect premise for a romantic comedy. Adam Webber (played by Brendan Fraser) is sealed away in his family’s bomb shelter during the Cuban Missile Crisis and emerges into the bustling modern world of the 1990s. Having grown up on a television diet of I Love Lucy and The Honeymooners, Webber’s efforts to find love render the fallout shelter a harmless time capsule of Cold War kitsch. Players of the first instalment of blockbuster video game Fallout (1997) took control of a “vault dweller,” similarly emerging from a bunker, to seek adventure.

Recent events have brought back images of family shelters, and today’s sobering shelter TikToks are whipsawing public consciousness again. It’s hard to predict what this latest paradigm shift will bring, with the situation in Ukraine being so fluid. What’s clear is that visuals of fallout shelters still shake us. Removed from carefully curated government pamphlets or movie sets, self-documented social media provides an uncensored and devastating look at the human costs of conflict through bunker life. The question is: will these new depictions of bunker life encourage this generation to create a world where nuclear fallout shelters can return to objects of harmless fiction once again?

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Created by a software engineer in Brooklyn for his partner in October 2021, the online word puzzle game gives you six tries to correctly guess a five-letter word each day. Its no-frills design, once-daily refresh, and spoiler-free way to share results on social media has turned it into an overnight success.

But the game’s swift pop culture ascendancy, which led to it getting acquired by the New York Times for upward of $1 million in January, isn’t unprecedented. In fact, 100 years before Wordle entered the scene, an even bigger word puzzle craze swept the nation.

I’m referring, of course, to the “cross-word mania” of the 1920s.

The modern “word-cross” appeared for the first time in print in the December 21, 1913 edition of New York World’s FUN Supplement. Section editor Arthur Wynne, trying to fill the Christmas insert, drew inspiration from his native England, where Victorian newspapers and magazines regularly published word squares, acrostic puzzles where the same words can be read both across and down.

Building on this prototype, Wynne debuted FUN’s Word-Cross Puzzle. The game looks different than what we’re accustomed to today—it’s shaped like a diamond, with 72 white squares clustered around a blank center. But the instructions are familiar: “fill the small squares with words which agree with the following definitions.”

The word-cross—which eventually became cross-word, likely due to a type-setting accident, and later dropped the hyphen to become, simply, the crossword—wasn’t supposed to be a regular feature in the weekly supplement. Wynne found the prep work tedious, and typographers resented setting up the puzzle shape for print. But players were hooked; when the word game didn’t appear one Sunday, they demanded to know where it had gone, helping ensure that game stayed on as a regular feature for FUN.

Readers weren’t just doing the crossword, they were also actively sending in construction submissions for consideration. Wynne bemoaned the boxes of submissions that started filling up his office. “The editor of FUN receives an average of twenty-five cross-words every day from readers,” he wrote in 1915, adding drolly that “the puzzle editor has kindly figured out that the present supply will last until the second week in December, 2100.”

By 1921, Wynne had had enough, handing over the reins to Margaret Petherbridge, an aspiring reporter who was languishing as secretary to the paper’s Sunday editor. At first, Petherbridge viewed the task much as Wynne had—a Siberia assignment—and like him, she rubber-stamped submissions for publication. Because of this, early crosswords regularly went to print untested and riddled with spelling errors, misnumbered definitions, and incorrect clues. But this changed after famed columnist—and noted crossword fan—Franklin Pierce Adams joined the World. Recognizing the game’s high-profile fan base, Petherbridge realized that she could make a name for herself if she really took ownership of the game. In turn, she and her colleagues, F. Gregory Hartswick and Prosper Buranelli, began setting the puzzles a full week ahead, proofing them for errors and establishing uniform standards, like only using dictionary words for game play.

The crossword was coming into its own, but it would take another year for it to truly go viral. Anecdotally, Richard Simon’s aunt, a fan of the game, is to thank for this: as the story goes, she inspired Simon and his partner Max Schuster to publish the world’s first crossword book as a launching pad for their new book publishing house. The $1.35 book —which came with an attached pencil (a cross-promotion with the Venus Pencil Company)—proved to be a smash success, laying the foundation for Simon & Schuster to become one of America’s biggest publishing houses.

The crossword started appearing everywhere. Families used them to announce engagements, including the pending union of Miss Katherine Langley and James G. Bentley of Pennsylvania. The Baltimore & Ohio Railroad announced it would put dictionaries on trains to “come to the aid of traveling cross-word puzzle enthusiasts.” One speaker at the Amateur Athletic Union’s annual meeting took the time to bemoan how much the hobby had bled into practice time. “The fascination of the puzzles is keeping the athletes of the country away from their training,” he alleged. “They put on their running or bathing suits and then stay in the locker rooms asking each other for words that fill in the white spaces of the puzzles.”

“Crosswords were the Beatles of 1924,” Petherbridge, who would go on to become the New York Times’ inaugural crossword editor under her married name, Margaret Farrar, later remarked.

By 1925, even Queen Mary (along with “lesser members of the royal family”) had taken up the pastime. But with all the buzz—including an original Broadway musical Puzzles of 1925 and a pop song—came pushback.

A crossword fanatic ringing up a doctor in the middle of the night to find the answer to a clue. Reproduction of a drawing after D.L. Ghilchilp, 1925. CC BY 4.0

Just as Wordle has its share of detractors (a phenomenon only magnified by social media), a look back at newspaper reports from the 1920s shows that the crossword faced its own number of critics.

Some of these complaints against the crossword feel quaint. For instance, the president of the British Optical Association blamed the crossword for eye strain: “Qualified opticians,” he said, “could perform valuable service to the public in warning them against over indulgence in the pastime under wrong conditions.” Other accusations, however, that sought to dismiss the game’s worth, read more like contemporary Twitter screeds. Take one pastor who used his sermon to declare that “the working of cross-word puzzles is the mark of childish mentality.” He continued, “there is no use for persons to pretend that working one of the puzzles carries any intellectual value with it.”

A literary debate around puzzling also raged: Should the crossword be taken seriously? The Carnegie Library of Pittsburgh, for one, “answered in the negative” when it reported it had no crossword books on file, and no plans to acquire any. “[T]he city’s money should be spent for more serious purposes,” one icy statement read.

Combing through coverage of crossword puzzles in the 1920s, I’m struck by how convinced its detractors were that the game wouldn’t have long-term relevance. But of course, we know now that the crossword wasn’t going anywhere. Currently more than 50 million Americans do them, and the crossword appears in every major daily newspaper.

Those who want to write Wordle off as a fad today would, in turn, do well to heed the advice of the Chicago Department of Health of 1924, which prescribed the crossword for “general health and happiness.” The slim bulletin, titled “Crossworditis,” asserted that “part of our lives and much energy must be put into amusement, to satisfy the play instinct within us.”

Wordle and the veritable cottage industry of derivatives that have already sprung up in its wake—from Heardle, which uses audio clues to popular songs, to the NSFW Lewdle, to the Taylor Swift-themed Taylordle—may be more contemporary in tone and tech than the crossword of the 1920s, but they continue to fulfill that same need for a new generation of fans.

After all, as one reporter observed when the crossword was just taking off, puzzling itself—“despite its furious vogue at the moment”—was nothing new: “Through the ages it runs,” the article noted, “with each age setting for itself its own brand of riddle.”

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In conversation with Los Angeles Times columnist Sandy Banks, Brownstein, who is a senior editor at the Atlantic and senior political analyst at CNN, explored the complexities of the early 1970s, and the era’s relationship to the mainstream social engagement of pop culture today.

The discussion, titled “How Did Politics and Pop Culture Become One?,” captured a moment of change, as the entertainment industry as a whole struggled to appeal to a new, younger audience in the early ’70s. For Brownstein, the year 1974, in particular, became a pop-cultural crucible, as mainstream music, film, and television were simultaneously at a peak of creative output and sociopolitical critique. Musicians Jackson Browne, Linda Ronstadt, and the Eagles each released career-defining albums, while an open, collaborative atmosphere flourished in Laurel Canyon, and politically incisive films like Chinatown hit theaters. And it was the only year that the socially engaged TV series All in the Family, The Mary Tyler Moore Show, and M*A*S*H were on television at the same time.

Those iconic works were able to reach audiences because of the rise of the Baby Boomers, who represented an oncoming tide whose sheer size overwhelmed the older audiences to which media had previously catered. This new generation was demographically more diverse, steeped in 1960s progressivism and the Civil Rights Movement, and had the economic clout to drive industries to cater to their zeitgeist.

It was a marked change from the 1960s, Brownstein explained, when film and television “steadfastly ignored all the changes that were happening around them.” Take Walter Cronkite: Brownstein pointed out that the broadcast titan “would spend half an hour every night documenting all the new fissures opening in American life, and then the CBS prime-time [programming], and the other networks would spend the next three-and-a-half hours trying to erase them from viewers’ minds.”

But the dial moved in the ’70s, as attitudes that had been considered radical or countercultural in the years leading up to them—including equal rights for Black people, gay people and women—were given new visibility through this shift in mainstream entertainment.

It was that same transformation, Brownstein argued, that inspired a stark cultural divide that laid the foundation for a divisive partisanship that has characterized American politics ever since. Over the course of his career, Brownstein observed how this led to the American political scene becoming dominating by the “culture wars.” If the 1960s was the “big bang” that laid the foundation for this transformation, he said, it was the 1970s where that change was reinforced by a growing rift between conservative politics and the entertainment industries.

“The early ’70s was a collision between this massive younger generation that was bringing its set of new cultural and social attitudes into society, and an older generation that was, by and large, really unnerved by those changes,” he said. Conservative politicians like Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan learned they could win elections by appealing to the older electorate’s fear of cultural change. At the same time, the entertainment industry faced a drastically opposite economic incentive to reach a younger, more progressive audience. The powerful creative energy ascendant in Los Angeles that resulted produced a kind of “golden hour,” he said. He recounted that the various artists he interviewed described a newly open, expressive, and collaborative atmosphere, with a distinctive sensation that creative and radical forces were suddenly beginning to coalesce.

But that bubble burst “once it was clear that fundamental revolution was not coming to the country,” said Bronstein. In turn, movies and television reverted to less-challenging work. Because the increasing representation of Black, female, and other marginalized voices in the early ’70s had been mostly limited to on-screen talent, rather than in executive roles, they, too, had less power to push back against this tide.

Still, said Bronstein, the baseline had undeniably shifted, as the increasing visibility and attention to diversity made mainstream the progressive attitudes that had grown through the 1960s, which have been maintained and expanded.

That unique moment in 1970s L.A. both prefigures, and allowed for our own, Brownstein argued. He pointed to a lineup of socially critical films like Judas and the Black Messiah and Nomadland, which stand in the running for Academy Awards, and studios bend to audiences’ demand for far greater racial and gender diversity and equal representation as creators, producers, stories and talent. And as certain reactionary politicians stoke fear of change across large swaths of the nation at the same time.

Now, as then, Brownstein places his bets on pop culture. Pop culture is an indicator of social attitudes ten years on, he said, speculating that a decade from now, ideas that may now seem radical will gain greater airtime and wider acceptance. “You can mobilize voters, on a short-term basis, by promising to stop change. But you can’t actually stop the change,” he said.

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