I Was a Teenage Communist

(Preface: This post will both advocate and dissent as penance for my sin of confusion. I offered to switch with Bill because I will be out of town next week, but alas, I was actually scheduled for this Thursday instead of next. I’ve set this entry so that you’ll be able to follow it in an Advocate-Dissent-Advocate-Dissent pattern. This may not be the most cohesive thing that I’ve ever written, but then again, I suppose that’s my style now. Onward.)


Like any self-respecting high school student in rural Pennsylvania, I was on a quest for some sort of cultural capital. I wasn’t popular. I didn’t play sports. Those were the mainstream of respectability. I took the low road and decided to become one of the smart kids. Not just the “I get good grades” smart kids, but one of the smart kids who champions a cause or a movement in order to appear cool.

I traded in my redneck past for Red Fever.

I became obsessed with Communism my freshmen year with my stage debut at Blackhawk High School as Mrs. Trotsky, wife of Leon Trotsky, in David Ives’ Variations of the Death of Trotsky. Between my “nyet, nyet, nyets” and atrociously groan-worthy puns (the best being “Hot-to-Trot...sky”) on stage, I devoted my time to learning everything I could about the my comrades. I made every academic project red-centered, ranging from Animal Farm to the Hollywood Ten to Dr. Strangelove. I even changed the candy hearts I included with my high school sweetheart’s Valentine’s Day present to say things like, “Pinko Love is True Love” and “Stop ‘Stalin’ My Heart.”

More recently I’ve decided to return to my redneck past and embrace it. I come from a long line of farm folk and people who use the word “them” as a demonstrative. However, I couldn’t let my Commie fascination go. I needed something to marry the two. And it seems that I have: 1950s American culture. The perfect combination of ignorance and knowledge, hope and despair, common folk and my beloved Reds. I am home.

This is the excitement I brought to reading Klein’s Cold War Orientalism. Not only is about 1950s culture and Communism, but there’s a picture from The King and I on the cover. My final high school performance was this very musical, in which I played one of the King’s many wives. The whole time, I felt as though we were all being extremely offensive, but I never said no to theatre. One of my most offensive scenes not mentioned as of yet by Klein is the one in which Anna dresses the wives in hoops and heels and we clomp around the stage like cattle. When the King comes in, we all bow by crouching on the ground with our posteriors facing him, and that’s when Anna makes the shocking discovery that Easterners don’t wear “undergarments.” Oh, what Rogers and Hammerstein will do for a sight gag.

However, I’ll start out by giving Klein more credit than critique. My only other exposure to 1950s American culture was a high school class taught by the assistant football coach where I earned 20 bonus points for hula-hooping longer than anyone else. I found Klein’s writing style to be extremely accessible and clear. In the introduction, Klein gives us a great overview of some of the history that goes into the specific moment we’re going to examine with an emphasis on the U.S.’s previous Eastward attention and the process of decolonization occurring simultaneously with the expansion of U.S. power after WWII. Her defense for the work that cultural texts perform is strong overall, and I was particularly impressed with the integration of Williams’ “structures of feeling” with the upcoming sentimental education. The most important parts of the introduction were her two large questions of national/individual identity (something that thanks to our work with Medovoi we now know was a significant concern and a term coined largely by Erik Erikson) and her claim about the goal of middlebrow cultural producers. And so we all know what I’m talking about here, I’ll reproduce them below.

Question of Identity (9):
1. How can we define our nation as a nonimperial world power in the age of decolonization?
2. How can we transform our sense of ourselves from narrow provincials into cosmopolitan citizens of the world who possess a global consciousness?

Claim about Producers of Middlebrow Culture (13):
**[T]hey sought to situate their audience in relation to a world increasingly understood as interconnected, whose ligatures were defined by the logic of the Cold War.

These are addressed very well in the first two chapters, and I sincerely hope that she’ll continue to address them in the remaining chapters.

Dissent-o-Rama: My only beef with the introduction is that it doesn’t contain many definitions other than sentimentality (which has a very detailed and helpful definition). We do not immediately know what she means by Middlebrow except for through a shortlist of authors and others. She does this much better in Chapter 2, but I didn’t like having to wait to hear it. Also, I’ve opted not to discuss Chapter 2 so much until my final dissenting note because I feel like it plays into the binaries I’ll make a fuss about in a minute here.

In the first chapter on sentimental education, I must say that my mind was definitely blown. Klein recognizes that containment is the main principle taught in history courses, which is certainly true in my experience, and I had no idea about the simultaneous narrative of integration. Klein’s definitions of both are again very helpful and provide us with some kind of context for both the development of politics and the development of culture during this era.

Dissent-o-Rama: Klein states, “At a time when the U.S. economy needed truly global access to markets and resources in order to sustain itself, the defense of the nation demanded securing that access through a variety of political and military means” (25). This entire breakdown of making the right-wing happy with containment and the left-wing happy with integration (while, of course, both plans of actions will keep the other in check and educating/fulfilling the needs of the masses) seems a little too binary for me. It’s just too convenient to be entirely believable. I’ll admit I could be too skeptical here--I’m no expert. If it is working in this kind of division, then perhaps my faith in world order will be restored. In the meantime, I’m onto you, Klein...

However, one point in the first chapter where this sort of binary is helpful is in the discussion of where the pro-Commie in the U.S. comes into play in the 1930s with the Spanish Civil War and the fight against fascism. It is a critical point, I feel, that it is made perfectly clear that Communism was really seen as opposite of fascism, which was at the time a serious problem, particularly in Spain as Franco’s troops were terrifying everyone. This transition to the establishment of the Popular Front makes more sense with that sort of a context. However, I was surprised to discover that the Popular Front dropped the political value/agenda and art and focused on how it unites people. I suppose it’s an admirable quality, but as a theatre folk, I think art is always used for a political purpose.

And now let’s get into my favorite part of this book so far: People-to-People. Now here’s something I have only heard of, but I didn’t know anything about really. I appreciated Klein’s great attention to this program as it combines elements of missionary traditions of internationalism as well as Soviet cultural strategies to form some kind of a sense of “community” where everyone is helping out everyone else. It also helped gloss over some of the negative practices that right-wing containment advocates pushed for (i.e. naming names and a slew of other party games that McCarthy developed). Here is a point in Klein’s argument where I am 100% on board. She notes that People-to-People is both “a failure and a success” (55). It made people back in the U.S. feel great, but where it was working in Asia, it was seen as “lip service” and being entirely fake.

I think this point is extremely pertinent to today where there are all sorts of “causes” to advocate, and a Facebook page and a bracelet to go with each and every one of them. I’d like to look at People-to-People as a cautionary tale of what happens when you think that donating a little money through a group to a cause means that you understand what’s going on with the cause as a whole or what the money is specifically doing. Now, don’t get me wrong, I have several causes (aside from communism) that I support, and I consider myself to closely align with the idea of integration and being a part of a global community (though I think Klein would say that this is a result of my education, and I’ll agree to that with enthusiasm). What I’m really saying here is that in helping others whether it’s through a national program or just the goodness of your heart, there is a fine, fine line between actually helping and making yourself feel better to gloss over something else. Lesson learned, Klein.

OVERARCHING DISSENT: Rather than going on in this style throughout the rest of Chapter 1 and Chapter 2, I’ll cut to the chase and jump to my dissent. I am concerned about how the information is ordered in this book. I don’t know if it’s because I’ve been thinking about postmodern literature lately (where we can’t trust the narrator as he or she chooses to tell you a story in a particular order and we become paranoid about the way the narrator is holding power over our reading experience--sorry, I’ve returned to Barth’s The Floating Opera as of late) or exactly what it is, but let’s look at the main players in order.
*Chapter 1: Government and their policies, bundled under the metonymy of “Washington.”
*Chapter 2: Middlebrow folk--presumably white because everyone else addressed in that section falls into the “other” category.
*Chapter 3: People who leave America.
*Chapters 4 & 5: Musicals (I’m very much looking forward to these chapters so I won’t attack the order of them until I know what she’s saying).
*FINALLY Chapter 6: Asians in America.

Why do we have to wait so long? During Chapter 1, I kept wondering about the reception of all of these programs and policies. I suppose that is better addressed in Chapter 2 as we can see by the sales of the two magazines where people were getting their information about these projects and policies. However, who is considered to be an American? Who’s a reader? Since this is a book about Cold War Orientalism, I was really hoping to see something about Asian-American identity. I took a class in undergrad on Asian-American identity and memoir, and all I can think about is how Asian-Americans and immigrants must have felt during this time period. There certainly isn’t any clear sense of identity, and the fact this demographic has been excluded thus far in Klein’s work in the earlier part of the book. I know that in the last chapter, we’ll get to that. But I really think that this is an issue that should be included earlier and throughout--or at the very least in the introduction. For as much as Klein shows us about propaganda and government control of education, she may not have considered that we may begin to question her arrangement of information. I know that arrangment is a great challenge in writing any sort of longer work, but still, I have concern with this.

But to end on a high note, I do believe that this text contains great information and reveals to us the side of integration that we do not get from our regular history classes. She also works hard to provide enough background to understand how containment of communism made the Cold War a heroic duty while integration made the Cold War much warmer and a way to expand our horizons to include the entire globe. In this way, there was something for everyone in the Cold War.

Finally, I leave you with a modern day example of integration and the promotion of world unity/coexistence with a video from They Might Be Giant’s recent Grammy-winning album, “Here Comes the 1, 2, 3s.” The song is called “One Everything,” and it even includes some mapping, which I know Thomas will appreciate. It’s not one of TMBG’s Communist songs (there’s one about Stalin that I particularly liked in high school), but it will warm your Cold War hearts. You’ll never be the same:

where the heart is

Christina Klein does an excellent job of finding the sentimental in much of Cold War culture. In her examinations of middle-brow culture, we see sentimentalism in cross-cultural narratives of humanist similarities in a variety of forms and more sparse similarities of experience (e.g. "suffering," as seen in Dooley's writing - 91). While these traditional media were seemingly powerful forces in American life (even affecting public policy, such as The Ugly American’s “inspiring” the Peace Corps - 88), they were not the only ones. BeyondReader's Digest,The Saturday Review, and similar entertainment media, Klein positions us with an understanding of the pervasiveness of sentimental rhetoric during this period in our history.

Klein’s use of sentimentality inscribes a broad methodology that she rightly compiles into a quite effective marketing technique for American politics. Sentimentality here is broadly understood as any tug on the heartstrings of America. Toward this end, Klein demonstrates the use of maps and the image-based interpretations that can be made from something as seemingly objective as a factual diagram of the world. Those who look closely will recognize that every map has a political agenda: country positioning, size of latitude and longitude, even country colors all affect emotive interpretation. The Department of State’s Bulletin on page 45 splices the USSR, more or less centers on the Americas, and uses a frequently-seen Northern-expanded map that forces focus on North America, Europe, and Northern Asia.

More stunning however is Life’s “World Struggle” map reprinted on page 35. This middlebrow informative map has shifted attention to the North Pole. While some are actually more proportional than on “normal” maps, many countries’ sizes are extremely distorted. The shift in perspective is most surprising. On this map it seems almost plausible to see the Soviet Union from one of the United States! It shows the proximity of the enemy and surely surprised the average Life reader by helping them recognize just how little space there is between the Soviet Union and the United States. No longer could they claim that distance helped to isolate them from any real danger. The map is in some regards accurate, although it is an effective piece of misleading propaganda, keeping readers from recognizing that the significantly inhabited portions of the USSR and of the US were not nearly as close as a polar map would suggest.

These are logical images that demand emotional responses, politics branded by sentimentality, as Klein describes. They show the world in a symbolically objective form, a map, but they play on fears and on prejudices. The color key of the “World Struggle” map is effective. The strong contrast between the pristine US and the red-tainted Soviets has more meaning than simply the difference between light and dark. The Soviet Union literally bleeds into other countries it has infected. Arrows indicating influence demonstrate this and strike down on other countries, while the US, which has the benefit of being right-side up (as seen on a “normal” map), exudes a soft, light embracing set of curving arrows. These maps are perfect examples of the sort of sentimental spin that official channels put on the Cold War.

Klein later introduces other policies, programs, and media that all use this same emotion-laden methodology, but the maps are the most convincing to me. Novels are fiction, journal articles alongside literary criticism feels like an opinion piece, and many governmental programs were based on personal experience, not on “facts” per se. Maps are not readily understood to be inflected with meaning. They, like the schools in which they’re often found, are often understood to be neutral terrain in a way that no other institution really claims. This, education, is another theme that Klein excellently pursues, but I’ll leave that for someone else to take on.

Where the Girls Were (Going)

In looking at the female rebel it would seem that no two follow the same path to eventual social and cultural acceptance whereas there was a somewhat more formulaic progression that accompanied the male rebel from bad boy to proper cog in the social machine. For the boys, they inevitably seemed to have to trade the switchblade and “chickie run” for the briefcase and morning commute. In addition, the ultimate goal was usually to supplant the domesticated father figure, either within the home, or outside of it in the realm of the peer group. This does not seem to be the case for the female rebel. There is rarely a singular social model that that the newly formed female rebel is marching towards. Medovoi alludes to this by including such varied examples as Silver, Gidget (great name by the way), Sarah Jane, and Tomboy. In many of the boy-centered narratives that he mentions, the audience can essentially swap one main character out for another without much harm done to the overall message. The same cannot be said for the girls.

It may be hard, initially, to draw parallels between many of the characters that Medovoi includes, other than the obvious fact that each enacts a period of rebelliousness, but the fact that they all reach very different destinations is of the greatest value. I feel that it is in this fact that Medovoi is making his larger point. He notes that, “what draws these narratives together, however, is the shared implication that girls need to pass through a wild moment, a phase of intelligible and justifiable rebelliousness, before they can be expected to embrace, in their own way, the domestic values associated with suburban womanhood” (314). It is the mention of the “domestic values” that leaves the reader to take the next step. At this time, what is expected of the female rebel? Where does she end up after she leaves Girls Town or when she steps off of the beach? He goes on to elaborate that, “most of the rebellious girls of the fifties were not definitively feminist figures,” but also that, “a path can thus be clearly traced from the fifties girl rebel to the radical politics of the lesbian and women’s liberation movement” (314). There is confusion here, and it is this uncertainty that runs throughout the discussion of the female rebel.

This becomes clear in looking at the stories of Silver and Tomboy. They begin mostly parallel but diverge drastically by the time they finish. While Silver drives off with Jimmy and Mary Lee as the mother in a constructed nuclear family, Kerry enters into a heteronormative/homoerotic relationship with Lucky that bends every gender role in the book. Both, however, are depicted as having “succeeded” in emerging from their “wild moment.” The confusion that Medovoi seems to be getting at is on display as there are two diametrically opposed solutions being offered for the problem of the female rebel. One ends in the extremely conservative role of domesticity that holds with popular convention and the other begins to lead us down the road to the women’s liberation movement that Medovoi mentions earlier. Kerry is able to retain her strength and power within the Harps without having to relinquish her desire for Lucky, whereas Silver, on the other hand, is last seen headed into the sunset with the asexual Jimmy and her sister/daughter Mary Lee. So where is the female rebel headed, and what role is she expected to fill once she is through sewing her wild oats? By including these varied examples, Medovoi seems to be posing that question to the reader, and possibly implying that the answer rested much more in the hands of the girls themselves than it did for any of the boys.

Female Rebels at a Crossroad

In this section of Rebels, Medovoi attempts to answer where the girls were by tracing various examples of female rebels in Hollywood film, thus arguing that the “bad girl” and the “tomboy” were the equal counterparts of the rebellious bad boy. I full-heartedly agree with him because I don’t see it possible that the bad boy culture, charged with rebellious sexuality and promiscuity, could exist without a female counterpart. While I was fascinated by Medovoi’s close readings of Imitation Life, Girls Town, and Gidget, I was a bit disappointed with the similar conclusions to each unique female rebel, which is that, in the end, all rebels, both male and female, return to domesticity and the social system form which they deterred: “Transformed by Gidget from a bum into an aviator, Kahuna—now returned to his original name, Bert—even succumbs to the suburban gender philosophy espoused by Francie’s mom” (301). Likewise, Gidget also must revert to the accepted social system because “for her [Gidget] to remain a surfer would thus condemn her to a kind of eternal prepubescence, in the film’s ideological terms as always too young for romance” (299). For this reason, because it’s linked to maturation, the return to the system seems obviously inevitable. What would happen to the rebellious males and females who abandon domestication never to return? In anticipation of this answer, whatever it may be, I think it’s obvious why the rebel eventually succumbs to the system after having a bit of good teenage fun. What I was left wondering is what does it all mean? Does the return suggest a complete return to the rigid gender roles that the rebel culture threatened, and what, if anything, was gained or lost? Did the female rebels of the 1950s become second wave feminists of the 1960s?

In terms of emerging identity politics, I found Medovoi’s analysis of how the “Other” was the key to determining good and bad behavior to be most interesting in that Sarah Jane is excluded from the rebel culture in which the white male or female rebel appropriates blackness but does so among a white social circle. There is certainly a clear distinction between enacting blackness and being black. In Medovoi’s analysis of the film, it seems that for the white rebel, “whiteness”=conformity, “blackness”=rebel but for the black rebel, “whiteness”=rebel, “blackness”=exclusion. Such distinction creates an ongoing identity crisis for Sarah Jane, who wishes to disown her black heritage, and calls herself white, but cannot escape her black identity for as long as her mother is living proof of her blackness. In that sense, Sarah Jane identifies herself with the white bohemian rebels, and yet when her race is revealed, her ability to create her own identity is co-opted by her white counterparts because of her mother’s skin color.

In addition to the identity issues faced by Sarah Jane, Medovoi distinguishes two outlets for female rebels: sexualized femininity and female masculinity. With these categories in mind, I found myself asking who is the true feminist—Tomboy or Lizzie? Medovoi raises a few questions and problems with female sexuality and female agency through the bad girl and the tomboy. I particularly took issue with the two rape scenes. On the one hand, we can argue that women acquired a sense of female agency through the exploration of their sexuality. However, the rape scenes suggest otherwise; Lizzie embraces her sexual desires and undermines the double standard that men are naturally promiscuous and women pure, only to have that double standard reinforced when she is gang-raped because she “like[s] doing it with lots of boys” (310). This scenario seems to suggest that if a woman is too open with her sexuality, mimicking male sexuality, ultimately getting raped shouldn’t come as a surprise. Likewise, Mary Lee of Girls Town finds herself in a similar situation and Medovoi argues that “the film makes it equally clear that when girls play the sex card they leave themselves exposed to dangerous boys” (270). They leave themselves exposed suggests that the woman is at fault for her rape. The double standard regarding male and female sexuality and its linkage to “anticipated” rape is a social problem that many late 20th-century feminist authors extensively criticize.

On the other hand, Tomboy, who completely rejects femininity and promiscuity, “must keep at bay not only the desires of the other boys but her own” (306), thus denying her an outlet for female agency. However, the “safety” in which the Tomboy finds herself from the dangerous boys seems to suggest that the successful female rebel must cross into the realm of homosociality (and arguably homosexuality) and stay there. Gidget and B.L. cross into the homosocial realm but, ultimately, Gidget abandons it for a domestic heterosexual relationship with Jeffrey, a.k.a Moondoggie. The ideal, then, would be Tomboy and Lucky’s relationship, which manages to remain in the “homosexual” realm. Even with all the possibilities of rebellion and sexual exploration, female sexuality remains a stigmatized issue that second wave feminists would surely address. Furthermore, one problem with the portrayal of the sexually promiscuous girl as “deb” (rebel failure) and the masculine female as “tomboy” (rebel success), I think, plays a critical role in the development of feminist=butch dike, and the negative connotation associated with feminism and feminist objectives seen in late 1950s, into the 1960s and probably beyond.

Rebelling against Medovoi

To dissent against Medovoi, I want to play his discussion off of Susan Douglas’s. In particular I want to discuss two things: the depiction of “rebel girl” characters and the “How do we get to the identity politics movement of the 60s/70s?” discussion from Medovoi’s conclusion.

First, the “rebel girls.” Medovoi talks about four in detail: Silver from Girls Town, Sarah Jane from Imitation of Life, and the titular Gidget and Tomboy. In the case of each, Medovoi articulates how the character in question “rebels” against things like traditional femininity, domestic suburban familiality, and heteronormative relationships with boys. Silver, for instance, eludes “good girl” chastity and enjoys a certain agency granted by her sexuality, although ultimately the relationships she ends up with are of a much more desexualized, familial nature. Tomboy is able to be “one of the guys” in the Harps gang and precariously negotiates the hinterland between the misogynistic and sexually aggressive men and the powerless, promiscuous “debs” whom they use for sex; Tomboy acknowledges that to enter into a sexual relationship would feminize her, make her a “deb” and thus powerless.

Now, I couldn’t help but wonder how Douglas would respond to these characters. I believe she would respond to them in much the same way that she responds to girl characters from Peter Pan, Father Knows Best, and so on. Douglas’s point in criticizing such characters is clear: they offer girls in the audience constricting and often conflicting options for femininity: “American women today,” Douglas explains, “are a bundle of contradictions because much of the media imagery we grew up with was itself filled with mixed messages about what women should and should not do, what women could and could not be” (9). In light of this, I think Douglas would look at Medovoi’s “girl rebels” and conclude the same thing: they’re just as much a “bundle of contradictions” as non-rebel girls and don’t offer full or appealing opportunities for womanhood. Their sexuality is a problem, their trying to have power or be men’s equals is a problem, and their negotiation of having a full life and a romantic relationship is a problem. So, rebels they might be, but positive women characters they’re not.

Granted, Medovoi does concede, “This overarching narrative of girls in revolt possessed both limitations and strengths (314, emphasis added). He’s right here: we shouldn’t expect—and he doesn’t suggest—that these 50s “girl rebels” can be seen as great, strong, full, feminist role models. Still it seems clear that these “rebel girl” characters don’t offer girls in the audience any better identification than their more passive, traditional counterparts.

Secondly, we have Medovoi’s conclusion, in which he takes a stab at a question he introduces in the introduction to his book: how can we understand the 60s/70s identity politics movement as having grown from, or as somehow rooted in, these 50s rebels? Ultimately I didn’t find his efforts to answer this question mollifying. Granted, to be fair once again to Medovoi, that’s one hell of a tough question to answer. Still, he spends most of his time in the conclusion describing what happened in the 50s-present “identity movement” rather than suggesting how that big change came about. He offers us various constitutive elements for us to consider: Fordism, de-industrialization, third-world freedom struggles, the move away from “liberation” and toward “multiculturalism” and “diversity” rhetoric. But these elements still don’t answer the question; I’m still not clear on what 50s rebellion has to do with identity politics movements.

Douglas does a much better job of this. Although arguably her task is easier, she establishes a link between the 50s and feminism in a straightforward, convincing way: “The truth is that growing up female with the mass media helped to make me a feminist, and it helped to make millions of other women feminists too [. . .]” (7). After her brief discussion of the “identity crisis” that media brought about in women of this era, I was convinced. Feminism came about, Douglas tells us, partly due to women viewing, reacting to, responding to, and rejecting mediated ideology about womanhood in the 50s-60s. Medovoi has nothing to offer like this.

Medovoi comes closest to actually addressing the question when he says that 50s rebels “were not very different from the political activists of the late sixties and early seventies, excepting for the vital fact that the latter’s ‘emergent selves’ deployed the politicized value of ‘identity’ on behalf of social constituencies whose interests were strongly served for several decades by the force of its claims” (323). Um, okay, Medovoi. But what we really want to know is, how and why did that “politicized value of ‘identity’” change in the 1950-1970 scene? How did a teenage boy’s disappointment in his dad’s frilly domesticity become “We’re here, we’re queer, get used to it”? Can we, as a class, consider some possible ways to respond to this question?

Shining a Spotlight on Anonymity

   I’ll admit it – I’m one of those girls Susan Douglas talks about, the girl who exclaims, “I’m not a feminist!” but makes sure to follow it up with a lame, “But, uh, equal rights for women.” I was surprised at how well Douglas knew this side of me, and how compelling her argument was for why women so often shun the label of feminism while at the same time upholding its ideals. Until today, I had never stopped to consider why the idea of feminism made me feel uneasy. As Douglas reveals, the media encourages women to be at once strong Americans and delicate girls, beautiful at all times yet never vain, rebellious and submissive. These contradictory messages create a rift between the views we share with others and those we keep to ourselves.

            I appreciated Douglas’s focus on the mothers of the 1950’s. Her description of the abrupt changes in propaganda directed towards women to suit the country’s changing economic and political needs fascinated me. It is outrageous that the media can claim to simply reflect “reality” to viewers when over the course of a few decades, women were first commanded not to steal jobs from men, then enticed by visions of glamorous female workers, and finally told that women who wanted jobs were “neurotically disturbed.” The women who endured this “ideological roller coaster,” as Douglas calls it, made up a significant yet largely forgotten portion of the population.

Did anyone else have trouble believing the excerpts from What Makes Women Buy? I was in shock as I read accounts of how “the instability of woman’s bodily functions and nervous system makes her a more emotional customer than a man” and that “women’s verbal aptitude accounts for the fact that they like to gossip and have the last word” (57). At first I found these preposterous and ignorant claims to be funny, but it is sobering to realize that fifty years ago, this was no joke.

I loved Douglas’s combination of fact with personal anecdotes – her participation in the period about which she’s writing makes the experience much more real for the reader. When she recounted her eagerness to see the scandalous adulteress Liz Taylor in her new film “Cleopatra” after vowing in church never to see it, I truly got a sense of the powerful allure of mass media and the many futile efforts to suppress it.

Janice makes a good point in her entry – some of Douglas’s arguments are unreasonable. I think Douglas realized this though, and accepted that in writing a book whose sole purpose is to expose the media’s portrayal and manipulation of a generation of women, she would be bound to alienate some readers. And although, as she admits, she “cannot speak for everyone,” her hilarious and brilliantly argued study of Baby Boomer culture succeeds in placing the emphasis away from the famous stars and leaders of the 1950’s and towards the anonymous female consumers.

Doing the Nasty: Teases & Sluts

"[N]o boy, not even her steady boyfriend, would ever respect her again, and no decent man would marry her, because she wasn't a virgin" (p. 63).

So since this post is about sex, I feel it's essential to mention how Seattle's education system emotionally scarred me before I get into the bulk of it so any intermittent sarcastic comments aren't misconstrued as genuine affirmation. There may be some personal information disclosed here that will make you wildly uncomfortable. You'll love it.

I don't know if my parents figured my sisters and Cosmo had already beaten them to it, but I never got that "sex is when people bump uglies" talk. Fortunately going to a public school took care of that when my 200 lb 2nd grade (well, 2nd-4th multi-age class) teacher found one of my 9-year-old classmates with a condom. She then decided to explain every horrifying detail about doing the nasty. I mean every horrifying detail, from positions to locations of anatomical parts I didn't even know existed. Why does a 7-year-old need to know what or where a cervix or a prostate is located? I mean, by the time I was 11 I had diagrams of every form of birth control out there, where to get it, how to use it, if it was effective against STIs, for his or her pleasure, what makes it ineffective, so on and so forth. Ugh, scarring stuff, let me tell you. I didn't even know a chick and a dick could do that, let alone just two dicks--but that's another, much happier story.

Now that we have that out of the way, after coming to college I learned my unpleasant and painfully detailed introduction to sex wasn't an American thing, but instead just seemed to be a Seattle thing. Instead every girl I talked to on this side of the continental divide seemed to have been fed the same thing that only abstinence is 100% effective, thought the pill blocked STIs, and seemed to think the more condoms merrier the blockade. They definitely needed those diagrams I had at age 11 much more than I did. Consequently, the moment they hit their pale, pasty, nerdy school they had a similar experience to that explained by Douglas: suddenly mommy and daddy were far away and they could go hump whatever they wanted, and damn the consequences. After all, come college the expectation seemed to switch from "all nice girls are virgins" to something closer to that in Grease's "There are Worse Things I Could Do" where "nice girls aren't teases". The latter seemed to have been the prevailing moral code in my junior high and high school though, while this change didn't seem to hit a good number of people I've talked to from the East Coast until they bumped into college.

This shift in morality is even evident in films very similar to the "whoops I got knocked up" flicks from the 1960s described by Douglas and more modern ones as well. In a manner similar A Summer Place and Love with the Proper Stranger, modern films like Saved and Juno both ended with the guys being happy with their knocked-up friend. In Juno, the two main characters end up happily making out afterwards, and while in Saved it didn't end with a romantic relationship seeing as to how the guy had a hot boyfriend, he still seemed pretty ecstatic about having a baby with his Christian friend while being a teenager. In both cases, the female characters "acknowledged the contradictions pulling them in different directions" (p. 74) in just the same way the characters in these earlier films seemed to be, so I'm inclined to agree with Douglas's readings of those films. The fact that we continued to have similar films with messages that "every girl must decide for herself" (p. 79) makes it obvious that the double standard about sex still exists to some degree, at least amongst high school students like in the films. After all, men screwing around are pimps, and women screwing around are either cougars if they're 30+ or sluts if their 30-.

Now for how much I happily downed every word Douglas said from the constant contradictions to the visual crack Cosmo's shoves down women's throats, mixing that odd dichotomy of "I want to be beautiful" with "you're all stupid for spending 2 hours every morning to look like a Castro Street tranny", there is one thing that has certainly seems to have changed from the 1960s to current times. At least in my experience, there isn't this idea that guys want to marry virgins anymore, while that was the idea parents shoved down their children's throats back in the day. Hell, most guys I know don't even want to date virgins anymore. After talking to a few of them while procrastinating writing this blog post, there seemed to be an agreement that dating a virgin meant you wouldn't get laid any time soon, while most college girls tend to put out fairly quickly. One friend even went so far as saying that he was interested in a girl who turned out being a virgin for about two years, but never ended up actually going out with her since she seemed more than happy to stay a virgin. Instead he dated a girl he knew would put out almost immediately and has been with her for a year now even though he says he doesn't like her as much. My friends are jackasses.

What's so wrong with wishing upon a star?

While I bought into a lot of Douglas’ arguments, there were a few topics she discussed and examples she cited that left an overall bitter taste in my mouth. For example, in the chapter entitled "Fractured Fairy Tales", Douglas discusses The Wonderful World of Disney and Disney movies in the late 1950s and early 1960s. She rebukes the way the Disney Princesses were portrayed with tongue in cheek remarks: “In the ensuing battle between the innocent, deserving, self-sacrificing girl and the vain, black-hearted, covetous woman, the girl won in the end, rescued from female power run amok by some handsome prince she had met only once” (29). I take argument with these types of remarks for several reasons. First, while I do agree that the females in Disney movies don’t necessarily portray strong, intelligent women or how life for women really was in the 50s, I don’t see why this lie is a problem. What else is Douglas expecting…an animated movie telling 5 year-olds that life as a woman is hard and tiring and unrewarding? No! Children are supposed to believe in princesses, and prince charmings, and the ability for any dream to come true if they just “wish upon a star”. That is just the essence of childhood and the innocence of youth. As a child, I was always dressing up in a blue Cinderella dress and plastic high heels, pretending to be the prettiest girl at the ball. Call me crazy, but I’m pretty sure I turned out just fine and have adjusted to the real world of hardships and truths even with these delusions of grandeur as a young girl.

However, I do recognize that I have grown up in a society that has a lot more respect for gender equality than did the children of the 50s and 60s. This brings me to the second reason why I don’t quite agree with Douglas’…because I know for a fact my mother, a woman born in the mid 1950s, grew up watching The Wonderful World of Disney every Sunday night with my uncle and grandparents as a weekly family event. And never once has she mentioned feeling betrayed at the unrealistic portrayal of women in the weekly show or animated movies (and my mother is somewhat of a feminist, at least by Douglas’ definition). Moreover, my mother has recounted multiple times the story of how, at the age of 18, she went to Disney World for the first time with her college roommate and they both stopped before the Magic Kingdom Castle and held each other and cried. Tears of joy were streaming down their faces because they couldn’t believe it was the castle from their childhood, the one they watched Tinkerbell fly around every Sunday night, live right before their eyes. If anything, this image brought back happy memories from her childhood. She did not once mention feeling upset, offended, or deceived as an adult due to watching Disney Princesses live happily ever after as a child. Sometimes ignorance is bliss.

I was very interested by the picture Medovoi painted of the conflicted nature of American culture in the 1950s Cold War era, particularly the way in which the new suburbam lifestyle was both idealized as the epitome of the 'Democractic lifestyle' and simultaneously scorned for 'domesticating' the men. We're so often sold on the idea of the 'American Dream', and at other times harshly warned away from it, that I'd never really considered that the dream itself might have been fragmented in such a way from the very beginning.

Another point Medovoi makes is how the Cold War was only, in a way, superficially about containment and spheres of influence, whereas the actual 'battles' were fought on ideological grounds. Considering this together with the previous concept, it starts to make some more sense -- the American Dream was just as much a product of the 1950s society as cars or soap, and it didn't matter so much whether the ideology behind it was coherent as long as it was convincing.

Similarly, the 'identity' with which Medovoi is primarily concerned is also rather blatantly just another product -- those who stood to benefit from it hoped to make others 'buy in' to their concept of identity, whether it be race, gender, sexuality. This can even be viewed in terms of brand consciousness, where part of the goal was to make sure that the wrong people (the outcasts of the outcast) did not buy into a particular identity in order to keep the purity of the identity from being watered-down.

Discovering the “Teenpic” Golden Formula

Reading Medovoi’s discussion on the two films Rebel Without a Cause and King Creole starring two of the most recognizable names of the 1950s and still today, James Dean and Elvis Presley, I realized that I had never seen either film. Medovoi’s description of scenes accompanied by photographs was not enough for me to be convinced by his argument. Medovoi explains that each film ended with the protagonist “rebel” mending their relationship with their father after a long rebellion against them. It seemed very cliché and expected that a Hollywood film would end this way. To see for myself, I watched the last scene of each film and witnessed the transformation that Medovoi describes.

Both films feel very formulaic since they follow a rebellious protagonist who protests against their “domesticated male” fathers. After a long rebellious streak, they reconcile with their fathers when they realize that they have grown out of their “rebel” stage. It is especially interesting when Medovoi refers to these two films as an “oedipal drama” because they both fit this template of a “teenpic” genre. Watching the last scenes of these two films reveals the realization of the protagonist as recognizing his own gender role and identity and accepting that of his father’s as well. There is a feminine and sensitive quality that appears in the rebels of both films. Jim, James Dean’s character begins to cry and latches onto his father’s leg as if he were a child begging for forgiveness for his rebellious ways and realizes his role as the child when his father states, “Stand up and I’ll stand up with you.” While Danny, Elvis’s character, is singing a love song on stage and shows his father that he has forgiven him through his performance. These images are the complete opposite of what is considered a rebel. It seems very sudden and conformist but at the same time expected for a Hollywood film that is directed towards a teenage audience. This happy ending formula for the teenage genre has continued to exist still today. I immediately thought of film such as the Breakfast Club that has the “rebel” character but by the end shows his softer side and wins the popular girl’s heart. Although it is completely opposite of the “rebel” role it is expected that the non-conformist ultimately conforms in one way or another. This transformation from “rebel” to “good guy” seems too sudden but as I stated before it is expected for a Hollywood film regardless of whether it was in the 1950s or 1980s. I agree with Medovoi’s use of explaining these rebel “teenpics” as “oedipal dramas” in a way but although I am advocating it is weird to think of these films about teenage drama and relate them to a more complex situation especially with the amount of success these films had amongst the teenage audience.

Feminism and Rebellion

Although Medovoi asserts that he will address this issue in more detail later, I found one of the most persuasive parts of his argument to be his discussion of the rebel in relation to feminism. Medovoi spends a great deal of time addressing the male persona within the culture of the 1950s. One of the emerging male roles became the rebellious one in which a male attempted to set himself apart from the rest of his peers. The element that was missing within this argument was something that I had not previously considered until Medovoi brought it up. How does this rebel male impact the behavior and thoughts of the women of the 1950s? Medovoi discusses this in the context of female characters in King Creole and Rebel. He writes, “For both Judy and Nellie, the experience and expression of erotic desire seems liberating. Judy is released from the feminine need to ‘be loved’ that is repeatedly thwarted by her father. Nellie in turn escapes the tedium of her alienated life at the shop. Suspended in these moments from the bad-boy narrative are feminist possibilities…”(Medovoi 209). I was struck by this quotation because it cast a different light upon the subject than I am used to. During this portion of the reading I was reminded of one of the strongest images of the 1950s that I have been presented with. In the 1970s sitcom Happy Days Fonzie is considered the rebellious male especially when viewed in the world of such clean-cut and respectable males as Richie, Potsy, and Ralph. Fonzie merely has to snap his fingers and a woman (or several) comes running into his arms. They giggle, look at him with doe-eyes and most significantly do not say much of anything. It has always been difficult for me to understand how these women would be so alright with being used in such a manner. I am certainly not saying that this behavior is appropriate, but I found some clarity within Medovoi’s claim that casting aside the need to be loved and instead favoring the freedom that come from expressing their desires. When I think about the 1950s, especially because I recently completed a course on feminist literature, I can hardly believe that the submissive role of women is all there was present in the decade. Despite what June Cleaver may have us believe about that time period, I have seen far too many works written by women of the time who were anything but submissive. These strong women may have been the type that Medovoi is discussing within Nellie and Judy. The freedom to express herself is currently and was in the 1950s, something crucial to women. The idea that the rebels of the time created an outlet for female expression is intriguing and encouraging. The discussion of what women desire is not necessarily something I would automatically connect with the time period. I am interested to see exactly where Medovoi takes this argument, and how he deals with contradictory examples who do not seem to want the rebel male. However, I agree with the initial claim that he makes that the rebel perhaps allows a part of feminist empowerment to be expressed.

Conformist Rebels

Most of Leerom Medovoi’s arguments and conclusions on the emergence of a teenage identity ring true to me, so dissenting has proven to be quite difficult this time around. The only thing I held some problems with tended to be the idea of the teenage population being able to actively deny conformity through rock’ n’ roll and the “realm of freedom” the musical genre created.
Medovoi seems to place “conformity” and “identity” as opposites, where one cannot have an identity while being a conformist and vice-versa. I tend to disagree with this idea. Mainly, I think the very idea of being a conformist is in itself an identity; it might not be a unique one, but it is some form of identity. In defining “identity,” Medovoi states that it “is conceived as the product of self-defining and self-affirming acts” (5). By this, if one naturally tends to follow the crowd and make decisions based on popular opinion, their identity is that of a conformist.
I also do not understand how the idea of a massive percent of the population suddenly deciding to rebel against conventional ideas of authority figures cannot be seen as a form of conformity against the man. If you are obeying these authority figures without question, you are conforming to their structures and rules, but if you are rebelling against them, are you not in some way actively aligning yourself with others against the set rules, and therefore conforming to a separate set of rules which oppose the lawful set?
I am not sure, but I think that one can be a conformist while having a unique identity, the point of classifying actions as conformity being motives. If one define their identity through acting normally and is unaffected by popular culture, then one could be said to be non-conformist. If one is actively attempting to be non-conformist, they are actually, in a way, being conformist – by acknowledging their awareness of others rebelling and deciding it is what one wants to be a part of, one is not unique in their identity, and so becomes a conformist non-conformer, a conformist rebel. One cannot be defined by something they attempt to be a part of.
If you cannot skate but you tend to hang around skate parks in hopes of being accepted by the crowd, you are not one of them but rather you become the ultimate conformist and fake, a poser. And so is the idea of the rebel. If you choose to actively follow and rebel against authority without true passion, you can only be a poser and never a true rebel. It is only in the motives and the authenticity of feeling that one can be a non-conformist.

Breaking new: McRebel defeats Commie Pinkos

One of the main arguments in Medovoi's Rebels works to establish the emergent process of the 1950' rebel culture and its natural transition into America's landscape.  As the postwar American workforce began to gravitate into the newly constructed suburbs, the emerging youth of that society defined constraints inherent of their environment and worked to distinguish themselves from their parents' normalcy.  The author parallels the basic premise of suburbs and their nonracial, classless living philosophy to that of communist Soviet Union.  Medovoi suggests that Fordism and the Cold War propagated the birth of the rebellious youth, and that these individuals embodied very "American" ideals.  Sharing motivations with the American Revolution, the rebel threw of the conforming restraints of a "parental" society and struggled to create a new independent identity.  Medovoi spends significant time discussing the newly formed concept of identity and the 1950's development of the adolescent as the teenager to build the foundation for the culturally necessary rebel.  

"Thus, if an adolescent exhibits a properly rebellious spirit before growing into a conforming suburbanite or an Organization Man, then she has effectively displayed the American self's sovereignty without necessarily sacrificing the eventual conformity of the adult" (23).  Simply put, if a teenager rebels and recognizes the importance of not blindly adhering to the collective consciousness, they exemplify what it is to be American.  Youthful questioning of the established system generates ideological prosperity and the weapons to fight communist tendencies.  Medovoi goes to great lengths to describe the new local of suburbia as a limbo between the urban and rural existence: a place that could potentially possess positives of both locations, but ultimately inherits the negative characteristics of both places it is intended to escape.  The rebellious tendency is as American as apple pie.

"A young person, living in apparent dissatisfaction with suburban domesticity, fulfilled the desire of Cold War nationalism.  Such a youth became an exemplary American individualist who refuses to submit to Fordist standardization" (103).  If we, 50 years later, are to study why the rebel emerged and why the rebel has endured, we need to understand the larger cultural context in which the rebel was born.  Not only did these teens (primarily men as Medovoi carefully acknowledges) fight against parental and educational authority, they were the soldiers protecting Americans from the structured collectivity of Communism.  Caged within their track houses and intended communities, they could escape to their teen locals, listen to rock n' roll, and socialize outside the family unit.  Rock n' roll, transcommidified through radio, was the anthem of individual discovery: escape from labor and domesticity.  

Today we still experience this individual expression as well as idolize the originators of the movement.  This American original, most notably the rock star and tormented film character, provide models for teenagers to mimic.  If we stop rebelling and conform to an established order, we forget the American ideal that different and independent is better.  Men like James Dean continued the struggle against conformist submission that men like George Washington began.  

As an aside, I want to share a video clip from John Water's film Crybaby, a satire of the 1950's conflict between the good boy and the bad boy.  It exaggerates the binary of the desired youth and the rebel present in 1950's youth cultural, but also locates specific conformities that teenagers felt restrained by.

www.youtube.com/watchv=cY_nTFXCqOQ&feature=related

           

I couldn't resist...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WSUkEqBbYl0&feature=related

Despite that it's in Spanish, the Elvis re-enactment is pretty fun.

Clichés, Myths, and Pop Music Historiography

• Elvis was a rebel.
• People think Elvis is dead, but he isn’t.
• 50,000,000 Elvis fans can’t be wrong.
• Elvis was known as “the pelvis” because of his erotic dancing.
• Elvis was a fat slob who ate peanut butter and banana sandwiches.
• Elvis was censored (filmed waist-up) by the Ed Sullivan show.
• Elvis served when his country called him.
• Elvis invented rock ‘n’ roll.
• Elvis made a ton of movies. Most of them were bad.
• Elvis was a truck driver from Tupelo, MS.
• Elvis and Richard Nixon met once.

There, I just listed all of the Elvis myths and clichés that I could get out in three minutes. All of these comments are familiar. Some are factual. Some are record-company PR. Others are the creation of rock ‘n’ roll historiographers. Some are romantic and optimistic, casting Elvis as a rousing pop-culture success and icon of rock’s “progress.” Others are rude, silly, or bitter, reminding us that the brightest starts burn out the fastest.

Gilbert Rodman’s essay makes a strong point in saying that Elvis’s mythology looms large—perhaps, even, so large that it obscures his artistry, his musicianship, and his real life—but that point is hardly revelatory. It’s damn near a given. I don’t mean that as a criticism, because I’m advocating for Rodman. The fact is, all historiography is hard, and it takes a great deal of work, thinking, and research to divine the “facts” from the “fiction.”

There’s something about pop-culture historiography, however, that seems harder somehow. How can you investigate a larger-than-life figure like Elvis when his record company put a concerted effort into making him look larger than life? When somebody has as many fans as he does haters (recall Guralnick’s anecdote about how Colonel Parker “was selling nearly as many ‘I Hate Elvis’ buttons as ‘I Love Elvis’ ones” [430]), how do you determine whether the public of the 50s fawned over Elvis or hated his guts? How can you critically consider the extent to which Elvis truly “revolutionized” music after having seen four decades of rock stars express that sentiment on MTV and Vh1? There’s something about pop music historiography that is really elusive and that lends itself to clichés and hyperbole.

Have you ever heard of Allmusic.com? It’s sort of a music encyclopedia website that offers biographies of musical artists, their discographies, and reviews of their music. I often look up artists on this site, and sometimes I play a game with myself, trying to guess what the first sentence of their Allmusic bio will say. Take the Beatles, for instance. Will it say they were “the greatest rock band ever”? Will it say that Led Zepplin were “the group that invented heavy metal”? What about David Bowie? Will that first sentence say that he was androgynous or that he adapted to every musical style like a chameleon? Will that first sentence emphasize that the most important thing you need to know about ABBA is that they were a Swedish supergroup that invented disco? My point is that it’s hard to talk about something like pop music without leaning on common knowledge and cultural assumptions. And it’s hard to write about pop music when myths overshadow facts. Indeed, as Rodman tells us, sometimes myths are all we have.

That’s part of why the rock critic Lester Bangs was such an interesting guy. Rodman quotes Bangs as saying that “rock ‘n’ roll comes down to myth. There are no ‘facts’” (460). Bangs was famous for…well…frankly…making shit up as he went along. In his music writing he would literally fill in the gaps of his knowledge with interesting, often highly plausible lies. For instance, he was really fascinated with a one-hit-wonder garage band from the mid 60s called The Count Five. The band had only one hit and one album, but that didn’t stop Bangs: in a 1972 article he wrote about the group, he provided a detailed retrospective of their entire (largely fake) career, going so far as to describe the cover art on their later albums (with titles like Ancient Lace and Wrought-Iron Railings and Snowflakes Falling on the International Dateline) and even reviewing songs—none of which actually existed. Bangs wasn’t satisfied that this group he liked sputtered out after just one album, so he invented the career they never had.

Rodman doesn’t try to rewrite Elvis’s history; he simply wants to investigate those two anecdotes about Sam Phillips’s and Elvis’s alleged racist comments. In the case of both, I feel the same way that Guralnick seems to: it seems to me that the preponderance of evidence suggests that Phillips and Elvis were not racists—indeed, that they were uncharacteristically accepting and even admiring of African Americans. Despite Rodman’s claim that, borrowing from Barthes, we can’t counter one myth with another, I would point out that the dominant opinion, or myth, about Phillips is that part of his and Sun’s mission was to pay tribute to black artists that other companies wouldn’t touch. If that questionable quotation from Phillips is a whisper, than his legacy as a man who “believed in the nobility of the American Dream [. . .] as it filtered down to its most downtrodden citizen, the Negro” (Guralnick 60) is a shout. The same sort of thing goes for Elvis. While those purported racist comments could threaten these men’s reputations, the dominant myths make them out to have a great deal of respect for black Americans in an age when, and in a place where, that sentiment wasn’t common.

Besides, as Rodman suggests, the whole “who stole what from whom” issue is hard to pin down in rock ‘n’ roll. Although, it remains an interesting question. In closing, I want to mention an interesting media depiction of this issue in the 1985 film Back to the Future. A former professor of mine, Bob Miklitsch, has written about this scene in detail, but I’m sure he wasn’t the first to notice its strangeness, either. At the end of this movie, which was my favorite when I was a kid, 1980s transplanted teenager Marty McFly basically invents rock ‘n’ roll. What’s fascinating, though, is that, racially, it takes place in exactly the opposite direction as how most historians figure: having taken the place of the African-American guitarist with the injured hand, Marty, a white dude, plays Chuck Berry’s “Johnny B Goode” (which he calls an “oldie where I come from”) and, doing so, teaches the black pop group how to play rock ‘n’ roll. After he plays his crazy solo, Mary tells the audience, “I guess you guys aren’t ready for that yet, but your kids are going to love it.” Only through the benefit of a time machine and Chuck Berry’s music, we might joke, could a white man teach African Americans rock ‘n’ roll! It’s a strange moment for those of us interested in the racial roots and exchange of rock ‘n’ roll music, and like everything else, it banks upon—and has become a part of—the mythology.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oYBGx8uKQLA

"If you strip away the myth from the man"

I have to agree with Aubrey that the later half of Rodman's article does seem somewhat miasmic. It's still an interesting read, but I think his stronger points lie in the first half of the article. And I think it's important to recognize the strength of Rodman's strongest argument: "I would argue that Elvis the artist is largely invisible today because [. . .] his music was never exclusively musical" (460). Rodman argues for Elvis the myth, neither Elvis the man, nor Elvis the musician. This is surely a compelling argument.

But Rodman's case against the fixation on Elvis's (purported) racism is more compelling still. He reminds the reader that Elvis was not just a white man singing black music, he was a musical miscegenist (474). It was in "mixing" black music with white music that he was at his most dangerous. That danger seems to be what was so appealing about him. It might not matter whether Elvis was a racist (as Aubrey asks, what does it say about us that we want to believe he was one?), but I wonder if it might not matter whether Elvis was white.

Rodman rightly places Elvis's whiteness as key to his success over the black artists whose music he appropriated. Inherent to his reminder that Elvis mixed black and white music to create a "new" rock 'n' roll is the idea that Elvis's success over the white artists whose music he appropriated was his "blackness." I recognize the extent to which Elvis's being white made him more readily marketable to a largely white audience, but as Rodman explains, it was not only white consumers who appreciated Elvis (Ibid). And as Guralnick demonstrates with his narrated recreations of Elvis concerts, Elvis consumers were not only music consumers.

This takes us back to Rodman's most strongly worded ("I argue that") thesis mentioned above, that Elvis is not as much a musician as a symbol of rock 'n' roll and of American popular culture at large. Does it matter whether the man was a racist? Whether the icon was a racist? Whether the start (or all) of rock 'n' roll was racist? Probably not. We can't "know," so why do we care? What does it get us to believe that he was and what does it get us to believe that he wasn't? 

It seems clear that Elvis took black music and made it, at least parts of it, popular with a lot of white folks. What is perhaps more relevant to Elvis and rock 'n' roll is the place of music and rock 'n' roll in this myth. Does it matter that Elvis was a musician and a rocker? Throughout Guralnick we see instances of Elvis's musical ability being thrashed. To my mind, Elvis was not a musician but a performer. He performed music, but at those concerts with shrieking fans, who could tell? What did Elvis as a rock 'n' roll star bring that other sexy rebellious entertainers, like James Dean, did not? Was it the music? Was it the blackness? Some other Otherness? Was it just the timing? Or was it just the je ne sais quoi of the man that's become a myth?

Play It Again, Elvis

Rodman’s argument draws attention to two separate quotes--one about Elvis and one by Elvis--and debates their existence as fact and as myth. These sort of quotational questions occur all the time. The most famous example I can think of is in Casablanca. “Play It Again, Sam” was never uttered in the film, but it’s become so much of a part of the quotable aura around Casablanca that it might as well have been. Rodman presents issues surrounding this aura or “myth” that somehow evolves (or perhaps leaps) from fact.

I appreciate what is going on here at first. Rodman tells us that Elvis is ubiquitous and pops up where we least expect him. I can attest to that--he’s definitely an icon. I really enjoyed his claim that “Elvis is an incredibly full signifier, one that is already intimately bound up with an entire range of important cultural mythologies” (457). The argument that begins to progress from this smells like the work of Jean Baudrillard, my cultural superhero. What we have going on here is that Elvis the man and Elvis the myth are not necessarily the same construct. We have copies of what we think is Elvis developing, and before you know it, it’s the copy or the simulacrum that is the full signifier here, not the man himself. I think this is what Rodman is suggesting the whole time, but he chooses Barthes over Baudrillard, and I really do wish he would have included Baudrillard. He also makes a passing reference to DeLillo’s White Noise, and I think if he would have fleshed out the comparison between the two figures (Jack and Elvis), we could more clearly see his point. The quote Rodman uses is “the false character that follows the name around.” In White Noise, this is the protagonist Jack, who is a professor of Hitler Studies (it’s exactly what it sounds like) at a university. At the suggestion of a colleague, he changes things about himself in order to be taken more seriously as a Hitler scholar. He changes adds an initial so that his full name is J.A.K. Gladney. He begins to wear dark sunglasses on campus all the time. Because of this, Jack feels that his name now invokes something more powerful/meaningful than he himself does, and thus he is “the false character that follows the name around.” Come on, that’s Elvis, too. The myth-making is better explained in that parallel between Jack and Elvis than in any of the other quotes about how myths work. Jack Gladney’s essential character or even perhaps his work are not what make him stand out in Hitler Studies. It’s his character, J.A.K. Gladney. It’s his mystique. It’s what people will inevitably make up about him. And the same goes for Elvis.

And then we hit the big claim of the article, where Rodman states, “Without trying to claim that Elvis’s music doesn’t matter, I would like to suggest that his myths matter much more” (460). Sure, culturally speaking, the myths speak louder than his lyrics. I also buy his idea that what people believe the facts to be matter more than what was actually said because these faux-facts become embedded in people’s minds to the point where even if a statement was released saying that these facts were sweet, sweet lies, people would still believe them. That’s believable to me as well. Rodman uses the examples of Marion Keisker/Sam Phillips quote as well as the shoeshine Elvis quote to illustrate his point that even if these were not true, people are still going to believe them to be true.

I am with him on all of this.

However, where I suppose I’ll start my raging dissent is where this argument goes from there. As in, it doesn’t really go anywhere. I appreciate that he’s looking at the issues of race contained within each one of these examples and how artists such as Little Richard (who is awesome, for the record) reacted to the white artists covering their music. We see lots of cameo appearances in the article by Guralnick and Marcus, our old and dear friends. And he even works to demystify some of the myths on race and what Elvis’s music was actually “doing” at the time.

Here’s my beef: Instead of looking for some kind of “truth” of what was actually happening or how “truth” won’t undermine and erase the myth surrounding it, why don’t we look at the myth more closely? Check out the shoeshine quote. Who cares if Elvis said it or not? The point is that it is out there floating in our cultural consciousness. My question is not simply, “Well where did that come from?” but “What does it mean that it got out there to begin with?” I think more can be understood about the surrounding culture itself if we take a look at these examples of myth and other broader examples and try to analyze and interpret what they mean in terms of ideology on the whole. This fits into our study of stereotypes as well. How do these myths perpetuate into the stereotypes or legends that they are today? And how seriously do we take them? Go back to the shoeshine. OK, so maybe Elvis said it and maybe not. What does it mean that we’re willing to believe it? What does that say about us? What does that say about Elvis? How do myths and legends about one of our most beloved (or at the very least, famous) popular icons affect our culture at large? All of these questions are thought-provoking and incredibly puzzling, which is probably why they haven’t been directly addressed. I am impressed by Rodman’s research, but I am just not sure if he’s asking the right questions. Nevertheless, his claim that the myth supersedes all possible facts is an accurate observation that happens in our cultural development across time and space, just as I pointed out with my initial Casablanca quote.

Here’s lookin’ at you, Elvis.

It don't matter if you're black or white--Or does it?

Perhaps it is because I’m not feeling well and am extremely tired, but I found Marcus’ article quite convoluted and, at times, I wasn’t entirely certain that I understood what Marcus was trying to tell me. Marcus traces a number of “contradictions” that he finds evident in Elvis’ work, image, and aura, beginning with the statement that Elvis was “a great artist, a great rocker…a great bore” (121). However, Marcus himself originally makes the statement that in Elvis’ music “you can hear that distance, that refusal to really commit himself, in his best music and in his worst” (125), and later recalls (as we saw in the documentary last week) that Elvis was a perfectionist to the extent that he recorded “Hound Dog” (I think it was Hound Dog) 32 times before he was satisfied with take #28.
Nonetheless, there are a few points that he makes which I feel require a bit more attention. My problem is with the idea of “artist,” not in the sense of a performer, but of a creator. Marcus seems to take the stand throughout the article that Elvis was a great creator, and his success is attributable to his new form of music, a new style. However, he also mentions that Elvis’ very style is rooted in Black culture. His adaptation of blues, R&B and gospel are just that—an adaptation. The style, born out of the Harlem Renaissance, existed long before Elvis recorded his first hit. The folkloric nature of Elvis’ music, and even his manner of speech, is also very much aligned with the narrative of African-American experience in the United States. So, on the one hand, Elvis’ edgy black and blues style was borrowed, not created. I think it’s reasonable to make a similar argument for country music. Both existed long before Elvis; maybe his genius, then, is forcing them to meet, thus giving birth to rockabilly.
On page 129 he claims that “the fundamental contrast, of course, could not have been more obvious: black and white.” While recording That’s All Right Mama, Marcus suggests that Phillips is “perplexed. Who is gonna play this crazy record? White jocks won’t touch it ‘cause it’s nigger music and colored will pass ‘cause its hillbilly” (142). Yet, just three paragraphs later, Marcus asserts “the image was white….There were two kinds of white counterattack on the black invasion of white popular culture that was rock ‘n’ roll: the attempt to soften black music or freeze it out, and the rockabilly lust to beat the black man at his own game” (143). This moment certainly destroys Marcus’ claim that Elvis’ music harbored the inability to exclude. In fact, I wouldn’t be surprised to discover that Elvis had less than ten black fans. In watching the documentary last week, Professor Newman made an important observation: were there any black fans in the audiences? One, maybe? There had to have been a notable looming racial tension hovering over Elvis’ career and what his career signified in American popular culture. Although on page 146 Marcus attempts to draw a distinction between early forms of rock ‘n’ roll, which may have co-opted an African-
American stylistic form, and rockabilly which was “a world of its own, and as authentically new as any music can be,” I don’t think rockabilly exists without rock ‘n’ roll.
Marcus’ claim of Elvis’ unending openness and inability to exclude is also problematic in that Elvis began his career with Sun Records, a recording studio that Sam Phillips originally founded with the intention of providing black artists an opportunity to record their rhythm and blues. After Elvis and other similar white artists hit it big with Sun Records, the days of wanting to infiltrate American culture with the music of the black artist began to fade. A musical style and harvesting of culture that would essentially uplift the race, using art to demand equality, was arguably twisted into a white popular cultural phenomenon that excluded its Black roots. The sorts of hierarchical exclusionary aspects of Elvis’ music and its effect on popular culture highlight an undemocratic nature of popular culture that privileges black culture through a white lens.

Post from Brian B (posted by The Prof on his behalf)

An Elvis for Everyone, A King for None

There is nothing more dangerous than a man with nothing to lose, and in 1968 Elvis was running the risk of losing that which had once given the young, snarling hillbilly the power to define American culture throughout his lifetime and for decades after. In describing the 1968 comeback special, Greil Marcus creates an atmosphere of tenuous uncertainty that makes it seem as though Presley’s audience, along with history as a whole, would not be forgiving The King this time around if the show turned out to be anything but his best. It was almost certain that, “if this show died, little more would be heard from Elvis Presley” (125). Aware that 1968 was his last chance to shed the family friendly sell-out aura that had come with years of poorly scripted Hollywood star-vehicles, Elvis knew what it would take to make him once again relevant in contemporary music. In opening the discussion of Elvis by looking at the comeback special, Marcus makes an implicit claim as to what it was that made him the impetus for the musical big bang that would open the door for every greasy-haired kid playing a jangly guitar.
The author does this by associating the ‘68 show with Presley’s mid to late fifties heyday and finding what it was in each that made him great. In both cases, it comes down to danger. In the fifties, Elvis was dangerous because of the cultural space he occupied. He was too black for country radio and too much a hillbilly for R&B. The article claims that, “even if Elvis’s South was filled with Puritans, it was also filled with natural-born hedonists,” which is exactly the audience he was playing to in 1956 (131). To the people who were able to identify with him, Elvis embodied, “that will to throw yourself all the way after something better with no real worry about how you are going to make it home” (132). There was a reckless abandon to the man’s image and also in the way he presented his music that struck a chord with the restless youth he was singing to.
By the sixties, however, Presley seemed to have traded the role of spokesman for a troubled southern youth for the life of a mainstream Hollywood pretty boy (not to mention a one-trick pony as he was singing the title song to nearly every film he appeared in). Marcus points this out in his music by saying that, “Elvis’s presentation is fixed. The glorious oppression of that presentation parallels the all-but-complete assimilation of a revolutionary musical style into the mainstream of American culture, where no one is challenged and no one is threatened” (123). To Marcus, for Elvis to be Elvis he has to be threatening and dangerous, and the fact that, “complete assimilation really means complete acceptance” means that the Elvis that had developed in Hollywood was encompassing everyone while threatening no one (123). Walt Whitman, yes. Sid Vicious, no.
This set the stage for 1968 as the writing on the wall gave the comeback special the urgency that was needed to make Elvis dangerous once again. “No one has ever heard him sing like this,” Marcus notes of the show, “not even his best records suggest the depth of passion in this music,” and a line from a Howlin’ Wolf cover that he sings, “When you see me runnin’, you know my life is at stake” sums up exactly what is taking place on stage (126). Elvis is singing for his life, his legacy, and himself in the comeback special, and with his back to the wall as it is, he again becomes as dangerous as ever.

Elvis Poem

Hey all - I was thumbing through the Carnegie Mellon Anthology of Poetry today and found a poem called "Young Elvis" by Cornelius Eady. What do you think?

Young Elvis

He's driving a truck, and we know

What he knows: His sweat

And hips move the wrong product.

In Memphis, behind a thick

Pane of glass, a stranger daydreams

Of a voice as tough as a Negro's.

But not a Negro's. A voice that

Slaps instead of twangs,

But not a Negro's. When it

Struts through the door

(Like he knows it will), and

Opens up, rides

The spiky strings of

The guitar, pushes

The bass line below the belt,

Reveals the drums

As cheap pimps,

In fact transforms the whole proceedings

Into a cat house, a lost night...

He wets his lips.

Already the young driver is imagining

A 20th century birthday present,

The one-shot lark of his recorded voice,

The awe he intends to

Shine through his mother's favorite hymns.

Rock-A-Doodle Elvis

As an aside, I remembered I used to love this cartoon movie as a child called Rock-A-Doodle, and the main character gets turned into an Elvis-like star:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4nSlid5Ouv4&feature=related
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nC5p6sc_tQg

Elvis: Star or Scam?

In the third segment of Last Train to Memphis, Guralnick uses a quote said by Elvis in an interview about his songs that really struck me:

"'I've never written a song in my life,' Elvis insisted vociferously on a number of public occasions, going on to declare in one interview, 'It's all a big hoax...I get one third of the credit for recording it. It makes me look smarter than I am.'" (387).

This quote started to make me think of Elvis' songs in a broader context and I found myself subconsciously making comparisons to modern-day singers and their practices. For example, my mind first wondered to the definition of today's "cover" song (e.g. Lady Marmalade by Christina et al, Emotions by Destiny's Child, Take my Breath Away by Jessica Simpson, etc.). Though these artists "took" the songs from other famous singers and added their own "flare" to them just as Elvis did, they differ greatly from Elvis in the fact that this was an exception, not the norm. Moreover, the original artists and versions of these songs got proper credit in their own time and right. Thus, it was a little disturbing to me when I was reading to learn that almost all of the songs I thought were original Elvis hits (Blue Suede Shoes, Hound Dog, etc.) were really not. In short, I felt scammed.

I then began to try to wrestle with the notion that Elvis' popularity might really be unjustified. Part of me wanted to believe that this practice of taking other artists songs, popularizing them, and profiting from them was acceptable and was considered just part of the 1950s music culture. However, another part of me couldn't help but think about the movie "Dreamgirls" in which a trio of black singers in the 60s in Detroit (largely modeled after the "Supremes") try to break into the music business. One of the earliest conflicts in the movie comes when the "Dreamettes" record their first single and have every indication that it will become a new hit, only to find out that another group (a white group) stole their single, changed it to sound like a california-beachy pop tune, and hit the top of the charts, leaving the original version made by the Dreamettes virtually unheard of. The movie made it very clear that this process happened somewhat frequently to new artists (especially black artists), however it was a practice that was very much frowned upon and therefore done behind people's backs.

So, in the heat of this battle within myself I did what most people would do...I turned to the internet to supply me with the answer :) I found some interesting quotes which I will share with you all below:

"Elvis wrote none of his songs although he is in the songwriting credits for 9 songs ..none of which he actually helped write" (Wiki Answers)

"Those who criticise his musical ability forget one thing. Elvis, like most of his contemporaries, was a singer, not a musician. It was rare for singers to write their own songs in those days." (BBC News)

“Well a lot of people said Elvis stole our music. Stole the black man’s music. The black man, white man, has got no music of their own. Music belongs to the universe." (BBC News)

Sigh. It seems I've hit on an issue that others have been debating for quite some time and one in which there may be no definitive answer.