Books by A. Bowdoin Van Riper
Hybrid films that straddle more than one genre are not unusual. But when seemingly incongruous ge... more Hybrid films that straddle more than one genre are not unusual. But when seemingly incongruous genres are mashed together, such as horror and comedy, filmmakers often have to tread carefully to produce a cohesive, satisfying work. Though they date as far back as James Whale’s Bride of Frankenstein (1935), horror-comedies have only recently become popular attractions for movie goers.
In The Laughing Dead: The Horror-Comedy Film from Bride of Frankenstein to Zombieland, editors Cynthia J. Miller and A. Bowdoin Van Riper have compiled essays on the comic undead that look at the subgenre from a variety of perspectives. Spanning virtually the entire sound era, this collection considers everything from classics like The Canterville Ghost to modern cult favorites like Shaun of the Dead. Other films discussed include Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein, Beetlejuice, Ghostbusters, House on Haunted Hill, ParaNorman, Scream, Vampire’s Kiss, and Zombieland.
Contributors in this volume consider a wide array of comedic monster films—from heartwarming (The Book of Life) to pitch dark (The Fearless Vampire Killers) and even grotesque (Frankenhooker). The Laughing Dead will be of interest to scholars and fans of both horror and comedy films, as well as those interested in film history and, of course, the proliferation of the undead in popular culture.
A collection of essays exploring stories of the supernatural from across wars, cultures, and medi... more A collection of essays exploring stories of the supernatural from across wars, cultures, and media - from The Haunted Tank to Abraham Lincoln, Vampire Hunter.
Divided into four thematic sections, What's Eating You? explores the deeper significance of food ... more Divided into four thematic sections, What's Eating You? explores the deeper significance of food on screen-the ways in which they reflect (or challenge) our deepest fears about consuming and being consumed. Among the questions it asks are: How do these films mock our taboos and unsettle our notions about the human condition? How do they critique our increasing focus on consumption? In what ways do they hold a mirror to our taken-for-granteds about food and humanity, asking if what we eat truly matters?
Horror narratives routinely grasp those questions and spin them into nightmares. Monstrous “others” dine on forbidden fare; the tables of consumption are turned, and the consumer becomes the consumed. Overindulgence, as Le Grande Bouffe (1973) and Street Trash (1987) warn, can kill us, and occasionally, as films like The Stuff (1985) and Poultrygeist (2006) illustrate, our food fights back. From Blood Feast (1963) to Sweeney Todd (2007), motion pictures have reminded us that it is an “eat or be eaten” world.
Battlefields have traditionally been considered places where the spirits of the dead linger, and ... more Battlefields have traditionally been considered places where the spirits of the dead linger, and popular culture brings those thoughts to life. Supernatural tales of war told in print, on screen, and in other media depict angels, demons, and legions of the undead fighting against—or alongside—human soldiers. Ghostly war ships and phantom aircraft carry on their never-to-be-completed missions, and the spirits—sometimes corpses—of dead soldiers return to confront the enemies who killed them, comrades who betrayed them, or leaders who sacrificed them.
Horrors of War: The Undead on the Battlefield explores the meaning and significance of these tales. Among the questions that the volume seeks to answer are: How do supernatural stories engage with cultural attitudes toward war? In what ways do these stories reflect or challenge the popular memories of particular wars? How do they ask us to think again about battlefield heroism, military ethics, and the politics of sacrifice?
Divided into four sections, chapters examine undead war stories in film (Carol for Another Christmas, The Devil’s Backbone), television (The Twilight Zone), literature (The Bloody Red Baron, Devils of D-Day), comics (Weird War Tales, The Haunted Tank), graphic novels (The War of the Trenches), and gaming (Call of Duty: World at War). Featuring contributions from a diverse group of international scholars, these essays address such themes as monstrous enemies and enemies made monstrous, legacies and memories of war, and the war dead who refuse to rest. Drawing together stories from across wars, branches of service, and generations of soldiers—and featuring more than fifty illustrations—Horrors of War will be of interest to scholars of film, popular culture, military history, and cultural history.
Here's what's inside:
Introduction
Part I: Monstrous Enemies
1. “Blood-Thirsty Graybacks:” The Monstrous Othering of the Confederacy in Abraham Lincoln, Vampire Hunter
Robert A. Saunders
2. Cry “Havoc!” and Let Slip the Vampires of War
Cynthia J. Miller
3. Vampire Pilots and Industrialized War in The Bloody Red Baron
A. Bowdoin Van Riper
4. Nazis on the Moon! Nazis under the Polar Ice Cap! And Other Recent Episodes in the Strange Cinematic Afterlife of the Third Reich
James J. Ward
Part II: The Dead Don’t Rest
5. The Wages of War: Spectral Children in The Devil’s Backbone
Michael C. Reiff
6. Traversing the Afterlife Fantasy: the Haunted Soldier in Jacob’s Ladder
Thomas Robert Argiro
7. The Haunted Tank
Paul O’Connor
8. (Re)Remembering the Great War in Deathwatch
Marzena Sokołowska-Paryż
9. The U.N.dead: Cold War Ghosts in Carol for Another Christmas
Christina M. Knopf
Part III: Making Monsters
10. Pall in the Family: Deathdream, House, and the Vietnam War
Christopher D. Stone
11. Strategic Military Reconfiguration in Horror Fiction: The Case of F. Paul Wilson’s The Keep and Graham Masterton’s The Devils of D-Day
Fernando Pagnoni Berns
12. Horror Under the Radar: Memory, Revelation, and the Ghosts of Below
Christina V. Cedillo
13. The Supernatural, Nazi Zombies & The Play Instinct: The Gamification of War and The Reality of the Military Industrial Complex.
Steve Webley
Part IV: Legacies and Memories
14. “Strange things happen in a war-torn land”: Cat Demons, Samurai, Victims’ Vengeance, and the Social Costs of War in Kaneto Shindo’s Kuroneko (1968)
Thomas Prasch
15. Public Memory and Supernatural Presence: The Mystery and Madness of Weird War Tales
Terence Check
16. War in The Twilight Zone: Rod Serling’s Haunted Visions of World War II
Vincent Casaregola
17. Specters of Media: Jacques Tardi’s Graphic Reanimation of the War of the Trenches
Katherine Kelp-Stebbins
18. R-Point as Post-Colonial Palimpsest: Generic Complexity and the Ghost in the War/Horror Film
Amanda Landa
The Western tradition, with its well-worn tropes, readily identifiable characters, iconic landsca... more The Western tradition, with its well-worn tropes, readily identifiable characters, iconic landscapes, and evocative soundtracks, is not limited to the United States. Western, or Western-inspired films have played a part in the output of numerous national film traditions, including Asia, Central and Eastern Europe, and Latin America.
This volume assembles a collection of essays that explore the significance and meanings of these films, as well as their reception in the national industries which gave them form. Among the questions that the volume seeks to answer are: What do Westerns not made in the U.S. reveal? In what ways do they challenge or support the idea of national literatures and cinemas? How do these films negotiate nation, narrative, and genre? Divided into five sections, the twenty essays in this volume look at films from France (The Adventures of Lucky Luke), Germany (Der Schuh des Maitu), Brazil (O Cangaceiro), Eastern Europe (Lemonade Joe), and of course, Asia (Sukiyaki Western Django).
Featuring contributions from a diverse group of international scholars—often writing about Westerns adapted to their own national traditions—these essays address such matters as competing national film traditions, various forms of satire and comedy based on the Western tradition, the range of cultural adaptations of the traditional Western hero, the ties between the nation-state and the outlaw, and Westerns in a variety of unanticipated guises.
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Introduction
Cynthia J. Miller and A. Bowdoin Van Riper
I: Dueling Industries
Turkish and Kurdish Westerns
Chapter 1
The Ghosts of Modernization: Landscape, Time, and the West in Once Upon a Time in Anatolia
Zak Bronson and Gozde Kilic
Chapter 2
On the Spatial Ideology of Turkish Cinema (The West as ‘Outside’):
Reading Seyyit Han as Western
Ali F. Sengul
German Westerns
Chapter 3
The Only Good Indian is a DEFA Indian: East German Variations on the Most American of all Genres
Franz Birgel
Chapter 4
(Dis)Respecting Winnetou: Comedy Aesthetics and the De-Re-Construction of the German Western’s Cultural Memory
Matthias Stork
II: Parodies from Around the World
Chapter 5
Visions of the West in Lucky Luke Comics: from Cliché to Critique
Pierre LaGuyette
Chapter 6
Upsetting the Genre’s Gender Stereotypes: The British Out West and Ramsbottom Rides Again (1956)
Lee Broughton
Chapter 7
Comedy, Capitalism, and Kolaloka: Adapting the American West in Lemonade Joe (1964)
Cynthia J. Miller
Chapter 8
Tough Guys of the Prairie: The Danish Potato-Westerns
Isak Thorsen
III: The Western Hero, Deconstructed
Chapter 9
Into the West: The Frontier in Ireland’s Celtic Tiger Cinema
Liam Burke
Chapter 10
El Topo: Cult Film Phenomenon Or Epic Western?
Michael T. Marsden
Chapter 11
“You Got the Wrong F**in’ Black Man!”: The Indigenous Experience in the Australian Western
Daniel Eisenberg
Chapter 12
The Self-Exiled Hero: Wong Kar-wai’s Ashes of Time
Michael C. Reiff
IV: Social Bandits and National Identities
Chapter 13
O Cangaceiro (1953) and the Brazilian Northeastern: The Western “in the Land of the Sun”
Wyatt D. Phillips
Chapter 14
“They Sing Songs about us Here”: Outlaw figures in Hungarian Westerns of the 1970s
Sonja Simonyi
Chapter 15
Reading Dost-Dushman (Bangladesh, 1977): Popular Cinema, Cultural Translation and Remaking American Western in South Asia
Zakir Hossain Raju
Chapter 16
American Cowboys, Malaysian Pirates, and the Italian Construction of Other-ed Adventurers in Film
Aliza S. Wong
V: Unexpected Roots
Chapter 17
Departure and Arrival as Motifs in Westerns with a German Background
Heike Endter
Chapter 18
“It Would Make Everything Right”: Thomas Hardy’s Western in Michael Winterbottom’s The Claim (2000)
Thomas Prasch
Chapter 19
“The East is a delicate matter”: White Sun of the Desert and the Soviet Western
Vincent Bohlinger
Chapter 20
The Sword and the Six-Shooter: Sukiyaki Western Django and the Universality of the Western
A. Bowdoin Van Riper
The undead are back! This sequel to "Undead in the West: Vampires, Zombies, Mummies, and Ghosts o... more The undead are back! This sequel to "Undead in the West: Vampires, Zombies, Mummies, and Ghosts on the Cinematic Frontier" moves beyond screens large and small into the realms of literature, sequential art, gaming, and fan culture (fan fiction, blogging, fan editing, and zombie walks). Its essays run the gamut from comics and graphic novels such as American Vampire, Preacher, and Priest, and games like Darkwatch and Red Dead Redemption, to novels and short stories by celebrated writers including Robert E. Howard, Joe R. Lansdale, and Stephen King.
Featuring a foreword by renowned science fiction author William F. Nolan (Logan’s Run) and an afterword by acclaimed game designer Paul O’Connor (Darkwatch), this collection will appeal to scholars of literature, gaming, and popular culture, as well as to fans of this unique hybrid.
Foreword
William F. Nolan
Introduction
Cynthia J. Miller and A. Bowdoin Van Riper
I. Pioneers on a Wide-Open Frontier
Chapter 1:
Vaqueros and Vampires in the Pulps: Robert E. Howard and the Dawn of the Undead West
Jeffrey Shanks and Mark Finn
Chapter 2:
Weird Western Comic Books of the 1950s
Paul Green
Chapter 3:
Filling Up the West with Dead Folks: Joe R. Lansdale
Cynthia J. Miller
Chapter 4:
On Death’s Horizon: Wandering Spirits and Otherworldly Landscapes in Western Art and Cinema
Courtney Fellion
II. Lawmen & Gunmen in the Badlands
Chapter 5:
Genre Exchange on the Supernatural Frontier in Stephen King’s The Gunslinger:
The Gunfighter Archetype Meets the Ravenous Other
Adam S. Kozaczka
Chapter 6:
Vampires and Vermin: The Ambivalences of Historical and Generic Revision of the West(ern) in Darkwatch
Christina V. Cedillo
Chapter 7:
Finding a Noble Purpose in the Post-apocalyptic Zombie West: Identity Development in Jonathan Maberry’s Rot and Ruin”
Julia Saric
Chapter 8
Allegorical Confrontation Meets Gaming System: Rhetoric and Trauma within Red Dead Redemption/Undead Nightmare
M. Melissa Elston
Chapter 9:
Go West, Young Fang!: Skinner Sweet as Outlaw and American Vampire
Andrew John Sneddon and Aspasia Stephanou
III. Men of God on Hallowed Ground
Chapter 10:
A Baptism of Blood: Priest and the Regeneration of Violence on Min-Woo Hyung’s Frontier
Will Grady
Chapter 11:
Ghosts of Texas: The Duke, The Vampire, and The Saint of Killers in Preacher
Jim Casey and Marc Petersen
Chapter 12:
“And Hell Followed with Him:” Gothic Economics in Clint Eastwood’s Pale Rider
John Edgar Browning
Chapter 13:
Scratching Open Old Wounds: The Supernatural Brujo and the Undead Body in The Missing and The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada
Jericho Williams
IV. Communities at the Edge of the Unknown
Chapter 14:
Days Gone Bye: Robert Kirkman’s Re-envisioned Western, The Walking Dead
Jeffrey A. Sartain
Chapter 15:
Genre Mashing in the Role-playing Game: Deadlands: The Weird West, the Horror-Steampunk-Western
Rachel Mizsei Ward
Chapter 16:
Unsettled: Ghosts, Zombies, and Indians in the American West
C. Richard King
Chapter 17:
Undead and Online: Fan Communities and the Undead Western
Matthias Stork & A. Bowdoin Van Riper
Afterword
Paul O’Connor ""
Televised “rocketman” series of the 1950s had relationships with their fans that affected not onl... more Televised “rocketman” series of the 1950s had relationships with their fans that affected not only ratings, but also domestic life, consumption, merchandising, print media, and a host of other, sometimes unexpected, aspects of everyday life. Captain Video’s “Ranger Messages” taught good civic behavior, Nestle’s commercials on Tom Corbett offered children advice on how to host successful parties, fan clubs converged on promotional events at supermarkets and department stores, and numerous magazine and newspaper articles offered parents tips on how to satisfy their children’s “space fever.” Intertextual references to “rocketman” series spread across media, and tie-in products, from books to rocket-shaped tree houses generated millions of dollars in sales.
The essays in this collection will explore the role of the "rocketman" series in the lives of their fans. What messages were they sending into American living rooms each week? What were fans (and others) doing with those messages? How did the values, ideals, goals, and desires transmitted and created by these series take form in material and social culture? They will focus on series such as Captain Z-Ro; Tom Corbett, Space Cadet; Space Patrol; Commando Cody; Rocky Jones; Flash Gordon; Buck Rogers; and Captain Video and his Video Rangers."
The frontier has long been framed as a landscape of life and death, but few scholarly works have ... more The frontier has long been framed as a landscape of life and death, but few scholarly works have ventured into the realm where the two become one, to explore portrayals of the Undead in the West – the zombies, vampires, mummies, and others that have lumbered, crept, shambled, and swooped into the Western from other genres. This sub-genre, while largely a post-1990 phenomenon, traces it roots to much deeper hybrid traditions of Westerns and horror or science fiction, and yet, shows ties to the recent A- Western renaissance.
The seventeen essays in this volume explore the intrusion of the undead into the cinematic West, from "Curse of the Undead" and "Billy the Kid vs. Dracula" to the "Dusk Till Dawn" trilogy and "Jonah Hex." Classic films like "Once Upon a Time in the West," low-budget genre romps like "The Quick and the Undead," and television series such as "The Walling Dead" and "Supernatural" all get their due. Topics range from the marketing of "Billy the Kid vs. Dracula," through the significance of the saloon in undead Westerns, to the cannibal horrors of "Ravenous" as a critique of Manifest Destiny.
Like undead Westerns themselves, Undead in the West will appeal to fans of both genres, and casts both in a new light.
"Films that dramatize historical events and the lives of historical figures – whether they are in... more "Films that dramatize historical events and the lives of historical figures – whether they are intended to educate or to entertain – play a significant role in shaping the public’s understanding of the past. This is a book about the dramatized portrayals of a particular group of historical figures – scientists, engineers, and inventors – that have appeared on American film and television screens. It catalogs nearly 300 separate performances and includes essays on the screen images of more than 80 historic scientists, inventors, engineers, and medical researchers. The individuals covered range from familiar figures such as Isaac Newton, Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Edison, Albert Einstein, Marie Curie, and Bill Gates to lesser-known ones like John Ericsson, who designed the Civil War ironclad Monitor; Hans Christian Oersted, whose discoveries paved the way for Edison and Bell; and Dian Fossey, who studied – and died protecting – the mountain gorillas of Rwanda.
The book covers portrayals theatrical, made-for-broadcast, and made-for-cable feature films; television specials, miniseries, and limited series; episodes of traditional television series; and short films released in theaters, on video, or on the internet. It encompasses well-known lead performances (Don Ameche in The Story of Alexander Graham Bell, Greer Garson in Madame Curie, Russell Crowe in A Beautiful Mind), but also cameo roles (Harpo Marx as Isaac Newton in The Story of Mankind; Alec Guinness as Sigmund Freud in Lovesick) and unlikely guest-star appearances on television series (Leonardo da Vinci in Star Trek: Voyager; Alfred Nobel in Have Gun, Will Travel; Marie Curie in Sabrina, the Teenage Witch).
his"
Beginning during World War II, Walt Disney Studios produced scores of films designed to simultane... more Beginning during World War II, Walt Disney Studios produced scores of films designed to simultaneously educate and entertain audiences. They ranged from wartime training and propaganda films to postwar classics such as "Our Friend the Atom" and "The Living Desert," and from familiar favorites such as "Donald in Mathmagic Land" to obscure curiosities such as "Water: Friend or Enemy?" and "VD Attack Plan." The sixteen essays in this volume cover the entire range of Disney edutainment films, from the earliest propaganda shorts to the based-in-fact sports dramas of the turn of the millennium. Among them are the first scholarly treatments of Disney's public-gealth films, the "People and Places" series of featurettes, about exotic cultures, and the groundbreaking "USA in Circarama."
Beginning with World War II, missiles transformed the art of war. For the first time, cities of w... more Beginning with World War II, missiles transformed the art of war. For the first time, cities of warring nations were vulnerable to sudden, unannounced, long-distance attacks. At the same time, rockets made possible one of the great triumphs of the modern age -- the exploration of space. Beginning with the origins of rocketry in medieval and early modern Asia, Rockets and Missiles traces the history of the technology that led to both the great fear of global warfare and the great excitement of the Space Age.
This volume focuses on rocketry in late-twentieth-century Western Europe, Russia, and the United States, as well as the spread of rocket technology to East Asia and the Middle East. It covers the full history of rocket technology -- including how rockets improved in performance, reliability, and versatility and how they affected everyday life.
The history of the air age has mostly been written from the perspective of aircraft designers, bu... more The history of the air age has mostly been written from the perspective of aircraft designers, builders, and pilots. "Imagining Flight" is a history of the air age as the rest of us have experienced it: on the pages of books, the screens of movie theaters and the front pages of newspapers. It is a book about the ways in which people outside the aviation business have looked at, dreamed about, and worried over powered flight in the century since the Wright brothers first showed a startled world that it was possible. "Imagining Flight" considers a great many themes from history in light of the September 11 terrorist attacks and the Columbia disaster. It thus aims to be the first book to explore the entire first century of flight through the eyes of those who watched it from the ground.
""This collection of eighty-one short essays is an attempt to separate reality from dramatic lice... more ""This collection of eighty-one short essays is an attempt to separate reality from dramatic license in popular culture's treatment of science and some of the technologies most deeply influenced by it. Each entry deals with a science-related object, idea, person, process, or concept. Each briefly summarizes the current understanding of the topic and then discusses its portrayal in popular culture and, where possible, the roots of that portrayal. Each entry concludes with a list of related entries and a brief list of suggested readings specific to that topic.
TOPICS
Acceleration
Action-Reaction, Law Of
Alternate Worlds
Androids
Atomic Energy
Chimpanzees
Clones
Comets
Computers
Cryonics
Cyborgs
Darwin, Charles
Death Rays
Dinosaurs
Dolphins
Dreams
Earthquakes
Eclipses
Einstein, Albert
Electricity
Elephants
Epidemics
Evolution
Evolution, Convergent
Evolution, Human
Experiments
Experiments On Self
Extinction
Flying Cars
Food Pills
Franklin, Benjamin
Galileo
Genes
Genetic Engineering
Gorillas
Gravity
Houses, Smart
Ideas, Resistance To
Inertia
Insects
Insects, Giant
Intelligence, Animal
Intelligence, Artificial
Intelligence, Human
Life, Extraterrestrial
Life, Origin Of
Lightning
Longevity
Magnetism
Mars
Matter Transmission
Meteorites
Mind Control
Miniaturization
Miracle Drugs
Moon
Mutations
Newton, Isaac
Organ Transplants
Prehistoric Humans
Prehistoric Time
Psychic Powers
Race
Radiation
Relativity
Religion And Science
Reproduction
Robots
Sharks
Space Travel, Interplanetary
Space Travel, Interstellar
Speed Of Light
Speed Of Sound
Superhumans
Theory
Time Travel
UFOs
Vacuum
Venus
Volcanoes
Whales""
""Between 1858 and 1863, a small group of British scientists--predominantly geologists--demonstra... more ""Between 1858 and 1863, a small group of British scientists--predominantly geologists--demonstrated that the human race was far older than generally believed: that humans had coexisted with now-extinct species of animals (such as the mammoth) in a world unlike the one we now inhabit. Along with the discovery of Neanderthal Man (1857) and the publication of Charles Darwin's "On the Origin of Species," these discoveries challenged long-held and deeply cherished ideas about the origins of the human race and humans' place in the natural world.
This book, a revised and expanded version of my doctoral thesis, traces the those pivotal five years in detail, and shows how they transformed the way that Britons--scientists and non-scientists--thought about the distant past and humans' place in it.""
Articles by A. Bowdoin Van Riper
The popular visual image of World War I is woven from the stuff of nightmares—mud, blood, rot, ra... more The popular visual image of World War I is woven from the stuff of nightmares—mud, blood, rot, rats, darkness, and chaos—and studded with icons of modern science and technology run amuck. Tales of World War I aerial combat are a lone, conspicuous exception to this pattern. The pilot-heroes of such tales, styled “knights of the air, re-create an older, more chivalrous, more personal style of combat amid the industrialized slaughter of the wider war.
Kim Newman’s The Bloody Red Baron (1995)—second in a quartet of novels mixing alternate history and literary pastiche—takes aim at the “knights of the air” mythology, erasing the purported distinction between fighter pilots and others and turning the war in the air into a struggle every bit as desperate, destructive, and traumatic as that played out in the trenches below. Newman posits that Count Dracula, aided by an all-star team of mad scientists, turns The Red Baron and his Flying Circus into a cadre of ruthless, near-invincible vampire fighter pilots.
All that stands in the way of Dracula using them to turn the tide of the war is a squadron of Allied pilots who, vampires themselves, are as coldly ruthless as von Richthofen’s in battle. Newman’s interweaves the gothic horror of Dracula with the industrial horrors of the modern battlefield, transforming the supposedly chivalrous “war above the trenches” into a brutal total-war struggle with all the hallmarks of World War II.
Aging Heroes: Growing Old in Popular Culture, ed. Norma Jones and Bob Batchelor, 49-61, May 6, 2015
The Star Trek Universe: Franchising the Final Frontier, ed. Douglas Brode and Shea T. Brode, pp. 15-28, May 14, 2015
Upstairs & Downstairs: British Costume Drama Television from the Forsyte Saga to Downton Abbey, ed. James Leggott and Julie Anne Taddeo, pp. 153-164, Dec 14, 2014
Danger UXB (1979) and Piece of Cake (1988) – limited-run series with richly detailed historical b... more Danger UXB (1979) and Piece of Cake (1988) – limited-run series with richly detailed historical backdrops, large ensemble casts, and intertwined, character-driven plot arcs – have the form of classic British television costume dramas. Their content, however, consistently subverts the conventions of the genre. Both series have overwhelmingly male casts, both are centered on the world of work rather than on the domestic or social spheres, and both routinely feature plots that hinge on the details if professional practice. Both series are set not just during but in the midst of the Second World War, and both feature characters who – as members of the uniformed military – are constantly at risk of violent death. Most important, both series depict the final disintegration of the social and cultural world that more traditional costume dramas celebrate.
The two series are, at their core, tales of amateurs transformed into professionals. The men of the unexploded-bomb disposal squad in Danger UXB are sent into the field with a little theoretical knowledge and even less hands-on experience. The fighter pilots in Piece of Cake are superbly trained in prewar tactics that prove lethally ineffective against the German Luftwaffe in the Battle of France. The ranks of both groups steadily diminish as war takes its remorseless toll on those unable or unwilling to learn the skills, and adopt the habits of mind, necessary to stay alive. The careless, the sloppy, the inattentive, and the incompetent die – suddenly, and often horribly – and the survivors, in turn, learn to be more careful, more precise, more focused, and more skillful. They learn, in other words, to embrace the values of the industrial age: speed, practicality, ruthless efficiency, and an intimate familiarity with complex machines. The enlisted men in both series forsake the easy rhythms that (costume dramas assure us) prevailed in the countryside, and adopt the factory hand’s all-consuming focus on The Work. The officers reject the languid casualness of the aristocracy for the practicality of the middle class, trampling time-hallowed traditions in their determination to get the job done.
The idea that industrial-age values won the war and “traditional” (that is, pre-industrial) English values were a dangerous impediment to victory is implicit in both Danger UXB and Piece of Cake. Both series thus stand in opposition to typical British television costume dramas, which celebrate pre-industrial values even when (as in Brideshead Revisited and Downton Abbey) they take place in the “long week-end” between the world wars. Both series also participate in the ongoing critique of Britain’s national mythology of the Second World War, which valorizes amateurism, resolve, and “pluck”—the values of the Edwardian past—rather than the technological sophistication, advance planning, and ruthless cost-benefit analysis that played a far greater role in protecting Britain from Nazi occupation. This essay, then, will consider the two series as revisions of, simultaneously, the costume-drama genre and popular historical memory of Britain’s darkest hour.
Monsters and the Monstrous 4 (no. 1), 29-32, 2014
The quintet of low-budget science-horror films that Boris Karloff made for Columbia Pictures and ... more The quintet of low-budget science-horror films that Boris Karloff made for Columbia Pictures and Monogram Pictures between 1939 and 1941 appear, at first glance, to be stock ‘mad scientist’ thrillers. Their plots revolve around scientists whose obsessive pursuit of forbidden biological research leads to madness, murder, and ultimately their own deaths, and they make free use of visual and character tropes established, earlier in the decade, in better-known, higher-budgeted films such as Frankenstein (1931) and The Island of Lost Souls (1933). Beneath their formulaic surface and low-budget ambience, however, the five Karloff films – The Man They Could Not Hang (1939), The Man with Nine Lives (1940), The Ape (1940), Before I Hang (1940), and The Devil Commands (1941) – actually challenge the conventions of the ‘mad scientist’ subgenre. The scientist-characters at the center of the five films are selfless individuals whose research is intended to serve the public good, but who descend into madness when society – gripped by ignorance and fear – thwarts their research and persecutes them for attempting it.
Hollywood’s pre-1945 view of the scientist’s role in society reflected a pair of broad attitudes then held by a majority of Americans. The first is that the proper function of science is to serve the needs of the larger society, and that science is worthy of support only if it serves those needs. The second is that individual scientists, acting in that socially sanctioned role, are powerful authority figures to whom considerable deference should be granted. The five ‘mad scientist’ films that Karloff made on the eve of the Second World War hold that bargain between scientists and society to be sacrosanct. They depict indict the public, and its elected representatives, for abrogating their side of the bargain, depicting them – not Karloff’s scientists or the science they practice – as monstrous.
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Books by A. Bowdoin Van Riper
In The Laughing Dead: The Horror-Comedy Film from Bride of Frankenstein to Zombieland, editors Cynthia J. Miller and A. Bowdoin Van Riper have compiled essays on the comic undead that look at the subgenre from a variety of perspectives. Spanning virtually the entire sound era, this collection considers everything from classics like The Canterville Ghost to modern cult favorites like Shaun of the Dead. Other films discussed include Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein, Beetlejuice, Ghostbusters, House on Haunted Hill, ParaNorman, Scream, Vampire’s Kiss, and Zombieland.
Contributors in this volume consider a wide array of comedic monster films—from heartwarming (The Book of Life) to pitch dark (The Fearless Vampire Killers) and even grotesque (Frankenhooker). The Laughing Dead will be of interest to scholars and fans of both horror and comedy films, as well as those interested in film history and, of course, the proliferation of the undead in popular culture.
Horror narratives routinely grasp those questions and spin them into nightmares. Monstrous “others” dine on forbidden fare; the tables of consumption are turned, and the consumer becomes the consumed. Overindulgence, as Le Grande Bouffe (1973) and Street Trash (1987) warn, can kill us, and occasionally, as films like The Stuff (1985) and Poultrygeist (2006) illustrate, our food fights back. From Blood Feast (1963) to Sweeney Todd (2007), motion pictures have reminded us that it is an “eat or be eaten” world.
Horrors of War: The Undead on the Battlefield explores the meaning and significance of these tales. Among the questions that the volume seeks to answer are: How do supernatural stories engage with cultural attitudes toward war? In what ways do these stories reflect or challenge the popular memories of particular wars? How do they ask us to think again about battlefield heroism, military ethics, and the politics of sacrifice?
Divided into four sections, chapters examine undead war stories in film (Carol for Another Christmas, The Devil’s Backbone), television (The Twilight Zone), literature (The Bloody Red Baron, Devils of D-Day), comics (Weird War Tales, The Haunted Tank), graphic novels (The War of the Trenches), and gaming (Call of Duty: World at War). Featuring contributions from a diverse group of international scholars, these essays address such themes as monstrous enemies and enemies made monstrous, legacies and memories of war, and the war dead who refuse to rest. Drawing together stories from across wars, branches of service, and generations of soldiers—and featuring more than fifty illustrations—Horrors of War will be of interest to scholars of film, popular culture, military history, and cultural history.
Here's what's inside:
Introduction
Part I: Monstrous Enemies
1. “Blood-Thirsty Graybacks:” The Monstrous Othering of the Confederacy in Abraham Lincoln, Vampire Hunter
Robert A. Saunders
2. Cry “Havoc!” and Let Slip the Vampires of War
Cynthia J. Miller
3. Vampire Pilots and Industrialized War in The Bloody Red Baron
A. Bowdoin Van Riper
4. Nazis on the Moon! Nazis under the Polar Ice Cap! And Other Recent Episodes in the Strange Cinematic Afterlife of the Third Reich
James J. Ward
Part II: The Dead Don’t Rest
5. The Wages of War: Spectral Children in The Devil’s Backbone
Michael C. Reiff
6. Traversing the Afterlife Fantasy: the Haunted Soldier in Jacob’s Ladder
Thomas Robert Argiro
7. The Haunted Tank
Paul O’Connor
8. (Re)Remembering the Great War in Deathwatch
Marzena Sokołowska-Paryż
9. The U.N.dead: Cold War Ghosts in Carol for Another Christmas
Christina M. Knopf
Part III: Making Monsters
10. Pall in the Family: Deathdream, House, and the Vietnam War
Christopher D. Stone
11. Strategic Military Reconfiguration in Horror Fiction: The Case of F. Paul Wilson’s The Keep and Graham Masterton’s The Devils of D-Day
Fernando Pagnoni Berns
12. Horror Under the Radar: Memory, Revelation, and the Ghosts of Below
Christina V. Cedillo
13. The Supernatural, Nazi Zombies & The Play Instinct: The Gamification of War and The Reality of the Military Industrial Complex.
Steve Webley
Part IV: Legacies and Memories
14. “Strange things happen in a war-torn land”: Cat Demons, Samurai, Victims’ Vengeance, and the Social Costs of War in Kaneto Shindo’s Kuroneko (1968)
Thomas Prasch
15. Public Memory and Supernatural Presence: The Mystery and Madness of Weird War Tales
Terence Check
16. War in The Twilight Zone: Rod Serling’s Haunted Visions of World War II
Vincent Casaregola
17. Specters of Media: Jacques Tardi’s Graphic Reanimation of the War of the Trenches
Katherine Kelp-Stebbins
18. R-Point as Post-Colonial Palimpsest: Generic Complexity and the Ghost in the War/Horror Film
Amanda Landa
This volume assembles a collection of essays that explore the significance and meanings of these films, as well as their reception in the national industries which gave them form. Among the questions that the volume seeks to answer are: What do Westerns not made in the U.S. reveal? In what ways do they challenge or support the idea of national literatures and cinemas? How do these films negotiate nation, narrative, and genre? Divided into five sections, the twenty essays in this volume look at films from France (The Adventures of Lucky Luke), Germany (Der Schuh des Maitu), Brazil (O Cangaceiro), Eastern Europe (Lemonade Joe), and of course, Asia (Sukiyaki Western Django).
Featuring contributions from a diverse group of international scholars—often writing about Westerns adapted to their own national traditions—these essays address such matters as competing national film traditions, various forms of satire and comedy based on the Western tradition, the range of cultural adaptations of the traditional Western hero, the ties between the nation-state and the outlaw, and Westerns in a variety of unanticipated guises.
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Introduction
Cynthia J. Miller and A. Bowdoin Van Riper
I: Dueling Industries
Turkish and Kurdish Westerns
Chapter 1
The Ghosts of Modernization: Landscape, Time, and the West in Once Upon a Time in Anatolia
Zak Bronson and Gozde Kilic
Chapter 2
On the Spatial Ideology of Turkish Cinema (The West as ‘Outside’):
Reading Seyyit Han as Western
Ali F. Sengul
German Westerns
Chapter 3
The Only Good Indian is a DEFA Indian: East German Variations on the Most American of all Genres
Franz Birgel
Chapter 4
(Dis)Respecting Winnetou: Comedy Aesthetics and the De-Re-Construction of the German Western’s Cultural Memory
Matthias Stork
II: Parodies from Around the World
Chapter 5
Visions of the West in Lucky Luke Comics: from Cliché to Critique
Pierre LaGuyette
Chapter 6
Upsetting the Genre’s Gender Stereotypes: The British Out West and Ramsbottom Rides Again (1956)
Lee Broughton
Chapter 7
Comedy, Capitalism, and Kolaloka: Adapting the American West in Lemonade Joe (1964)
Cynthia J. Miller
Chapter 8
Tough Guys of the Prairie: The Danish Potato-Westerns
Isak Thorsen
III: The Western Hero, Deconstructed
Chapter 9
Into the West: The Frontier in Ireland’s Celtic Tiger Cinema
Liam Burke
Chapter 10
El Topo: Cult Film Phenomenon Or Epic Western?
Michael T. Marsden
Chapter 11
“You Got the Wrong F**in’ Black Man!”: The Indigenous Experience in the Australian Western
Daniel Eisenberg
Chapter 12
The Self-Exiled Hero: Wong Kar-wai’s Ashes of Time
Michael C. Reiff
IV: Social Bandits and National Identities
Chapter 13
O Cangaceiro (1953) and the Brazilian Northeastern: The Western “in the Land of the Sun”
Wyatt D. Phillips
Chapter 14
“They Sing Songs about us Here”: Outlaw figures in Hungarian Westerns of the 1970s
Sonja Simonyi
Chapter 15
Reading Dost-Dushman (Bangladesh, 1977): Popular Cinema, Cultural Translation and Remaking American Western in South Asia
Zakir Hossain Raju
Chapter 16
American Cowboys, Malaysian Pirates, and the Italian Construction of Other-ed Adventurers in Film
Aliza S. Wong
V: Unexpected Roots
Chapter 17
Departure and Arrival as Motifs in Westerns with a German Background
Heike Endter
Chapter 18
“It Would Make Everything Right”: Thomas Hardy’s Western in Michael Winterbottom’s The Claim (2000)
Thomas Prasch
Chapter 19
“The East is a delicate matter”: White Sun of the Desert and the Soviet Western
Vincent Bohlinger
Chapter 20
The Sword and the Six-Shooter: Sukiyaki Western Django and the Universality of the Western
A. Bowdoin Van Riper
Featuring a foreword by renowned science fiction author William F. Nolan (Logan’s Run) and an afterword by acclaimed game designer Paul O’Connor (Darkwatch), this collection will appeal to scholars of literature, gaming, and popular culture, as well as to fans of this unique hybrid.
Foreword
William F. Nolan
Introduction
Cynthia J. Miller and A. Bowdoin Van Riper
I. Pioneers on a Wide-Open Frontier
Chapter 1:
Vaqueros and Vampires in the Pulps: Robert E. Howard and the Dawn of the Undead West
Jeffrey Shanks and Mark Finn
Chapter 2:
Weird Western Comic Books of the 1950s
Paul Green
Chapter 3:
Filling Up the West with Dead Folks: Joe R. Lansdale
Cynthia J. Miller
Chapter 4:
On Death’s Horizon: Wandering Spirits and Otherworldly Landscapes in Western Art and Cinema
Courtney Fellion
II. Lawmen & Gunmen in the Badlands
Chapter 5:
Genre Exchange on the Supernatural Frontier in Stephen King’s The Gunslinger:
The Gunfighter Archetype Meets the Ravenous Other
Adam S. Kozaczka
Chapter 6:
Vampires and Vermin: The Ambivalences of Historical and Generic Revision of the West(ern) in Darkwatch
Christina V. Cedillo
Chapter 7:
Finding a Noble Purpose in the Post-apocalyptic Zombie West: Identity Development in Jonathan Maberry’s Rot and Ruin”
Julia Saric
Chapter 8
Allegorical Confrontation Meets Gaming System: Rhetoric and Trauma within Red Dead Redemption/Undead Nightmare
M. Melissa Elston
Chapter 9:
Go West, Young Fang!: Skinner Sweet as Outlaw and American Vampire
Andrew John Sneddon and Aspasia Stephanou
III. Men of God on Hallowed Ground
Chapter 10:
A Baptism of Blood: Priest and the Regeneration of Violence on Min-Woo Hyung’s Frontier
Will Grady
Chapter 11:
Ghosts of Texas: The Duke, The Vampire, and The Saint of Killers in Preacher
Jim Casey and Marc Petersen
Chapter 12:
“And Hell Followed with Him:” Gothic Economics in Clint Eastwood’s Pale Rider
John Edgar Browning
Chapter 13:
Scratching Open Old Wounds: The Supernatural Brujo and the Undead Body in The Missing and The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada
Jericho Williams
IV. Communities at the Edge of the Unknown
Chapter 14:
Days Gone Bye: Robert Kirkman’s Re-envisioned Western, The Walking Dead
Jeffrey A. Sartain
Chapter 15:
Genre Mashing in the Role-playing Game: Deadlands: The Weird West, the Horror-Steampunk-Western
Rachel Mizsei Ward
Chapter 16:
Unsettled: Ghosts, Zombies, and Indians in the American West
C. Richard King
Chapter 17:
Undead and Online: Fan Communities and the Undead Western
Matthias Stork & A. Bowdoin Van Riper
Afterword
Paul O’Connor ""
The essays in this collection will explore the role of the "rocketman" series in the lives of their fans. What messages were they sending into American living rooms each week? What were fans (and others) doing with those messages? How did the values, ideals, goals, and desires transmitted and created by these series take form in material and social culture? They will focus on series such as Captain Z-Ro; Tom Corbett, Space Cadet; Space Patrol; Commando Cody; Rocky Jones; Flash Gordon; Buck Rogers; and Captain Video and his Video Rangers."
The seventeen essays in this volume explore the intrusion of the undead into the cinematic West, from "Curse of the Undead" and "Billy the Kid vs. Dracula" to the "Dusk Till Dawn" trilogy and "Jonah Hex." Classic films like "Once Upon a Time in the West," low-budget genre romps like "The Quick and the Undead," and television series such as "The Walling Dead" and "Supernatural" all get their due. Topics range from the marketing of "Billy the Kid vs. Dracula," through the significance of the saloon in undead Westerns, to the cannibal horrors of "Ravenous" as a critique of Manifest Destiny.
Like undead Westerns themselves, Undead in the West will appeal to fans of both genres, and casts both in a new light.
The book covers portrayals theatrical, made-for-broadcast, and made-for-cable feature films; television specials, miniseries, and limited series; episodes of traditional television series; and short films released in theaters, on video, or on the internet. It encompasses well-known lead performances (Don Ameche in The Story of Alexander Graham Bell, Greer Garson in Madame Curie, Russell Crowe in A Beautiful Mind), but also cameo roles (Harpo Marx as Isaac Newton in The Story of Mankind; Alec Guinness as Sigmund Freud in Lovesick) and unlikely guest-star appearances on television series (Leonardo da Vinci in Star Trek: Voyager; Alfred Nobel in Have Gun, Will Travel; Marie Curie in Sabrina, the Teenage Witch).
his"
This volume focuses on rocketry in late-twentieth-century Western Europe, Russia, and the United States, as well as the spread of rocket technology to East Asia and the Middle East. It covers the full history of rocket technology -- including how rockets improved in performance, reliability, and versatility and how they affected everyday life.
TOPICS
Acceleration
Action-Reaction, Law Of
Alternate Worlds
Androids
Atomic Energy
Chimpanzees
Clones
Comets
Computers
Cryonics
Cyborgs
Darwin, Charles
Death Rays
Dinosaurs
Dolphins
Dreams
Earthquakes
Eclipses
Einstein, Albert
Electricity
Elephants
Epidemics
Evolution
Evolution, Convergent
Evolution, Human
Experiments
Experiments On Self
Extinction
Flying Cars
Food Pills
Franklin, Benjamin
Galileo
Genes
Genetic Engineering
Gorillas
Gravity
Houses, Smart
Ideas, Resistance To
Inertia
Insects
Insects, Giant
Intelligence, Animal
Intelligence, Artificial
Intelligence, Human
Life, Extraterrestrial
Life, Origin Of
Lightning
Longevity
Magnetism
Mars
Matter Transmission
Meteorites
Mind Control
Miniaturization
Miracle Drugs
Moon
Mutations
Newton, Isaac
Organ Transplants
Prehistoric Humans
Prehistoric Time
Psychic Powers
Race
Radiation
Relativity
Religion And Science
Reproduction
Robots
Sharks
Space Travel, Interplanetary
Space Travel, Interstellar
Speed Of Light
Speed Of Sound
Superhumans
Theory
Time Travel
UFOs
Vacuum
Venus
Volcanoes
Whales""
This book, a revised and expanded version of my doctoral thesis, traces the those pivotal five years in detail, and shows how they transformed the way that Britons--scientists and non-scientists--thought about the distant past and humans' place in it.""
Articles by A. Bowdoin Van Riper
Kim Newman’s The Bloody Red Baron (1995)—second in a quartet of novels mixing alternate history and literary pastiche—takes aim at the “knights of the air” mythology, erasing the purported distinction between fighter pilots and others and turning the war in the air into a struggle every bit as desperate, destructive, and traumatic as that played out in the trenches below. Newman posits that Count Dracula, aided by an all-star team of mad scientists, turns The Red Baron and his Flying Circus into a cadre of ruthless, near-invincible vampire fighter pilots.
All that stands in the way of Dracula using them to turn the tide of the war is a squadron of Allied pilots who, vampires themselves, are as coldly ruthless as von Richthofen’s in battle. Newman’s interweaves the gothic horror of Dracula with the industrial horrors of the modern battlefield, transforming the supposedly chivalrous “war above the trenches” into a brutal total-war struggle with all the hallmarks of World War II.
The two series are, at their core, tales of amateurs transformed into professionals. The men of the unexploded-bomb disposal squad in Danger UXB are sent into the field with a little theoretical knowledge and even less hands-on experience. The fighter pilots in Piece of Cake are superbly trained in prewar tactics that prove lethally ineffective against the German Luftwaffe in the Battle of France. The ranks of both groups steadily diminish as war takes its remorseless toll on those unable or unwilling to learn the skills, and adopt the habits of mind, necessary to stay alive. The careless, the sloppy, the inattentive, and the incompetent die – suddenly, and often horribly – and the survivors, in turn, learn to be more careful, more precise, more focused, and more skillful. They learn, in other words, to embrace the values of the industrial age: speed, practicality, ruthless efficiency, and an intimate familiarity with complex machines. The enlisted men in both series forsake the easy rhythms that (costume dramas assure us) prevailed in the countryside, and adopt the factory hand’s all-consuming focus on The Work. The officers reject the languid casualness of the aristocracy for the practicality of the middle class, trampling time-hallowed traditions in their determination to get the job done.
The idea that industrial-age values won the war and “traditional” (that is, pre-industrial) English values were a dangerous impediment to victory is implicit in both Danger UXB and Piece of Cake. Both series thus stand in opposition to typical British television costume dramas, which celebrate pre-industrial values even when (as in Brideshead Revisited and Downton Abbey) they take place in the “long week-end” between the world wars. Both series also participate in the ongoing critique of Britain’s national mythology of the Second World War, which valorizes amateurism, resolve, and “pluck”—the values of the Edwardian past—rather than the technological sophistication, advance planning, and ruthless cost-benefit analysis that played a far greater role in protecting Britain from Nazi occupation. This essay, then, will consider the two series as revisions of, simultaneously, the costume-drama genre and popular historical memory of Britain’s darkest hour.
Hollywood’s pre-1945 view of the scientist’s role in society reflected a pair of broad attitudes then held by a majority of Americans. The first is that the proper function of science is to serve the needs of the larger society, and that science is worthy of support only if it serves those needs. The second is that individual scientists, acting in that socially sanctioned role, are powerful authority figures to whom considerable deference should be granted. The five ‘mad scientist’ films that Karloff made on the eve of the Second World War hold that bargain between scientists and society to be sacrosanct. They depict indict the public, and its elected representatives, for abrogating their side of the bargain, depicting them – not Karloff’s scientists or the science they practice – as monstrous.
In The Laughing Dead: The Horror-Comedy Film from Bride of Frankenstein to Zombieland, editors Cynthia J. Miller and A. Bowdoin Van Riper have compiled essays on the comic undead that look at the subgenre from a variety of perspectives. Spanning virtually the entire sound era, this collection considers everything from classics like The Canterville Ghost to modern cult favorites like Shaun of the Dead. Other films discussed include Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein, Beetlejuice, Ghostbusters, House on Haunted Hill, ParaNorman, Scream, Vampire’s Kiss, and Zombieland.
Contributors in this volume consider a wide array of comedic monster films—from heartwarming (The Book of Life) to pitch dark (The Fearless Vampire Killers) and even grotesque (Frankenhooker). The Laughing Dead will be of interest to scholars and fans of both horror and comedy films, as well as those interested in film history and, of course, the proliferation of the undead in popular culture.
Horror narratives routinely grasp those questions and spin them into nightmares. Monstrous “others” dine on forbidden fare; the tables of consumption are turned, and the consumer becomes the consumed. Overindulgence, as Le Grande Bouffe (1973) and Street Trash (1987) warn, can kill us, and occasionally, as films like The Stuff (1985) and Poultrygeist (2006) illustrate, our food fights back. From Blood Feast (1963) to Sweeney Todd (2007), motion pictures have reminded us that it is an “eat or be eaten” world.
Horrors of War: The Undead on the Battlefield explores the meaning and significance of these tales. Among the questions that the volume seeks to answer are: How do supernatural stories engage with cultural attitudes toward war? In what ways do these stories reflect or challenge the popular memories of particular wars? How do they ask us to think again about battlefield heroism, military ethics, and the politics of sacrifice?
Divided into four sections, chapters examine undead war stories in film (Carol for Another Christmas, The Devil’s Backbone), television (The Twilight Zone), literature (The Bloody Red Baron, Devils of D-Day), comics (Weird War Tales, The Haunted Tank), graphic novels (The War of the Trenches), and gaming (Call of Duty: World at War). Featuring contributions from a diverse group of international scholars, these essays address such themes as monstrous enemies and enemies made monstrous, legacies and memories of war, and the war dead who refuse to rest. Drawing together stories from across wars, branches of service, and generations of soldiers—and featuring more than fifty illustrations—Horrors of War will be of interest to scholars of film, popular culture, military history, and cultural history.
Here's what's inside:
Introduction
Part I: Monstrous Enemies
1. “Blood-Thirsty Graybacks:” The Monstrous Othering of the Confederacy in Abraham Lincoln, Vampire Hunter
Robert A. Saunders
2. Cry “Havoc!” and Let Slip the Vampires of War
Cynthia J. Miller
3. Vampire Pilots and Industrialized War in The Bloody Red Baron
A. Bowdoin Van Riper
4. Nazis on the Moon! Nazis under the Polar Ice Cap! And Other Recent Episodes in the Strange Cinematic Afterlife of the Third Reich
James J. Ward
Part II: The Dead Don’t Rest
5. The Wages of War: Spectral Children in The Devil’s Backbone
Michael C. Reiff
6. Traversing the Afterlife Fantasy: the Haunted Soldier in Jacob’s Ladder
Thomas Robert Argiro
7. The Haunted Tank
Paul O’Connor
8. (Re)Remembering the Great War in Deathwatch
Marzena Sokołowska-Paryż
9. The U.N.dead: Cold War Ghosts in Carol for Another Christmas
Christina M. Knopf
Part III: Making Monsters
10. Pall in the Family: Deathdream, House, and the Vietnam War
Christopher D. Stone
11. Strategic Military Reconfiguration in Horror Fiction: The Case of F. Paul Wilson’s The Keep and Graham Masterton’s The Devils of D-Day
Fernando Pagnoni Berns
12. Horror Under the Radar: Memory, Revelation, and the Ghosts of Below
Christina V. Cedillo
13. The Supernatural, Nazi Zombies & The Play Instinct: The Gamification of War and The Reality of the Military Industrial Complex.
Steve Webley
Part IV: Legacies and Memories
14. “Strange things happen in a war-torn land”: Cat Demons, Samurai, Victims’ Vengeance, and the Social Costs of War in Kaneto Shindo’s Kuroneko (1968)
Thomas Prasch
15. Public Memory and Supernatural Presence: The Mystery and Madness of Weird War Tales
Terence Check
16. War in The Twilight Zone: Rod Serling’s Haunted Visions of World War II
Vincent Casaregola
17. Specters of Media: Jacques Tardi’s Graphic Reanimation of the War of the Trenches
Katherine Kelp-Stebbins
18. R-Point as Post-Colonial Palimpsest: Generic Complexity and the Ghost in the War/Horror Film
Amanda Landa
This volume assembles a collection of essays that explore the significance and meanings of these films, as well as their reception in the national industries which gave them form. Among the questions that the volume seeks to answer are: What do Westerns not made in the U.S. reveal? In what ways do they challenge or support the idea of national literatures and cinemas? How do these films negotiate nation, narrative, and genre? Divided into five sections, the twenty essays in this volume look at films from France (The Adventures of Lucky Luke), Germany (Der Schuh des Maitu), Brazil (O Cangaceiro), Eastern Europe (Lemonade Joe), and of course, Asia (Sukiyaki Western Django).
Featuring contributions from a diverse group of international scholars—often writing about Westerns adapted to their own national traditions—these essays address such matters as competing national film traditions, various forms of satire and comedy based on the Western tradition, the range of cultural adaptations of the traditional Western hero, the ties between the nation-state and the outlaw, and Westerns in a variety of unanticipated guises.
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Introduction
Cynthia J. Miller and A. Bowdoin Van Riper
I: Dueling Industries
Turkish and Kurdish Westerns
Chapter 1
The Ghosts of Modernization: Landscape, Time, and the West in Once Upon a Time in Anatolia
Zak Bronson and Gozde Kilic
Chapter 2
On the Spatial Ideology of Turkish Cinema (The West as ‘Outside’):
Reading Seyyit Han as Western
Ali F. Sengul
German Westerns
Chapter 3
The Only Good Indian is a DEFA Indian: East German Variations on the Most American of all Genres
Franz Birgel
Chapter 4
(Dis)Respecting Winnetou: Comedy Aesthetics and the De-Re-Construction of the German Western’s Cultural Memory
Matthias Stork
II: Parodies from Around the World
Chapter 5
Visions of the West in Lucky Luke Comics: from Cliché to Critique
Pierre LaGuyette
Chapter 6
Upsetting the Genre’s Gender Stereotypes: The British Out West and Ramsbottom Rides Again (1956)
Lee Broughton
Chapter 7
Comedy, Capitalism, and Kolaloka: Adapting the American West in Lemonade Joe (1964)
Cynthia J. Miller
Chapter 8
Tough Guys of the Prairie: The Danish Potato-Westerns
Isak Thorsen
III: The Western Hero, Deconstructed
Chapter 9
Into the West: The Frontier in Ireland’s Celtic Tiger Cinema
Liam Burke
Chapter 10
El Topo: Cult Film Phenomenon Or Epic Western?
Michael T. Marsden
Chapter 11
“You Got the Wrong F**in’ Black Man!”: The Indigenous Experience in the Australian Western
Daniel Eisenberg
Chapter 12
The Self-Exiled Hero: Wong Kar-wai’s Ashes of Time
Michael C. Reiff
IV: Social Bandits and National Identities
Chapter 13
O Cangaceiro (1953) and the Brazilian Northeastern: The Western “in the Land of the Sun”
Wyatt D. Phillips
Chapter 14
“They Sing Songs about us Here”: Outlaw figures in Hungarian Westerns of the 1970s
Sonja Simonyi
Chapter 15
Reading Dost-Dushman (Bangladesh, 1977): Popular Cinema, Cultural Translation and Remaking American Western in South Asia
Zakir Hossain Raju
Chapter 16
American Cowboys, Malaysian Pirates, and the Italian Construction of Other-ed Adventurers in Film
Aliza S. Wong
V: Unexpected Roots
Chapter 17
Departure and Arrival as Motifs in Westerns with a German Background
Heike Endter
Chapter 18
“It Would Make Everything Right”: Thomas Hardy’s Western in Michael Winterbottom’s The Claim (2000)
Thomas Prasch
Chapter 19
“The East is a delicate matter”: White Sun of the Desert and the Soviet Western
Vincent Bohlinger
Chapter 20
The Sword and the Six-Shooter: Sukiyaki Western Django and the Universality of the Western
A. Bowdoin Van Riper
Featuring a foreword by renowned science fiction author William F. Nolan (Logan’s Run) and an afterword by acclaimed game designer Paul O’Connor (Darkwatch), this collection will appeal to scholars of literature, gaming, and popular culture, as well as to fans of this unique hybrid.
Foreword
William F. Nolan
Introduction
Cynthia J. Miller and A. Bowdoin Van Riper
I. Pioneers on a Wide-Open Frontier
Chapter 1:
Vaqueros and Vampires in the Pulps: Robert E. Howard and the Dawn of the Undead West
Jeffrey Shanks and Mark Finn
Chapter 2:
Weird Western Comic Books of the 1950s
Paul Green
Chapter 3:
Filling Up the West with Dead Folks: Joe R. Lansdale
Cynthia J. Miller
Chapter 4:
On Death’s Horizon: Wandering Spirits and Otherworldly Landscapes in Western Art and Cinema
Courtney Fellion
II. Lawmen & Gunmen in the Badlands
Chapter 5:
Genre Exchange on the Supernatural Frontier in Stephen King’s The Gunslinger:
The Gunfighter Archetype Meets the Ravenous Other
Adam S. Kozaczka
Chapter 6:
Vampires and Vermin: The Ambivalences of Historical and Generic Revision of the West(ern) in Darkwatch
Christina V. Cedillo
Chapter 7:
Finding a Noble Purpose in the Post-apocalyptic Zombie West: Identity Development in Jonathan Maberry’s Rot and Ruin”
Julia Saric
Chapter 8
Allegorical Confrontation Meets Gaming System: Rhetoric and Trauma within Red Dead Redemption/Undead Nightmare
M. Melissa Elston
Chapter 9:
Go West, Young Fang!: Skinner Sweet as Outlaw and American Vampire
Andrew John Sneddon and Aspasia Stephanou
III. Men of God on Hallowed Ground
Chapter 10:
A Baptism of Blood: Priest and the Regeneration of Violence on Min-Woo Hyung’s Frontier
Will Grady
Chapter 11:
Ghosts of Texas: The Duke, The Vampire, and The Saint of Killers in Preacher
Jim Casey and Marc Petersen
Chapter 12:
“And Hell Followed with Him:” Gothic Economics in Clint Eastwood’s Pale Rider
John Edgar Browning
Chapter 13:
Scratching Open Old Wounds: The Supernatural Brujo and the Undead Body in The Missing and The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada
Jericho Williams
IV. Communities at the Edge of the Unknown
Chapter 14:
Days Gone Bye: Robert Kirkman’s Re-envisioned Western, The Walking Dead
Jeffrey A. Sartain
Chapter 15:
Genre Mashing in the Role-playing Game: Deadlands: The Weird West, the Horror-Steampunk-Western
Rachel Mizsei Ward
Chapter 16:
Unsettled: Ghosts, Zombies, and Indians in the American West
C. Richard King
Chapter 17:
Undead and Online: Fan Communities and the Undead Western
Matthias Stork & A. Bowdoin Van Riper
Afterword
Paul O’Connor ""
The essays in this collection will explore the role of the "rocketman" series in the lives of their fans. What messages were they sending into American living rooms each week? What were fans (and others) doing with those messages? How did the values, ideals, goals, and desires transmitted and created by these series take form in material and social culture? They will focus on series such as Captain Z-Ro; Tom Corbett, Space Cadet; Space Patrol; Commando Cody; Rocky Jones; Flash Gordon; Buck Rogers; and Captain Video and his Video Rangers."
The seventeen essays in this volume explore the intrusion of the undead into the cinematic West, from "Curse of the Undead" and "Billy the Kid vs. Dracula" to the "Dusk Till Dawn" trilogy and "Jonah Hex." Classic films like "Once Upon a Time in the West," low-budget genre romps like "The Quick and the Undead," and television series such as "The Walling Dead" and "Supernatural" all get their due. Topics range from the marketing of "Billy the Kid vs. Dracula," through the significance of the saloon in undead Westerns, to the cannibal horrors of "Ravenous" as a critique of Manifest Destiny.
Like undead Westerns themselves, Undead in the West will appeal to fans of both genres, and casts both in a new light.
The book covers portrayals theatrical, made-for-broadcast, and made-for-cable feature films; television specials, miniseries, and limited series; episodes of traditional television series; and short films released in theaters, on video, or on the internet. It encompasses well-known lead performances (Don Ameche in The Story of Alexander Graham Bell, Greer Garson in Madame Curie, Russell Crowe in A Beautiful Mind), but also cameo roles (Harpo Marx as Isaac Newton in The Story of Mankind; Alec Guinness as Sigmund Freud in Lovesick) and unlikely guest-star appearances on television series (Leonardo da Vinci in Star Trek: Voyager; Alfred Nobel in Have Gun, Will Travel; Marie Curie in Sabrina, the Teenage Witch).
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This volume focuses on rocketry in late-twentieth-century Western Europe, Russia, and the United States, as well as the spread of rocket technology to East Asia and the Middle East. It covers the full history of rocket technology -- including how rockets improved in performance, reliability, and versatility and how they affected everyday life.
TOPICS
Acceleration
Action-Reaction, Law Of
Alternate Worlds
Androids
Atomic Energy
Chimpanzees
Clones
Comets
Computers
Cryonics
Cyborgs
Darwin, Charles
Death Rays
Dinosaurs
Dolphins
Dreams
Earthquakes
Eclipses
Einstein, Albert
Electricity
Elephants
Epidemics
Evolution
Evolution, Convergent
Evolution, Human
Experiments
Experiments On Self
Extinction
Flying Cars
Food Pills
Franklin, Benjamin
Galileo
Genes
Genetic Engineering
Gorillas
Gravity
Houses, Smart
Ideas, Resistance To
Inertia
Insects
Insects, Giant
Intelligence, Animal
Intelligence, Artificial
Intelligence, Human
Life, Extraterrestrial
Life, Origin Of
Lightning
Longevity
Magnetism
Mars
Matter Transmission
Meteorites
Mind Control
Miniaturization
Miracle Drugs
Moon
Mutations
Newton, Isaac
Organ Transplants
Prehistoric Humans
Prehistoric Time
Psychic Powers
Race
Radiation
Relativity
Religion And Science
Reproduction
Robots
Sharks
Space Travel, Interplanetary
Space Travel, Interstellar
Speed Of Light
Speed Of Sound
Superhumans
Theory
Time Travel
UFOs
Vacuum
Venus
Volcanoes
Whales""
This book, a revised and expanded version of my doctoral thesis, traces the those pivotal five years in detail, and shows how they transformed the way that Britons--scientists and non-scientists--thought about the distant past and humans' place in it.""
Kim Newman’s The Bloody Red Baron (1995)—second in a quartet of novels mixing alternate history and literary pastiche—takes aim at the “knights of the air” mythology, erasing the purported distinction between fighter pilots and others and turning the war in the air into a struggle every bit as desperate, destructive, and traumatic as that played out in the trenches below. Newman posits that Count Dracula, aided by an all-star team of mad scientists, turns The Red Baron and his Flying Circus into a cadre of ruthless, near-invincible vampire fighter pilots.
All that stands in the way of Dracula using them to turn the tide of the war is a squadron of Allied pilots who, vampires themselves, are as coldly ruthless as von Richthofen’s in battle. Newman’s interweaves the gothic horror of Dracula with the industrial horrors of the modern battlefield, transforming the supposedly chivalrous “war above the trenches” into a brutal total-war struggle with all the hallmarks of World War II.
The two series are, at their core, tales of amateurs transformed into professionals. The men of the unexploded-bomb disposal squad in Danger UXB are sent into the field with a little theoretical knowledge and even less hands-on experience. The fighter pilots in Piece of Cake are superbly trained in prewar tactics that prove lethally ineffective against the German Luftwaffe in the Battle of France. The ranks of both groups steadily diminish as war takes its remorseless toll on those unable or unwilling to learn the skills, and adopt the habits of mind, necessary to stay alive. The careless, the sloppy, the inattentive, and the incompetent die – suddenly, and often horribly – and the survivors, in turn, learn to be more careful, more precise, more focused, and more skillful. They learn, in other words, to embrace the values of the industrial age: speed, practicality, ruthless efficiency, and an intimate familiarity with complex machines. The enlisted men in both series forsake the easy rhythms that (costume dramas assure us) prevailed in the countryside, and adopt the factory hand’s all-consuming focus on The Work. The officers reject the languid casualness of the aristocracy for the practicality of the middle class, trampling time-hallowed traditions in their determination to get the job done.
The idea that industrial-age values won the war and “traditional” (that is, pre-industrial) English values were a dangerous impediment to victory is implicit in both Danger UXB and Piece of Cake. Both series thus stand in opposition to typical British television costume dramas, which celebrate pre-industrial values even when (as in Brideshead Revisited and Downton Abbey) they take place in the “long week-end” between the world wars. Both series also participate in the ongoing critique of Britain’s national mythology of the Second World War, which valorizes amateurism, resolve, and “pluck”—the values of the Edwardian past—rather than the technological sophistication, advance planning, and ruthless cost-benefit analysis that played a far greater role in protecting Britain from Nazi occupation. This essay, then, will consider the two series as revisions of, simultaneously, the costume-drama genre and popular historical memory of Britain’s darkest hour.
Hollywood’s pre-1945 view of the scientist’s role in society reflected a pair of broad attitudes then held by a majority of Americans. The first is that the proper function of science is to serve the needs of the larger society, and that science is worthy of support only if it serves those needs. The second is that individual scientists, acting in that socially sanctioned role, are powerful authority figures to whom considerable deference should be granted. The five ‘mad scientist’ films that Karloff made on the eve of the Second World War hold that bargain between scientists and society to be sacrosanct. They depict indict the public, and its elected representatives, for abrogating their side of the bargain, depicting them – not Karloff’s scientists or the science they practice – as monstrous.
The women captains are defined, as adventurers, not by individual toughness or skill with small arms (though they frequently possess both), but by their mastery of their ships – which, whether powered by sails, nuclear reactors, or warp drive – allow them to wield immense military and political power. Their status as captain gives them a social position unusual, and perhaps unique, among modern female adventure heroes. They possess absolute, unquestioned authority over their ships and crews, and – whether independent operators like Morgan Adams or agents of a distant authority like Kathryn Janeway – wield the power of their ships with little or no immediate oversight. They possess neither partners, nor mentors, nor immediate superiors: only subordinates and – in the event of armed conflict -- targets.
Ships are, traditionally, strongly gendered spaces: the ship itself female, the crew male. They are also, however, self-contained worlds within which traditional roles blur: Male sailors must “keep” the ship (cooking, cleaning, sewing) as well as “work” it, and the captain (to be successful in his role) must be both stern disciplinarian and compassionate caregiver/protector to the crew. The female captains of the 1990s and 2000s – whether in print, on film, or on television – thus approach the challenge of being women in a traditionally masculine occupational category (ship’s commander) and fictional role (adventure hero) from a unique position, and develop in ways that few land-based heroines can match.""
Takashi Miike’s 2007 film Sukiyaki Western Django cheerfully demolishes those comfortable assumptions. Plucking elements from Japanese samurai epics, Italian spaghetti Westerns, and classic Hollywood Westerns and films noir, into a bizarre landscape that hints at many times and places but clearly belongs to none of them. Pagodas sit alongside dance halls and swordsmen fight gunslingers on equal terms in the dusty streets of a lonely frontier town. The hero wears a Stetson and boots, the villains sport punk hairstyles, and the heroine’s silk jacket – slashed open by a sword – reveals an elaborate dragon tattoo across her back. The land itself is bleak and dusty (a sign in one early scene labels it “Nevata”) but the entire film is shot in lurid, deeply saturated colors: the antithesis of Kurosawa’s black-and-white or Leone’s grays and browns.
The plot -- the tale of a lone, nameless hero who restores order to a frontier town by setting the rival gangs that control it against one another -- seems built up by the same magpie-like process, cobbled together from pieces of films such as Yojimbo, A Fistful of Dollars, Django, and Last Man Standing. As the story careens toward its conclusion, however, it becomes clear that they – along with Dashiell Hammett’s Red Harvest and even Shakespeare’s tales of the Wars of the Roses – are all the same story. Such stories, Sukiyaki Western Django suggests, belong to the world; they are universal, transcending time and place. The classic Western is, Miike suggests, simply a costume in which Americans – from the late nineteenth to the early twenty-first century – have chosen to dress them.
The rocketmen – like heroes of earlier eras – did not struggle alone against evil forces and unknown dangers. They were supported by scientist-allies, by female partners, and, sometimes, by the resources of vast organizations – but above all by young male protégés. These cadets and junior space men were a made-for-television version of the teen sidekicks in the comic books and movie serials of the 1940s. Like Robin the Boy Wonder or Captain America’s young friend Bucky Barnes, they provided a character with whom young viewers could identify—someone more human-scaled than the seemingly flawless hero—and at the same time, created a space in the narrative where viewers could insert themselves into the adventure.
Reaching toward adulthood in their fictional futures, the young sidekicks joined their mentors in acting as models of adult masculinity for fans – particularly young boys – contemplating their own futures. During the course of their weekly adventures, the rocketmen mentored their young protégés on screen and a generation of eager young fans watching at home. Together, rocketmen and their sidekicks tutored their audiences in what it meant to be an American male, whether military officer, frontier innovator, intellectual gatekeeper, or corporate leader, enabling audience members to experience the consequences and rewards of different strategies for success, in the security of their own living rooms.
While the undead first began to menace the West in the late 1950s, with Edward Dein’s Curse of the Undead (1959), they did not truly begin to proliferate until the close of the twentieth century was near. From Dusk ‘Til Dawn (1996) along with its 1999 sequel and prequel, laid the groundwork for the undead’s twenty-first century invasion of the frontier. This careful positioning of the undead in the West is no accident. In the absence of urban infrastructure, industrialization, and technologization, the undead attack humanity in one of its most elemental regions, at one of its most elemental levels – the heartland of traditional American values and identity – at a time when rapid social change has called all fundamental elements of existence into question.
This essay, then, explores the many tropes and themes through which undead Westerns make those inner plagues and demons visible, and lay siege to a frontier tied to myths of freedom, independence, strength, ingenuity, that not only comprise individual identities, but collective national identity, as well.
""
Official memorials deny the reality of these deaths (caused by known design flaws and preventable equipment failures) and offer, instead, a mythic narrative in which the astronauts are heroes who died “exploring the unknown.”
Wrapping dead astronauts in a shroud of myth serves the immediate needs of the manned space program by rallying support and deflecting criticism at a moment of vulnerability. It has also, particularly in the space shuttle era now coming to a close, served a larger, long-term need: adding glamour to a program that, in the eyes of many onlookers, had long since become dull, repetitive, and unremarkable. Glowing tributes to fallen astronauts as brave explorers – rather than as operators of what NASA once described as a “space truck” on a routine trip to a familiar destination – burnishes the public’s memory of other unremarkable flights by suggesting that they, too, were bold voyages into the unknown carried out by daring explorer-heroes.
This essay analyzes this systematic redefinition of reality as it is manifested across range of official, quasi-official, and unofficial tributes to NASA’s fallen astronauts. It encompasses the monumental (the “Space Mirror” at the Kennedy Space Center) and the abstract (named geologic features on other worlds); the oral (eulogies by Presidents Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush), textual (newspaper op-ed columns and “instant books”), and the graphic (memorials at Arlington National Cemetery); the nearly sublime (the “fallen astronaut” figurine left on the Moon by the astronauts of Apollo 15) and the nearly ridiculous (Barry Winslow’s song “The Smallest Astronaut,” in which Snoopy and the Red Baron race to the Moon). It is an exploration Americans’ collective need to find meaning and purpose in seventeen of the most public deaths of the last half-century and, through them, in the space program itself.
Seductive shape shifters, androids, and clones add new dimensions to “passing” in science fiction films and television series such as Species, Blade Runner, Life Force, and Star Trek, while humanoid and non-humanoid variations merge into a continuum of difference that ranges from the alluring (Jeff Bridges’ portrayal of Starman; Seven-of-Nine and Dax in the Star Trek universe; Narim in Stargate – SG1) to the monstrous (Return of the Jedi’s Jabba the Hutt; Laliari of Galaxy Quest, Syl of Species). Regardless of the pairing – human and humanoid, humanoids of different species, human or humanoid and inorganic life form – or whether the setting is Earth or space, these narratives of interstellar intimacy reflect hierarchies, biases, and consequences drawn directly from human history.
Representations of race, ethnicity, gender, and social hierarchy in science fiction are all increasingly receiving attention in the quest to engage with audience’s values and ideological leanings. Seldom, however, are those dispositions as clear as in the portrayals of, and responses to, intimate relationships. This paper uses miscegenation – sexual intimacy at its most controversial – as a lens through which to examine such issues. It explores the ways in which – even as science fiction carries the reader outward in space and forward in time – its framing assumptions about sexuality remain rooted in Earth’s past.
The technological fantastic – technology with nineteenth-century mechanisms and with twentieth-century capabilities – is an emblem of steampunk as both subgenre and subculture. The stories that steampunk tells about those fantastic machines take place in the nineteenth century, but the stories’ creators and their audiences come to them fully aware of technology’s complex twentieth-century legacy. Steampunk’s portrayal of engineers reflects this dual historical consciousness. It balances the nineteenth-century image of engineer as wizards – defined by their wisdom and effortless control over of powerful forces – with a twentieth-century awareness of their humanity and, therefore, their fallibility and potential for short-sightedness. It tempers an uncritical Victorian-style embrace of engineers as a class with a sadder-but-wiser awareness of individual engineers’ ulterior motives and ethical lapses. It is informed by the memory of Thomas Edison, whose relentless experiments with incandescent bulbs enabled him to light the world, but also by the memory of J. Robert Oppenheimer, whose dedication to solving the “technically sweet” problem of building an atomic bomb brought civilization to the brink of self-destruction.
This article explores the image of engineers – as heroes, villains, sidekicks, and tragic victim of their own ingenuity – in steampunk fiction, film, and television. It analyzes the complex ways in which nineteenth- and twentieth-century attitudes toward technology, and those who create it, interleave to create a diverse range of engineer characters ranging from swashbuckling industrialists like Josiah Traveller of Stephen Baxter’s Anti-Ice (who consult with heads of state and alter the course of history) to modest inventor-sidekicks like Artemus Gordon of The Wild, Wild West (who work behind the scenes, supplying their hero-partner with advanced tools and weapons). It focuses, particularly, on the frequently ambiguous moral position of engineers in steampunk, through characters such as Leviticus Blue – an inventor simultaneously reviled and revered, in Cherie Priest’s Boneshaker, by residents of the city he partially destroyed. Fantastic machines make steampunk what it is; this article takes a step back, to consider the (fictional) people who make the machines."
The vampires, and the horror-world of the bar they inhabit, are the point at which the three Dusk Till Dawn films visibly intersect. Lost amid the Western Gothic décor, the dripping fangs, and the flying body parts, however, is a less obvious connection between them. Each of the three parts of the trilogy is very much a Western, and like most classic Westerns they are concerned with threats to civilization and the heroes’ struggle to overcome them. The vampires are, in each film, a threat not just to the heroes’ physical well-being, but to the moral order of which they are a part. The nature of the vampires’ threat to the moral order is different in each film, but in each case threat is familiar to any fan of classic Westerns. The vampires are unreasoning savages in the first film, calculating outlaws in the second, and seductive agents of moral dissolution in the third.
Rowman & Littlefield primarily markets to school, college, and larger public libraries, but it also welcomes proposals for potential general-interest titles that can appeal to a broad audience.
While the Dictionary of Nineteenth-Century British Scientists covers those working in traditional scientific areas such as physics, astronomy, chemistry, mathematics, and biology, it also acknowledges those working in the human sciences such as anthropology, sociology, psychology, and medicine. In addition, areas often overlooked by historians of science—such as phrenology, mesmerism, spiritualism, scientific illustration, scientific journalism and publishing, instrument making, and government policy—are included here, as are the important roles of neglected "amateurs," such as women and members of the working class. By including those who worked in nontraditional areas and by considering the social and cultural context in which they lived, the dictionary reflects a richer picture of nineteenth-century science than has ever been seen before.
That said, I think that the course -- part intellectual history, part history of scientific ideas, part STS -- is an interesting concept. Someday, I hope to revisit and update it.
Knowing that the course would have (very) limited future utility, I used it as an opportunity to experiment with an approach that -- even more than my standard world history courses -- focused on broad trends and patterns rather than detailed narratives about specific periods or regions.
This talk explores the reasons why, when we try to imagine the technological future, we not only fail, but fail consistently and repeatedly in the same ways: overestimating the likelihood of massive engineering projects, and underestimating (simultaneously) the resilience of the status quo and the power of below-the-radar technological changes to upend it.
Pop culture has a significantly worse track record when dealing with the laws of nature than it does when dealing with important stuff . . . like parking places and the menu at Waffle House. Still, the same basic reasons are behind it. Sometimes it’s because the writer picked the wrong day to sleep in science class: George Lucas, for example, who has Han Solo use “parsec” as a unit of time (not distance) when he brags about the Millennium Falcon’s speed in Star Wars. Sometimes it’s because ignoring the laws of nature makes the story better. As long as I’m picking on George Lucas, remember the chase through the asteroid field in The Empire Strikes Back? Remember the scene where Our Heroes land on one of the asteroids and almost get eaten by the giant worm-like beastie that lives inside it? You know where I’m going with this, right? What does the damn worm breathe? Come to that, what does it eat, and how does it reproduce? The answer, of course, is that the giant man-eating space worm is so cool that we don’t really care. Like the handy parking space, we accept it because it improves the story.
Popular culture also, however, plays fast-and-loose with science on a second, deeper level. This talk is, if you will, a guided tour of that second level.
The women captains are defined, as adventurers, not by individual toughness or skill with small arms (though they frequently possess both), but by their mastery of their ships – which, whether powered by sails, nuclear reactors, or warp drive – allow them to wield immense military and political power. Their status as captain gives them a social position unusual, and perhaps unique, among modern female adventure heroes. They possess absolute, unquestioned authority over their ships and crews, and – whether independent operators like Morgan Adams or agents of a distant authority like Kathryn Janeway – wield the power of their ships with little or no immediate oversight. They possess neither partners, nor mentors, nor immediate superiors: only subordinates and – in the event of armed conflict -- targets.
Ships are, traditionally, strongly gendered spaces: the ship itself female, the crew male. They are also, however, self-contained worlds within which traditional roles blur: Male sailors must “keep” the ship (cooking, cleaning, sewing) as well as “work” it, and the captain (to be successful in his role) must be both stern disciplinarian and compassionate caregiver/protector to the crew. The female captains of the 1990s and 2000s – whether in print, on film, or on television – thus approach the challenge of being women in a traditionally masculine occupational category (ship’s commander) and fictional role (adventure hero) from a unique position, and develop in ways that few land-based heroines can match."
Despite substantial differences in form and content, the films shared a common goal of cross-cultural education. The Grain that Built a Hemisphere, Saludos Amigos, and Three Caballeros were attempts to introduce Latin American culture to North American audiences. The public health films were designed to explain the benefits of North-American-style diet, sanitation, and disease-control practices to Latin American audiences. All reflect Walt Disney’s unshakeable personal belief in the universality of the human experience, which would be made manifest even more clearly in the studio’s “People and Places” featurettes of the 1950s and in the theme park ride “It’s A Small World.” The films provide spectacle, in the form of exotic images and characters, but insist that beneath the exotic surface lies a common humanity that enables mutual understanding.
The image of Latin America in Disney’s wartime films thus run counter to that offered in most Hollywood films of the 1930s and early 1940s, which suggested that the exotic Otherness of Latin America did not just lay on the surface, but went straight to its cultural bones.
"
Around the fringes of the ur-myth, however, have accumulated a halo of non-canonical stories about the race to the Moon: tales of men and missions, triumphs and tragedies that, though they involve familiar-looking hardware and familiar-sounding names, are entirely fictitious. The drama in these tales of a space-program-that-never-(quite)-was often seems, at first glance, to be intended as a cynical commentary on the golden glow of the ur-myth (as the revisionist Westerns of the 1960s and 1970s were deliberate attempts to complicate and trouble the received cinematic mythology of Westward expansion). Astronauts suffer crippling self-doubt, and even mental breakdowns, in Countdown (1968) and Marooned (1969). NASA officials are clueless in Stowaway to the Moon (1975), duplicitous in Space Cowboys (2001), and murderous in Capricorn One (1978). Astronauts risk – and in Space (1985) and Apollo 18 (2011), lose – their lives in suicidal missions that push them a step too far into an unknown and hostile world.
Taken as a whole, however, the vision of astronauts, NASA, and the manned space program presented by these cinematic tales of a not-quite-real Apollo program ultimately reinforces the messages of the received Apollo-program mythology. Ill-conceived missions, malevolent bureaucrats, and the prospect of imminent death in an environment even more hostile than they had imagined bring out familiar, definitively “American” qualities in the astronaut-heroes, and – in fact – do so in a degree unimagined even in the canonical tales.
Takashi Miike’s 2007 film Sukiyaki Western Django cheerfully demolishes those comfortable assumptions. Plucking elements from Japanese samurai epics, Italian spaghetti Westerns, and classic Hollywood Westerns and films noir, into a bizarre landscape that hints at many times and places but clearly belongs to none of them. Pagodas sit alongside dance halls and swordsmen fight gunslingers on equal terms in the dusty streets of a lonely frontier town. The hero wears a Stetson and boots, the villains sport punk hairstyles, and the heroine’s silk jacket – slashed open by a sword – reveals an elaborate dragon tattoo across her back. The land itself is bleak and dusty (a sign in one early scene labels it “Nevata”) but the entire film is shot in lurid, deeply saturated colors: the antithesis of Kurosawa’s black-and-white or Leone’s grays and browns.
The plot -- the tale of a lone, nameless hero who restores order to a frontier town by setting the rival gangs that control it against one another -- seems built up by the same magpie-like process, cobbled together from pieces of films such as Yojimbo, A Fistful of Dollars, Django, and Last Man Standing. As the story careens toward its conclusion, however, it becomes clear that they – along with Dashiell Hammett’s Red Harvest and even Shakespeare’s tales of the Wars of the Roses – are all the same story. Such stories, Sukiyaki Western Django suggests, belong to the world; they are universal, transcending time and place. The classic Western is, Miike suggests, simply a costume in which Americans – from the late nineteenth to the early twenty-first century – have chosen to dress them.
""
The vampires, and the horror-world of the bar they inhabit, are the point at which the three Dusk Till Dawn films visibly intersect. Lost amid the Western Gothic décor, the dripping fangs, and the flying body parts, however, is a less obvious connection between them. Each of the three parts of the trilogy is very much a Western, and like most classic Westerns they are concerned with threats to civilization and the heroes’ struggle to overcome them. The vampires are, in each film, a threat not just to the heroes’ physical well-being, but to the moral order of which they are a part. The nature of the vampires’ threat to the moral order is different in each film, but in each case threat is familiar to any fan of classic Westerns. The vampires are unreasoning savages in the first film, calculating outlaws in the second, and seductive agents of moral dissolution in the third.
A hybrid subgenre, the steampunk Western features traditional Western heroes – lawmen, bounty hunters, and adventurers – but gives them sidekicks straight out of science fiction: brilliant-but-eccentric inventors whose mastery of science allows them to produce technological miracles on demand, but whose mastery of everyday reality is sometimes in doubt. The inventors play the Western sidekick’s traditional role: providing color, enthusiasm, and comic relief as they assist the laconic, sparely drawn hero. Their knowledge and skill puts powerful weapons and exotic vehicles at the hero’s disposal, ensuring his success even in the face of seemingly insurmountable technological challenges. Their wild, unruly genius is only beneficial, however, when it is tightly yoked to the hero’s (and thus society’s needs). Left to their own devices, carried away by their uncritical enthusiasm for innovation, they are likely to inadvertently unleash anarchy – becoming a more benign version of the evil geniuses they help the hero to fight. The inventor-sidekicks of steampunk Westerns thus carry much of the subgenre’s thematic freight. They represent both technology-as-boon and technology-as-threat, embodying the tension that – imported from science fiction along with them – is steampunk Westerns’ central concern."
Hollywood’s depictions of scientists in love span the sound era, from Ronald Colman and Helen Hayes in Arrowsmith (1931) to Paul Bettany and Jennifer Connelly in Creation (2010). Across eras and cinematic genres, however, cinematic scientists in love face the same essential problem: how to balance the cool detachment required in the lab with their feelings for their beloved. Romance in the lab is a chaotic distraction in Bringing Up Baby (1938), a support system in The Great Moment (1941) and Madame Curie (1943), a vital anchor to reality in Altered States (1981) and Creator (1985), and a source of ethical complications in Junior (1989) and Splice (2010).
This paper explores the ways in which the changing role of love in cinematic laboratories – the scientist’s “office” – reflects changing Hollywood’s changing attitudes toward science."
The four most prominent residents of Refuge—the sheriff, his deputy, the doctor, and the storekeeper—go by the names of Forrest, Glen, Woods, and Brooks. All four are, in fact, notorious gunmen: Wild Bill Hickock, Billy the Kid, Doc Holliday, and Jesse James. Sonny Dillard, youngest of the outlaw band whose arrival sets the plot in motion, knows and (gradually) recognizes them all: not from prior meetings, but from the dime novels he obsessively reads and rereads. The film’s central mystery is not the identities of the four men, but their true characters. Were they ever the colorful, outsized heroes of the dime novels (or was that a fiction concocted for credulous Easterners)? Are they now muted, mild-mannered townsmen that they present themselves as on the streets of Refuge (or is that a fiction to encourage God to have mercy on their souls)?
Purgatory follows Sonny as he struggles to separate reality from the performed identities that overlay it. By using real historical figures, it invites the audience to be part of Sonny’s struggle, and to reflect on how much of what we take for historical truth is, in fact, deft performance for the benefit of onlookers."
Telling the story of Darwin’s time on the Beagle demands a different approach. The ship’s wardroom (a collegial, all-male environment) offers neither romance nor intense, sustained interpersonal conflict. The world beyond the ship, however, offers spectacular landscapes, exotic beasts, and unexpected finds. Dramatizations of Darwin’s voyage—I’ll consider four, here, as examples—substitute these natural spectacles for the human drama that conventional biopics rely on. They unfold the story of Darwin’s physical encounter with these exotic environments and use it as a framework on which to hang the story of his intellectual encounter with them.
It seemed obvious, from 1900 through the early 1930s, that the future of air travel lay in bigger, faster, more powerful dirigibles. Technological limits prevented such continuous improvement, however, even as unexpected advances in materials and design radically improved the performance of the once-marginal passenger airplane. Robot servants were plentiful in imagined futures from the 1930s and 1940s, because they solved “the servant problem.” Soon, however, social and cultural changes erased the demand for flesh-and-blood servants, and rendered their robot equivalents a solution without a problem. Food pills and jumpsuits were presented as inevitable things-to-come in the 1950s and 1960s, embodying the streamlined efficiency of the future. The public—their would-be users--looked at them and grimaced, however, choosing to privilege sensuality and sociability over efficiency.
These specific failures of vision are neither random nor inexplicable, but examples of a pervasive pattern rooted in the reassuring-but-misleading popular image of technological change as linear, incremental, and inevitable.
Written by David Franzoni (best known for Gladiator), directed by Antoine Fuqua (best known for Training Day), and produced by Jerry Bruckheimer (best known for making a hit movie out of an amusement park ride), King Arthur was conceived and marketed as part of that cycle. It also, however, offered audiences something rarely found in Hollywood historical epics: A point of view. The movie’s marketing campaign emphasized grim-faced warriors, clashing swords, and Keira Knightley dressed in leather straps and body paint, but it also promised audiences “the true story that inspired the legend.” The movie itself delivered a story that was—though not the Truth—a great deal closer to it than any previous movie about King Arthur. This talk is about how Jerry Bruckheimer & Co. invited moviegoers to think about the relationship between history and legend . . . and how they responded to the invitation.
Each of the five pictures features a brilliant, humane doctor (Karloff) whose research—intended to benefit humankind by solving a concrete, real-world medical problem—is thwarted by the ignorance, misunderstanding, and egomania of The Authorities (both scientific and political). Karloff begins each of the films quite sane, but is driven to madness by the relentless opposition of those he wishes to help. On the road to madness, he argues with his tormentors about issues that still exercise bioethicists and politicians: informed patient consent, the rights of the terminally ill, and the legitimacy of testing experimental drugs on human subjects, among others. Beneath their outré B-movie trappings, these films raise issues that are still potent today and would have been even more so in 1939-41.
All five of the films end (as the Production Code demanded) with the doctor dead and “order” restored, but none are eager to indict him—much less Science itself—for his actions. They seem far more interested in indicting American society for its willingness to accept medical “miracles” but not the hard choices that they entail.
""