Robert Lawson explores both toxic masculinity and positive masculinity in the media landscape, from Andrew Tate to the television show Brooklyn 99. OUPblog - Academic insights for the thinking world.
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OUPblog » Media


Exploring language and masculinities in the media landscape

Exploring language and masculinities in the media landscape

We all engage with different media formats on a daily basis. From watching television shows and movies, to catching up with the news, playing videogames, reading a blogpost from a favourite author, downloading the latest app, or discussing current events with people on social media, the media is an integral (and inescapable) part of our lives. While there is some evidence to suggest rates of use across commercial media platforms is declining, a recent Ofcom report found that over 90% of the British adult population are regular users of the internet and British viewers are still watching over five hours of television per day, even as overall media consumption is now fragmented across smart phones, online platforms, radio stations, television, streaming services, and print. 

Men in the media

What is also clear across a variety of news reportstelevision showssocial media sitescomputer games, and other media formats is that men appear to dominate, both in terms of focus and the number of contributions they make. In the case of televised and printed media, this dominance raises questions of representation, equity, and the shape of contemporary gender relations. In other spaces, such as the manosphere (a loose collection of blogs, websites, Twitter accounts, and Reddit communities dedicated to a variety of men’s issues), this dominance is inflected by a virulent strand of networked misogyny, anti-feminism, and male supremacism. 

This intersection of men and media has been a research focus in academia, public policy work, and the charity sector for some time now. This research highlights how the media sets out cultural scripts of what’s “normal” and “accepted.” Media outputs give audiences exemplars and models they can compare themselves against, offering aspirational goals to strive for or images of self-hood to avoid. The media can also subvert these scripts, pushing gender discourses into new territory, challenging established wisdoms, and destabilising conventional stereotypes. By virtue of their interactivity and sense of community, manosphere spaces bring an added layer of complexity to proceedings, with research suggesting that their technological affordances play a key role in driving online radicalisation. 

And it is clear that the diversity of media influences can have substantial real-world effects. For instance, a recent survey commissioned by BBD Perfect Storm found that 51% of men believe that the media negatively impacts how successful they feel, while a joint UN Women/UNICEF report from 2022 notes “the particular role of news media reporting in perpetuating discriminatory gender norms and stereotypes, and bolstering the social permission structures that normalize this violence.” The arrest of Andrew Tate, the self-proclaimed “king of toxic masculinity,” in December 2022 brought some of these issues into ever clearer focus, with a number of teachers, educators, charity leaders, parents, and counsellors expressing concerns about how Tate’s controversial talking points around consent, respect, dating, gender relations, and women were being parroted by male pupils in school hallways and classrooms up and down the country.  

Exploring the language of men in the media

Given the ubiquity of men in the media, it would seem to be an obvious place to look at how language relates to issues of contemporary masculinities. But while masculinities studies is a well-established field, the empirical analysis of the language used by (and about) men is a relatively new part of language and gender research. In my own work in this area, I explore how language is used by men across a range of media contexts, including fatherhood forums, television comedy shows, newspaper articles, manosphere communities, and alt-right spaces. More specifically, I’m interested in the history of “tough” masculinity in the British press, evaluations of “ideal” masculinity in the manosphere, the role of the media in promoting “positive” masculinities (with specific focus on the comedy show Brooklyn Nine-Nine), and the representation of caring models of fatherhood in online forums.

Why might we want to apply a linguistic lens to men in different media spaces? First and foremost, language is the primary means through which we relate to one another and (dis)align ourselves from other groups and categories. By paying close attention to linguistic practice, we can learn more about contemporary gender dynamics and how language is used to structure these relations. Second, by analysing the kinds of linguistic strategies used in manosphere and alt-right spaces, we can better understand how these strategies become part of a system of persuasion and manipulation to recruit young men to male supremacist ideologies. In the context of the growing threat posed by networked misogyny (captured in the toxic narratives promoted by Tate and other “manfluencers”), challenging these strategies becomes an important pedagogical intervention. Finally, it is clear that some media outputs offer a more positive and healthier configuration of masculinity and we can do a lot to learn about how these outputs use language to disrupt some of the more damaging aspects of masculine behaviour.  

For many people, language is an unremarkable part of everyday life, yet it is through this mundanity that language retains its power to shape society in subtle and indirect ways. The job of a linguist is to bring to light these hidden systems of differentiation and alignment, in order to show how language contributes to ongoing processes of discrimination, bias, and prejudice. The media reflects (and influences) both the good and the bad of who we are and what we stand for and, because of how it sits within a broader system of gender discourses, different media forms are ideal spaces for exploring the contemporary construction of modern-day masculinities (and of gender relations more generally). With the media so deeply integrated into our everyday lives, and substantial concerns being expressed about the problems of networked misogyny, gender representation, online radicalisation, male supremacism, and a whole host of other social ills, we need to use all the tools at our disposal to try to address these problems.

Featured image from the book cover of Language and Mediated Masculinities: Cultures, Contexts, Constraints (OUP 2023)

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Has Russian journalism returned to Soviet era restrictions?

Has Russian journalism returned to Soviet era restrictions?

“As Vladimir Putin’s leadership enters its third decade, time will tell whether the despair of the current generation will be replaced by a renewed sense of journalism’s power to effect change.” That was how I ended the epilogue of News From Moscow, my monograph on post-war journalism in the Soviet Union. When I wrote those words, the situation for Russian journalists was already dire: journalists who contradicted the Kremlin line were regularly harassed, and independent publications were forced to register as “foreign agents.” But Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine on 24 February has made a bad situation immeasurably worse. Sooner than expected, the dismal future of Russian journalism is becoming clearer. 

Before I discuss the war’s effects on Russian journalists, it is important to begin this post by acknowledging the even-worse fate of Ukrainian journalists, at least 30 of whom have been killed in the conflict, either as frontline reporters or victims of Russian bombing. Occupying forces have deliberately targeted the press: countless Ukrainian journalists have been kidnapped, tortured or “disappeared,” while their families have also been threatened. But it is thanks to these journalists that audiences around the world have learned about Russian war crimes. Despite threats to silence them, Ukrainian journalists continue to search for the truth about a war Russian journalists cannot even name. 

“Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine on 24 February has made a bad situation immeasurably worse.”

The intensification of the so-called “special military operation” became a pretext for a crackdown on independent media across Russia. Officials threatened to prosecute those who described events in Ukraine as a war, while the state’s media watchdog Roskomnadzor blocked access to the websites of many independent outlets. As a result, the Russian news landscape has become a state-controlled landscape, with news outlets including Meduza and Mediazona only accessible through a VPN. Staples of the liberal 1990s, such as the radio station Ekho Moskvy and the newspaper Novaia gazeta closed their doors in March, having been threatened by Roskomnadzor. The latter’s editor, Dmitri Muratov, was attacked with red paint on a train to Samara, an assault which underlines the dangerous conditions for anti-war journalists, who now face 10-15 years in jail for disseminating “fake news.” 

When, in June 2021, Muratov was awarded the Nobel Prize, the committee’s statement mentioned the newspaper’s “fundamentally critical attitude towards power” as well as its “fact-based journalism and professional integrity.” But how can journalists working within the Russian mediascape maintain their integrity in a climate that seems to mitigate against truth, and which calls for moral compromises rather than ethical principles? 

For some Russian journalists, the invasion presents an opportunity. Russian television now offers a ready platform for various regime loyalists, nationalists, and conspiracists to launder their pet theories, including Vladimir Solovyov, a media pundit famous for his increasingly-deranged rants on Channel One. For others, the invasion became the straw that broke the camel’s back. State media was hit with a stream of resignations, while most of the non-Russian staff who had run the various versions of RT, the Russian state’s foreign broadcasting arm, rapidly jumped ship. The most high-profile act of dissent was the protest of Maria Ovsyannikova, an editor on the Channel One news, who famously crashed the channel’s evening news broadcast carrying an anti-war banner. Ovsyannikova was feted by western media and subsequently accepted a post with the German newspaper Die Welt. That decision was met with consternation from journalists and activists, who wondered why Ovsyannikova, who had for many years worked to disseminate the Kremlin’s narrative, had suddenly become a poster child for dissent. 

“Are journalists automatically tainted by association with a discredited regime or can they point to positive actions they had taken to mitigate its impact?”

These discussions of complicity recall debates taking place after 1991, at which point journalists were understandably keen to deflect accusations of having been Soviet propagandists. They raise a wider question about journalism in authoritarian conditions: are journalists automatically tainted by association with a discredited regime, or can they point to positive actions they had taken to mitigate its impact? 

I am sometimes asked about parallels between the present-day Russian journalism and the press of the Soviet era: are we back in the USSR? The journalists at Dozhd’ suggested as much when they broadcast footage of Swan Lake in March, an allusion to Soviet TV broadcasts of the ballet during emergencies. One must, however, acknowledge the differences: independent media in the Soviet Union ended with the Decree on the Press of 9 November 1917, which effectively mandated the closure of all non-Bolshevik newspapers; after the Soviet collapse, it has never been illegal for journalists to start a new newspaper, nor to express opinions that differ from those of the regime. The Kremlin authorities have preferred to dismantle these freedoms piece by piece rather than with a single legislative act. The key point is that for much of the Soviet Union’s existence, journalists had no memory of the pre-1917 past, nor any expectation of being able to act independently. Today’s journalists, by contrast, are the children of Perestroika and the 1990s, and had, until recently, been able to speak truth to power. For that reason, there is a sense of loss.

Good journalism meant different things in each period. Soviet journalists were never free to contradict the Party line, nor to break important news stories, which were always approved at high levels. Journalists’ work was always tied to the overarching goal of building communism. Nevertheless, this still left them with space for creativity—especially after Stalin’s death. For journalists in the 1950s and 1960s, a period I examine in detail in my book, journalists helped popularise new pedagogical initiatives and even inaugurated the country’s first polling institute. Doing so, they hoped, would unleash untapped energies from below that would enable the building of communism. At the same time, they helped smooth the regime’s rough edges. Newspapers received thousands of letters every week, complaining of various ills of Soviet life, from a leaking roof to wrongful imprisonment. These letters became the source material for articles which could reverse a sentence, secure long-awaited housing, or expose official wrongdoing. It is this spirit of public service that allows Soviet journalists to claim that they were public servants, even if much of the material in their newspapers was geared towards the Party’s goals.

In the present day, the Kremlin’s constant attacks on independent journalists mean the hard-won freedoms of 1991 have shrunk to almost nothing. Top-level journalists at leading state broadcasters operate under constraints that recall Soviet conditions, including daily memorandums giving details of subjects to be covered and those to be avoided. The majority of journalists, who form the staff of regional television stations and newspapers, are increasingly squeezed between the requirements of their employers, their advertisers, and the demands of local politicians. In this climate, as Elisabeth Schimpfössl and Ilya Yablokov have noted, good journalism boils down to adekvatnost’: an ability to understand the “rules of the game” in the face of political and commercial restrictions and to operate effectively within those parameters.  

“The disappearance of independent media will only intensify the feeling that Russian journalists are providers of propaganda and distraction.”

Adekvatnost’ could similarly describe the work of Soviet journalists who operated in a hostile political climate that severely restricted their freedom. Indeed, one of the most iconic accounts of the Soviet press came from the émigre novelist Sergei Dovlatov, whose comic novella The Compromise (1981) details the daily accommodations with authority that marred a young journalist’s career. Yet some Soviet journalists remained hopeful about the communist future and even when that future horizon receded, retained a belief that journalism could serve the public. Present-day Russian journalists, by contrast, have imbibed the Putin’s era’s trademark cynicism. The disappearance of independent media will only intensify the feeling that Russian journalists are providers of propaganda and distraction rather than contributors to the public good. Nevertheless, there remain journalists—many outside Russia, some, bravely, within it—who have continued to question the official line via Twitter, YouTube, Telegram, or blog posts. As Farida Rustamova, an exiled journalist whose Substack offers a perceptive view of Russian politics, told Meduza: “I started writing, among other things, to keep my hands and my head busy and to be of at least some use, describing what I can discover. I don’t want Russian speakers, especially in Russia, to be left alone with Putin’s propaganda”.

Featured image by Jeremy Bishop via Unsplash, public domain

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Digital dance cultures: from online obscurity to mainstream recognition

Digital dance cultures: from online obscurity to mainstream recognition

I didn’t enter the world of digital dance cultures as a scholar. When I was introduced to TikTok and Dubsmash in October 2018 by my high school students, I first engaged with the platforms as a dancer. Despite having no formal training in dance and believing that any opportunity for me to become a dancer had passed me by, I was suddenly dancing alongside my students on a number of digital platforms that facilitated a growing screendance community. These platforms—namely TikTok, Dubsmash, and Triller—became part of my every day vernacular as the Gen Z dance moves that fill those spaces such as the Woah, the Mop, and the Wave became my choreography. Suddenly, I was a dancer

In just over three years since TikTok’s entry into the United States and Dubsmash’s re-launch as a dance challenge app, so much has changed. When I joined these apps, posting videos dancing alongside my students, I was one of few adults among millions of teenagers. In fact, even today, Dubsmash is still an almost exclusively Gen Z space. TikTok, bolstered by the pandemic, has become a home for social media users of all ages even if young people continue to dictate the app’s dominant culture. TikTok and Dubsmash’s emergence as critical spaces for digital dance fall into a lineage of screendance platforms that have proliferated since the dawn of the internet. Although screendance has been steadily gaining popularity, the pandemic accelerated this trend.

As with most things during the pandemic, the digital dance world saw a dramatic shift that both changed the culture and solidified many of the trends that had been shifting on the sidelines well before March 2020. Seeing this, dance scholars Harmony Bench and Alexandra Harlig guest-edited a special issue of The Journal of Screendance that responded to the nuanced ways that the pandemic has shifted the ways we engage with dance on digital media. Bench and Harlig note, “Activities once on the sidelines of the dance field are the new normal: teaching technique on Zoom, holding online dance film festivals, DJing house parties on Instagram, streaming archival performance documentation, making TikToks.” Indeed, screens are where we dance now.

 

As digital dance cultures became more normalized, scholars and the general public began to take notice. This was no more apparent than on 12 March 2021 during the This Is Where We Dance Now: Covid-19 and the New and Next in Dance Onscreen Symposium, produced by Harmony Bench and Alexandra Harlig to coincided with the special journal issue. The online symposium began with a keynote roundtable featuring dance and digital media scholars Crystal Abidin, Kelly Bowker, Colette Eloi, Pamela Krayenbuhl, Chuyun Oh, and myself. Each scholar presented new research about how platforms such as Dubsmash and TikTok have exploded during the pandemic, making what was once something largely associated with teenagers in the US to something more universal. Now, dancing on TikTok, Triller, Dubsmash, and the like is not just an activity filling the hallways of high schools across the US. Rather, digital dance platforms have become an integral part of the mainstream.

As TikTok and Dubsmash have solidified themselves in mainstream US culture, so too have many of the conversations I engage with. Discussions about artist credit, monetization, choreography, activism, and community-building on social media apps, for example, are commonplace now. Casual onlookers now see these apps as serious spaces for artistic production which is the antithesis to how adults diminished young people’s content in the early days of these apps. 

Take for instance the story of the Renegade Dance Challenge set to K-Camp’s song “Lottery.” The Renegade Dance entered the mainstream in Fall 2019 after Charli D’Amelio, TikTok’s most-followed creator, posted a video of her performing the dance. The dance took off, becoming what is arguably the most famous dance in TikTok’s short history. But TikTok isn’t where I first encountered Renegade and Charli D’Amelio wasn’t who I associated the dance with. I first learned about the dance from my high school students who had seen it on Dubsmash. The dance wasn’t created by D’Amelio, but was created by Jalaiah Harmon, a Black teen who wasn’t credited for her choreography and was seemingly left behind. After a media firestorm in January and February 2020, Harmon was rightfully credited as the mastermind behind the Renegade Challenge. Her popularity and career both took off, demonstrating the monetization that corresponds with social media virality.

The case of the Renegade signalled a shift in TikTok culture. Soon after, TikTok’s major talents such as D’Amelio and Addison Rae Easterling began giving dance credits in their videos, which modelled a culture of crediting artists. Their followers soon began giving credit, as well. By the time Keara Wilson choreographed one of 2020’s biggest dances, the Savage Challenge set to Megan Thee Stallion’s song of the same name, the entire landscape had changed. Wilson immediately was given credit, received the blue checks on Instagram and TikTok, had articles written about her, and even had the stamp of approval from Megan Thee Stallion. As TikTok grew in import throughout 2020, this became common practice, demonstrating how digital dance spaces became more recognized and respected by mainstream US culture as well as the media who had frequently disregarded TikTok and Dubsmash as silly spaces for teenagers. 

Indeed, now looking forward into what the future might hold for screendance, we can see that the pandemic has ushered in many changes that were likely inevitable. Social media dance spaces have been normalized. 

Feature image by Solen Feyissa on Unsplash.

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François Truffaut: why we crave great fiction

François Truffaut: why we crave great fiction

François Truffaut is among the few French directors whose work can be labeled as “pure fiction.” He always professed that films should not become vehicles for social, political, religious, or philosophical messages. As Bunuel used to say: “My cinema is not meant to be understood. When you understand, you reach a meaning. If you reach a meaning, there is no use for images.” Martin Scorsese flatly declared: “If I could put it in words, I would not have to put it in films.” The specificity of images is to transpose something that goes beyond the linguistic and the cognitive. Truffaut called it emotion as opposed to ideas and he was supremely gifted at delivering this precious good in his work. What exactly is emotion? This innocent word covers a fearfully complex process.

Truffaut grew up in an atmosphere of secrets and lies. He was unwanted child and found out when he was 10 that his father was not Monsieur Truffaut, but another, unknown, man. Early on, he confronted a world where words could not be trusted and learned to rely on the accuracy of non-verbal signs. His fictions expertly reactivate the silent grasp of the external world associated with pre-linguistic perceptions and create a pregnant reality alive with telling gestures, lights, colors, motions, sounds, music. A brilliant film critic and script writer, Truffaut also worshipped the formidable power of language. His films abound with letters and literary texts and cultivate elegant dialogues. He devoted one of his most beautiful films to the duality of language, verbal and non-verbal. In The Wild Child, he confronts a scientist—played by himself—writing his diary and a little savage who will never master the use of words, but still displays a natural gift for deep connections. 

Truffaut translated a rich perceptual world into hallucinatory landscapes. Under a deceptively realistic guise, images of his heroes chasing magical women in the streets of Paris become beautiful and universal metaphors for human destiny. His fictions give a geographic reality to emotions, memories, perceptions we cannot grasp or control. These metaphors suggest a hidden order organizing this buried material and bring it to light with exhilarating clarity. We are suddenly face to face with subterranean passions and we love what we see, instead of experiencing them amidst fear and confusion. 

Truffaut often declared that human destiny is imprinted by what happens to a man between the ages of 8 and 12. To illustrate how his metaphoric constructions are charged with deep autobiographical overtones, I want briefly to compare two films dealing directly with these years in his life: The 400 Blows (1959) and The Last Metro (1980). More than 20 years separate these works. The 400 Blows is Truffaut’s first film and The Last Metro his antepenultimate one. He would only make two more films before his death in 1984. Besides covering the same time-period, they share another characteristic: both were his two biggest financial successes. They obviously delivered a powerful emotion to audiences. In every other respect, however, they completely differ. 

First, style: realistic in The 400 Blows filmed in black and white and natural decors; elliptical and allusive in The Last Metro, which uses a studio-like set and a rich palette of colors where a deep red dominates. Second, narrative: The 400 Blows follows the social exclusion of a lonely 12-year-old boy who is successively expelled from school, home and Paris, and is ultimately locked up in a center for delinquents in Normandy. The Last Metro depicts the life of a theater during the German occupation, with a large cast of characters who closely interact in a series of subplots dealing with secrets, transgressive love, and creativity. A third difference sends us back to dates. Truffaut, born in 1932, was between 8 and 12 years old during WWII. He chose to film The 400 Blows in a 1959 setting, while The Last Metro is set in the Paris of the French Occupation. In The 400 Blows, we have the child, but not the décor; in The Last Metro, the décor but not the child. 

Or so it seems. One feature common to both films is the presence of a formidable woman: in one, the child’s mother; in the other, Marion Steiner, played by Catherine Deneuve. Enigmatic, lonely, distant, somewhat scary but totally fascinating, both women harbor a secret: the former is hiding a lover; the latter a husband. The main dramatic twist in both narratives will be the unveiling of this secret by the hero: Antoine Doinel, will run into his mother and her lover in the streets; Bernard Granger (Gérard Depardieu) will discover Marion’s hidden Jewish husband in the cellar of the theater. From the beginning, Granger is associated with a young boy, the concierge’s son— who will be Deneuve’s illegitimate son in the play the theater is rehearsing. In The Last Metro, we also have a second major male figure: Deneuve’s husband, the creator in the cellar. In other words, in The Last Metro, Truffaut is present under three different personas: as a child, as a lover, as a celebrated creator.

Like Antoine Doinel, the creator is in jail, hiding and threatened because he is Jewish. Truffaut suspected that his unknown biological father was Jewish, and Catherine Deneuve was one of his great loves after their meeting on the set of The Mississippi Mermaid in 1969. Their break-up broke his spirit in 1971. “Love hurts” a line from The Last Metro, is a quote from The Mississippi MermaidThe 400 Blows and The Last Metro form a diptych; they’re two complementary facets of Truffaut’s childhood. The 400 Blows evokes the loneliness of a rejected child, The Last Metro the healing art can dispense. The theater it depicts, with its red velvet seats, is a wonderful space, protected from the threats of the outside world (the Gestapo) and dominated by a radiant star figure in a splendid red dress (Marion Steiner). This is Truffaut’s everlasting image of the cinemas of his childhood.

Autobiographical material in The Last Metro is ubiquitous, albeit most cryptic—

so cryptic that it eluded even Truffaut’s directorial eye. I wrote my first essay on The Last Metro while Truffaut was still alive. He read my analysis and told me he was “staggered” by it. Knowing nothing about his illegitimate birth and his Jewish father, I was explaining that Bernard was in the position of a child who explores the maternal space and discovers the hidden father. Under the guise of a historical film, Truffaut had unknowingly projected, within a beautiful metaphor, the secret of his birth. This anecdote is meant to make an essential point: metaphors belong to the pre-linguistic perceptions; they escape the control of the cognitive mind. This is true for both the creator and the spectator. 

Metaphor seems to be a key word to define Truffaut’s art. In each of his films, he seems to craft a new one almost more elegant, arresting, and poignant than the one before. The metaphoric constructions are embedded in formal elements that are peripheral to the main narrative. While analyzing The Last Metro, I decrypted the metaphor by focusing only on spaces, colors, and movements and ignoring the plot. Truffaut’s first film, The 400 Blows, is already profoundly metaphoric. Jean-Pierre Léaud was instructed not to express any explicit emotion while acting. The film’s form, in appearance naturalistic, furnishes secretly, through images, the key to the child’s inner rift. One example: the camera work sets up a contrast between the streets of Paris filmed in long mobile tracking shots and the inside scenes where fixed close ups dominate. The use of space captures a fantastic vitality frozen by the constraints of school and family life. Antoine’s long run at the end of the film brilliantly picks up both this spatial energy and its counterpoint in the last frozen shot by the sea.

Truffaut’s metaphoric constructions have a double function. While displaying a subterranean reality through formal arrangements, they generate a light hypnosis in the spectator. This perceptual mode differs radically from our normal ways of perceiving. It is not only different, it is accessible only through fiction and its metaphoric language. Emotion is hypnosis. Fiction opens a perceptual experience otherwise unreachable except, possibly, with alcohol and drugs, which however both lack the harmony inherent in art and, clearly, its safety. Mystical rapture would be another avenue, albeit much less within everyman’s reach than a film ticket. As the anthropologist Gregory Bateson writes: “What unaided consciousness (unaided by art, dreams and the like) can never appreciate is the systemic nature of the mind.” Art, in all its forms through the centuries, is not a luxury, but an adjuvant, an ancillary to our equilibrium and even survival, as Bateson suggests: “Unaided consciousness must always tend toward hate.” The systemic mind fosters empathy.

Great films also have moments when the hypnotic process breaks down because the images suddenly concentrate, in a fantastic coda, all the formal elements of the metaphor. This overload of effects wakes up the viewers and imprints the scene forever in their memory. It becomes what we call “an iconic scene”: Marilyn Monroe on the subway grate; Anita Ekberg in the fountain of Trevi, De Niro in the “You’re talking to me” scene of Taxi Driver and, of course, Antoine Doinel facing the viewer, his back to the sea, at the end of The 400 Blows. This last image is, by general consensus, one of the most memorable shots in the history of cinema. 

At this point we may well ask two questions: Did Truffaut know he was putting this architecture in place? Do viewers realize it exists? As I suggested earlier, the answer to both questions is almost certainly no. Knowledge implies a conscious, deliberate cognitive operation, one that is lacking on the parts of both creator and spectator. Truffaut conceived his films as a trajectory in space, as rhythms and forces in movement. The logic of this vision instinctively guided his creation of the mise en scène; the viewer responds unknowingly to the call of these forms. They trigger the pleasure of the film, which becomes the locus of a passionate dialogue between two unconscious minds, one forcefully leading the other. Such is, in fact, the film’s raison d’être. When we go to the movies, this is what we crave. Basking in the dim light of great films, we rejoice in this pause in our daily routine—a pause as indispensable as it is blissful.

Feature image: from Nationaal Archief via Wikimedia Commons.

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A Charlie Brown Christmas: the unlikely triumph of a holiday classic

A Charlie Brown Christmas: the unlikely triumph of a holiday classic

A Charlie Brown Christmas was never supposed to be a success. It hit on all the wrong beats. The pacing was slow, the voice actors were amateurs, and the music was mostly laid back piano jazz (the opening theme, “Christmas Time is Here,” carried a strange, wintery melody built on unconventional modal chord progressions). It was almost like the program was constructed as a sort of anti-pop statement. In many ways, that’s exactly what it was. And that’s exactly why it so worried the media executives who had commissioned it.

Incredibly, however, A Charlie Brown Christmas emerged from the holiday season of 1965 an unlikely and instantaneous classic, beloved by both the hip and the square in the United States. It did the incredible work of bridging the vast cleavage between the conservative and increasingly radical elements of the nation. The story of how this off-beat children’s program became a staple of modern American pop culture reveals much about the moment in which it was created and the people who fell in love with it.

The Christmas special had its origins in a television documentary that no one wanted. A young California filmmaker named Lee Mendelson had first met Charles Schulz in the early 1960s while shooting footage for a television program about Willie Mays, the famed centerfielder for the recently transplanted (1957) San Francisco Giants baseball team. Schulz, himself a recent migrant to northern California, had been at the ballpark to celebrate a Peanuts-themed event at the Giants’ Candlestick Park. After an enjoyable introduction, Mendelson had reached back out to Schulz with the idea for a documentary on Peanuts that he eventually titled A Boy Named Charlie Brown. The television documentary depicted the unassuming daily life of America’s hottest new cartoonist, from the school carpool to the drawing board to the evening at home with all his kids. Try as Mendelson might, however, he could not find a network interested in buying the program. After a year and a half of searching, it seemed that A Boy Named Charlie Brown was a loser like its namesake.

“Mendelson immediately telephoned Schulz. ‘I think I may have just sold a Charlie Brown Christmas show,’ he breathlessly announced. ‘What show might that be?’ Schulz replied a bit stunned and entirely confused. ‘The one you need to make an outline for tomorrow,’ Mendelson replied without missing a beat.”

Despite this bump in the road, filming the documentary had sparked a strong working relationship between Schulz and Mendelson. During the first half of the 1960s, Peanuts grew into a national sensation thanks to big advertising deals with Ford Motor Company, a best-selling children’s book called Happiness is a Warm Blanket, and a rapidly expanding national syndication. All of this success led to a phone call in 1965. John Allen, an advertising man from McCann-Erickson, reached out to Mendelson. Allen had known Mendelson from his many attempts at selling A Boy Named Charlie Brown. This time Allen wanted to talk about a new idea for Schulz. Coca-Cola was in search of a television special for the holiday season. Did Schulz have anything, Allen inquired. “Of course,” Mendelson lied.

Mendelson immediately telephoned Schulz. “I think I may have just sold a Charlie Brown Christmas show,” he breathlessly announced. “What show might that be?” Schulz replied a bit stunned and entirely confused. “The one you need to make an outline for tomorrow,” Mendelson replied without missing a beat.

That weekend Schulz, Mendelson, and animator Bill Melendez typed and retyped and cut and pasted a draft of the script for A Charlie Brown Christmas. By Monday morning it had reached Atlanta where it received immediate approval from Coca-Cola and was soon picked up by CBS. Now the truly difficult work began. These three men had to make a promising idea into a reality.

A Charlie Brown Christmas would later become famous for its embrace of authentic child actors, smooth jazz soundtrack, and deliberate pacing. Unmoved by the flashy, multi-colored aluminum Christmas trees in fashion at the time, Charlie Brown’s Christmas tree was a spindly, crooked sprout that could not stand up to the weight of the single ornament placed atop it. Love and teamwork (and the comfort of Linus’s security blanket wrapped at its base) transformed the pitiful sprig into just the right tree for the Peanuts kids. Fans of the program found the whole thing instantly heartwarming and refreshingly genuine. That’s not how the CBS and Coca-Cola executives initially saw it, though.

“Unmoved by the flashy, multi-colored aluminum Christmas trees in fashion at the time, Charlie Brown’s Christmas tree was a spindly, crooked sprout that could not stand up to the weight of the single ornament placed atop it.”

In a pre-release screening, moods could hardly have been more dour. “The network thought it was awful,” Mendelson remembered afterwards. None of it had the polish, flash, pizzazz they had hoped for. Most troubling of all was a section Schulz himself had insisted on adding to the final act of the program. In it Linus finally answered the question that had plagued Charlie Brown throughout the special: “Isn’t there anyone who knows what Christmas is all about?” Linus then stepped into a spotlight on the Christmas pageant stage and recited a passage from Luke 2 about the birth of Jesus. The CBS executives minced no words about the scene after their screening. “The Bible thing scares us,” one admitted.

While this might seem like a bit of surprising response to us today as we imagine the quainter times of the long 1950s, it is important to understand just how different the television landscape was in 1965. With only three national networks, television programs competed for the broadest audience possible with their programs. This meant that television executives wanted their content to be inoffensive both to viewers and advertisers (unlike our fragmented media landscape today which thrives on polarization and controversy to sustain loyal subsets of American viewers). Religion, then, was suggested in the vaguest and most ecumenical ways so as not to stir sectarian differences. This is why Linus’s monologue put knots in the executives’ stomachs. It is also why Schulz insisted on keeping it in the program despite repeated concerns from Mendelson and Melendez. “If we don’t do it, who will?” Schulz asked.

So in December 1965, A Charlie Brown Christmas ran for the first—and, CBS executives assumed, last—time. The audience response could hardly have been more surprising or overwhelming. In the days following the program, thousands of letters and postcards flooded the offices of Coca-Cola, CBS, and Charles Schulz. Viewers praised the authenticity of the special, the message of finding deeper meanings in the season’s traditions than crude consumerism, and—for the Christian subset of the audience—explicit reference to Jesus. By juggling a broadly popular message of anti-consumerism with a more niche message of religious exclusivity, Charles Schulz and his collaborators created one of the most unlikely Christmas television classics of all time.

Feature image by Lucas Hoang on Unsplash

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