Given his decided penchant for spectacle—he crowned himself emperor, after all—there is no reason to be surprised that Napoleon’s empire soon included the cinema, a medium his visual ubiquity made ripe for conquest. To prepare for our newest ...
‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ 

OUPblog » TV & Film


Napoleon’s cinematic empire: a fascination with film

Napoleon’s cinematic empire: a fascination with film

People around the nineteenth-century Atlantic world were fascinated by Napoleon Bonaparte. One way to measure this enthusiasm is to look to the poems, novels, plays, paintings, lithographs, souvenir objects, as well as memoirs, histories, and biographies in which he appears. Often, he is front and center, but the emperor also lurks on the margins or pops in momentarily. Some factual, many fanciful, these works created a new kind of Napoleonic empire that continued to conquer the imagination long after his armies disbanded. Indeed, Napoleonic spectacles were a feature of nineteenth-century life, from the Napoleon plays that entertained audiences in cities large and small, the elaborate festivities arranged to honor the return of his body from Saint-Hélène on 15 December 1840—the retour des cendres—or the great parade route at the St. Louis World’s Fair of 1904, where a lounging young Napoleon oversaw the activities.

Given his decided penchant for spectacle—he crowned himself emperor, after all—there is no reason to be surprised that Napoleon’s empire soon included the cinema, a medium his visual ubiquity made ripe for conquest. To prepare for our newest Napoleon, it is worth looking back on some of his prior celluloid incarnations, some great and others less so. Sometimes Napoleon is granted center stage, while other times he tries to steal it, but there is no lack of Napoleon content in the history of film.

“Some factual, many fanciful, these works create a new kind of Napoleonic empire that continues to conquer the imagination.”

Napoleon’s familiarity is key to one important category of movie, what I’ll call the famous people across time film. Whether the goal is plundering historical treasures as in Time Bandits (dir. Terry Gilliam, 1981) or to saving humanity from extermination, the premise of the panned The Story of Humankind (dir. Irwin Allen, 1957), Napoleon inevitably is among the cast of characters. In the best of these movies—Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure (dir. Stephen Herek, 1989)—as in Time Bandits, Napoleon is the first historical figure viewers encounter, his familiar face launching viewers into the romps to follow. (Despite the Marx brothers and Dennis Hopper as Bonaparte, there isn’t much of a romp to The Story of Humankind, however.)

“Napoleon I” by Louis Philibert Debucourt, 1807.
Via Wikimedia Commons (public domain).

Poet Pierre-Jean de Béranger penned some of the most famous iterations of a familiar nineteenth-century fantasy: what if Napoleon escaped again? In poems like “Il n’est pas mort” [He is not dead], Béranger gave voice to the collective belief in Napoleon’s ability to defy normal, including mortal, expectations. Alan Taylor’s 2002 The Emperor’s New Clothes updates this genre as it follows Napoleon off St. Helena and into a quotidian, but happy, life. The moments when the fantasy intersect with fact, as Napoleon’s belief that he is Napoleon lands him in a mental asylum, is a fine, ironic touch.

The Napoleonic era provides the backdrop for many movies in which the emperor seldom wanders on stage—Austen, Dumas, and Dickens films, Vanity Fair, various versions of War and ­Peace—as well as an array of battle movies (Waterloo [dir. Sergei Bondarchuk (1970)], Abel Gance’s Austerlitz (1960), or the more recent Portuguese film, Lines of Wellington [dir. Valeria Sarmiento (2012)]), in which he more often does. But these are less engaging, finally, than the movies about Napoleon that aren’t watchable. The first, with apologies to fans of long silent films, is Abel Gance’s 1927 epic, Napoléon. At 330 minutes, it is an odyssey full of technical innovations, if one can find it.

No matter how hard one looks, however, it is not possible to see what may be the most famous of all Napoleon movies—Stanley Kubrick’s planned, but unmade, Napoleon biopic. Planned around the Felix Markham biography of the emperor, for which Kubrick attained the rights, Kubrick’s screenplay emerged with the aid of a corps of Oxford graduate students, who carefully surveyed Bonaparte and his world. Kubrick claimed there had “never been a good or accurate movie” about Napoleon and his project, no mere “dusty historic pageant,” would fill the gap (The Stanley Kubrick Archive, 787). But it didn’t happen. Still, given that Jack Nicholson was Kubrick’s choice for Napoleon, there are hints of it in both Barry Lyndon, the historical work he made instead which romps into the Napoleonic era, and The Shining, with a deliciously maniacal Nicholson unleashing his own tidal waves of blood. Surely Steven Spielberg version of Kubrick’s plan, currently being created for HBO, won’t be any closer than this combination.

“It is impossible to make a good and accurate movie about Napoleon, a figure weighted with expectations and fantasies and facts and fictions.”

Neither previews nor interviews with Ridley Scott have convinced me, though, that the new Napoleonic spectacle will shake my enthusiasm for a shimmering Cinemascope account of Napoleon’s life and loves, Henry Koster’s 1954 Désirée. Adapted from a best-selling novel of the same title by Austrian author, Annemarie Selinko, Désirée tells the story of Napoleon’s first—and purportedly enduring—love of a young woman from Marseille. To assert that his fleeting romance with Désirée Clary is more important than his subsequent romance with Joséphine de Beauharnais already establishes that this is no documentary, as does its conclusion suggesting that it is Désirée who convinces Napoleon to accept defeat (again) in 1815. Lush cinemascope, brief vignettes, and melodramatic acting all combine to make this movie an odd choice for enthusiasm. Certainly Bosley Crowther, who reviewed the film for the New York Times, thought so. The excellent cast, he sighs, “merely fill out the plushy décor of this Twentieth Century-Fox spectacle, which at times Henry Koster has direct as though it were a satire on suburbia. For the most part, however, he has made it what it is—just a colorful vehicle for a pseudo-Napoleonic outing, a streetcar named ‘Désirée.’”  Had Crowther read Ralph Waldo Emerson’s essay on Napoleon he might have realized just how many pseudo-Napoleonic hearts beat in suburbia—and it may well be this aspect of the movie that speaks most powerfully to me.

And then there’s Marlon Brando’s Bonaparte. Juxtaposed against his performance as Terry Malloy in On the Waterfront, Brando’s turn as the emperor is flat, wooden, sometimes silly. If in On the Waterfront, Brando brings to life the frustration of a character who realizes that he could have been somebody, in Désirée he turns to a historical figure who, unbelievably, is not just a contender but an emperor. It may not be a performance to win awards, yet Brando captures the naked ambition and awkward unease that is said to have characterized the young Napoleon off the battlefield. Perhaps Rod Steiger, who plays Joseph Bonaparte, thought so, for he would go on to play Napoleon in Bondarchuk’s Waterloo. It is neither a good nor an accurate movie—but I think it is impossible to make a good and accurate movie about Napoleon, a figure weighted with expectations and fantasies and facts and fictions. So why not have Marlon Brando, in white knee breeches, dancing?

Featured image: “Napoleon I” by Louis Philibert Debucourt, 1807. Via Wikimedia Commons (public domain).

OUPblog - Academic insights for the thinking world.

 

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)

OUPblog - Academic insights for the thinking world.

 

On specters and spectacle: tales of two Eurovisions, Liverpool-Ukraine 2023

On specters and spectacle: tales of two Eurovisions, Liverpool-Ukraine 2023

Phantoms from the past, ghosts of the present, specters of the future, all gathered on 13 May to haunt the Eurovision Song Contest, cohosted in 2023 by the United Kingdom in Liverpool and by Ukraine in the spectral spaces of a Europe divided by war, but singing in concert under the banner, “United by Music.” Two Europes and two Eurovisions were on full display, each summoning its many specters in the chorus of the nation at its most spectacular: three minutes of song, dance, and theater in the most widely-viewed annual cultural event in the world.

One Eurovision was the temporary safe space of competition among a community of nations. The annual run-up to Eurovision Week in Liverpool unfolded according to well-worn tradition, the internet flooded with videos from national song contests and their winning entries, the full range of genres from intimate love songs to no-holds-barred extravagance. Fans would gather in Liverpool in the thousands (estimates claimed ca. 100,000, a figure significant only because of its symbolic excess).

The other Eurovision was Ukraine, the nation as a whole rather than a host city, a place of precarity, whose life as a European nation was under siege. The annual run-up to Eurovision Week in Ukraine was one of war and suffering, of pride in the long history of Ukrainian sovereignty to which song and music had borne witness, chronicled by the Ukrainian entries in the Eurovision over the past two decades, three first-place finishes among them, most recently the 2022 winner, Kalush Orchestra’s “Stefania.”

The tale of two Eurovisions in 2023 is the story of a Europe riven by the conflict between East and West, unsettled by migration and unabated refugee crisis, and staggered by the threats of rising fascism, antisemitism, and anti-LGBTQ politics. Europe has been here before, and far too often. So, too, had the Eurovision Song Contest, first established in 1956 at the height of the Cold War, and on the eve of the Soviet military intervention in Hungary and Czechoslovakia, and the establishment of the European Commission, the precursor of the European Union. The phantoms of the past are all-too-familiar, the specters of the future once-again-threatening. 

This year’s competition witnessed a substantial retreat in the number of nations competing, only 37 after a decade and a half when the numbers hovered between 42 and 43. Recently competing nations choosing not to enter this year came entirely from Eastern Europe: Belarus, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Hungary, Montenegro, North Macedonia, Russia, and Slovakia. There are many explanations for the retreat of Eastern European nations—Russia was banned from entering—but the most common one claimed that costs for smaller nations were prohibitive. The investment in sending a national team to the Grand Prix are not insignificant, but smaller nations in Western Europe routinely manage them, among them San Marino (population 33,745) and Luxembourg when it re-enters the Eurovision next year.

There is much about the two Eurovisions in Ukraine and Liverpool in 2023 that seems hard to reconcile. Though I have written about the Eurovision Song Contest since the 1980s, from the multiple perspectives of ethnographic fieldwork, close analysis of the songs themselves, and active integration of Eurovision courses into university curricula in the United States and Germany, I am unable, in 2023, to write about the two Eurovisions as one big party, conjoined by kitsch and camp. The phantoms and the ghosts are too haunting. Public celebration takes on more spectral meaning in the Ukrainian Eurovision when public curfew sends viewers to their homes and shelters after 8:00 pm.

At the Liverpool Eurovision the desire to celebrate by no means disappeared. It was the spirit of celebration that lifted the Swedish popstar Loreen to first place after she garnered the largest number of votes from the professional juries in each competing nation for her song, “Tattoo.” As she had in 2012, when she won the Eurovision in Baku, Azerbaijan with “Euphoria,” Loreen brilliantly captured the magic of the Eurovision stage with a Eurosong par excellence. When I wrote about her in my 2012 blogpost, I claimed that, as a child of Moroccan immigrants in Stockholm, Loreen (Lorine Zineb Nora Talhaoui) “represents the New Europe, with a multiculturalism and religious diversity that undoes the nationalism of the Old Europe.” In the 11 years since her first Eurovision—much rejoiced as the first woman to do so, and on the fiftieth anniversary of Sweden’s greatest Eurovision victory, ABBA’s “Waterloo”—Loreen’s performance relies on an earlier history, comfortably situated in the Liverpool Eurovision.

 

The favorite of the public voting was, however, not Sweden’s Loreen, but Finland’s Käärija, whose “Cha Cha Cha” successfully cobbled together the Eurosong’s tried-and-true formulae of over-the-top spectacle, with a refrain of countless iterations of “cha cha cha,” to which ecstatically entertained fans in the Liverpool arena and on the internet could sing along. Käärli’s public could not, in the final moment, outweigh Loreen’s media professionals.

 

The spectacle of the Liverpool Eurovision was plentiful, and yet the specters of the Ukrainian Eurovision were present, and painfully so. These were the specters that drew me to the other Eurovision, the one haunted by the phantoms tearing apart Europe along its very borders. These were the ghosts of misogyny and physical violence. The Czech entry—and my overall favorite—Vesna singing “My Sister’s Crown,” placed tenth in the Grand Finale, singing proudly of the resistive power of sisterhood, every verse framed by the couplet, “My sister won’t stand in the corner / Nor will she listen to you.”

 

It was the call to listen that most powerfully opened the spaces of the Eurovision that took place in Ukraine on 13 May 2023. We were reminded that song and sound draw us to places we cannot be, spectacle transformed to oracle, amplified by the beauty and horror of the sirens, past and present. If we watched one Eurovision on the stage in Liverpool, the sounds of the other Eurovision in Ukraine refused to be silent. I had the good fortune to watch the Grand Finale with my friend, colleague, and visiting professor at the University of Chicago, Olha Kolomyyets, who holds a professorship in ethnomusicology at the Ivan Franko National University of Lviv, Ukraine. Even as the spectacle in Liverpool was broadcast, the air raid sirens in Ukraine were sounding through Olha’s cellphone, fully in disharmony with a contest professing “Unity in Music.” The ensuing Russian missile attacks, not least among them a strike on the home city of Tvorchi, the two singers of the Ukrainian entry, Ternopyl, immediately prior to their performance. It is to Tvorchi, then, whose song, “Heart of Steel,” placed sixth in Liverpool, that I give the final words for the Eurovision in Ukraine:

Don’t be scared to say just what you think,

‘Cause no matter how bad, someone’s listening.

 

Featured image: Tvorchi performing the song “Heart of Steel” on stage by Michael Doherty via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)

OUPblog - Academic insights for the thinking world.

 

Music for Prime Time: 15 of the greatest TV themes

<em>Music for Prime Time</em>: 15 of the greatest TV themes

Music composed for television had, until recently, never been taken seriously by scholars or critics. Catchy TV themes, often for popular weekly series, were fondly remembered but not considered much more culturally significant than commercial jingles. Music for Prime Time is the first serious, journalistic history of music for American television. Jon Burlingame, author of Music for Prime Time and one of the nation’s leading writers on the subject of music for films and television, has selected his favorite TV themes through the years for this playlist.

Listen to his selections for TV’s greatest themes and read on to learn about the composers and their creations.

1. “Peter Gunn” by Henry Mancini (1958)

“Peter Gunn” is among the first well-known, widely recognized themes for television. The jazz approach for a suave private detective (who happened to hang out at a jazz club) immediately became the only acceptable music for practically every cop and private eye series (and movies) for the next few decades.

2. “Rawhide” by Dimitri Tiomkin and Ned Washington (1959)

Dimitri Tiomkin, who wrote such famous western movie scores as “High Noon” and “Gunfight at the OK Corral,” wrote this cowboy song for a cattle-driving drama for TV starring Clint Eastwood long before he became a movie star. It became one of singer Frankie Laine’s biggest hits and made a fortune for its composer because he insisted on owning the music publishing rights.

3. The Andy Griffith Show theme by Earle Hagen (1960)

The best-known and most fondly remembered theme by one of the pioneers of TV music; Hagen would go on to write themes for The Dick Van Dyke ShowI SpyThat GirlThe Mod Squad, and many others. Incidentally, he whistled the tune himself and often said that was the one and only time he ever whistled at a recording session.

4. The Twilight Zone main theme by Marius Constant (1960)

The great Bernard Herrmann composed the original theme for Rod Serling’s first season, but it was replaced for season two by this strange tune by an obscure French classical composer—who wasn’t even consulted and didn’t know his musical snippets (written for the CBS music library) were being turned into a TV theme. It has, over time, become musical shorthand for “something weird is happening here.”

5. Jerry Goldsmith TV themes (1961-1995)

One of the all-time great Hollywood composers, Jerry Goldsmith started in TV and, while he became an Oscar-winning film composer, he often returned to TV to write themes for old friends who helped start him in the business. In order, they are the spy show The Man from U.N.C.L.E., medical series Dr. Kildare, high-school sitcom Room 222, sci-fi series Star Trek Voyager, homespun period drama The Waltons, and ’70s detective drama Barnaby Jones. Some of these were among the most popular shows of their time.

6. The Addams Family main theme by Vic Mizzy (1964)

Vic Mizzy was a funny songwriter who wrote funny comedy themes (“Green Acres” was also his); he came up with the finger-snapping incorporated into the titles of this offbeat half-hour. The show only lasted two seasons, but the theme outlived the original to become a part of the 1990s movies and the ongoing animated series. The harpsichord accompaniment of this theme now resonates in the harpsichord of the Netflix series Wednesday, based on one of the ’60s characters.

7. “Secret Agent Man” from Secret Agent by P.F. Sloan and Steve Barri (1965)

This was the first successful rock ‘n’ roll theme for TV (The Beach Boys had done a sitcom theme the year before, but the show was cancelled and the boys never issued a single). Johnny Rivers sang it and it became a top-10 hit on the radio. The show was a British import, and CBS thought it needed a musical update to attract a younger demographic. The guitar hook became the first thing that young guitar players learned to play back in the mid-1960s.

8. “Mission: Impossible” by Lalo Schifrin (1966)

Maybe the most famous spy theme ever. Schifrin turned this into a top-40 hit in 1967. It’s one of the reasons there’s now a series of movie thrillers starring Tom Cruise—the theme is so identifiable that it became a marketing tool for Paramount to “sell” viewers on its big-screen franchise. Schifrin became a well-known film composer after that (Dirty HarryRush Hour) but this remains his best-known work.

9. “Hawaii Five-0” by Morton Stevens (1968)

This was one of the ’60s most dynamic themes, an exciting musical backdrop for a long-running cop show starring Jack Lord. Its original main-title imagery is so iconic that it was largely replicated by the creators of the reboot decades later. And the theme was so crucial to the reboot that composer Brian Tyler made CBS dig out the original arrangement to re-record for the new series.

10. The Persuaders! theme by John Barry (1971)

Widely considered among the greatest themes in the history of British television, this hummable waltz-time theme for offbeat percussion instruments was written by the veteran James Bond composer John Barry, whose “Goldfinger” and “Thunderball” were big hits in both the US and UK. The series starred Roger Moore (before he was 007) and movie star Tony Curtis, and it remains a favorite of action-adventure TV buffs of the era.

11. Hill Street Blues theme by Mike Post (1981)

Mike Post is responsible for some of the best-known TV themes in history (LA LawMagnum P.I.The A-TeamThe Greatest American HeroLaw & Order) but this is probably my favorite. The Hill Street Blues theme was written for the legendary Steven Bochco series, an ensemble police drama that won many Emmys and remains one of the great cop shows of all time.

12. Dynasty theme by Bill Conti (1981)

Along with Dallas, this was one of the top-rated prime-time soaps of its time, a drama about the rich and famous. Bill Conti of Rocky fame composed this very regal theme for the series. He always said that he could never be inspired by the original title, “Oil,” but when they renamed it “Dynasty” this tune came right away.

13. “Where Everybody Knows Your Name” from Cheers by Gary Portnoy and Judy Hart Angelo (1982)

This is merely the greatest song about a bar ever written. It’s a sitcom theme, yes, but one that conveys the locale, the people, the mood, and is so catchy and memorable that, decades later, it still resonates. The two-minute version has extra verses and it’s sung by one of the songwriters.

14. Game of Thrones main title by Ramin Djawadi (2011)

This theme for the HBO fantasy became a sensation with millions of YouTube—an earworm for cello, tribal drums, and orchestra that introduced us all to a dark and dragon-filled world. The composer won two Emmys for his music, and he redid the main theme for the prequel House of the Dragon.

15. Succession main title theme by Nicholas Britell (2018)

A brilliant fusion of classical and hip-hop influences, this Emmy-winning theme by popular composer Nicholas Britell (MoonlightAndor) serves as a great accompaniment to one of the most popular cable series of our time.

OUPblog - Academic insights for the thinking world.

 

A Black Irish-American rejoinder to Gone With The Wind: Frank Yerby’s The Foxes of Harrow

A Black Irish-American rejoinder to <em>Gone With The Wind</em>: Frank Yerby’s <em>The Foxes of Harrow</em>

The Foxes of Harrow (1946), a Southern historical romance by Black Irish-American author Frank Yerby (1916–1991), writes back to Margaret Mitchell’s bestselling novel, Gone with the Wind (1936; hereafter GWTW). Although Yerby and Mitchell were both raised in Georgia during segregation by mothers of Irish descent, their socially assigned racial identities created divergent approaches to representing the pre- and post-Civil War South in their respective novels. 

GWTW was (and remains) controversial for opening with a vision of an antebellum world of grace and for a plotline that justifies the KKK as needed protection from the sexual predation of white women by formerly enslaved men in the Reconstruction South. A break-out bestseller, Foxes kick-started a historical novel-writing career that made Yerby America’s highest-earning novelist by 1954. As with GWTW, Yerby’s novel covers the rise and fall of white Southern fortunes, but markedly departs from Mitchell in centering three-dimensional African-American characters and in its positive depiction of Reconstruction. Nevertheless, both romances feature penniless, “off-white” planters of Irish birth who transform themselves into the white exploitative landowner class to whom they themselves had once been subject: Gerald O’Hara in GWTW and Stephen Fox in Foxes. Only Yerby’s Irish planter ultimately understands the connections between these contexts, however.

As a young man in Ireland, Mitchell’s Gerald murders an oppressive landlord’s agent in disordered colonial Ireland and subsequently flees. Arriving in the South in the 1820s, O’Hara acquires both his first enslaved man and a neglected plantation in Georgia in games of poker, and further “whitens” by marrying into the local elite. These plot points almost all repeat in Foxes, but in an insightful departure from the easy interpretation of Yerby as merely derivative, Mark C. Jerng calls his novel “a prequel to GWTW that centers on the Gerald O’Hara figure.” (Mitchell moves from an opening emphasis on Gerald to center his daughter, Scarlett, for much of the action.)

Yerby’s negotiation of his dual heritages is apparent in Stephen’s “guttersnipe” Dublin street urchin beginnings, which challenges the certainties of the South’s black-white binary as much as the novel’s many mixed-race and racially ambiguous (“swarthy”) French characters. Yerby writes accessible fiction in the Mitchell mode, but simultaneously debunks what Du Bois had indicted as the “southern white fairytale” of graceful plantation life. In a Foxes scene that anticipates a similar event in Toni Morrison’s Beloved (1987), the unfree Sauvage attempts to take her baby with her when she commits suicide, exposing the stark reality of the desperation created by enslavement. By contrast, Mitchell propounds the “cherished darky” myth by having Scarlett claim that “house slave” Peter is “‘family,’” though this claim is certainly not meant to suggest interracial ties of the sort depicted by Yerby! (Indeed, the impossibility of Irish-African hybridity in GWTW’s sealed white supremacist universe is mocked by Alice Randall’s 2001 parody, The Wind Done Gone, in which Scarlett turns out to be mixed-race.) Although Yerby had a predominantly white mainstream readership and his marketing in the South evaded the issue of his racial identity, he deviates most from Mitchell in depicting rebellious, articulate, and prominent African-American characters, particularly those on the enslaved Caleen’s matrilineal line. 

Foxes of Harrow starring Maureen O’Hara film poster used by permission of Alamy

When read without the blinders of caste, gender, and the patrilineal, Foxes turns out to be a novel of Caleen’s surname-less matrilineal line as much as Stephen’s “legitimate” line. Caleen, the shrewd materfamilias of Harrow’s enslaved cohort, upon whose knowledge of weather and medicine Stephen relies, is everywhere in the action and is its seditious centre: she teaches her grandson, Inch, reading and passwords for the Underground Railroad, and he ultimately makes a bid for freedom. Caleen makes herself indispensable to Stephen, but all the while she strategizes for her family and its future, as protective of bloodline as any white planter. The dynastic lines of Caleen and Stephen converge at the close with Cyrus, Stephen’s son by his mixed-race Creole mistress, Desiree. Young Cyrus becomes Inch’s stepson when the latter marries the boy’s mother in the Reconstruction era, a repudiation of the racially “pure” bloodline that underpins the antebellum logic of Mitchell’s novel.

Mitchell’s planter sees no connection between the sectarian oppression in Ireland that he had fled and the South’s slave system. Fox’s street origins, by contrast, are an implicit source of his ambivalent view of that way of life. Indeed, Yerby puts words in his planter’s mouth of the sort likely never before uttered by “the master” in a Southern plantation romance: “‘slavery is a very convenient and pleasant system – for us…I have my leisure, which I haven’t earned, and my wealth, which I didn’t work for…’” Mitchell’s Gerald justifies his acquisition of plantation and human chattel as the hunger “of an Irishman who has been a tenant on the lands his people once had owned.” Likewise, Stephen flees Ireland to gain “freedom,” but his final words in Foxes—as his plantation is threatened by the war and the hunger of his Dublin street days returns—suggests a reluctant understanding of the costs paid by others for his freedom that is entirely absent from GWTW: “‘For a little while, we lived like gods. I’m not sure that it was good for us.’” 

OUPblog - Academic insights for the thinking world.

 

Contact UsPast IssuesJoin This ListUnsubscribe

 

Safely Unsubscribe ArchivesPreferencesContactSubscribePrivacy