Blockbuster Anthropology

What's the Cultural Meaning of the Slide and Catch in Baseball?

2012-01-10T13:56:00.000-08:00

Sports often reflect interesting aspects of a culture. For example, the 24-second shot clock in basketball reflects the fast-paced lifestyle of contemporary Americans. So what about the slide in baseball? How does it resonate with American culture?

I think sliding reflects American ambivalence about social authority. Baseball players dress up in fine clothes (how many other sports require a belt?), as if they're going to church or court--and then they throw themselves in the dirt. Respect and disdain for authority are in tension with each other in baseball and American society. Respect the rules, but kill the ump. Get dressed up, but slide in the dirt. Sliding is controlled social rebellion.

We should remember that sliding didn't have to become part of baseball. For roughly the first hundred years of baseball's existence, there was no such thing as sliding. The slide was a novelty when first introduced in the mid-1800s and many people opposed it, arguing that players should be allowed to overrun every base rather than sliding. This is how the crowd reacted to one of the first recorded slides, during an 1859 game in Portland, Maine: "the feat fairly astonished the natives, who at first roared with laughter, but Chandler scored the run, and they then woke up to the fact that a large, new and valuable 'wrinkle' had been handed out to them" (quoted in Peter Morris's excellent book, A Game of Inches: The Stories That Shaped Baseball, p. 265).

This early phase in baseball history reminds us that sliding didn't become popular for purely practical reasons. There were other ways to reach the bases, just as basketball could still be played without a shot clock, as it was in its early years. Sliding has become such a fixture in baseball because it resonates with American ambivalence about social authority.

And what about the catch?

The catch seems to simulate a key aspect of human history: sharing. The writer-director of Field of Dreams, Phil Alden Robinson, touched on this when he described a catch this way (in the DVD bonus materials and a 2009 SI article):

"I give to you. I receive from you. It's a lovely experience with nonverbal communication, the sharing of something very sweet."

Of course, the best example of this sweet sharing is the father-son catch at the end of the film ("Dad, you wanna' have a catch?").

Such sharing is not only deeply emotional--it's the very reason homo sapiens are here today. Without reciprocal gift-giving and sharing of information, homo sapiens never would have made it. One of my professors in grad school used to say, "Early hominids were dumb, friendly, and good to eat. How in the world did they ever survive?" I'm finally ready with a short answer: Sharing.

I usually resist "We're Hunter-Gatherer" explanations for contemporary cultural patterns, since they often lead to dangerous claims about unchanging "human nature," but I'm making an exception in this case because the parallels are too overwhelming.

What else? Do the slide and the catch have other resonances with that nebulous, ever-changing thing we call American culture?

Related Posts about Baseball:
What would George Carlin say about baseball vs. basketball?

All my posts about baseball and Field of Dreams

10-Second Video of a Little League Player Stealing 2nd Base While the Pitcher's Not Looking:

Interpreting Broderick's Poem in "The Freshman"

2011-12-18T03:10:00.000-08:00

I can't resist analyzing the poem that Matthew Broderick recites to Marlon Brando in The Freshman.

Since The Freshman is about an elaborate con-game that plays off The Godfather, Broderick's poem is heavily symbolic and layered—a dream within a dream within a dream. So I have to ask: What does this poem mean?

In the scene in question, Don Sabatini (Brando) is visiting Clark Kellogg (Broderick) in his dorm room at NYU. After Clark tells him that his father was a poet and died when Clark was young, Sabatini asks Clark to recite one of his father's poems. This is the poem that Clark recites from memory:

A Doorway on Boylston Street

There's a certain doorway on Boylston Street
that I passed by on foot, suited and shod,
one of many each Tuesday,
toward lunch with a certain woman,
regarded each Tuesday by the perfect turning gaze of a white Persian,
regarding me, love-bound and sped by desire,
and returning to the certainty of his fur.

Sabatini not only guesses correctly that the poem was about "a cat in the doorway," but he repeats and savors the last line about "the certainty of his fur," and he admires Clark for remembering his father's poetry. It's one of the most touching father-son scenes ever filmed.

Here's my specific question: What does the cat in this poem stand for? I see at least a couple possible interpretations.

The Cat = Brando
The cat in the poem is regal, self-assured, and a careful observer of human social interactions—just like Don Sabatini in The Freshman and Don Corleone in The Godfather. In fact, when Clark gets to the part in the poem about being "regarded" by the cat's "turning gaze," the camera zooms in on Don Sabatini and shows his eyes focusing intensely on Clark and his head titling to the side, mirroring the cat in the poem.

Given that both Clark and his father took this poem about a cat into their hearts, and given that the cat stands symbolically for Sabatini, the poem creates a major turning point in the film: it gives Clark permission to accept Sabatini as a second father, a choice that even his own father would have approved of. The final obstacle to the father-son union of Sabatini and Clark has been removed, clinching the core emotional dimension of the con game. Sabatini pulls Clark even closer to him just when he was about to leave Sabatini, his family, and his business.

But there is at least one other way to interpret the cat.

The Cat = the Cat in The Godfather, as well as Clark and the Komodo Dragon.
It's hard to think of Brando without thinking of the iconic image of him holding a cat in the first scene of The Godfather:

This image of Don Corleone and the cat appears on posters and movie boxes of The Godfather.

Even while he's besieged with requests on his daughter's wedding day, Don Corleone is so masterful and nurturing that he keeps this cat purring, like his clients. It's fair to assume that the cat in Clark's father's poem plays off this famous image, but the difference is that the Don's regal, masterful nature is symbolized in The Godfather by the way he toyed with a cat, not by his identification with the cat itself.

But maybe that difference doesn't matter, and not just because distinctions between subject and object often blur in poetry. The cat in the father's poem, the cat in The Godfather, and the komodo dragon at the center of The Freshman have something in common: they're all animals manipulated by the Don. The komodo dragon is what first lures Clark into Sabatini's orbit, but the cat in the poem closes the deal, as I said earlier.

Clark, too, like the komodo dragon and the cat in The Godfather, is being played with by the Don in the course of a pursuit that mixes love, family, and profit. Completing the father-son union, the cat could be both Broderick and Brando at the same time, in which case my two interpretations wouldn't be at odds.

These twin interpretations seem to work, but whenever I get this involved in analyzing a Hollywood film, I check myself by asking whether I'm turning into Professor Fleeber, the over-the-top Film Studies Professor in The Freshman who went so far as to compare Karl Marx's Das Kapital, Immanuel Kant's Critique of Pure Reason, and the Lake Tahoe scene from The Godfather, II. I take Professor Fleeber as a funny cautionary tale, a reminder not to get too carried away with my interpretations, which is a danger in this business.

Professor Fleeber, unable to resist mouthing the dialogue to himself while his students watch The Godfather, II.

Unlike Fleeber but like most of the professors I know, I try not to be mean to my students, and rather than regurgitation, I always insist that my students develop original interpretations in their papers. But if somebody wants to see some of my film interpretations (including this one) as over-the-top in a Fleeberian way, that's fine. At least Fleeber understands that film analysis can be social and emotional at the same time. And if Fleeber goes a bit too far with some of his interpretations, he's erring on the right side. As I've said before, I'd rather risk over-stating the case than stating the obvious. If I'm going to live in a dream within a dream within a dream, I'm glad it's this one.

Further Reading:
My post about two songs ("I Wanna Be Around" and "Mona Lisa") in The Freshman

All my posts about The Godfather

Certainly Andrew Bergman, the screenwriter who created The Freshman and Professor Fleeber, understood the value of socially-informed film criticism. Bergman wrote a PhD dissertation in American history about how Hollywood films reflected social tensions during the Depression, later published as We're in the Money: Depression America and Its Films (1992). Bergman's book was well-received by scholars and published by NYU Press, Fleeber's old haunt.

Football and Basketball as American Rituals (Peter Wogan)

2011-09-29T22:14:00.002-07:00

How do football and basketball reflect American culture? I think it's fair to assume there's a connection. Otherwise, the highlight of the American sports year would be something like Super Shot-Put Sunday (SSS) or the Big Badminton Bowl (BBB). Instead, Americans gravitate toward football and basketball. Why?

(Note: I originally posted this mini-essay on an anthro blog: AnthropologyWorks.com).

Football action. Photo credit: JSmith, Creative Commons, Flickr

Football vs. Basketball

Here are a few salient differences between football and basketball, highlighted to throw their essential qualities into relief.

In football, players dress in Superhero outfits.
In basketball, players dress in bathing suits.

In football, it’s so cold you see steam coming out of the players, as if they’re scaling Mt. Everest.
In basketball, it’s so hot you see sweat pouring off players, as if they’re mowing the lawn.

But the ultimate difference lies in spatial orientation.

Football is all about lines: Lining up on lines, measuring lines, crossing lines. The central objective of the game, in fact, is to cross a line: the goal line.

Basketball, on the other hand, is all about circles: putting a rubber circle inside a slightly larger, metal circle (the ball and the hoop). Instead of yard lines, the basketball court is divided up into circles: the center circle (which contains a circle within a circle), the 3-point line (which is a semi-circle), and the foul circle at the top of the key. Not to mention all the players running around in circles, trying to get open for a pass. Lines vs. circles—that’s the key difference.

Blazers Court. Photo credit: Tom Langston, Creative Commons, Flickr

Empty Redskins Field; Photo credit: squidpants, Creative Commons, Flickr

How, though, do these micro aspects of football and basketball reflect American culture? (Warning: I’d rather risk overstating the case than stating the obvious, and I would never say there’s only one reason we love these sports, nor that one is better than the other.)

Basically, football is about masterful strategies, specialized roles (punter, receiver, linebacker, etc.), and strict lines of authority (have you ever heard anyone call it “circles of authority”?). Coaches, quarterbacks, and coordinators control every play.

Basketball, on the other hand, comes out of a democratic model based on spontaneous teamwork. The basketball coach cannot even intervene in most plays. Basketball is about role flexibility (every player shoots, passes, plays defense) and fast-paced improvisation.

Football comes out of America’s hierarchical, industrial economy and military strategizing, whereas basketball emerges from the more recent knowledge economy. Lines vs. circles.

But the differences don't just reflect political economy. Basketball, with its sweaty players in bathing suits, matches the growing informality and bare-all impulses of contemporary culture: casual Fridays, confessional memoirs, reality TV, Facebook.

Other social changes also play a role. Circles are more associated than lines in American culture with equality and togetherness. Not coincidentally, basketball, the Circle Game, has skyrocketed in popularity at the same time that there’s been a push toward greater multiculturalism and gender equality.

At a more basic level, though, these sports aren't that different. The heart of football and basketball is the Thrill of the Chase: players frantically trying to get a few steps ahead of their pursuers. And that's exactly how homo sapiens and our hominid ancestors have spent most of our time on earth: chasing and being chased. So let the beer flow and The Great Chase continue.

Further Reading:

All my blog posts about baseball (moonlight, the slide, Jackie Robinson, etc., minus George Carlin).

My related post, "What would George Carlin say about Baseball vs. Basketball?"

Arens, W. “Professional Football: An American Symbol and Ritual.” In The American Dimension, Arens and Montague, eds., Alfred Publishing, 1976. A wonderful, early anthropological essay on football, with insight into things like football’s resonance with labor specialization in postwar America.

Carlin, George “Baseball vs. Football.” Carlin’s famous stand-up comedy routine is funny, insightful, and a major source of inspiration here.

Geertz, Clifford “Deep Play: Notes on the Balinese Cockfight.” In The Interpretation of Cultures, Basic Books, 1973. An extremely influential example of interpretive anthropology’s method, though, curiously, it never led to as many anthropological studies of sports as you might imagine.

Mandelbaum, Michael The Meaning of Sports: Why Americans Watch Baseball, Football, and Basketball and What They See When They Do, Public Affairs, 2005. Mandelbaum is a professor of foreign policy, and also the son of the late, great anthropologist David Mandelbaum, a fact that becomes apparent in the anthropologically-minded sections of the book where he relates sports to underlying economic structures.

Andy Knipe, ALS, and Baseball

2011-07-27T16:25:00.001-07:00

It’s hard to believe that my younger cousin, Andrew Knipe, died of Lou Gehrig’s disease in 2005. I still think of Andy as an innocent, insecure kid, the second-to-last child in a family of five children, the tag-along. When our families got together, with eight of us cousins sitting at the table cracking jokes and poking each other, Andy was just trying to figure out what where the next joke was headed. We’d yell at him to shut up when he tried to intervene, but every once in awhile he’d crack us all up, usually by squeezing food through his fingers or reminding us about the toilet. His life of mischief was underway.

Andy on left, older brother Billy on right.

Over the years, I moved out to the West Coast, while Andy stayed in New York, got married, and excelled as the art director of TV commercials. His audience and humor had evolved. His jokes now cracked up millions of people all over the country. He almost seemed like an adult.

Andy in his 30s.

Then he got ALS, in his prime. He was 37 years old, with a wife, teenage daughter, and two little boys. At Christmas that year, he couldn’t make the salad tongs squeeze together, but otherwise he seemed fine, so I still thought there must be some mistake, some way out. But there wasn’t. ALS continued to destroy his nervous system, relentlessly. With each visit back to New York, I could see he was progressively worse. Soon he was in a wheelchair, hands propped on the armrests, unable to turn his head from side to side, barely able to swallow. His body was frozen in place, but he was fully alert, watching himself die.

Andy's final months were largely spent helping other people. He raised money for the ALS Association by making films about Lou Gehrig and other sports figures. He sent my 9-year-old son a heavy encyclopedia of baseball history, which my son studied like the Rosetta Stone. I hadn’t thought much about baseball since I was in Little League, but now that my three boys were playing it, and now that Andy was dying, I wanted to know everything I could. Andy answered my questions with pithy, enlightening emails.

It took a lot of effort to send those emails. Andy put on a headset that tracked his eye movements, looked ahead at a screen, and then clicked with his index finger—one of the only parts of his body with any sensation left—on the word or letter he wanted. Those emails were the last gasps of a dying man.

But with his last ounces of energy, Andy didn’t just send out Zen-like emails. He also got on websites for Red Sox fans and clicked out messages like this:

“R-e-d S-o-x = S-c-u-m-b-a-g-s.”

Yes, he spent his final days tormenting Red Sox fans, the arch rivals of his beloved Yankees. Some of his insults were so disgusting that he got banned from the websites.

After awhile, though, the emails and rants tapered off, as the disease took over every last inch of his body, including his insides. In August, 2005, he decided not to get an artificial respirator. At age 38, he wrote a final letter to his kids and got ready to die.

I couldn’t get a flight in time, but I called to say goodbye. Andy couldn’t speak anymore, so I did all the talking.

I said I loved him. I said I was sorry I ignored him so much when we were little. I said I knew he would be there whenever I was watching baseball. I had to fight through tears to finish my sentences--I was incoherent--but I didn’t want to hang up, knowing I’d never talk to Andy again. Finally the call had to end. A few days later, Andy was dead.

At the funeral, I found out that pitcher Curt Schilling had asked the other Red Sox players to pray for Andy. Despite his Red Sox affiliation, Schilling had become friends with Andy through their joint fundraising for ALS.

But the biggest surprise came after the funeral, at the lunch reception we had for family at a small restaurant on Long Island. Suddenly one of my cousins shouted, “Sick Bastard’s here!” Looking over at the entrance, I didn’t see anyone who looked sick or like a bastard, just a regular guy in his 30’s. “I found out that Sick Bastard” was this guy’s screen name. He was a Red Sox fan who had traded vicious insults with Andy for months, until Andy let on that he was dying of ALS. By that point, they’d spent so much time together online, trying to reach new heights of creativity with their insults, that they’d formed a friendship. Sick Bastard, who had never met Andy in person, drove down from Boston to attend the funeral.

This was like a soldier walking onto the middle of a battlefield during the American Civil War and screaming, “Wait, don’t shoot! Or shoot if you want, but that’s my brother over there and I’m taking him home with me.”

My cousins, all faithful Yankees fans, mobbed Sick Bastard, hugging him and treating him like a celebrity. Even after his death, Andy was still making us laugh.

Thinking about Andy six years later still makes me cry, too. My little cousin taught me what it really means to live knowing I'm going to die.

****************************

Links, Photos, and More:

Funny commercial that Andy made for Fed Ex (1-minute video, about Stanley Cup)

Curt Schilling's Words About Andy:
"ALS, three small yet horrifyingly fatal letters. Devastating letters because they, right now, are a guaranteed death sentence for its victims. Why is it, then, that just about every ALS patient I’ve ever met, including Andy Knipe, wake up each day with a smile? Why are they the ones that bring laughter and joy to a room of seemingly healthy people? I don’t know why, but I thank God each and every day for putting these people in my life, and my families. Andy was a great man, Yankee allegiance aside! He was, until his last breath, working to improve the lives of so many others while his withered away. Andy is the man you meet that reminds you, without a word, how lucky and happy you SHOULD be."

Andy with ALS and that constant smile that Curt Schilling mentioned.

Andy teaching nephew Ben to drink soda. A few years later, he took Ben to the horse races, as his sister Susan fondly recalls.

Why is Catching a Foul Ball So Exciting?

2011-07-01T18:51:00.000-07:00

Credit: Flickr, SethSquatch.

I think the excitement is related to the crowd. When you catch a foul ball, suddenly you rise out of the anonymous masses. Out of thousands of fans and against all the odds, you get chosen. The universe loves you, and you have the gift to prove it.

Credit: Flickr, Dizzy-eyed. (Check out the arms reaching upward, to the heavens. Beautiful.)

Of course, there are other, less mystical reasons why catching a foul ball is so exciting: the indirect contact with famous players, the thrill of an athletic achievement, the danger. But being loved by the universe—that has to count for something.

Credit: Flickr, Malingering.

Related Posts:
What Would George Carlin Say about Baseball Vs. Basketball?

All My Posts about Baseball/Field of Dreams

Vet with One Arm Makes Amazing Foul-Ball Catch (Video)
I also love this comparative, historical detail: during WWII, foul balls caught in the stands by fans were sent to the troops. See Richard Crepeau, “Baseball and War,” in The Cambridge Companion to Baseball, p. 87.

WWII Shark Attacks: What Survivors' Tears Teach Us

2011-05-31T22:07:00.000-07:00

What makes men cry? That's hard to say, even harder when it comes to World War II veterans. They grew up at a time when men tried not to talk much about their war experiences. Some WWII veterans, though, have told haunting stories that help us understand what it means to be human.

I'm especially thinking of stories by survivors of the USS Indianapolis, the navy ship torpedoed by a Japanese submarine toward the end of WWII, leaving about 900 U.S. sailors drifting for days in the Phillipine Sea.

The USS Indianapolis. Credit: Flickr, Charles McCain.

Most of these sailors died of shark attacks, dehydration, salt-water ingestion, and drowning, but some miraculously survived. This is the way one book describes the scene on the third or fourth day at sea, as Dr. Haynes, the ship's doctor, went around checking to see which of the floating bodies near him were still alive:

"Son?" He [Haynes] lifted the head. "Are you with us?" There was no reply. "Son?" Haynes tapped on the cold, opened eyeball. When he found a reflex, he felt an immense sense of relief.

Then he moved quickly to the next boy. He tapped again; this eye was bloodshot and swollen--a sign, Haynes knew, of edema caused by ingestion of salt water. There was no reflex. It was like touching the blank and glassy eye of a stuffed animal. Haynes had to declare the boy dead" (Doug Stanton, In Harm's Way, p. 200).

Whenever Haynes found another dead body, he'd try to honor the dead by saying the Lord's Prayer. Then, while trying not to look in his eyes, Haynes would take off the dead sailor's life jacket, so he could give it to another young man struggling to stay afloat.

In a Discovery Channel interview about a year before his death at age 89, Dr. Haynes admitted that hearing the Lord's Prayer always made him cry years after WWII:

"And that was hard work, getting an oil-soaked life-jacket off. And then we'd say the Lord's Prayer and then let him go. I, I got to stop going into detail, okay? Because I'll start crying. I don't go to church any more. Not that I'm not a Christian. I'm a Christian and I believe there is a God. But they always say the Lord's Prayer. I'm crying, and I can't do that. And I must have known 100 men on that ship very well. And many of my friends died in my arms. Gave me messages to their wives and all that."

At least to me, Dr. Haynes' quiet pain gives even more emotional force to that famous scene in Jaws where Quint describes the Indianapolis disaster. I hasten to add that it feels crude to compare these veterans' horrifying, real-life experiences with a Hollywood movie like Jaws. I certainly don't take the comparison lightly. But for better or worse, that Jaws scene is how most Americans have learned about the Indianapolis, and it provided an emotional understanding of war, death, and loss.

I can't help but notice the overlap between what Haynes (and/or Stanton) said about the dead sailors' eyes--"like the blank and glassy eye of a stuffed animal"--and Quint's description of the shark as having "lifeless eyes, black eyes, like a doll's eye." Both the eyes of the dead men and the living sharks are described with the same analogy to a doll, apparently because both reside on an eerie border zone, where it isn't clear if the living are dead or the dead are living.

Credit: Flickr, Mattk1979.

To people like Haynes, this would not be an abstract point. He lived it, body and soul. He may be like another Indianapolis survivor, Donald Mack, who has never seen Jaws and says he changes the channel when shark shows come on TV.

I'm glad that Spielberg didn't have Quint (actor Robert Shaw) choke up when he delivered his Indianapolis speech. Quint's delivery honors the sense of restraint that veterans like Dr. Haynes and Mr. Mack show.

But the tears are still there. At reunions, the Indianapolis survivors often pour affection all over Chuck Gwinn, the PV-1 pilot who first spotted them in the water and called for help. They call him their "angel"--and it makes him cry (Stanton, p. 218).

These men remind us that our eyes connect us with each other. Among the many animals on earth, only humans cry.

Related Posts:
Does the Jaws shark have the eyes of God?

What do Jaws and WWII have in common?

All my posts related to Jaws

Full text of our book chapter about Jaws (with more on Japan, and Hooper/Dreyfuss as an anthropologist figure)

Does the "Jaws" Shark Have the Eyes of God?

2011-04-21T22:30:00.003-07:00

This question probably seems outrageous, but I think there's something to it.

Flickr, Mattk1979.

Peter Mathieson, for example, described the eye of the great white shark as "impenetrable and empty as the eye of God" (Blue Meridian: The Search for the Great White Shark).

In Jaws, fisherman Quint similarly emphasizes the emptiness of the shark's eyes when he says, "You know the thing about a shark? He's got lifeless eyes, black eyes, like a doll's eye."

So perhaps Quint, too, sees the shark as God—masterful, yet mysterious.

In fact, many early cultures of the Pacific viewed the shark as a deity. But the best indication that Quint saw the shark as God comes from Captain Ahab, Quint's obvious predecessor in Herman Melville's Moby Dick.

When Ahab's first mate tells him that it's madness to seek revenge on Moby Dick, a "dumb brute" who attacked him out of blind instinct, this is how Ahab responds:

All visible objects, man, are but as pasteboard masks. But in each event...some unknown but still reasoning thing puts forth the mouldings of its features from behind the unreasoning mask. If man will strike, strike through the mask! How can the prisoner reach outside except by thrusting through the wall? To me, the white whale is that wall, shoved near to me.

In other words, Ahab wants to find God by destroying this surface "mask," Moby Dick. It's a religious quest.

Melville is particularly fascinated with the whiteness of the whale. He wants to understand why this color "appeals with such power to the soul," and why it is at once appalling and the most meaningful spiritual symbol, "nay, the very veil of the Christian's Deity." Melville finds his answer in the emptiness of the color white and its suggestion of death: "Is it that by its indefiniteness, it [whiteness] shadows forth the heartless voids and immensities of the universe, and stabs us from behind with the thought of annihilation, when beholding the white depths of the milky way?"

Maybe Quint, too, wants to "strike through the mask," to see whether God lies behind the shark's indifferent facade, those empty, lifeless eyes. Quint certainly doesn't lack other reasons for wanting to kill Jaws: survivor guilt, desire to reunite with his war buddies by experiencing death the way they did (just before he's eaten by the shark, Quint puts on his old war jacket and burns out the motor of the ship, so there can be no return to shore). But Quint also may be in the grips of an Ahab-like drive to see what lies on the other side--to experience the mysteries of the universe through violent, religious ecstasy.

In fact, Quint has already tread the outer limits of the known world. During the days and nights of shark attacks after the Indianapolis sank, Quint found his boatswain's mate somehow both alive and dead at the same time: "I thought he was asleep. Reached over to wake him up. Bobbed up and down in the water like a kinda' top. Well, he'd been bitten in half below the waist." Quint's experience here dances on the thin line between life and death, and questions the relationship between the two. Surrounded by death, the mate seems alive, but only half-way, since sleeping is a mini-death that we all experience at night--except this soldier turns out to be truly dead. In trying to wrap his mind around this mixture of death and life, Quint is like soldiers who say paradoxical things about war, such as "you never feel so alive as when you're about to die."

Understanding the connections between life and death is usually the domain of organized religion, but Quint is taking matters in his own hands. He's trying to see through the eyes of God.

Related Posts:

What do Jaws and WWII have in common?

Free Book Chapter on Jaws, with analysis of WWII, Hooper as anthropologist, etc.

All my posts about Jaws.

Further Reading:
Melville's Moby Dick with helpful annotations (free, online): www.powermobydick.com/

What would George Carlin say about Basketball vs. Baseball?

2011-04-19T14:11:00.000-07:00

Here's what comedian George Carlin might have said.

BASEBALL vs. BASKETBALL

The baseball uniform looks like a formal outfit, something you might wear to church.

The basketball uniform looks like a bathing suit, something you might wear to the pool.

Baseball is played on green grass.

Basketball is played on a beige hardwood floor.

Baseball looks like a battlefield, with a few soldiers trying to pass through enemy territory.

Basketball looks like a dance floor, with couples trying to decide who they should dance with next.

Every baseball park is different.

Every basketball court is the same.

In short, baseball comes out of 19th-century pastoral America. Basketball comes out of 20th-century office culture.

__________

Now For Some Analysis

I view George Carlin as a great comedian (and, yes, anthropologist), but I don't buy his famous riff's depiction of baseball as wimpy. As former Commissioner Giamatti once said, baseball consists of a man standing on a hill throwing a rock at a man below him holding a club.

Lately I'm even thinking that baseball might have gained popularity in 18th-century America due to its emotional resonance with organized violence: pistol duels and the line warfare of the American Civil War. In both arenas, there was a masculine code of honor that required the courage to stand there while someone shot at you from close range.

Regardless of historical origins, baseball clearly has violence at its core, but the violence has been ritualized and made into art—like a movie fight scene with sweet music in the background that makes you feel something beautiful is transpiring, or a ballet where punches are thrown, but nobody connects with the opposing ballerina's chin.

Still, baseball doesn't dance the same way basketball does. Ballet with actors spread around the stage (baseball) is not the same as 5 couples dancing close together and constantly switching partners (basketball). Basketball seems to come more out of the delicate communication dynamics of the early 21st-century American office: fast-paced, lots of teamwork and immediate, visible rewards, all played out under florescent lights and clean indoor spaces. Unlike baseball, the allegorical background in basketball is less the battlefield (even less farmlands) and more the modern workplace.

Sometimes I think I'm getting closer to understanding the cultural meaning of baseball and basketball, and other times I feel like I'm just staring at crop circles or the Inca lines around Cuzco, and I'm not sure what any of it means. As Carlin said, "I just want to go home! I hope I'll be safe at home!"

What Do the "Jaws" Movie and WWII Have in Common?

2011-01-22T14:22:00.000-08:00

American WWII soldiers. Credit: Flickr, "England."

Or put differently, what does the Jaws shark symbolize?

At least for some Americans, I think the Jaws shark symbolizes...the Japanese in World War II. What Quint said about the shark would have applied to the stereotypical Japanese soldier as well: "He's got lifeless eyes, black eyes, like a doll's eye." Both the shark and the Japanese soldier were made out to be a relentless enemy that hides in the water (a Japanese submarine), and an enemy that suddenly attacks the nation on its own soil (the "sneak attack" on Pearl Harbor, like Amityville being attacked on the 4th of July).

Japanese Submarine. Credit: Flickr, Marion Doss.

Shark fin. Credit: Flickr, Anita363.

But it's both more specific and broader than that. Jaws tells us a lot about stereotypes, war, and the challenges of understanding other cultures.

I'm referring to the scene where Quint, the fisherman, describes the shark attacks that followed the sinking of the U.S.S. Indianapolis by a Japanese submarine.

(Video clip of Quint's speech here.)

Quint says, "Japanese submarine slammed two torpedoes into our side, Chief. It was comin' back from the island of Tinian Delady. Just delivered the bomb--the Hiroshima bomb. Eleven hundred men went into the water. Vessel went down in twelve minutes. Didn't see the first shark for about a half an hour."

Quint's speech not only refers to real WWII events, but his description of the shark's eyes is very similar to American stereotypes of the Japanese soldier. Here's what Quint says: "You know the thing about a shark? He's got lifeless eyes, black eyes, like a doll's eye. When he comes at ‘ya, doesn't seem to be livin'." Quint could just as well have been describing the American stereotype of the heartless Japanese soldier with lifeless eyes.

Part of the power of Jaws, then, is that it allows Americans to explore their complicated feelings about WWII. When the shark gets blown to pieces at the end of the movie, viewers are encouraged to feel that such destruction was fully justified. In real life, though, Americans have felt increasingly regretful, or at least conflicted, about dropping the atomic bomb on the Japanese. Even many of those who thought the atomic bombings were justified because they saved thousands of American lives later felt misgivings about killing women and children. Jaws plays with these ambivalences and vexing ethical issues, always in a non-obvious way.

Hiroshima bomb cloud.

Jaws ending.

Jaws in Germany
This analysis also applies to American attitudes toward German soldiers in WWII. For example, here's what one American soldier remembered about a battle on the front lines near Cologne, Germany:

"We were passing the Germans we killed. Looking at the individual German dead, each took on a personality. These were no longer an abstraction. These were no longer the Germans of the brutish faces and the helmets we saw in the newsreels. They were exactly our age. These were boys like us. ...Once the helmet is off, you're looking at a teenager, another kid." --Robert Rasmus, interview reprinted in Studs Terkel's book The Good War: An Oral History of WWII.

This soldier's story sounds like Quint's points about the shark's eyes--how they seem "lifeless," or as this soldier put it, like "an abstraction." German soldiers with helmets that hide their eyes also fit Quint's image of the shark, which is the underlying stereotype of all enemies in modern Western warfare: lifeless, inhuman, animalistic.

U.S. wartime poster of German soldier.

But as noted by the American soldier, all this changes when the enemy helmet comes off, when you get up close and see that the supposed monsters are just teenage boys like you. Quint notes this same type of sudden switch in perspective when he says, "Until he [the shark] bites 'ya and those black eyes roll over white..."

In other words, Jaws and WWII both create strange oscillations between media stereotypes and individual personalities, abstract concepts and real beings. The shark seems dead but then you realize how alive he is...just before he kills you; WWII enemy soldiers seem like abstractions, but then you realize they're humans...just before you kill them.

21st Century
But what does any of this have to do with 21st-century viewers, most of whom have no experience with World War II or shark attacks?

These days, many Westerners are trying to see the positive aspects of other cultures...but we still do so through mass-media abstractions, and struggle with jarring contrasts between cultural stereotypes and real people that we meet in our travels or workplace or corner grocery store. Quint's war references and the shark imagery dramatize these intercultural challenges in a visceral yet non-obvious way, which presumably helps explain why Jaws has continued to fascinate new generations of viewers, not just WWII veterans.

I find it comforting to hear the American soldier (Rasmus) say he eventually recognized the humanity of the German soldiers, and I gather other WWII soldiers did the same thing. For example, you can listen here to a strangely beautiful, 2-minute Story Corps interview with an American talking about his deep feelings for a German soldier.

American helping wounded German soldier. Credit: WWII in Color.

Anyone want to suggest other stories of soldiers, on any side of any conflict, who have transcended stereotypes and recognized the enemy's humanity in a sudden, dramatic moment? I like those stories.

Further Reading:
My post about USS Indianapolis Survivors and Their Tears

My other posts related to Jaws

Full text of our book chapter about Jaws (with more on Japan, and Hooper/Dreyfuss as an anthropologist figure)

Robert Willson Jump Cut journal article, where he shows the resonance between Jaws and submarine movies.

Can Your Soul Change in 5 Seconds?

2010-12-10T20:45:00.000-08:00

To what extent can movies change our inner selves? As a concrete example, I'm going to consider my reactions to two songs from The Freshman: "Mona Lisa" and "I Wanna Be Around." These songs did something to me, and I'm trying to figure out what it was.

Just in case you haven't seen it, I should start by explaining that The Freshman is a comedy starring Marlon Brando and Matthew Broderick. It's a supreme gift: a chance to see Don Corleone in action again, this time taking more delight in life. For someone who loves The Godfather (me, for example), The Freshman is exquisite—sheer perfection.

The first song in The Freshman that I have come to love, "Mona Lisa," gets played when Broderick dances with Brando's daughter in her family living room:

As horrible as this sounds, I have to admit I never used to like this type of "old-timey" music, and I never understood all the fuss about the Mona Lisa. Yet I absolutely love this scene. It's so intimate. Dance has moved out of the clubs and the crowds, and into the embrace of a young couple dancing alone in the living room, in the middle of the day. It's like pulling stars out of the night sky, or having the original Mona Lisa in your own living room, as Brando does here ("Now I'm happy, sugar. Now I got the Mona Lisa"). Against the odds, this "Mona Lisa" song found its way into my heart.

And then there's Tony Bennett's song "I Wanna Be Around," which plays while Brando gracefully ice skates with an older woman:

This scene both echoes and reverses the Mona Lisa scene. This time, an older couple goes public with their private dance. Mona Lisa goes on tour.

And music is crucial here, too. Tony Bennett's silky-smooth rendition of "I Wanna Be Around" in the background captures Broderick's feelings as he watches the skating from the balcony: a confused mixture of affection, desire, hurt, and bemusement.

The whole scene is so perfect it makes my heart ache.

This is really strange, though. I don't usually find my heart aching over images of large men ice skating, and as I said before, this kind of crooner music used to leave me flat. In fact, lately even my own favorite musical genres, rock and cumbia, no longer move me the way they used to. (The only artist that still consistently moves me is Van Morrison, making my gratitude to him soar to impossible, religious levels.) I'm trying to figure out, then, what's going on with my reactions to the music in The Freshman.

On the few occasions when I have told other people about my recent inability to get excited about music, they treated it like a ritualized complaint about the traffic--"Yeah, it's bad, but what can you do?"--and then quickly moved on to the next topic. Maybe that's because, as Stanford biologist Robert Sapolsky showed, most people spend their entire adult lives listening to the same music they heard as kids; only 5% of people branch out into new musical genres after age 35. Sapolsky makes an interesting point about the comfort of childhood music: "There's a stage in childhood in which kids become mad for repetition, taking pleasure in the realization that they are mastering the rules. Maybe the pleasure at the other end of life is the realization that the rules are still there--as are we."

True, I do take comfort in the old songs, but lately I'm finding that they're an iron cage. I can't take in new music because it's too different from what I know, but I'm also tired of the music I do know. Apparently this is a common problem, based in the brain's wiring, as Jonah Lehrer notes: "...the corticofugal system is a positive-feedback loop...This only encourages us to listen to the golden oldies we already know...and to ignore the difficult songs that we don't know...."

I'm deeply grateful to The Freshman, then, for helping me break out of this feedback loop. This soundtrack provides me with the pleasure of something new, but at the same time something familiar. It reassures me that I'm still alive. I can still feel. And no matter how far away I may be from my parents' generation, we're still connected.

More specifically, it was The Godfather and this blog that brought me to this point. After I mentioned Sinatra in my eulogy post for Johnny Fontane, my friend Mark A. told me I really needed to listen to more Sinatra. I did, and, after awhile, I found that I was getting into it. The song that first got me was "The Way You Look Tonight," mostly because it starts off with that same wonderful, muffled trumpet sound that plays when Tom Hagen's plane is touching down in California, on his trip to see the movie director in The Godfather.

It usually takes thousands of experiences to change your musical taste, and even then, it doesn't happen 95% of the time, but this one Tom Hagen scene and music clip, which don't last more than 5 seconds, changed me; they provided a bridge to the music in The Freshman and beyond. That's the power of music and movies: they can move your soul in new directions, even when it looks like they're telling the same old stories.

So, as Bert Parks sings at the end of The Freshman, "I ain't gonna' work on Maggie's farm no more."

More about The Freshman

2009 Report that They're Making a TV Series about The Freshman

2010 Interview with Matthew Broderick and Director Andrew Bergman. Contains gems like this: Laurence Olivier wanted to play Larry London.

DVD of The Freshman. Doesn't contain any special features, but the Spanish voice-over for Brando is fantastic. This actor masterfully captures in Spanish the nuances of Brando's voice and speech patterns.

Roger Ebert's 1990 Review. Ebert called it right, as usual, from the very start:
"He [Brando] is doing a reprise here of his most popular character, Don Vito Corleone of 'The Godfather,' and he does it with such wit, discipline and seriousness that it's not a ripoff and it's not a cheap shot, it's a brilliant comic masterstroke."

More about Sinatra and Bennett

Sinatra once said, "for my money, Tony Bennett is the best in the business." And Bennett has been so inspired by Sinatra that in 2001 he founded the Frank Sinatra School of the Arts, a high school in Queens. For more, you can read this 2009 Vanity Fair article by Bennett, age 82.

But, of course, Sinatra and Bennett were not the same. For example, in a recent interview about his new biography of Sinatra, James Kaplan notes that Sinatra sang with more sadness than Bennett, calling Sinatra's style "an almost operatic version of the blues." You can listen to this characteristically insightful Christopher Lydon interview here.

Why Do Crowds Feel So Good?

2010-07-30T14:16:00.000-07:00

Credit: Flickr, Ian Broyles.

A sports crowd of 30-40,000 people is a great image of society, as close as any of us will ever get to experiencing that abstraction known as "our culture" or "the nation." But it's more physical than that: you can feel a large crowd in your body. You feel different in a huge crowd--lighter, ebullient, slightly buzzed. Durkheim called it collective effervescence, Freud called it the oceanic feeling, and many still call it madness, but all agree on one thing: being part of a crowd creates special psychological and physical sensations. But why? Exactly where do those sensations come from?

Obviously the sensations partly derive from the joy of communion with others and the merging with something greater than oneself. But maybe there's something physiological going on here as well. Maybe we feel different in a large crowd because we're surrounded by all those other human bodies, which are pretty much...water. The average human body is about 60-75% water, so packing 30,000 of these bodies close together--that's basically like creating a beautiful lake, a sea of electrical conductance.

In other words, maybe Freud was closer to the truth than he realized when he called it the oceanic feeling (though we can't expect any more insight from him, because, sadly, he said he had never experienced this feeling himself). It's the same reason people do "the wave" at sports events: they're acting out, and reveling in, their true watery selves.

Credit: Flickr, Roberta WB.

Of course my theory is highly speculative--yet it actually seems plausible to me. Scientists have shown that the mind and body are intimately connected, and that our bodies are sensitive to very subtle physical effects. As Jonah Lehrer puts it in Proust Was a Neuroscientist, our ears are "sensitive to sounds of atomic dimension. We can literally hear Brownian motion, the random jostle of atoms." And when music plays in a baseball park or elsewhere, our pupils dilate, pulse and blood pressure rise, the electrical conductance of the skin lowers, and blood is even redirected to the leg muscles (hence the impulse to tap your feet). Other studies have shown that people staring at water produce more alpha waves, the same electrical brain waves found in people doing meditation, especially the Zen "let it flow" type.

So couldn't the high concentrations of water in crowds get us high?

Related Posts about Baseball:
What would George Carlin say about baseball vs. basketball?

What's the cultural meaning of the slide and catch in baseball?

What's the connection between moonlight and baseball?

All posts about baseball and Field of Dreams

Why Is Feeding Ducks So Fun?

2010-06-30T20:20:00.000-07:00

A couple years ago, I was reading a book by a lake in Oregon when a couple little girls showed up with bags of bread in their hands. They were obviously there for one reason: to feed the ducks.

The older one with skinny shoulders was about 11, the other 8, and they looked like sisters. As soon as they threw out the bread, ducks zoomed over and gobbled it up. I tried to focus on my book, but I couldn't help overhearing the older girl say to the younger one, “Why is this so much fun? It’s just feeding birds, but it’s fun.” The girl really wanted to understand why something so simple could bring so much delight. And it was a good question: Why is it so much fun to feed "birds"?

The younger girl's response got me, too. She was probably too young to understand the implications of her sister's question, but she desperately wanted to keep up, so she quickly agreed, “It is fun. I know.” Then when their father came over, the little sister jumped up and immediately reported her older sister's observation as if it were a joint creation: “It’s so much fun, Dad—and we’re just feeding birds!”

After the bread ran out, the sisters trotted off with their father, and I just sat there looking at the water, missing my brother and sister and our childhood together. I tried to remember how thrilling it must have been when I first got to feed ducks--the satisfaction of finally getting to feed someone who needed me. I also remembered that they say water is a symbol for the unconscious, the ultimate mystery, and I wondered if this could explain not only why it's so fun to feed the ducks, but also why so many adults are fascinated with the deep seas. When it got dark, I finally left.

I thought that was the end of it, but the next morning I was back at the same spot and the two girls reappeared, out of nowhere, with more bread for the ducks. A rare opportunity—a second encounter with strangers, a chance to follow up.

While they threw out the bread, I quickly started talking to the girls before anyone could come over and interrupt or view me as a creeper (that's the sad world we live in). They told me that a duck flew into the pool at the hotel yesterday, but then he got away.

“So did you figure out why it’s so much fun to feed the ducks?” I asked.

The older sister looked up from the ducks, and said,“Yeah, it’s weird, you know? They just squawk and eat the bread."

She paused, shrugged her shoulders, and said cheerfully, "I don’t know, but it’s great." Then she went back to feeding the hungry ducks.

The little sister chimed in, “Yesterday we fed them half a loaf of bread! But today we’re leaving the hotel, so we’re feeding them all the rest now.”

I just left the two sisters there, kneeling at the water’s edge.

___________________

Related Posts:
Kids quoting movies

Jackie Robinson's # 42, and a Father and Son

All posts with personal stories

Interview with David Sutton, Co-Author of "Hollywood Blockbusters"

2010-02-09T21:35:00.005-08:00

Here are some excerpts from an interview I did with my co-author, David Sutton:

Wogan has fun interviewing Sutton in this 18-minute podcast. (8-meg mp3 file.)

Questions that Sutton Answers in this Podcast:

In The Big Lebowski, which character do you think you're most like?

Would you eat shark?

What's a shark-like mystery for anthropologists today?

Why did you dress like Don Corleone for Halloween last year?

*****************

By the way, when Hollywood Blockbusters came out in print (January 5, 2010 in the U.S.), I said to Dave the same thing I always say when I publish something: "The new phone book's here! The new phone book's here!"

Of course, that line comes from Navin R. Johnson in The Jerk. The movie is a spoof on the "rags to riches" story, with Navin playing the part of the total fool. When the new phone book gets delivered, Navin starts jumping up and down, sure that with this "kind of spontaneous publicity... things are going to start happening to me now." And what happens? Some crazy guy finds his name in the phone book and decides to shoot at him. (Click here to see the video clip.)

So to sum up: The new phone book's here! He hates these cans! Stay away from the cans!

Kids Quoting Movies While Lying in Hammocks

2010-01-05T21:36:00.000-08:00

Why do young kids quote certain movie lines? Even on a normal day kids seem to be hallucinating, so when they watch movies--which are basically just the dreams of our whole culture--I always wonder what effect it has on them. I definitely thought about this when my kids and I spent an entire weekend in Mexico quoting movies.

At the time, we were living in Oaxaca, Mexico while I directed a study-abroad program. Our three young boys--ages 10, 8, and 6--had a hard time adjusting to this new situation. They had left their friends behind, and had to speak Spanish all day at the local elementary school, where they were the lone gringos. Some of the school kids were friendly, but others were resentful and standoffish toward these foreign newcomers, and the whole thing was confusing to our kids. After school, they spent the afternoons playing soccer on the tiny driveway in front of our apartment--and fighting with each other. Finally, when we didn't think we could put up with any more screaming, my wife and I decided to escape to the coast with the kids for the weekend, so we found a cheap hotel on a pristine beach in San Agustinillo.

Oaxaca beach, 2006.

As a bonus, this hotel had hammocks on the balcony outside our 2nd-floor room. My wife and I loved gazing at the ocean and talking while lying in the hammocks, feeling as if we were sailing on air, floating on magic carpets. But gentle swaying wasn't enough for our boys. They preferred violently whacking their hammocks into each other. Every time their hammocks collided, they laughed, amazed and delighted that they could hit each other and not get hurt. The hammocks provided the illusion of safety, a little cocoon, and the sun and salt water had washed away their worries, so a bonk from a brother that would have set off an argument a day ago was now taken as good fun. For an entire 3-day weekend, we were blissed out in those hammocks: swaying...rocking...whacking.

My two oldest kids (ages 10, 8) in the hammocks.

My youngest son, with sand and on his head for fun.

It got even better at night. Lying in the hammocks after the sun went down, we entered an altered state of consciousness. The closeness of our bodies and the absence of visual cues tapped us into another dimension, one filled with ruminations and emotional openness. In this state, we invented a game. One person quoted a line from a movie, and then the others had to guess which movie it came from, and who said it. It was a simple game, but we played it for hours, lying there in our hammocks waiting for movie images to float by like puffy clouds, hoping one would contain some obscure movie line that nobody else could guess.

Every time the kids didn't recognize one of my quotes, one of them said, "Is it from that movie where the guy says, 'Looking good, Lewis!'?" They asked because they'd heard me repeating that line ever since we got to the beach, and it was from a movie they'd never seen, Trading Places. The line comes from the last scene, where the two main characters, played by Dan Aykroyd and Eddie Murphy, strike it rich and retire to a tropical island. Dan Aykroyd is on a yacht at the water's edge, and Eddie Murphy calls to him from his lounge chair on the beach, "Looking good, Lewis!"

For me, that line evoked a feeling of supreme contentment in a tropical paradise, and it kept running through my head, even though I hadn't seen the movie in about 15 years. Sitting at a table on the beach while looking at the waves, I kept clinking the kids' glasses of mango juice and proclaiming, "Looking good, Lewis!"

For the game, though, I just stuck to the movies we'd seen together, and left Trading Places out of it. We usually guessed each others' quote lines, but it sometimes took a few rounds, and the kids loved the challenge. At one point, my middle son Liam got stuck trying to find a good, tough line, so I said, "How about something from Rainbow Fish?" The kids immediately started laughing at the outrageousness of my suggestion.

Rainbow Fish was one of those films they watched when they were 3 or 4 years old, back in the days when they watched videos just to see the pretty colors flickering by. Recalling Rainbow Fish was like hitting reverse and going back light years in time to those far-away days before Shrek or Donkey or the Pink Panther, before the days of plot, character, or irony. The kids had changed so much since then that they looked at their earlier selves as some sort of stranger--and the sudden intrusion of that stranger cracked them up. For the next few minutes, they could barely concentrate on the game. They just kept laughing and saying, "Rainbow Fish?!" They were trying to comprehend--and reject--the connection between their past and present selves.

The next day, when the sun was directly overhead and beating down, we decided to use the hammocks for more traditional education: school work. We got the kids in the hammocks, under the shade of the roof, so they could do some homework and reading. The kids quieted down and applied themselves to their studies for a couple hours. But when 8-year-old Liam got up to go to the bathroom, this is what I found written in his notebook: Halo My name is inigo Montoya. You kill my father prepare to die.

Instead of doing homework, he was lining up movie quotations to use that night!

The funny thing is, Liam had never even seen this movie, Princess Bride, since he had been out of the house with my mother when the rest of the family watched it. He knew the "prepare to die" line, though, because the next day he heard his Aunt Cecelia saying it over and over. In fact, she repeated it so many times that she got confused over the accent, sometimes sounding more French or even Scottish than Spanish as she walked around the house saying, with exaggerated guttural effect, "You kill my father, prepare to die." Perhaps Liam remembered this line because he was so shocked at the violent imagery and confusing accent coming from his aunt? Maybe it hit him that this wasn't just a thing of movies, that maybe his father could be killed someday, just like in The Lion King? Or maybe he just was desperate to win the game, and would take any quote he could think of?

The line didn't stump the crowd that night, but it did bring to mind a bunch of other great lines from this movie, such as "Inconceivable!" and "I do not think that word means what you think it means." It was as if we had woken up and discovered we'd all miraculously had the same dream.

At the end of the long weekend we had to leave the beach and go back to the city. Petie, our 6-year-old, came in to our room that night and asked me why we couldn't stay longer at the beach, and I mumbled something about having to go back to work. But his best questions were about the new Pink Panther movie, which we had seen about a week earlier. The Pink Panther was Petie’s first real detective story, and it filled him with all sorts of questions. “If Yuri killed that other soccer player because he was going to tell on him, wouldn’t he have to kill all the rest of the soccer players, too?”“ If Bizu was Yuri’s friend, why did he try to get money from him?” “Don’t soccer players make a million dollars?”

All I could say was, “Looking good, Lewis.”

*************

So what about you? Have you ever wondered why a certain movie line stuck in a child's memory?

*I found out later that the line is actually "Looking good, Billy Ray," but if I'm going to tell the kids about this correction, I"ll have to wait until we're lying in a hammock again. I would refer everyone else without a hammock to the New York Times/ "On Language" article about movie misquotations, such as "Play it again, Sam" (which was never said); "If you build it, they will come" (original: "he will come"); and "We're gonna' need a bigger boat" (original: "You're gonna' need a bigger boat"). I especially like the last line of this article: "It is a fitting homage to the fantasy machine of Hollywood that its verbal gems are no less compelling when their origins are themselves fantasies."

And for a good Psychology Today article by Stuart Fischoff on how favorite movie quotes vary by age and gender, click here.

Lévi-Strauss Joins Don Corleone

2009-12-12T19:14:00.000-08:00

Claude Lévi-Strauss, one of the most famous anthropologists of the 20th century, died on October 30, 2009. To pay homage to this powerful thinker and wish him well, I like to imagine that he's now with the Godfather, and I wonder, What would a meeting of these towering figures look like?

For starters, they would agree that writing has been intimately connected to power. Lévi-Strauss might recall the time he met an Amazonian chief who intuitively understood this connection. Rather than answer Lévi-Strauss's questions verbally, the illiterate chief asked for a writing pad, drew wavy lines on it, handed back the pad, and insisted that Lévi-Strauss pretend to understand the meaning of his "answers." Even though the chief was illiterate, he had grasped that writing equals power. Reflecting on this incident, Lévi-Strauss concluded, "Writing...seems to have favoured the exploitation of human beings rather than their enlightenment." That's quite a condemnation of writing (especially coming from someone who spent his whole life studying written texts), yet Don Corleone agreed with Lévi-Strauss's view. Don Corleone got his godson Johnny out of a bandleader's legal contract by making him "an offer he couldn't refuse," and, instead of written contracts, he based his power on personal relationships and the exchange of food and drink ("you look terrible, I want you to eat more"). When Don Corleone says he refused to be "a fool, dancing on a string held by all those big shots," he's not just talking about the senators and judges; he's talking about the whole bureaucratic, text-based power structure of American society, what Lévi-Strauss called the "exploitation of human beings."

Lévi-Strauss and the Don would probably bond, then, by reflecting on the peculiar power of writing...and by drinking wine together. In fact, Lévi-Strauss appreciated the "science of the concrete," and he once wrote about the touching custom in certain French restaurants of pouring the table wine for the person next to you, even if he or she is a stranger.

Don Corleone also had a taste for wine. Toward the end of The Godfather, he told his son Michael, “I like to drink wine more than I used to." I love the way the son then comforts the father: “It’s good for you, Pop.” I also love the way Michael listens sympathetically as his father reviews his life ("I don't apologize, that's my life"), and I find it interesting that they sit together in this scene as if they're in a confession booth:

Shortly after drinking that last glass of wine, Don Corleone died while playing with his grandson in the tomato garden, with a sun sheet flying overhead as if it were the canopy on a bed ready to float gently to the heavens.

Lévi-Strauss also died a “good death,” even though the empire he'd built, like Don Corleone's, was on the wane. He died at exactly 100 years of age, still admired by the French public, dignitaries, and intellectuals around the world. He didn't have to apologize--that was his life.

I hope Lévi-Strauss and Don Corleone are together now, sipping wine and reflecting on their lives.

What do you think they're saying to each other?

Johnny Fontane, Frank Sinatra, and This American Life

2009-10-14T20:22:00.000-07:00

Johnny Fontane, played by actor and singer Al Martino, represented love and the rising hopes of a new generation in The Godfather. Don Corleone loved and indulged Johnny, and his future seemed bright. So when Al Martino died this week at age 82, it hurt. How could Johnny ever die?

I didn't grow up listening to Al Martino or Frank Sinatra--who they say Johnny's character was based on--or any of the other crooners, but I do appreciate their deep connection with New York.

This connection was brought home to me when I listened to an episode of "This American Life" about this guy who sang Sinatra songs on the stoop of his apartment building in Greenwich Village. Even though Mayor Guliani was cracking down on noise violations at the time, the singing drew a large crowd of New Yorkers for several Friday nights in a row. Time stood still, as strangers became transfixed and momentarily united by this channeling of Sinatra. One of the tenants put couches out on the street for people to sit on, another tap danced, and an elderly Asian man from another floor in the building came over and hugged the singer, even though they'd never talked before.

My favorite part was when the cops, who were supposed to be shutting the singer down (he had speakers and a microphone), circled the block, parked their cruiser, and then shouted out on the bullhorn, "Do 'Summer Wind'!"

I wish we could also ask Al Martino to sing one more. As the Don's wife begged in that marvelous wedding scene, "Johnny, Johnny... Sing a song."

P.S. For an epilogue of sorts, about how my attitude toward Sinatra later changed, see my post on the music in The Freshman.

What's the Connection between Moonlight and Baseball?

2009-09-10T14:12:00.000-07:00

What is it about the moon, and is there a special connection with baseball?

I think moonlight is like baseball itself: it flips things around and mocks the usual rules. In other sports you can't keep playing once you cross the out-of-bound lines, but in baseball, you can. When someone catches a ball in the foul territory, we realize the foul line is not the out-of-bounds line, after all; it's an illusion. The foul line says, "This looks like the out-of-bounds line, but beyond its limits, the game keeps going." And since lines represent social authority (limits, rules, what you can and can't do), this strange aspect of baseball embodies a deep ambivalence about society: a desire to respect rules and "Kill the ump!" at the same time, a desire to keep it going, even after it's supposed to be over--like moonlight.

The glaring lights at a night game even look like moon beams, as in this shot of Shoeless Joe in Ray's field:

Novelist Bill Kinsella certainly saw a connection. He included the character Moonlight Graham in his book (on which Field of Dreams was based) because he was taken by that name when he found it in the Baseball Encyclopedia. Yes, Archibald "Moonlight" Graham was a real player: he played a half inning for the Giants in the early 1900's, never got to bat, and later became a doctor in Chisholm, Minnesota.


The real Moonlight Graham. Credit: encyl.opentopia.com

But maybe there's more to it than that. Again, does baseball have a special connection with the moon?

_________________
My Other Posts about Baseball:
What would George Carlin say about baseball vs. basketball?

What's the cultural meaning of the slide and catch in baseball?

All posts about baseball and Field of Dreams

Further Reading:
For more on the real Moonlight/Doc Graham, see his Wikepedia entry or the new book titled Chasing Moonlight: The True Story of Field of Dreams' Doc Graham.

Jackie Robinson's # 42, and a Father and Son

2009-07-25T21:27:00.001-07:00

This year my son was painfully shy, always remaining silently apart from his baseball teammates. We had just moved to town, and he was one of the few 7th graders on a team of big 8th graders, so he was afflicted with acute self-consciousness.

To my surprise, though, he chose # 42 for his jersey, the same number that Jackie Robinson wore for the Brooklyn Dodgers. All the other kids had numbers below 20, but my son was out there taking a stand every day, wearing # 42.

When I asked him why he chose # 42, he said, "Because Jackie Robinson was one of the fastest players, ever." So that explained how Jackie Robinson became his hero, not the repeated viewings of Field of Dreams or the books we had read together about Jackie "breaking the color barrier." No matter what kind of batting slump my son might have been going through (and anything short of a base hit was a slump, in his eyes), he had always been one of the fastest kids on his Little League teams, and nobody could take that away.

This new team needed my son's speed, so he mostly played center field--out there by himself, on the fringes of baseball's social imaginary. If the pitcher and catcher symbolize downtown, the heart of the action, the infield is the suburbs, and the outfield is the land of abandon.

Seeing that # 42 on my son's back as he trotted out to center field killed me every time.

Related Posts:
What's the cultural meaning of the slide and catch in baseball?

Kids quoting movies while lying in hammocks

What's the connection between moonlight and baseball?

All posts about baseball and Field of Dreams

Seinfeld and the Anthropology of Gift-Giving

2009-07-25T00:21:00.001-07:00

As promised in our book's final chapter, we're providing here an essay that we wrote on potluck dinners and gift-giving in "The Seinfeld Show" and American culture. Specifically, the essay is about Episode # 20, "The Pen," which you can see on Youtube.

Warning: We really like potlucks, Seinfeld, and gifts, but this essay could make you feel bad about one or more of these things.

WHAT’S WRONG WITH POTLUCK DINNERS?: SEINFELD AND GIFT-GIVING

Have you ever thought to yourself, “My God, the potluck dinner is a bizarre and disturbing American custom”?

If not, then you would be surprised to learn that many visitors to the United States have this kind of reaction. When they first attend an American potluck, they experience culture shock and a sudden sense of American cold-heartedness. That’s right: they see the potluck as cold-hearted.

This reaction is hard for Americans to understand, since we usually see the potluck as not only harmless but downright lovely, an example of community at its best. We’re like Donkey in the movie “Shrek,” who is sure that everybody likes parfait (“Have you ever met a person, you say, ‘Let's get some parfait,’ they say, ‘Hell no, I don't like no parfait?”). Likewise, it’s hard for us to imagine someone not appreciating the potluck.

So how could anyone resist the potluck, and, more broadly, what might this add to our understanding of the problematic nature of gift-giving? To answer this question, we’re going to take a close look in this article at another piece of popular culture, the Seinfeld show. Although the Seinfeld show never directly addressed the potluck dinner (perhaps one of the only topics it left uncovered), it had a lot to say about gift-giving and American culture more broadly, so it’s a perfect source on this question. To get some perspective on what Seinfeld has tapped into in American culture, we will also draw on anthropology, which has a long-standing interest in the exchange of food and gifts. Like Seinfeld, this paper is “about nothing.” The anthropological trick is to see the something that is nothing, the social implications of a show where they claim nothing happens.
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...Again, the full Seinfeld essay (about 4-pages long) is here. This essay can also be found in the first (March 2010) issue of Popular Anthropology Magazine.

"Hollywood Blockbusters": Table of Contents and Sample Chapter (on "Jaws")

2009-06-10T18:53:00.000-07:00

SUMMARY FROM THE BACK COVER
Why do Jaws, Field of Dreams, The Big Lebowski, and The Godfather remain strikingly popular in this age of fragmented audiences and ever-faster spin cycles? Hollywood Blockbusters argues that these films continue to captivate audiences because they play upon underlying tensions and problems in American culture, much like the myths that anthropologists study in non-Western contexts. In making this argument, the authors employ and extend anthropological theories about ritual, kinship, gift giving, power, egalitarianism, literacy, metalinguistics, stereotypes, and the mysteries of the Other.

ENDORSEMENT FROM BACK COVER
"Hollywood Blockbusters is anthropological theorizing at its filmic best. Sutton and Wogan have translated complex anthropological concepts and debates into a rich analysis of popular motion pictures, giving us both a window into the value of anthropological sensibilities and a new interpretation of well-known Hollywood offerings. This wonderful book helps to counter claims about anthropology’s marginal status in contemporary discussions about mainstream American culture, and will be an essential read for both students and scholars." --John Jackson, Professor of Anthropology, University of Pennsylvania

TABLE OF CONTENTS
Chapter 1: Introduction
Chapter 2: The Godfather: The Gun, the Pen, and the Cannoli
Chapter 3: Field of Dreams: Foul Balls and Blurry Lines
Chapter 4: The Big Lebowski: Bowling, Gender, Temporality, and Other “What Have You’s”
Chapter 5: The Village: Egalitarianism and the Political Anthropology of the Possible
Chapter 6: Jaws: Knowing the Shark
Chapter 7: Conclusion

FREE EXCERPTS AND CHAPTER ON JAWS
At Amazon.com, you can search the full book and read sample pages.

Click here for a pdf copy of our entire chapter on Jaws, in which we analyze the shark as a symbol of Asian wartime enemies of the U.S. and Hooper (Richard Dreyfuss) as an anthropologist.

WHERE TO GET THE BOOK
You can order Hollywood Blockbusters through Amazon, Barnes and Noble, Berg, and other booksellers.