Grad Research: Bombs and Belvederes
Last week, I introduced a collaborative project that I've been working on for the past few years, Mystery Spot Books. This week, I submit another bit of writing from our first book, Mystery Spot Vol. 1, on buried cars in Tulsa and hydrogen bombs hiding in plain sight in New Mexico.
Sandia Base was a field test area for nuclear weapons run by the U.S. government that operated from 1946 until 1971. The former test site lies southeast of Albuquerque amidst a seemingly unbroken expanse of dry mesas and their tributaries of dusty roads. In May of 1957, at what is now called the Mark 17 Broken Arrow site, a 42,000-pound hydrogen bomb fell through the closed bay doors of a plane that was approaching Kirtland Air Force Base to the south. The plutonium pits were safely stored on the plane, but radioactive pieces of the bomb were scattered across the mesas. In 1996, the Center for Land Use Interpretation placed a descriptive marker at the site to commemorate the incident. The marker is a wooden post that stands in the middle of a field and holds a plaque describing the 1957 event. The Air Force cleaned up the site in secret, but if you visit the Mark 17 Broken Arrow site today, you can still find radioactive pieces of the hydrogen bomb hiding in the sagebrush.Six hundred and fifty miles east of the Sandia Base, also in 1957, the city of Tulsa buried a brand new Plymouth Belvedere in an underground bunker designed to withstand nuclear fallout. The car was a time capsule, slated to be unearthed during Oklahoma’s centennial celebration in 2007. The concrete enclosure was intended to protect the car from decay, but a defect in the design of the bunker allowed water to seep in over the years and severely damage the Belvedere. A second car, a Plymouth Prowler, was placed in an above ground vault in 1998 and will be sealed there until 2048. If you visit Tulsa in 2048, you might see a well-preserved 1998 Plymouth Prowler emerge from its sepulcher, or perhaps a design flaw will allow time to do its work on this time capsule as well.Some things get buried so no one can find them; some things get buried so everyone remembers them. But things don’t always stay buried. What you find if you visit the Broken Arrow site or Tulsa, Oklahoma, is more than the radioactive scraps of a destroyed bomb or a bizarre representation of local pride. One way or another, things come to the surface, and what is revealed when they do is not simply the contradiction between what we hide and what we honor, but the fact that the latter is often a mask for the former.
Faculty Research: Dr. Randy Lewis on Unplugging at Flow
Dr. Randy Lewis has a new piece over at Flow that questions why it is so difficult to imagine unplugging from the constant buzz of electronics that characterizes modern life:
Yet… are we not curious about how it would feel to experience the “great unplugging”? Would we relish the ensuing silence as we restore the old ways of communicating and connecting with one another? Or would we lapse into a languorous funk without Google and HBO, Avatar and Annoying Orange? Would we feel permanently stuck in the isolation tank of our own boredom, marooned with the hideousness of our own organic thoughts? Would we start sketching the “Real Housewives” on the walls of our condos in crayon, breathlessly narrating their erotic adventures like an ancient bards singing the tale Odysseus and the sirens? Would we pine for our iPhones, laptops, and flatscreen TVs like postmodern amputees cursing the loss of our cyborg appendages? Would we grieve for our machines?Probably. But what fascinates me is how loathe we are to even imagine this scenario. We are increasingly unwilling to contemplate the absence of the various screens that convey so much of our entertainment, sociality, and labor. Like Francis Fukuyama’s Cold War “End of History” argument in which capitalism’s apparent triumph over socialism foreclosed any discussion of alternatives, the new media juggernaut is so powerful that it has blotted out our ability to imagine anything else. We are all hopeless screenagers now.
I'm reminded here of a neuroscience experiment described at io9 last October:
A group of researchers from Germany and the UK designed a fairly complex psychological test to determine how people planned for negative events in the future. First, they asked the about the likelihood of 80 different disturbing events happening, such as contracting a fatal disease or being attacked. After they'd recorded people's responses, researchers told each subject the actual, statistical likelihood of such events happening. In some cases, people had overestimated the likelihood and in some cases they'd underestimated it.Then, after some time had passed, the researchers asked subjects again about the likelihood of these events happening to them. Interestingly, they found that people had a much harder time adjusting their expectations if the real-world statistical likelihood was higher than what they had first guessed. They had little trouble adjusting expectations for a more favorable outcome. It was as if people were selectively remembering the likelihoods of future events — forgetting the bad odds but not the good ones.
What does this mean? io9 sums it up nicely:
Basically, human optimism is a neurological bug that prevents us from remembering undesirable information about our odds of dying or being hurt. And that's why nobody ever believes the apocalypse is going to happen to them.
I think there are lessons to be drawn from these findings with respect to our reliance on technology, too. Perhaps our inability to imagine a world without these [im]material comforts, even though many of us actually lived in that world, is a chemical intervention to protect us. Because we are so individually and socially embedded in technology, maybe imagining the scenario of loss that Randy wonders about is too much for our grey matter to handle.Read the piece in its entirety here.
List: 7 Films from 2011 that American Studies Scholars Should See
Somehow, it’s already December, and you know what that means: a million year-end lists of the best (and worst) 2011 had to offer. So we’re throwing our collective hat in the ring with this list of the best movies from 2011 that are of particular interest to American Studies scholars of all stripes. We can’t vouch for the quality of all these, of course, but they at least provide some fodder for folks to potentially research and write about.Quick note: there are a ton of worthwhile documentary films that were released this year that are worth a look, but this list only highlights fictional films. Have fun!
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CWX34ShfcsE]
Drive
Ryan Gosling stars in this intense homage to a very gritty Los Angeles. He plays a Hollywood stuntman who moonlights as a getaway driver, but a botched heist leaves him with a contract on his head. Though the film’s storyline is predominantly a tale of the unnamed driver dealing with a variety of folks who try to kill him, Drive also offers a fascinating and dark portrayal of the city. Visually and musically, it’s 1980s-style noir at its best (but caveat emptor: the violence is sporadic but incredibly graphic).
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zH7KZD5vGBY]
Cowboys and Aliens
This is definitely not an Oscar winner, but for anyone who loves western-science fiction crossovers, it’s a must. Cowboys and Aliens is based on a graphic novel of the same name, centering on a no-holds-barred battle between man and alien in the Arizona territory, back in 1873. Bombastic visuals aside, the film also boasts a great cast and crew: it was directed by Jon Favreau and written by a crew that includes Lost scribe Damon Lindelof. And it stars Harrison Ford, Daniel Craig, and Olivia Wilde.
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J_ajv_6pUnI]
The Help
Based on a novel of the same name, The Help tracks the relationship of a white woman with her black maids during the 1960s in Mississippi. Though the film has received generally positive reviews, it’s also earned some criticism for its problematic and stereotypical portrayal of black women. The Help even prompted the Association of Black Women Historians to release a public statement critiquing its treatment of the historical moment.
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JerVrbLldXw]
Captain America: The First Avenger
Comic books are often very political works, and the films that are based on these stories are no different. Captain America: The First Avenger stars Chris Evans, Hugo Weaving, Tommy Lee Jones, and a bunch of other heavy-hitters, and features the super hero in a battle with the U.S. military against a power hungry subset of the Nazi Party called HYDRA. The film is a hell of a lot of fun, but it also comments on military technology, bodily enhancement, patriotism, and the importance of PR in fighting wars. Plus it has "America" in the title - there's lots of America.
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5rhNrz2hX_o]
Meek’s Cutoff
Back to the West. Meek’s Cutoff centers on a small group of settlers heading west before the Civil War. They end up lost in the wilderness thanks to guide Stephen Meek, who doesn't quite know where he's going. The desperation of the situation leaves the settlers both at each others' throats and struggling to deal with their depleting resources and energy. The narrative is intense and captivating, but what really resonates is the stunning camerawork highlighting the landscape – it really is a beautiful, deadly, painful frontier.
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y2DqFRsPrns]
Margin Call
Margin Call examines an investment bank (based loosely upon the now-defunct Lehman Brothers) in the throes of a financial crisis that threatens both the company and the national economy. Sound familiar? The star-studded cast, which includes Kevin Spacey, Jeremy Irons, Paul Bettany, ZacharyQuinto, and Stanley Tucci, highlights the personal stakes of the decisions made by Wall Street, so it’s worth a look if your understanding of the financial calamity that began a few years ago is centered more on numbers and formulas than on people.
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bdzWcrXVtwg]
Contagion
At first glance, Contagion is just another apocalyptic viral outbreak film. The real story, though, lies in the human response to an international threat. You’ll see a society deteriorate in the face of panic and fear, you’ll see how quickly information – right or wrong – can spread, thanks to new media, you’ll see the impotence of a government responding to an international disaster. It’s an upper, to say the least – but stellar performances by Marion Cotillard, Matt Damon, Laurence Fishburne, Jude Law, and Gwyneth Paltrow make the film worth the inevitable uneasy paranoia you'll feel after seeing it.That's all, folks! Did we miss anything? Leave a comment if you know another film that American Studies folks might find interesting!
Grad Research: The End of Austin, a Collaborative Documentary Project
Here at AMS :: ATX, we're - perhaps not surprisingly - huge fans of academic projects that engage with the digital realm in meaningful ways. We're particularly excited by projects like the Archive of Childhood, which we featured last week, and other digital archives like these (among myriad others, naturally). Public access, multimedia, and interactivity all open up possibilities for innovation in research.But what about digital academic work of a different sort - those that blend the creative and the scholarly on a digital platform?One graduate seminar held this fall at UT had a chance to experiment with creating a digital scholarly and artistic project as a class assignment. Randy Lewis’s “Documenting America” class was charged with the task of creating a collaborative, interactive documentary project using the Tumblr platform. The topic? The end of Austin.
Here’s what Randy had to say about the project’s inception and its future possibilities:
Our seminar on documentary had looked at cinematic "city symphonies" from the 1920s like Berlin and Rain, and I wondered if we could track a particular thread through the landscape of Austin. All I came up with was the thread—the idea of "endings" that evokes borders, walls, boundaries, eras, nostalgia, death—and the rest reflects the talents of grad students working within a tight schedule of 7 days.Students, especially grad students, work very hard each semester, but relatively little of their work appears "on view" anywhere public. So we all liked the idea of something enduring beyond the fall semester, rather than going into a file cabinet, and Tumblr provided a public, permanent location that could accommodate writing, photos, sound files, and video equally well. We could even add to it in future semesters, and in that way have a "living project" for years to come.
Each student contributed one (or more) pieces to the site in a wide variety of forms: sound, image, text, video, and considered the questions from any number of angles – the end of place, the end of time, the end of culture, the end of living.So take a look here at the END OF AUSTIN – explore and engage with how this class imagined our swelling city’s possible, eventual, inevitable decline. And, of course, keep checking back for more.Lest we end on a bummer of a postapocalyptic note, though, it’s worth noting that projects like this might point to a new future for creative and scholarly work. The lasting and public frontier of the digital world has the potential to breathe new life into traditional scholarship in academia and into documentary production.Ultimately, as Randy notes, American Studies is a perfect place for experiments like this to begin: “Creating a site like this seems like the next step for fields like American Studies: it invites scholarship, art, and the wider public all to the same party.”