Configuring America : Iconic Figures, Visuality, and the American Identity [1 ed.] 9781841507620, 9781841506357

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ICONIC FIGURES, VISUALITY, AND THE AMERICAN IDENTITY

CONFIGURING

EDITED BY KLAUS RIESER MICHAEL FUCHS MICHAEL PHILLIPS

ConFiguring America

ConFiguring America Iconic Figures, Visuality, and the American Identity

Edited by Klaus Rieser, Michael Fuchs, and Michael Phillips

intellect Bristol, UK / Chicago, USA

First published in the UK in 2013 by Intellect, The Mill, Parnall Road, Fishponds, Bristol, BS16 3JG, UK First published in the USA in 2013 by Intellect, The University of Chicago Press, 1427 E. 60th Street, Chicago, IL 60637, USA Copyright © 2013 Intellect Ltd All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without written permission. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Cover designer: Holly Rose Copy-editor: MPS Technologies Production manager: Melanie Marshall Typesetting: Planman Technologies ISBN 978-1-84150-635-7 EISBN: 978-1-84150-762-0 Printed and bound by Hobbs the Printers Ltd, UK

Table of Contents Acknowledgements Introduction: Theorizing Iconic Figures Klaus Rieser

vii 1

PART I: Icons and the Struggle over Meaning

23

Chapter 1: ‘Just Like You’, But Not Like Us: Staging National Belonging, Multiracial Femininity, and Collective Memory in the American Girl Family Karina Eileraas

25

Chapter 2: Behind the Brown Mask: Joe Louis’ Face and the Construction of Racial Mythologies Marcy S. Sacks

47

Chapter 3: LeBron James and the Web of Discourse: Iconic Sports Figures and Semantic Struggles Michael Fuchs & Michael Phillips

65

PART II: Appropriating Iconic Figures

93

Chapter 4: O Superman: The Many Faces of the Man of Steel Bradley Bailey

95

Chapter 5: Thirty Are Better Than One: Marilyn Monroe and the Performance of Americanness Susanne Hamscha

115

Chapter 6: Queering Cowboys, Queering Futurity: The Re/Construction of American Cowboy Masculinity Leopold Lippert

133

Chapter 7: Iconizing Radical Change: How Gary Cooper Led Poland to Freedom Jolanta Szymkowska-Bartyzel

149

ConFiguring America

PART III: The Mutability and Abstraction of Iconic Figures

167

Chapter 8: The Embodiment of a Nation: The Iconicity of Uncle Sam and the Construction of a Conflicted National Identity Louis J. Kern

169

Chapter 9: Lois Lane: The Making of a Girl Reporter Peter Lee Chapter 10: War in Four Colors: The Battle between Superman and Captain America for America’s Hearts and Minds during World War II B. Keith Murphy Chapter 11: Myth and Materiality: The Duality of Grace Kelly Ana Salzberg

195

217 239

Chapter 12: ‘Its Own Special Attraction’: Meditations on Martyrdom and the Iconicity of Civil Rights Widows Brenda Tindal

257

Contributors

277

Index

283

vi

Acknowledgements The editors would like to thank the many friends and colleagues whose eagerness to talk about cultural icons at various venues and occasions over the years has contributed to this volume. Special thanks are due to Melanie Marshall of Intellect, who guided this volume from the proposal stage to its final realization, and to the anonymous peer reviewer whose suggestions helped make this volume more focused. Finally, we would like to express our gratitude to the Austrian Federal Ministry for Science and Research and the University of Graz for their financial support, which made the publication of this volume possible.

Introduction Theorizing Iconic Figures Klaus Rieser

I

mages are overwhelmingly present in American life, a fact that prompted Fredric Jameson in 1988 to diagnose a ‘transformation of reality into images’ (14) and W. J. T. Mitchell in 1994 to announce a ‘pictorial turn’ (11). Among this flood of visual representations, a limited number of images gain greater prominence and remain in the public consciousness for an extended period of time, thereby becoming icons.1 In contrast to common images, thus, icons are special markers within the cultural matrix of meaning, highly relevant for the day-to-day integration of the otherwise heterogeneous composition of the American social landscape. But only a narrow set of icons survive the test of time and gain national or global prominence, thereby bonding the nation together on a symbolic level. Resplendent among these super-icons, as we might call them, are iconic figures—from heavyweight boxer idol Muhammad Ali to the legend of Zorro—anthropomorphic figures that truly ‘embody’ American values, ideologemes2 or structures of feeling3, being, as they are, particularly suited for public identification and desire. It is such national iconic figures that the present book seeks to understand, attempting to clarify both their functioning and their function within the American cultural landscape, which, due to the size and heterogeneity of the American population, has always been in particular need of nationally integrative symbols. Before turning to theories of figurality, visuality, national identity, and iconicity (the key terms of the book’s title), it is instructive to start in a deductive manner. An analytical look at the edutainment encyclopedia America A to Z: People, Places, Customs & Culture (Reader’s Digest 1997), published by Reader’s Digest, itself a U.S. icon, reveals some pertinent aspects of iconicity. Among the figures listed under ‘A’, one finds Woody Allen, Louis Armstrong, and Fred Astaire, all of whom are well-established figures globally, super-icons in the sense defined above. In contrast, other figures in the same section (Hank Aaron, George Abbott, Ethan Allen, and many more), while certainly not unfamiliar, nonetheless cater to special interests: they may be popular only with a certain age cohort, with sport aficionados, or hobby historians. The ranking of iconic figures obviously shifts over time and place, and their position depends on how well they are integrated into national discourses and discursive formations. What else can be learned from Reader’s Digest? The fact alone that Reader’s Digest publishes such a lavishly illustrated book reveals that iconic figures, a bit like the symbols at airports (such as emergency exit signs or bathroom signs), help people navigate; in this case, through American culture. Moreover, those who recognize a number of these iconic figures are reassured about their membership within a cultural community that shares a cultural

ConFiguring America

encyclopedia. Finally, a look at America A to Z highlights the special status of iconic figures: while similar to other cultural icons in some respects (e.g., they depend on image circulation), iconic figures are particularly adept at inviting cathexis (the conscious or unconscious investment of psychic energy), be it via attraction (libidinal) or via identification. What cannot be learned just by looking at America A to Z, and what has not yet been sufficiently studied in the growing academic field of ‘visual studies’, are the constitutive qualities of iconic figures: how, when, and why are certain images transformed into icons? How do certain people achieve iconic status? What are the cultural and political implications of those icons? Could we do without them? This volume offers clarifications of these essential questions within the emerging critical practice of ‘American Cultural Iconography’ (Hunter & Reynolds 2000).

Iconic Figures and Visuality For the purposes of this book, iconic figures include both ‘real’ celebrities, such as Grace Kelly, Joe Louis, or Marilyn Monroe, and humanoid fictional figures, such as Lois Lane or Superman.4 This is, of course, not meant to deny the ‘authenticity’ of human beings, but results from the extraordinary similarity that the two forms of personhood share in their functioning as iconic figures. Firstly, star and celebrity studies from Richard Dyer onward have pointed out that it is not the private, haphazard, individual aspect of celebrities, but rather their public, constructed, type aspect (or the interrelation of the latter with an assumed correspondence in the former) that accounts for their star status.5 Of course, stars have corporeal existence, but their meaning is based on their signification in the public field, in discourse. Thus, the meanings that are coalesced or condensed in iconic figures far surpass the flesh-andblood materiality of the human beings who embody them. Secondly, this book works on the premise that human and humanoid, real and virtual iconic figures belong in a single category not only because of their similarities, but also because of their common difference to other entities. Quite obviously, they differ from non-personalized icons such as the Vietnam Veteran’s Memorial or the American flag. However, iconic figures also differ from public persons that do not feature a strong visual aspect, such as most literary authors. In contrast, a recent book on American icons, edited by Günter Leypoldt and Bernd Engler (2010), admits only real human beings into their icon pantheon. Yet it is highly questionable why the real person James Fenimore Cooper should be regarded as an ‘icon’, while his famous characters Natty Bumppo or Chingachgook are left out. Similarly, in terms of visuality, James Dean and Madonna have more in common with Superman or Uncle Sam (not included in Leypoldt & Engler) than they do with James Fenimore Cooper or Anne Bradstreet, authors that may hold a strong commemorative but not an iconic function. Leypoldt and Engler’s American Cultural Icons (2010), a very fine book, distinguishes between ‘real’ and ‘fictional’ persons because the authors chose to bring to attention ‘representative lives’. 4

Introduction

In contrast to representativity, the focus of our book is primarily on visuality as a basis for iconicity and on the iconic figure’s constructed status within cultural discourses. The issue of representativity versus visuality has still further effects: Leypoldt and Engler’s selection criteria have the advantage of shifting the grounding of iconicity toward the individual. Yet their insistence on human personhood implicitly forges a link between the celebrity status and the personal agency of human actors. Instead focusing on visuality helps to lay bare the constructedness of iconic figures and their functioning and function in a discursive system. Moreover, our approach highlights the body (real and virtual) and shifts the attention to psychic processes, such as identification and desire as elements of the iconic configuration. Ultimately, the difference highlights the plasticity of icons: Iconic figures are, on the one hand, anchored in a reality of lived experience (where the difference between real and fictional personhood may matter), but on the other hand, they are personifications of these lived experiences (involving the condensation of historical epochs, of emotional patterns, of spiritual dimensions, etc.), and in that realm the distinction between real and virtual persons vanishes. In other words, icons are concrete, manifest, materialized (human beings, drawings on paper, film characters), but also abstractions, condensations, images in our minds. To sum up, in the present volume, iconic figures include both persons and personifications because both share a ‘gestalt’ aspect of iconic figures, the aspect through which they invite identification, empathy, desire, fear, or hatred. Before turning to the formal and ideological functioning of icons, however, another terminological clarification is in order.

American Iconic Figures or the National Symbolic The United States offers a particularly rich resource of iconographic research material, since the maintenance of an American national identity is especially complex due to the nation’s multi-ethnic and multi-cultural background. In this environment of diversity, national identity is determined through a constant negotiation between various subcultures. Icons are one of the major currencies of this negotiation. As part of the ongoing effort to maintain a unified imagined community, a wide variety of icons have been embedded in American cultural narratives. Such icons form part of the ‘exterior scaffolding’ (Nora 1989: 13) of American history, which helps preserve national unity and compensates for the lack of unified social practices, which is further exacerbated in postmodern society. Furthermore, since many American cultural narratives conceptualize the country as engaged in a process of continual realization (Frontier Myth, Manifest Destiny, American Dream), its icons must be constantly readjusted if they are to continue to capture the public imagination and shape public memory. As part of this ongoing renewal, icons are continually adopted, transformed, rejected, and re-invented. But what makes an iconic figure an American iconic figure? At first glance, it may seem advisable to determine what is special or ‘exceptional’ about the iconic figure on 5

ConFiguring America

the transnational level, thus proceeding in a delimitative, exclusory way. In the case of the United States, such an exceptionalist approach is bound to fail from the beginning because ‘America’ was a European projection from its inception. And today, more than ever, ‘Americanness’ is a global imaginary construct, whose icons are modeled within global mass-media networks aimed at post-national markets, at a global ‘iconomy’. Particularly since World War II, the United States has been in a prime position to configure the ‘geopolitical aesthetic’ (Jameson 1995), contributing icons to global media culture in a range of fields as diverse as entertainment (from Homer Simpson to Lady Gaga), politics (Reagan, Bush, Obama), and business (Coke, Levi’s, McDonald’s). As Nick Heffernan puts it, the United States is an ‘empire of signs whose global supremacy is asserted as much through the pervasiveness of its popular culture as through its military reach or its command of international trade’ (2006: 352). Thus, it is ultimately impossible to strip the ‘U.S.’ aspects of any popular U.S. icon from its global impact, its global reach, its global imagination. What’s more, for many iconic figures, it is precisely their transnational appeal that constitutes them as icons in the first place. Any attempt to establish a sort of ‘national provinciality’ is not only reductive but counterproductive to the understanding of U.S. iconic figures with their transcultural, hybrid appeal. Therefore, to analyze the role iconic figures play in a national American identity construction, a functionalist approach seems best suited. A functionalist approach to the ‘Americanness’ of U.S. icons is almost the reverse of an exceptionalist view: Icons are American icons not because they are limited to the nation, but because they create the nation state as an imagined community through a myth of an ‘America’ that is presented as a stable, indisputable term—historically (a genealogy that implicitly runs from 1607), geographically (delimited by national borders), and culturally (anchored in a supposed unity of cultural values). Thus, American iconic figures are defined by the fact that they are adopted or accepted by a large segment of the national public, but, more importantly, in that they play a decisive role in the shaping of national discourses. For an understanding of these processes, the concept of the ‘National Symbolic’, which Lauren Berlant proposed on the basis of Lacanian concepts, is very useful. Berlant defines the National Symbolic as [t]he order of discursive practices whose reign within a national space produces, and also refers to, the ‘law’ in which the accident of birth within a geographic/political boundary transforms individuals into subjects of a collectively-held history. Its traditional icons, its metaphors, its heroes, its rituals, and its narratives provide an alphabet for a collective consciousness or national subjectivity. (1991: 20) That is, the National Symbolic depends on the reenactment of the images and narratives that symbolically imply a national subjectivity (which make a human being, accidentally born within its borders, an ‘American’): ‘[T]hrough the National Symbolic 6

Introduction

the historical nation aspires to achieve the inevitability or status of natural law, a birthright’ (Berlant 1991: 20). In this vein, icons can be seen not simply as powerful tools of a dominant class or group, but rather as socio-political constructions that create subject positions for individuals, thereby implicating them in national power structures. The National Symbolic (shaped significantly through iconic figures) allows individuals to identify themselves with a collective identity, but thereby they subject themselves to the national narremes and image codes. According to Berlant, the National Symbolic constitutes the official history of the nation. As such, it is bound to relate to a collective iconography. The collective iconography must certainly exclude some disruptive discourses or counter-memories, but, more importantly, it has to integrate as many discourses as possible into its ideological project. As will be shown below, if an icon works well, it will work less by exclusion than by inclusion. A successful national icon leaves the minimal number of citizens possible outside its grasp and even limits subordination and marginalization of citizens within its realm. For some, the Obama’s ‘Hope’ poster served as a symbol of black advancement, for others as an attempt to move into a ‘post-race’ phase, for others as a reincarnation of the self-made man, and for many more, it represented the abstract ‘hope’ for a future not yet defined, inserting itself in the American Dream rhetoric and iconography. It is highly important to stress that this process is not unidirectional in the sense that the National Symbolic subjugates the citizen. Rather, iconic figures can emerge from various places, including marginalized cultures (see, e.g., the chapters on Joe Louis or LeBron James in this volume). However, once they enter the National Symbolic, they become re-framed, reinterpreted, and re-distributed for different reasons and from different perspectives, in forms that are often far removed from their origins. On the other hand, once they are established as national iconic figures, they are again open for various subversions, appropriations or at least reinterpretations by members of the public (cf. the uses and abuses of Uncle Sam or Superman discussed in the contributions below). In any case, the super-iconic figure cannot help but reconstruct the National Symbolic. Berlant therefore refers to a ‘mnemotechnique—a form or technology of collective identity that harnesses individual and popular fantasy by creating juridically legitimate public memories’ (1991: 8). Thus, ‘the modern nation installs itself within the memory and conscience’ (1991: 225) of its citizens, partly through this mnemotechnique, partly through an interpellation of the citizens. Paradoxically, this National Symbolic must be understood through the imaginary, a deeply ideological relation. As Louis Althusser has pointed out, ‘[W]hat is represented in ideology is […] not the system of the real relations which govern the existence of individuals, but the imaginary relation of those individuals to the real relations which they live’ (1971: 165). And one aspect in the establishment and maintenance of this imaginary relation is the construction and maintenance of ‘national’ icons. For example, U.S. icons often exhibit a utopian impulse that manages and masks their social contradictions and that attempts to integrate a maximum variety of social groupings.6 7

ConFiguring America

Iconicity As has already been mentioned, icons are not merely images, nor are they merely particularly famous images. Rather, they exhibit a number of special formal features and serve specifi c social functions that define them over and against other images. The following section proposes two theses to conceptualize some of these functions. At the core of both theses is the awareness that icons are defined by bridging tensions, by reconciling opposites, both on a formal and on a content level.

Thesis 1: On the formal level, icons condense aspects relevant to everyday life (the ‘ordinary’) into an extraordinary form To be successful with the public, icons tend to be closely associated with everyday life, but to stand out among other images and other representations, they have to be extraordinary. To achieve this, they have to merge at least some formal properties that are usually oppositional (cf. Winkler 2008). On the common side, icons must be ‘recognizable to a large number of members of a specific group […]: Iconicity presupposes immediate recognizability and familiarity’ (Sørensen 2006: 239). In contrast, on the extraordinary side, icons should both be able to instantly catch one’s attention and to survive for a prolonged period of time. The description of icons as straddling the border between ordinary and extraordinary could also be conceptualized as a concurrent presence of soft and hard schematizing in the icon. Visual forms of representation generally belong to the first category in that they are not rigidly codified or at least allow diversified ‘readings’, whereas written language and even more so mathematics are forms of hard schematizing because of their pre-constituted lexica and grammar rules (cf. Winkler 2008: 271–274). Icons, however, tend to bridge this chasm: successful icons retain the openness (and the reality effect) of visual representation, but in the process of condensation approach the codified nature of abstract languages. That is, icons, although still pictorial, also exhibit characteristics of ‘hard schematizing’, otherwise the realm of more codified media. Further, to persist through time, media basically have two options: (ritualistic) repetition or monumentalization. In fact, some experiences and events have received only tangible encoding (papyrus, oral tradition, home video), being maintained by repetition, while other aspects of life have been inscribed, that is, they obtained a more tangible form (stone carvings, flags, monuments, 30mm film) (cf. Winkler 2004; 2008). While at first glance, icons seem to belong to the latter category, in fact the process of ‘becoming icon’ is not the least accomplished through repetition (particularly in the advanced electronic media age). Thus, icons tend to exhibit both elements of repetition (continuous use, reproductions, mass circulation, etc.) and of the contrary process of inscription (exhibiting more permanence than other images, being enshrined in museums or collections, being labeled as ‘art’, etc.). 8

Introduction

It is important to stress that these mergers of incongruent aspects that icons achieve are not an incidental aspect, but rather the defining characteristic of icons.7 In other words, the degree to which an icon succeeds in bridging these paradoxa determines its specific iconic potency, which ideally inspires both identification (through the icon’s relevance for everyday life) and idolization (through its extraordinary form). But icons are not just situated in some paradoxical way between everyday life and an extraordinary status. Rather, they perform cultural work by transforming aspects of everyday life into an extraordinary form through an act that I will refer to as condensation. Illustration 1 delineates this process (dashed lines). Icons constitute a movement from their point of anchorage (the common, everyday life) to the extraordinary. In bridging this chasm, icons strive to anchor the sliding of signification, to freeze social indetermination into a fixed (hegemonic) form by condensing information. This process takes somewhat different shapes in different icons and, depending on one’s interpretative interest, can be labeled with a wide variety of terms, including ‘abstraction’, ‘coding’, ‘semiosis’, ‘typifying’, ‘stylizing’, ‘synthesizing’, ‘fixing’, ‘reduction of complexity’, ‘translation’, ‘visualization’, ‘decontextualization’, and ‘schematizing’. Space limitations preclude a discussion of the relative merit of each of these. I have chosen the umbrella term ‘condensation’ to highlight the fact that the raw materials that make up an iconic image (i.e., everyday experience) are not consumed or lost in the icon-formation process (as, e.g., ‘reduction of complexity’, and, to some degree, ‘abstraction’ imply), but are rather focused and transformed into something extraordinary and powerful. Although these experiences may not be directly visually represented, the icon’s ability to evoke these experiences in the viewer is essential to its success. As such, these experiences are constitutive elements that are invariably present in the icon. As a result of this process, which transforms and captures aspects that are usually distinct, even oppositional, icons are usually very

Illustration 1: Condensation of the everyday into the extraordinary.

9

ConFiguring America

distinct, but also ambivalent, which accounts for their often being fought over, as the contributions in part one show. While I hypothesize that all icons have to exhibit such condensation work, its degree varies from icon to icon. For example, a celebrity such as Grace Kelly (see the contribution by Ana Salzberg), of whom a variety of images circulate, can be said to be based on relatively soft schematizing. In contrast, Superman’s ‘S’ logo is definitely hard schematizing, and even the figure as a whole, with its familiar costume and the typical flight mode with outstretched arm, is hardened signification. Such condensation, of course, reduces the concrete, connotative aspects of an icon, but at the same time fosters its ability to serve as a projection space. When the semantic potentials of icons are condensed beyond a certain degree, they become almost empty of tangible specificity. In terms of their social signification, this means that icons tend toward what Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe (1985) call ‘transcendental signifiers’, which are almost devoid of concrete meaning, therefore opening themselves to filling by various connotative signifieds. This means that they depend more on their application (and applicability) than on a specific meaning. Laclau and Mouffe have pointed out repeatedly how such transcendental signifiers play a central role in political processes, staking out an unspecific territory over which a hegemonic struggle can be waged all the more easily. Thus, rather than being detrimental to political application, the supposed ‘emptiness’ is actually often an asset for hegemonic appropriation. This brings us to the important question of the role of icons in hegemonic processes: What are the uses of the power that icons exhibit in culture?

Thesis 2: On the content level, icons play a double role in the hegemonic processes, being tied both to nodes of power and the public As on the formal level, icons also have to bridge a fundamental tension on the level of their public functioning. They are involved in a hegemonic process of mediation in which they serve both as norming tools used by dominant groups to control and shape shifting identities and interests within the public, and as democratic elements expressing popular identities and interests. To become iconic, figures certainly have to tap into established beliefs, and their images invariably have to pass gatekeepers (journalists, editors, academics, etc.) that are in turn bound to ‘nodes of power’ (Laclau & Mouffe 1985). In this process, iconic figures have to insert themselves into—and become super-icons and co-shape—prevailing discourses. This can be related to Roland Barthes’s influential suggestion that the photographic image carries two messages, ‘one without a code (the photographic analogue), the other with a code (the “art”, or the treatment, or the “writing”, or the rhetoric, of the photograph)’ (1993a: 19). As he continues elsewhere, ‘[t]he denoted image naturalizes the symbolic message, it innocents the semantic artifice of connotation, which is extremely dense’ (1993b: 45). This naturalization of representation is a main connecting point between the semiotics of the 10

Introduction

Illustration 2: The hegemonic functioning of icons in democratic societies.

photographic image and its cultural critique. Barthes himself asked his readers to ‘track down, in the decorative display of what-goes-without-saying, the ideological abuse which […] is hidden there’ (1972: 11; italics in original). The analysis of iconic figures can reveal how the symbolic is being naturalized in the representative figure. Another helpful tool for this analysis is Louis Althusser’s concept of ideology, which, he suggests, ‘makes an allusion to the real in a certain way, but […] at the same time it bestows only an illusion on reality’ (1990: 29). In the Marxist context, this imaginary relationship to reality is generally thought to be subject to influence from the dominant classes. From this perspective, icons can serve as powerful tools that a dominant group can use in the ongoing struggle to define and control the identities and interests of the public. Seen in this way, icons serve to mask the relationships of historical processes underlying each icon, thereby forcing people to build their understanding of the world on (mass-mediated) naturalized realities. Moreover, since modern societies are characterized less by stable norms (doxa) than by a dynamic normalization, icons serve as a terrain on which the borders of the norm(al) and the dialectic between norm and deviance, can be played out, as illustratively demonstrated by Marcy Sacks’ contribution to this volume. Icons are then subject to hegemonic influence such as idealizations (star system), looking for and establishing significance, gatekeeping, and hierarchizing (rankings from best-seller lists to beauty pageants), which serve as powerful devices of control over the shifting identities and perceptions of the population at large. Within this context, Christian Metz’s work on spectator identification becomes a valuable avenue of inquiry, since it can be transposed onto the more general field of visual culture and in particular the identification of the public with iconic figures. According to Metz, 11

ConFiguring America

the spectator identifies with particular characters only secondarily. Primarily, ‘the spectator identifies with himself, with himself as pure act of perception […] as the condition of possibility of the perceived and hence as a kind of transcendental subject, which comes before every there is’ (1982: 49; italics in original). Metz’s concept has been the basis for an ‘apparatus theory’, that is, a concept of the overwhelming power of the textual and ideological over the idiosyncratic—an analysis that looks at the structuring of such positions, a creation of the spectator in ideological terms. Although icons are implicated with nodes of power, they are not themselves embodiments of the dominant powers. Rather, they are examples of Althusser’s ‘imaginary relationship’, which the mass of the people have developed to their real conditions of existence (under the relevant influence of the aforementioned powers). Icons, then, are not themselves embodiments of the symbolic order (capitalist, patriarchal, etc.), but rather embodiments of how the members of the public living under this order (however phantasmagorically) envision their reality and their position within it. What is more, icons are characterized by a tension between two forms of the Symbolic—the nodes of power and ‘democratic society’ (see above)—for, as Larry Grossberg points out, hegemonic power ‘has to operate where the masses live their lives’. In that process, hegemonic power cannot help but construct ‘positions of subordination that enable active, real, and effective resistance’ (1997: 209). Through icons, nodes of power have a norming influence on the public. Yet, I would claim that the public, in turn, approves, consumes, appropriates or resists icons and thereby has an effect on nodes of power. Thus, the power of the public exceeds mere resistance, since icons are formed in the public sphere. Indeed, they may even be maintained by marginalized groups through ‘collaborative icon-work’ (e.g., fan culture). In their impressive book on iconic photographs, Robert Hariman and John Louis Lucaites stress this point when they argue that since ‘an image both exceeds any code and remains relatively inarticulate, it can become a site not only for the ideological relay but also for depicting the dynamic negotiations that are the rich, embodied play of societal power relations in everyday life’ (2007: 9). Hariman and Lucaites even go so far as to call icons ‘works […] of a public art grounded in the experiences and aspirations of a democratic society’ (2007: 3). Following Michael Warner’s thesis that ‘[t]he public is a discursively organized body of strangers constituted solely by the acts of being addressed and paying attention’ (Hariman & Lucaites 2003: 36), they see the public as constituted by mediated communication (as opposed to face-to-face interaction). They further argue that as a body of strangers rather than people intimately connected, the public could not function without bases of identification or symbols of important abstractions—without icons, that is. One particularly strong form of audience power is constituted in what Bent Sørensen calls ‘adversarial icon-work’, which is a ‘type of intervention which aims at destabilizing or subverting the icon’s function and meaning in the icon-worker’s contemporary cultural

12

Introduction

reality’ (2006: 239). He adds that ‘[i]cons, especially over-commercialized and overfamiliarized ones, tempt people into actively resisting them’ (2006: 239). As examples, Sørensen points to depictions of Elvis as Jesus or Jane Fonda urinal stickers for those who read her as ‘Hanoi Jane’. Another typical example of such subversive appropriation of popular icons is Judy Garland as an icon in drag acts. According to Richard Dyer, Judy Garland is open to camp style (the gay appropriation of ‘respectable’ culture through irony, exaggeration, or trivialization) because she is ‘imitable, her appearance and gestures copiable’ (1986: 176). In the volume at hand, a number of contributions, particularly those in section two, highlight appropriations that fashion established icons into sites of active resistance to the hegemonic power of a dominant group.

Illustration 3: Conceptualization of icon work.

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ConFiguring America

The Future of Iconic Figures The question that remains is how iconic figures will develop in the future. Most likely, iconic figures will proliferate in the era following the ‘iconic turn’ (Burda & Maar 2004). It seems clear that a capitalist society, which runs on recognizability, commodification, and branding, will continue to foster and even demand iconic figures. However, ongoing technological advancements are changing the rules of the game. Today, it is cheaper and easier than ever to produce (e.g., handheld digital HD cameras, Garage Band), manipulate (e.g., Photoshop, iMovie, Audacity), and distribute (e.g., YouTube, blogs, Facebook) the kind of multi-media representations that nurture and maintain iconic figures. A recent example is illustrative of this process. In late 2011, onlookers at a protest captured video footage of John Pike, a university police officer, nonchalantly hosing down protesting UC Davis students with a can of pepper spray. The videos were quickly posted on YouTube, and forwarded email messages and mentions in other media outlets soon caused the clips to ‘go viral’. Pike, who was dubbed ‘the pepper spray cop’, quickly became an iconic figure of the nebulous powers that the ‘Occupy’ movement protests. However, the iconization of Pike went well beyond the distribution of the primitive video footage. Across the Internet, Pike’s image was soon inserted into art, pop culture, and documentary images, thus being transformed into an Internet meme (see our online companion at www. configuringamerica.com). As has been pointed out above, such uses and abuses are prime techniques by which icons are constructed out of remarkable images, and it is perhaps significant that these representations were produced by average Internet users across the world (on icon-work in the digital age, see, especially, the chapters by Michael Fuchs & Michael Phillips and Leo Lippert). However, the pepper-spraying cop’s career as an icon was decidedly brief, and this highlights an important aspect of what I have called ‘super-icons’. The multiplication of lesser icons, as fostered by the aforementioned social and technological changes, inhibits the creation of super-iconic figures. This is particularly evident in today’s celebrity culture. As researchers Richard A. Lanham and Georg Franck have pointed out, in the information society, attention, not information, is of prime value. According to Richard A. Lanham, ‘information is not in short supply in the new information economy. We’re drowning in it. […] Attention is the commodity in short supply’ (2006: xi). Georg Franck adds that in our ‘economy of attention’, it becomes an economic necessity to steer the (organically limited) attention of the public (1998: 69).8 If we apply these concepts to the field of iconic figures, it becomes clear that super-icons, with their need for large-scale consumption and long-term survival, are inherently unstable and therefore require high levels of icon-work from various parties: the iconic figure itself (that is, if the iconic figure is a living human being), commercial spin-doctors, managers, and/or media representatives, the consumer-interferers (who consume, forward, create spoofs or memes, comment, etc.), and other wannabe celebrities. Increasingly, to remain relevant, an iconic figure will have to be associated with new images, new texts, and new attention-grabbing events, but also with spoofs, discussions, and praise. 14

Introduction

At the same time, it will have to maintain consistency, so as not to drown in the number of images and stories available in the information economy. To sum up: While in the past super-iconic figures were—at least partially—limited by the availability of information, in the future they will be limited by a surplus of information and the resulting scarcity of public attention. The effect remains the same: Only a handful of iconic figures have and will achieve(d) super-iconic status.

Overview of the Contributions to this Volume The chapters in this volume examine the abovementioned ambivalent constructions and reconstructions of iconic figures, revealing the tension between their democratic and ideological aspects. Some articles do so by pointing out the struggle over iconic figures and their meaning (Section I), while others look at artistic and other appropriations (Section II). A third group of contributions stresses that for iconic figures to maintain currency, they, in fact, have to be redefined. Of course, these processes are not mutually exclusive. Rather, they coexist in some iconic figures. As I have argued above, iconic figures are embodiments of complex and contradictory historical situations. The public monuments and the iconography-from-above of totalitarian regimes represent rather ‘pure’ forms of power. In contrast, iconic figures of democratic societies gain their status not through state-dictated repetition, but, at least partly, through wide acceptance by heterogeneous groups. In combination, these two aspects—representation of complex lived experiences and acceptance by diverse segments of the population—account for the recurring struggle over iconic figures. To maintain an achieved status, iconic figures have to be constantly elevated above other images and representations. For this attention, a struggle over icons, a re-membering, be it positive (idolatrous) or negative (iconoclastic) is, in fact, helpful. Therefore, iconic figures that encompass a creative tension (formal and/ or ideological) have an advantage over images of people that are merely popular. Such a struggle over the production and maintenance of the meanings of iconic figures is the focus of the contributions in the first section of this book. Karina Eileraas analyzes the ‘Just Like You’ variant of the classic ‘American Girl’ dolls. The dolls’ producers had been very successful in establishing an iconic ‘all-American’ girl through, on the one hand, a typical look and, on the other hand, historical variation through attire. The ‘Just Like You’ diversification constituted an attempt to further broaden their reach by establishing a diversified racial/cultural repertoire, that is, to keep their iconic status, but also to maximize variants of the ‘American’ face. In terms of iconicity, this constitutes a case in which an existing iconic figure is consciously redefined in order to be more inclusive. It answers to challenges of the representativeness of an ‘American’ doll that is only white. However, as Eileraas points out, this attempt at integrating diversity ends up establishing a racial classification and reinforces a biological definition of ethnic identity through a few parameters of hair, skin tone, and eye color. Eileraas’ study brings in issues of gender, 15

ConFiguring America

national identity and representability to show how multiracial femininity is conceived in regimes of visibility. The next chapter examines the racially distinctive readings of Joe Louis’ image. When Joe Louis defeated German boxer Max Schmeling in 1938, he became a national icon, but also, of course, a black American icon. Subsequently, his famous deadpan expression became a foil onto which very divergent interpretations were layered. According to Marcy S. Sacks, this allowed viewers to imprint their own interpretation of race onto the supposedly blank canvas of his face. By hailing Louis for diametrically opposing reasons, Marcy S. Sacks provocatively claims, blacks and whites, in fact, reinforced the racial schism evident in America through their common embrace of the man and icon as the nation’s standardbearer. Michael Fuchs and Michael Phillips explore the discursive struggle that has enveloped basketball superstar LeBron James since before he even entered the NBA. From teams and the league to sponsors and fans, their chapter highlights the wide range of parties who have exploited James’ iconic force to achieve their own ends and in the process shows some of the main values that American iconic sports figures have traditionally embodied. In particular, they examine the rapid transformation of LeBron’s iconic image, from savior to traitor, that followed his infamous Decision telecast, as well as the subsequent Nike ad that sought to rehabilitate this image and re-frame the terms of the debate. This analysis also reveals the way in which iconic resonance can be transferred from an iconic figure to a corollary artifact and identifies some of the key characteristics that such corollary artifacts must contain in order to be suitable for iconic exchange. National iconic figures are often challenged, their meaning struggled over. Whenever such a struggle occurs, a hostile or critical invocation of the icons usually remains centered on the icon itself, seeking to challenge or transform its meaning or what it signifies. Appropriation constitutes a somewhat different intervention in an existing iconic figure because here the user manipulates the icon for his/her own purpose according to historical, geographic or social circumstances. The resultant new meaning of the iconic figure can be quite close to the original one, or at a large remove. In Section II, four contributions enlighten such traveling icons or traveling meaning processes. Bradley Bailey and Susanne Hamscha present artistic appropriations of Superman and Marilyn Monroe, respectively, while Leopold Lippert and Jolanta Szymkowska-Bartyzel analyze two very different trajectories of the cowboy/Western figure, into outer space and beyond heteronormativity in one case to revolutionary Poland in the other. Bradley Bailey’s study of Superman appropriations throughout the twentieth century exemplifies again that this icon is particularly fit for survival because it is multiple, open, and fought over. However, Bradley Bailey focuses more on the shifts contemporary artists forced onto the Superman icon, going beyond straightforward political interventions. In some appropriations (Roger Shimomura’s, Laurie Anderson’s), Superman’s savior aspect is turned into an oppressive symbol, whereas in other instances (Jun Yang), Superman represents the hybrid identities of minority artists, who must often negotiate ‘proper’ appearances and 16

Introduction

concealed identities. Finally, in Andres Serrano’s The Death of Superman, the costume on a coat hanger questions not only the immortality of Superman, but the power of iconicity itself. Susanne Hamscha, too, takes a hard look at representation, which is a central characteristic of most icons. Specifically, she zeroes in on repetition and how it forms the basis both for the maintenance and the transformation of an iconic figure. Susanne Hamscha, like Bradley Bailey, takes artistic appropriations as a springboard for her analysis. Starting out from Warhol’s multiplication of Marilyn Monroe in his famous silk prints, she scrutinizes the interplay between the Marilyn icon, commodification (which she represents) and art. She then looks at Madonna’s ‘Material Girl’ video and Lindsay Lohan’s recreation of Monroe’s ‘The Last Sitting’ photo shoot to substantiate her claim that the Monroe icon not only signifies Americanness, but also produces it. The idea that iconic figures play a productive rather than reflective role also resonates through the contribution of Leopold Lippert. If Monroe creates Americanness, and does so through strong transformations, she starts to leave the realm not only of human being, but also of iconic figure in the narrow sense, instead becoming a nodal point of a type. Arguably, the cowboy is such a type, partly independent of but also grounded in various embodiments. Leopold Lippert explains the evolution of this figure in a variety of incarnations both hegemonic and (sometimes concurrently) subversive through Star Trek, Brokeback Mountain, and the e-parody Broke Trek. All three are internally contradictory and very liberally play on frontier and cowboy themes. Broke Trek, the synthesis, Lippert claims, queers the cowboy icon: in this spoof, cowboys can be both future-driven and gay, both hegemonic Americans and counter-cultural homosexuals. Jolanta Szymkowska-Bartyzel’s contribution takes us to Poland, where we discover a local incarnation of the Western figure. On June 4, 1989, the communist government of Poland was ousted in a democratic election. A popular poster made by a young graphic designer depicted Sheriff Will Kane (Gary Cooper) from High Noon, but with a ballot slip and Solidarność logo. While in Western societies, a classical Western icon such as Sheriff Kane would seem outdated and would be likely to trigger ironic connotations, Jolanta Szymkowska-Bartyzel shows that on the basis of the communist suppression of all things ‘American’, an icon signifying American culture exhibited a dream-generating, libratory energy. The contributions in the final section have as a common characteristic the focus on mutability and abstraction as elements that establish the endurance of iconic figures. Again, it is less the iconic figures themselves that are different from those treated in the other sections (indeed, Superman makes another appearance), and more the analytical lens. Louis Kern, Peter Lee, and B. Keith Murphy point out that the historical endurance of iconic figures is in part achieved by their ability to adapt to the changing times and to fulfill new roles. From their studies, it emerges that while the iconic figures treated—Uncle Sam, Lois Lane, Superman, Captain America—are not permanently changing, their meaning and social role could be described as changingly permanent. Similarly, Ana Salzberg claims that it is 17

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the adaptability of Grace Kelly (from movie star to princess) that is a foundation for her continuing iconicity. However, Salzberg goes beyond this to argue, very much in line with the above-theorized paradoxical status of icons, that the endurance of the Grace Kelly icon also is based on a continuous balancing of a defining tension within the figure. This line of thinking is then extended in the contribution of Brenda Tindal, who analyzes a composite iconic figure, mourning African American widows. Louis Kern’s contribution sketches the evolution of Uncle Sam, today the most popular iconic figure to represent the nation itself. Kern’s approach is a thoroughly historical one that reveals the continuity of the figure through the many challenges and redefinitions it has faced, from revolutionary beginnings through the nationalistic employment in the famous recruitment poster to later, more challenging formations, which include an undercutting of the figure’s strength (e.g., in Alex Ross and Steve Darnall’s Uncle Sam graphic novel) and his reemployment to signify guilt over failed ideals. It emerges clearly how the Uncle Sam icon has been maintained precisely through both reiteration and challenges. Of course, Lois Lane’s durability as an icon was always tied to that of the more prominent Clark Kent/Superman figure. However, as Peter Lee demonstrates, it was also affected by her being redesigned throughout the years. Lois Lane has mirrored the changing perspective toward working women, especially the woman reporter employed in a male-dominated workplace: From her Great Depression roots to the end of World War II, Lois Lane was a strong-willed, independent, crusading newshound, while after World War II, she was transformed into a lovesick columnist, only to re-emerge after the 1970s as an update of the 1940s persona, becoming ‘a weight-lifting, gun-toting, fist-fighting fashion plate’. Like Bradley Bailey and Peter Lee, B. Keith Murphy, too, focuses on the Superman comic to advance our knowledge of iconic figures. He contrasts Superman with Captain America, his main adversary in the field of popular opinion: While at the beginning, during World War II, Superman had a number of competitors, only Captain America was able to challenge Superman’s bid for iconic status as the bearer of American values (‘Truth, Justice, and the American Way’). As we know, only one of the two popular characters ‘lived’ to become a universal icon. Murphy traces these different fates through their historical evolution and their implication with more established discourses that link them to old-established discourses on heroism and divinity. Ana Salzberg takes the radical break in Grace Kelly’s life, from movie star to princess, as a starting point for her investigation into what she perceives as Grace Kelly’s characteristic duality. Salzberg claims that a tension-fraught dualism (‘snow-covered volcano’ according to Hitchcock) lay at the heart of the Kelly persona from its inception. From the start, Grace Kelly’s public persona was defined through paradoxes and contrasts: authenticity and illusion, the corporeal and the ethereal. Instead of championing one over the other or reconciling the opposition into a synthesis with no evidence thereof, Salzberg posits that it is the instability of the contradictory nature of the iconic Monaco figure itself that accounts for the exceptional duration of the icon of the royal actress/acting royal. Grace Kelly, thus, is a key example of the thesis that icons are paradoxical in nature—that, indeed, the survival of 18

Introduction

the Grace Kelly/Gracia Patricia myth is based on a continuous reconstruction of its founding oppositions. Brenda Tindal looks at another instance in which mutability and continuity converge. She analyzes ‘movement widows’, that is, the composite figure established by the widows of African American political martyrs: Myrlie Evers-Williams (widow of Medgar Evers), Coretta Scott King (widow of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.), and Betty Shabazz (mother of Malcolm X’s children). As Tindal points out, these women (or, rather, the images of their mourning) have become vessels for different attachments to the cause of the civil rights movement. They are a reminder of the vulnerability of black bodies within the struggle for a participatory democracy, images of martyrdom, as well as embodiments of the martyr’s legacy, and thus calls to carry on. Tindal’s analysis of African American widows also, in a way, offers an outlook beyond this anthology because here we are dealing not only with condensation but also with another primary psychic process: displacement. For these black women are iconic themselves, but their images as widows also constitute a shift from the iconic value of the imagery of their more famous husbands. Of course, they are not just ‘empty signifiers’, since they bring black female bodies into public circulation, but still they are signifiers of an absence. In that, however, they are again condensations of something more, a surplus—of the cause, of its price, of what it is that iconic figures always try to embody, namely major issues that affect everyday lives. As such, they may serve to remind us that what matters most is not signification, representation or iconicity itself, but the political struggle that they are part of.

References Althusser, Louis (1971), ‘Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses’, in Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays, trans. Ben Brewster. London: New Left Books, pp. 127–186. (1990), ‘Theory, Theoretical Practice and Theoretical Formation: Ideology and Ideological Struggle’, in Gregory Elliott (ed.), Philosophy and the Spontaneous Philosophy of the Scientists & Other Essays. New York: Verso, pp. 1–42. Barthes, Roland (1972), Mythologies, trans. Annette Lavers. New York: Hill and Wang. (1993a), ‘The Photographic Message’, trans. Stephen Heath, in Image-Music-Text. London: Fontana Press, pp. 15–31. (1993b) ‘Rhetoric of the Image’, trans. Stephen Heath, in Image-Music-Text. London: Fontana Press, pp. 32–51. Berlant, Lauren (1991), The Anatomy of National Fantasy: Hawthorne, Utopia, and Everyday Life. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Burda, Hubert, and Christa Maar (eds.) (2004), Iconic Turn: Die neue Macht der Bilder. Cologne: DuMont. De Vries, Lyckle (1999), ‘Iconography and Iconology in Art History: Panofsky’s Prescriptive Definitions and Some Art-Historical Responses to Them’, in Thomas F. Heck (ed.), Picturing 19

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Performance: The Iconography of the Performing Arts in Concept and Practice. Rochester: Rochester University Press, pp. 42–64. Dyer, Richard (1986), Heavenly Bodies: Film Stars and Society. London: British Film Institute. (1997), Stars, New Edition. London: British Film Institute. Franck, Georg (1998), Ökonomie der Aufmerksamkeit: Ein Entwurf. Munich: Carl Hanser Verlag. Gledhill, Christine (ed.) (1991), Stardom: Industry of Desire. New York: Routledge. Gombrich, Ernst H. (1956), Art and Illusion: A Study in the Psychology of Pictorial Representation. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Grossberg, Lawrence (1997), Dancing in Spite of Myself: Essays on Popular Culture. Durham: Duke University Press. Hariman, Robert, and John Louis Lucaites (2003), ‘Public Identity and Collective Memory in U.S. Iconic Photography: The Image of “Accidental Napalm”’, Critical Studies in Media Communication, 20: 1, pp. 35–66. (2007), No Caption Needed: Iconic Photographs, Public Culture, and Liberal Democracy. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Heffernan, Nick (2006), ‘Popular Culture’, in Christopher Bigsby & Howard Temperley (eds.), A New Introduction to American Studies. Harlow: Pearson, pp. 352–375. Holmes, Su, and Sean Redmond (eds.) (2007), Stardom and Celebrity: A Reader. Los Angeles: Sage. Hölbling, Walter W., Klaus Rieser, and Susanne Rieser (eds.) (2006), US Icons and Iconicity. Münster: LIT Verlag. Hunter, Gordon, and Larry J. Reynolds (eds.) (2000), National Imaginaries, American Identities: The Cultural Work of American Iconography. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Jameson, Fredric (1988), The Cultural Turn. London: Verso. (1995), The Geopolitical Aesthetic: Cinema and Space in the World System. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Laclau, Ernesto, and Chantal Mouffe (1985), Hegemony and Socialist Strategy: Towards a Radical Democratic Politics. London: Verso. Lanham, Richard A. (2006), The Economics of Attention: Style and Substance in the Age of Information. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Leypoldt, Günter, and Bernd Engler (eds.) (2010), American Cultural Icons: The Production of Representative Lives. Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann. Marshall, P. David (ed.) (2006), The Celebrity Culture Reader. New York: Routledge. McDonald, Paul (2000), The Star System: Hollywood’s Production of Popular Identities. London: Wallflower. Metz, Christian (1982), The Imaginary Signifier: Psychoanalysis and the Cinema. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Mitchell, W. J. T. (1994), Picture Theory: Essays on Verbal and Visual Representation. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Nora, Pierre (1989), ‘Between Memory and History: Les Lieux de Mémoire’, Representations, 26, pp. 7–24. Panofsky, Erwin (1939), Studies in Iconology: Humanistic Themes in the Art of the Renaissance. New York: Oxford University Press. 20

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Reader’s Digest (1997), America A to Z: People, Places, Customs and Culture. Pleasantville: Reader’s Digest. Sørensen, Bent (2006), ‘Sacred and Profane Icon-Work: Jane Fonda and Elvis Presley’, in Walter W. Hölbling, Klaus Rieser, and Susanne Rieser (eds.), US Icons and Iconicity. Berlin: LIT Verlag, pp. 237–258. Williams, Raymond (1977), Marxism and Literature. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Winkler, Hartmut (2004), Diskursökonomie: Versuch über die innere Ökonomie der Medien. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp. (2008), Basiswissen Medien. Frankfurt am Main: Fischer Taschenbuch Verlag.

Notes 1 ‘Icon’ refers to a famous, overdetermined image (or image cluster), a secular equivalent to the religious icon. A different meaning underlies the discussion of iconography versus iconology, which is associated in art historical discourses with the names of Erwin Panofsky (1939) and Ernst Hans Gombrich (1956). For one (of the many) introduction(s) to these terms, see De Vries (1999). 2 Constitutive elements of an ideology (its encyclopedia) from which ideology is constituted. 3 By ‘structures of feeling’ Raymond Williams refers to the lived experience or the quality of life at a particular time and place: ‘Structures of feeling can be defined as social experiences in solution […]. Yet this specific solution is never mere flux. It is a structured formation’ (1977: 134). 4 Arguably, the category also extends to personifications, such as Mickey Mouse and other anthropomorphic characters, which are not treated in this volume. For an even more inclusive set of U.S. icons, see Hölbling, Rieser, and Rieser (2006). 5 Star studies, which combines film studies with a cultural studies approach, was pioneered in the 1970s by Richard Dyer (cf. Dyer 1986; Dyer 1997; Gledhill 1991; McDonald 2000). Later it merged into the broader ‘celebrity studies’, which expanded, among other fields, into visual culture studies (Marshall 2006; Holmes & Redmond 2007). 6 On ideological fantasies, see also Jameson (1988: 130–148). 7 Naturally, not every merger is present in every icon. 8 A prime—one is tempted to quip ‘pure’—example for such an attention economy, which grounds celebrity in nothing but celebrity itself, is Paris Hilton.

21

PART I Icons and the Struggle over Meaning

Chapter 1 ‘Just Like You’, But Not Like Us: Staging National Belonging, Multiracial Femininity, and Collective Memory in the American Girl Family Karina Eileraas

Re-Membering Race and Representation

S

everal months ago, my daughter burst in from preschool, eager to fill me in on her day’s activities. ‘I created my color in class today!’ she said, as she explained how she and her classmates had mixed pots of acrylic paint to approximate their skin colors. ‘Look, here it is!’ she shouted and lovingly described all of the ‘ingredients’ that had contributed to her unique concoction. ‘A blend of fawn, mahogany, snowflake, and cinnamon!’ My daughter felt that she had engaged in something revolutionary on that day: a proud swirling and re-mixing of paints, cultural heritages, and ‘races’, boldly conceived. Hungry for more details about this early experiment in claiming an identity, I asked, ‘How did you know when you had created exactly the right color, and when to stop mixing?’ ‘Because, look,’ she replied, holding her arm up to the painting, ‘this color looks just like me!’ By applying herself so diligently to the task of creatively approximating her skin color, my daughter had learned both everything and nothing at all about ‘race’ and the challenges of its representation. After all, race is nearly impossible to define. Popular understandings shift in relation to diverse cultural, scientific, and political objectives, transforming race into one of the ‘most contradictory and violent ideas’1 (Guillaumin 1972: 183) of our time. While I celebrate my daughter’s delight in the act of claiming an identity, I am troubled by the social and pedagogical imperatives that encourage her to equate skin color with racial or ethnic identity. Because our identities are always forged in negotiation with, rather than outside, representation, the understandings of race that circulate in collective memory have a profound impact on subjectivity. They shape the parameters of what one imagines as ‘possible’ at the level of identity: all that one is and might become. Navigating the relationship between image and identity is a particularly fraught endeavor for people of color in the post-9/11 global political landscape, where individual efforts to articulate diverse racial, ethnic, and religious perspectives collide with state initiatives to regulate the visibility of ‘difference’ in the public sphere. In July 2010, this intersection provoked intense debate in Arizona, where SB1070 proposed racial profiling of those perceived to have questionable trajectories of ‘belonging’ to the United States. Although SB1070 was ultimately overturned, similar attempts to legislate the public appearance of ethnic, racial, and religious ‘difference’ are in effect or underway throughout Europe and the Middle East, including a controversial ban on the niqab in France.

ConFiguring America

To challenge conventional mappings of the relationship between image and identity, it is imperative to ask why individuals and institutions remain invested in conventional racial categories in lieu of more nuanced models of identity and affiliation. How are categories of racial, ethnic, and national belonging imagined, performed, and resisted within popular culture? This chapter will explore racial and national identification as sites of collective memory and epistemic violence, and as openings onto the political possibilities of fantasy. I will focus on the American Girl brand of dolls, launched by Pleasant Rowland in 1985. As cultural icons, American Girl dolls shape popular fictions of femininity, difference, and national belonging, ‘fixing’ them within collective memory. To evaluate American Girl’s contribution to ongoing conversations about racial identification and classification in the United States, I will analyze visual artifacts (websites, catalogues, and retail displays) from American Girl’s line of customized dolls, the Just Like You (JLY) collection (renamed My American Girl in 2011), which I find especially pernicious because it reinforces lingering cultural equations between race and skin color.

‘Race’ Re-Mixed: Histories, Debates, Definitions, and Evolutions Although often presumed self-evident, race is constituted as such only in relation to a complex and shifting web of fantasies, anxieties, and desires. Especially in light of human genome sequencing efforts that reveal more heterogeneity within, rather than across, conventional racial groupings, ‘race’, as Orlando Patterson highlights, is most productively conceived as an artifact: ‘something we invent: partly imposed on us, partly what we select and choose’ (quoted in PBS 1997: par. 21). ‘Race’ nonetheless begets material consequences and contributes to historically specific patterns of discrimination and domination (McLaren 1997: 303). Whereas colonial processes of racialization tended to inferiorize ‘Others’ to justify exploitation, contemporary racist discourse frames difference relative to a putative ‘threat’ in a transnational frame, emphasizing the ‘“irreducible alterity” of those who must be expelled from the body of a nation that cannot assimilate them’ (Lionnet 2008: 1505). The racialized meanings grafted onto one’s skin have complicated histories and potentially shattering effects for subjectivity (Fanon 1967: 112).2 The conflation of race with skin color confers invisibility on entire populations, precluding equitable citizenship. Historically, racial classification efforts have governed legal rights, the allocation of resources, and vital decisions about ‘who shall live and who shall die’ (Omi & Winant 1994: 54). Taxonomic ambitions have profoundly shaped the American political landscape and collective imaginary, especially during the American Eugenics movement of the early twentieth century. Proponents understood race relative to a continuum or evolutionary scale of skin color and deployed racialized iconography to justify social inequality. In the same era, the one-drop rule established racial identity as a quantifiable measure of blood and ancestry, despite centuries of intermingling that have yielded plural entanglements across color lines. Americans with one drop of ‘black blood’ in their 28

‘Just Like You’, But Not Like Us

ancestry were classified as ‘colored’, hence denied the legal and socioeconomic privileges of whiteness. This fractional approach to racial identification ruled the American imagination during World War II, when anyone with 1/8 or more Japanese ancestry was forcibly relocated to an internment camp. The one-drop rule was upheld as recently as 1983 by the Supreme Court of Louisiana, which refused to allow a woman with white ancestry to change the classification on her birth certificate from ‘colored’ to ‘white’ (Omi & Winant 1994: 57). Fears of racial mixing informed scientific, cultural, and literary studies of degeneracy, as well, and shaped public opinion on interracial marriage until challenged by the U.S. Supreme Court in Loving v. Virginia (1967). Anxieties about interracial mixing resurfaced recently in Louisiana, where an elected official denied a marriage license to an interracial couple (Siegel 2009). Multiracial individuals today comprise the fastest-growing demographic in the United States. Statisticians first observed this shift in 2000, when Americans were given the option to ‘mark one or more’ race boxes on the U.S. Census.3 Analysts attribute this trend to higher rates of interracial marriage as well as a ‘national mixed race baby boom’ (Mavin Foundation 2008). Many predict that as more Americans identify as ‘multiracial’,4 we will ‘turn a corner’ with respect to how we think about race in this country (Prewitt 2001: 40). Yet, while mixed-race children often reject conventional racial categories in favor of fluid, intersectional models of identity (Moran 2003), their insights prove difficult to integrate with persistently narrow frameworks for thinking about race in the United States. Many Caucasians are troubled by the ‘browning of America’ (Guerrero 2009: 189). Questions about racial purity, citizenship, and patriotism that have plagued the Obama Administration reveal profound anxieties about ethnic ambiguity that haunt the American body politic post-9/11.5 Fear of infiltration encourages Americans to imagine the nation as a zone of perpetual violability, wherein the terrorist ‘threat level’ or perceived national security risk is attributed to individuals of foreign or indeterminate origin and used to justify heightened surveillance of the borders of the nation. This chapter will ask how American Girl dolls, as pop culture icons, reinforce limited understandings of racial and ethnic diversity in the national imaginary.

Framing American Girl: Consuming National Identity Since its debut in 1985, American Girl has evolved into a highly successful commercial venture and household name. Founded by Pleasant Rowland to capture a pre-teen demographic and to whet young girls’ appetite for history, the brand aspires to ‘change the way girls conceptualize America and themselves’ (Acosta-Alzuru & Kreshel 2002: 140). Marketed and widely regarded by parents, educators, and consumers as pedagogical tools, the dolls inform popular fantasies of national identity, history, and belonging. Formal display cases interspersed throughout American Girl Place stores lend an air of legitimacy to American Girl’s historical mission. Combining a museum-like ambiance with nostalgic 29

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representations of the past, the stores resemble ‘brand museums’ (Hollenbeck, Peters, and Zinkhan 2008), whose intensely loyal fans travel far and wide to consume American Girl’s spectacular staging of femininity and national belonging (cf. Borghini, Diamond, Kozinets, McGrath, and Muñiz 2009). Femininity dominates the American Girl market: virtually all of the dolls are female, and girls comprise the majority of American Girl’s customer base, as well. The hyper-visibility of female characters in the American Girl line implicitly reinforces women’s symbolic alignment with national identity, reproduction, and tradition. Conservative formulations of women’s role vis-à-vis the nation have been politically mobilized in nationalist discourse in diverse historical contexts including the U.S. post-WWII, the Algerian revolution, the 1979 Islamic Revolution in Iran, and the 1990s civil war in Bosnia and Herzegovina. Such symbolism often undercuts sex equality by depicting women as bearers of the nation while simultaneously denying them any direct relation to national agency. Similarly, while American Girl enlists girls as symbols and consumers of America, it invests them with limited forms of agency vis-à-vis the body politic. Owned by Mattel, the American Girl brand reported an operating income of $113.1 million in 2011 according to Mattel’s annual report. The dolls have inspired over 46 million visits to their retail stores, where consumers have purchased roughly 21 million dolls.6 Dolls are just one component of the American Girl empire, which includes coordinated doll and child clothing, accessories, a magazine, hair salons, musical theaters, cafes, doll hospitals, books, a major motion picture, a kosher dinner cruise on the New York harbor, and a website that attracts 43 million visits per year. Given American Girl’s status as a cultural icon, it is vital to explore its peculiar orchestrations of race, femininity, and national memory. American Girl capitalizes on the educational aspirations of young girls and their parents by channeling them toward consumption. The company encourages customers to purchase a dizzying array of products and, by so doing, to embrace a feminist mode of consumerism that celebrates consumption wherever it is perceived to have empowering effects for women (cf. Marshall 2008). Given American Girl’s commercial success, it is imperative to take seriously its packaging of ethnic identity and to ‘critically examine the lessons about gender and history contained in [its] unofficial yet salient curriculum’ (Marshall 2008). American Girl teaches young girls what it means to belong to the ‘imagined community’ of America (Anderson 1991). While the brand nominally celebrates diversity, consumers often question the place of ethnicity within American Girl’s national family (cf. Acosta-Alzuru & Kreshel 2002: 139–161). Captivated by the fabrics, colors, and hairstyles of ethnic identity conceived by American Girl, consumers nonetheless regard dolls of color as ‘different’ from the prototypical American Girl, perhaps ‘inassimilable to the nation in its pure form’ (Berlant 1996: 401). American Girl masks this ambivalence with utopian rhetoric, revisionist history, and superficially inclusive visions of the national family. By doing so, it reinforces collective forgetting as a vital component of national identity and situates multiethnic identity outside history altogether. 30

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American Girl’s vision of the national family has evolved in response to significant demographic changes. In 1995, American Girl launched its line of JLY dolls—many of which appear to be ethnically ambiguous or multiracial—following U.S. Census Bureau predictions that non-Hispanic whites would soon comprise a minority of the U.S. population.7 American Girl capitalizes on trends in youth culture, including a tendency to identify as ‘mixed race’ at increasingly early ages.8 In 2006, in a nod to the expanding community of Hawaiian and Pacific Islanders on the mainland, the company introduced its first explicitly multiracial doll, Jess, a Hapa of mixed Japanese, Irish, and Scottish descent. Such updates have allowed Mattel to increase market share and maintain proprietary cachet (Sage 2006). Yet American Girl’s strategy for fashioning a more ‘inclusive’ national family invites substantive critique. Some critics view the brand’s diversity initiatives as glib efforts to expand its customer base. Others understand American Girl’s strategy of diversification as a betrayal of corporate responsibility, since it tends to recycle pernicious stereotypes, advocate a tokenistic approach to ethnic representation, and promote a ‘whitewashed’ version of U.S. history. Many Asian American parents regard the absence of Asians within the American Girl collection as symptomatic of the tendency to exclude hyphenated identities from the national family. One father describes how his initial enthusiasm for Jess, a limited edition JLY doll, yielded to skepticism of the doll’s ‘assimilated’ appearance and storyline: ‘A part of me [says] “yes! A Hapa doll!” But I wonder why her mixed-race background didn’t figure more [prominently in her story and presentation]’ (quoted in Aoyagi-Stom 2006: 2). By representing Jess as a generic ‘Asian’, Mattel sidesteps genuinely inclusive approaches to multiethnic representation.9 American Girl’s emphasis on assimilation reminds us that ‘not all hyphenated identities are permitted entry into America’s official lexicon of ethnicities and races’ (Shohat 2003: 168). Through reductive portrayals of ethnic identity, American Girl redacts difficult moments and controversial memories from the national imaginary. Efforts to ‘sanitize’ history are understandable, for it is difficult to imagine how a company would profit from aligning its products with traumatic periods of national memory or relative to racial and class strife. Yet it is imperative to fill in the blanks of American Girl’s history by examining its relationship to social inequality in the United States. Since their debut in 1985, American Girl dolls have evolved into cultural icons with unique appeal for pre-teen girls. Marketed and widely understood by parents, educators, and consumers as pedagogical tools, the dolls inform personal narratives of identity as well as collective visions of race, femininity, and national belonging. American Girl aims to ‘bring history alive’ by promoting historical consciousness and providing role models for young girls. While the brand professes an earnest engagement with American history, American Girl is not without controversy in terms of whose history, culture, facial features, skin color, and hair texture are presumed to represent the ‘authentic’ American girl. The dolls have 31

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sparked lively debate about the politics of representation, as witnessed recently in response to American Girl’s introduction of a homeless doll, Gwen Thompson (2009). Premised on ideals of whiteness and assimilation, the American Girl family remains deeply invested in the project of ‘forgetting’ institutionalized racial and economic inequality. Consequently, the dolls raise salient questions about the role of stereotypes in the articulation of national identity, collective memory, and multiracial femininity. American Girl offers a microcosm for thinking about the sexual and racial politics of national memory and belonging. One cannot fully evaluate American Girl’s products without considering the distinctly American histories of racial classification, citizenship, and interracial prohibition in which they are embedded. I emphasize the need to historicize readings of popular culture and to inject debates about the politics of collective memory into feminist engagements with popular culture. While American Girl dolls gesture toward inclusivity, they also reveal anxieties about national and ethnic identity that haunt the body politic. It is imperative to elaborate a history within which to situate these fears in order to ‘unthink whiteness’ (McLaren 1997) and challenge cultural fantasies of belonging. To this end, American Girl’s vision of racial identity must be evaluated relative to historical efforts to regulate racial purity and interracial mixing, as reflected in the American Eugenics movement, the one-drop rule, Loving v. Virginia, and nineteenth-century degeneracy studies. Although American Girl initially distinguished itself by offering ‘period dolls’ to represent specific historical eras, its vision of national identity has evolved alongside demographic trends. In 1995, American Girl introduced a new line of dolls distinct from its core collection. JLY dolls, renamed to My American Girl in July 2010, were designed to provide a ‘customized’ approach to racial identity.10 While many JLY dolls appear to be ethnically mixed or ambiguous, their iconography reinforces conventional understandings of race as biologically based. Whereas American Girl positions its period dolls relative to historically specific visions of femininity, race, and nation, the JLY line drops out of history altogether to advance a customized and arguably more ‘modern’ approach to ethnicity. If the JLY collection initially appears to challenge conventional definitions of race and nationality, it nonetheless grounds identity in the ‘fact’ of biology and the fiction of ahistoricity. And it is important to remember that American Girl’s lessons about race, class, and national belonging are delivered through dolls, which significantly impact identity formation and childhood development.

Doll Play Dolls are key players in the socialization, engendering, and racialization of young girls that ‘begin in infancy and [are] furthered by almost everything about our society’ (DuCille 1994: 63). As role models and pedagogical tools, dolls contribute to ongoing projects of selfdefinition. They also provide a form of ‘basic training’ to initiate girls into conspicuous 32

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consumption (DuCille 1994: 3). Because children learn what is valued in society partly through doll play, it is crucial to evaluate the sociopolitical effects of habitual play with dolls that do not look like us, especially for minority children. Doll studies conducted by social psychologists Kenneth and Mamie Clark sought to document these effects (1939; 1953). Concerned with the relationship between doll play, internalized racism, and self-esteem, the Clarks studied the preferences of children of color when offered a choice between black and white dolls. Nearly 70 percent of children preferred white dolls and attributed more positive qualities to them. The Clarks concluded that a normative social landscape of racial prejudice and discrimination fosters low self-esteem and self-hatred among African American children. The Clark study highlights the damaging effects of normative whiteness and white privilege for people of color, who struggle to retain a sense of self-worth in a world in which ‘all [agree] that a blue-eyed, yellow-haired, pinkskinned doll [is] what every girl child treasures’ (Morrison 1970: 20). The Clarks’ doll studies were invoked in the U.S. Supreme Court’s landmark ruling in Brown v. Board of Education, which prohibited racial segregation in the public school system. Fundamental to the Court’s ruling in Brown was the insight that segregation imparts feelings of inferiority that ‘may affect hearts and minds in a way unlikely ever to be undone’ (my emphasis). Especially when legally sanctioned, racial segregation lowers morale, undercuts self-esteem, and precludes equal access to resources and institutions. Kiri Davis revisits the traumatic potentials of internalized racism in her documentary A Girl Like Me (2006). The film recreates the doll study to similar effect: most children still prefer white dolls and describe them in socially valuable terms, whereas they associate black dolls with negative moral and aesthetic characteristics. Davis interviews several African American teenage girls in her film, who attest to the lingering purchase power of light skin, blue eyes, and straight, blond hair in the United States. Racialized beauty ideals saturate popular culture and promote a wide range of bodily modification practices among girls and women of color, including skin-lightening, hair-straightening, and cosmetic surgery.

Just Like You, But Not Like Us American Girl’s savvy multiculturalism relies upon a form of commodity fetishism. This is especially true of the JLY line, which consists of twenty dolls intended to reassure contemporary girls that they, too, constitute a ‘part of history’. JLY dolls offer a smorgasbord of ‘various combinations of skin tones, facial features, and hair and eye colors,’ as American Girl’s website claims, from which customers may choose in order to create miniature versions of themselves. For $105, parents can purchase a playmate that mirrors their daughter’s hair, skin, and eye color. While JLY dolls are not exclusively multiracial, their customizing potentials offer a set of tools with which to envision—and begin to map out—a multiracial identity. American Girl avoids conventional modes of classification by refusing to identify JLY dolls with specific 33

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names, racial categories, or histories. Yet the visual culture of JLY reinforces assimilationist ideals and stereotypes of visible racial difference. When I first encountered the JLY doll menu in an American Girl catalog, my curiosity translated to an urgent question: How did American Girl conceive of this peculiar mapping of racial and ethnic identities? Haunted for days by this question, I contacted American Girl’s media department to arrange an interview with the JLY product design team. Once I realized that no such meeting would be forthcoming, I decided to trace a genealogy of this image: from whence did it come? Which historical understandings of racial identity and national belonging are obscured or made visible within the JLY collection? I came away feeling that American Girl contributes to confused visions of race and ethnicity by anchoring identity exclusively in relation to visible racial signifiers and by selectively emphasizing or erasing specific histories associated with class and ethnic diversity in the United States. My research stems from a series of questions regarding the projects of looking and narrating at the heart of the American Girl enterprise. If American Girl is founded on a commitment to position its dolls within specific historical contexts and national and cultural narratives, then how is this project complicated or compromised by the JLY dolls—a line of ethnically ambiguous and interracial dolls stripped of proper names, narratives, and histories? By asking how JLY dolls reinforce collective fantasies of the national family and its ‘others’, or popular stories of belonging and affiliation, I will show how femininity and difference are both imagined and managed within the American Girl family as they are, more broadly, in the nation (Berlant 1996: 410). JLY dolls exhibit an ‘unrelenting sameness’ (DuCille 1994: 46) that is especially apparent in retail stores, where they are displayed en masse in one display case (see online companion). Collective grouping highlights their uniformity and interchangeability rather than uniqueness. Regardless of subtle hair and skin variations, all of the dolls have shoulder-length hair, slightly parted lips, and identical outfits. Their collective display and striking resemblance reinforce a visual economy of sameness within the American Girl family. Despite a promise to look ‘just like you,’ the dolls instead appear ‘strangely uniform and perfect, smiling slightly, frozen in time’ (Borghini, Diamond, Kozinets, McGrath, and Muñiz 2009: 8). While the backdrops designed for American Girl’s period dolls often encourage storytelling among older family members, the JLY display case stimulates no comparable experiences of memory or exchange. Instead, it transforms the dolls into anonymous ‘ethnic specimens’ and thus recalls a history of objectifying racial classification efforts in the United States. In retail stores, JLY dolls are identified by small slips of paper akin to identity cards. The papers assign each doll a unique number and inventory of three physical traits: eye, hair, and skin color. Emblazoned with the dolls’ phenotypes, head shots, and prices, these slips of paper double as ‘souvenirs and vehicles for requesting merchandise from cashiers’ (Borghini, Diamond, Kozinets, McGrath, and Muñiz 2009: 4). Yet they also introduce an objectifying gaze to American Girl’s scene of racial customization. Denied proper names and histories, reduced instead to numbers and a reductive array of physical features, JLY dolls resemble ‘people without history’ (Wolf 1982). This identifying gesture is especially disturbing in 34

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light of a longstanding tradition of efforts to apprehend, measure, inventory, and compare the physical traits of minorities and immigrants in the United States, especially their skulls and facial features. Such initiatives sought not only to classify individuals, but to rank the races by positing a correlation between physical attributes and intellectual, emotional, and behavioral traits and aptitudes. When viewed in this historical context, the identifying slips of paper that inventory JLY dolls’ physical features serve as triggers for traumatic memory at the level of both personal and collective consciousness. Unlike the core members of the American Girl family, the particulars of JLY dolls are ‘made the same’ (DuCille 1996), or subsumed within a fantasy of assimilation. Bereft of name and narrative, the dolls are fundamentally at odds with the company’s signature product: period dolls enmeshed in educational narrative and historical detail. Mattel’s identification of JLY dolls with numbers rather than names betrays the explicit goals of the product line: to ‘highlight individuality’ and ‘express unique style.’ Although designers may equate anonymity with the potential for customization, the divestment of names and stories from the JLY line undermines the narrative project at the heart of the American Girl enterprise. Reduced to numbers, the dolls recall the objectifying potentials of anthropological photography, which has historically paired faces with numbers to designate distinct racial and ethnic ‘types’. Through this portrayal, American Girl misses a significant opportunity to frame race as cultural artifact rather than genetic predisposition. Most striking about JLY dolls is how each face reads the same despite its unique elements. Designed to portray a spectrum of racial and ethnic identities, the dolls instead ‘conform to a restricted range of female beauty’ (Urla & Swedlund 1995: 284) centered on a Caucasian aesthetic. Nearly all of the original dolls were designed with the identical face mold, and only four did not have skin classified as ‘light’.11 Until 2008, only one ‘Asian’ face mold had been used within the JLY collection. Some face molds are occasionally ‘swapped’ for others, while skin tones evolve over time: for example, the ‘dark’ tone has faded to a lighter shade of brown. Equally troubling is the visual ‘menu’ of JLY dolls online and in catalogs, arranged in a photographic grid that resembles the Punnett Square, a tool designed in the 1890s to predict genetic inheritance and re-deployed by American eugenicists.12 It also eerily recalls the ‘Family of Man’, or ‘photographs of ranked “races” found in early 20th century [sic] books on “race” science’ (Hans Gunther quoted in Ifekwunigwe 2004: 1). Because it evokes the visual tools of racial science, the menu aligns American Girl’s representations of racial and ethnic ‘difference’ with a disturbing legacy of classification efforts used to justify social disparities in the United States. As an inventory of ‘racially marked’ and ‘racially marketed’ bodies (DuCille 1996: 9), the JLY menu recalls photography’s role in the anthropological sciences as a means of quantification, or a technological tool with which to record, measure, enumerate, classify, and reinforce social hierarchies. Often regarded as evidence, photography has long ‘contributed to popular understandings of race as an empirically measurable, materially tangible, and above all visible reality’ (Poole 2004: 40–41). Shortly after photography’s invention in the 1820s, anthropologists began to deploy the camera to classify race. Anthropometric photography 35

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Illustration 1: American Girl’s Punnett Square. Taken from http://store.americangirl.com/html/myagconfig2/main.html.

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of the late nineteenth century enlisted profile and frontal headshots to compare cranial size and shape among disparate populations. Practitioners upheld cranial measurements as a vital component of human classification whereby they could rank the relative ‘progress’ of various racial and ethnic groups along an evolutionary ladder. To fulfill its classificatory objectives, anthropometric photography followed conventional principles of design and composition. Portraits consisted exclusively of head and shoulders and required their subjects to look straight ahead, arms at their sides. Modeled after the portrait parler or ‘verbal pictures’ initiated within the French criminal justice system and used by detectives to highlight distinct facial features, anthropometric portraits were subsequently adapted within criminology and pathology for social control purposes: to categorize ‘criminal types’ and examine mental asylum patients. They served as a precursor to state-issued identity cards, which have enlisted photography as a tool of state control since the colonial era (Graham-Brown 1988: 48–49). Although American Girl does not share the colonizing objectives of anthropometry, the JLY menu is reminiscent of photography’s disturbing investment in projects of racial classification and social control. The menu conveys uniformity by grouping dolls’ headshots into one composite photograph. American Girl’s use of composite photography to depict ethnically mixed and ambiguous faces is troubling in light of historical precedent. Developed by French criminologist Alphonse Bertillon to measure the physical attributes of criminals, the technique of composite portraiture—in which many portraits are collapsed into one large photograph—was popularized by Francis Galton during the American Eugenics Movement of the 1920s. Galton enlisted composite photography to compare the traits of particular social groups, including criminals and Jews (Illustration 2).13 Composite portraiture was also a mainstay of British colonial iconography in the late nineteenth century, where it advanced a hierarchical racial typology. By representing the ‘Other’ as socially inferior, this typology served both taxonomic and political ends. As Gilbert Beauge points out, ‘types’ constitute a grouping of images whose homogeneity is established not only through their content and manner of representation, but also by their usage and the historical period to which they correspond. [They represent] the ‘Other’ as a generic equivalent of the ethnic group to which he or she belongs. (1995: 48) In their study of representations of race, class, gender, and ethnicity in National Geographic, anthropologists Lutz and Collins consider how group photography reinforces hegemonic depictions of ‘otherness’ in colonial and postcolonial encounters. Because group portraits obscure individual gestures, comportments, and styles, they often perpetuate stereotypes of ‘others’ as anonymous, ‘deviant’ and/or interchangeable (Lutz & Collins 1993). Neo-Orientalist media portrayals of veiled women post-9/11 exemplify this tendency of group portraiture to erase personhood while exaggerating cultural otherness. 37

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Illustration 2: Composite photograph of ‘the Jewish type’ by Francis Galton. This image was published in the supplement to the Photographic News, volume 29, 1885.

When examined in relation to the role of composite photography in reinforcing racial and ethnic stereotypes and hierarchies, American Girl’s representation of JLY dolls in group portraits and displays seems problematic. Framed by an aesthetic tendency to craft ‘others’ in relation to a homogenous norm, the individual faces of dolls of color on the JLY menu seem to blend into the background, lost in a sea of whiteness yet superficially integrated into a singular narrative of American history. The menu recalls Time magazine’s 1993 ‘new face of America’ cover (see online companion), which forecasts the effects of immigration on the American body politic by juxtaposing the faces of individuals of mixed races, genders, and ethnicities in one composite photograph. Time imagines America’s new face, ‘SimEve’, as an amalgam that obscures all variation. On Time’s cover, this ‘new face’—a computer-generated portrait of a woman morphed from a mix of several races—is superimposed over a matrix of digitally cut portraits, formatted in the background as a multiplication table. Evidence of what may happen when diverse ethnicities collide, Time simultaneously advertises hybridity as ‘the [appealing] future of national culture’ and registers profound cultural anxieties about these demographic shifts.14 Time’s ‘new face of America’ presents not 38

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only a ‘cultural memento mori’ for the white majority, but also a stirring call to action: ‘Within these “reproduction squares” the images are morphed onto each other so that their future American “progeny” might be viewed in […] the newly lightened form, [while] suffused with nostalgia for the feeling of stable and dominant collective identity’ (Berlant 1996: 417). Anxieties about the changing face of America recall how E pluribus unum presumes universal identification with the ‘One’ that authorizes plural forms of inequality and exclusion (Lionnet 2008: 1506). This dream of symmetry, or the ‘strange and subtle goal’ (C. I. R. James quoted in Hall 1995: 14) of the melting pot, defines the contours of the American Girl family, as well. Within JLY iconography, ‘American’ identity depends upon successful assimilation. In this sense, American Girl achieves a form of historical elision that precludes more complex understandings of ethnic and national belonging (Gonzalez 2003: 538). By conflating ethnic identity with visible traits or ‘biological stigmata’ (DuCille 1996: 11), American Girl creates ‘appended subjects’ (Gonzalez 2003: 538), dolls whose personae derive from the assembled components of their bodies rather than contextualized identities. The dolls gaze out from the JLY menu not as compelling historical subjects in their own right, but as fetish objects that exist only in relation to the racialized look of the other. Consequently, the JLY menu ‘induces amnesia about what it costs, and what might be possible, when [we] confront the racialized structure of desire and reproduction’ (Haraway 1996: 42) at the heart of national identity and consumer culture. While American Girl celebrates national identity as a harmonious weave of racial and ethnic affiliations, it simultaneously contains the ‘threat’ of race—its imagined potentials to seep, ooze, contaminate—by casting a controlling gaze over its project of racial customization. American Girl resurrects a politically charged taxinomia of sorts by establishing a table of visible differences similar to those enlisted in eugenics discourse. The taxonomic legacy that informs JLY’s visual culture reinforces normative visions of race, femininity, and national belonging as reliant upon successful assimilation. An assimilationist ideal similarly shapes American Girl’s hair politics. In October 2009, the brand introduced a web-based doll selection tool that allows customers to ‘build’ a doll online beginning with hair and eye color. This tool is part of a broader effort to re-vamp the JLY line, recently renamed My American Girl and expanded into 40 different combinations of eye, skin, and hair color. Designed to facilitate the process of racial customization, this design tool nonetheless omits black hair, forcing customers to choose between blonde, red, light brown, medium brown, and dark brown hair. The disappearance of black hair is disturbing in a cultural context in which women of color spend millions of dollars per year on lightening products and straightening procedures to conform to Caucasian beauty ideals, primarily because ‘ethnic’ hair is constructed as a social problem rather than a form of social capital.15 Homogeneity underlies American Girl’s success, as evident from a search tool on the American Girl website that allows customers to sort dolls by popularity. Serial sorts conducted over the last year reveal a history of consumption wherein the popularity of 39

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JLY dolls correlates with pale complexion and straight hair. Dolls with dark skin tones and textured hair are routinely concentrated at the least popular (least purchased) end of the spectrum.16 These trends mirror American Girl’s predominantly white, upper-middle class customer base and have disturbing implications in a socioeconomic climate wherein brown female bodies circulate as invisible, undesirable, and/or worthless.

American Grrrl: Racial and Ethnic Queering If American Girl has important stories to tell about race and gender in America, the most compelling are those that remain untold. While some consumers overlook missing faces within the American Girl family, others contest its portrayal of national memory. To challenge American Girl’s visions of ethnic identity and national belonging, many consumers devise unique doll personae that reconfigure collective identity and history. Through their creative efforts, they imagine a nation premised not on forgetting or assimilation, but on the productive potentials of counter-memory. To fill in the blanks of American Girl’s history, savvy consumers ‘queer’ their dolls by stylizing them with looks, subjectivities, and contexts in which they are least expected.17 Queering strategies wrest knowledge production ‘back into the hands of those who are written out of dominant scripts of power’ (Oishi 2006: 661) and who find pleasure in interrogation (hooks 1992: 126). They also engage in acts of ‘diva citizenship’ (Berlant 1997) by claiming the site of collective forgetting as a space of resistance from which to rework citizenship and re-member those typically excluded from the national family. One such consumer, Naomi Goodman, subjects her dolls to periodic reinvention. Although she treasures her doll collection, she has long felt alienated by the absence of Jewish dolls from American Girl’s inventory.18 Goodman understands this omission as symptomatic of broader patterns of erasure within American culture that exert violence through repetition—a perpetual ‘side step that keeps Jewish history out of the books and away from the dolls’ (Goodman 1999: 26). To challenge the elision of Jewish religion, identity, and history from mainstream American culture, she adorns her Samantha doll with a tin foil Star of David, refers to her ‘tea dress’ as a ‘Shul dress’, and equips her with a shoebox sukkah. While attentive to the dilemmas of visually ‘marking’ Jewish identity, Goodman has invented a series of alter-egos for her American Girl dolls, including ‘Rochel of 1909’, a Russian immigrant whose family experiences the grueling labor of New York sweatshops and the tenements of the Lower East Side. Within Goodman’s storyline, Rochel joins a labor union to advocate for employee rights. Her accessories include a sewing machine and a picket sign that reads: ‘Abolish Slavery in the Garment Trades.’ Goodman’s imaginative re-staging of the American Girl family enlists her in creative play with commodity culture. While her acts of religious ‘queering’ constitute a form of survival in mainstream Christian society, they also have transformative effects for her identity. As Goodman explains, ‘[T]aking Samantha and making her my own represented my first 40

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steps toward becoming comfortable as a Jew in a Christian world’ (1999). Through creative appropriation, Goodman reconfigures American Girl’s narrative of national belonging. Another consumer recalls how her grandmother’s gift of an American Girl doll inspired her to design her own line of ‘Anti-American Girl’ dolls. Thus far, her designs include an ‘oppressed immigrant doll of undetermined Latin American origin’ and a ‘Chinese child seamstress doll’ (Hausman 2009). Such tweakings reflect a shared ethos among a subset of American Girl consumers, many of whom wonder whose history American Girl can legitimately claim to represent. They posit alternative historical subjects through creative tactics of re-vamping that highlight the political potentials of consumption. By ‘culturejamming’, or scrambling and reconstructing the meanings of popular cultural objects, consumers expose exclusionary tendencies within the American Girl—and national— family. They simultaneously empower subaltern identities by strategically ‘representing that which has been rendered unthinkable [within] dominant culture’ (Munoz 1999: 31). Although young girls’ creative mutations of the American Girl family recall the amputations of previous generations of Barbie owners, they reflect a more sophisticated critique of the overlapping forms of inequality engendered by globalization. Doll hair is an especially charged site of cultural contestation for American Girl consumers, who use beads, braids, and dyes to tease doll hair into intentionally ‘mixed’ styles. These re-stylings deliberately blur racial and ethnic boundaries while acknowledging the ‘socially constructed nature of race, the ambiguity of racialized existence, and the flexibility of racial expression’ (Chin 1999: 308). Savvy American Girl consumers transform the violence of oblivion into powerful counter-memories of resistance. They challenge the boundaries of national belonging by staging personae in the interstices between black and white, Christian, Jewish, and Muslim, rich and poor; and restore to collective memory traces of the violence inherent in exclusionary fantasies of national belonging.

Conclusion American Girl’s vision of multiracial femininity ignores the performativity of race and the heterogeneity of consumer desires. By staging race as phenotype, it ‘masks the complexity of race’ (Chin 1999: 312) as a social construct and lived experience. Yet for those to whom the privileges of recognition, visibility, and belonging are routinely denied, what different circuits of desire might erupt to trouble the lure of identification at the heart of American Girl’s appeal? The violence of exclusion births alternative desires, such as the desire not to identify with, but to disrupt hegemonic images of identity. For some children, dolls are valuable not as objects of resemblance or narcissistic identification, but as avenues of escape from the material realities of inequality and oppression. For others, cost-prohibitive dolls like American Girl become sites of impossible longing. Within this context, dis-identification emerges as a productive site of resistance and aspiration toward social justice—a call to rethink ‘how and which bodies matter’ (Butler 1993: 4) in the contested project of narrating the nation. 41

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References Acosta-Alzuru, Carolina, and Peggy J. Kreshel (2002), ‘“I’m an American Girl… Whatever That Means”: Girls Consuming Pleasant Company’s American Girl Identity,’ Journal of Communications, 52: 1, pp. 139–161. Anderson, Benedict (1991), Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. London: Verso. Aoyagi-Stom, Caroline (2006), ‘Multiple Choices: Identifying with More than One Race,’ Pacific Citizen News [online], 19 May, http://www.pacificcitizen.org/content/2006/national/may19stom-multiplechoice.htm. Accessed 5 February 2010. Beauge, Gilbert (1995), ‘Type d’image et image du type,’ in Pascal Blanchard (ed.), L’autre et Nous: Scenes et Types. Marseille: ACHAC, pp. 45–51. Berlant, Lauren (1996), ‘The Face of the Nation and the State of Emergency,’ in Cary Nelson & Dilip Gaonkar (eds.), Disciplinarity and Dissent in Cultural Studies. New York: Routledge, pp. 397–440. (1997), The Queen of America Goes to Washington City. Durham: Duke University Press. Borghini, Stefania, Nina Diamond, Robert V. Kozinets, Mary Ann McGrath, and Albert M. Muñiz (2009), ‘Why Are Themed Brandstores So Powerful?: Retail Brand Ideology at American Girl Place,’ Journal of Retailing, 85: 3, pp. 363–375. Butler, Judith (1993), Bodies that Matter. New York: Taylor and Francis. Chin, Elizabeth J. (1999), ‘Ethnically Correct Dolls: Toying with the Race Industry,’ American Anthropologist, 101: 2, pp. 305–321. Clark, Kenneth B., and Mamie K. Clark (1939), ‘Development of Consciousness of Self and the Emergence of Racial Identification in Negro Preschool Children,’ Journal of Social Psychology, 11, pp. 159–169. (1953), ‘The Effect of Segregation and the Consequences of Desegregation: A Social Science Statement,’ The Journal of Negro Education, 22: 1, pp. 43–61. DuCille, Ann (1994), ‘Dyes & Dolls: Multicultural Barbie and the Merchandising of Difference,’ differences, 6: 1, pp. 46–68. (1996), Skin Trade. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Fanon, Frantz (1967), Black Skin, White Masks. New York: Grove. Gonzalez, Jennifer (2003), ‘The Appended Subject: Race and Identity as Digital Assemblage,’ in Amelia Jones (ed.), The Feminism and Visual Culture Reader. New York: Routledge, pp. 534–544. Goodman, Naomi (1999), ‘Dolls to Live By: “American Girls” Series Dresses America in Christian Clothing,’ Lilith Magazine, 24: 3, online. Graham-Brown, Sarah (1988), Images of Women: The Portrayal of Women in Photography of the Middle East 1860–1950. New York: Columbia University Press. Guerrero, Lisa (2009), ‘Can the Subaltern Shop? The Commodification of Difference in the Bratz Dolls,’ Cultural Studies, Critical Methodologies, 9: 2, pp. 186–196. Guillaumin, Colette (1972), L’ideologie raciste: Genese et langage actuel. Paris: Mouton.

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Hall, Stuart (1995), ‘Negotiating Caribbean Identities,’ New Left Review, 209, pp. 3–14. Hamamoto, Ben (2007), ‘Hapa Issues Forum Holds Its “Last Hurrah,”’ Nichi Bei Times Weekly [online], 13 September, http://www.nichibeitimes.com. Accessed 25 September 2009. Haraway, Donna (1996), ‘Monkey Puzzle,’ World Art, 1, p. 42. Hausman, Aliza (2009), ‘The Jewish American Girl Doll Meets the Dominican American Girl Doll,’ Memoirs of a Jewminicana [online], 9 June, http://www.alizahausman.net/2009/06/ jewish-american-girl-doll-meets.html. Accessed 17 June 2009. Hochschild, Jennifer, and Vesla Weaver (2008), ‘The Shifting Politics of Multiracialism in the United States,’ in American Political Science Association, 2008 APSA Annual Meeting: Categories and the Politics of Global Inequalities, Boston, Massachusetts, 28–31 August. APSA: Washington, D. C. Hollenbeck, Candice R., Cara Peters, and George M. Zinkhan (2008), ‘Retail Spectacles and Brand Meaning: Insights from A Brand Museum Case Study,’ Journal of Retailing, 84: 3, pp. 334–353. hooks, bell (1992), Black Looks: Race and Representation. Boston: South End. Ifekwunigwe, Jayne O. (2004), ‘Introduction: Rethinking “Mixed Race” Studies,’ in Jayne O. Ifekwunigwe (ed.), ‘Mixed Race’ Studies: A Reader. London: Routledge, pp. 1–29. Lionnet, Francoise (2008), ‘Continents and Archipelagoes: From E Pluribus Unum to Creolized Solidarities,’ PMLA, 123: 5, pp. 1503–1515. Lutz, Catherine A., and Jane L. Collins (1993), Reading National Geographic. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Marshall, Elizabeth (2008), ‘Marketing American Girlhood,’ Rethinking Schools, 23: 2, pp. 16–19. McLaren, Peter (1997), ‘Unthinking Whiteness, Rethinking Democracy: Critical Citizenship in Gringolandia,’ in Peter McClaren (ed.), Revolutionary Multiculturalism: Pedagogies of Dissent for the New Millennium. Boulder: Westview. Moran, Rachel F. (2003), Interracial Intimacy: The Regulation of Race and Romance. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Morrison, Toni (1970), The Bluest Eye. New York: Penguin. Muñoz, José Esteban (1999), Disidentifications: Queers of Color and the Performance of Politics. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Oishi, Eve (2006), ‘Visual Perversions: Race, Sex, and Cinematic Pleasure,’ Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, 31: 3, pp. 1187–1193. Omi, Michael, and Howard Winant (1994), Racial Formation in the United States: From the 1960s to the 1990s. New York: Taylor & Francis. PBS (1997), ‘Not an “Other”,’ PBS Online Newshour [online], 16 July, http://www.pbs.org/ newshour/bb/fedagencies/july-dec97/census_7-16.html. Accessed 11 August 2009. Poole, Deborah (2004), ‘An Image of “Our Indian”: Type Photographs and Racial Sentiments in Oaxaca, 1920–1940,’ Hispanic American Historical Review, 84: 1, pp. 37–82. Prewitt, Kenneth (2001), ‘Census 2000 and the Fuzzy Boundary Separating Politics and Science,’ Bulletin of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, 54: 4, pp. 32–40. Rand, Erica (1995), Barbie’s Queer Accessories. Durham: Duke University Press.

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Sage, Alexandria (2006), ‘Multi-Ethnic Doll Store American Girl Opens in LA,’ Red Orbit News [online], 22 April, http://www.redorbit.com/news/general/478702/multiethnic_doll_store_ american_girl_opens_in_la/index.html. Accessed 10 July 2009. Shohat, Ella (2003), ‘Lynne Yamamoto: Reflections on Hair and Memory Loss,’ in Elaine Kim, Lisa Lowe, Margo Machida, and Sharon Mizota (eds.), Fresh Talk, Daring Gazes: Conversations on Asian American Art. Berkeley: University of California Press, pp. 167–172. Siegel, Elyse (2009), ‘Interracial Couple Denied Marriage License by Louisiana Justice of the Peace,’ The Huffington Post [online], 15 October, http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2009/10/15/ interracial-couple-denied_n_322784.html. Accessed 15 December 2009. Urla, Jacqueline, and Alan Swedlund (1995), ‘The Anthropometry of Barbie: Unsettling Ideals of Femininity in Popular Culture,’ in Jennifer Terry & Jacqueline Urla (eds.), Deviant Bodies: Critical Perspectives on Difference in Science and Popular Culture. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, pp. 277–313. Wolf, Eric (1982), Europe and the People Without History. Berkeley: University of California Press. Yen, Hope (2009), ‘Multiracial People Become Fastest-Growing US Group,’ Washington Examiner [online], 28 May, http://washingtonexaminer.com/nation/2009/05/multiracial-peoplebecome-fastest-growing-us-group. Accessed 30 May 2009.

Notes 1 ‘L’une des idées la plus violente et contradictoire’ in the original; my translation. 2 Fanon refers to these as the ‘racial epidermal schema’ (1967: 112). 3 This refers to instructions on the 2000 census form, and the multiracial political movement that spearheaded this change. See also Hochschild & Weaver (2008). 4 Based on demographic data from July 2008, 5.2 million Americans identify as belonging to two or more races, making ‘multiracial’ the fastest-growing ethnic group in the nation. Interracial marriages have increased threefold to 4.3 million since 2000. States reporting the highest percentage of multiracial residents include California, Texas, New York, Hawaii, and Alaska. See also Yen (2009). 5 These questions implied that Obama might be ‘Muslim’, disloyal, or unpatriotic—fears voiced on the basis of his birth name; his associations with ‘radicals’ and ‘former terrorists’ (Bill Ayers, Jeremiah Wright); his critique of unquestioning patriotism; his cultural sensitivity; and his willingness to engage in dialogue with perceived ‘enemies of the United States’, including Iran. 6 See the ‘Fast Facts’ on the American Girl website (http://www.americangirl.com/corp/ corporate.php?section=about&id=6; accessed on 28 August 2009). 7 Initial data suggested that this milestone would be reached by 2050; more recent estimates point to 2019–2042. This shift has already taken place in Texas and California. See, for example, Sam Roberts, ‘Projections Put Whites in Minority in U.S. by 2050,’ The New York Times, 18 December 2009. See also Roberts, ‘In a Generation, Minorities May Be the U.S.

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8 9 10

11

12 13 14

15 16

17

18

Majority,’ The New York Times, 14 August 2008. Similar predictions appeared throughout the 1990s during the ‘Just Like You’ design phase. A recent study suggests that 5 percent of Americans under age five identify as belonging to more than one race (Hamamoto 2007). The only other Asian American doll in the American Girl line is Ivy, who is Julie’s friend rather than a primary character. Hereafter referred to as ‘JLY’. Although Mattel recently renamed this the ‘My American Girl’ line, this chapter will refer to ‘Just Like You’ dolls, as my research was undertaken prior to Mattel’s reformulation. The ‘face mold’ describes the cranial and facial characteristics of American Girl dolls. There are currently seven molds in use for the entire American Girl collection; only the ‘Asian Face Sculpt’, introduced in 1995 with the release of the JLY dolls and used only for JLY doll #4, explicitly refers to ethnic origin. See the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory’s Image Archive on the American Eugenics Movement online at http://www.eugenicsarchive.org/eugenics/list2.pl. For examples of Galton’s composite portraiture, see the image archive of the American Eugenics Movement online at http://www.eugenicsarchive.org/eugenics/list2.pl. Time’s ‘SimEve’ is reportedly 15% Anglo-Saxon, 17.5% Middle-Eastern, 17.5% African; 7.5% Asian; 35% Southern European; and 7.5% Hispanic. See Haraway (1996) and Berlant (1996: 419). See Chris Rock’s documentary Good Hair (2009) and media coverage of the presidential daughters Sasha and Malia Obama. According to periodic database searches conducted over a one-year period from 2008 to 2009, darker skin tones account for only 2 of the 10 most popular JLY dolls, whereas they consistently comprise 3 of the 5 least popular dolls. No JLY doll sports ‘natural’ or unaltered African American hairstyles like afros, cornrows, twists, braids, or dreadlocks. For a cinematic treatment of the cultural devaluation of ‘nappy’ hair in popular culture and the sociopolitical implications of black women’s hairstyles, see Chris Rock’s Good Hair (2009). See Erica Rand’s discussion of queering Barbie in Barbie’s Queer Accessories (1995). She describes how consumer activists switch the voice boxes of talking G.I. Joe with Barbie, cross-dress Barbie, and design mythical dolls such as AIDS Barbie. Rebecca Rubin, a Jewish immigrant doll, was introduced in 2009. The American Girl collection previously lacked a Jewish doll and failed to mention Jewish history or to incorporate Jewish characters within its literature.

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Chapter 2 Behind the Brown Mask: Joe Louis’ Face and the Construction of Racial Mythologies Marcy S. Sacks

F

or a moment in 1938, Joe Louis appeared to have achieved the elusive dream articulated by W. E. B. Du Bois: He became ‘both a Negro and an American, without being cursed and spit upon by his fellows, without having the doors of Opportunity closed roughly in his face’ (1903: 3). The grandson of freed slaves, the son of Alabama sharecroppers, Joe Louis fleetingly gained acceptance as his nation’s standard-bearer when he resoundingly defeated the German boxer Max Schmeling in front of a jubilant, 80,000-strong crowd at Yankee Stadium. As other historians have already documented, whites and blacks alike hailed Louis’ accomplishment as an American victory (Erenberg 2005; Margolick 2005). The late 1930s offered a propitious moment for the arrival of an iconic black figure on the American scene. With fascism on the rise in Europe and the world teetering on the brink of war, Americans’ increasingly vociferous condemnation of the Nazis’ racist creed smacked uncomfortably of hypocrisy. Gradually, beginning with academics and social progressives, Americans began to reexamine their own system of beliefs about racial hierarchy and even to challenge the precepts underlying Jim Crow segregation. As Atlanta Constitution editor Ralph McGill bluntly noted, ‘We can’t do much pointing of the accusing finger at Adolph [sic] Hitler or ell Doochey [sic] for trying to give their people an exaggerated idea of the supremacy of their blood. We have the Klan’ (quoted in Klinkner & Smith 1999: 138). Anxious to affirm the preeminence of democracy, particularly in the face of anti-discrimination protest emerging from the black population in the form of A. Philip Randolph’s March on Washington Movement and the black press’ ‘Double V’ campaign, a growing contingent of white Americans became receptive to symbolic representations of racial tolerance. Joe Louis seemed ideally suited for the role of moving the country toward the perceived amelioration of its race relations. His life was a veritable Horatio Alger American success story: Through hard work and upright conduct, Louis had overcome his impoverished beginnings to reach the zenith of the boxing world. Born under Jim Crow’s yoke ‘on an Alabama cotton patch’ (as a Time reporter described Louis’ southern home on September 29, 1941 [64]), his family joined the Great Migration in search of better prospects in the urban North. In Detroit, the young Louis found himself still mostly insulated within a black neighborhood and church, yet here he experienced new forms of racism (‘[N]obody white ever called me a “nigger” until I got to Detroit,’ Louis recalled in his autobiography [1978: 9]) and struggled both with school and Depression-era deprivation. Nevertheless, he persevered, working odd jobs and eventually participating in the industrial experiment of Henry Ford’s ‘Five Dollar Day’, until a friend persuaded him to visit the Brewster Street Recreation Center,

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where he discovered his real calling—boxing. After a swift rise through the amateur ranks, a 21-year-old Louis turned professional and immediately proved to be a formidable foe. Just seven years later, at the pinnacle of a tremendously successful career, a patriotic Louis risked his heavyweight crown in a charity bout against Buddy Baer to benefit the Naval Relief Fund (despite the Navy’s continued refusal to offer blacks anything but menial positions). He contributed his entire $70,000 purse from that victory and promptly volunteered for the army. At that moment, white America truly embraced Louis as the emblem of democracy’s promise (cf. Sklaroff 2000). The long shadow of Jack Johnson compelled Joe Louis to carefully mold his public persona. In 1908, the flamboyant and audacious Johnson became the first black heavyweight boxing champion, and his achievement raised uncertainty about the eugenicist claim that pugilism represented the supreme test of citizenship and civilization. Since the late nineteenth century, boxing had enjoyed tremendous symbolic importance; a crisis of bourgeois masculine identity sparked by concern about the perceived effeminization of American society generated a nascent interest in athletics among the middle and upper classes. While a variety of sports gained in popularity, the ‘manly art’ of prize fighting seemed best suited to the revitalization of American life. Inside the ring, combatants embodied all of the ideal traits of virile manliness—self-discipline, physical prowess, grace, mental acuity, and courage. The man who triumphed over the test of the ring, therefore, had apparently mastered those qualities essential for citizenship in an energetic and confrontational age. To achieve the status of heavyweight champion was to realize, symbolically, one’s arrival at the apex of civilization (Gorn 1986: 194–202). In that context, the crowning of a black champion wrought insecurity in and of itself. But Jack Johnson intentionally exacerbated whites’ anxieties. He openly taunted his white foes and gloated over them in their defeat. Moreover, Johnson defiantly consorted with white women, flaunting their presence in his entourage. Incensed whites vilified him and desperately sought a ‘white hope’ to dethrone Johnson, to no avail. When Jess Willard finally defeated Johnson in 1915, white Americans breathed a collective sigh of relief. ‘Mr. Willard made it possible for many millions of his fellow [white] citizens to sit down to their dinners last night with renewed confidence,’ declared the Chicago Tribune, while the Detroit News insisted that with the ‘Ethiopian’s’ elimination, ‘[t]here will never be a[nother] black heavyweight champion’ (Ward 2004: 381–382). Confronting that legacy, Joe Louis crafted himself into the near antithesis of Jack Johnson. At the insistence of his trainers and managers, Louis followed a strict set of rules that focused on his public actions (but said little about his private behavior). Those interdictions included never to be photographed in the company of white women, to limit his attendance at nightclubs, and to avoid situations that might permit whites to refashion him into a caricature (Louis 1978: 39). Louis translated those imperatives into a painstakingly constructed public image. Inside the ring, he rarely expressed any emotion, eschewing any insinuation of boastfulness or conceit. Outside, he spoke little to reporters, permitting his managers and trainer to attend to the media, although he allowed photographers to capture 50

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him engaging in a diverse array of activities, from sparring to eating to riding horses or golfing. However, despite the variety of images that appeared in the print media, Louis’ deadpan became the characteristic for which he became best known. The mystery of Joe Louis’ face generated near-obsessive attention from the white public. Observers relentlessly harped on his inscrutability: The Chicago Daily News (June 23, 1937) dubbed him ‘the man in the mask’, while the Philadelphia Record (June 23, 1938) complained that Louis remained ‘cold and unsmiling’ even amid the bedlam that followed his resounding defeat of Max Schmeling at Yankee Stadium. And a mystified New York Herald Tribune (June 26, 1935) reporter disparaged the inscrutable Louis as an ‘unemotional sphinx’. While ‘triumph makes others smile,’ complained boxing reporter Caswell Adams, it was not the same for Louis. ‘He never smiled,’ the writer confirmed. Louis’ emotionless face provoked unease and discomfort as white Americans struggled to determine whether he posed a threat to the racial order. Since the era of slavery, white supremacy had relied heavily on the paternalistic assertion that black people welcomed their own subordination. Black slaves had learned to don a figurative ‘mask of obedience’ when in the presence of whites, and while white people might recognize the insincerity of the act, the ritual of servility made the slave institution more predictable for the enslaved and helped to assuage the conscience of the master (Wyatt-Brown 1988: 1239–1241). In the aftermath of emancipation, that pretense became even more urgent. Desperate to reestablish their authority over a purportedly free population, whites utilized the ever-present specter of violence to compel blacks’ perpetuation of the charade. In the Jim Crow era, any suspicion that black people begrudged their second-class citizenship could have devastating—even fatal—consequences (Helg 2000: 583), as Richard Wright describes in Black Boy. In one representative episode, Wright recounts a situation that transpired when he worked as a porter in a clothing store that regularly mistreated black customers. Although Wright endeavored to ‘keep my feelings from registering in my face,’ the boss’ son viewed the employee with skepticism. ‘Why don’t you laugh and talk like the other niggers?’ the white man demanded one day. Wright bluntly responded that he had nothing to smile about, enraging his accuser. His face turning red, the man summarily fired Wright. ‘I don’t like your looks, nigger. Now, get!’ he screamed (Wright 1998: 182). Though perhaps apocryphal, this story nevertheless exposes the grave importance that whites placed on the appearance of contentment. Black southerners either performed the ritual expression of submission or risked tremendous personal danger. White supremacy rested squarely on smiling faces. Joe Louis complicated that carefully scripted charade. His inscrutable expression confounded whites who anxiously sought reassurance that his countenance did not conceal sinister thoughts. The overpowering physical force that Louis held in his fists and unleashed on his opponents in the boxing ring might reflect veiled anger, a yearning for vengeance, resentment, or hatred. Such a display of wrath endangered the foundation bolstering America’s rationalization of its race relations. The sports editor of Boxing News (December 1936) disclosed the insecurity wrought by Louis’ deadpan: ‘The young Negro who has the 51

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fight game in the hollow of his brown hand,’ he wrote revealingly, is ‘cold and unfathomable […]. It is impossible to tell what is going on behind the brown mask of his face.’ Whites’ unease about Louis becoming heavyweight champion of the world provoked the construction of plausible explanations for the boxing success of a black man; they simultaneously worked to allay their concerns about the racial order. They did so by inscribing new myths onto the blank canvas of Louis’ face, ones that reaffirmed long-held stereotypes about black people. In an effort to reassure themselves about Louis, white people drew upon his placidity to make myriad claims about him, most notably that his blank face revealed an empty head. Louis ‘dead pan is no pose,’ announced the Syracuse Post-Standard in 1935, avowing that it actually resulted from mental exertion. ‘He’s a-concentratin’!’ the newspaper derided (Black 1935–1944: Vol. 2, Fiche 7; Vol. 71, Fiche 204). The sheer number of articles either ridiculing Louis’ effort to become educated or alluding to his presumed stupidity produced an overwhelming image of a dimwitted man. ‘I think the talk about Joe being a slow thinker,’ scoffed Bill Corum in his June 19, 1937, New York Evening Journal sports column, ‘is pure drivel.’ No! He insisted. In fact, the ‘Dark Shadow’ failed to think at all: ‘Joe Louis is one person with whom thinking, or trying to think, is a definite weakness. Attempting to indulge himself in that luxury would ruin him quicker than all the dissipation on earth.’ ‘Joseph, make me up a sentence with the word DEFEAT in it,’ ran the opening salvo of a joke in the New York Evening Journal featuring a white professor and the boxing champion (see Illustration 1). ‘Sho!’ came the swift retort from a bumptious Louis caricature. ‘I pops ’em on de chin an’ dey drags ’em out by de feet!!’ (June 8, 1936). The coherence of this image with prevailing stereotypes about black people allowed eager whites to easily believe the narrative of Louis’ limited mental capacity. While whites amused themselves with stories of Louis’ hapless attempts to better himself, they found comfort and security in other depictions of him as a typical ‘Negro lad,’ born ‘to listen to jazz music, eat a lot of fried chicken, play ball with the gang on the corner and never do a lick of heavy work he could escape.’ Like ‘a hundred thousand similar’ black youths who ‘come, year in and year out, from the lean-to shacks, small towns and cotton fields of the deep South’ (New York Evening Journal, June 19, 1937), Louis promised to be too lazy, too slow-moving, and too unimaginative to question—much less challenge—the social order. Notably, in this 1937 description of Louis (as in virtually all articles in the white press that mentioned Louis’ background in the context of his behavior), the journalist stressed the boxer’s Alabama roots rather than his Detroit home, highlighting an important element of Louis’ acceptability to whites. White northerners responded to ballooning urban black populations in the first decades of the twentieth century with a marked hardening of racial lines, evident in increased residential segregation, restrictions in accommodations, and palpable tension between whites and blacks that sometimes spilled over into violence. Their discomfort simultaneously bred a culture of nostalgia for the Old South, including an imagined ideal of a southern black servant. To white northerners, ‘real genuine southern darkies’, those who behaved with humility, deference, and affection toward white people, represented a stark contrast to the stereotype of their abrasive, even dangerous, urban 52

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Illustration 1: Joe Louis was frequently depicted as a dimwit. This cartoon, drawn by Hal Coffman, was published in the New York Evening Journal of June 8, 1936.

counterparts (Sacks 2006: 75; Black 1935–1944: Vol. 1, Fiche 3). Joe Louis, the ‘sleepy Alabama colored boy’ (Black 1935–1944: Vol. 28, Fiche 76), conveyed a far safer image than that of the ‘Detroit Destroyer’. Consequently, commentary that focused on Louis’ general harmlessness almost uniformly referred to his southern heritage. Conversely, when discussing his fighting prowess and boxing success, white writers had a far greater tendency to refer to Louis as ‘the Detroit Negro’ (Black 1935–1944: Vol. 44, Fiche 126). The white press widely characterized Louis in language that defied both his actions and actual portraits. They represented him as lazy even as they publicized his training regimens (see Illustration 2), described him shuffling around the ring (a New York Times reporter, John Kieran, dubbed him ‘J. Shufflin’ Louis’ on February 2, 1941), rendered his facial features with fat lips and beady eyes even when closely positioned photographs proved the inaccuracy, and belabored his overindulgence with food when his weigh-ins prior to bouts 53

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Illustration 2: According to this article, which appeared in the December 20, 1938 issue of Look, ‘food’s only rival in Joe’s affection is sleep. Joe is living proof that sleeping sickness isn’t necessarily fatal’ (McLemore 1938).

demonstrated his fitness. Photographs circulated in white newspapers regularly depicted him eating ice cream or fried chicken and appearing boyish and non-threatening. Stories of Louis’ God-fearing, semi-literate mother, portrayed as a recognizable and beloved ‘mammy’, received wide readership (McElya 2007). If Louis’ deadpan expression reflected his intellectual shortcomings, it also allegedly verified his inherent brutality. The ‘Detroit Negro […] is a jungle man,’ a newswire reporter declared of Louis in 1938, ‘as completely primitive as any savage’ (Black 1935–1944: Vol. 79, Fiche 221). Regularly construing Louis as an ‘icy assassin’ who ‘shed his mercy as easily as he did his bathrobe,’ whites could only feel relief that ‘this boxing championship […] was held in a civilized setting. Had it been held in a jungle, with survival and not the title at stake, it is no exaggeration to say that Schmeling, the weaker man, would be dead’ (Black 1935–1944: Vol. 56, Fiche 162). Commentators easily juxtaposed the claim about Louis’ pugilistic brutality with his placidity outside the ring. The ‘Joe Louis who talked of ice cream, and trips to Europe, and his new pin-striped suit’ became a ‘savage tiger’, a ‘butcher’, a ‘ruthless, unmerciful killer’ inside the ropes (Black 1935–1944: Vol. 54, Fiche 156).1 This paradoxical characterization of Louis comprised a critical aspect of his image in the white mind. In portraying Louis as a ‘natural-born killer’, whites reassured themselves that he lacked premeditation when he pummeled his white opponents (or even his black ones—more proof still that vengeance did not motivate his actions). Unlike white boxers who ‘studied’ the ‘sweet science’, Louis 54

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fought with savagery supposedly inherited from a primordial Africa. Anger, resentment, or even mental discipline had nothing to do with his success. He punched mindlessly, driven by instinct rather than thought. By convincing themselves that Louis’ actions resulted from ‘natural’, rather than studied, athleticism, whites safeguarded their conviction about blacks’ contentment with their lot in life. Louis’ triumphs neither challenged that belief nor implied that black people had intellectual abilities, because his boxing revealed nothing about his thoughts or emotions. Furthermore, the suggestion that Louis harbored a hidden savage also supported the second foundational myth of white supremacy: that black men, while content under white authority, threatened to become menacing brutes in the absence of that control. Southern lynch law and northern complicity were premised on precisely that charge. The widespread credence given to the insistence that black men lusted after white women (‘documented’ in the 1915 film Birth of a Nation that President Woodrow Wilson, a trained historian, corroborated as truth) rationalized the subjugation of the nation’s black population. The white press’ sinister interpretation of Louis’ pugilistic triumphs only confirmed such necessities, further legitimizing the American racial order. When the United States entered World War II and Louis uncritically threw his support behind the American cause, he consolidated his place as a hero to whites (who had been quick to denounce Louis when he appeared reluctant to enlist [Black 1935–1944: Vol. 89, Fiche 247]). The press praised his ‘magnificent example of loyalty and patriotism’ and documented his many acts of charity on behalf of the military and to boost troop morale. They disseminated dozens of photographs of him submitting to the requisite medical exams and entertaining enlisted men stationed around the world. ‘This Negro boy from the cane fields of Alabama,’ gushed the sports editor of the Los Angeles Evening Herald and Express, ‘wants only to be another soldier […], and he certainly will be a real inspiration to his fellow draftees’ (Black 1935–1944: Vol. 92, Fiche 252). His actions provided a welcome counterpoint to the growing protest of the ‘Double V’ campaign (demanding both victory over fascism abroad and over racism at home) and the March on Washington Movement led by A. Philip Randolph (that sought equal access to defense industry jobs) (Sklaroff 2002). Whites acclaimed Louis as an exemplar of both patriotism and black stereotypes, reassuring the white public that Louis would not challenge the fundamental tenets of white supremacy that demanded black submissiveness to white authority. The demystification of Joe Louis’ face helped to usher in a new strategy of white supremacy. In whites’ emphatic admiration of Louis, they could assert democracy’s preeminence. ‘That a colored boy can get to the top of his profession in America,’ insisted Dan Parker in the New York Daily Mirror, ‘is a much better advertisement for Joe’s country than that a Jewish lawyer or doctor can’t even practice his profession in Germany is for Max’s native land’ (June 18, 1938). Only in America, they boasted, could an unsophisticated former sharecropper from an impoverished upbringing reach the heady heights of financial success. Only in America might such a simple and naïve boy-man enjoy widespread admiration. They congratulated themselves for their munificence. The adoration of a black man by white Americans served 55

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to prove the accessibility of the American Dream—anyone with legitimate talent or ability, regardless of race or background, might reach the dizzying pinnacle of society. Joe Louis’ victory was an American victory, not because he proved that Americans were the strongest men in the world, but because his embrace as a hero confirmed America’s progressiveness. Black people, on the other hand, saw in Joe Louis a superstar, a messiah (sometimes avenging) who could lead them out of their oppression with both his fists and his image. Where white people crafted from Louis’ image a confirmation of existing racial stereotypes, black people vested him with the ability to forcibly demolish the trappings of white prejudice and the perception of their inferiority. They dreamt of him inaugurating a new age in American race relations premised on mutual respect and the admission of black dignity. In 1947, Melvin Ellis, editor of a black newspaper in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, offered a fabricated rendering of Louis’ influence on race relations that represented widely held fantasies about the boxer’s capacity to fundamentally alter American society: ‘And the white men shook his hand,’ he enthused. ‘And the white men let him eat in their restaurants. And the white men let him ride on their trains. And there came a time’—here Ellis indulged in pure fantasy—‘when the white men tipped their hats to his women folk.’ Leading with his fists, Ellis imagined, Joe Louis could transform society by representing all black people. ‘[M]ore and more white men came to know that even though he was black,’ Ellis continued, ‘he was just like they were. And then in time they began to think that maybe other black men were the same as white men, too,’ until, at last, all black people had access to the white world opened by Joe Louis. ‘The world will forget the fights he fought,’ Ellis believed, but ‘the emancipation [Louis] wrought will live after him’ (NAACP, Box II A-405, Folder 4). Walter White, the executive secretary of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), wrote a column in the New York Post in 1936 (April 2) in which he tried to explain to the paper’s white readership Louis’ profound significance for the black population. ‘Joe Louis’s achievements with his fists,’ White wrote, inspired other black people to believe in the possibility that they might also achieve success. ‘They reason,’ he continued, ‘if Joe can do it, maybe I can, too.’ More broadly, black people sought to follow Louis’ example by breaking through oppressive racial barriers. ‘It would be hard, if not impossible, to find an Aframerican youth,’ quipped the New York Amsterdam News, a black newspaper, in 1935, ‘who does not want to emulate Joe Louis in his own sphere of life’ (October 5). Even as they dreamed of an enduring transformation in American race relations, black people also venerated Louis for the immediate satisfaction that his victories vicariously provided. ‘Joe was the one invincible Negro,’ mourned a distraught Lena Horne after listening to a broadcast of Louis’ knockout loss to Schmeling in 1936. He ‘stood up to the white man and beat him down with his fists […]. He in a sense carried so many of our hopes, maybe even dreams of vengeance’ (quoted in Levine 1977: 434). Louis offered a psychic balm to the bruised collective ego of black Americans, whose silent aspirations and yearnings accompanied him into the ring at every bout. Joe Louis’ significance to black America can be measured by the tens of thousands of people across the country who huddled in ‘near-sacred quiet’ (Angelou 1971: 134) around 56

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radio sets during each of his matches. ‘We used to almost hold our breath, waiting to see what would happen,’ recalled Eloise Greenfield and Lessie Jones Little (1979: 143–44). Former president Jimmy Carter witnessed one such episode at his boyhood home in Plains, Georgia, during the second Louis-Schmeling fight. His father had one of the few radios around, and on that night, about fifty of ‘Mr. Earl’s’ tenant farmers asked him if they could listen to the broadcast. ‘We propped the radio up in the open window of our house,’ President Carter recalled, and the throng listened from beneath a mulberry tree (outside the house, of course). Upon Louis’ summary rout of the German fighter, the group, uniformly subdued and expressionless, offered a polite, ‘thank you, Mr. Earl,’ and ‘filed across the dirt road, across the railroad track, and quietly entered a house about a hundred yards away in the field’ (quoted in Lapointe 1988: 6). At that moment, a somewhat wistful Carter admitted that ‘pandemonium broke loose inside that house’ (Gilmore 1983: 265). Joe Louis’ followers had learned to don their masks as securely as the boxer himself did. Like white people, black people inscribed their fantasies and desires about race onto Louis’ public countenance, appropriating his image in their longing to realize dreams of self-defense and even vengeance that so many of them hid behind the façade of their own placid faces. In his poem ‘King Joe (Joe Louis Blues),’ Richard Wright gave voice to those secret, shared yearnings: ‘Say wonder what Joe Louis thinks when he’s fighting a white man?/ Bet he thinks what I’m thinking, ’cause he wears a deadpan’ (2003: 32–33). To so many black people, Joe Louis represented far more than a celebrated boxing champion or even a symbol of democracy. Black people worshipped Joe. To them, he was their Moses (Time 1941: 64). Louis embraced his role as a leader of the black community, using his wealth and renown to support various causes in pursuit of racial equality. He intervened on behalf of other black people who encountered discrimination, including Private Jackie Robinson, who had been denied the chance to play baseball on an integrated army team. He insisted that black journalists be granted a spot in the press row at each of his bouts during a time when black reporters were typically relegated to a segregated section (Louis 1978: 55). Louis lent his name, time, and money to civil rights organizations, such as the NAACP and the National Urban League, as they fought against the injustices that America continued to inflict upon black people. Even as black people begged Louis to serve as a symbol, they also hungered for information about the man himself. He arguably gave to the black population its first real superstar. And Louis complied, exposing far more of himself to black people than he ever did to whites. The black press enthusiastically reported on his every move, both personal and political, revealing to its black readers a far more complex man than white people cared to see. They analyzed Louis’ love interests, worried over his financial woes, exposed his foibles, and debated his every decision. They depicted him in fine clothes, among throngs of delirious fans on city streets, commanding attention at Harlem’s Hotel Theresa, and in his army uniform surrounded by the highest-ranking military officials. The Chicago Defender, one of the country’s preeminent black newspapers, hired a photographer to follow Louis around, capturing images of the boxer with church youth groups (May 25, 1935), visiting 57

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the sick (July 13, 1935), or on horseback (July 27, 1935). Perhaps most significantly, they portrayed him smiling. They also reacted to the white public’s racism toward Louis, publishing responses to disparaging claims about his character or intelligence. ‘Certain newspaper scribes,’ lamented the Chicago Defender, have revealed an ‘attitude of ridicule’ of Louis’ speech, intellect, and

Illustration 3: The New York Amsterdam News, an African American newspaper, featured this image of a smiling Louis on its front page on June 22, 1935.

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manner. Denouncing that tendency, the Defender responded with strong praise for Louis’ deportment: ‘[B]oth his public and private conduct far exceed from the standpoint of respectability that of many of his critics. He is what he claims to be, prizefighter, citizen and gentleman’ (June 19, 1937). B. Weldon Hayes of Virginia emphatically concurred, as he expressed in his letter to the editor of the Amsterdam News in 1935: Joe Louis ‘is a gift to the Negro race. In him we find character saturated with love for his race, morality and fistic ability to bring his opponents to submission’ (October 5). Joe Louis as both a man and a symbol—in his life story and how his life came to be appropriated by whites and blacks—reveals a great deal about race relations in twentiethcentury America. He achieved the seemingly impossible by becoming a beloved figure to whites and blacks alike. But despite his popularity among white Americans, his triumph over racial prejudice, in fact, proved illusory. Although white Americans acclaimed Louis’ success in the boxing ring, he could not escape the burden of white scrutiny; their tolerance of a black champion came only on the condition that he renounce the flamboyant and transgressive legacy of Jack Johnson. Louis responded to the racialized expectations by behaving in public with humility and deference. But the very existence of such interdictions revealed the white public’s unwillingness to view Louis, or other black people, as genuinely equal members of society. Louis’ successful negotiation of America’s racial minefields paradoxically served as a catalyst in altering the culture of race in America. In the thousands of writings on Louis as a boxer, a man, and an icon made by white commentators and analysts, none even hinted at the possibility that his athletic triumphs might signify anything substantive about race itself. On the contrary, Louis enjoyed white admiration precisely because he confirmed their preconceptions about appropriate black behavior. But Louis’ fistic dominance did generate discomfort. Many white people recoiled at the vision of a black man pummeling a white man into the ropes. For that reason, according to Maya Angelou, black people avoided being ‘caught on a lonely country road on a night when Joe Louis had proved that we were the strongest people in the world’ (1971: 136). More importantly, Louis’ attainment of the heavyweight crown produced unease about the long-touted relationship between sports and civilization. Athletic prowess, particularly in the ‘manly art’ of boxing, had ostensibly marked a group’s arrival at the acme of civilization. On those terms, Louis’ victories in the ring threatened to force the acceptance of black people as equals. Unwilling to do so, whites instead exploited Louis’ pugilistic accomplishments to jettison the link between the two. After Louis defeated Schmeling in 1938, and precisely at the moment that white Americans collectively began to cheer for a black boxer, one newspaper article pointedly declared boxing to be ‘the most primitive of sports’ (Black 1935–1944: Vol. 54, Fiche 156). With this salvo, sports commentators had initiated the process of divesting boxing of its symbolic significance as the arbiter of civilized manhood. Like dominos, one writer or social commentator after another began to insist that boxing connoted nothing more than simple athletic ability. Ahead of Louis’ title fight 59

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against Jim Braddock in 1937, the Boston Sunday Post declared that the match was merely ‘a fistfight of a certain regulated sort between a couple of men who chance to be of different coloration. It doesn’t mean a thing except that one of them can whip the other’ (June 13). Consequently, averred the New York Post the subsequent year, ‘the fact that a Negro happens to be the heavyweight titleholder stirs no resentment, rouses no racial feeling’ (June 24). With the return of a black man to the pinnacle of the boxing world, white people eagerly discounted the larger significance of the sport. By earning the title of world heavyweight boxing champion, Louis heralded the demise of an era when sports affirmed the eugenicist claim of white racial superiority. His success, however, did not dismantle the claim itself. Even as whites figuratively moved the goalposts, abandoning the creed that athletic achievement corresponded in any way with upward mobility or progress toward racial equality, they simultaneously seized on sports to demonstrate America’s triumph over its racist past (Miller 1998: 125). In the Nazi era, white Americans eagerly asserted their nation’s superiority on issues of racial tolerance and inclusion, and Joe Louis provided much-welcomed evidence of their claim. As Louis enlisted in the army, Ring Magazine earnestly congratulated the country for ‘upholding the right of a Negro to all the respect and admiration which must go to every well-behaved exemplar of a healthy sport.’ Indeed, the magazine denounced ‘persons who cling to that shoddy, un-American principle of race inferiority and subjugation’ (Black 1935–1944: Vol. 90, Fiche 250). Other media outlets suggested that America’s racial ‘squabbles’ were mere ‘trivialities’, especially when juxtaposed against the atrocities being committed in support of Nazi racial ideology. With Joe Louis about to participate in yet another title fight in 1939, Bill Corum of the New York Journal and American could extol his country for being ‘too big, too fine’ for ‘bigotry, prejudice, [or] hatred’ (Black 1935–1944: Vol. 65, Fiche 188). Even a newspaper from Georgia, the Savannah Morning News, made the astounding declaration that ‘Aryan vs. negro does not have the importance attached to it in this country that it does in Germany’ (Black 1935– 1944: Vol. 49, Fiche 141). The integration of sports, beginning with boxing, continuing with baseball in 1947, and eventually encompassing all professional athletic organizations (some more willingly than others), continues to be widely upheld as evidence that American race relations are on a relentlessly progressive path. Sports have been identified as the single-most successful experiment in racial integration (with the possible exception of the military), and many commentators have used whites’ idolization of black athletes, beginning with Joe Louis, as ammunition to support their claims that America has become ‘colorblind’. Indeed, in many ways sports provide an ideal forum for demonstrating the country’s commitment to egalitarianism; sports imagery has become a fixture in our rhetoric of equality (consider the metaphor of a ‘level playing field’). In the idealized mythology, athletes unite around their mutual respect for one another, and victory is always earned through unobstructed personal effort. Bill Corum ushered in this vision of athletics as a demonstration of the vitality of the American Dream: ‘[W]e must be all one. All Americans. All friends. All 60

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sportsmen,’ he effused in 1939 in reference to his nation’s acceptance of a Negro athlete (Black 1935–1944: Vol. 65, Fiche 188). Through sports, America could subsume its divisions and disagreements. And through the embrace of a black athlete, the country could demonstrate its righteousness. Joe Louis’ death on April 12, 1981, provided an opportunity for a very public and official display of racial tolerance. Then-president Ronald Reagan, author of a conservative political agenda that sought to dismantle the policies of ‘privilege’, ironically permitted the otherwise unqualified army veteran to be buried in Arlington National Cemetery. Reagan released a brief statement in conjunction with his decision that adhered to the widely accepted image of a humble, unassuming man: I was privileged and will always be grateful to have had Joe Louis as my friend. The son of an Alabama sharecropper, Joe Louis fought his way to the top of professional boxing and into the hearts of millions of Americans. Out of the ring, he was a considerate and soft-spoken man; inside the ring, his courage, strength, and consummate skill wrote a unique and unforgettable chapter in sports history. But Joe Louis was more than a sports legend—his career was an indictment of racial bigotry and a source of pride and inspiration to millions of white and black people around the world. All of America mourns his loss, and we convey our sympathy to his family and friends. But we also share their pride in his professional achievements, his service to his country, and his strength of heart and spirit. (Arlington National Cemetery 1981: par. 71) Much like white commentators from Louis’ boxing heyday who appropriated his image to serve their own racial goals, Reagan seized upon Louis’ death to bolster a political agenda. On the one hand, the president stressed Louis’ individual accomplishments, evidence that the United States, as a land of opportunity, offered a chance for anyone who worked hard to achieve their own rags-to-riches story. On the other, in conjunction with a vague allusion to ‘racial bigotry’, Reagan highlighted the collective embrace of Louis by whites and blacks. The association of white acceptance with a denunciation of prejudice easily fit within the Republican Party’s national platform that asserted, ‘no individual should be victimized by unfair discrimination because of race’ (Klinkner & Smith 1999: 300).2 By demonstrating that racial tolerance had been achieved in the hearts and minds of white Americans, made explicit in part by his own act of largesse toward Louis (the same black man whom the Internal Revenue Service had relentlessly hounded for back taxes during his lifetime), Reagan reinforced his call for the elimination of ‘inherently discriminatory’ race-based policy initiatives that seemed to violate the egalitarian principles of America’s democratic promise. For Reagan, Louis’ example of conspicuous success offered affirmation of this neoconservative ideal. The broader public reaction of white Americans in the aftermath of Joe Louis’ death revealed a similar desire to appropriate the boxer’s image for their own ends. The front-page 61

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obituary in the New York Times resurrected long-suppressed worries about the former heavyweight champion but concluded reassuringly: There was no Joe Louis behind any façade. He was the same slow-spoken, considerate person in a close social group as he was to the vast crowds […]. A simple dignity was characteristic of Louis, who never pretended that his sharecropper origins in Alabama were more than humble. (quoted in Mead 1986: 290–291) Even years after his boxing career had ended, white Americans felt compelled to reaffirm their belief that Louis was, indeed, nothing more than they had construed him to be. On the other hand, when Joe Louis died, black people eulogized him not for his supposed humility but rather for his Herculean achievement of lifting an entire people upon his shoulders. ‘God sent Joe from the black race to represent the human race,’ declared the Reverend Jesse Jackson at Louis’ funeral. ‘He was the answer to the sincere prayers of the disinherited and dispossessed. Joe made everybody somebody.’ Louis emancipated black people from the shackles of the indignities that they had endured. ‘Something on the inside said we ought to be free,’ Jackson continued, ‘something on the outside said we can be free […]. [B]e glad,’ Jackson exhorted the 3000 mourners gathered at the Caesars Palace Sports Pavilion in Los Angeles, ‘he lifted us up when we were down, he made our enemies leave us alone, he made us feel good about ourselves’ (quoted in Mead 1986: 296–297). At a time when black people were constantly beset by symbols of their alleged inferiority, Joe Louis appeared like a messiah to carry them into the sun. These inconsistent—indeed contradictory—perspectives suggest an enduring racial chasm that has yet to be bridged. From his earliest years as a boxing sensation, black people invoked Joe Louis’ name in moments of crisis and desperation (as in Martin Luther King’s apocryphal story about the young black man on death row pleading, ‘Save me, Joe Louis,’ at the moment of his execution [2000: 100]). Still today, Louis enjoys iconic status among many black Americans who treat his memory with the utmost reverence. White people, conversely, never imagined Louis in deified terms, nor do they now. Today, they remember him as ‘decent’ and ‘honorable’ (as commentator Frank Deford noted during a morning broadcast on National Public Radio’s Morning Edition on April 12, 2006, while complaining about the comparatively appalling behavior of contemporary athletes), but certainly they do not consider Louis a messiah. The disparity of Joe Louis’ meaning to white and black Americans must be acknowledged and understood if the United States is to successfully address the persistence of race as a social divider. Whites and blacks in America have yet to achieve open and honest dialogue with one other, and much of that mistrust derives from a failure to properly interpret one another’s cultural cues. The treatment of Louis’ legacy reveals this misunderstanding and offers a starting point for confronting it. Only by acknowledging the different cultural

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perspectives of whites and blacks can we begin the kind of genuine conversation that might lead the United States on a path of becoming a truly multi-racial and egalitarian society.

References Angelou, Maya (1971), I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings. New York: Bantam Books. Arlington National Cemetery (1981), ‘Joe Louis (Barrow): Sergeant, United States Army,’ Arlington National Cemetery Website [online], 13 April, http://www.arlingtoncemetery.net/ joelouis.htm. Accessed 5 January 2011. Black, Julian (1935–1944), Julian Black Scrapbooks of Joe Louis, 1935–1944, Microfiche, National Museum of American History, Washington, D.C., 1980.0683. Du Bois, W. E. B. (1903), The Souls of Black Folk. Chicago: A.C. McClurg & Co. Erenberg, Lewis A. (2005), The Greatest Fight of Our Generation: Louis vs. Schmeling. New York: Oxford University Press. Gilmore, Al-Tony (1983), ‘The Myth, Legend, and Folklore of Joe Louis: The Impression of Sport on Society,’ South Atlantic Quarterly, 82, pp. 256–268. Gorn, Elliot J. (1986), The Manly Art: Bare-Knuckle Prize Fighting in America. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Greenfield, Eloise, and Lessie Jones Little (1979), Childtimes: A Three-Generation Memoir. New York: HarperTrophy. Helg, Aline (2000), ‘Black Men, Racial Stereotyping, and Violence in the U.S. South and Cuba at the Turn of the Century,’ Comparative Studies in Society and History, 42: 3, pp. 576–604. King, Jr., Martin Luther (2000), Why We Can’t Wait. New York: Signet Classics. Klinkner, Philip A., and Rogers M. Smith (1999), The Unsteady March: The Rise and Decline of Racial Equality in America. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. LaPointe, Joe (1988), ‘The Championship Fight that Went Beyond Boxing,’ New York Times, 19 June, p. 6. Levine, Lawrence W. (1977), Black Culture and Black Consciousness: Afro-American Folk Thought from Slavery to Freedom. London: Oxford University Press. Louis, Joe, with Edna and Art Rust, Jr. (1978), Joe Louis: My Life. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich. Margolick, David (2005), Beyond Glory: Joe Louis vs. Max Schmeling and a World on the Brink. New York: Knopf. McElya, Micki (2007), Clinging to Mammy: The Faithful Slave in Twentieth-Century America. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. McLemore, Henry (1938), ‘Joe Louis,’ Look, 20 December, pp. 30–34. Mead, Chris (1986), Champion Joe Louis, Black Hero in White America. New York: Penguin Books. Miller, Patrick B. (1998), ‘The Anatomy of Scientific Racism: Racialist Responses to Black Athletic Achievement,’ Journal of Sport History, 25, pp. 119–151.

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National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) Papers. Manuscript Division, Library of Congress, Washington, D.C. Sacks, Marcy S. (2006), Before Harlem: The Black Experience in New York City before World War I. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Sklaroff, Lauren Rebecca (2000), ‘Joe Louis and the Construction of a Black American Hero, 1935–1945,’ American Studies Association Online Panels [online], n. d., http://epsilon3. georgetown.edu/~convention/asa2000/panel1/sklaroff.html. Accessed 28 August 2010. (2002), ‘Constructing G.I. Joe Louis: Cultural Solutions to the “Negro Problem” during World War II,’ The Journal of American History, 89: 3, pp 958–983. Time Magazine (1941), ‘Black Moses,’ Time Magazine, 19 September, pp. 63–65. Ward, Geoffrey C. (2004), Unforgivable Blackness: The Rise and Fall of Jack Johnson. New York: Knopf. Wright, Richard (1998), Black Boy. New York: Perennial Classics. (2003), ‘King Joe (Joe Louis Blues),’ in Rebert Hedin & Michael Waters (eds.), Perfect in their Art: Poems on Boxing from Homer to Ali. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, pp. 208–209. Wyatt-Brown, Bertram (1988), ‘The Mask of Obedience: Male Slave Psychology in the Old South,’ The American Historical Review, 93, pp. 1228–1252.

Notes 1 Louis complained privately of this characterization, but his trainer cautioned him to avoid generating public controversy about the labels (Louis 1978: 68). 2 Notably, Reagan offered largesse to Louis, implying the former boxer’s subordinate position, but the U.S. government never provided him with an opportunity for independence by offering a compromise on his tax burden.

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Chapter 3 LeBron James and the Web of Discourse: Iconic Sports Figures and Semantic Struggles Michael Fuchs & Michael Phillips

T

he term ‘U.S.-American mythology’ calls to mind such stories as the arrival of the pilgrims, the battle for independence, the Wild West, and the internal strife of the Civil War. These stories provide the raw material out of which American identity has been forged and re-forged over the course of history. Through the telling and re-telling of these and other stories, through the teaching and re-interpreting of their messages and morals, Americans have constructed a history and maintained a shared value system that has evolved and mutated over the course of history, effectively creating the ‘imagined community’ (cf. Anderson 1991) that is the people of the United States of America. Of course, as a tool for value articulation and community building, any narrative needs characters that embody or act out these values and offer venues for audience identification. After all, one could just declare that people should be honest, but it simply doesn’t capture the heart or imagination of the community like the story of young George confessing his arboreal transgression. Although the heroes of these traditional narratives—fearless pilgrims, revolutionary soldiers, defiant statesmen, and restless pioneers—have endured in the American imagination right down to the present day, the supply of mythological heroes who embody the communal values must be continually replenished with figures from contemporary experience in order to safeguard audience identification. However, by the late 1800s, the ‘foreign oppressors’ had been expelled (from the Eurocentric perspective, of course), the territory that makes up the United States had almost all been bought, conquered or stolen, and the internal strife of the Civil War had subsided. Deprived of armed domestic conflicts as a source of mythology, the nation turned to a new form of violent conflict for its iconic heroes—sports.

The Iconicity of Sports Figures It is perhaps not a coincidence that the first major ‘American’ team sport to emerge at this time was the one most directly analogous to war—football, in which two teams square off across a front line and battle to conquer each other’s territory. Although football, which evolved from earlier versions of rugby-style sports, began to take on its distinctly ‘American’ features with the rule changes and innovations introduced by Walter Camp in the 1880s and 1890s, arguably the first true modern sports hero did not appear on the national stage until the 1920s. At this time, the emerging professional league was beginning to challenge the previous dominance of college football, and the first iconic athlete to successfully make the

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jump between these two leagues was Harold ‘Red’ Grange, the ‘Galloping Ghost’. Although his exploits at the University of Illinois first brought him national renown, he did not achieve true iconic status until his days playing for the Chicago Bears. Of course, the question arises: What does it mean to achieve iconic status? In answering this question, there is a danger of being cast adrift in a turbulent sea of terminology. As Keith Parry has noted, ‘the words hero, star, celebrity and icon are often used interchangeably in our modern vocabulary’ (2009: 213). For orientation purposes, therefore, we have isolated three characteristics that are present in many of these discourses. First, iconic sports figures must embody the values that define a particular collective identity. From high school leagues right up to national professional leagues, the United States is saturated with sports at a wide variety of levels, and it is not uncommon for even small communities to have local sports icons who embody communal values. However, only a select few athletes achieve the widespread prominence necessary to play a role in the articulation of national values, and Grange was one of the first to achieve this status. In his case, with his ascension to prominence in the turbulent 1920s, he played a crucial role in calming public anxieties surrounding the ‘passing of the traditional dream of success, the erosion of Victorian values and feelings of powerlessness’ (Rader 1981: 11). The second important characteristic in our definition is that the American sports icon is a ‘symbolic framework charged with meanings distinct enough to inspire multiple groupinscriptions but also open enough to resist ideational closure’ (Leypoldt 2010: 10). In the case of Grange, a wide range of parties tapped into his iconicity to achieve their own ends. When Grange began his professional career with the Chicago Bears in 1925, legendary player/coach/impresario George Halas organized a 16-game, 67-day national tour to showcase Grange, which played a key role in establishing the popularity of the fledgling professional football league (cf. Anderson 2009). At the same time, the sportswriters of the day filled the papers with stories of Grange’s exploits, helping to drive newspaper sales, and Grange’s appearances in newsreels, a new medium at the time, helped attract millions of Americans to movie houses across the country each week (Carroll 1999; Inabinett 1994). Furthermore, Grange was a pioneer in the field of athlete product endorsement, lending his image to promote the sales of everything from sweaters and a football doll to ginger ale and even meatloaf (cf. Carroll 1999: 132). A university, the mass media, a sports league, corporations—everyone wanted a piece of Harold Grange, and he rapidly became perhaps the most recognized athlete in the history of America to that date. Finally, the icon must balance conflicting demands to be both ordinary (to foster identification) and exceptional (to enhance ideological power). Using religious imagery, John Hughson summed this up by saying that icons must ‘serve as […] human approximation[s] of god[s]’ (2009: 85). In the case of Harold Grange, contrasting his statements about himself with the statements made by others provides a vivid illustration of this dynamic at work. Grange’s own public statements seemed almost custom-made to project modesty and emphasize his ‘common’ nature. For example, he once said, ‘They built my accomplishments way out of proportion. I never got the idea that I was a tremendous big 68

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shot. I could carry a football well, but there are a lot of doctors and teachers and engineers who could do their thing better than I’ (quoted in Schwartz 2007: par. 23). While Grange was working to project ordinariness, the ‘they’ he mentions were the many people seeking to build up the legend of the Galloping Ghost, and there have been many. It started most notably with the legendary sports journalist Grantland Rice, who even composed an ode to Grange, dubbing him a ‘gray ghost’ whom ‘rival hands may never touch’ (quoted in Schwartz 2007: par. 4). In fact, this lionizing of Grange continues to the present day. As recently as 2008, a new book about Grange was published (Poole 2008), and the University of Illinois erected a twelve-foot-high statue to honor him in 2009, effectively erecting a monument that allows the community to publicly worship its secular god. Despite these effusive accolades, Grange somehow managed to maintain his humility throughout his life. However, the same cannot be said for the main subject of this paper, LeBron James, who is arguably the quintessential contemporary sports icon. Although James has been and continues to be one of the United States’ highest profile professional athletes, his career as a would-be global icon is replete with significant missteps that showcase youthful ignorance. In this chapter, we will take a closer look at the career of LeBron James, both on and off the court. By analyzing some of his more notorious blunders and the controversies that ensued, this contribution will reveal some of the important values represented by contemporary iconic athletes and the ways in which different entities tap into their iconicity to frame and manipulate these values. While today’s iconic sports figures continue to play an important role in the ongoing negotiation and articulation of national identity, they face a corporate/media apparatus that has evolved into a (trans)national colossus, not to mention increased pressure from leagues, teams, politicians, and even the newly empowered fans themselves. With this mass of high-stakes players, it is little wonder that an athlete who (in)famously entrusted the care of his image to an old high school buddy in the early stages of his professional career has experienced some problems.

The Boy Who Would Be King LeBron’s early life story has all of the ingredients of a stereotypical Hollywood rags-to-riches story, but with a distinctly twenty-first-century, urban, African American touch. Born on December 30, 1984, to sixteen-year-old Gloria James, James never met his father and spent his earliest years bouncing around between his mother’s relatives and friends. Gloria still managed to complete her high school diploma and raise her son as a single mother. In this time, LeBron and his mother lived in the Elizabeth Park area of Akron, Ohio. LeBron would later comment on these years as follows: ‘Anybody who knows about Elizabeth Park knows how bad it is. […] You had gunshots flying and cop cars driving around there all the time. As a young boy it was scary’ (quoted in Morgan 2003: 28). LeBron soon discovered basketball, where he excelled right from the start. In 1999, LeBron and his friends from a local All-Star team reached the AAU Fourteen-and-Under 69

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National Championship Game and then decided to go to St. Vincent-St. Mary High School together. Here, at the tender young age of fourteen, LeBron experienced his first controversy brought on by the expectations of others. As Sian Cotton, one of James’ teammates at the time, says in the documentary More Than a Game (Belman 2008), ‘The African American community wanted us to bring our talents to Buchtel and felt like we were traitors,’ since St. Vincent-St. Mary was regarded as a white school. Nevertheless, the myth of LeBron took off at St. Vincent-St. Mary when the Fighting Irish won the Division III State Championship in James’ freshman year, with James being selected as the Most Valuable Player of the playoffs. The Irish repeated the following year, and LeBron became the first sophomore to not only earn Ohio’s Mr. Basketball Award but also the first sophomore to be honored as First-Team All-American by USA Today. In LeBron’s junior year, his national media exposure continued to grow, as he was named Ohio’s Mr. Basketball, made First-Team All-American, and was selected as Gatorade National Boys Basketball Player of the Year. In February 2002, the first mainstream, nationally circulated iconic image of LeBron James hit the newsstands when he became the first high school junior ever to be featured on the cover of Sports Illustrated (see online companion). Visually speaking, the cover is somewhat bizarre. Stripped of any context, James appears to be looming out of a dark background. One unlit, dark hand stretches out ominously toward the viewer, while the other hand holds a basketball cocked menacingly like some kind of weapon. Despite the sports jersey, the image evokes a dangerous criminal more than a promising athlete. However, the danger is nullified by the ludicrous look on James’ face. With wide-open eyes and lips pursed in an exaggerated O-shape, the expression is one that could scarcely be imagined in an athletic contest or in any other walk of human life. Indeed, the expression calls to mind some bizarre blend of overexcited chimpanzee and blackface minstrels. Needless to say, these are hardly the kind of images an African American athlete would choose, but then LeBron was barely seventeen when the photo was taken. As such, he could hardly have been expected to have any sense of such imagery, and there was no agent or other figure around to offer guidance. On the textual level, this SI cover kicked off the trend of applying grand, expectationladen titles to James by proclaiming him ‘The Chosen One’, which subsequently turned into one of his nicknames.1 Some might balk at the expectations that come along with such a title, but LeBron himself clearly embraced it, as evidenced by his decision to have it tattooed in large letters across his back. Even at this young age, it seems that LeBron was already buying into his media-constructed image as an American hero and savior. During James’ senior campaign, the hype grew. While some sports shows discussed ‘the pros and cons of making a prep star into a national icon’ (CNN footage shown in Belman 2008), the Irish games were televised on pay-per-view in Ohio, and the third game of St. Vincent-St. Mary’s 2002–2003 season was even broadcast nationally on ESPN2. The Fighting Irish destroyed number-one-ranked Oak Hill Academy 65–45, and it was the teenager wearing no. 23 for St. Vincent who excelled in the national spotlight. At the end of the season, the Fighting Irish won the National Championship, and LeBron set several firsts: 70

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He received his third Mr. Basketball Award, was named a First-Team All-American for the third consecutive year, and was named the Gatorade National Boys Basketball Player of the Year for a second year in a row. When James, as expected, decided to skip college and declare for the NBA Draft, the opportunities and demands facing the young man soon began to mount. In 2003, Nike shocked the sports world by offering James a 90-million-dollar endorsement deal before he had even played a single NBA game. This unprecedented contract offer constituted a coronation of James as the heir apparent to Michael Jordan as the emperor of the Nike (basketball) empire. By outbidding competitors Reebok and Adidas, Nike was betting that LeBron James would lead the company into a bold new era and continue its dominance in the basketball sector. Naturally, this was quite a burden to place on a nineteen-year-old, but it was nothing compared to the other burdens the young man would face.

LeBron Saves Whereas Nike needed someone to continue their success, the NBA needed someone to stop the ‘steady decline’ in TV ratings and merchandising that they had been suffering ‘since Jordan left the Chicago Bulls in 1998’ (Chappell 2004: 124). Even though several heirs apparent to His Airness had emerged, no one had been able to fill Jordan’s admittedly huge shoes. Nevertheless, just a few months after James made his NBA debut with the Cavaliers (Cavs), Kevin Chappell was already writing in Ebony magazine that James was ‘the player with the greatest chance of becoming the “savior” of the NBA’ (2004: 124). As already indicated in the opening section of our contribution, this connection to religion is not all that surprising. In his book The Sacred Canopy (1969), Peter L. Berger outlines how sports was attached to the transcendent in traditional societies. Athletic contests were intended to please the gods; they were regarded as specific forms of worship. Although the process of secularization shifted the use of sports from religious to more secular purposes, fans to this day ‘worship their heroes in quasi-religious form’ (Parry 2009: 12). It is thus no great surprise that after the religiously inflected SI cover headline, LeBron and the media increasingly invoked the vast field of religion to establish LeBron’s aura of the extraordinary. After the SI cover, ‘more and more fans expected mythical performances’ from LeBron James, as he ‘was coming to be seen as superhuman’ (Freedman 2008: 31), assuming ‘a new kind of mystic’ (Armstrong 2001: 16) quality so characteristic of the hypermediated athletes in our day and age. Corporate giant Nike was quick to tap into the ‘savior’ narrative with their LeBron James marketing campaigns. Already in their second commercial featuring the then-nineteen-yearold (sackingbedford 2009), the religious connections were made explicit. In the commercial, a pastor preaches from the ‘King James Playbook’, a kind of LeBron gospel, in a gym in front of a congregation of NBA greats and a choir of WNBA players. In this commercial, Nike draws on Greek mythology, wherein the heroes are depicted as transcending the mortal 71

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realm, but translates them into the context of the African American Baptist church. If the church scene had been filled with white people, there might have been a public outcry of blasphemy. But no such outcry arose, as society placed its tacit stamp of approval on the usage of stereotyped depictions of African American religion for commercial purposes. In fact, the commercial was such a hit that Nike doubled down on the religious imagery with its subsequent ‘Witness’ campaign, which became perhaps the hallmark of the LeBron James media image. The original ‘Witness’ TV commercial (snoozer 2006), first aired in November 2005, begins with some quick shots of Cleveland, clearly stressing the city’s roots as a (former) manufacturing hub. Images of LeBron on the court are then intercut with young fans drawing pictures of LeBron and painting number 23 on their cheeks (thus providing a visual link to Nike’s original hero, the original owner of that number, His Airness himself). A montage of scenes then follows with people displaying the line ‘We are all witnesses.’ Not coincidentally, this line echoes a nearly identical statement about the resurrection of Jesus Christ, which is rendered in the King James Version as ‘This Jesus hath God raised up, whereof we all are witnesses’ (Acts 2: 32). In the commercial, this line is shown in various contexts, including self-made banners hung from fans’ windows, restaurant signs, an electronic ticker, and of course, Nike-produced T-shirts. During the 2007 playoffs, Nike raised the bar in terms of religious connotations even higher when the Witness commercials closed with the line ‘believe at nike.com’. The discourse of these advertisements provides a good example of what Matt Hills has termed ‘neoreligiousity’. Hills argues that the members of a neoreligious community ‘take neither “religion” nor “the media” for granted but instead rework the meanings and the practices associated with both’ (2000: 74). Hills thus highlights that ‘[r]eligiosity is itself sociohistorically reconstructed and reconfigured […] in such a way as to suggest that there is no essential thing which can be referred to as “religiosity”’ (2000: 74; italics in original). John Frow has similarly argued that ‘religious sentiment has migrated into many strange and unexpected places, from New Age trinketry to manga movies’ and concludes that due to (neo)religion’s ‘centrality in the modern world,’ it has to be taken ‘seriously in all of its dimensions’ (1998: 208–209). Arguably, neoreligiosity provides ‘viable forms of social being in a global world of commercial and commodified religiosity’ (Turner 2010: 665). As in any religion, one must demonstrate one’s allegiance to the neoreligious community. Since exorbitant ticket prices (or geographical distance) preclude the attendance by most fans at the relevant religious services (i.e., Cavaliers games), the available form of testimony comes down to purchasing the LeBron James commodities on offer. Thus, just as Jesus has provided a lucrative living for centuries of religious painters, booksellers, jewelry makers, and, more recently, T-shirt and blacklight poster sellers, so does LeBron James keep the people at Nike (and other companies—not to mention the NBA) laughing all the way to the bank. Of course, LeBron was laughing with them, as his fame and his bank account expanded exponentially. However, LeBron was soon to learn that there is more to the job description 72

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of a ‘savior’ than winning accolades and making money. Although LeBron was making a lot of money for a lot of people, there was more than just money invested in LeBron James. As with any African American who appears in the national spotlight, LeBron James was automatically expected to represent the black community, and as many athletes and public figures before him have discovered, this is not an easy task.

King? Kong? The April 2008 cover of the U.S.-American edition of Vogue represented an incredible milestone not only in LeBron’s career, but in the struggle for equality. LeBron was only the third man to be featured on the cover of the American Vogue and the first African American man to receive this ‘honor’. However, as much as LeBron’s inclusion on the cover might be regarded a step toward equality, there is a problematic subtext at work in the photo, which critics were quick to pick up on. Similar to the problematic connotations found in the aforementioned SI cover, the Vogue cover rather explicitly alludes to King Kong’s poster. The image, which depicts a fierce looking LeBron holding supermodel Gisele Bündchen in one arm, re-imagines the dominant myth of black men ‘as threatening creatures who have the potential for sexual power over whites,’ as a black man is depicted as a ‘mad and mean predatory craver of white women’ (West 2001: 119–120). It is crucial to note that despite the excessive saturation of contemporary visual culture with images of African Americans, iconic figures like LeBron James find themselves in a tension-fraught position that ‘both engages with and disengages from an economy of signifiers related to stereotypical and ideological depictions of Black masculinity’ (McDonald & Andrews 2002: 25). This is most visible in ‘the simultaneous commodification and demonization of hip hop,’ which illustrates ‘the complex and contradictory place of aesthetics, cultural values, and bodies that are constructed as both fashionable (desirable and cool) and suspect (dangerous)’ (Leonard 2006: 161). There is thus little surprise that there are strong ties between LeBron and hip-hop. In fact, LeBron James had been linked to hip-hop culture even before he turned professional. Already in SI’s February 2002 cover story, Grant Wahl noted that LeBron had ‘an Iversonian2 street cred that Jordan himself lacked’ (2002: par. 3). By additionally admitting that he took drugs in high school after the SI cover story had been published (cf. James & Bissinger 2009), LeBron fueled the stereotypical image of the drug-infected black urban body that lacks discipline and thus personal resolution. These white racist preoccupations with the allegedly threatening African American masculinity can, of course, be traced back to slavery and have been used by the dominating classes to legitimate the political status quo. White racist fears infer that blacks are closer to nature and thus more physically gifted,3 yet they need supervision, since they are less civilized, which leads to the presumption that blacks are intellectually and culturally inferior. It is noteworthy in this context how iconic basketball star Michael Jordan negotiated these 73

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fears by not only practically always appearing in suits (thus following white middle-class expectations on the visual level), but also by the repeated emphasis on the importance of family life. In this way, Jordan (and his management) demonstrated that the (supposed) values of white America were also his values.4 This brings us to perhaps the most important distinction between His Airness and his heir apparent. While LeBron clearly studied Jordan’s on-court game carefully, it is obvious that he was not such a careful student of Jordan’s off-court game. Of course, this relative lack of image savvy is hardly a surprise. While Jordan had three years of NCAA experience to transition into superstardom, LeBron was thrust into the NBA spotlight at the age of eighteen. And where Jordan had his own Colonel Parker figure in high-profile sports agent David Falk, LeBron has entrusted the care of his public image to one of his high school buddies. Thus, in response to the Vogue controversy, LeBron actually expressed his satisfaction with the cover and stated, ‘Everything my name is on is going to be criticized in a good way or bad way. Who cares what anyone says’ (quoted in USA Today 2008: par. 8). Since the LeBron James brand was flying high at the time, he could afford to brush aside the racial sensitivities of certain media commentators and academics. However, eventually LeBron learned the hard way that a would-be global icon cannot be so casually nonchalant about his public image. This lesson came in the form of one of the worst self-inflicted media blunders in the history of professional sports—The Decision.

The Hometown Hero If the African American community was invested in LeBron James, there was another group of people that certainly looked on themselves as the prime spiritual stakeholders in the LeBron brand—Cleveland sports fans. Although there are individual teams more famous for their suffering, perhaps no city is as known for sports misery as Cleveland, which has suffered through a series of particularly painful sports heartbreaks. When LeBron was drafted, he was expected to exorcise decades of demons. ‘LeBron is going to have to be the savior in Cleveland, there’s no getting around that,’ said former NBA player Joe Dumars right after the 2003 NBA Draft (quoted in Sports Illustrated 2003: par. 4). Nike quickly tapped into Cleveland’s LeBron mania, even erecting what can only be considered a public monument to LeBron that drew strongly on the savior narrative. This shrine was the ten-story-high, 212-foot-wide LeBron billboard that served as the local centerpiece of the aforementioned ‘Witness’ campaign and ‘dominated the city’s skyline for years’ (CBSSports 2010: par. 1). The image (Illustration 1) depicts James with outstretched arms and his head thrown back, an obvious allusion to his pre-game ritual. However, the visual composition also invokes two other iconic images. First, it recalls Nike’s iconic Michael Jordan ‘Wings’ poster, which depicts Michael Jordan with his arms outspread, and second, both images allude strongly to the image of Jesus on the cross. While the billboard quickly became an ‘iconic image of James’ (CBSSports 2010: par. 1), it was clearly more 74

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Illustration 1: The iconic ‘Witness’ billboard in downtown Cleveland.

than that. It was an icon for (and of) Cleveland. As Lisa Cartwright and Marita Sturken write, ‘[a]n icon is an image […] that has great symbolic meaning for many people’ (2009: 36). The image of the ‘savior’ LeBron represented hope for the nearly bankrupt city of Cleveland. On the court, the Cavs’ fortunes improved markedly, even reaching the NBA Finals for the first time ever in 2007. However, as his contract was expiring in 2010, LeBron had still failed to deliver the long-awaited NBA Championship. In 2010, the Cavs bowed out to the Celtics in five games, with LeBron turning in singularly uninspired performances in the last two losses. Just as in the year before, when the Cavs lost to the Orlando Magic in the Conference Finals, the whispers began that LeBron had quit on his team and that he was tired of shouldering the expectations of Cavs fans on his own. Nevertheless, before the season was over, Ohio had already launched a full-court press to keep LeBron in town. As early as May, Ohio Governor Ted Strickland summoned local celebrities to sing ‘We are LeBron’ to the tune of ‘We are the World’. The video was posted on YouTube, and a website was launched to implore LeBron to stay in Cleveland (pleasedontleave23.com). However, many fans stuck with the old-school media to send their messages to LeBron. Playing on the Nike slogan of ‘Just Do It’, T-shirts pleaded ‘Just Stay’, fans helped pay for a billboard that optimistically proclaimed ‘Born Here. Raised Here. 75

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Plays Here. Stays Here,’ and the LeBron James Grandmothers Fan Club wrote him a letter. Prominent sportswriter Joe Posnanski, who was born and raised in Cleveland, voiced the hopes of a community in his poignant column entitled ‘Look Homeward, Homie’: Truth is, LeBron, you are the first national sports icon to play in Cleveland since Jim Brown. You are the sports soul for a city that loves sports, the promise for a city that wants something to go right, just once. You are the hope, LeBron. Fair? Unfair? We are who we are. (2010: par. 4)

Decisiongate By July, LeBron mania had reached a fever pitch, and LeBron’s representatives approached ESPN to inquire about the network’s interest in broadcasting a one-hour prime-time special about LeBron James’ decision, which eventually aired on July 8, 2010 (ESPN 2010a). According to the Nielsen ratings, nearly ten million Americans tuned in to witness the spectacle, resulting in a rating of 7.3 (Huffington Post 2010; Kimball 2010: par. 1). As CNBC’s Darren Rovell (2010) notes, The Decision thus had a higher rating than the 2007 NBA Finals, LeBron James’ previous highlight on national television, which only scored a 6.2. This stunning statistic is a remarkable testament to the iconic status achieved by LeBron James and the way in which iconic athletes transcend the meaning of their sporting endeavors. These ten million people did not tune in to witness feats of superhuman athletic prowess, but rather to see the resolution of a human drama that pitted the conflicting human longing for individual achievement against the bonds of loyalty that tie individuals to their communities. After an opening montage of earlier interview clips and some speculation from commentators in the ESPN studio, the scene switches to a high school gym in Connecticut, where LeBron and the interviewer Jim Gray are seated in traditional high canvas ‘director’s chairs’ facing each other (Illustration 2). LeBron’s heavily tattooed body is covered by a redplaid shirt, a wardrobe choice that would go on to become a standard element of the many parodies that would soon follow this ‘event’. However, as with the big decision he was there to announce, LeBron ultimately had few attractive sartorial options. For example, his desire to finally emerge from the long shadow of his childhood idol (as evident from his much [self-]hyped decision to change his number from 23 to 6 earlier in the summer of 2010) precluded the business suit. Another standard option for athletes, team-related attire, was not an option, since LeBron was, temporarily, a man without a country, and hip-hop urban attire ran the risk of being too threatening for the white, mainstream section of the fan base.5 Lacking image guidance (Nike was not consulted on this extravaganza), LeBron somehow settled on a preppy rendition of the classic red-checkered country farm-boy shirt that somehow manages to conflate both racial and class-related stereotypes. 76

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Illustration 2: LeBron James and Jim Gray surrounded by children during The Decision.

After 26 mind-numbing minutes, King James finally announced: ‘This fall, I’m gonna take my talents to South Beach and join the Miami Heat.’ Watching the rest of the show was like watching the never-ending train wreck scene in the recent movie Super 8 (2011). Matthew C. Whitaker writes that ‘icons […] engender intense reactions in people’ (2008: xviii), and it didn’t take long for ESPN to pipe in some ‘intense’ fan reactions. Live footage showed the ecstatic fan celebrations in Miami and the shocked faces of the fans in Cleveland bars, which eventually gave way to images of fans in Cleveland burning LeBron jerseys. This jersey burning has enormous symbolic power, not only for its connotative link to flag desecration. Clothing is ‘one of the easiest ways of identifying oneself with a particular basketball icon’ (Andrews, Carrington, Jackson, and Mazur 1996: 445), and by burning his jersey, Cleveland fans were dramatically severing the bonds of identification with their former hero. Although LeBron actually said some of the ‘right’ things in the subsequent interviews (e.g., playing down the importance of individual players) and even apologized to Cleveland when he was asked if he had anything to add, these positive things were lost amid a sea of awkward, opportunistic marketing placements. The press, as expected, submitted their negative reviews, blasting James and his sycophantic ESPN cohorts for the excessive hype and the awkward staging of the whole special. Of course, it is difficult not to read a certain level of self-loathing in such responses, since surely all of the media bears some responsibility for this spectacle. Even before the show aired, ESPN analyst Jackie MacMullan had pointed out the absurdity of the show, while using first person plural pronouns to acknowledge the culpability of both the media and the fans: ‘I’m a big fan of LeBron James but really, a one-hour special for a guy that hasn’t really done anything? […] It’s unfathomable, yet we’re all part of feeding the beast. We created this monster, and he’s just playing along’ (quoted in Sandomir 2010: par. 8). 77

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Semantic Antics: Of Iconic Events and Appropriations However, press reactions alone do not create an iconic media event, and The Decision was certainly one such event. Following film scholar Barbara Klinger, one could argue that the iconicity of a televised event can best be measured in ‘the sheer volume of commentary [on the web], including the dissonant postings on message boards […] and the varied appropriations of e-cinema parodies’ (2006: 225). Klinger goes on to emphasize that the heterogeneity of these appropriations is the key to the longevity of the iconic event, and the response to The Decision was nothing if not heterogeneous. One ambitious fan group created a mash-up of The Decision and the movie Inception, which suggested that ‘A Dream Team is assigned to plant an Inception into the mind of LeBron James to sign with the Miami Heat’ (SliceFriedGold 2010). Other media figures were also quick to appropriate this iconic event. Musician John Mayer staged his own parody (2010), which was basically a promotion for his upcoming tour, and Old Spice pitchman Isaiah Mustafa lampooned the essential triviality of the event by using his parody to announce his decision to go to South Beach to get a tan (AOLPopEater 2010). The emphasis on the triviality of the event and LeBron’s immense narcissism was also the main thrust behind most of the other e-parodies, in which the main ‘actors’ solemnly announced the most trivial of decisions. The definitive production of this type was performed just a week after The Decision at the ESPY (Excellence in Sports Performance Yearly) Award Show (ESPN 2010d). In the parody, a stone-faced Steve Carrell, playing the role of LeBron, solemnly announces to Paul Rudd, cast as interviewer Jim Gray, that he has decided to eat at Outback Steakhouse instead of Chili’s. The bit highlights an important aspect of iconic exchange and appropriation. While The Decision clearly drew much of its discursive resonance from the iconic reserves of its protagonist, in order for a representation of an icon to be suitable material for appropriation (and thereby become iconic itself), it must have certain signifiers that help the audience of the appropriations connect them to the original. These signifiers can be both visual and textual. In the case of The Decision, the main signifiers, which appeared over and over in the many appropriations, were LeBron’s checkered shirt, the staging of the event (i.e., two individuals seated face-to-face on high canvas director’s chairs), and the selfaggrandizing phrasing of LeBron’s announcement. The Carrell-Rudd bit mimicked all of these aspects (right down to Carrell’s line, ‘I have decided to take my appetite to the Outback Steakhouse’), thereby establishing the link necessary to transform the iconic ‘decision’ from a celebration of LeBron’s importance to a condemnation of his narcissism.

Regicide in Cleveland While these parodies featured a mostly lighthearted tone, the response from Cleveland was distinctly different. Before the evening was over, Cavs owner Dan Gilbert set the tone by posting a vitriolic open letter to LeBron. Gilbert’s letter, which was also subjected 78

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to appropriation,6 calls out LeBron’s narcissism, calling the event ‘a several day, narcissistic, self-promotional build-up culminating with a national TV special of his “decision” unlike anything ever “witnessed” in the history of sports’ (quoted in Kanalley 2010: par. 6). However, the main force of Gilbert’s attack centers around the discourse that was upmost in the minds of Clevelanders, the discourse of community loyalty. The letter contains repeated references to ‘disloyalty’, ‘betrayal’, and desertion and suggests that LeBron will take the ‘so-called “curse” on Cleveland, Ohio’ with him (quoted in Kanalley 2010: par. 20). The day after The Decision, Gilbert’s company Fathead, which produces life-size wall graphics of figures from popular culture, lowered the price tag of James Fatheads from $99.99 to $17.41—tellingly the birth year of Benedict Arnold, who famously ‘has gone down in history not as a hero but as a villain, a military traitor’ (Henretta 1997: par. 5). This reaction is evidence of the powerful role played by iconic figures in the articulation of cultural values and also demonstrates the different discourses at play within LeBron’s various iconic ‘constituencies’. While the national sports icon is viewed with something akin to respect and admiration, the local sports icon is loved and revered by the local fans. In this particular fantasy, heroic fellow citizens meet on the field (or court) of battle to fight bravely for the honor and glory of their cherished hometowns. Needless to say, LeBron’s Akron roots (as well as his public statements and tattooing the area code of his hometown on his body) intensified this illusion considerably. With The Decision, one might say that LeBron broke the fourth wall that sustains the illusion upon which local sports fandom is built, or what Louis Althusser, in his definition of ideology called ‘the imaginary relationship of individuals to their real conditions of existence’ (1972: 162). On a rational level, most contemporary sports fans, who constantly see teams buying and selling players like commodities to maximize team performance and profitability, know that LeBron spoke the truth in The Decision when, in response to images of his jersey being burned, he stated, ‘Put the shoe on the other foot, you know, the Cavs would have got rid of me at one point. […] This is a business. And I had seven great years in Cleveland, and I hope the fans understand.’ However, Cleveland’s response showed the pain of having one’s ‘imaginary relationship’ with reality destroyed. Shortly after the broadcast, LeBron’s iconic Cleveland billboard was stoned and defaced by angry fans, which prompted Nike to remove the billboard a few days later. On the Internet, multiple videos of fans burning LeBron jerseys soon appeared, and some outraged fans even took this to the next logical, yet highly disturbing, step by launching a BurnLeBron website, which was dominated by pictures of LeBron going up in flames. The site evokes chilling associations of the extrajudicial mob ‘justice’ faced by blacks who offended the white majority in the segregated South, for, as film scholar Adam Lowenstein has put it in a different context, ‘the visual iconography of lynching overwhelms the images’ (2010: 119). In the print media, several images appeared directly after The Decision that commented on the impact of this ‘event’ on LeBron’s iconicity. Perhaps the most iconic image to emerge 79

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Illustration 3: ESPN’s 2010 NBA Season Preview alludes to both the iconic Plain Dealer cover and one of the most iconic images in comics history.

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in the direct aftermath of The Decision took up the entire cover of the Cleveland Plain Dealer of July 9, 2010. The cover features a full-body shot of James in his Cavs uniform with his back to the camera. A one-word headline forlornly proclaims ‘Gone’, and a small caption points to LeBron’s finger saying ‘7 years in Cleveland. No rings.’ A few months later, an image appearing in ESPN’s 2010 NBA Season Preview (ESPN 2010c), made in collaboration with Marvel Comics, connected the Plain Dealer cover with one of the most iconic panels in comics history (Illustration 3). In The Amazing Spider-Man #50, Peter Parker dumps his Spider-Man gear in a waste bin in a deserted alley, since no matter how many people he saves, only his alter ego ever receives accolades. While leaving his costume, Parker says to himself that ‘every boy […] must become a man’ (Lee 1967: 8). Interestingly, James repeatedly emphasized in interviews prior to The Decision (and in the show itself) how Cleveland had watched him growing from an eighteen-year-old boy to a man. Much like Peter decides in Spider-Man #50 that becoming a man means burying his past alter ego, so does the Season Preview’s cartoon LeBron conclude that in order to earn what really counts (i.e., championships), he has to leave his alter ego behind—‘King James No More!’ reads the caption.7

The Return of the King Although the image shows LeBron walking away from Cleveland, it is important to recognize the implied value behind this scene. Despite the level of implied sympathy for Cleveland, the scene tries to justify LeBron’s decision (if not his Decision): The King is leaving his kingdom, but to go on a quest for the holy grail of the NBA—championships. It is not surprising to find this line of argumentation in an ESPN publication, when one considers the company’s significant investment in its ‘Chosen One’ and the amount of criticism the network also received for aiding and abetting The Decision. Despite the blowback from the show, ESPN was too heavily invested in LeBron to walk away. Instead, they doubled down on their LeBron bet, launching a special website (the Heat Index) to track the progress of the new ‘super team’ and sending a film crew to cover every minute of pre-season training camp. The Spider-Man-influenced image appeared in the issue’s ‘Cleveland’ season preview, where it would have been unacceptable to include any image that was too openly pro-LeBron, but the magazine showed no such restraint with the cover image. The cover of the season preview features cartoon super hero renditions of Kobe Bryant, LeBron James, and Kevin Durant, with LeBron cast as Captain America. It is not surprising that ESPN would feature its Chosen One as one of the most iconic American figures, but the fact that LeBron James is not just anyone, but Captain America, ‘a hero covered in red, white, and blue, who defends America with passion against those who do not share the nation’s values’ (Dittmer 2009: 100), is significant. 8 This choice is indicative of ESPN’s concerted efforts to counteract the iconoclastic efforts of the Cavaliers’ ownership and fan base (and other parties) to link LeBron with America’s 81

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iconic traitors. Instead, ESPN used this image in an attempt to link James to the values that Captain America so passionately defends. However, despite their best efforts, LeBron’s image problems were significant, and ESPN, with its shared Decision taint, was in no position to resolve them. In October 2010, Nike brought its considerable power into the post-Decision ideological fray in the form of a 90-second LeBron James ad entitled ‘LeBron Rise’ (nikebasketball 2010). The spot opens backstage of The Decision. Wearing his iconic shirt, LeBron sits in his director’s chair, but the chair opposite him is empty. Looking down, he asks, as if to himself, ‘What should I do?’ He then turns to the camera and addresses the viewer, asking, ‘Should I admit that I’ve made mistakes?’ This pattern then repeats several times, with LeBron first asking the question and then suggesting a possible answer using the interrogative form. The spot ends with a slow motion shot of LeBron soaring towards the basket for a finger roll layup, as LeBron’s voice asks, ‘Should I be who you want me to be?’ The answer is provided by the Nike slogan, ‘Just Do It’. In the mainstream press, the ad was well received. For those gainfully employed within the media and marketing apparatus that surrounds professional sports in America, this was another episode in the ongoing King James saga, which was ultimately more marketable than the sport itself. The standard line among sportswriters is that they ‘root for the story’. For them, this was like the sequel to The Decision, and it was reviewed based on its merits as a marketing/PR production. On this level, many deemed it a success and likened it favorably to Nike’s previous attempts to salvage Tiger Woods’ image after his infidelity scandal broke.

The (Re-)Do-It-Yourself Iconic Spot Of course, once again ‘official reviews’ were only the beginning. Due to the sheer volume of media attention, the ad quickly went viral, with over 6.4 million people viewing the spot on Nike’s official YouTube channel. And unlike The Decision, the ‘Rise’ ad seems practically customized for use in the realm of iconic exchange. Where The Decision ‘suffered’ from a relative dearth of iconic signifiers, ‘Rise’ practically drowns in them. With its ‘dialogic’ script, its distinctive structure, its mixing of audio-visual styles, and its catalog of meaning-laden references to iconic pop culture figures and events, the ad offered a perfect vehicle for iconic appropriation. In fact, within two weeks of its release, the first allusion to the ad was already appearing in the ultimate pop culture seismograph—South Park. In ‘Mysterion Rises’ (Parker 2010), Tony Hayward, the former CEO of BP who rose to global notoriety thanks to his infamous excuse about the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico in the summer of 2010, is seen in the iconic pose and a setting that clearly alludes to the spot (Illustration 4), saying the tragic spill in the gulf is a disaster that should have never happened and as head of the oil company responsible I would like to say: What should I do? Should I admit we’ve 82

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Illustration 4: South Park appropriating the ‘Rise’ spot. South Park © Comedy Central, 2010.

made mistakes? Should I remind you we’ve done this before? What should I do? Should I find newer and better ways to say ‘I’m sorry’? Other characters join in, parodying nearly every single shot of the commercial. On the one hand, by featuring Tony Hayward, the parody obviously connects LeBron’s (pseudo-)excuse to similar (pseudo-)excuses, which had, however, much more serious consequences, thereby underscoring the insignificance of LeBron James’ decision. On the other hand, the explicit presence of BP highlights the capitalist impulses that obviously led to the ‘Rise’ commercial. South Park creators Matt Stone and Trey Parker were not the only media players to appropriate the iconic ‘Rise’ ad. For example, Fox Sports’ Dan Patrick (Casey 2010) and ESPN’s Michelle Beadle (ESPN SportsNation 2010) produced parody versions to promote their own media productions. However, perhaps more important in the present context is the abundance of fan-produced contributions that sprung up. Indeed, the events that transpired after the ‘Rise’ ad provide clear evidence of the important claim put forth by Henry Jenkins in his seminal book Convergence Culture: ‘[T]he power is shifting from institutions that have always been run top down, hording information at the top, telling us how to run our lives, to a new paradigm of power that is democratically distributed and shared by all of us’ (2006: 211). In this case, one did not need to be a media personality to contribute to the national, intermedial icon negotiation triggered by the ad. Dozens of ‘response videos’ soon appeared on YouTube. These ran the gambit from amusing parodies (e.g., a version making fun of Brett Favre’s indecision about retiring [Yacenda 2011]) to irreverent mock promotions for actual events (e.g., a mashup promotion for an upcoming UFC event [FreeFights4You 2010]) to simply bizarre clips (e.g., a seemingly naked young woman admonishing LeBron to pray for forgiveness [daughterofgodinzion 2010]). 83

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The Fans’ Decision The wide range of comic appropriations of the ‘Rise’ ad testify to the function of icons, that is, their immense mutability and their usefulness as a medium of ideological negotiation. However, there were also a number of not-so-lighthearted appropriations, and these cases speak more to the content of sports icons in particular—that is, the specific values that sports icons typically come to represent in American culture. As already described above, for Cleveland, the primary value associated with LeBron was loyalty to the community. For them, the ‘Rise’ ad was like kicking them when they were down, for it showed that LeBron rejected their criticisms and seemingly suffered no remorse. However, the ad helped Cleveland move beyond the initial pain of betrayal by crystallizing their anger and resolving the semantic confusion that had sprung up around their sacred icon. With over 4 million views at the time of writing, perhaps the best example of this ‘healing’ process at work is an expertly edited clip posted on YouTube by Dan Wantz (2010). The clip mixes LeBron’s questions with answers given by ‘average’ Clevelanders: LeBron: Clevelander: LeBron: Clevelander:

Should I remind you that I’ve done this before? […] Boston … game 5 … we watched … you quit. Should I really believe I ruined my legacy? […] Traitors don’t leave legacies.

After Clevelanders label LeBron everything from ‘backstabber’ to ‘traitor’, the video ends with an upside down Nike swoosh and the word ‘Quitness’. Using web 2.0 technology, the Clevelanders thereby issued a resounding verdict of ‘Guilty!’ The ritual sacrifice of LeBron James was necessary for the preservation of the Cleveland sports narrative, a story whose Jobian essence is clearly visible in the title of a popular local sports blog—God Hates Cleveland Sports. The narrative unites Cleveland sports fans in shared, ‘noble’ suffering, and by condemning LeBron, the community claimed the iconic image of LeBron for its own, forever freezing its signification within the Cleveland community as a symbol of betrayal. While people outside of Cleveland felt some sympathy for the seemingly cursed city, there was a larger discourse at work for these people, which informed their most critical responses. This discourse centers around the cherished belief that America is a meritocracy—a land of opportunity where any individual can achieve success. At the heart of this ‘meritocracy discourse’ lies a proclaimed reverence for struggle in the face of adversity, which one can trace right back to what Max Weber referred to as the ‘protestant work ethic’ (2003). Among sports fans, the common view is that this essential struggle for success is ritually enacted on the playing fields/courts of America. In this context, ‘common’ players (i.e., not the superstars) are expected to ‘leave it all on the field’ each game, a popular sports expression that means to do their best to contribute to each individual match, despite their inherent limitations. These players, referred to as ‘role players’ or even ‘blue collar heroes’, are often local fan favorites, perhaps due to the ease with which the ‘average’ person can identify with them. 84

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However, for would-be icons, the narrative arc stretches beyond individual games or even seasons. For LeBron, the power of his iconic image ‘hinge[s] on the authenticity effect of a life lived’ (Leypoldt 2010: 8). With his Horatio Alger childhood story and early years as the hometown hero for the Cavs, LeBron’s narrative was proceeding perfectly. However, since the meritocratic heroic myth required him to use his substantial gifts and his ‘will to succeed’ to overcome every obstacle in his path to success alone, the decision to join forces with a super team violated the ‘rules’ of meritocracy. After The Decision, even Air Jordan himself weighed in on this violation. In a widely circulated interview, His Airness stated, ‘There’s no way, with hindsight, I would’ve ever called up Larry [Bird], called up Magic [Johnson] and said, “Hey, look, let’s get together and play on one team.” […] In all honesty, I was trying to beat those guys’ (quoted in ESPN 2010b: par. 3). When the ‘Rise’ ad challenged this verdict by trying to paint a sympathetic picture of LeBron, one fan quickly (Hinueber 2010) took the opportunity to strike back by creating a video mashup of the ‘Rise’ ad and the iconic Michael Jordan Nike ‘Maybe’ ad. The original Jordan ad was structurally similar to ‘Rise’. In the ad, a Michael Jordan voiceover narrates a series of responses to criticisms that he ruined the game, each of which begins with the word ‘maybe’. Of course, the difference is that Jordan was responding to criticisms that were never really made (thanks in part to his legendary image control), and the ad simply glorified his hard work ethic (e.g., ‘Maybe I led you to believe that basketball was a Godgiven gift, and not something that I worked for … every day of my life’). Therefore, set against LeBron’s pleading ‘What should I do?’ refrain, the final words from Jordan take on a new meaning: ‘Or maybe you’re just making excuses.’ The message is clear: LeBron and Nike can make all the justifications that they want, but LeBron will never be a true iconic hero like Michael Jordan.

Conclusion: Thoughts on Iconic Exchange Rates Yet the question becomes, ‘Who is making excuses?’ We would suggest that Decisiongate actually revealed some problems inherent in casting an iconic sports figure as the hero of a meritocratic narrative. First, there is the inherent incompatibility between the discourse of heroic individualism and team sports. Due to its format, basketball is often referred to as a ‘stars’ league’—meaning that individual players can have a greater influence on the fortunes of their teams than in some other sports. However, basketball is ultimately a team sport, and there are limits to what any one player can do. Any fan with any sense of NBA history knows this at some level, and LeBron James knows it as well. Already in The Decision, LeBron offered the following defense to the insinuations that he was not ‘great’ enough to win championships himself: ‘[Y]ou become a superstar individually, but you become a champion as a team. And I understand that, and I know the history of the game.’ In fact, there is a long list of great basketball players who never won a championship because they simply never ended up on the right team.9 Thus, the ‘teamwork’ element of success stories in team sports 85

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inherently works against that heroic individualist discourse upon which meritocratic myths are normally based. The concept of landing on the ‘right team’ also highlights a second problem. Coming just a year before the looming labor dispute, the whole incident forced fans to confront the fundamental inequality of the NBA, where all teams are not created equal, and smallmarket teams such as Cleveland face a constant uphill struggle to compete. The carefully constructed illusion is that success depends on the athletic ability of the players on the court, and the fantasies take it even further to believe that the passion or dedication of the fan base can somehow impact what happens on the court. But the commentary that swirled around The Decision forced fans to confront the reality that the NBA is not a level playing field, and the teams with more money have a distinct advantage. Furthermore, since the popular mythology views sports as a metaphor for life, this stark economic reality carried disturbing implications for American society, particularly in the context of the recent recession and bank bailouts. This fundamental inequality also leads to the final incompatibility unmasked by The Decision. On the night of LeBron’s announcement, sportswriter Will Leitch captured some of the feelings of betrayal felt by sports fans around the country: Loving sports, by definition, requires a certain suspension of disbelief and logic. We are all pouring our hearts and souls into cheering for men (and women) who do not care about us, who are not like us, who are not the type of people we would ever associate with (or even meet) in real life […]. We trust that they will recognize […] that this all exists because we allow it to exist, that the illusion must be maintained. We trust that they understand how good they have it, how much we give them, against our own self-interest. We trust that they are not laughing at us […]. (2010: par. 2–3) Considering the relative racial compositions of the NBA and its fan base, particularly as represented by the media, it is difficult not to see the racial subtext in this condemnation. ‘We’, the (white) fans, allow this to exist, and they, the players, are expected to wear their smiles and be grateful for the roles assigned to them. One might point out that these same fans ‘allow’ the Akron ghettos to exist; they ‘allow’ the twisted NCAA system to exist, in which universities make untold millions of dollars off the unpaid labor of their mostly African American players; and when the NBA changed its rules to prevent anymore LeBrons coming straight to the NBA without serving their time in the NCAA, these same fans applauded the wise benevolent actions of the league in protecting the youths of America. All of these points resonate in LeBron’s final question in ‘Rise’: ‘Should I be who you want me to be?’ In this context, the response, ‘Just Do It’, provides a definitive rejection of society’s claims and also a reiteration of a time-honored American credo succinctly expressed by Ralph Waldo Emerson: ‘What [he] must do is all that concerns [him], not what the people think’ (1981: 38). 86

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However, it would seem that America is still not comfortable having its Emersonian ideals proclaimed by an African American. This fact highlights a final important dimension that was lacking from most of the commentary surrounding The Decision. Writing about a recent HBO documentary that chronicles the 1980s-era rivalry of Larry Bird’s (largely white) Celtics and Magic Johnson’s (largely African American) Lakers (Edelman 2010), Bostonborn African American sportswriter Howard Bryant stressed the film’s glossing over of the racial aspect of that rivalry, pointing out that most African Americans in the Boston area ‘rooted for the Sixers and the Lakers (and later the Detroit Pistons, but never the Celtics). The Celtics were the white fan’s team’ (2010: par. 9). Similarly, when Will Leitch writes in the quote above that athletes are ‘nothing like us’, this statement clearly originates in a particular cultural identity. What the mainstream media coverage of The Decision so often overlooked was that LeBron is in some ways very much like many disadvantaged, urban, primarily African American kids across the United States. Outside of Cleveland, one cannot help but wonder if the young kids in other cities around the United States were particularly worried about what jersey their own Horatio Alger hero was wearing. In fact, based on T-shirt sales (cf. McCarthy 2010), it would seem that Nike’s core market for LeBron-related merchandise was little affected by his ‘treacherous’ decision. And here one sees the real dynamics of the American iconic exchange at work. As with the NBA and the other exchange located in downtown NYC, the iconic exchange of cultural values does not take place on a level playing field. Although resistance and reinterpretation can come from any corner of society, those with the most financial clout and marketing know-how (i.e., Nike) are in a strong position to influence the ways in which icons come to represent and reinforce certain values among certain groups of people. In the long run, perhaps the only ‘charge’ that really sticks in the public image condemnation of LeBron James is narcissism. The myopic self-absorption required to stage a one-hour show to celebrate your own career decision, which was destined to break the hearts of thousands of people, is truly staggering, but then, should we really be surprised? In a society that has fostered the recent meteoric rise of a website based around a mechanism that allows users to post their every action for their friends to see and followed that up with a mobile service that ensures that these exciting updates can keep flowing even when they are away from their computers, could it be that LeBron James is nothing more than the iconic hero that America deserves?

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Anderson, Lars (2009), The First Star: Red Grange and the Barnstorming Tour That Launched the NFL. New York: Random House. Andrews, David L., Ben Carrington, Steven J. Jackson, and Zbigniew Mazur (1996), ‘Jordanscapes: A Preliminary Analysis of the Global Popular,’ Sociology of Sport Journal, 13: 4, pp. 428–457. AOLPopEater (2010), LeBron James’ ‘Decision’ Parody with Old Spice Guy Isaiah Mustafa. http:// www.youtube.com/watch?v=dJRZICdXl6k. Accessed 22 October 2010. Armstrong, Edward G. (2001), ‘Michael Jordan and His Uniform Number,’ in David L. Andrews (ed.), Michael Jordan, Inc.: Corporate Sport, Media Culture, and Late Modern America. Albany: SUNY Press, pp. 15–33. Belman, Kristopher (2008), More Than a Game. North Hollywood: Harvey Mason Media. Berger, Peter L. (1969), The Sacred Canopy: Elements of a Sociological Theory of Religion. Garden City: Anchor Books. Bryant, Howard (2010), ‘Magic, Bird Were More Than Rivals,’ ESPN Commentary [online], 11 March, http://sports.espn.go.com/espn/commentary/news/story?id=4985885. Accessed 18 December 2010. Carroll, John M. (1999), Red Grange and the Rise of Modern Football. Urbana: University of Illinois Press. Cartwright, Lisa, and Marita Sturken (2009), Practices of Looking: An Introduction to Visual Culture, 2nd Edition. New York: Oxford University Press. Casey, Shawn (2010), Dan Patrick Rise Commercial—LeBron James Parody. http://www.youtube. com/watch?v=L-oMXQkx9JY. Accessed 19 December 2010. CBSSports (2010), ‘Iconic LeBron Billboard in Cleveland Taken Down,’ CBSSports.com [online], 10 July, http://www.cbssports.com/nba/story/13625841/iconic-lebron-billboardin-cleveland-taken-down. Accessed 21 August 2010. Chappell, Kevin (2004), ‘Can LeBron James Repeat the Jordan Miracle?,’ Ebony, 59: 3, pp. 124–128. daughterofgodinzion (2010), Re: NIKE COMMERCIAL—LEBRON RISE. http://www.youtube. com/watch?v=srtfMwBAfCc. Accessed 19 December 2010. Dittmer, Jason (2009), ‘Fighting for Home: Masculinity and the Constitution of the Domestic in Tales of Suspense and Captain America,’ in Lisa DeTora (ed.), Heroes of Film, Comics and American Culture: Essays on Real and Fictional Defenders of Home. Jefferson: McFarland, pp. 96–116. Edelman, Ezra (2010), Magic & Bird: A Courtship of Rivalry. New York: HBO. Emerson, Ralph Waldo ([1841] 1981), ‘Self-Reliance,’ in Emerson’s Essays. New York: Harper Perennial, pp. 31–66. ESPN (2010a), The Decision. Bristol: ESPN. (2010b), ‘Jordan Wouldn’t Have Called Magic, Bird,’ ESPN.com News [online], 19 July, http://sports.espn.go.com/nba/news/story?id=5391478. Accessed 18 December 2010. (2010c), NBA Preview, Special Issue of ESPN Magazine, November 2010. (2010d), Steve Carell’s ‘The Decision’—Spoofs LeBron James on the ESPY Awards (Uncut Version). http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0f7AtdF6B_0. Accessed 18 December 2010. ESPN SportsNation (2010), Great Spoof of LeBron James New Nike Ad RISE by Michelle Beadle. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ksR2M0afC5c. Accessed 18 December 2010. Freedman, Lew (2008), LeBron James: A Biography. Westport: Greenwood Press. 88

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Lowenstein, Adam (2010), ‘Living Dead: Fearful Attractions of Film,’ Representations, 110, pp. 105–128. Mayer, John (2010), Announcement. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5CzZAxj_OEE. Accessed 12 October 2010. McCarthy, Michael (2010), ‘LeBron James Passes Kobe Bryant for Best-Selling NBA Jersey,’ USA Today [online], 13 April, http://content.usatoday.com/communities/gameon/post/2011/04/ surprise-lebron-james-passes-kobe-bryant-in-jersey-sales-miami-heat-los-angeles-lakersboston-celtics-rajon-rondo-nba/1. Accessed 18 December 2010. McDonald, Mary G., and David L. Andrews (2002), ‘Michael Jordan: Corporate Sport and Postmodern Celebrityhood,’ in David L. Andrews & Steven J. Jackson (eds.), Sport Stars: The Cultural Politics of Sporting Celebrity. New York: Routledge, pp. 20–35. McDonald, Mary G., and Jessica Toglia (2010), ‘Dressed for Success? The NBA’s Dress Code, the Working of Whiteness and Corporate Culture,’ Sport in Society: Cultures, Commerce, Media, Politics, 13: 6, pp. 970–983. Morgan, David Lee (2003), The Rise of a Star: LeBron James. Cleveland: Gray & Company. nikebasketball (2010), LeBron Rise. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cdtejCR413c. Accessed 25 December 2010. Parker, Trey (2010), ‘Mysterion Rises,’ South Park, Season 14, Episode 12. New York: Comedy Central. Parry, Keith D. (2009), ‘Search for the Hero: An Investigation into the Sports Heroes of British Sports Fans,’ Sport in Society: Cultures, Commerce, Media, Politics, 12: 2, pp. 212–226. Poole, Gary Andrew (2008), The Galloping Ghost: Red Grange, an American Football Legend. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. Posnanski, Joe (2010), ‘Look Homeward, Homie,’ SIVault [online], 24 May, http://sportsillustrated. cnn.com/vault/article/magazine/MAG1169734/index.htm. Accessed 25 December 2010. Rader, Benjamin G. (1981), ‘Compensatory Sport Heroes: Ruth, Grange and Dempsey,’ Journal of Popular Culture, 16: 4, pp. 11–22. Rovell, Darren (2010), ‘Would Outrate Cavs–Spurs,’ Twitter [online], 8 July, http://twitter.com/ darrenrovell/status/18115931727. Accessed 25 December 2010. sackingbedford (2009), LeBron James Church Commercial: Nike Ad. http://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=VvnaVoPbUI8. Accessed 25 December 2010. Sandomir, Richard (2010), ‘ESPN Clears the Lane to Go One-on-One With James,’ New York Times [online], 7 July, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/08/sports/basketball/08sandomir. html. Accessed 25 December 2010. Schwartz, Larry (2007), ‘Galloping Ghost Scared Opponents,’ ESPN SportsCentury [online], n. d., http://espn.go.com/sportscentury/features/00014213.html. Accessed 18 August 2011. SliceFriedGold (2010), LeBRONCEPTION (Inception LeBron James Parody Spoof). http://www. youtube.com/watch?v=NqH5e7N11nw. Accessed 25 December 2010. snoozer (2006), Witness. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VvnaVoPbUI8. Accessed 25 December 2010. Sports Illustrated (2003), ‘Darko Detroit,’ Sports Illustrated [online], 26 June, http:// sportsillustrated.cnn.com/basketball/nba/2003/draft/news/2003/06/26/pistons_milicic_ap/. Accessed 25 December 2010. 90

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Turner, Bryan S. (2010), ‘Religion in a Post-Secular Society,’ in Bryan S. Turner (ed.), The New Blackwell Companion to the Sociology of Religion. Malden: Blackwell, pp. 649–667. USA Today (2008), ‘LeBron James’ “Vogue” Cover Called Racially Insensitive,’ USA Today [online], 24 March, http://www.usatoday.com/life/people/2008-03-24-vogue-controversy_N. htm. Accessed 25 December 2010. Wahl, Grant (2002), ‘Ahead Of His Class,’ SIVault [online], February 18, http://sportsillustrated. cnn.com/vault/article/magazine/MAG1024928/index.htm. Accessed 25 December 2010. Wantz, Dan (2010), Lebron James ‘Rise’ Commercial & Cleveland’s Response. http://www.youtube. com/watch?v=NvgD9HNTMkM. Accessed 19 December 2010. Weber, Max ([1905] 2003), The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, trans. Talcott Parsons. Mineola: Dover Publications. West, Cornel (2001), Race Matters. New York: Vintage. Whitaker, Matthew C. (2008), ‘Introduction,’ in Matthew C. Whitaker (ed.), African American Icons of Sport: Triumph, Courage, and Excellence. Westport: Greenwood, pp. xxvii–xxi. Yacenda, Tony (2011), Brett Favre: Rise—‘What Should I Do? http://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=POyFvDgV2cU. Accessed 29 January 2011.

Notes 1 According to LexisNexis, SI has referred to 52 athletes as ‘The Chosen One’ since 1982. 2 Allen Iverson was one of the earlier potential heirs to Michael Jordan, but his gangsta appearance and outspokenly rebellious attitude did not go down too well with NBA management. 3 Tellingly, Lew Freedman writes in his LeBron James biography: ‘James was a raw talent. […] He had an actor’s ability to pick up mannerisms and styles. The quick learning curve enhanced the natural speed, jumping ability, and quickness already on hand’ (2008: 7; our emphasis). 4 Nike (and LeBron) has tried to ‘correct’ his image especially in its ‘The LeBrons’ commercials, in which LeBron is intentionally relocated to a domestic setting. The commercials have sparked an animated web series that premiered in April 2011. For more on LeBron as a black signifier in white corporate America, see Leonard (2009) and Guerrero (2011). 5 For more on the racial undertones of the NBA dress code, see McDonald & Toglia (2010). 6 A day after the ESPYs, Chili’s posted a message on their Facebook page humorously voicing their frustration about Carrell’s decision that perfectly mimics and even quotes verbatim in some places Gilbert’s letter. 7 The caption provides another allusion to The Amazing Spider-Man #50, which sports a ‘Spider-Man No More!’ caption on its cover in very similar font and color. 8 Objectively, the clear choice to ‘play’ Captain America would have been Kevin Durant— the loyal (he signed an extension around the same time with his small-town Oklahoma City Thunder), modest (he announced that decision to his fans with little fanfare via Twitter) star athlete who had recently led an underdog team of ‘second-tier’ American 91

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players to a gold medal at the FIBA World Championship when all the big stars (LeBron, Kobe) had decided they could not be bothered to sacrifice their summer vacations to participate. 9 Perhaps not coincidentally, Charles Barkley, who would appear on this list of superstars who never won a championship, was one of the most vocal critics of LeBron’s decision and even merited a special refutation in the ‘Rise’ ad.

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PART II Appropriating Iconic Figures

Chapter 4 O Superman: The Many Faces of the Man of Steel Bradley Bailey

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e have all come to know Superman, the tireless protector of humankind, as the defender of ‘truth, justice, and the American way,’ but whose America has Superman been charged with defending? Since its very beginnings, the American experience has come to be understood as something multivalent and fluid, protected by a constitution and administrative structures designed not only to absorb what is likely an unprecedented diversity of belief within a single society, but also to be capable of evolving as the nation itself undergoes its own evolution. It is therefore remarkable that the most recognizable mythic hero of a nation that prides itself so much on diversity of both opinion and racial/ethnic origin should not in some way reflect the profile and the processes of the nation more faithfully. A white male with unchecked power flying around unilaterally making decisions about what is right and wrong is about as far from the American democratic ideology as one could possibly imagine. Of course, over his 70-year history, Superman has found himself conflicted at times, struggling over complex issues with daunting gray areas that have bested even the most open of minds. However, even if we agree with comic book writer and editor Danny Fingeroth that the superhero’s values are a reflection of the values of the society that created him or her—and, by necessity, must also be malleable enough to absorb change within that society—it would still be the case that Superman is the defender of the majority, the mainstream. In Fingeroth’s words, .

the hero’s values are the society’s values. That’s not to say that the hero is Republican or Democrat, a Christian or a Jew. But the rules, both spoken and unspoken, that we live by—the ones that say, ‘Our society isn’t perfect, but it’s pretty damn good,’ are the rules on which superheroes agree. Ironically for a group of vigilantes, superheroes generally agree that the laws of the land need to be upheld. They believe that democracy is the best form of government. They believe in racial, religious, and gender parity; judge each individual on his or her own merits. In other words, without being overtly ideological, superheroes champion the consensus views of most residents of Western democracies. (2004: 160) That the iconic image of Superman has neither been understood unanimously as a signifier of the normative nor venerated universally as a symbol of benevolence and protection is a theme that has been explored by numerous contemporary artists. For these artists, Superman has functioned more effectively due to an exceptional symbolic versatility that makes him capable of representing extremes from mainstream nationalism to outsider alienation. For by

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the end of the twentieth century, Superman had developed into a highly complex signifier for a wide spectrum of social, political, and cultural groups and their agendas both at home and abroad. Thus, Superman has represented everything from a brute enforcer of American cultural hegemony to a closeted alien Other with conflicting public and private identities that closely mirror the struggle of those marginalized due to racial, gender, and sexual difference. Outside of his square-jawed good looks and Flash Gordon-inspired costume, the defender of all things status quo that we know today as Superman has little in common with the original Superman. Superman’s now familiar origins bear repeating here in brief. Against a background of Depression-era bread lines, anti-Semitism, and the rising paranoia over Euro-fascism in the late 1930s, Jewish Clevelanders Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster created a character from a doomed planet sent to earth to be the ‘champion of the oppressed’, as he was described in the original newspaper strip in 1939. Living a double life as the Man of Steel, Kal-El, and meek newspaper reporter, Clark Kent, Superman’s adventures in the modern urban city of Metropolis (a thinly veiled but surprisingly ethnically and racially homogenous New York City) attained unprecedented popularity, spawning not only the superhero genre but also the now pedestrian idea of a comic book series that focuses on a single original character (Daniels 1998: 41). Based in part on a host of influences both traditional and modern (including Flash Gordon, Tarzan, Moses, Hercules, Jesus, Doc Savage, the Scarlet Pimpernel, Douglas Fairbanks’ Zorro, Buck Rogers, the Shadow, Hugo Danner from Philip Wylie’s 1930 novel Gladiator, and Popeye), Superman has in turn inspired countless imitators with similar origins, double lives, and modi operandi. At the beginning, there was little question that Superman was a force for social change; even a small selection of storylines from the early issues of Action Comics in which Superman first appeared bears this contention out. From the seediest slums to the courtrooms of America’s justice system, anyone was capable of demonstrating criminal or otherwise malevolent behavior, and Superman was neither shy nor indecisive when it came to meting out condemnations and what he considered appropriate punishments. A prime example of this unilateralist approach occurs in Action Comics #8. When the mother of a convicted criminal pleads that her son’s disregard for the law was the result of the environment in which he was raised, Superman promptly razes the slum in question and forces the government to provide low-cost (read: subsidized) modern housing (Regalado 2007: 169). Aldo Regalado, who has written extensively on Superman within the context of modern society, suggests that ‘Superman evinced and reaffirmed the spirit of New Deal politics, with its ideals of social justice. Far from being an extension of official authority and culture, Superman often worked at odds with authority figures, fighting political and urban corruption’ (2005: 91). This is far from a hip, revisionist understanding of what Superman represented. Citing the superhero’s lack of respect for due process in The Mechanical Bride, Marshall McLuhan characterized Superman as ‘ruthlessly efficient in carrying on a one-man crusade against crooks and anti-social forces. In neither case is there any appeal to process of law. Justice is represented as an affair of personal strength alone’ (1951: 105). McLuhan was in turn anticipated by the slightly more fanatical Gershon Legman, who lamented that 98

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[i]nstead of teaching obedience to law, Superman glorifies the ‘right’ of the individual to take the law into his own hands […]. Instead of preaching the 100 percent Americanism that he and his cruder imitators express in hangmen’s suits of red-white-&-blue, Superman […] is really peddling a philosophy of ‘hooded justice’ in no way distinguishable from that of Hitler and the Ku Klux Klan. (1949: 118) The invective expressed by Legman was but a prelude to the work that would briefly cripple the entire comic book industry, psychiatrist Frederic Wertham’s diatribe about the apparent dangers that comics posed to juveniles titled Seduction of the Innocent. Published in 1954, Wertham leveled the unkindest cut against, among others, the Man of Steel: Actually Superman (with the big S on his uniform—we should, I suppose, be thankful that it is not an S.S.) needs an endless stream of new submen, criminals, and ‘foreignlooking’ people not only to justify his existence but even to make it possible. Superman has long been recognized as a symbol of violent race superiority. (34) Both Legman and Wertham sought to call Superman’s patriotism and motivations into question by drawing connections between the alien and the Nietzschean Übermensch, the super-evolved species of human that provided inspiration for Hitler’s ideas regarding nationalism and racial purity (Jones 2004: 80). Superman’s legacy, however, proved to be indestructible as well, as these accusations failed to lessen the popularity of the superhero for subsequent generations. What emerges, however, is the fundamental paradox that is Siegel’s and Shuster’s response to Social Darwinism: Kal-El, the alien immigrant Other vigilante with the Semitic-sounding name, triumphs over the modern city and its various social and industrial complexes—the price of victory: his heritage. When he assumes the WASPy guise of mild-mannered Clark Kent, the persona that enables him to infiltrate society, he loses his power and potency and becomes another nameless face in a crowd. Moreover, as a newspaper reporter (like Siegel had been in high school), Kent makes social commentary and can be an advocate for social change. However, he does this through the slow, limited means afforded by such channels as print media, while Superman effects instant change through strength, superhuman powers, and an unbending confidence in his convictions. As with any fictional character whose popularity grows to iconic heights, Superman’s image has undergone innumerable modifications over the course of his 70-year evolution. Some of the more obvious changes are those that inevitably result from being portrayed by dozens of writers and illustrators over the years, each with his or her own vision of the character, not to mention the portrayals of the various voice-over talents and live-action performers of stage and screen who have taken on the coveted role. Other changes include those that resulted from the broadening of the narrative and the resultant need for more 99

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characters for Superman and the object of his affection, Lois Lane, to interact with, including the doting copyboy and photographer Jimmy Olsen, their intimidating boss at the Daily Planet Perry White, and later Mary and Jonathan (‘Ma and Pa’) Kent, Kal-El’s adoptive parents who raise him in the aptly named town of Smallville (in the original narrative, the alien baby is found by a man on the side of the road and delivered to an orphanage). Indeed, Smallville’s location is never specifically identified, though its middle-American appearance led the producers of the 1978 film to locate the town in Kansas. This decision is consistent with the larger shift that took place in the portrayal of Superman from his early days as a left-wing defender of the innocent and disenfranchised to the comparatively conservative postwar Superman, who gradually lost the radical edge he had been endowed with by his original creators and became ‘an instrument of U.S. law’ (Bergfeld 2009: 58). Dennis O’Neil points out that Superman’s image was changing even before the end of the war: ‘Superman had grown more powerful physically, he had become more flamboyant personally, safer somehow—a scoutmaster in cape and boots’ (quoted in Bergfeld 2009: 58). This Superman represents the shift from the ‘champion of the oppressed’ to the later more geographically specific but politically ambiguous defender of ‘truth, justice, and the American way’ of the 1950s that came to dominate television and film portrayals of the superhero. This squeaky-clean image came to inform not only the feature film version of the character for popular audiences, but also Frank Miller’s casting of Superman as a Cold War-era government agent in his genre-redefining Batman series The Dark Knight Returns of 1986 (Miller, Janson, and Varley 2002). Here, Superman’s hardline black-or-white, right-or-wrong mentality is contrasted against Batman’s traditionally more complex and nuanced psychology. Superman was cast in a similar role in the recent award-winning limited series DC: The New Frontier (Cooke 2004), in which Superman is tapped by President Eisenhower shortly after World War II to assist in the incarceration of superheroes who failed to retire or register with the Congressional Committee on Un-American Activities. Superman’s obedience to American government authority is confirmed when he joins a ‘relief ’ effort in Indo-China, in which both he and Wonder Woman are sent to stabilize the region under the guise of humanitarian activities. Despite the vastness of Superman’s cultural territory and how thoroughly imbricated his image may be with popular American ideologies, Superman is also consumed by individuals, whose unique experiences of the superhero form a small but nonetheless considerable part of his reception. Part of the difficulty in dealing with individual responses to Superman is the virtually innumerable ways in which a person may have encountered the action hero, whether through the comic books, comic strips, novels, television (both live-action and animated), theatrical production, film, or commercial products, to name just the most likely avenues. While this multiplicity is endemic to the very nature of icons and their ubiquity, it is further complicated when the icon is not a living, breathing human, but rather a fictional character whose every manifestation is an act of creation and reinterpretation.1 Moreover, none of the origin stories, no matter how complex, ever explain exactly why Superman fights for ‘truth, justice, and the American way,’ which we implicitly read as democracy. This leaves us to assume that this intellectually and technologically advanced utopian Kryptonian society 100

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must have been philosophically advanced as well (as we would like to imagine ourselves) and thus enlightened regarding the importance of equality and individual rights for all. If we choose nurture over nature to explain Superman’s unwavering faith in democracy, then the answer is quite simple: He landed in the United States, was raised in an American home (or orphanage), and learned American values in American schools. Indeed, the matter of the seeming arbitrariness of Superman’s identification with the United States was broached in 1976 in issue #300 of Superman (Bates, Maggin, and Swan 1976). In this issue, the writers posit a then-present-day circumstance in which the infant Superman’s spacecraft lands in international waters in the North Pacific, and the U.S. and Soviet navies must race to claim the rocket, with the U.S. forces narrowly winning. Such a premise was further developed in the critically acclaimed miniseries Superman: Red Son by Mark Millar in 2003, in which Superman’s spaceship lands in the Ukraine rather than in Smallville in 1938. Chest emblazoned with the hammer and sickle rather than his familiar ‘S’ logo, Superman thus comes to be revered as ‘the champion of the common worker, [who] fights a never-ending battle for Stalin, socialism, and the international expansion of the Warsaw Pact’ (Millar 2009).2 As an icon with exceptional symbolic versatility, capable of representing extremes from mainstream nationalism to outsider alienation, Superman has been referenced frequently by contemporary artists to respond to the variegated terrain of the American sociocultural landscape. As Andrew Kirk has noted in his recent dissertation, Superman may simply be a comic book superhero, but his pop-culture status endows him with a ‘textually-specific readability that necessarily intertwines with the life experiences and worldviews of those consuming him, [which] results in numerous interpretations and responses that are salient for groups of consumers, despite being varied from group to group’ (2009: 39). Kirk cites John Fiske’s ‘Television: Polysemy and Popularity,’ in which Fiske explores the power struggle implicit in the struggle over meaning. ‘As a result,’ Kirk maintains, ‘consumers of popular culture texts—regardless of dominant or subordinate cultural group membership, or perhaps because of them—are able to produce their own interpretations for those texts, including interpretations that resist the dominant producer’s “intended” meanings’ (2009: 40). This polysemy is a result of the various levels of meaning that can be determined as encoded within the construction of the text or decoded during the reception of the text, not to mention the intertextual possibilities brought on by the author’s cross-referencing or other texts the reader must inevitably have in mind while reading. This ‘semiotic excess’, or the personal meanings that result from the interaction of individual reader and text, are, according to Fiske, what enable the culturally subordinated to experience the text in relation to the dominant cultural system. Each text, then, has the capacity to bear ‘multiple meanings because of the varying intertextual relationships [that texts] carry […] and because of the varying constructions (or interests) of receivers’ (Condit 1989: 104). By experiencing the text in this oppositional way, ‘the dominant and the oppositional are simultaneously present in both the text and its readings’ (Fiske 1986: 403). Such an oppositional framework has been used by numerous contemporary artists to identify with Superman, thus revealing the underlying structures of meanings and the power contained within them. 101

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One of the first major paintings to feature Superman was made in 1952 by the American realist Philip Pearlstein. This is remarkable in that the painting not only predates Pop art in America by nearly a decade, but also in that Pearlstein was a friend of Andy Warhol when they were in school at the Carnegie Institute of Technology in the 1940s, and the two lived together briefly after they moved to New York City in 1949. Pearlstein’s Superman is the lone survivor of several comic strip paintings he executed between 1951 and 1952, which comprised the conclusion of what Pearlstein referred to as his symbolist period (Bowman 1983: xv).3 In the vibrant, agitated hand commonly seen during the height of Abstract Expressionism in New York in the early 1950s (and far from the cool, detached style of his later, more familiar, figurative work), Pearlstein wryly combines ancient religion with modern myth, depicting Superman in the pose of God in the Creation of the Sun and Moon panel from Michelangelo’s Sistine Chapel ceiling frescos of 1508 to 1512. Rather than creating the sun and moon, however, Pearlstein shows Superman, according to Russell Bowman, ‘intervening between missiles about to collide over Metropolis’ (1983: xvi). While this could simply be an imagined display of Superman’s heroic abilities, it also reveals some Cold War arms race anxieties on the part of Pearlstein, as the Soviet Union had already demonstrated its own nuclear capabilities in 1949, followed by further tests in September and October of 1951. Comic book culture in general became increasingly popular among artists with the mounting success of Pop art, the style and themes of which sought to present an alternative to the high seriousness and dependence on abstraction that modernism vehemently promoted. Comic strip characters, which would have been considered ultra-kitsch by modernists, were embraced by Andy Warhol, whose painting of Superman from the spring of 1961— following Pearlstein’s by nearly a decade—preceded such readily identifiable themes in Warhol’s work as the Campbell’s soup can and Marilyn Monroe. The hand-painted canvas, an enlargement of a panel from the comic book Superman’s Girl Friend, Lois Lane #24 (Frei & Printz 2002: cat. 12), shows a hovering Superman using his ‘super breath’ to extinguish a forest fire. Warhol gave up enlarging comic panels when he found out that Roy Lichtenstein had been mining the same resource in his own work. Although Warhol clearly suspected that Lichtenstein was inspired by his painting of Superman, which was part of an April 1961 window display at Bonwit Teller department store where Lichtenstein had been employed as a sign painter, Lichtenstein maintained that he was unaware of the painting when he began painting single comic strip panels with speech balloons (Comenas 2011). That Andy Warhol was an emerging homosexual artist in the predominantly heterosexual atmosphere of the 1950s New York art scene could provide an explanation for his attraction to—or perhaps identification with—Superman as a subject. As Andrew Kirk has pointed out, ‘Through his own identity negotiation, Superman struggles with his difference in ways that are similar to his queer human counterparts’ (2009: ii). Thus, for an artist like Warhol having a difficult time situating himself in the hypermasculine New York avant-garde art community of the 1950s, Superman could function as an encoded signifier of Otherness. As Donna de Salvo noted, ‘as a gay man in the 1950s, Warhol grew adept at constructing a language of signs and symbols which could live two simultaneous lives, one public, the other private’ (1992: 86). 102

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Two Pop artists emerging from regions other than New York who similarly focused on Superman are Mel Ramos and Peter Saul. West Coast painter Mel Ramos painted Superman as part of his larger exploration of popular culture figures, though his work did not comment on the commercial printing processes that popularized these figures, as Warhol and Lichtenstein did. Ramos, with a heavily loaded brush reminiscent of his mentor Wayne Thiebaud, depicted his supermen and superwomen with a sensuous bravura brushstroke that further removed these figures from their kitsch/commercial origins and situated them firmly within the tradition of West Coast figurative painting with a playfully ironic spin. Peter Saul, whose blend of Pop themes and Surrealist biomorphic abstraction was typical of Chicago artists seeking to distance themselves from the commercial look of the East Coast Pop artists, explored a less naïve version of Superman. His 1963 series of Superman paintings, which included Superman’s Punishment and Superman and Superdog in Jail, depict the superhero as the victim of a gruesome series of tortures and degradations that challenge viewers to reconsider the unquestioned faith and trust they place in such a figure.4 Unlike the literal manner in which other Pop artists presented their cartoon subjects, Saul uses iconic characters like Superman ‘as a means of provocation. [Superman] is only worthwhile if he is deformed and placed in new contexts. Taking a familiar image, then transforming it is much richer and more provocative’ (Decron 1999: 36). With the growing multiculturalism of the late 1970s and 1980s and the emergence of postmodernism in painting and photography, the trend of inserting Superman into visual culture in unusual and unfamiliar ways to challenge dominant discourses and interrogate master narratives expanded. For artists born and raised during the Cold War, U.S. military might was perceived as a necessary protection from anti-democratic forces. However, there was also a sense that this military might could be massively destructive, aggressive, and imperialistic, which caused some to understand Superman as similarly authoritarian, patriarchal, and oppressive. Superman is a particularly ominous figure in musician and performance artist Laurie Anderson’s ‘O Superman’. The piece exists in several permutations, including a music video and a stage performance that comprised part of her live show United States, Part 2. The song, which was originally released as a 45-rpm single in 1981, achieved tremendous popularity. It rose to #2 on the British pop charts and was included on her first full-length album, Big Science, released by Warner Brothers in 1982. ‘O Superman’ was inspired by seeing a performance by tenor Charles Holland of Massenet’s ‘O Souverain’. The song, which is about redemption and salvation (Goldberg 2000: 90), features the lines that impacted strongly on Anderson, ‘O Sovereign, o Judge, o Father/always hidden yet always present.’ Indeed, with its ominous tone and hushed atmosphere, Anderson’s oblique narrative implies the presence of an omnipotent observer, who is presented as a disembodied voice. This voice issues statements with vaguely threatening undertones, such as ‘Well you don’t know me/but I know you,’ the repeated line ‘this is the hand, the hand that takes,’ and ‘Cause when love is gone, there’s always justice, and when justice is gone, there’s always force.’ Anderson underscores force as one of the chief themes of the song visually as well with the closed fist, one of several silhouetted hand and arm gestures she employs in both the stage 103

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Illustration 1: The cover of Laurie Anderson’s ‘O Superman’ (45-rpm disc), © 110 Records, 1981.

performance and the video. Used on the cover of the single (Illustration 1), the closed fist signifies authority through physical strength, which may reference the ‘might makes right’ brand of justice that Superman dispenses, guided by his strict and unwavering sense of moral rectitude. The clenched fist was also a symbol associated with the solidarity of various left-wing movements from Marxism to communism. Given Superman’s early history as defender of the downtrodden masses, this is singularly appropriate. Even the de facto creed of the United States Postal Service, normally a comforting idea in the mind of someone awaiting a delivery, becomes more akin to an obsessive and portentous mantra when intoned by Anderson’s electronically deepened voice. Perhaps the most haunting lines from the song are ‘Here come the planes/They’re American planes, made in America.’ Not only do these lines seem to anticipate the events of the September 11 terrorist attacks on the United States, but they also convey a more ambiguous but pointed 104

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sense of technology gone out of control, a power created by America that could potentially be used against itself. This, of course, is one of the underlying anxieties of the Superman myth (and the Cold War in general)—that the power he exerts against America’s enemies could, under slightly different circumstances, just as easily be aimed against Americans. The Man of Steel plays a similarly authoritarian role in Roger Shimomura’s Diary series.5 This series recounts his family’s experience during World War II at a Japanese internment camp in Minidoka, Idaho, where they were detained in 1942 (Daniels 2005: 39). The paintings depict passages from his grandmother’s diary, in which she lucidly recorded the family’s circumstances during a dark time that Shimomura’s parents had been angrily reluctant to describe to him, as he was only three when the family was incarcerated (Lippard 1995: 4). The scenes are painted in Shimomura’s Pop-influenced style that marries a recognizably comic book aesthetic with the ukiyo-e woodcut tradition of his Japanese ancestry. Superman, who has been a persistent motif in Shimomura’s work since the early 1980s, is used to particularly powerful effect in the painting Diary: Dec. 12, 1941 of 1980 (Illustration 2), which was inspired by his grandmother’s entry of that day: ‘I spent all day at home. Starting from today we were permitted to withdraw

Illustration 2: Roger Shimomura, Diary: December 12, 1941, 1980. Acrylic on canvas. Smithsonan American Art Museum. Used by permission of the artist.

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$100 from the bank. This was our sustenance of life, we who are enemy to them. I deeply feel America’s large-heartedness in dealing with us.’ The painting depicts a Japanese woman, perhaps intended to signify Shimomura’s grandmother, in a small room staring idly out of an open door. The imposing silhouette of Superman on the shoji-screen wall, fists on his hips and cape flapping majestically in the breeze, is seen to her immediate left. Shimomura’s allusion to Superman’s strength and dominance is made clear here, as the superhero stands guard outside of the confined space of the room, which imparts a claustrophobic feeling. The nature of Superman’s guardianship, however, is ambiguous; is he there to protect the woman, or to protect against her? Shimomura uses Superman’s status as de facto U.S. government agent to describe his own conflicted feelings regarding his status as an American who was declared an ‘enemy alien’ in the country of his birth at the age of three. Shimomura’s bicultural status puts him in a position of cultural dispossession, or in his own words, ‘You could take it to the point where there is no culture […]. Anyone who isn’t like everybody else is seen as invasive; you live and die with that sense as a person of color in this country’ (quoted in Lippard 1995: 7). Regarding the use of Superman, Shimomura noted: To me he stood for the (then) current omnipresent U.S. Government that called all the shots for us. We didn’t question things like we do now. When Superman said ‘a Jap is a Jap,’ the citizens of this country went along with it. When Superman said let’s put them in camps, we tacitly agreed. When my grandmother in her diary said, ‘I am thankful to America,’ that sadly had Superman drawn all over it. (2010) Though DC chose to limit Superman’s involvement in the war,6 there were other opportunities to have him back the war effort. These included numerous posters and other ephemera, such as a sign intended for shop windows that featured a drawing of Superman, fists on his hips in his usual imposing way. The sign read ‘your purchase of war stamps and bonds will help stamp out the Japanazis,’ and was signed, ‘Best personal wishes from Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster’ (Daniels 1998: 70). Here, the conflation of the German and Japanese adversaries is critical, as they were easier to manage politically when lumped together into the single category of ‘enemy’. One can imagine the kind of impact an image like this would have on a young Japanese-American such as Shimomura, who might find it more difficult to see Superman as the benevolent, compassionate protector who can discern the internal motives of individuals and judge them accordingly. The theme of cultural dislocation and dispossession is similarly a preoccupation in the work of Chinese-born artist Jun Yang, who was raised in Austria after moving to Europe at the age of four. Yang experiences the alienation of identifying neither with his place of birth nor with the culture in which he was raised and must therefore find different ways to negotiate his cultural isolation. Like Shimomura, Yang also uses Superman to represent this sense of anxiety about place and belonging. However, rather than envisioning the superhero as a threatening signifier of racial homogeneity and the forced marginalization of the Other, Yang instead chose to identify with Superman, who likewise lived his life as an alien Other under the guise of the human Clark 106

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Kent. In Yang’s video From Salariiman to Superman of 1998 to 2002 and his still photographs SM at UN of 1998 to 2006 (which, though much larger, are reminiscent of the aesthetic of photo booth snapshots), the artist is seen dramatically removing his suit jacket, shirt, and tie to reveal the familiar Superman costume beneath. Here, Superman’s traditional use of the phone booth as the simultaneous public and private space in which he transforms himself is changed to a site of a different form of communication, from verbal to visual. The photo booth as medium recalls not only the work of Andy Warhol, but goes even further back to Marcel Duchamp’s playful identity transformations in his Wanted/$2,000 Dollar Reward of 1923. In this hugely influential work, Duchamp used the recognizable format of the wanted poster with its familiar frontal and profile photographs and lists of known aliases to interrogate his own complex identity formations.

Illustration 3: Jun Yang, SM at UN, 1998. Passport photographs taken after work at the United Nations, Vienna; three photograph strips each day. Courtesy of Galerie Martin Janda and Vitamin Creative Space. Used by permission of the artist.

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The suit and tie reference the period of Yang’s life in which he worked at the United Nations in Vienna (Rebhandl 2007), but also signify the process of naturalization and assimilation that Yang identifies with in the same efforts made by Superman through his own alter ego. Even the evocation of the ‘salariiman’ reflects racial and ethnic confusion, as it is a term that describes white-collar, middle-class Japanese businessmen who connote bureaucratic conformity. Perhaps the identification with the Japanese type by a Chinese-born artist is intended to reflect the manner in which minority races are often conflated by majority social groups (Yang is misidentified by a European as Japanese in the film BA006 Chicken with Curry Rice of 2001). In such a process, Yang simply becomes ‘Asian’ and therefore is subject to a wide variety of cultural stereotypes, many of which did not originate or are not even endemic to his home country. Hu Fang’s characterization of the protagonist X in a different work by Yang, the video Camouflage—Look Like Them— Talk Like Them of 2004, could easily apply to Yang’s self-study in From Salariiman to Superman: X recognizes that the only suitable environment for him—the safe route—entails disappearing into the local society, becoming a member of the crowd. He understands that looking and dressing the same—camouflaging himself—is the implication of survival. Through this quiet recounting of X’s story, the narrator discovers the deep contradictions within society. In order to survive, you must make yourself disappear. (2010: par. 12) Yang’s desire to suppress his individuality could also be understood not only as the racial/ ethnic camouflage described above, but also as a means of masking his role as artist/other in the guise of the drone-like salaried businessman, who, like Clark Kent, craves the normalcy and inconspicuousness of ‘ordinary’ Americans. Another artist whose work directly confronts the estrangement of life between cultures is the Mexican-born painter Enrique Chagoya. Chagoya did not permanently immigrate to the United States until the age of 26, but he nevertheless felt the alienating effects of his proximity to a dominant culture. For Chagoya, the violence and instability of his homeland contrasted strongly with the perceived freedom and idealism of life in the United States. Despite the fact that semantically the entire region is considered ‘America’, the artist was well aware that his America was markedly different than that of the American Dream. Chagoya was indeed raised between cultures, as he explains: We used to go for picnics to the pyramids of Teotihuacán […] [where] my dad’s family is from. And then we were going to [Catholic] church. At the same time, I grew up with Mickey Mouse and Superman and all the comics. All the American programs from the sixties and seventies were translated into Spanish. You name it; I saw it, all the way from Rin Tin Tin to Zorro to The Lone Ranger. (quoted in Hickson 2007: 13) 108

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Indeed, Chagoya’s iconography is an amalgamation of popular American symbols and traditional Mexican figures and emblems, or even more recent social commentators, such as the cartoonist and illustrator José Guadalupe Posada (Kantor 2008: 375). Superman makes regular appearances in Chagoya’s collages and paintings as an embodiment of the dominant culture to the north, often shown in conflict with traditional Mexican religious, mythological, or historical figures. For example, in his 1994 painting Crossing I, the powerful Aztec god Tlaloc is pitted against the ‘secular American messiah’ (Daniels 1998: 19) Superman. In the painting, Superman sheds the hat and clothing of a seventeenth-century New England colonist rather than his usual twentieth-century business suit, and with his typical braggadocio, proclaims, ‘I don’t know what hole you crawled out of or where you came from—but I’m sending you back!’ In Chagoya’s onesided exchange from colonizer to colonized, Superman’s treatment of the foreign god is emblematic of the way dominant cultures frequently respond to difference: with denigration and violence. In another 1994 painting from the same series titled Uprising of the Spirit (Elevación del espíritu) (Illustration 4), Superman emerges from an engraving of Spanish conquistadors pillaging the New World to square off against legendary philosopher-king

Illustration 4: Enrique Chagoya, Uprising of the Spirit (Elevación del espíritu), 1994. Acrylic and oil on paper. Gift of Ann and Aaron Nisenson in memory of Michael Nisenson (AC1995.183.9). Digital image © 2009 Museum Associates/ LACMA/ Art Resource, NY. Used by permission of the artist.

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Nezahualcoyotl, the founder of the Texcocan Empire in the fifteenth century. Both the images of Nezahualcoyotl and Tlaloc mentioned above were taken from the Codex Ixtlilxochitl, an early seventeenth-century illuminated manuscript written in Spanish.7 Interestingly, such pre-Columbian codices have been described as the ‘“comics” of American antiquity’ (Storr 2007: 31). It is fitting, then, that Superman plays a lead role in several codices of Chagoya’s own creation, such as his Tales from the Conquest/Codex of 1992. The very first section of the document involves an appropriated comic panel in which Superman is escorting a young Mexican boy, who tells the superhero of his dying father’s wish that he emigrate to the United States to make a better life. Superman’s body language is fatherly and protective, as the young alien tells a story that closely parallels the superhero’s own tale of immigration to the United States. Conversely, the subsequent images in the codex show violent juxtapositions of high and low cultural symbols that bespeak a far less benevolent image of Old and New World relationships than the empathy that Superman shares with the young boy. Just as Shimomura saw conflict within a Superman who represented American democracy while enforcing racial segregation, so too does Chagoya see the contradiction between Superman’s compassionate goodwill and the aggressive imperialism practiced by the nation he has sworn to protect. Numerous writers and critics have remarked that Superman no longer seems compatible with contemporary society. Regarding Superman’s alter ego, Clark Kent, Tom De Haven has observed: In our time of Homeland Security, the whole business of assuming and maintaining a ‘secret identity’ seems impossible, anachronistic; Batman at least wears gloves. And in a culture of celebrity worship, the very idea that anyone would want not to be recognized as famous 24/7 seems cheesy and inauthentic, counterintuitive. (2010: 39) If we are skeptical today about Superman being perhaps too pure, it may not be because goodness, decency, and integrity are no longer valued in American society, but rather because these qualities are no longer so easily defined. Indeed, Superman began to feel far too grand a narrative for our multi-layered postmodern problems. One critic even described Superman as ‘[v]iscerally terrifying, overtly patriarchal: an elder statesman, thick-necked, intransigent, an aging good ol’ boy’ (Evans 2010: 118). Superman’s flagging relevance to a sociocultural context that resists master narratives was perhaps the inspiration behind controversial photographer Andres Serrano’s The Death of Superman of 2000.8 Surely the least immediately shocking or provocative photograph of Serrano’s series ‘The Interpretation of Dreams’ (which includes such disquieting and provocative images as a masturbating nun, a menstruating young woman, a black man in Klan robes, and a doubled over Catholic Cardinal with his robes raised over his buttocks), the deceptively simple and non-confrontational image shows a closet containing a single garment: a familiar blue, red, and yellow Superman costume suspended on a hanger. In 110

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2000, the mention of the death of Superman would have almost immediately evoked the recent commotion over what is surely still among the best-selling single comic book issues of all time, DC Comics’ Superman #75, in which Superman was believed to have been killed by the supervillain Doomsday (Carlin 1992). While this was not the first time Superman was believed to be dead,9 this particular instance did have a massive resonance in popular culture, with coverage on CNN and in Time magazine. Doomsday, a Kryptonian genetic experiment gone wrong that resulted in an unthinking, unfeeling agent of unfathomable death and destruction, could be seen as the most appropriate supervillain in the age of AIDS. This disease was a similarly mindless and merciless enemy of humanity at the end of the twentieth century, the fear of which had nearly reached its apogee in the United States when the comic was published in 1992. Serrano’s image is a potent and disturbing memento mori that extends beyond the personal fear of death into a more probing statement regarding the decline of Western civilization, or even a suggestion of an approaching Armageddon. In fact, Serrano’s photograph questions the very nature of iconicity itself—is Superman the icon truly immortal, or is his invulnerability dependent on the strength of the belief system that he upholds? Conservative political activist Herbert London’s comments following Superman’s demise are pertinent to this question: It is understandable that Superman must go […]. Superman is after all an anachronism, a model of a bygone era when virtue mattered, when morality wasn’t relative […]. Superman was indeed a figure towering above the others, a hero to emulate […]. Superman will be missed, but the virtue he embodied will be missed even more. (quoted in Evans 2010: 118) It is strangely prophetic that Serrano’s photograph was created only a year before the events of September 11, 2001, as the terror attacks of that day are exactly the kind of tragic event that Superman had typically held himself accountable for preventing. When DC produced its volume to raise funds for the relief effort, 9-11: The World’s Finest Comic Book Writers & Artists Tell Stories to Remember (Levitz 2002), Superman was the obvious choice to demonstrate the heroism of those who had acted with courage and selflessness on that day. In a cover painting by frequent Superman illustrator Alex Ross, the Man of Steel and his dog Krypto are shown dwarfed by an imposing billboard that features a multiracial, multi-ethnic spectrum of NYPD and NYFD first responders, medical professionals, pilots, and other assorted types, with a stupefied and humbled Superman able only to muster the word ‘wow’. Perhaps this sentiment can be construed as the rebuttal to London’s comments above about Superman’s ostensible demise signaling the loss of virtue in America. It may even be the key to understanding Serrano’s image as well: that while virtue may be more difficult to define in a multicultural, polytheistic society such as the United States, life in America today requires a greater degree of responsibility from each of its citizens. Thus, in the absence of superheroes, it is the responsibility of the citizenry to practice the basic respect and tolerance of difference that even Superman has not always modeled perfectly in his long history. Indeed, it is not tolerance and 111

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virtue that keep Superman alive, but rather prejudice and malevolence, the fear of which inspired two anxious Jewish boys in Cleveland to create the superhero in the first place.

References Anderson, Laurie (1981), ‘O Superman,’ in O Superman [EP]. Burbank: Warner Bros. Bates, Cary, Elliot S. Maggin, and Curt Swan (1976). Superman #300. New York: DC Comics. Bergfeld, Sarah Elizabeth (2009), ‘Hegemony at Play: Four Case Studies in Popular Culture,’ Ph.D. Thesis. Pullman: Washington State University. Bowman, Russell (1983), Philip Pearlstein: The Complete Paintings. New York: Alpine Fine Arts Collection. Cameron, Dan (2008), Peter Saul. Newport Beach: Orange County Museum of Art. Carlin, Mike (ed.) (1992), Superman #75. New York: DC Comics. Comenas, Gary (2011), ‘Andy Warhol Pre-Pop: 1949–1962,’ Warholstars.org [online], ongoing, http://www.warholstars.org/warhol1/11roylichtenstein.html. Accessed 3 March 2011. Condit, Celeste (1989), ‘The Rhetorical Limits of Polysemy,’ Critical Studies in Mass Communication, 6: 2, pp. 103–122. Cooke, Darwin (2004), DC: The New Frontier, 2 vols. New York: DC Comics. Daniels, Les (1998), Superman: The Complete History—The Life and Times of the Man of Steel. San Francisco: Chronicle Books. Daniels, Roger (2005), ‘Ethnic Cleansing in America? The Mass Incarceration of Japanese Americans, 1942–46,’ in William W. Lew (ed.), Minidoka Revisited: The Paintings of Roger Shimomura. Clemson: Lee Gallery, pp. 37–43. Decron, Benoît (1999), ‘True Crime,’ in Benoît Decron, Robert Storr, and Anne Tronche, Peter Saul. Paris: Somogy. De Haven, Tom (2010), Our Hero: Superman on Earth. New Haven: Yale University Press. De Salvo, Donna (1992), ‘“Subjects of the Artists”: Towards a Painting Without Ideals,’ in Russell Ferguson (ed.), Hand-Painted Pop: American Art in Transition, 1955–62. Los Angeles: Museum of Contemporary Art, pp. 67–94. Evans, Alex (2010), ‘Superman Is the Faultline: Fissure in the Monomythic Man of Steel,’ in Jeff Birkenstein, Anna Froula, and Karen Randell (eds.), Reframing 9/11: Film, Popular Culture and the ‘War on Terror’. New York: Continuum, pp. 117–126. Fang, Hu (2010), ‘Jun Yang: For the Forgetting of Memory, and the Separation of Arrival,’ ART iT [online], 2 December, http://www.art-it.asia/u/admin_ed_contri6/ mfAZhbou1XQleaHiKVUp. Accessed 12 December 2010. Fingeroth, Danny (2004), Superman on the Couch: What Superheroes Really Tell Us about Ourselves and Our Society. London: Continuum. Fiske, John (1986), ‘Television: Polysemy and Popularity,’ Critical Studies in Mass Communication, 3: 4, pp. 391–408. Frei, George, and Neil Printz (2002), The Andy Warhol Catalogue Raisonné: Vol. 1, Paintings and Sculpture, 1961–1963. London: Phaidon. 112

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Goldberg, Roselee (2000), Laurie Anderson. New York: Harry N. Abrams. Hickson, Patricia (2007), ‘Borderlandia Unbound,’ in Patricia Hickson (ed.), Enrique Chagoya: Borderlandia. Des Moines: Des Moines Art Center, pp. 13–19. Jones, Gerard (2004), Men of Tomorrow: Geeks, Gangsters and the Birth of the Comic Book. New York: Basic Books. Kantor, Jordan (2008), ‘Enrique Chagoya,’ Artforum International, 47: 2, p. 375. Kirk, Andrew (2009), ‘“Sometimes You’ll Feel Like and Outcast”: Using Superman to Interrogate the Closet’, Ph.D. Thesis. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University. Legman, Gershon ([1949] 2004), Love and Death: A Study in Censorship. New York: Breaking Point, pp. 33–43, excerpted in Jeet Heer & Kent Worcester (eds.), Arguing Comics: Literary Masters on a Popular Medium. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, pp. 112–121. Levitz, Paul (ed.) (2002), 9-11, September 11, 2001: The World’s Finest Comic Book Writers & Artists Tell Stories to Remember. New York: DC Comics. Lippard, Lucy R. (1995), ‘Delayed Reactions,’ in Nancy A. Corwin (ed.), Roger Shimomura: Delayed Reactions. Lawrence: Spencer University of Art. McLuhan, Marshall ([1951] 2004), ‘Superman,’ in Jeet Heer & Kent Worcester (eds.), Arguing Comics: Literary Masters on a Popular Medium. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, pp. 104–106. Millar, Mark (2009), Superman: Red Son–The Deluxe Edition. New York: DC Comics. Miller, Frank, Klaus Janson and Lynn Varley (2002), Batman: The Dark Knight Returns. New York: DC Comics. Rebhandl, Bert (2007), ‘Man of the World,’ Frieze Magazine [online], 9 August, http://www. frieze.com/issue/print_article/man_of_the_world/. Accessed 9 November 2010. Regalado, Aldo Javier (2005), ‘Modernity, Race and the American Superhero,’ in Jeff McLaughlin (ed.), Comics and Philosophy. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, pp. 84–99. (2007), ‘Bending Steel with Bare Hands: Modernity and the American Superhero in the Twentieth Century,’ Ph.D. Thesis. Coral Gables: University of Miami. Serrano, Andres (2004), America and Other Work. Cologne: Taschen. Shimomura, Roger (2010), correspondence with the author, 29 November 2010. Siegel, Jerry, and Joe Shuster (1939), Action Comics #8. New York: DC Comics. Storr, Robert (2007), ‘Strategies,’ in Patricia Hickson (ed.), Enrique Chagoya: Borderlandia. Des Moines: Des Moines Art Center, pp. 29–32. Uradomo-Barre, Stacy (2009), Yellow Terror: The Collections and Paintings of Roger Shimomura. Seattle: Wing Luke Asian Museum. Wertham, Fredric (1954), Seduction of the Innocent. New York: Rinehart. Wright, Bradford W. (2001), Comic Book Nation: The Transformation of Youth Culture in America. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press.

Notes 1 Indeed, by the mid-1980s, Superman and the DC Comics universe as a whole had become so unwieldy with innumerable and often contradictory ‘continuities’ or storylines over the half century since its inception that the company launched what essentially amounted to a 113

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2 3 4 5 6

7

8 9

reboot called Crisis on Infinite Earths. This twelve-issue limited ‘maxiseries’ killed off several ‘unnecessary’ characters and resulted in the restart of several of their most heralded titles, including Superman. I thank Chas LiBretto for his insight and for the references to both DC: The New Frontier and Superman: Red Son. The painting by Philip Pearlstein discussed herein can be found in Bowman (1983). The paintings by Peter Saul discussed herein can be found in Cameron (2008). The art pieces by Roger Shimomura discussed in this chapter are depicted, among others, in Uradomo-Barre (2009). Several reasons have been suggested why Superman—the ultimate patriot—was largely kept out of World War II. While his creators recognized that Superman needed to be involved in the war, they were fearful that his powers could diminish or even trivialize the efforts of the U.S. soldiers overseas. The problem was solved by having Clark Kent declared 4-F, or unfit for active service. Ever the humble servant to the nation, Superman returns home, proclaiming that ‘the United States Army, Navy, and Marines are capable of smashing their foes without the aid of Superman!’ (Wright 2001: 43). Gerard Jones notes that DC Comics publisher Jack Liebowitz ‘didn’t allow Superman to take an implicit stance on the subjects of war and fascism. Too many isolationists out there had the power to keep their kids from buying comics’ (2004: 165). See also B. Keith Murphy’s contribution to this volume. I thank Matthew Robb for his expertise in identifying these pre-Columbian religious and historical figures and the codex from which they were appropriated by Chagoya. Such images are reminiscent of paintings by the Surrealist Frida Kahlo, who similarly described in a personal iconography how she was torn between the modern Western culture and her native Mexican culture. For visual representations of Serrano’s photographs discussed in this chapter, see Serrano (2004). DC had already used the death of Superman as a ploy in the 1960s (Superman #149, 1961) in one of the ‘imaginary’ stories, or narratives that were intended to be understood as taking place outside of the continuity. Interestingly, the original idea for these issues was not Superman’s death, but rather Superman’s marriage to Lois Lane, a plotline that was cut because it conflicted with the release of the ABC prime-time television series Lois and Clark: The Adventures of Superman, which was intended to highlight the sexual tension between the characters (Jones 2004: 334).

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Chapter 5 Thirty Are Better Than One: Marilyn Monroe and the Performance of Americanness Susanne Hamscha

T

he image of Marilyn Monroe is certainly one of the most widely recognized images in American culture. In many contexts, her first name or even her initials suffice to refer to her, and her image appears everywhere from music videos and advertising to drag performances and gift shop souvenirs. There are a number of iconic images of Marilyn Monroe that circulate widely in American culture and that seem to evoke particular meanings of Marilyn, on the one hand, and of ‘America’, on the other: Monroe in her white dress in The Seven Year Itch (1955), her nude photographs for the first issue of Playboy magazine, her rendition of ‘Happy Birthday’ for President Kennedy, and, not to forget, Andy Warhol’s iconic Marilyn portraits. ‘Whichever Marilyn one prefers,’ Clara Juncker states, ‘she lives (on) as refrigerator magnet, coffee cup, earrings, diary cover, poster girl, or […] an empty container with a removable head’ (2003: 129). The title and the premise of this chapter, ‘Thirty Are Better Than One,’ are borrowed from Andy Warhol. Warhol gave this telling title to a painting with multiple images of Leonardo da Vinci’s Mona Lisa in 1963, which he produced on the occasion of an exclusive exhibition of da Vinci’s masterpiece in the National Gallery in Washington, D.C. ‘Thirty Are Better Than One’ is also Warhol’s credo—the sole reason behind the multiplication of mass culture objects in his art. Warhol doubled virtually everything from soup cans and laundry detergents to portraits of American movie stars and political figures dozens, if not hundreds of times, making repetition a staple of his aesthetic strategies. But, one might ask, what exactly are thirty better for? If we consider Warhol’s arguably most famous silk print series, his Marilyn portraits, the answer seems clear: Thirty Marilyns are better than one in establishing Marilyn Monroe as an American icon. Warhol’s multiple reproductions of Monroe’s face were only the first in a long series of Marilyn replica and incarnations that have turned Marilyn Monroe into a signifier of consumption, emptiness, commodification, glitz, and glamour—in short, of all the things commonly associated with American popular culture. This chapter explores the reproduction and recycling of Marilyn Monroe in American art and popular culture and focuses on two different yet related questions: How did Marilyn Monroe become an icon, and how can she be read as a particularly American icon? In other words, this article will investigate the process of Monroe’s iconization, on the one hand, and scrutinize what kind of Americanness she reflects and transmits, on the other. In order to answer these questions, I will draw on two very overt imitations of Marilyn Monroe, namely the direct quoting of Gentlemen Prefer Blondes (1953) in Madonna’s ‘Material Girl’ (1985) music video and

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Bert Stern’s recreation of Monroe’s ‘The Last Sitting’ photo shoot with Lindsay Lohan. Analyzing the cultural work these citations perform, I will show that as an iconic figure, Monroe embodies an Americanness that is clearly rooted in pop culture aesthetics of consumption and commodification. More specifically, it is the continuous reproduction of Marilyn’s image and the emulation of her signature performances in popular culture that consolidate Monroe’s status as an icon of Americanness. In other words, the icon Marilyn Monroe not only signifies Americanness but also produces it, serving as a site on which the meaning of ‘America/nness’ can be negotiated and redefined.

‘If I’m a Star, Then the People Made Me a Star’: The Iconization of Marilyn Monroe As S. Paige Baty points out, icons are ‘culturally resonant units’ (1995: 59); they are dynamic and transmutable, they can appear in various contexts, and they connote a variety of political, ideological, and cultural meanings. As icons represent content as form, they figure as sites and surfaces on which these meanings can be negotiated and re-defined, reflecting the ‘conversations and contestations of changing political cultural orders’ (Baty 1995: 60). In and through icons, the struggle over cultural meaning, over hegemonic processes and resistance, and over the formation of collective identities and countercultures becomes manifest and palpable. Therefore, icons are in the ambivalent position of having to be open and malleable enough to allow for employment in various contexts and situations, while also being particular enough to ensure that they are read and decoded ‘correctly’. American culture is densely populated by iconic signs in the form of mythicized popular cultural figures, such as Elvis Presley, James Dean, or Marilyn Monroe, through whose bodies narratives of American culture are staged and circulated.1 As Daniel Herwitz has bluntly put it, Marilyn ‘became iconic mostly through her [untimely and mysterious] death’ (2008: 15), a fate she shares with Presley and Dean. However, according to Carl Rollyson, ‘Monroe as icon was self-invented’ (2005: 2), and her iconic status merely intensified because of the circumstances of her early passing. As is well known, ‘Marilyn Monroe’ is the stage name Norma Jeane Baker adopted early in her film career on the advice of Twentieth Century Fox executive Ben Lyon, who found her birth name too plain and ordinary for a Hollywood actress. At around the same time, Norma Jeane dyed her brown hair blond, which completed her transformation into the sexy bombshell Marilyn Monroe, the role Norma Jeane went on to play to perfection.2 As Rollyson argues, Marilyn Monroe ‘studied herself and her replications as carefully as any artist reviewing his or her work’ (2005: 2), internalizing patterns of gesture, facial expressions, and bodily movements that defined ‘Marilyn Monroe’. In other words, ‘Marilyn Monroe’ is a performance of Marilyn Monroe (who is again a performance by Norma Jeane Baker), a work of art that resembles Marilyn Monroe but that, not least because of its multiple reproductions, cannot exist in an unmediated and unconstructed sense. As an iconic sign, Marilyn thus functions as a 118

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simulacrum, a sign that represents a copy without an original. As Baty explains, Marilyn Monroe can be understood to function as an iconic sign often reproduced as an image or name to resemble the referent Marilyn Monroe. Of course, this creates an endless looping effect, as the referent Marilyn Monroe is constructed to convey that which is already an iconic being—a movie star. (1995: 64) Marilyn Monroe’s iconicity is reinforced through reproductions of her image, through the continuous replication of copies of copies, which render her immortal as a surface on which narratives of American culture may be (re-)constructed.3 In this way, Marilyn’s body and image have become a projection screen for the ‘Americanness’ of American culture, that is, a widely circulating, translatable, and transferable sign that seems to purport some ‘truths’ about American culture. Marilyn as an icon has always been associated with commodification and celebrity culture, and the reproduction of her image—whether on key chains or towels, posters or coffee mugs, calendars or ashtrays—is almost always done for the sake of capitalizing on her status as a truly ‘American’ icon. Andy Warhol was probably most successful in cashing in on Marilyn’s iconic image and, on the other hand, in solidifying Marilyn as an American icon.4 Warhol’s celebrity portraits, which, aside from Marilyn Monroe, include American icons such as Elvis Presley, Liz Taylor, Grace Kelly, and Jackie Kennedy Onassis, play on the relation between the star and his/her image, between the individual and the surface that is publicly displayed, exemplifying how celebrities have become commodities that can be purchased, fetishized, and consumed. Warhol’s art thus reads almost like a direct reply to Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno’s ‘The Culture Industry’, in which they compare popular culture to a factory producing standardized goods in order to manipulate the masses into passivity and complacency. The consumption of popular culture, they suggest, promises easy pleasures and cultivates false needs created by capitalism, while ousting the true needs (creativity, freedom, happiness, negation), which are satisfied by the high arts. Horkheimer and Adorno believed that modernity and the culture industry found their most direct expression in American culture, as commodification, technologization, and mass production thrived particularly well in the United States (2002: 94–136).5 Warhol’s work, as William V. Ganis points out, is deeply concerned with making the ‘standard, stereotyped, and repeated intensely perceptible’ (2000: par. 2) and celebrates the democracy of mass culture and consumerism.6 Warhol thus affirms the affinity that Horkheimer and Adorno detect between consumerism and American culture, but his work also blurs the boundaries between mass culture and high arts and suggests that the appeal of American culture lies in its preference for surfaces. The genesis of Warhol’s first Marilyn exemplifies the very principle of privileging the surface. Warhol produced his first Marilyn shortly after the actress’ death, as part of a ‘death series’ he was working on at that time: 119

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The Monroe picture was part of a death series I was doing of people who had died by different ways. There was no profound reason for doing a death series, no ‘victims of their time’; there was no reason of doing it all, just a surface reason. (Berg 1989: 54) Warhol’s emphasis that there was no ‘profound’ but only a ‘surface reason’ for producing the first Marilyn portrait underlines the purpose of his art: Marilyn’s face, blown up and colored in, is at once beautiful and grotesque, flawless and flattened to a cliché, insistently memorable and stressing the artificiality of her image. Thus, the aesthetic experience of mass production meets excessive commodification in Warhol’s fetishization of Marilyn’s image. In Warhol’s work, both art and culture are commodified and approached as surfaces that seem to lack ‘depth’ in order to demonstrate that, in a mass-mediated culture, production and memory cannot be divorced from mass-produced images and, consequently, cannot be ‘pure’, ‘original’, and ‘unconstructed’. As Baty explains, Warhol’s Marilyn series ‘demonstrates the reproducibility of any body, image, or event as graphic commodity and the redundancy of mass-mediated iconographic processes’ (1995: 69). These processes desire a subject that can easily be recognized and is omnipresent in the American cultural imaginary, for easy recognition and the force of imagination are the prerequisites for the reproduction and translation of an icon into different contexts. The icon becomes its own context and selfreflexively refers to its own emptiness and banality. The concept of an original, ‘authentic’ work of art, then, is destabilized by mechanisms of reproduction that always produce the same result over and over again. Walter Benjamin discussed the consequences mechanical reproduction has on the notions of originality and authenticity in his seminal essay ‘The Work of Art in the Age of its Technological Reproducibility.’7 Benjamin argues that reproducibility causes the loss of the artwork’s ‘aura’, that is, of that element that cannot be replicated and makes an artwork ‘original’.8 Benjamin defines the aura as a ‘strange tissue of space and time: the unique apparition of a distance, however near it may be’ (2008: 23). To Benjamin, the aura is inexplicable and ungraspable, is the quality that makes an artwork, but also is a performance or a spectacle of nature, unique and original. Technological reproducibility, Benjamin states, causes the stripping of the veil from the object, the destruction of the aura, is the signature of a perception whose ‘sense for all that is the same in the world’ has so increased that, by means of reproduction, it extracts sameness even from what is unique. (2008: 23–24) On the other hand, Benjamin argues, the loss of the aura liberates a work of art and allows for its employment as a weapon for political and cultural critique, as the aura is always bound ‘to the here and now’ and thus encloses the artwork in a de-politicized realm (Benjamin 2008: 27). Warhol’s art seems to be an illustration of Benjamin’s text, an exemplification of the artwork’s loss of the aura due to technological reproducibility. Indeed, 120

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the infiltration of the ordinary and banal into the realm of the fine arts poses a challenge to an understanding of artworks as ‘unique’ and ‘authentic’ cultural artifacts. However, the notion of a supposed ‘original’ work of art is not completely eradicated in Warhol’s work; rather, this notion is constantly deferred, and the displacement of ‘originality’ invokes a distinct ‘fascination with finding “originality” in [his] works,’ as Ganis suggests (2000: par. 3). This originality is, of course, sought in vain, as Warhol’s source materials, such as the publicity shot for Niagara, which he used for his first Marilyn, are themselves simulacra. Warhol’s artworks, then, are simulacra in a Deleuzian sense, that is, ‘not simple imitation but the act by which the very idea of a model or privileged position (an original) is overturned’ (1994: 69). Warhol’s serial reproduction of Marilyn’s image obliterates Marilyn Monroe through processes of remembrance; Marilyn’s multiple reproductions render her a reproduction, hence ‘she is an icon because she is the subject of this repeated reproduction’ (Baty 1995: 69). Warhol’s reincarnations of Marilyn Monroe underline the degree to which the icon is appropriated to a cultural site of recollection and projection. Marilyn’s body and image are never completely situated in one particular time and place, but they are continuously replicated and disseminated, ensuring the circulation and mass-mediated rememberings of Marilyn’s likeness in American culture. In this way, Marilyn functions as a cultural type that can be reproduced, transformed, translated into new contexts, and enacted by other people. One of the most famous ‘Marilyn-types’ is Madonna, herself an icon of American popular culture, whose performance as Marilyn Monroe in the ‘Material Girl’ music video has contributed to the continuous use of Marilyn’s image in popular culture, cementing her status as cultural icon. Likewise, the recreation of the famous ‘The Last Sitting’ photo shoot, which features Lindsay Lohan as the stand-in for Monroe, has added to the circulation and enduring presence of iconic images of Marilyn Monroe in American culture.

Marilyn Is Dead, Long Live Marilyn Madonna, Lindsay Lohan, Gwen Stefani, Lady Gaga, Christina Aguilera—these are just a few, but probably the best known, celebrities who ‘perform themselves as versions of the icon’ (Baty 1995: 71) Marilyn Monroe. From singers and actresses to impersonators and drag queens, ‘those who partake in Marilyn’s iconic self/type,’ Baty explains, ‘replicate a theater of being already enacted by the subject in life’ (1995: 71). All these reincarnations of Marilyn subvert notions of an original and authentic self preceding the icon: ‘There is no Marilyn apart from the “Marilyn-type,” as the iconic character of her cultural being reveals her identity as always reproducible, always part of a “series”’ (Baty 1995: 71). Copy and original are conflated in the reproduction of the icon, as the ‘copy’ performs as ‘original’, and the icon only becomes accessible to us through its stand-ins. Or, as Baty succinctly puts it, ‘the icon lives as copy’ (1995: 72). 121

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While American culture abounds in Marilyn Monroe impersonators, the quintessential Monroe-performer, it has frequently been remarked, is ‘the Queen-of-Seeming-as-Being herself ’ (Baty 1995: 72), Madonna. Madonna has resurrected Marilyn Monroe through her own body and replicated the icon in style, gesture, and outfits, thus forging her own identity out of Monroe and, at the same time, contributing significantly to the continuous circulation of Monroe’s image. Largely thanks to Madonna, Marilyn Monroe has become ‘the woman who will not die,’ as Gloria Steinem puts it (2002: 63), an ever-present fixture in everyday American culture. Steinem describes the odd sensation she experienced while walking down a street in midtown Manhattan in the late 1980s: In a shopwindow display of white summer dresses, I see several huge photographs—a life-size cutout of Marilyn standing in a white halter dress, some close-ups of her vulnerable, please-love-me smile—but they don’t look dated. […] I walk another block and pass a record store featuring the hit albums of a rock star named Madonna. She has imitated Marilyn Monroe’s hair, style, and clothes, but subtracted her vulnerability. […] Nevertheless, her international symbols of femaleness are pure Marilyn. (2002: 64) Steinem is struck not only by Marilyn’s seeming omnipresence in the shop windows of New York, but even more so by the fact that Marilyn’s presence does not feel outdated or out of place. In appropriations and translations of the ‘Marilyn-type’ like Madonna’s, Marilyn Monroe is not merely recycled, as Steinem rightly observes, but the icon is transformed into new versions of itself and thus continuously finds its way into the American cultural imaginary. While Marilyn’s untimely death may have played a crucial part in making her an icon, in an ironic twist of fate she has now become immortal and is revived in the performances of Madonna and others. Madonna’s most overt and direct re-enactment of Marilyn Monroe is her ‘Material Girl’ (Lambert 1985) music video, which restages Marilyn’s performance of ‘Diamonds Are a Girl’s Best Friend’ from the movie Gentlemen Prefer Blondes (Hawks 1953). The dance/song scene of ‘Diamonds Are a Girl’s Best Friend’ occurs toward the end of the film, when Lorelei (Monroe) is forced to earn her living by performing, as she has been financially severed from her love-interest, Gus Esmond, Jr. (Tommy Noonan), by the latter’s father. In this scene, Esmond, having desperately tried to find Lorelei, is sitting in the audience watching her show. As E. Ann Kaplan explains this scene, ‘the familiar Hollywood situation, where the woman’s performing permits her double articulation as spectacle for the male gaze’ (1987: 118–119) is thus constructed. The scene operates with the opposition of the two spaces of the stage and the audience, as the camera moves between Esmond and Lorelei. First, the camera catches Esmond as he looks at Lorelei in astonishment, before Lorelei then directs her gaze at the camera, which assumes Esmond’s position. Even though Lorelei is assertive in her actions, her sexuality, and the display of her body, the exchange of gazes makes very clear that the world within which she moves offers her only a limited set of options. 122

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Illustration 1: Marilyn Monroe in Gentleman Prefer Blondes’ iconic scene. Gentlemen Prefer Blondes © Twentieth Centry Fox, 1953.

Both the song and Lorelei’s performance are expressive of her aim to catch a rich man, which she pursues throughout the movie. Lorelei’s stage performance thus correlates with the context of its presentation and the film’s narrative, in general. In Madonna’s re-enactment of this scene, one can detect a significant discrepancy between the framing story and the scenes in which Madonna performs ‘as’ Marilyn Monroe/Lorelei. The opening shots of ‘Material Girl’ introduce a powerful male character (Keith Carradine) and his nervous assistant (Robert Wuhl), who are watching bits of a musical film starring a young and rising actress (Madonna). In a video-within-the-video, Madonna performs ‘Material Girl’ in a pink sleeveless dress that is a replica of Monroe’s dress in Gentlemen Prefer Blondes and recreates the choreography of the film’s iconic scene. The song simultaneously celebrates, parodies, and criticizes the materialistic gold digger’s self-commodification in a capitalist consumer society: ‘The boy with the cold, hard cash is always Mr. Right/Cause we are living in a material world and I am a material girl.’ However, backstage ‘Madonna’ (as the actress in the video) rejects expensive gifts from rich suitors and, in the end, falls in love with the Carradine character, who tosses the diamond necklace he intended to give her into a trash bin and tries to win her heart by giving her flowers and taking her out on a date in a cheap pickup he rents from an employee. Some critics, like 123

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Illustration 2: The ‘Material Girl’ music video opens with ‘Material Girl’ situated hypodiegetically (as a video-within-the-video). The characters situated in the diegesis comment on (hypo-diegetic) Madonna, thus leading to spatial confusion. ‘Material Girl’ © Warner Bros., 1985.

Mary Ellen Brown and John Fiske, read ‘Material Girl’ as a downright feminist text, arguing that the video proposes ‘an empowered heroine controlling the meanings of herself and her gender relations,’ which is an ‘oppositional, resistive fantasy that has political effectivity’ (1987: 71). David Tetzlaff, by contrast, remarks that ‘Material Girl’ activates complex and contradictory discourses, because ‘the independent woman is unwittingly manipulated by a powerful male, yet she is also controlling his actions in a way, via the obsession her image has aroused in him’ (1993: 246). Although she devalues material objects, she ends up with a rich man and achieves ‘by happy accident the material aims expressed by the character she plays’ (Tetzlaff 1993: 246). The power relations in ‘Material Girl’ are, in other words, confusing and all but clear, as both ‘Madonna’ and ‘Carradine’ try to claim control and be in the power position. The complexity of the video’s gender dynamics is visually translated in the blurring of spaces and an inconsistency in the structure of the individual shots. The camera moves between the spaces of the screening room, the screen, the film set, and the performance of the song, with Madonna and Carradine infiltrating and occupying each other’s realm.9 Moreover, as Kaplan points out, the director’s gaze ‘seems to structure some of the shots, but this is not consistent, as it is in the Monroe scene,’ which results in constant shifts of perspective that make it virtually impossible to determine ‘who is speaking in this video’ (1987: 119). The blurring of spaces, that is, the lack of a clear-cut opposition of male and female spheres, differentiates ‘Material Girl’ significantly from ‘Diamonds Are a Girl’s Best Friend,’ where the cinema audience is aligned with the diegetic male audience, and the authorial viewer and speaker is thus clearly male, while the female performer is rendered an object of desire. As far as the intertextual references to Gentlemen Prefer 124

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Blondes are concerned, Kaplan does not want to speculate ‘whether the Monroe scene is being commented upon, simply used, or ridiculed by exaggeration’ (1987: 122). What is obvious, however, is the discrepancy between the ways in which the song/dance sequence is incorporated into the narratives of Gentlemen Prefer Blondes and ‘Material Girl’, respectively. While the message of ‘Diamonds Are a Girl’s Best Friend’ correlates with the overall aim of Monroe’s character to marry rich, Madonna humorously fashions herself as the stereotypical gold digger. Her character in the video is seemingly bored by the fancy presents of her suitors and ultimately values true love higher than wealth, since in the end, she picks the man who brings her flowers instead of jewelry. Uniting both scenes is the alignment of femininity with capitalism and commodification and the prevalence of the notion that women can be bought like jewelry with jewelry. Even if one reads the lyrics of ‘Material Girl’ ironically, the notion that a woman’s love can be bought ultimately prevails in the narrative of the video, and the association between money, power, and masculinity is reinforced. Similarly, Monroe’s signature performance of ‘Diamonds Are a Girl’s Best Friend’ affirms Monroe as an icon that signifies not only glitz and glamour but also consumerism, capitalism, and commodification. This connection is reiterated and emphasized, of course, in Madonna’s revival of Monroe’s performance, which establishes a firm link between the two icons, Marilyn and Madonna, and aligns both of them with glitzy surfaces and consumption. Fiske assesses Madonna as a product of patriarchal capitalism—a diagnosis that is certainly also applicable to the icon Monroe. As Fiske summarizes the relation between culture and capitalism, the economic needs of the culture industry are ‘perfectly in line with the disciplinary and ideological requirements of the existing social order, and all cultural commodities must therefore, to a greater or lesser extent, bear the forces that we can call centralizing, disciplinary, hegemony, massifying, commodifying’ (1989: 28). The cultural needs of people, however, oppose these forces and ‘transform cultural commodities into a cultural resource, pluralize the meanings and pleasures it offers, evade or resist its disciplinary efforts, fracture its homogeneity and coherence, raid or poach upon its terrain’ (Fiske 1989: 28). All of popular culture therefore testifies to a process of struggle over meaning, and Fiske understands Madonna, in particular, as ‘a site of semiotic struggle between the forces of patriarchal control and feminine resistance, of capitalism and the subordinate, of the adult and the young’ (1989: 97). Fiske draws attention to the market imperatives behind Madonna’s multiple transformations and elaborate selfstylizations; her reproduction and appropriation of elements of the Monroe image serve the purpose of self-marketing through a critical self-parody as the blond and sexy golddigger, which adds a degree of knowingness, wit, and control to the Monroe-type that is absent from most nostalgic rememberings of Marilyn (cf. Robertson 1996: 126). In the dialectical constellation of Madonna-Marilyn that ‘Material Girl’ establishes, Monroe becomes more savvy and witty in the image of Madonna, while the former’s seductiveness, sexiness, and glamorousness are intensified, and Monroe’s status as the ultimate icon of American femininity is reaffirmed in Madonna’s performance. A similar 125

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dialectic constellation is established in the recreation of Marilyn’s legendary ‘The Last Sitting’ photo shoot with actress Lindsay Lohan. Just like Madonna in ‘Material Girl’, Lohan seemed to use ‘The Last Sitting’ to comment on her own public persona through the re-enactment of a very specific iconic Monroe performance.10 ‘The Last Sitting’ is a series of photographs that were taken by Bert Stern for Vogue at the Hotel Bel-Air in Los Angeles in the summer of 1962, only weeks before Marilyn’s death.11 Some of the photographs taken during this session are among the most famous ever captured of Marilyn Monroe. Naked, sleepy-eyed, and visibly drunk in many of the shots, Marilyn poses on a bed of white linens and playfully dances with various halftransparent scarves wrapped around her fragile body. As Amanda Fortini remarks, the photos ‘endure partly as artifacts—the last visible evidence of the living woman’ (2008: 84). Stern’s decision to include the shots Monroe herself had crossed out in red marker reinforces this legacy. The red marker looks like blood smeared across Marilyn’s body—a dead body that is immortalized through these pictures, which seem to reveal ‘raw truths’ about an actress ‘whose comedic talents were overshadowed by her sex appeal,’ who is ‘cannily aware of her pinup status’ (Fortini 2008: 84), and who is visibly struggling with her image. Twice divorced and with a brief stint in the psychiatric ward behind her, Stern’s photos capture a beautiful yet fragile, sexy yet vulnerable woman on the brink of her complete self-destruction. Forty-six years later, Stern recreated Monroe’s most iconic shots with Lindsay Lohan, ‘another actress whose prodigious fame is not quite commensurate with her professional achievements’ (Fortini 2008: 84). By February 2008, when the photo spread was published, Lohan had arguably reached more fame through her alcoholic excesses, DUI arrests, and her relationship with DJ Samantha Ronson than her acting skills. Stern chose her for the recreation of ‘The Last Sitting’, because he suspected that Lohan, similar to Monroe, ‘had a lot more depth to her’ (Fortini 2008: 84) than one might assume from her public image. In her article for New York Magazine, Fortini stresses Lohan’s admiration for Monroe, suggesting that the connection between Monroe and Lohan is a very intimate one that reaches beyond their respective professional lives. Lohan purchased one of Monroe’s former apartments and, as Fortini quotes her, owns ‘a lot of Marilyn stuff ’ (2008: 84), including a huge painting of Monroe that alludes to the icon’s supposed suicide. Lohan’s version of the sitting, then, is a theatrical performance in which she emulates and imitates—perhaps even inhabits—the icon by strictly copying Marilyn’s each and every move. Lohan, wearing a rather poorly duplicated blond wig, reveals her naked body behind various sheer scarves, rolls amid white sheets, and glances seductively into the camera. In contrast to Madonna’s ‘Material Girl’, there is no parodic or subversive element in Lohan’s recreation of Monroe. Rather, Lohan’s spread is intended to be read as her rebellion against the all-consuming and destructive Hollywood machinery that takes its toll on many young actors and actresses, including Monroe and herself (cf. Fortini 2008). Lohan interprets Marilyn’s original photos as an act of subversion, suggesting that Monroe’s photos display ‘a woman who is giving herself to the public. 126

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[…] She’s saying “Look, you’ve taken a lot from me, so why don’t I give it to you myself.” She’s taking control back’ (Fortini 2008: 84). According to Lohan, the photo spread was Marilyn’s response to a society and a fi lm industry that saw her only as an image, and her own spread is supposed to fulfill a similar purpose, in the sense that her deliberate self-objectification is meant to criticize the public fetishization of the downfall and death of young female celebrities. However, the line between (re-)gaining control over one’s image and finally submitting oneself to the public’s total ownership through such photo spreads is, of course, very thin. After all, ‘The Last Sitting’ cemented Marilyn’s legacy as the ultimate sex symbol, just as the photo spread inextricably links Marilyn’s naked body with death, consumption, and the emptiness beneath the glitzy surfaces of the film industry. Similarly, Lohan’s spread connotes excess, (self-)destruction, and the commodification of the female body, in particular of the body of Monroe as an American icon. As Baty comments on Monroe’s sitting with Stern (and the same, I believe, holds true for Lohan’s sitting), ‘Marilyn is portrayed as the object of her authors’ desire, and the subjective representative of American sexuality’ (1995: 23). Both women are subjected to a male gaze they do not visibly try to resist or to invert; both are explored by a man who directs and frames them, and they are framed as ‘the site of a shared and mass-mediated desire’ (Baty 1995: 23), as fleshly commodities that can be consumed even long after their death.12 Lindsay Lohan’s photos have been criticized for lacking the profundity Stern had hoped to extract from the young actress and the intimacy that Stern and Monroe shared in the original shooting. In some of the shots, Lohan unintentionally looks like a caricature of Monroe, that is, like someone who strongly identifies with and desperately strives to be Marilyn Monroe, which gives her spread a somewhat eerie and morbid flair. Lohan blindly imitates Monroe but fails to appropriate her idol in a way that would add new layers of meaning to her own public persona, on the one hand, and to Monroe’s ‘The Last Sitting’, on the other. However, the flatness and emptiness of Lohan’s shots affirm Marilyn Monroe as a monument to Hollywood celebrity, glamour, and artifice—as a transcending icon that aligns American culture with consumerism and consumption, volatility and the irrevocable loss of innocence, all of which are countered through the icon’s reproduction in an attempt to capture an ‘authentic’ Americanness.

Conclusion As Graham McCann notes, Marilyn Monroe ‘haunts reality’ (1987: 77), as she remains present in the world, even though she has long been physically absent from it. As a commodity always available to be consumed, her body provided a surface on which ‘the very tensions that inflected the ideological life of fifties America’ (McCann 1987: 19) could be negotiated and onto which ideas about morality and sexuality could be projected. Moreover, Marilyn Monroe has become a cultural myth, an American icon that ‘epitomizes 127

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the ambiguities in modernity’ (McCann 1987: 11), that is, the tensions and disjunctions between the mass media, technological reproduction, consumerism, and modern celebrity. Constantly reproduced, imitated, and displaced, Marilyn Monroe is an unfinished product that is indefinitely in the making, as each reincarnation of Marilyn adds to her cultural myth. Mass-mediated remembrances like Warhol’s prints, Madonna’s performance, or Lohan’s re-enactment affirm Monroe as an icon of American culture, but Monroe does not always return the favor to the cultural agents who appropriate her image. While Warhol’s prints and Madonna have become American cultural icons in their own right, Lindsay Lohan failed at appropriating Monroe for the purpose of enhancing her own public persona with an iconic or mythic quality. In ‘Material Girl’, Madonna does not blindly copy Monroe’s performance in Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, but rather endows it with her own signature. Madonna emulates Monroe’s movements and gestures, but through the ironic twist that results from the discrepancy between the performance scenes and the frame-narrative, she notably sets herself apart from the icon at the same time. As ‘Material Girl’ makes its own statement on capitalism, consumerism, and male/female relationships, Madonna manages to turn Marilyn Monroe’s iconic performance into her very own iconic performance. Lohan’s re-enactment of Monroe’s ‘Last Sitting’, however, lacks the actress’ own touch. In contrast to Madonna, Lohan does not appropriate Marilyn Monroe, but tries to be Marilyn Monroe, which is, of course, impossible to achieve. The flatness of Lohan’s shots results from her inability to develop her own personality in Stern’s photographs and to carry out her own agenda. As a result, her photographs have no edge, no particular factor that makes them recognizable as her work—they are merely copies of Marilyn Monroe’s work. As the two examples of Madonna and Lohan’s re-enactments of Marilyn Monroe demonstrate, cultural icons are particularly powerful and effective if they are not senselessly reproduced but appropriated to accentuate the image of the ‘appropriator’ or to reflect on cultural processes and developments. While icons are flexible and open to new significations, they are not devoid of all meaning and need to be adapted and adjusted to the particularities of their appropriation. Mass-mediated images of Monroe have consolidated her as an icon that embodies and ‘authenticates’ reproducibility, excess, and consumption as ‘American’ qualities. Marilyn’s multiple replications and appropriations in American culture point to the impossibility of unitary identity and, as Baty argues, signal that national identity ‘comprises a series of contestations, disruptions, negotiations, and amendments’ (1995: 49). Reading America through re-constructions of Marilyn, in other words, reveals the tensions of the nation itself, for neither will resolve into a finite and fully realized identity. Both Marilyn and America are imagined again and again; they are made up of copies that displace and have become more ‘real’ than the ‘original’, which has been irrevocably lost in the multitude of reproductions. The ‘copied’ America that is produced through the repeated circulation of mass-produced and mass-mediated images and re-enactments of, for instance, the cultural myth Marilyn Monroe becomes the ‘real’ 128

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America, then. This ‘copied’ America is the only America we have access to and, therefore, to emphasize this notion, Thirty Are Better Than One.

References Baty, S. Paige (1995), American Monroe: The Making of a Body Politic. Berkeley: University of California Press. Benjamin, Walter (2008), ‘The Work of Art in the Age of its Technological Reproducibility,’ in Michael W. Jennings, Brigid Doherty, and Thomas Y. Levin (eds.), The Work of Art in the Age of its Technological Reproducibility and Other Writings on Media. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, pp. 19–56. Berg, Gretchen (1989), ‘Nothing To Lose: An Interview with Andy Warhol,’ in Michael O’Pray (ed.), Andy Warhol: Film Factory. London: British Film Institute, pp. 54–61. Brown, Mary Ellen, and John Fiske (1987), ‘Romancing the Rock: Romance and Representation in Popular Music Videos,’ OneTwoThreeFour, 5, pp. 61–73. Deleuze, Gilles (1994), Difference and Repetition, trans. Paul Patton. New York: Columbia University Press. Fiske, John (1989), Reading the Popular. Boston: Unwin Hyman. Fortini, Amanda (2008), ‘Lindsay Lohan as Marilyn Monroe in “The Last Sitting,”’ New York Magazine, February 25, p. 84. Ganis, William V. (2000), ‘Andy Warhol’s Iconophilia,’ Invisible Culture: An Electronic Journal for Visual Studies, 3, online. Grosz, Elizabeth (1994), Volatile Bodies: Toward a Corporeal Feminism. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Herwitz, Daniel (2008), The Star as Icon: Celebrity in the Age of Mass Consumption. New York: Columbia University Press. Hawks, Howard (1953), Gentlemen Prefer Blondes. Century City: 20th Century Fox Home Entertainment. Horkheimer, Max, and Theodor W. Adorno (2002), The Dialectics of Enlightenment, trans. Edmund Jephcott. Palo Alto: Stanford University Press. Juncker, Clara (2003), ‘Real Marilyns,’ in Beverly Maeder (ed.), Representing Realities: Essays on American Literature, Art, and Culture. Tübingen: Gunter Narr Verlag, pp. 129–142. Kaplan, E. Ann (1987), Rocking Around the Clock: Music Television, Postmodernism and Consumer Culture. New York: Methuen. Lambert, Mary (1985), ‘Material Girl,’ in Celebration: The Video Collection. Burbank: Warner Brothers. Lüthy, Michael (1995), Andy Warhol: Thirty Are Better Than One. Frankfurt am Main: Insel Verlag. McCann, Graham (1987), Marilyn Monroe. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press. Monroe, Marilyn, with Richard Meryman (1962), ‘Fame May Go By and So Long—I’ve Had You,’ Life, August 3, pp. 31–38. 129

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Robertson, Pamela (1996), Guilty Pleasures: Feminist Camp from Mae West to Madonna. Durham: Duke University Press. Rollyson, Carl (2005), Female Icons: Marilyn Monroe to Susan Sontag. Lincoln: iUniverse. Steinem, Gloria (2002), ‘The Woman Who Will Not Die,’ in Yona Zeldis McDonough (ed.), All The Available Light: A Marilyn Monroe Reader. New York: Touchstone, pp. 63–77. Stern, Bert, with Anne Gottlieb (1982), The Last Sitting. New York: William Morrow and Company. Tetzlaff, David (1993), ‘Metatextual Girl,’ in Cathy Schwichtenberg (ed.), The Madonna Connection: Representational Politics, Subcultural Identities, and Cultural Theory. Boulder: Westview Press, pp. 239–263. Warhol, Andy (1975), The Philosophy of Andy Warhol: From A to B and Back Again. San Diego: Harcourt Brace.

Notes 1 Elizabeth Grosz has famously argued that the body is not ‘merely’ biological, but it is also signifying and signified. Historically contingent, the body becomes ‘a body as social and discursive object, a body bound up in the order of desire, signification, and power’ (1994: 19). Marilyn Monroe’s ‘body’—as it is represented and revived in re-enactments, impersonations, and other performances—may therefore operate as a metaphor for culture, as a site of signification where cultural processes are negotiated, reconciled, and reconfigured. 2 See McCann (1987: 43) for details on the evolution of Norma Jeane Baker into Marilyn Monroe. 3 Baty suggests that Monroe is in the paradoxical position of signaling ‘both presence and loss as her body/image must also always signify her death—the removal of her body from the living world and its resurrection on the virtual spaces of mass mediation by means of simulation and mechanical reproduction’ (1995: 22). 4 See, for instance, Lüthy (1995: 43): ‘Die Porträts von z.B. Marilyn Monroe und Liz Taylor […] gehören nicht nur zu den bedeutendsten und bekanntesten Arbeiten des Künstlers, sie haben sogar, besonders im Falle Marilyn Monroes, das Bild des jeweiligen Stars entscheidend mitgeprägt.’ (‘The portraits of, for instance, Marilyn Monroe and Liz Taylor […] do not only belong to the artist’s most important and most famous works, but they also shaped the image of the respective star in significant ways. This is especially true in the case of Marilyn Monroe.’ [my translation]) Lüthy argues that the success of Warhol’s star portraits cannot be solely traced back to the fame of the celebrities he reproduces in his art, but on the ability of his work to make visible the multiple layers on which fame and the cult of celebrity operate, which, in turn, contributes to the solidification of the celebrities as celebrities. Warhol’s art, in other words, critically examines and enthusiastically reinforces American celebrity culture at the same time (cf. 1995: 43–49). 5 As Horkheimer and Adorno explain the objective of Dialectics of Enlightenment, their book ‘demonstrates tendencies which turn cultural progress into its opposite,’ which they attempt to do ‘on the basis of social phenomena of the 1930s and 1940s in America’ (2002: xiii). 130

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The main problem they identify in culture is that it is ‘infecting everything with sameness,’ that it is ‘inflexible’ and ‘systematic’, and subjugated to ‘the power of capital’ (2002: 94). Drawing on examples from American culture, such as jazz, Hollywood, and Disney cartoons, Horkheimer and Adorno argue that film, radio, and other mass media are not art but businesses that produce standardized goods for passive mass consumption and promise easy pleasure while really deceiving the audience into conformity and the suppression of individuality. Warhol explains the democracy of consumerism in The Philosophy of Andy Warhol as follows: ‘What’s great about this country is that America started the tradition where the richest consumers buy essentially the same things as the poorest. You can be watching TV and see Coca-Cola, and you know that the President drinks Coca-Cola, Liz Taylor drinks Coca-Cola, and just think, you can drink Coca-Cola, too. A Coke is a Coke and no amount of money can get you a better coke than the one the bum on the corner is drinking. All the cokes are the same and all the cokes are good. Liz Taylor knows it, the President knows it, the bum knows it, and you know it’ (1975: 100–101). I quote from the English translation of Benjamin’s essay as published in the 2008 volume The Work of Art in the Age of its Technological Reproducibility and Other Writings on Media. As Benjamin elaborates in his essay, while mechanical reproduction does not touch the work of art as such, it interferes with its authenticity, which ‘is the quintessence of all that is transmissible from its origin on, ranging from its physical duration to the historical testimony relating to it’ (2008: 22). The interference with authenticity has far-reaching consequences, as Benjamin continues: ‘Since the historical testimony is founded on the physical duration, the former, too, is jeopardized by reproduction, in which the physical duration plays no part. And what is really jeopardized when the historical testimony is affected is the authority of the object […]. One might focus these aspects of the artwork in the concept of the aura, and go on to say: what withers in the age of technological reproducibility of the work of art is the latter’s aura’ (2008: 22). In the initial scene, ‘Carradine’ sees ‘Madonna’ for the first time on an enormous screen that takes up almost the entire frame. ‘Madonna’ is shot in a close-up, which intensifies the impression that she invades the ‘male sphere’ of the screening room. In the following scene, on the other hand, ‘Carradine’ visits the set of ‘Madonna’s’ film, thus infiltrating the ‘female sphere’ of theatricality and performance. In an interesting twist, Lindsay Lohan posed as Madonna in an ‘American Icons’ photo spread in honor of the seventieth Anniversary of Glamour in 2009. In this spread, current female entertainers posed as important female icons from different eras of American history, including, for instance, actress Hayden Panettiere as Amelia Earhart, actress America Ferrera as Dolores Huerta, and singer Alicia Keys as Michelle Obama. Vogue published the photographs on August 6, 1962, the day after Monroe died, for the September 1 issue. It is arguably one of the most famous of Vogue’s ‘September Issues’ and was a very timely tribute to Marilyn Monroe. As Stern reminisces about the photographic process of ‘The Last Sitting’: ‘That energy of observing is marvelous. When you desire someone so much, and she’s right there in front of 131

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you, there’s something very special about not touching, and just letting the light caress her. And the camera plays a very powerful role in all this’ (1982: 136). In the shoot with Marilyn, Stern found some of his earliest teenage fantasies fulfilled, as he recalls: ‘Since I was thirteen, I had dreamed of a woman who would roll on a bed with me and do everything I wanted. Now I had found that woman. She was vulnerable and drunk and tender and inviting and exciting’ (1982: 136). ‘My love affair with Marilyn was photographic’ (1982: 162), as he sums up his encounter with Monroe, articulating his desire to capture her at the nexus of the photographic and the pornographic, or the artistic and the carnal (cf. Baty 1995: 24). Of the shooting with Lohan, Stern said that it was ‘very similar, déjà vu you might say, like revisiting an old street’ (Fortini 2008: 84).

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Chapter 6 Queering Cowboys, Queering Futurity: The Re/Construction of American Cowboy Masculinity Leopold Lippert

‘W

ell … here it be. I think the existing Brokeback TOS parodies were pretty funny … but missed a couple of clips I thought would work really well. The concept is old hat, but enjoy’ (Zebonka 2007). With this description, YouTube user Zebonka uploaded the two-and-a-half-minute video Broke Trek: A Star Trek Brokeback Mountain Parody to the popular online platform. The clip, which uses the format of a movie trailer for a non-, or rather, not-yet-existent film, is essentially a mash-up from already existing pop culture artifacts. Broke Trek represents a creative juxtaposition of Ang Lee’s 2005 film Brokeback Mountain, a star-studded Hollywood movie significant for its presentation of two gay male lead characters, and Star Trek: The Original Series (hence ‘TOS’), the 79-episode TV drama that has generated one of the most extensive science fiction franchises in history. Zebonka’s clip relies on Gustavo Santaolalla’s soundtrack for Brokeback Mountain and combines it with visual and audio material from the 1960s Star Trek series. Employing the (sexually) insinuating glances, slow fades, and epic textual inserts characteristic of the Brokeback Mountain trailer, Broke Trek metamorphoses Captain Kirk and Mr. Spock, the stalwart soldiers of an imagined ‘American’ futurity, into Jack Twist and Ennis del Mar, the gay shepherds who fall in love on a Wyoming mountain range. At the time of writing, Broke Trek had been viewed over 424,000 times.1 As the brief introduction that comes with Broke Trek indicates, Zebonka was certainly aware that his contribution was not particularly original, but rather ‘old hat’. In fact, I will show that Broke Trek participates in a larger tradition of popular appropriation and re-interpretation of commercial entertainment produced for mass audiences. By recontextualizing material from Star Trek and Brokeback Mountain, the clip also reassesses a number of discourses (of masculinity, sexuality, and nationhood, for instance) embedded in the original texts. Such a reassessment evolves as an intricate re-interpretation of the iconic figure of the ‘cowboy’, a mythical inhabitant of the American West, who has long served as a vehicle for the cultural construction of ‘Americanness’ and the postulation of unique ‘American’ characteristics. Through the figure of the cowboy, Broke Trek enthusiastically participates in a considerable reconfiguration of sexual identity, American masculinity, and the politics of a well-capitalized entertainment industry. Thus, although primarily produced for popular pleasure (‘enjoy!’), the clip also represents a curious channel through which American national identity is negotiated. The following chapter aims to unravel the complex bundle of meanings that accumulate during the short running time of Broke Trek. A particular focus on the cowboy may shed light on the network of associations made up of Star Trek, Brokeback Mountain, and the

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popular productions that have already begun to rework creatively their commercial originals. The reinscription of cowboy masculinity and sexuality in this small pop culture archive, however, necessitates not only a reflection on American sexual politics, but also a thorough examination of the temporal tropes that frame these politics. As recent thinking in Queer Theory has shown, discourses of sexuality and sexual normativity are often put forward as discourses of temporality, futurity, and social reproduction. Therefore, a consideration of the interconnectedness of time, sexuality, and the American nation is of crucial importance for this analysis. For in order to understand the queering of cowboys, we need to be able to make sense of the concomitant queering of futurity.

Queer Temporality and America In his book No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive, a widely read and controversial polemic, Lee Edelman rejects the liberal progressivism of much mainstream gay rhetoric and firmly announces that queers have no promise of futurity at all. Edelman’s argument is built on the disconcerting recognition that the prevailing stereotypes about queer people are all strangely connected with temporality, or rather, one particular form of temporality. In the dominant cultural imagination, queers have, in Elizabeth Freeman’s words, ‘no children, no succeeding generations, no meaningful way to contribute to society, no hope, no plans, and nothing to offer most political tomorrows’ (2007: 165); queers have, in short, no future. Advancing a rationalization that is certainly influenced by the deadly shadow of AIDS and the changes it brought to queer thinking about longevity and historicity, Edelman claims that ‘the queer comes to figure the bar to every realization of futurity’ (2004: 4). Positioned outside the continually progressing cycles of ‘reproductive futurism’ (2004: 3), queers are caught in a strange temporality that always already precludes the promise of their full (i.e., future) realization. In a country that puts Manifest Destiny, ‘perennial rebirth’ (Turner 2008: 2), and continuous expansion at the heart of its national political imaginary, queerness is certainly rendered securely outside the sphere of politics. If the ‘national time’ of ‘America’ (as a cultural construction) is geared toward futurity, toward constant progress, then queerness must be considered its undoing. There is simply no time for queers in a political arena that hinges on its intrinsic futurism. As a cultural agent without a politics, without a future, the queer is phantasmatically figured as the ultimate marker of social negativity. In a political imaginary that posits the future as its primary legitimation, then, queers must necessarily embody the resistance to every form of community, sociality, and posterity. Judith Halberstam’s take on the ‘No Future’ argument is more optimistic in outlook and speaks immediately to the hopeful prospect that I will presume to read in Broke Trek. In her 2005 book In a Queer Time and Place, she insists that despite their strange life temporalities, queers can still harbor viable political aspirations. For Halberstam, queer politics involves an active challenging of what she labels ‘the time of reproduction’ (2005: 5), a provocation that may open up imaginative spaces for new ways of timing queer living and belonging. 136

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Halberstam claims that ‘queer time, even as it emerges from the AIDS crisis, is not only about compression and annihilation; it is also about the potentiality of a life unscripted by the conventions of family, inheritance, and child rearing’ (2005: 2). Having no future, or more precisely, being denied the representational politics of futurity, can also be an opportunity to rethink the linearity, sequentiality, and what Edelman derides as the ‘royal road to consequence’ (Dinshaw, Edelman, Ferguson, Freccero, Freeman, Halberstam, Jagose, and Nguyen 2007: 181) that informs most conventional modes of ‘old-school’ historicism. And while Elizabeth Freeman rightly observes that ‘origin stories have been critiqued for quite some time,’ she also recognizes that ‘fewer critics have questioned the progressivist doctrine of the improved tomorrow’ (2007: 165). Queering futurity, thought of as a project that is both theoretical and political, might provide just that framework for questioning the unreconstructed progressivism that underlies even the most liberal lines of argumentation. As queerness implies that the future, in Judith Halberstam’s words, ‘can be imagined according to logics that lie outside of those paradigmatic markers of life experience—namely, birth, marriage, reproduction, and death’ (2005: 2), it harbors the potential to provoke a constructive rethinking of historicity and futurity in the American national context. Queering futurity, queering the time of reproduction, then, may emerge as a massive re-interpretation of the American political imaginary. For queering futurity would also mean queering the temporality of ‘America’. It is Broke Trek’s creative rewriting of the futurist imperative that governs the representational logic of both Star Trek and Brokeback Mountain that makes such a rethinking manifest. A full grasp of the revisionary import of Zebonka’s short clip, therefore, necessitates an assessment of the politics of its sources, and the ‘American’ cowboy iconicity they transport.

Star Trek’s Undiscovered Countries ‘By any measure of cultural iconicity—innovation, scope, resilience, recognizability, representativeness,’ Brian Ott and Eric Aoki point out, ‘Star Trek is truly a touchstone of U.S. popular culture’ (2001: 392). Indeed, Star Trek constitutes a science fiction franchise that is made up of a still expanding catalogue of six television series, eleven feature films, hundreds of novels, comics and even technical handbooks, replicas of almost every prop used by Star Trek characters, such as uniforms, tricorders, or phasers, a confusing multitude of other merchandise like playing cards, mugs, starship model kits, and a well-attended circuit of fan conventions and exhibitions all over the globe. There even exists a fully functional language, Klingon, which thousands of fans learn as a foreign language, and which ‘should have the inventors of Esperanto turning green with envy’ (2000: 39), as Volker Gentejohann quips. But Star Trek seems to be much more than mere science fiction entertainment: By constantly using the vocabulary of American myth, it actively intervenes in debates about nationhood, about what may constitute ‘Americanness’ in the popular imagination. ‘The enduring popularity of Star Trek,’ Rick Worland argues, ‘is illuminated through the varied 137

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sources of American historical and cultural mythology it evokes and negotiates’ (1994: 19). Extending the frontier into space, Star Trek perpetuates the settler expansionism that has been associated with the American nation-building project of the nineteenth century. In this constellation, the starship Enterprise figures as a ‘wagon train to the stars,’ as the popular phrase holds, an imaginary vehicle that allows its occupants, in Daniel Bernardi’s words, ‘to dominate and domesticate the frontier’ (1998: 77). Star Trek is westward expansion ad infinitum. It literalizes the bold civilization claims of progress and Manifest Destiny, as the franchise has created a fictional universe in which the mythical national future, the ‘final frontier’, has always already arrived. Star Trek’s famous imperative ‘to boldly go where no man has gone before’ speaks to the heart of the reproductive futurism determining the American national project. For despite its incentive to explore, Star Trek mainly embraces more of the same. As Volker Gentejohann argues, ‘[w]hen Americans venture into space, they seem to expect to find themselves’ (2000: 152), they expect alien civilizations that conform to the American concept of ‘civilization’, and they project, or rather, reproduce a future in which the dominance of traditional ‘American culture’ is asserted. Captain James T. Kirk (William Shatner) and his Vulcan first officer Mr. Spock (Leonard Nimoy), the lead characters of The Original Series, emerge as space cowboys roaming the mythical landscape of an all-American futurity. They participate in a tradition of the hegemonic representation of cowboy masculinity that asserts the significance of nineteenthcentury imaginations of the American West, the frontier, and Manifest Destiny to contemporary national politics. Kirk and Spock embody different but complementary traits of that masculinity: While Kirk is a confident ladies’ man with (almost) one new girlfriend per episode, Spock represents the stoic (scientific) explorer who makes every effort not to show any feelings. Together, they inform a homosocial yet always staunchly heterosexualized

Illustration 1: The USS Enterprise riding into the sunset. Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country © Paramount Pictures, 1991.

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futurity that reproduces the old American West in space. At the same time, Captain Kirk and Mr. Spock also tap into the mythical reservoir of the expansionist politics informing the more recent ‘American Century’. Star Trek’s original outlook, for instance, is heavily indebted to John F. Kennedy’s New Frontier, a rhetorical amalgamation that combined military global expansionism (in the guise of ‘containment’) with the technological-ideological fantasy of space exploration. A virtual reincarnation of Jack Kennedy, James Kirk (with a little help from his science officer, Spock) capitalizes on the 1960s obsession with both the U.S. space program and the ideological struggle between American individualism and Soviet Communism. Rick Worland argues that just like JFK, Star Trek displayed great expertise in ‘re-conceptualiz[ing] traditional frontier symbolism in ways meaningful to modern people’ (1994: 22). In Star Trek, the frontier, the New Frontier, and the final frontier converge in the figure of the cowboy: The common national project they advance is reproductive futurism. In a brief exemplary review of the sixth Star Trek feature film, The Undiscovered Country (Meyer 1991), I want to make visible the interconnectedness of the Trek narrative and the American national project. An at times hilariously explicit commentary on U.S. geopolitics during the final years of the Cold War, The Undiscovered Country openly draws on the demise of the Soviet Union, which coincided with the film’s production and initial reception. At the beginning of the film’s narrative, the audience witnesses the explosion of Praxis, a Klingon moon that evaporates, as Daniel Bernardi holds, ‘like a Chernobyl due to overmining and poor safety procedures’ (1998: 100). The increasing obsoleteness of the antique industrialism that sustains the Klingon Empire brings the peace-loving chancellor Gorkon to the political stage, who, like his Russian counterpart Gorbachev, endorses nonviolence and ruefully attempts to negotiate peace with the ‘American’ United Federation of Planets. As it turns out, high-ranking Federation officials intend to send the notorious Klingon-hater and political hawk James Kirk, despite his vehement protests, on the perilous peace mission. In a remarkable allusion, Ambassador Spock explains the rationale behind Kirk’s nomination and claims that, according to an old Vulcan proverb, ‘only Nixon could go to China.’ Spock’s geopolitical witticism is only one of the numerous intertextual references that pattern The Undiscovered Country. When the Klingon delegation is scheduled to arrive on the Enterprise to participate in an informal banquet, Commander Chekov reasons, ‘Guess who’s coming to dinner’ and reveals not only his knowledge of Hollywood movie history, but also the African American stereotyping that has always influenced the narrative construction of Klingons within the Star Trek universe. Most frequently, however, lines from Shakespearean drama are transported into a twenty-third-century context: The Klingon General Chang, played by the British actor Christopher Plummer, seems to have developed a particular affection for the Bard and invokes him constantly. The Shakespeare connection becomes most evident in the quoted title of the film that also turns out to be its structuring metaphor. ‘The undiscover’d country’ is a phrase from Hamlet’s famous ‘To be, or not to be’ soliloquy that simply stands for death, ‘from whose bourn/No traveller returns’ (III.1: 80–81). In the futurist logic of Star Trek, however, Hamlet’s deadly negativity is invested with different (temporal) meaning. In his final statement in The Undiscovered Country, Captain Kirk points out that the Enterprise 139

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and her history will shortly become the care of another crew. To them and their posterity, we will commit our future. They will continue the voyages that we have begun and journey to all the undiscovered countries, boldly going where no man, where no one, has gone before. Death, as a futureless marker of social negativity, as a queer reminder of anti-sociality, is simply eradicated by the futurist logic of Star Trek, in the same way as Hamlet’s selfdestructive uncertainty is reconfigured as the exhilarating promise of reproductive expansionism. Although Captain Kirk’s gender-neutral speech has become famous for its acknowledgement of the feminist struggles of the previous decades, it at the same time renders queerness, in the form of negativity, outside of what is thinkable. Despite its playful convolution of diverse historical references and different temporalities, The Undiscovered Country still posits the future as its imperative. In the Star Trek universe, just as in the ‘American’ political imaginary, accordingly, queerness is simply omitted from dominant discourse and relocated to the unimaginable realm from where no traveler returns. If Star Trek carries the ‘national time’ of ‘America’ into its infinite future, it seems only consequential that there is very little talk of homosexuality anywhere in the Trek universe. Henry Jenkins and John Campbell chronicle the futile efforts of many fans who demanded from the studios ‘some evidence that gays, bisexuals, and lesbians exist in the twenty-fourth century represented on the program [Star Trek: The Next Generation]’ (2006: 91), a struggle that has gathered new momentum since George Takei, the actor who played helmsman Mr. Sulu in The Original Series, came out as a gay man in 2005 and has been vocal in gay-rights activism ever since. Nevertheless, queerness is conspicuously missing on the final frontier. As Ott and Aoki reason, the ‘absence of same-sex couples and gay characters invites viewers to imagine a future in which homosexuality is non-existent’ (2001: 409). As it turned out, however, many viewers considered themselves invited to imagine otherwise.

Textual Poaching, or the Politics of Popular Re-Interpretation In his widely recognized book about fan cultures, Henry Jenkins describes fans, following Michel de Certeau, as ‘textual poachers’ (1992: 24). Jenkins considers fans not merely passive, ‘fanatic’ consumers of mass entertainment, but active interpreters who selectively and productively appropriate the commercial material provided to them. Fans often creatively undermine the hegemony of the ‘original’ and provide alternative meanings, perspectives, and pleasures in their own ‘grassroots’ cultural productions. Jenkins argues that ‘[f]ans possess not simply borrowed remnants snatched from mass culture, but their own culture built from the semiotic raw materials the media provides’ (1992: 49). Surveying a vast amount of fan culture, such as fan novels or short stories, video clips, and fanzines, he claims that fan culture can ‘rework the program ideology (foregrounding marginalized characters, inverting or complicating codes of good and evil, introducing alternative sexualities) in 140

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order to make the texts speak to different perspectives’ (1992: 176). Fans, then, seem to acquire a considerable amount of power; they develop their own opinions and judgments on mass-mediated productions and employ startlingly creative means to voice them. The work of John Fiske can be considered the theoretical groundwork for an understanding of the popular appropriation of mass entertainment occurring, for example, in fan cultures. Fiske developed an analytical model that allows acknowledging the capability of readers to resist the dominant ideologies provided by mass culture and posit their own interpretations against them. In Understanding Popular Culture, originally published in 1989, he claims that although ‘[t]he economic needs of the cultural industries are thus perfectly in line with the disciplinary and ideological requirements of the existing social order’ (2011: 23), audiences provide resistant readings that counterbalance the primacy of the economic. Fiske’s project is socially progressive: He argues for localized (small-scale) audience resistance as a viable model for political intervention. These resistant forces, says Fiske, ‘transform the cultural commodity into a cultural resource, pluralize the meanings and pleasures it offers, evade or resist its disciplinary efforts, fracture its homogeneity and coherence, raid or poach upon its terrain’ (2011: 23). Although one might consider Fiske’s romanticization of audience power somewhat naïve, his theoretical framework still remains an influential concept for an understanding of popular culture beyond the mass culture paradigm put forward by critics associated with the Frankfurt School. Some words of caution, however, seem necessary: Henry Jenkins has rightly noted that ‘readers are not always resistant; all resistant readings are not necessarily progressive readings; the “people” do not always recognize their conditions of alienation and subordination’ (1992: 34). What’s more, the emergence of Web 2.0 and its accompanying technologies has shifted the field of investigation to a certain degree: In his introductory essay to the second edition of Understanding Popular Culture, Jenkins claims that ‘[t]he debate now centers on the terms of our participation, not whether spectatorship is active or passive’ (2011: xxx). As Broke Trek was uploaded to YouTube and thus presented a typical Web 2.0 product, I find it particularly important to keep in mind Jenkins’ modification of Fiske’s theories, as he draws attention to the fact that ‘[w]e may no longer be able to draw a clear or simple distinction between consumers and producers’ (2011: xxx). For a more thorough understanding of the processes that shape the production and circulation of Broke Trek, then, the clip must be acknowledged as both resistant reading and active reworking, both reception and production of popular culture. While YouTube and Web 2.0 are relatively recent phenomena, Broke Trek stands in a long tradition of popular appropriations of Star Trek. The rewriting of the sexualities of Captain Kirk and Mr. Spock emerged as early as the early 1970s under the umbrella title of ‘slash’. A particularly striking component of Star Trek fandom, slash denotes fan productions (such as stories, graphic depictions, or imaginatively cut video material) that turn the homosociality routinely depicted in mass entertainment into something more explicitly sexual. In narratives of ‘Kirk/Spock’, or ‘K/S’, then, their writers suggest ‘however timidly, that Kirk and Spock cared more deeply for each other than for any of the many female secondary characters who 141

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brush past them in the original episodes’ (Jenkins 1992: 187). A popular attempt to invest the bodies of Captain Kirk and Mr. Spock with alternative meaning, slash produces democratic resistance to the reproductive futurism of the final frontier.2 While the ‘changing cultural status of fans’ (Gray, Sandvoss, and Harrington 2007: 5) and fandom—from an exceptional, a ‘fanatic’ phenomenon to a typical pop culture consumption pattern—has shifted academic attention away from such extraordinary fan groups as the Trekkers, slash has developed into a multifaceted and still productive communal enterprise. Bridging the realms of romance and pornography, slash ‘liberat[es] the characters, and indeed the character archetypes, from the heterosexist norms of commercial media production’ (Falzone 2005: 249). As popular culture in John Fiske’s sense of the term, slash harbors the resistant potential to infuse the futurism of Star Trek with the negativity of the queer—a potential that is also evident in Broke Trek, Zebonka’s short YouTube clip.3 But Broke Trek represents a very particular version of slash: As a popular rewriting not only of Star Trek but also of Brokeback Mountain, the clip presents homosexuality in the ‘American’ future through the iconic figure of the cowboy. Tapping into the mythical reservoir of cowboy masculinity that connects Ang Lee’s movie with the science fiction franchise, Broke Trek emerges as ‘cowboy slash’, a critical and always creative juxtaposition of the politics of Star Trek with the temporality of the ‘gay cowboy movie’.

Brokeback Times? Brokeback Mountain, Ang Lee’s 2005 adaptation of Annie Proulx’s short story of the same name, introduced the tragic love story of two young gay men in the American West of the 1960s to American mainstream audiences. Extensive press coverage turned the film into a virtually ubiquitous phenomenon and launched, as B. Ruby Rich notes, ‘the tag “the gay cowboy movie” into the American vernacular’ (2007: 44).4 Brokeback Mountain recounts the lives of Jack Twist (Jake Gyllenhaal) and Ennis del Mar (Heath Ledger), two young drifters who fall in love with each other in the seclusion of a summer spent herding sheep on a (fictional) Wyoming mountain. The film elaborates on the well-known narrative trope that unravels the tragic fates of two ‘star-crossed lovers’, as it relates the protagonists’ struggles with the all-powerful heteronormative forces of the society that surrounds them. Living in Wyoming and Texas between roughly 1960 and 1980, Jack and Ennis find little time and space for themselves, as the pressures of jobs, wives, and children interfere with their precarious relationship. Brokeback Mountain ends on a sad note: When Jack finally dies in a mysterious car accident, Ennis finds himself mourning his lover and dreaming ruefully of a life they never had. Despite the critical acclaim for Brokeback Mountain as an empowering representation of homosexuality in mainstream cinema, the cultural logic of mass-mediated entertainment produced different politics. The film, and the promotional efforts that accompanied its release, engage in a remarkable de-politicization of gay content. Advertised as a ‘universal 142

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Illustration 2: Tellingly, Jack and Ennis’ first sexual encounter suffers from bad lighting, effectively making gay sex invisible. (Brightness significantly increased in this screen grab.) Brokeback Mountain © Universal Studios, 2005.

love story’ (Mendelsohn 2006: 12), as a ‘tragic and universal study of tabooed passion and unrealized dreams’ (Kitses 2007: 23), Brokeback Mountain removes queerness from its narrative focus and incorporates the fictional fates of Jack and Ennis into seemingly universal cultural conceptions of unrealized love and rugged masculinity. This downplaying of the film’s radical potential, certainly owing to an intended mainstream appeal, is also evidenced in what D. A. Miller labels the ‘de-eroticization’ (2007: 50) of gay love. In Brokeback Mountain, audiences do not really see gay sex, as it is either rendered invisible in the darkness of an unlit tent in the wilderness or eclipsed by the fading of the screen. What is shown with greater explicitness, instead, is the marital sex between Ennis and his wife Alma (Michelle Williams) and the prenuptial lovemaking of Jack and Lureen (Anne Hathaway). In a comment on the invisibility of gay sex, then, John Howard asserts that Annie Proulx ‘can’t imagine a sustainable gay relationship in the country,’ just as ‘Larry McMurtry and Diana Ossana [the movie’s scriptwriters] can’t imagine gay sex in the nation’ (2007: 101). They can imagine, however, an almost routine codification of queer social negativity. Howard challenges the progressiveness ascribed to Brokeback Mountain and insists that the film’s ‘[c]lunky closet metaphors, shadowy street cruising, homosexual homicide narratives [and] unhappy endings’ (2007: 101) merely retell long-established tropes that link gay male characters with social negativity in Hollywood cinema and popular entertainment culture at large. Miller strikes a similar chord: He argues that, in the movie, ‘[w]hat we are asked to “accept” about the Homosexual is not his sexuality, but his agonized attempts to fight it—touching proof of a certain devotion to normality after all’ (2007: 50). Indeed, much of 143

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the narrative thrill in Brokeback Mountain stems from the incompatibility of gay love with the needs of family, the raising of children, and eventually, the prospect of futurity and posterity. Mendelsohn considers the film a ‘psychological tragedy’, in which homosexuality is associated with the ‘unhealthy, hateful, and deadly’ (2006: 11). Brokeback Mountain, then, emerges an almost typical cinematic demonstration of the cultural belief that queers have no future. Ennis’ neglect of his family, the perpetual conflicting of his romantic adventures with his ability to keep a job and earn money, and Jack’s eventual death serve as a cautionary tale about the futureless social negativity offered by queer ways of living. While the iconic figure of the cowboy is constantly evoked in the film, it is certainly not queered, as Jack and Ennis’ potential queerness is always already positioned outside of what is possible, of what is thinkable. There is no time for ‘gay cowboys’ in the national imaginary, Brokeback Mountain seems to suggest, as there is no future in store for the sweet yet fleeting pleasures of Ennis del Mar and Jack Twist.

Transcending the Discipline of the Service Shortly after the release of Brokeback Mountain, a popular phenomenon capitalized on the momentum of the newly launched website YouTube, a platform that enables every registered user to upload video data and make it publicly available. A vast number of brief video clips surfaced on YouTube that were soon categorized as Brokeback Mountain parodies. The blueprint for such parody is simple: Each clip utilizes the Brokeback Mountain soundtrack and combines it with existing material from mainstream movies in order to fashion a twominute trailer for a non-existent gay film. Following Barbara Klinger, these clips can be considered ‘hybrid parodies’ (2006: 210), since they involve more than one cinematic source. Klinger argues that ‘[t]he hybrid parody presents a special display of mass cultural competence, because the maker shows his or her own prowess not merely by imitation but also by forging clever intertextual alliances between different sources’ (2006: 211). In the case of Brokeback Mountain parody, clips named Star Wars: The Empire Brokeback, Brokeback Harbor, Brokeback Rocky Mountain, or Harry Potter and the Brokeback Goblet recast Hollywood blockbusters as tales of homosexual desire. Although these trailers may be considered resistant readings of Ang Lee’s depiction of queer social negativity, most of them feature unsubstantial plot lines and relocate Brokeback Mountain into the realm of innocuous amusement. In fact, most Brokeback Mountain parodies can be considered part of a more general development affecting Web 2.0 environments: as Jean Burgess and Joshua Green argue, very often these ‘marginal, subcultural, and community-based modes of cultural production are by design incorporated within the commercial logics of major media corporations’ (2009: 75). As it turns out, many of these parodies are complicit in what has been discussed as de-politicization of the film, as they depict homosexual love as hilarious folly. Corey Creekmur contends that ‘[s]eemingly despite itself, Brokeback Mountain has sanctioned the widespread revival of the publicly spoken fag joke’ (2007: 106) and highlights that the light-hearted and humorous exploitation 144

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of the film’s gay narrative reinforces its depiction of queerness as socially negative. Brokeback Mountain parodies do not necessarily engage in popular resistance: more often, they reify cultural fantasies about ‘funny fags’ (Creekmur 2007: 107) and obscure the political capacities of popular readings and rewritings. Not only an example of slash, but also of Brokeback Mountain parody, Broke Trek seems to be ‘old hat’ in two ways, as it participates in more than one tradition of popular reinterpretation. Emerging at the junction of Star Trek and Brokeback Mountain, the clip capitalizes on a confrontation of queer negativity and ‘American’ national futurity in the figure of the cowboy. In Broke Trek, a clash of mythically charged ‘national’ bodies takes place. Curiously conflating the hopeless and futureless queer cowboys Jack Twist and Ennis del Mar with the hegemonic space cowboys of the ‘American’ future, Captain Kirk and Mr. Spock, the video actively renegotiates the landscape of national myth and the American political imaginary. As a result, the temporality of ‘America’, its future-driven progressivism, is blatantly queered, and new ways of imagining sociality and temporality are made possible. For unlike Star Trek, Broke Trek not only acknowledges but actually celebrates the existence of a homosexual relationship in the future; and unlike Brokeback Mountain, Broke Trek insinuates a queer love affair that does not end in tragedy. In Broke Trek, it seems, the cowboys can be gay without being fatally punished for it. As a trailer, and as a Star Trek mash-up, Broke Trek points into the future, a time in which, as Mr. Spock poignantly informs us, ‘there are some things which transcend even the discipline of the service.’ Broke Trek opens with contemplative shots of Captain Kirk relaxing in his dimly lit quarters and Mr. Spock playing the Vulcan lute. Although the clips are excerpted from different contexts in The Original Series, their proximity in the trailer suggests narrative continuity and emotional closeness. The following scene is already more explicit: Spock asks a shirtless Kirk, ‘Is there something I can do for you, Captain?’ and is left tongue-tied when Kirk replies, ‘Like what?’ Clearly, Broke Trek plays on the similarities between the Vulcan stoicism of Mr. Spock and the quiet cowboy roughness of Ennis del Mar. At one point, Spock claims that ‘such emotions are foreign to me,’ while Kirk implores him, ‘Will you try for one moment to feel?’ And yet, despite the emotional tension indicated by these initial excerpts, the romance of Captain Kirk and Mr. Spock is optimistic in outlook. Rather than accepting the impossibility of queer love in the ‘American’ future, Kirk asserts, ‘It’s a risk I’ll have to take.’ In this context, Kirk’s bold statement takes the exploration imperative so prominent in Star Trek into a different direction. Revealingly, the gay sex scene in Broke Trek (although only insinuated since the ‘original’ material used was non-sexual in nature) appears to be more explicit than any gay sex in Brokeback Mountain. The hopeful and imaginative prospect put forward by Broke Trek culminates in the final shots of the trailer. ‘How would it be?’ Kirk asks, and Spock replies, ‘For the first time in my life, I was happy.’ As the music rises to a dramatic high, we read inserts of the lead actors’ names, only to be startled by Spock’s final statement, ‘Captain, there are some things which transcend even the discipline of the service.’ Contrary to Ennis del Mar’s notorious assertion in Brokeback Mountain that ‘if you can’t fix it, Jack, you gotta stand it,’ Spock’s call for transcendence reveals the possibility 145

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of a time in which a gay relationship becomes thinkable. Spock’s call for transcending the discipline of Federation service is a call for transcending the ‘American’ futurism that the Federation has always symbolized. Spock’s call for transcendence, then, is also a call for the reconstruction of traditional cowboy masculinity and the myth of the American West. In Broke Trek, the future is queer, and the romantically entangled cowboys traversing the final frontier engage in a larger reworking of what temporality and sociality in America may signify. As an exceptional popular reworking of Star Trek and Brokeback Mountain, as well as a creative combination of slash and Brokeback Mountain parody, Zebonka’s clip may be ‘old hat’, but it serves as a powerful reminder of the potential of queerness in ‘America’. Broke Trek shows that the queering of national cowboy mythology goes hand in hand with a queering of futurity, as the tropes of time have always been connected with the tropes of nation in the political imaginings of ‘America’.

References Bacon-Smith, Camille (1992), Enterprising Women: Television Fandom and the Creation of Popular Myth. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Bernardi, Daniel Leonard (1998), Star Trek and History: Race-ing Toward a White Future. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press. Brod, Harry (2006), ‘They’re Bi Shepherds, Not Gay Cowboys: The Misframing of Brokeback Mountain,’ The Journal of Men’s Studies, 14: 2, pp. 252–253. Burgess, Jean, and Joshua Green (2009), YouTube: Online Video and Participatory Culture. Cambridge: Polity. Coppa, Francesca (2008), ‘Women, Star Trek, and the Early Development of Fannish Vidding,’ Transformative Works and Cultures, 1, online. Creekmur, Corey K. (2007), ‘Brokeback: The Parody,’ GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies, 13: 1, pp. 105–107. Dinshaw, Carolyn, Lee Edelman, Roderick A. Ferguson, Carla Freccero, Elizabeth Freeman, Judith Halberstam, Annamarie Jagose, Christopher Nealon, and Nguyen Tan Hoang (2007), ‘Theorizing Queer Temporalities: A Roundtable Discussion,’ GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies, 13: 2–3, pp. 177–195. Edelman, Lee (2004), No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive. Durham: Duke University Press. Falzone, P. J. (2005), ‘The Final Frontier is Queer: Aberrancy, Archetype and Audience Generated Folklore in K/S Slashfiction,’ Western Folklore, 64: 3–4, pp. 243–261. Fiske, John (2011), Understanding Popular Culture, 2nd Edition. London: Routledge. Freeman, Elizabeth (2007), ‘Introduction,’ GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies, 13: 2–3, pp. 159–176. Gentejohann, Volker (2000), Narratives from the Final Frontier: A Postcolonial Reading of the Original Star Trek Series. Frankfurt: Peter Lang. 146

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Gray, Jonathan, Cornel Sandvoss, and C. Lee Harrington (2007), ‘Introduction: Why Study Fans?’ in Jonathan Gray, Cornel Sandvoss, and C. Lee Harrington (eds.), Fandom: Identities and Communities in a Mediated World. New York: NYU Press, pp. 1–16. Halberstam, Judith (2005), In a Queer Time and Place: Transgender Bodies, Subcultural Lives. New York: NYU Press. Howard, John (2007), ‘Of Closets and Other Rural Voids,’ GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies, 13: 1, pp. 100–102. Jenkins, Henry (1992), Textual Poachers: Television Fans and Participatory Culture. New York: Routledge. (2011), ‘Why Fiske Still Matters,’ in John Fiske (ed.), Understanding Popular Culture, 2nd Edition. London: Routledge, pp. xii–xxxviii. Jenkins, Henry, and John Campbell (2006), ‘“Out of the Closet and into the Universe”: Queers and Star Trek,’ in Henry Jenkins (ed.), Fans, Bloggers, and Gamers: Exploring Participatory Culture. New York: NYU Press, pp. 89–114. Kerry, Stephen (2009), ‘“There’s Genderqueers on the Starboard Bow”: The Pregnant Male in Star Trek,’ Journal of Popular Culture, 42: 4, pp. 699–714. Klinger, Barbara (2006), Beyond the Multiplex: Cinema, New Technologies, and the Home. Berkeley: University of California Press. Kitses, Jim (2007), ‘All That Brokeback Allows,’ Film Quarterly, 60: 3, pp. 22–27. Lee, Ang (2005), Brokeback Mountain. Los Angeles: Paramount Pictures. Mendelsohn, Daniel (2006), ‘No Ordinary Love Story,’ Gay and Lesbian Review, 13: 3, pp. 10–12. Meyer, Nicholas (1991), Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country. Los Angeles: Paramount Pictures. Miller, D. A. (2007), ‘On the Universality of Brokeback Mountain,’ Film Quarterly, 60: 3, pp. 50–60. Ott, Brian L., and Eric Aoki (2001), ‘Popular Imagination and Identity Politics: Reading the Future in Star Trek: The Next Generation,’ Western Journal of Communication, 65: 4, pp. 392–415. Rich, B. Ruby (2007), ‘Brokering Brokeback: Jokes, Backlashes, and Other Anxieties,’ Film Quarterly, 60: 3, pp. 44–48. Shakespeare, William (1998), Hamlet. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Turner, Frederick Jackson (2008), The Significance of the Frontier in American History. London: Penguin. Worland, Rick (1994), ‘From the New Frontier to the Final Frontier: Star Trek from Kennedy to Gorbachev,’ Film and History, 24: 1–2, pp. 19–35. Zebonka (2007), Broke Trek. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7xSOuLky3n0. Accessed 1 February 2011.

Notes 1 Earlier incarnations of some of the ideas I venture in this chapter have been used, under a different pretext, in my Utopian Contemporaries: Queer Temporality and America. I want to thank Timothy Raphael, Astrid Fellner, and Chris Tedjasukmana for the valuable suggestions 147

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they provided for this argument at various stages of its development. Work on this chapter has been made possible by a research grant (‘Forschungsstipendium 2011’) from the University of Vienna. 2 As Camille Bacon-Smith points out in her study on Enterprising Women, slash was in its early years an almost exclusively female subculture that only later entered the ‘mainstream’ of Star Trek fandom; see especially the chapter ‘Homoerotic Romance’ (1992: 228–254). In her article ‘Women, Star Trek, and the Early Development of Fannish Vidding’ (2008), Francesca Coppa argues that the motivation to produce slash involving Kirk and Spock stemmed from the fact that Spock’s character was a woman (Number One, played by Majel Barrett) in the pilot episode—a character that never made it into the show. Accepting such a rationale would, of course, limit the queer potential of slash and firmly reinstall it within the heterosexual matrix. 3 Although this is not the case in Broke Trek, the slash subgenre dealing with male pregnancy (mpreg) is certainly worth further investigation in light of Edelman’s conceptual antagonism between queer social negativity and the symbolic Child. Stephen Kerry’s analysis of genderqueers in the Star Trek canon, in which he claims that ‘it is the pregnant male that best describes that which is genderqueer behavior’ (2009: 706), may serve as a starting point for such an endeavor. 4 Brokeback Mountain’s invocation of cowboy imagery is so pervasive that Jack and Ennis were hardly ever discussed in light of their actual occupation. Acknowledging Harry Brod’s forceful insistence that ‘they’re bi shepherds, not gay cowboys’ (2006: 252), I would argue that the constant invocation of the ‘gay cowboy’ tag in the film’s reception is indicative of the ongoing, culturally sanctioned heterosexualization of cowboy iconicity. While certainly not a ‘family man’, the cowboy is still routinely considered someone who is not gay.

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Chapter 7 Iconizing Radical Change: How Gary Cooper Led Poland to Freedom Jolanta Szymkowska-Bartyzel

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989 was a special year: The collapse of the Soviet Bloc and the regaining of political and economic freedom by the countries of Central and Eastern Europe established a new global balance of power. Poland was the leader of these transformations. It was in Poland that the opposition acted most intensely, with its driving force being the Solidarity workers’ union, established in August 1980 and symbolized by the union’s globally recognized leader, Lech Wałęsa. The wave of strikes initiated by Solidarity, which began in 1988 and swept the entire country, found its conclusion at the Round Table1, where representatives of the opposition and the government sat down together to negotiate. At that time, in early February 1989, nobody even imagined that a change in the political system could happen. During the talks, the opposition simply wanted to be able to participate more actively in public life. However, the next significant event, the first semi-free elections to the so-called ‘Contract’ Parliament, the first round of which took place on June 4, clearly proved that the government had no support in the society. In this election, the Solidarity candidates won decisively, winning 160 of 161 seats in the Parliament and 92 in the Senate. Only three candidates from the government coalition were elected to Parliament. The turnout amounted to 62 percent (Roszkowski 2003: 117). June 4, 1989, is most frequently considered the end of the communist regime in Poland. On that day, Poland became the first state in the Eastern Bloc in which elected representatives of the opposition gained real influence in the exercising of authority. Subsequent events, such as the establishment of the first non-communist government, headed by Tadeusz Mazowiecki, and the implementation of Balcerowicz’s plan, a set of bills that changed Poland’s economy, were consequences of the choice made by Poles on June 4. It soon turned out that the victory of the Poles gave hope to other nations, such as Hungary, Czechoslovakia, and Bulgaria, which also commenced an open fight against the totalitarian system and the authoritarian, communist governments. In October, the Berlin Wall—the despised symbol of the forced division of a population by two conflicting camps—was demolished. It was June 4 in Poland that accelerated a process that might otherwise have lasted much longer. This breakthrough opened people’s eyes and awakened their will to fight. On that day, Poles made the decision that was to radically change not only Poland and Europe, but the entire world. Apart from the globally recognized face of Lech Wałęsa, another icon of those times in Poland was Gary Cooper, a Hollywood actor who had been dead for almost 30 years and was featured on the poster announcing election day. The election poster, created by Tomasz Sarnecki, a young artist who was then a third-year student of the Warsaw Academy of Fine

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Illustration 1: The iconic 1989 election poster. © Tomasz Sarnecki, 1989.

Arts, presented Gary Cooper in his most famous role, Marshal Willy Kane from High Noon (1952), directed by Fred Zinnemann. On Sarnecki’s poster, instead of a gun, Gary Cooper holds a voting card in his hand, while on his chest, just over the star, is a small Solidarity badge. The inscription is also visible on the banner above the cowboy’s head. Below the sheriff ’s feet is the text: ‘High noon, June 4, 1989’ (see Illustration 1). The circumstances in which the poster was created did not promise that it would gain the status of an icon. In many interviews, Tomasz Sarnecki has recalled that none of the decision-makers among the opposition wanted to accept the poster, considering it ‘too confrontational’, and it almost failed to see the light of day. It was only Henryk Wujec, Secretary of the Citizenship Committee, who, just a week before the elections, decided that the poster featuring Gary Cooper should be the election poster (Kuc 2009). A mere 152

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10,000 copies of the poster were printed in France. It reached Poland on June 3 and was displayed on the night preceding the elections in Warsaw alone. For this reason, it certainly did not impact the political decisions of very many voters.2 Nevertheless, it became an icon of transformation, while Gary Cooper became a hero equal to Lech Wałęsa. But why did a cowboy, a character from a foreign culture, become an icon of the political, economic, and cultural transformations in Poland of 1989? In order to analyze the phenomenal impact of Sarnecki’s poster, a researcher may use tools generated by two traditions: one is semiology, deriving from the linguistic tradition of Ferdinand de Saussure, while the other is iconology, an interpretation method developed by the German art historian Erwin Panofsky. Jan Białostocki, an outstanding Polish researcher who effectively popularized Panofsky’s method in Poland, claims that these research approaches are very similar: Panofsky’s system of interpretation, with its focus on the world of motifs, themes, symbols and allegories, resulted from an approach not very different to the one characterizing the semiological approach. It differed in the fact that it was rooted in historical thought and art history, not in the systematic thought of linguistics or anthropology. (2008: 112)3 Although semiological tools can be applied to the analysis of Sarnecki’s poster, Białostocki has pointed out the limitations of this practice. In reference to the rather unsuccessful attempts at applying systemic paralinguistic research to the analysis of visual art, such as in the work of Jean-Louis Schefer (1969) or Umberto Eco (1972), Białostocki pointed out that ‘considering art as a system similar to language would require far-reaching endeavors parceling this broad term. […] [A]nd experts on art are very skeptical as to the usefulness of applying terminology shaped by linguistics to the analysis of artwork’ (2008: 119)4. When examining operations performed by semiologists analyzing visual texts, Erwin Panofsky’s method seems to be outstandingly clear, coherent and simple. ‘Parceling’, dividing the image into phonemes and morphemes, or searching for the grammar of the image could result in the loss of the very essence of the analysis. Secondly, iconology is more adequate for the analysis of visual texts. And thirdly, it definitely focuses more on the context of the artwork, the circumstances that led to the author selecting specific techniques, motifs or symbols. Moreover, in order to justify the adoption of Panofsky’s method for the analysis, it must be mentioned that Erwin Panofsky collected and systematized the ideas and deliberations of another German art historian, Aby Warburg. Aby Warburg was one of the first researchers of visual art for whom the social conditioning of an artistic phenomenon was important and who went beyond the world of art in his analyses, considering various types of visual messages. Like his contemporaries, Warburg not only analyzed the visual aspect of a work of art, but also took the philosophy, religion, and social or political situation within which a particular work was embedded into account. In this way, he introduced an interdisciplinary approach to the analysis of visual arts. For Warburg, the most important task of art history was the 153

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interpretation of images while considering their historical context; he understood images as expressions of the culture of a specific time. Jan Białostocki sums up Warburg’s contribution as follows: ‘Warburg, therefore, started a school in art history which, commencing from the analysis of the image, aimed at the re-creation of the ideological and social context that underlay this image’ (2008: 101)5. The contexts of Polish political, ideological, and social history are crucial for understanding Sarnecki’s poster, which is why Panofsky’s method, derived from Warburg’s proposition, forms a basis for this analysis. In his seminal book Studies in Iconology (1939), Panofsky presents his three-phase strategy for image analysis and interpretation. Phase one uncovers the first layer of the image’s meaning, referred to as primary or natural subject matter. This layer is discovered through the simple and very basic identification of objects, figures, colors, and composition. Panofsky refers to this phase as pre-iconographical description. In order to go beyond this first interpretation phase, a researcher’s ‘life experience’ is enough. Thus, using Panofsky’s approach to analyze Leonardo da Vinci’s The Last Supper, such experience would suffice, in the first phase of the analysis, to determine that in this famous mural painting, one can recognize a group of thirteen men sitting at a table. Phase two is the iconographical analysis, which reveals the secondary or conventional subject matter of the painting. In this phase, one can conventionally interpret the significance of the objects identified during the first phase and recognize their culturally sanctioned meanings. In order to perform such an analysis, one requires knowledge of literary sources, as well as the ability to recognize specific motifs, themes, symbols, and concepts. It is this phase in which recipients determine that the image presenting a group of thirteen men at a table is an illustration of a Biblical story and recognize the motif of the Last Supper. Phase three, in turn, referred to as iconological interpretation, does not refer to the subject matter of the work as such, nor is related to the author’s intention, but serves to interpret the work as a historical phenomenon, a document of a time. This phase aims to detect the ‘internal meaning’ of the piece, belonging to symbolic forms that serve to show historical transformations. This phase of interpretation of a work of art requires familiarity with the essential tendencies of the human mind and what Panofsky calls ‘synthetic intuition’. Knowledge of cultural symbols is very important here, the knowledge of how the essential tendencies of the human mind were expressed in specific themes or concepts. ‘It is apprehended by ascertaining those underlying principles which reveal the basic attitude of a nation, a period, a class, a religious or philosophical persuasion—qualified by one personality and condensed into one work’ (Panofsky 1974: 30). During this phase, spectators will attempt to interpret Leonardo’s fresco as a testimony of Leonardo’s personality or a product of Italian Renaissance culture, or perhaps in light of a religious approach (Panofsky 1974: 31). Panofsky used his method to analyze Renaissance art, which is strongly codified and involves artificially created, yet generally recognized, symbolism, and it is probably for this reason that many researchers consider it of little use when studying texts from periods other than the Renaissance. However, many examples confirm the topicality and usefulness of 154

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Panofsky’s method. In Methods and Theories of Art History, Anne D’Alleva mentions Fritz Saxl, Rudolf Wittkower, Ernst Gombrich, Richard Krautheimer, and Jan Białostocki as art historians who have all applied this method in their works. She also refers to the famous and very controversial publication by Leo Steinberg, The Sexuality of Christ, which she defines as a ‘skillful and imaginative exercise in iconographic and iconologic analysis’ (2005: 24). As it turns out, the iconographic approach is also successfully applied in disciplines other than art history. The analyses of Ronald Berg, who applied Panofsky’s method to the analysis of photography (1994), and those of German researchers Rainer Gries, Volker Ilgen, and Dirk Schindelbeck, who applied it to the analysis of advertisements and forged a connection to the collective imaginary of Germans (1995), enter into the area of visual sociology. In addition, Polish film scholar Wiesław Godzic (1980) attempted to apply Panofsky’s method to the study of film scripts. How, therefore, should Panofsky’s method be applied to Tomasz Sarnecki’s poster? Firstly, there are formal doubts: Panofsky’s method was developed with the aim of analyzing fine arts that are created out of the need for artistic and aesthetic expression, not for practical purposes. In this sense, Sarnecki’s poster is not fine art, as it does not meet the requirement of autotelism. It is a text with the primary persuasive function of convincing voters to make specific political decisions. However, in the wake of postmodernism, the term and scope of fine arts has been redefined. Today, a host of scholars discuss comics, photography, and posters in the same breath as painting and sculpture. Secondly, the genesis of grand masterpieces of the Italian Renaissance that form the primary objects of inquiry for many art historians, including Panofsky, was similar to persuasive non-literary texts—they aimed to convince viewers to purchase the products of the day, none more important than religious services (Goldthwaite 1993; Twitchell 1997). Thus, the decision to apply Panofsky’s model to Sarnecki’s poster is more appropriate than it may seem at first glance. When analyzing Sarnecki’s poster according to Panofsky’s three-phase method, the preiconographic phase reveals a linguistic-visual message presented in black, white, and red. In the center, there is a walking male figure in trousers, boots, hat, and waistcoat. The waistcoat features a star and badge with the red inscription ‘Solidarność’ (Solidarity). In his right hand, the man holds a piece of paper with the word ‘wybory’ (elections) written on it. Behind him, the same word is displayed, but much larger. Below his feet, there is the inscription ‘W samo południe. 4 czerwca 1989’ (High Noon. June 4, 1989). The iconographic analysis thus discloses the two ‘heroes’ of the poster, one of which is the ‘Solidarity’ logo and the other the cowboy, easily recognized as the hero of the famous Western of 1952, High Noon—Sheriff Will Kane, played by famous Hollywood star Gary Cooper. For an appropriate and precise definition of meanings generated by the character depicted by Sarnecki’s poster, one must examine the relations between the actor and the fictional characters that he played. It must be determined whether the icon that is the object of this analysis should be Gary Cooper, an authentic person and famous actor of Hollywood cinema, or the film character, Will Kane, hero of the story set in the Wild West. In reference to great stars of classical American films, such a separation of fiction and reality is impossible. Both 155

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in the process of creating movie personalities and as a consequence of the reception process, fictional characters and actual persons were interlinked and merged. Screen and non-screen images had to complement one another and support the construction of a specific image of the star, his/her personality and charisma, as defined by marketing specialists. Therefore, whichever roles classical Hollywood stars played, they principally played themselves, and the film careers of the stars were built in a way not to contradict their private images. In his seminal study Stars (originally published in 1979), Richard Dyer claims that for audiences, the non-screen image of a star is equally important as their roles, and adds that the star’s personality is ‘itself a construction known and expressed through films, stories, publicity, etc.’ (1998: 20). Thus, notions created by viewers while watching Will Kane’s on-screen acts were always related to the person of Gary Cooper. This permeation of characters belonging to two different worlds is particularly visible when viewers, while telling the fictional story of the film, use the names of actors rather than those of the characters. Also, in materials and statements referring to Sarnecki’s poster, references were most frequently made to Gary Cooper, not Will Kane. In this context, it is justified to assume that at the level of iconographic analysis, the recipient recognized Gary Cooper, whose image was to become the object of further interpretation. As mentioned above, Gary Cooper is only one of two popular icons employed in the poster. The other is the symbol of the Polish democratic revolution, the Solidarity logo, which is recognized worldwide. It was created in 1980 during the workers’ strikes by a young graphic designer and illustrator named Jerzy Janiszewski. His inspiration for the logo came from figures and slogans painted on shipyard walls to inform the public that the strikes were ongoing and that the workers were fighting in solidarity. The letters forming the word are reminiscent of people marching in a row in protest, walking unevenly, with uncoordinated movements, supporting one another (the letters seem to fall against one another). The ‘protesters’ carry the white-and-red flag over the letter N. The placement of the Solidarity logo in relation to Gary Cooper’s figure suggests that he is leading the people marching behind him. He is also a member of this group, as the Solidarity badge is pinned to his waistcoat. His function as leader is also stressed by the sheriff ’s star. Gary Cooper is, therefore, the symbolic leader of the Polish opposition. He leads the members of Solidarity to battle, yet to a bloodless battle, as the only weapon he carries is the voting card. The inscription below the sheriff ’s feet suggests that the battle is to take place on June 4, 1989, at high noon. High noon is, of course, also the hour of the decisive duel in the film of the same name. In order to link the Polish election campaign to the film, it is worth recalling its story. High Noon’s action takes place in a small town called Hadleyville, where three gunmen are waiting for their leader, Frank Miller, who has just been released from prison and is returning on the noon train to take revenge on Will Kane, the local sheriff who sent him to prison for murder. For Will, it is his last day as the town’s sheriff. He has just married Amy, a pacifist Quaker woman, and is about to leave town in order to start a new life as a storekeeper. However, once he learns about Miller’s arrival, he decides to fight the criminal and his gang and sets out to form a posse. But the townspeople refuse to help Kane and 156

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pressure him into leaving the town. Even his wife decides to leave on the noon train. Kane has no choice but to face Miller alone. He guns down two of the gang but is wounded. When Amy Kane hears the gunfire, she gets off the train and decides to help her husband. She shoots the third of the gunmen from behind, but Miller takes her hostage. Suddenly, in a very critical moment when Kane decides to surrender, Amy escapes, which allows Will to kill Miller. When the townspeople emerge from their boltholes, Kane throws his sheriff ’s star on the dusty road and leaves town with Amy. Sarnecki used Cooper’s figure from the scene in which he walks alone across the empty town to his final battle against the bandits. The film lasts precisely 85 minutes,6 and the action in the presented world takes exactly the same amount of time: It begins at 10.35 a.m., and ends at ‘high noon’. The tension in the film grows largely through the skillful building of a sense of hopelessness for the abandoned Kane and the passing of time, as measured by various clocks appearing in the film. The clocks inform the audience of noon’s unavoidable approach, the time when the hero must face his enemies. Kane, therefore, goes to the final battle, just as the Poles had to go to the election that was also to be their moment of truth. How many of them would follow Cooper and the Solidarity he leads? In this context, for the Poles, ‘high noon’ (as for the film hero) meant the moment of truth or time of reckoning. When asked why he chose Gary Cooper as the hero of his poster, Tomasz Sarnecki stressed that he had to choose a very well-known person: ‘It had to be someone who would carry the burden of the situation and would be easily recognized. It had to be a symbol of something black-and-white, an absolutely clear situation’ (Portal Historyczny 2009: par. 12 )7. In another interview, Sarnecki explained the motivation behind his choice: I searched for a hero, ‘the man’ who, through his outstanding, noble and immaculate image would be able to carry the burden that is too heavy for one man. An ideal solution was to find someone generally known, yet without the blemish of our times, greater or lesser politics. Therefore, I decided not to use the image of Pope John Paul II or Lech Wałęsa, but precisely that of Gary Cooper. (Urzykowski 2009: par. 2)8 In yet another interview, Sarnecki also admitted, as he put it, to the subconscious choice of Cooper due to his resemblance to his grandfather in a pre-war photograph: I had known the photo of Lieutenant Janusz Sarnecki with his wife, probably from 1934 (when he enrolled in the commissariat of the Higher Military School in Warsaw), very well since my childhood, from family albums. Please, take a look. The same walk, gesture, shadow under his cocked hat just like under Cooper’s hat. And Cooper and my grandfather were born in the same year, 1901! My grandfather fought to defend his homeland during the September campaign of 1939 and died in the German trap at Śladów over the Bzura River. (Kuc 2009: par. 4)9 157

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The resemblance of Cooper’s figure to the grandfather of the poster’s author is also important for the next and final phase of the analysis, which begins by defining a relevant cultural context for the poster. The context, relying on two important traditions, had an impact on both the form and the content of the poster. The first of these traditions is the rich and renowned history of the Polish film poster, while the other derives from underground publications issued by the Polish opposition during the Soviet regime. The visual style of the election poster also established a link to the specific conventions of film posters: The film poster is a genre and product of commercial design which, located in public places, constitutes one of the basic elements of film advertising, but it may also have original artistic value. It is characterized by conventional, laconic and graphic means of expression, based on the interaction of word and image. A film poster includes the film title, often its genre, names of actors and director (their layout and size is often the subject of minute arrangements), as well as the name of the producer and distributor, while its general graphic effect should draw the attention of the viewer and synthetically signal to him the contents of the film, its atmosphere, etc. (Szczepański 2003: 744–745)10 Sarnecki’s poster only partially follows the assumptions of a film poster. The film’s title and the lead actor’s figure are featured on the poster, but the name of the star is not listed, nor is the genre defined. The image of the cowboy is, however, so obvious that the viewer has no doubts as to it being a Western. Sarnecki’s application of the poetic characteristic of a film poster to a political poster may be justified by the rich poster art tradition in Poland. The famous Polish School of Poster, which originated after 1956, was a unique phenomenon. The spiritual father of the movement was Henryk Tomaszewski, whose poster art began to raise interest in 1948 when, at the International Film Poster Exhibition in Vienna, he won five awards, some of which were for his poster for the famous Orson Wells film Citizen Kane. Most active artists in the Polish School of Poster came from the Warsaw Fine Arts Academy, where Henryk Tomaszewski worked. Although their posters were not stylistically uniform, they were all characterized by sarcasm, irony, a lapidary quality, and the innovative use of fonts. Małgorzata Żurakowska and Karin M. Weber described the posters created by Polish artists as follows: With a distinct style that defies labels, the Polish poster is a cross between design and fine art. Paradoxically it developed its unique language because of economic shortages. The lack of advanced technology and limited art supplies became a stimulating factor, challenging the artists’ imaginations and encouraging exploitation. In an effort to get their messages across, despite these obstacles, Polish artists developed a hybrid art form which has been elevated to a discipline in its own right. (1997: 6) 158

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Polish artists mainly created posters for cultural events such as theatrical performances, exhibitions and, primarily, films—both Polish and foreign, distributed on the Polish market. The uniqueness of Polish film posters, particularly when compared to American posters, resulted from the fact that American posters were created according to schemes imposed from above. These mandates dictated that the poster should feature the image(s) of the star(s), and the film title should dominate the entire poster. The American film poster recipe included meticulous calculation, as prepared by experts in promotion and communication. Polish film posters were all conceptual masterpieces, created without any rules or obligations. Although it is a text that urges viewers toward specific political behavior and not to a cultural activity, Tomasz Sarnecki’s poster, both formally and through its contents, refers to the tradition of the Polish film poster. The historian Frank Fox even claims that Sarnecki ‘processed’ Marian Stachurski’s 1959 High Noon poster (2001: par. 4). However, Sarnecki denies this, claiming that the designs had nothing in common (Urzykowski 2009). Rather, he confirms that his artistic sensitivity was largely built on the works of the Polish School of Poster, many representatives of which were Sarnecki’s professors at the Warsaw Academy of Fine Arts. This influence can also be seen in the technique applied for the poster. Sarnecki admits that the artistic strength of the poster is the idea; the rest is just ‘glue and scissors’. The collage technique and monochromatic colors broken with patriotic red recall the printing tradition of independent, underground, and illegal publications, leaflets, brochures, books and posters, which were circulated unofficially. Modest financial resources, as well as limited freedom to publish such texts, meant the almost exclusive use of black-and-white print. The application of another color, either ink or paper, always carried an added, often symbolic value. Collage was a technique broadly used by Polish poster-makers. Its application, although often resulting from the aforementioned lack of resources faced by Polish artists, also allowed for the achievement of quite exquisite artistic effects: ‘The Polish poster incorporated collage as one of its visual means. But what was most distinctive was the way visual symbolism was explored. Instead of adhering to rigid theory, the guideline was simple: whatever it took to get the message across was permissible’ (Żurakowska & Weber 1997: 7). Embedded within such symbolic meanings, Sarnecki uses the Solidarity logo and Cooper’s figure to juxtapose symbols deriving from different cultural circles and different discursive orders. Through this process, they gained new symbolic value. Solidarity was a native Polish movement, a grassroots social movement resulting from opposition to the totalitarian system, a movement that from its start became an important political force in Polish public life of the 1980s. It was, in fact, the only organized force that constituted opposition to the Communist Party in the government and the Soviet Union. The history of Solidarity included not only the joy of victory, but also strikes, persecutions, imprisonment, and the suffering of activists and their families. It often featured blood and death. This symbol of striving for freedom, independence, and dignity was marked in red on the poster and juxtaposed with the hero of a Western film, who—like the world presented in such a film—is black-and-white. 159

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The Western is a typical representative of a film genre. According to Charles F. Altman (1987), genre films express the values and needs suppressed by the dominant ideology— the puritan ethos of labor. In this meaning, the genre film provides a way to escape from reality and follows the principle of pleasure experienced as a result of the repetitive and predictable ritual that constitutes this type of film. In a slightly later publication devoted to Hollywood genres, Rick Altman observes that, indeed, interpretation of meanings is a result of Hollywood’s negotiation with viewers and takes place somewhere between the ritual and ideological use of the film text. The genre film provides some ritualistic pleasure, but also, depending on the viewers’ situation, may serve various ideological purposes (1999: 223). For the Poles, films about the Wild West have had a special value. The stories of heroes of the Wild West as shown in Westerns are full of symbols, myths, and motifs that are close to their hearts. ‘The mythic vision of the American West has a long tradition in Poland, extending back into the nineteenth century. Poles heard tales of the expansive frontier and the mythic figures of the cowboy and the Native American’ (Johnson 2009: 47). As early as the 1830s, the first Polish translation of James F. Cooper’s prose was published and, since then, his novels have been regularly published and re-published. According to Józef Chałasiński, ‘Cooper’s novels are prototypes of the Western and have created the myth of the true America’ (1973: 204)11. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, Poles also became familiar with the mythology and symbolism of the Wild West through the famous Wild West Shows by William F. Cody, more widely known as Buffalo Bill. From 1887 to 1892 Buffalo Bill took his Wild West show to Europe, where thousands of people saw it and acquired their view of America from it. […] The show served many needs, not the least of which was as an advertisement for many Europeans who were contemplating migrating to the United States. For many of them this was the first and last image of the West as it existed in myths and stories. (Fox 1998: 16) According to Frank Fox, in 1906, Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show also reached Polish lands under Austrian rule, while Buffalo Bill’s competitor, Doc Carver, who toured the world with a similar show, reached Russia in 1889, with performances in Budapest and Warsaw on the way (1998: 16). Undoubtedly, however, the film industry is most responsible for the creation and popularization of the mythical Wild West. Since the film industry developed swiftly on a global scale, the first Westerns also reached Poland. Along with the entire world, Poles admired the stunts of Broncho Billy and protagonists played by Tom Mix. The postwar years and the Soviet regime added special value to the Wild West. During the Cold War, everything American was ideologically hostile and officially banned. Party authorities skillfully selected products of American pop culture that would not threaten communist ideology, with the aim of suppressing the restless atmosphere. In the years 160

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from 1945 to 1967, Polish cinemas screened only 336 films from the United States. These films were mostly Westerns, which were not considered to ‘threaten the national emotions.’ Television stations also broadcast American series set in the Wild West. In the 1970s, when Bonanza was broadcast, the streets in Polish cities became quiet and empty. What was it that caused Westerns and the Wild West to hold so much attraction for the Poles, which Sarnecki obviously referred to in his poster? Westerns formed the quintessence of America and the American, and all that was American was desired by Poles. On the one hand, this resulted from the strong feelings of gratitude that Poles had toward the American people and state for assistance in regaining independence in 1918, for support and victory over Nazi Germany, and for all the material aid, such as within Lend-Lease or the aid organized by the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration. The amicable feelings toward America were also a form of opposition against the oppressive system in Poland. Wearing American clothes or glasses, listening to American radio, and watching American movies were forms of rebellion and expressions of resistance against the system. These acts often resulted in severe punishment. Therefore, during the moment of truth, when the fate of Poland was decided upon, and when people were required to express which side of the political struggle they were on, one had to invoke the icon of rebellion, the most obvious symbol of the hitherto banned world. This is most likely the reason why Sarnecki’s poster was accused of being ‘too confrontational’. Another reason why a poster depicting a cowboy proved to be so ideologically powerful is connected with the identity of the cowboy himself, with all his assigned attributes, features, and the system of values he represents. The cowboy is a figure of American mythology. He is a (romanticized and idealized) hero whose acts have been related to the creation and construction of the ‘true America’: The nineteenth-century hardworking, hard-living laborer who lived on the back of his horse and was underpaid for his job entered the mythic world by dint of dime novels, Wild West shows, country music and Western movies. He became America’s most prominent and enduring symbolic figure. He has come to represent American manhood and a spirit of self-reliance and independence. […] The mythic cowboy, the cowboy whose image has been shaped by history, fiction and folklore, is unquestionably America’s predominant symbolic native son. His myriad images have come to represent the American ideals of individualism, strength, and courage; and his imagined role in the settlement of the West is a national metaphor for the American commitment to action, work and achievement. (Martin 1983: 26) Apart from the very essential masculinity, courage, independence, and strength, the cowboy has also been associated with honesty and observance of a certain code of honor, which involves loyalty to his companions, caring for the weak, and treating enemies with respect and dignity. An important element of the mythical cowboy image is the horse and its specific relation to its rider—the horse is the cowboy’s best friend, confidant, and defender. 161

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Furthermore, life close to nature and in harmony with nature gave cowboys a sense of freedom that had been irrevocably lost with civilization. Surprisingly, all these properties of the cowboy’s personality have also characterized the canons of manhood in Polish culture. In the Middle Ages, this was personified by Polish knights, later by the Polish gentry, while in the early twentieth century, such an embodiment of the Polish archetype of manhood was seen in Polish officers of the Second Republic of Poland, who defeated the Soviets near Warsaw, fought in the campaign of September 1939, and were killed in the Katyn massacre.12 Polish officers were praised for their loyalty to companions, courage, bravery, and honor. They were also characterized by their respect for women and their feeling of responsibility for the weak and the injured. Particularly, the cavaliers, for whom the horse was not merely part of their armory, but rather a devoted friend, resembled American heroes from the Wild West. This explains Sarnecki’s intuitive reference to the figure of his grandfather, a pre-war officer who died during the campaign of September 1939. Although Polish officers wore uniforms and cocked hats in place of cowboy boots, cowboy hats and waistcoats, their axiological system was almost identical to that in the masculine world of Westerns. By using the figure of the cowboy, Sarnecki referred to the values that had been praised by Poles for centuries and were deeply rooted in the Polish identity, but which had been devalued during the time of the Soviet regime and deemed unfit for modern reality. The truth was completely different—the ethos of masculinity, with such a rich Polish tradition, and the values associated with it were dangerous to the system and therefore consistently eradicated. Out of the entire set of iconic Western heroes, Gary Cooper was an ideal choice. Although the Western had created many equally recognizable American cowboys, such as John Wayne and Henry Fonda, it was Cooper who was the most American and the most authentic. Raised in Montana on a ranch owned by his rich father, he was a true Westerner who grew up riding horses and could handle guns. He was a type of noble cowboy: tall, upright, with beautiful blue eyes, and extreme calm that emanated from his entire posture. He always portrayed decent, straightforward heroes for whom honesty and human decency were most important, although courage, honor, and responsibility were no less significant. This can be said about Cooper’s Virginian in Victor Fleming’s 1929 film of the same name, about Cole Harden, the hero of The Westerner (1940), directed by William Wyler, about Benjamin Trane in Vera Cruz (1954) by Robert Aldrich, and certainly about Will Kane. Naturally, such roles made Cooper a global symbol of righteousness and nobleness. It must also be noted that both with his noble and distinguished appearance and with his character, Cooper matched the ideal of Polish handsomeness, which made it easier for many Poles to identify with his characters. Finally, one must not forget Cooper’s political views. He consistently voted for Republican candidates, such as Calvin Coolidge in 1924 and Herbert Hoover in 1928 and 1932, and supported Thomas Dewey in his presidential campaigns in 1944 and 1948. Privately, he also lived the traditional life of a cowboy: He rode a horse, hunted, and collected guns. Conservative political views characterized every true cowboy, as they were part of his value system based on American tradition. Therefore, many American politicians wishing to 162

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express their political views and give them a clear and distinct nature have worn cowboy hats. The most spectacular, effective, and convincing use of the iconography and values of the cowboy world was made by Ronald Reagan: During the long summer and fall of the 1980 presidential campaign, posters and billboards appeared throughout the western half of the United States featuring a photograph of the Republican candidate wearing a cowboy hat and a work shirt, and grinning like a ranch hand who had just come in for supper. The poster bore a simple message: ‘This is Reagan country.’ And so it was. […] When he spoke about getting the government off the people’s back, about making America strong and self-sufficient and proud again, he was espousing the same mythic cowboy ideals that he had helped implant in the American consciousness with his roles in Hollywood Westerns. And it was his cowboy image […] that lent so many of his positions and policies an air of credibility. (Martin 1983: 371) During his presidency, Ronald Reagan strongly supported the Polish efforts to abolish communism. The main reason for this involvement was the use of the Polish case in the fight against the ‘empire of evil’. It was on his order that the CIA supported the Polish opposition in the fight against the communist authorities. Reagan also supported the aid to Solidarity activists after the institution of martial law in December 1981 and, finally, imposed economic sanctions on Poland, which exacerbated the economic crisis and forced communist authorities to introduce reforms that found their climax at the Round Table and resulted in the election of June 4, 1989. With his conservative views and traditional values, Gary Cooper provided an ideal symbol of the views and values of the Poles in 1989. At a 2005 conference devoted to American democracy of the twenty-first century, when prominent Polish Americanist Krzysztof Michałek wondered whether the Polish pro-American sentiment had a ‘red or blue face,’ he concluded that Poles love Republican America and perceived the causes of this phenomenon in the nature of the economic and social transformation of Poland in 1989. According to Michałek, advocates and creators of the new system were exposed to the following: the philosophy of private ownership, the self-regulating power of the free market, and the bright side of individual material success, which all formed the basis of Republican ideology (2006: 89–90). The aesthetic values and axiological system embodied by the icon of the cowboy from the election poster of 1989 corresponded to the needs of the Polish people at that specific moment. In the most topical and, at the same time, universal way, cowboy Gary Cooper served as a patron to the ritual of the Poles’ passing from the communist system to the system of democracy and free market. The function of this figure was not only limited to ad hoc pre-election propaganda, but gained an additional context in the following years. Gary Cooper also symbolically led the Poles from the iconography characteristic of the former political system to the iconography of western culture. He headed groups of 163

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figures and images that, since then, have started to hit the Polish collective imagination with unimaginable force. Ironically, in the new, liberated Poland, the figure of the cowboy with his burden of experience and the values he represented has been devalued. Nowadays, images of the heroes of the Wild West are used to sell cereals, jeans, or cigarettes. Cowboys have retired and, as shown by history and by the novels and films on this issue, the life of veterans during times of peace is not easy, particularly because they must work just as others do. In a way, the history of the cowboy image has come full circle: It began with hardworking and poorly paid men grazing cattle across the Great Plains and ended with the use of the cowboy image by corporations to sell various products. Is this a sign that in the non-polarized world, where it is hard to define good and evil, and where nothing is blackand-white like in a Western, true cowboys are no longer needed?

References Altman, Charles F. (1987), ‘W stronę teorii gatunku filmowego,’ trans. Alicja Helman, Kino, 6, pp. 18–22. Altman, Rick (1999), Film/Genre. London: BFI Publishing. Berg, Ronald (1994), ‘Die Photographie als alltagshistorische Quelle,’ in Berliner Geschichtswerkstatt (ed.), Alltagskultur, Subjektivität und Geschichte: Zur Theorie und Praxis von Alltagsgeschichte. Münster: Westfälisches Dampfboot, pp. 187–198. Białostocki, Jan (2008), Wybór pism estetycznych. Krakow: Universitas. Chałasiński Józef (1973), Kultura amerykańska. Formowanie się kultury narodowej w Stanach Zjednoczonych. Warszawa: Ludowa Spółdzielnia Wydawnicza. D’Alleva, Anne (2005), Methods and Theories in Art History. London: Laurence King Publishing. Dyer, Richard (1998), Stars. London: BFI Publishing. Eco, Umberto (1972), Pejzaż semiotyczny, trans. Adam Weinsberg. Warsaw: PIW. Fox, Frank (1998), ‘Polish Posters and the American West,’ in Magdalena Ciesielska, Maria Kurpik, and Dorota Sobczyk (eds.), Plakat współczesny i tworzenie nowych symboli. Warsaw: Poster Museum, pp. 8–21. (2001), ‘Polskie plakaty Plakat współczesny i tworzenie nowych symboli bój na papierze,’ Zwoje, 28, online. Godzic, Wiesław (1980), ‘Metoda ikonograficzno-ikonologiczna w badaniu dzieła filmowego,’ in Alicja Helman & Andrzej Gwóźdź (eds.), Z badań porównawczych nad filmem. Warsaw: Państwowy Instytut Wydawniczy, pp. 119–131. Goldthwaite, Richard (1993), Wealth and the Demand for Art in Italy, 1300–1600. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Gries, Rainer, Volker Ilgen, and Dirk Schindelbeck (1995), ‘Ins Gehirn der Masse kriechen!’: Werbung und Mentalitätsgeschichte. Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft. Johnson, Jeffrey K. (2009), American Advertising in Poland: A Study of Cultural Interactions since 1990. Jefferson: McFarland. 164

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Kuc, Monika (2009), ‘W samo południe’ [Interview with Tomasz Sarnecki], Rzeczpospolita [online], 5 December, http://www.rp.pl/artykul/304432.htm. Accessed 15 December 2010. Martin, Russel (1983), Cowboy, the Enduring Myth of the Wild West. New York: Tabori & Chang. Michałek, Krzysztof (2006), ‘Polski Proamerykanizm—czerwony czy niebieski,’ in Andrzej Mania & Paweł Laidler (eds.), Amerykańska demokracja w XXI wieku. Krakow: Jagiellonian University Press, pp. 87–96. Panofsky, Erwin (1974), Meaning in Visual Art: Papers on and in Art History. New York: Overlook Press. Roszkowski, Wojciech (2003), Najnowsza historia Polski 1980–2002. Warsaw: Świat Książki. Portal Historyczny (2009), ‘Sarnecki: Plakat wyborczy “W samo południe” mógł się nigdy nie ukazać,’ Portal Historyczny [online], 27 May, http://www.dzieje.pl/?q=node/239. Accessed 30 December 2010. Schefer, Jean-Louis (1969), Scénographie d’un tableau, Paris: Le Seuil. Szczepański, Tadeusz (2003), ‘Plakat filmowy,’ in Tadeusz Lubelski (ed.), Encyklopedia kina. Krakow: Biały Kruk, pp. 744–745. Twitchell, James B. (1997), Adcult USA: The Triumph of Advertising in American Culture. New York: Columbia University Press. Urzykowski, Tomasz (2009), ‘Ten plakat nikomu się nie podobał’ [Interview with Tomasz Sarnecki], Gazeta Stołeczna [online], 5 June, http://warszawa.gazeta.pl/warszawa/1,34889,6689804,Ten_ plakat_nikomu_sie_nie_podobal.html. Accessed 30 December 2010. Zinnemann, Fred (1952), High Noon. Los Angeles: Stanley Kramer Productions. Żurakowska, Małgorzata, and Karin M. Weber (1997), ‘Polish Printing as Part of the Cultural Psyche,’ in Walter Jule (ed.), Sightlines: Printing and Image Culture: A Collection of Essays and Images. Edmonton: University of Alberta Press, pp. 1–38.

Notes 1 The Round Table negotiations were negotiations held between February 6 and April 5, 1989, with the participation of representatives of the communist government, opposition activists and representatives of the Catholic Church. 2 For the time of the election, the Solidarity Citizen Committee prepared various versions of election posters—the most popular was the series of posters where MP candidates from Solidarity were photographed with Lech Wałęsa, the founder of the Solidarity movement and a living icon of those times, clearly associated with the striving for Poland’s independence. These posters, distributed in high numbers across Poland, undoubtedly were the most persuasive and effective. 3 ‘Opracowany przez Panofsky’ego system interpretacji z jego koncentracją na świecie motywów, tematów, symboli i alegorii, wynikał z postawy nie bardzo odmiennej od tej, która znamionuje podejście semiologiczne. Różnił się o tyle, ze korzenie jego tkwiły w myśli historycznej i w historii sztuki, a nie w systematycznej myśli językoznawstwa czy antropologii’; all translations are mine. 165

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4 ‘uznanie sztuki za system, na podobieństwo języka wymagałoby daleko idących zabiegów, parcelujących to szerokie pojęcie. […] a badacze sztuki są bardzo sceptyczni, co do użyteczności stosowania do analizy dzieł sztuki aparatury pojęciowej ukształtowanej przez lingwistykę.’ 5 ‘Warburg zapoczątkował wiec w historii sztuki szkołę, która wychodząc od analizy obrazu stawiała sobie za cel odtworzenie kontekstu ideologicznego i społecznego, który ten obraz wydał.’ 6 It is worth pointing out that in the PAL version, due to the increase to 25 fps, the film lasts only about 81 minutes. 7 ‘To musiał być ktoś, kto udźwignie ciężar sytuacji i będzie łatwo rozpoznawalny. To musiał być symbol czegoś czarno-białego, sytuacji absolutnie jednoznacznej.’ 8 ‘Szukałem bohatera, takiego “jedynego sprawiedliwego”, który poprzez swój wspaniały, szlachetny, nieskazitelny wizerunek byłby w stanie udźwignąć ciężar ponad miarę jednego człowieka. Idealnym rozwiązaniem było znalezienie kogoś powszechnie znanego, lecz nie obarczonego odium naszych czasów, większej lub mniejszej polityki. Dlatego nie zdecydowałem się na wizerunek Jana Pawła II czy Lecha Wałęsy, ale właśnie Gary’ego Coopera.’ 9 ‘Zdjęcie porucznika Janusza Sarneckiego z żoną prawdopodobnie z 1934 (gdy zapisał się na kurs intendentury Wyższej Szkoły Wojennej w Warszawie) doskonale znałem od dziecka z rodzinnych albumów. Proszę się przyjrzeć—ten sam krok, gest, cień pod rogatywką jak pod kapeluszem Coopera. A przy tym i Cooper, i mój dziadek urodzili się w tym samym 1901 roku! Dziadek walczył w obronie ojczyzny podczas kampanii wrześniowej 1939 i poległ w niemieckiej zasadzce w Śladowie nad Bzurą.’ 10 ‘Plakat filmowy to gatunek i produkt grafiki użytkowej, który umieszczony w miejscach publicznych stanowi jeden z podstawowych elementów reklamy filmu, ale może posiadać również oryginalną wartość artystyczną. Charakteryzuje go umowny, lakoniczny i ekspresyjny język graficznych środków wyrazu, który opiera się na współdziałaniu obrazu i słowa. Plakat filmowy zawiera tytuł filmu, często jego określenie gatunkowe, nazwiska aktorów i reżysera (ich rozmieszczenie i wielkość bywa przedmiotem drobiazgowych uzgodnień) oraz nazwę producenta i dystrybutora, a jego ogólny efekt plastyczny winien przyciągać uwagę odbiorcy i w syntetycznym skrócie sygnalizować mu treść filmu, jego atmosferę itp.’ 11 ‘powieści Coopera są prototypami westernu i stworzyły mit prawdziwej Ameryki.’ 12 The Katyn massacre was a mass execution of Polish officers and Polish intelligentsia carried out by the Soviet secret police (NKVD) at Katyn Forest in April and May of 1940. For contemporary Poles, the Katyn massacre has become a symbol of the criminal policies of the Soviet system against the Polish nation and, as a matter of fact, against the essence of Polishness embodied by leading elites of pre-war Poland.

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PART III The Mutability and Abstraction of Iconic Figures

Chapter 8 The Embodiment of a Nation: The Iconicity of Uncle Sam and the Construction of a Conflicted National Identity Louis J. Kern

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xamining icons in popular culture, Marshall Fishwick concluded that icons are ‘expressions of internal convictions,’ traditionally assumed to ‘connote fixity and permanence’ (1970: 2–3). National icons that produce collective identity through their codification of cultural, social, and political ideologies are secular sign systems that express, by means of universally accessible and immediately recognizable images, the commonly held beliefs and aspirations of a people. But, as Albert Boime writes, ‘whatever power the flag and other patriotic symbols possess depends in large measure on what significations we assign to them, but these significations are never static and are constantly being contested’ (1998: 7). As the preeminent national signifier, Uncle Sam is rivaled only by the national flag as a symbol of patriotism and American identity. Unlike the flag, however, the anthropomorphic nature of the figure projects a personification of the nation that fosters a more personal relationship to the state, gives individuals a sense of shared communal values, and makes it more useful for expressing conflicting beliefs and values. Yet, Uncle Sam’s widespread popularity and ubiquity have meant that he has been variously appropriated by both the orthodox and the iconoclast alike. Despite humble beginnings, Uncle Sam has become one of the most over-determined popular icons of American culture. This chapter will present an assessment of the origins and evolution of his character to his enduring conventional visual representation by James Montgomery Flagg in World War I, his entry into popular culture during World War II and the changes his image has undergone from that point down to the present, and the diverse iconic functions he has performed as an imaginative embodiment of American national identity. The Popular Press and the Origins of Uncle Sam The story of Uncle Sam’s origin is so simple and circumstantially straightforward that it seems too apt to be literally true. A conscious creation during a time of national crisis, Uncle Sam is presumptively the imagined projection of Samuel Wilson. The legendary account that established that connection, however, did not appear in print until 1830 in the New York Gazette. In that narrative, Elbert Anderson, a contractor providing beef and pork for the U.S. Army during the War of 1812, employed Sam Wilson to inspect the meat before it was packaged. Approved barrels were stamped E.A.-U.S. The association of the letters ‘U.S.’ with Wilson was supposedly a joke by a workman explaining their meaning. When Wilson’s workmen entered

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the Army, the association of the letters that stood for the nation with Sam Wilson entered American folklore. The author of this account concedes that it challenges the reader’s credulity: It originated precisely as above stated; and the writer of this article distinctly recollects remarking at the time when it first appeared in print, to a person who was equally aware of its origin, how odd it would be should this silly joke, originating in the midst of beef, pork, pickle, mud, salt and hoop-poles, eventually become a national cognomen. (Ketchum 1959: 40–41) Albert Matthews, in his careful critical study of the figure’s beginnings, cites John Fiske’s Book of the Navy (1842) as the source of the Wilson connection, but that account appears to have been a verbatim reiteration of the 1830 newspaper story. Nevertheless, the connection of the real-life Samuel Wilson and the symbolic figure did not emerge until fifteen- or twenty-odd years after the end of the war. As Matthews convincingly demonstrates, there is no mention of Uncle Sam prior to the middle of the war. The first reference appeared in the Troy Post on September 7, 1813, and attributed the avuncular figure to the letters ‘U.S.’ appearing on governmental wagons. The synecdochical use of the figure became common during this period, as evidenced by the October 1, 1814, Lansingburgh Gazette (New York) referring to American soldiers as ‘Uncle Sam’s men’, and the October 1813 Columbian Centinel (New York), which noted that Uncle Sam had become ‘the new popular explication of the United States’ (cf. Matthews 1908a: 33–37). Matthews, justly skeptical of the Wilson-Sam connection, finds it largely fabular. In light of the fact that Samuel Wilson and his brother, Ebenezer, conducted their victuallers’ trade exclusively out of Troy, New York, where they also resided, if Wilson had been the basis for the Uncle Sam figure, the local press would have certainly highlighted that fact. However, none of the wartime references to Uncle Sam in the Troy Post makes this connection. Instead, they attribute his emergence to acronymic transposition. One reference (August 20, 1816) even took the figure’s origins back to the pre-war period (1807) and associated it with the U.S. Light Dragoons, while a later one (August 19, 1817) cited the initials on soldiers knapsacks as its source. None of these references make any mention of Samuel Wilson (cf. Matthews 1908a: 64). Other early print references to Uncle Sam also fail to make any association with Wilson. A broadside printed in the spring of 1813 mentions Uncle Sam twice, but only as the collective projection of national identity (Ketchum 1959: 40–41). While there is clearly a legendary quality to the popular explanations of the origins of the figure, and it seems clear that its provenance will remain obscure, it was conceived in crisis and immediately involved in a wartime context.

The Literary Foundations of a National Icon Uncle Sam’s first literary appearance, The Adventures of Uncle Sam, in Search of His Lost Honor (1816), offered a picaresque reflection of the nation’s misfortunes in the war, where readers are informed that he ‘will occasionally make his appearance on various parts of 172

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[the fictional stage], bouncing like a sturgeon, sinking out of sight, and soon after thundering out at a distant part’ ([Fidcuddy] 1816: 9). This is the first appearance of the comically uxorious Sam, unable to restrain the excessive expenditures of his wife: And see ye not this woman, in whom the heart of mine Uncle Sam is bound up how she walketh in the pride of her imagination, and hath bought many costly ornaments of silk and purple, and delighteth in hoods and ear-rings, and bracelets and nose-jewels, and saith, I sit a Queen. ([Fidcuddy] 1816: 11) The text offers a critique of Democratic-Republican governments from Jefferson to Madison, with Uncle Sam seen as a sorry victim of the machinations of the Chief Steward (President Madison) and Madam Sam, who, with clear implications of cuckoldry, seems to occupy the ‘great Wigwam’ (the White House) with Madison ([Fidcuddy] 1816: 38), while the hapless Uncle Sam is left to fight the war in the guise of Don Quixote. At this point, the national figure embodied in female form seems to represent institutional government in association with the executive office, while the male incarnation is a projection of the electorate—the propertied stake-holders, men of substance, who had the exclusive right to the franchise. Warned to ‘refrain from listening to the suggestions of this profligate and abandoned woman’ ([Fidcuddy] 1816: 50), Sam remains committed to the war and even comes to believe in the invincibility of the nation’s cause; the ‘old blockhead’ ultimately ‘says our cause is so just and righteous that we have nothing to do but wait the interposition of Providence—that the taking of Canada is a mere trifling job like dressing a cabbage yard before breakfast—it can be done at any time’ ([Fidcuddy] 1816: 91). In the wake of the loss and burning of the Capitol and the ‘Washington Hegira’, ‘the foolishness of Samuel [did not] depart from him,’ and he meekly accepted his impotence: Oh, he accepted a Philippic from the mouth of his Chief Steward, at the next family meeting, as a full atonement for the desertion of his city […] and as for the loss of honor, it was agreed by all, that the saving of so many valuable lives, was an ample equivalent. ([Fidcuddy] 1816: 123–124) In the sequel, ‘Uncle Sam’s Lady’ abandons all pretense to economy and bestows a splendid salary on herself and her servants while, as readers are told in a song, Americans have ‘Drained the last cent from Uncle Sam, / And turned him on the town’ ([Fidcuddy] 1816: 141). Clearly, the author intends to make a distinction between the ridiculous, emasculated Uncle Sam of the text, a stand-in for the naïve and bamboozled American people, and an unstated ideal projection of the manly, authoritative, true spirit of America. Uncle Sam is in no sense to be identified with the government, which is here seen as fiscally irresponsible, purblind, corrupt, and pusillanimous. In this vision of the American polity, it is not so much the institution of centralized power that is the problem, as it is for modern libertarians and the 173

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Tea Party movement, but rather corrupt and venial individuals who have usurped governance to the exclusion of legitimate authority. The ideal Uncle Sam thus stands for legitimacy here. A more humorous take on Sam was offered in two comic sketches by James K. Paulding entitled ‘The History of Uncle Sam and His Boys’ (1831) and ‘Uncle Sam and His Womankind’ (1832). These satiric pieces were sequels to his earlier The Diverting History of John Bull and Brother Jonathan (1812), an allegorical, Anglophobic rendering of U.S.-British relations on the eve of war. In the later volume, Brother Jonathan matures, gains his autonomy, and becomes Uncle Sam, who owns thirteen farms and sires twenty-four sons. The genealogy in ‘Boys’ is direct: John Bull had christened this son of his by the name of Jonathan; but by and by, when he became grown, being a good hearty fellow, about half horse, half alligator1, his friends and neighbors gave him the nickname Uncle Sam, a sure sign that they liked him, for I never knew a respectful nickname given to a scurvy fellow in my life. (Paulding 1868: 326) Uncle Sam, of native attribution, assigned a familial sobriquet, becomes a cocky populist figure, close to the democratic heart of the Jacksonian common man. But in ‘Womankind’, he is victimized by his ‘wife according to the marriage contract,’ who is prodigal with his money and domineering in his house: Sometimes, when the worthy old gentleman put his arms a-kimbo, and plucked up courage to say NO to some of her extravagant schemes of domestic improvement, she made a great to-do, and cackled all about the house like an old hen that has lost her last chickens. (Paulding 1868: 342) In the acerbic allegorical treatment of the Nullification Crisis in ‘Womankind’, Uncle Sam proves not to be up to the task; he is weak and fallible; he is hampered and henpecked by his own administrators of the domestic economy. This piece continues the earlier gendering of the American polity, with centralized government represented as a feminine principle and Uncle Sam seen as the embodiment of the masculine virtues of the Jacksonian man of the people. Given Andrew Jackson’s reputation as a muscular champion of the common man, the president is implicitly linked to the ideal of Uncle Sam rather than tainted by his association with the federal government. In the mid-1850s, as sectional tensions escalated, humorist Mortimer Neal Thomson published a mordantly satiric rendering in trochaic tetrameter of the national foundation myth entitled Plu-Ri-Bus-Tah (1856), ostensibly a parody of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s popular Native American epic Hiawatha (1855). Thomson proposed to ‘invent a mythology of my own, and [to] set up deities to suit myself,’ and in a neat inversion of nationalist bravado asserted that he ‘intended to slaughter the American Eagle, cut the throat of the Goddess Liberty, annihilate the Yankee nation, and break things generally’ (1856: iii). The eponymous anti-hero is the founder of the new nation, an ersatz proxy, serving the functions and bearing the characteristics 174

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of Uncle Sam, but bearing only an inchoate relationship to his full-blown visual representation. He is envisioned here as an ambiguous opera buffa Pilgrim/Dutch patron, depicted on the frontispiece as a bearded, long-haired Dutch burgher but described in the text as wearing a suppositious Dissenter’s costume—black clothing and high-crowned hat. In Thomson’s ‘captious fabrication’ of the national mythos, symbolical patriotism is feminized, for Plu-Ri-Bus-Tah recounts How [Liberty] taught him Yankee Doodle, Made him whistle Yankee Doodle, and how he borrowed her red night cap, ran it up a pole, And […] took her petti-garment, Garment blue, and stripe and starry, Nailed it just beneath the nightcap, Swore that should be his banner. (1856: 94) With the addition of Liberty’s sisters, Peace and Thrift, the domestic economy is sustained literally and figuratively by ‘petticoat’ government. Yet, the Plu-Ri-Bus-Tah-Liberty connection is at best irregular, for having appropriated the new land, he enters into an informal matrimonial contract with Liberty, and ‘[t]ake[s] her in the free-love fashion, / [t]ake[s] her, for awhile [sic] on trial’ (1856: 78). Thomson depicts Plu-Ri-Bus-Tah as an archetypical American male, excluded from a patriarchal role in the domestic sphere and seduced by materialism, who transfers his affections from his spouse to ‘Spondulicks, or ye Tin’ (1856: 113). In pursuit of profit, he introduces the institution of chattel slavery, which leads to a marital crisis issuing in the division of national territory into slave and free along the ‘Mah-Sun-Dic-Sun’ line. When Plu-Ri-Bus-Tah dies, having failed to resolve the slavery issue during the Kansas-Nebraska crisis, his degenerate, gambling-addicted and alcoholic son, Yunga-merikah assumes the administrative reins of ‘the mighty Yengah nation’ (1856: 195). From this point, Thomson’s satirical national epic takes a darkly apocalyptic turn. Summoned by some reckless or inept Spiritualist medium, the spirit of Plu-Ri-Bus-Tah returns as an otherworldly immigrant. From beyond the grave, he proclaims a curse on Yunga-merikah and the quondam land of Liberty: All your cities shall be ruined, All shall moulder, rot, and crumble, You shall smaller grow and smaller, In your mind and in your body, You shall meaner grow and meaner, Till your cringing, creeping, crawling Form is lost from earth forever, 175

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Till your soul is all extinguished, None is left to merit saving, Not enough to be worth damning. (1856: 216) Liberty, the disgusted maternal parent, ‘raving mad and furious,’ then takes the final action that will assure the immediate implementation of the curse: ‘Good-by Yengah land, I leave you,’ she cries, You have swindled and betrayed me; Yunga-merikah, I leave you— You have humbled and abused me; I disown you, I deny you; You’re no child of mine by thunder! Then she caught the Yengah eagle By the neck and wrung its head off, Wrapped the stars and stripes about her Took the ferry-boat for Jersey, Leaving Yengah land forever. (1856: 243–244) Thomson’s surrogate Uncle Sam underscores several key aspects of the iconic figure: his distinctly native origins as represented by the Native American doggerel dialect and his descent from Puritan forbears; his evolution from Yankee to Brother Jonathan to Uncle Sam (Yengah to Plur-Ri-Bus-Tah to Yunga-merikah), his intimate association with, indeed marriage to, a female counterpart—Lady Liberty (otherwise Columbia); his direct connection with exploitative capitalism; his identification with the economic and political policies of the nation; his inept and greedy pursuit of the ‘Almighty Dollar’; his presumptive immortality as the spiritual incarnation of the nation; and the sadder but wiser conditional affection with which the character is viewed. These characteristics were borne out by the graphic representations of the character that began to appear during the revolutionary transformation of print technology—the rise of the penny press—that gave voice to the perfervid nationalism of the Young America movement, Thomson’s satiric target.

Early Graphic Iconography: From Columbia to Uncle Sam The female iconography of America evolved from the dark-skinned Indian maiden (a reflection of the power of the Pocahontas legend in the popular European imagination) during the Revolution to the goddess of Liberty (Lady Liberty) in the Constitutional period to (by 1800) the classically garbed Columbia. The latter figured prominently in works of a 176

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patriotic sort—Timothy Dwight’s ‘Columbia’ (1777) and the anonymous ‘Columbia, the Gem of the Ocean’ (ca. 1843) that served as the unofficial national anthem through much of the nineteenth century. Graphically, although Columbia (alias Lady Liberty) continued to appear throughout the nineteenth century, after the mid-1830s, she played a distinctly subordinate visual role. Her representation down to the end of the nineteenth century was typically as Uncle Sam’s consort. When Uncle Sam was represented apart from Columbia in the first half of the nineteenth century, he was often depicted as strongly in touch with his feminine side. It was as though Americans needed both a maternal and a paternal embodiment of national identity. In the earliest graphic representations of Uncle Sam, he is depicted wearing a flowing American flag, echoing the classic robes of Lady Liberty, and a night cap that is indistinguishable from the liberty cap of the female Columbia figure, and even bears the inscription ‘Liberty’ on its rim. The earliest graphic representation of Uncle Sam, expressive of a somewhat vitiated masculinity, seems to be an 1832 anti-Jackson lithograph entitled ‘Uncle Sam in Danger.’ It shows the President bleeding Sam (an outpouring of coins) into a basin marked ‘Safety Fund’, which presages Jackson’s removal of governmental funds from the Bank of the U.S. in the wake of his veto of its rechartering. Uncle Sam appears as a clean-shaven, callow figure, attired in a striped robe, a starred vest, and a liberty cap. His appearance suggests a feminization in comparison to the male figures representing state authority in the drawing and provides a striking prolepsis of Thomson’s Plu-Ri-Bus-Tah, who, in a drunken stupor, attempting to rouse the sleeping Liberty, strips her of the symbols of her ideological power—her red night (liberty) cap and her stars and stripes quilt (Thomson 1856: 142). This Uncle Sam is a stand-in for a fiscally victimized nation, the spiritual representation of the common man at the mercy of the political machinations of the current administration. His powerlessness is underscored by the presence of Major Jack Downing (a popular satiric character created by humorist Seba Smith), who provides the caustic comment epitomizing the relationship of Uncle Sam to the national government: ‘Twixt the Ginril (since he’s taken to Doctoring) and the little Dutch Pothecary [Martin Van Buren] “Uncle Sam” stands no more chance than a stump tail’d Bull in fly time.’ A second cartoon lampooning Jacksonian fiscal policy appeared as a broadside entitled ‘Uncle Sam Sick with La Grippe’ in 1838 (just after the Panic of 1837). Again, Uncle Sam appears wrapped in a robe (clearly the American flag here) and a red liberty cap, apparently suffering from constipation. He complains, ‘I was once as hearty an old cock as ever lived’ and ‘if you don’t leave off ruining my Constitution with your quack nostrums, I’ll soon give you your walking ticket’ (Czulewicz 1995: Plate 635). Reinforcing the collapse and emasculation of Uncle Sam, a bust of George Washington has tumbled to the floor leaving a crumbling, obviously phallic column ironically labeled ‘Pater Patria’. This Uncle Sam graphic provides a clear tri-partite division of figures representing national identity—the members of the current administration, or government, per se, Uncle Sam, the representative of the best instincts of the nation, and Brother Jonathan, who represents the people and appears outside, encouraging Dr. Biddle to come to the aid of Sam. Brother Jonathan here appears in 177

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Illustration 1: ‘Uncle Sam Sick with La Grippe’ attributes the United States’ dire fiscal situation to Andrew Jackson’s policies. Lithograph on wove paper, H. R. Robinson, 1837.

the costume that will come to identify Uncle Sam—top hat, blue swallow-tail coat, and red and white striped trousers. The first artist to represent Uncle Sam more conventionally attired was Frank H. T. Bellew in 1852. His panel cartoons for Harper’s Weekly in the mid-1860s began to show elements of what would become the figure’s iconic dress. Thomas Nast, who standardized the canonical Sam costume, first featured this figure in a Harper’s Weekly cartoon of November 20, 1869, entitled ‘Uncle Sam’s Thanksgiving Dinner,’ that shows a multiethnic gathering at a table (Keller 1968: 64). Nast produced a number of cartoons of the figure after the Civil War, but it was his four-chromolithograph supplement entitled ‘Nast’s Almanac’ (Harper’s Weekly, 1876) that fixed the sartorial appearance of Uncle Sam. In these illustrations, Sam appears dressed in a star-spangled blue swallow-tail, red and white striped pants, and a top hat bearing the letters ‘US’. This figure is clearly modeled on Yankee Doodle: The hat sports a long feather, visually echoing the words of the popular song; and one of the pictures shows the figure signing a declaration of independence, which reads ‘Yankee Doodle, U S declares himself free from King George’ (Czulewicz 1995: 10). The final picture in the series shows Uncle Sam on the porch of the White House (more clearly linking him to the government and the presidency, specifically) smoking a cheroot and Liberty in a red and white skirt with her characteristic tiara. The graphic transition from the Brother Jonathan/Yankee figure to Uncle Sam and his separation from 178

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and additions to the residual habiliments of his earlier incarnation is clearly located here. The costume reiterates the illustrative representation of the Yankee as he appeared in such publications as Yankee Doodle (1846) and Yankee Notions (1850s) (Ketchum 1959: 26; 32), but incorporates key distinguishing details like the goatee, which Nast added to the figure in 1872. Throughout the nineteenth century and especially in Nast’s later illustrations, Sam continued to appear regularly with Columbia or Lady Liberty, who acts as his conscience and goads him to domestic economy. In an etching from 1878 titled ‘Giving U.S. Hail Columbia,’ an angry Columbia upbraiding Sam for his naïve politics and his foolhardy impecuniousness, here represented by a trap on his foot clearly labeled ‘this is not a trap,’ is depicted. This echoes an earlier one showing Sam’s foot caught in a gigantic bear trap with the caption ‘The First Step Toward National Bankruptcy’ (February 16, 1878), and a later, even more pointed one, that shows Sam with the small trap on his foot burdened with inflationary fiscal policy swinging between silver and Greenbacks (December 20, 1879) (Czulewicz 1995: Plate 560; 575). In the post-Civil War era, the roles of Uncle Sam and Columbia were altered. He was no longer the pitiable subject of petticoat government but rather a gullible, diddled dupe, the projection of ineffective and misguided governmental monetary policies, while she was the embodiment of sound fiscal judgment and wise federal policies. These changes reflected popular reaction to the scandals of the Grant Administration (of which the president himself was ignorant) and the long quest for a monetary panacea in the wake of the Panic of 1873 that included a demand for the expansion of silver coinage, a bimetallic currency, and raising the ceiling for the printing of greenbacks. Appropriately, Columbia makes her last public appearances with Uncle Sam at the World’s Columbian Exposition in 1893, and thereafter enjoys primarily a ceremonial capacity, especially in connection with domestic celebrations like Thanksgiving and the Fourth of July. Increasingly, Uncle Sam assumes a more masculinized persona befitting the turn of the century and the emergent imperial ambitions of a rising American power. But it would be World War I that would finally establish the standardized iconic appearance of Uncle Sam and also provide the formulaic pose and gesture by which he has become instantly recognizable no matter how crudely drawn or unfamiliar the specific lines of his physiognomy. And this final phase of the transition of Uncle Sam to the embodiment of patriotic national identity was a direct product of the propaganda machine that sustained the American war effort. While it is clear that Uncle Sam was born in war and that he was always available as a projection of jingoistic bellicosity and America-first patriotism, he was not called to service as the iconic representation of the embattled nation until the era of World War I. His call to body forth the nation united was facilitated and to a degree necessitated by the rise of the modern corporate state, resting on a military-industrial complex that generated centralized control of wartime information. For the first time, appeals could be made directly to national patriotism in a way that had not been possible prior to the unification and dominant centralization resulting from the Union victory in the Civil War. 179

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The Classic Embodiment of the Patriarchal National Icon It was James Montgomery Flagg, artist and illustrator, who consolidated and standardized the appearance, persona, and attributes of the modern Uncle Sam in the iconic image on what became the most famous recruiting poster in American history. It was originally produced for the cover of the illustrated weekly Leslie’s (February 15, 1917), two and a half weeks before the U.S. declaration of war and a month before the implementation of the Selective Service Act. The illustration was an exact reproduction of Flagg’s earlier cover illustration for the magazine (the first appearance of the classic pointing figure) that had appeared on July 6, 1916, which bore the legend ‘What are YOU Doing for Preparedness?’ and was a direct response to the National Defense Act of June 1916. Leslie’s had a traditional association with Uncle Sam, having printed a series of issues featuring a bellicose, sword-rattling Sam by illustrator E. N. Blue during the run-up to the Spanish-American War (April–June 1898) (Czulewicz 1995: Plate 514–532). Flagg, however, became the preeminent interpreter of the national symbol, producing some 45 additional renderings of the figure during World War I under the auspices of Charles Dana Gibson’s Committee of Pictorial Publicity, a creation of George Creel’s vast federal propaganda network, the Committee on Public Information. Flagg’s poster Uncle Sam is actually a suitably aged self-portrait of the 40-year-old artist, whose eyes, following the line of the pointing finger, immediately engage the viewer through a personal interpellation of his loyalty and claim to manhood. Four million copies of the poster were printed during the war, and Flagg and other artists contributed regular covers to

Illustration 2: James Montgomery Flagg’s iconic Uncle Sam recruiting poster for the U.S. Navy, 1917.

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the ‘War in Pictures’ series of Leslie’s. Flagg also produced posters promoting war bonds, war savings stamps, national insurance, and animal relief. His patriotic, authoritative Uncle Sam provided support for the New Deal—in one poster (prepared for the Committee of the Arts and Sciences for Roosevelt) reprising the gesture of the World War I poster and including a picture of the President with the text ‘I want YOU F. D. R. Stay and Finish the Job!’—and then was reenlisted for World War II and even saw limited service during the Korean War. Uncle Sam serves here not so much as a projection of a people united but more as a vehicle of suasion, a means of eliciting a certain behavior from the general populace and of securing adherence to top-down governmental policies. However, in the post-World War II era, this association of Sam with the government once again dissolved and yielded to a more diverse appropriation of the iconic figure across a wide variety of media.

From World War II to the Cold War and Beyond: The Evolution of Uncle Sam in Comic Books Uncle Sam made his first comic book appearance in the run-up to World War II as a virile, two-fisted superhero, a supernatural entity in the form of a reincarnated revolutionary war soldier who reappeared sporadically throughout history whenever his country needed him. Accompanied by a juvenile sidekick, Buddy, The American Boy, this Will Eisner character was featured in National Comics #1 through #3, at times in wildly irrelevant contexts. Though war had already broken out in Europe, the first issue declared itself ‘Starring Uncle Sam in an Action Adventure in the Philippines’ pitted against ‘2000 savage Moros’. Subsequently, his origin story was retold (National Comics #5), and he remained a supporting character at least until issue no. 43 in 1944, but did not fight directly in the war. Early comic book appearances acceded to the official governmental appropriation of the icon derived from its propagandistic use in the Flagg posters, but by mid-war, there is evidence of a movement of comics toward an appropriation of the icon for the people as distinct from the government, a movement that will ultimately make the icon available for critique of national policies and political figures. Uncle Sam received his own book with Uncle Sam Quarterly (1941–1943), a simple migration of the original character (with boy wonder) to a new Quality Comics product. In the feature story, ‘Forged Faces’, there are two Uncle Sams, an evil one, who supports the plan of corrupt Senator Bristol and the proto-fascist Steel Helmets to put American children into labor camps, and a good one, who opposes him. This is the first instance of what would become a comic convention—the superhero doppelganger, the hero’s nemesis. While the doppelganger motif typically allows a sharp literary distinction between the pure and good and the evil and corrupt, as employed in these comics, it is expressive of paranoia and fear of betrayal by native-born enemies indistinguishable in their appearance from loyal Americans. Since the false doppelganger seeks the abrogation of fundamental American institutions and their supersession by diametrical ones, these 181

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early doppelganger Uncle Sams presage the late subversive representations of the fi gure in postmodern media. By fall 1943, Uncle Sam had effectively disappeared from the comics scene, not to reappear until #107 of the Justice League of America (Wein & Giordano 1973) in a reunion with superheroes from an earlier era, subsequently becoming the leader of the Freedom Fighters. The history of Uncle Sam in the comics realm has been a strange and twisted one. A brief overview of his major incarnations since 1970 can give some idea of the plasticity of the icon in the postmodern era. Freedom Fighters was published from March 1976 to August 1978, probably capitalizing on Bicentennial enthusiasm. In the historical retrospective All-Star Squadron #31 (Thomas & Holberg 1984), a gigantic Sam looms on the cover in a finger-pointing Flagg pose above the words ‘Uncle Sam Wants You to Save the World.’ The Freedom Fighters, buoyed by a wave of heightened patriotism, disappeared when that wave receded. As the twentieth century neared its end, Uncle Sam reappeared, but in much altered form, first in The Spectre, 3rd series, #37, ‘The Spectre vs. The Spirit of America’ (January 1996), then in Steve Darnall and Alex Ross’ Uncle Sam (1997), published as a graphic novel in 1998, and finally, the Freedom Fighters were resuscitated in the wake of 9/11, and Uncle Sam and the Freedom Fighters enjoyed a run from September 2006 to June 2008. The Uncle Sam that appears in these comics is a figure of the occult and science fiction realms of fantasy, either the product of ancient magical rites or a function of futuristic technology. Ironically, though an all-toohuman character, flawed and psychologically damaged, he possesses extraordinary powers— super strength, enhanced speed, invulnerability, the ability to alter his size, clairvoyance, the power of inter-dimensional time travel to an alternate Earth,2 where World War II is still in progress, and an uncanny ability to teletransport himself and others to an alternate dimension called The Heartland. Even though, like the postmodern Superman, Uncle Sam can be killed (as he is in Infinite Crisis #1), he has regenerative powers. In The Spectre (#37) story, Uncle Sam is an alchemical creation of the Founding Fathers, whose spiritual essence is captured in a talisman formed of magical tokens from each of the states combined with a copy of the Declaration of Independence. The talisman empowers him to take on flesh by occupying the body of a dying patriot, and he has successively assumed human form as a revolutionary Minuteman, Brother Jonathan, and Billy Yank and Johnny Reb. He first took the form of Uncle Sam in 1870, when he was resurrected as a political cartoonist killed by Boss Tweed, and subsequently as heroic soldiers in World War I and II. A huge, glow-in-the-dark skeletal skull of Uncle Sam, looming over The Spectre, is depicted on the cover of Spectre #37. Inside, the zombie Sam rises from the grave to recapture his talisman. Lest we miss the import of this figure, one of the characters says, ‘Blazing Hell! According to this book we’re up against the ICONIC REPRESENTATION of America—UNCLE SAM—but back in his primal incarnation when he was known as BROTHER JONATHAN’ (Ostrander & Mandrake 1996). This reversionary, undead Sam is the evil Sam sans doppelganger, a menace to the human population, as he makes clear when he declares, ‘T’ain’t Heaven! T’ain’t Hell! Collective Will of the People. Ain’t that what makes 182

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Illustration 3: In the metahistoriographic graphic novel Uncle Sam, the title character relives iconic events in the history of the United States. Uncle Sam © DC Comics, 1997.

a God in the first Place?’ (Ostrander & Mandrake 1996). In Spectre #50 (February 1997), the long struggle over the nation’s soul (‘The Haunting of America’) between the deathless, psychopathical, unbidden revenant and The Spectre comes to an end when the latter, using the talisman, is able to vanquish yet another evil doppelganger of Uncle Sam and to call forth a true incarnation of the real values of the United States, The Patriot. Subsequently, The Patriot merges with Uncle Sam in a Superman issue. More recently, Uncle Sam has figured in the apocalyptic struggles of the DC Comics universe: found face down in a puddle of rainwater and presumed dead in Infinite Crisis #1 (Johns & Pérez 2006), but apparently resurrected to fight again in Final Crisis #4 (Morrison & Jones 2008), where he is corrupted by the Anti-Life Equation that leaves him suspended between life and death.3 He is overwhelmed by feelings of loneliness, despair, fear, failure, mockery, guilt, and shame. The only antidotes are hope and freedom, which seem to have abandoned him. This premise of a demented, tortured, abused, and ignored figure is the characteristic face of the postmodern Uncle Sam. In some ways it echoes earlier uses of the doppelganger motif as well as reprising the sharp divide between the virtuous people and the corrupt government. In the wake of the Watergate scandals, the resignation of President Nixon, and the Vietnam War, however, this vision of Uncle Sam is much bitterer and disillusioned. It was most forcefully presented in Steve Darnall and Alex Ross’ Uncle Sam (1997), where 183

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the title character appears as a confused, fly-blown, disheveled homeless man, who hears voices and sees visions from the nation’s violent and bloody history. He is rolled in an alley, his shoes are stolen, he goes dumpster-diving for his dinner, and ends up slumped over a toilet in a hotel men’s room. He encounters his doppelganger in the form of a figure on stilts at a political convention, who tells him he is the real Uncle Sam and that ‘you, on the other hand—you’re nothing. You used to be somebody, but now you’re nothing’ (Darnall & Ross 1998). Sam pulls the impostor down, but is arrested and thrown in a cell, where he sits in his own excrement. After his release, some street punks try to light him on fire, but he will not burn. The caption for this panel reads, ‘This is the Dream. All one big American Dream’ (Darnall & Ross 1998). In his kaleidoscopic journey through the worst moments of U.S. history, Sam finally comes to an encounter with Columbia at the 1893 World’s Fair, and she recalls him to his lost ideals. He then comes to a second encounter with his false self, of whom he declares: ‘You are the Spirit of a Nation. But it’s not America. […] You’re not America. You’ll never be America’ (Darnall & Ross 1998). After a long fight, the real Uncle Sam appears to triumph, but when the dust clears, he is back on the street where he finds his star-spangled hat (previously seen on his false persona) lying on the sidewalk. Passersby throw a dollar in it, he picks it up and walks off under a commercial sign bearing the pyramidal Novus Ordo Seclorum logo, whistling ‘Yankee Doodle’. In the final panel, Columbia can be seen picking up the dollar bill he has let fall. This is a dark and historically critical vision of American experience and the abandonment of the nation’s basic principles; a rejection and banishment of the iconic spirit of America, but the piece is intended to reconstitute lost values and rehabilitate Uncle Sam. On the rear inside cover, two images of Sam appear: In one, he holds out his hat in supplication, and in the other, in tattered clothes with pockets turned inside out, the legend ironically pleads ‘I NEED YOU.’ As Neil Gaiman (1998) writes in the preface, ‘[T]he country may have betrayed every promise on which it was founded—and that means that the promises remain to be kept. Everything you ever believed in may go up in smoke here […] but UNCLE SAM that is the air you breathe.’ In the final analysis this work is a tortured cry for redemption, for the reclamation of the spirit of America, for the rehabilitation of Uncle Sam. The new Freedom Fighters, set in a post-Infinite Crisis world,4 featured in Uncle Sam and the Freedom Fighters (2006–2008), provide a tentative response to that call. In this storyline (‘Brave New World’), the President has been assassinated and replaced by an extraterrestrial android that controls the Anti-Life Equation, and the meta-human FF force is combating the conspiracy. An anti-Sam appears in the form of a false Miss America, who announces that she is ‘a vital component in the war on terror and our president’s efforts to foster political hegemony so we can reduce the appeal of metahuman terrorists’ (Gray, Palmiotti, and Acuña 2007). She clearly sets forth the debased and impotent condition of Uncle Sam: Samuel, my poor sweet SAMUEL, America doesn’t need you. Can’t you feel that deep in those calcified bones? The DREAM you hoped would materialize is drowning in new technologies, political and social gray areas, and the never-ending war against an 184

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unseen enemy. You exist only in America’s imagination. Unfortunately, Americans have no imagination. They live and dream vicariously through what they see on television, in movies, and through electronic games. Everyone wants to be somebody else. No one wants to be you. (Gray, Palmiotti, and Acuña 2007) The cover of this issue reinforces the image of an incapacitated, helpless Uncle Sam. Against the somber backdrop of a vertically hung American flag, he kneels, head bowed, chained with hands secured behind his back. In the initial issue of this series, Uncle Sam, finger pointing in the classic Flagg gesture, rejects the suggestion that the FF become a national police force, and declares ‘my recruitment poster days are behind me’ (Gray, Palmiotti, and Acuña 2007). The doppelganger motif is doubled, pitting Uncle Sam vs. Father Time, and on the distaff side, the real Miss America, the female embodiment of the national spirit, vs. the false cyborg in issue #6 (February 2007). The series concludes with the triumph of the FF over Father Time and S.H.A.D.E. (Superhuman Advanced Defensive Executive), the enforcers of the alien invasion. Interestingly, in the postmodern popular culture vision, Uncle Sam appears as dead, impotent, or feminized. Indeed, in issue #52 of the alternative worlds series 52 (Morrison & Sinclair 2007), he appears on Earth 11, a reversed-gender world, as Columbia, a reappropriation of the more feminized iconic character from the preCivil War era, that also recapitulates the association of Columbia and Uncle Sam through a postmodern merging of their personae. Despite the efforts of Flagg to associate the figure permanently with an unquestioning, militant, masculinized patriotism, in the world of comics, Sam has been unable to escape the ambiguities of his origins—the transition from a female symbol of nationality (Columbia) to the adolescent Brother Jonathan to the often henpecked spouse. Reflecting the uncertainties and disappointments that plague the popular imagination when it contemplates the nation’s history and its ambivalent feelings about an iconic character often viewed as irrelevant or discredited, the popular culture Uncle Sam has experienced diminished confidence in his masculinity, impotence, an insecure identity, and a loss of faith in the legitimacy of his mission. This uncertainty and ambiguity in the comic book characterization of Uncle Sam has been expressed in more mainstream public responses as well. While official efforts to shore up his credibility were made in the post-World War II years, and again in celebration of the bicentennial, they have been conspicuously absent since. In 1950, the State Department adopted him as the official national symbol, the standardized image representing the U.S., and a joint congressional resolution on September 15, 1961, ‘resolved […] that the Congress salutes Uncle Sam Wilson of Troy, New York, as the progenitor of America’s National symbol Uncle Sam.’ A memorial bronze statue of Uncle Sam was erected in Arlington, Massachusetts, in September 1976. Reinforcing the origin myth, it depicts ‘Samuel Wilson (1766–1854),’ and bears the inscription, ‘He became our national symbol.’ The statue memorializes the last vestiges of the Uncle Sam of conventional popular myth. Every year since 1976, the city of Troy has held an Uncle Sam Birthday Parade on September 11, the day a most condign 185

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historical coincidence. The parade is both a vehicle for promoting local ‘boosterism’, an outlet for public expression of patriotism, and a crass commercial exploitation of the symbolic significance of a central national icon.

Uncle Sam Goes to the Movies: The Icon on the Screen In films, Uncle Sam has played an allegorical role and has been pressed into service to support military campaigns and imperial expansion, for ideological persuasion, and to promote domestic reform. One early Vitagraph film (among the earliest films shown in the United States), The Monroe Doctrine (Edison 1896), was a response to the Venezuela crisis (1895), which revolved around a border dispute between British Guiana and Venezuela. When the British intervened in the dispute to protect their access to Venezuelan gold fields, the United States invoked the Monroe Doctrine. The film presents a fantasized version of these events: John Bull is shown shelling a South American shoreline; Uncle Sam materializes seemingly out of the ether, forces the British icon to his knees, and makes him doff his hat to Venezuela. The subtitle for this vignette reads, ‘U.S. Teaching John Bull a Lesson’ (Musser 1990: 16). A more serious production was the melodramatic American Mutoscope and Biograph Co. film The American Soldier in Love and War (Anon. 1903), which provided a justification for conquest and offered a rationale of racial superiority for the American occupation of the Philippines. In the third scene of the film, the expeditionary soldier’s wife arrives and finds him ensconced in a native hut with a dusky maiden. She reestablishes her claim to him and the Filipino woman becomes the willing servant of both. The American woman is accompanied by an elderly gentleman (probably intended to be her father), who is read as Uncle Sam by Amy Kaplan. The wife leaves this gentleman with the other native women, and ‘[i]n the coupling at the end, the ambiguous familial figure of “Uncle” replaces the native man among the native women. […] The film thus invokes, settles, but then revives the threat of imperial expansion as miscegenation’ (Kaplan 2002: 159–160). Kaplan’s reading of the figure of the elderly gentleman here seems something of a metonymical overreaching, since the diegetic context more clearly implies a paternalistic role for the character. Nevertheless, Kaplan’s reading, while unable to establish a firm link between this figure and the iconic Uncle Sam, does indicate how this film, a clear attempt at justifying and domesticating imperialist expansion, can be seen as a metaphorical expression of paternalistic empire building under the aegis of the pater familias, a localized reflection of the pater patria. A 1917 propaganda film, How Uncle Sam Prepares, features an allegorical prologue in which Uncle Sam awakens and discusses the European war with Abraham Lincoln and Woodrow Wilson. Uncle Sam, and by extension, the American people, are reconciled to U.S. participation in the war by a reminder of the sinking of the Lusitania and other German atrocities. For added conviction, the film, produced under military auspices, with on-screen appearances by representatives of the U.S. Navy, Army, and War Department, screened scenes of American munitions manufacture and training of soldiers. 186

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An animated short entitled Uncle Sam and the Bolsheviki-I.W.W. Rat (Anon. 1919), produced by the Ford Company, finds farmer Uncle Sam guarding the ‘fine results of our labor’ (sacks labeled ‘American Institutions’) from the ‘Red’ rat that bears a banner reading ‘Bolsheviki Rat (I.W.W.)’. Farmer Sam kills the rat with a coal shovel and tosses the body outdoors, observing, ‘Bolshevists are the Rats of Civilization.’ At the height of the first Red Scare, in a year of increased strikes, the film provides a clear sense of the identity of the interests of manufacturers and the national government in the confrontation between labor and capital. This short film is a product of popular political expression, the appropriation of the iconic figure to express social and economic discontent, or, more profoundly, the sense that there has been a fundamental betrayal of American ideals, an ideological slippage that threatens to destroy the social contract linked to capitalism. The I.W.W. film is an expression of right-wing paranoia about the Communist threat to the capitalist infrastructure. A light wartime film, which played on Al Jolson’s popular The Jazz Singer (1927), was the animated Bugs Bunny short Any Bonds Today? (Clampett 1942), made to promote war bonds and stamps. Bugs, wearing blackface and dressed as Uncle Sam, sings ‘Sammy’ to encourage sacrifice for the war effort. The theme song of the film was composed by Irving Berlin at the request of the Secretary of the Treasury, and was based on his earlier song, ‘Any Yams, Today?’ Bugs’ performance also echoes Al Jolson’s blackface presentation of ‘Mammy’ in the early sound film The Jazz Singer. In both instances there is an unabashed racial stereotyping that makes an emotional appeal—for family and for country—and in the Bugs cartoon directly associates racial stereotyping with patriotism. At a time when U.S. military units were still segregated, this might have seemed both acceptable and natural. Reform films were rarer and futilely sought a populist Uncle Sam, who would act to improve social and ethical life. A sentimental film of 1912, Children Who Labor (Miller 1912), offered a melodramatic appeal to abolish child labor. The central narrative—of the awakening of the conscience of a factory owner—is framed by two vignettes. In the first, a child entering the factory beseeching a godlike Uncle Sam in the clouds for relief can be seen. But he ignores the child, the skies cloud over, and the word ‘Greed’ forms. At the end of the film, an intertitle flashes ‘Lest We Forget’ and reprises the vainly imploring child, while dollar signs materialize in the sky. An even darker early film is Uncle Sam of Freedom Ridge (Beranger 1920), a propaganda film made to support U.S. participation in the League of Nations. The central character promotes Liberty Loan rallies by dressing as Uncle Sam. His son is killed in France and, disillusioned by America’s betrayal of its ideals and mentally unhinged, he comes to believe that he really is Uncle Sam. In the end, he shoots himself to atone for the nation’s sins, sacrificing the symbol to preserve the redeemed substance. This is the earliest representation of the death of Uncle Sam, albeit in a masquerading form. Perhaps this suicide amid the disillusionment that succeeded the ‘war to end all wars’ provides a clue to the most effective use of the iconic figure in promoting national unity and patriotism. Uncle Sam has figured on the silver screen most prominently in direct connection to unambiguously ‘good’ wars. In the two most clearly defined ‘holy’ wars 187

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the United States has waged, Uncle Sam retained a positive image that reflected a spirit of sacrifice and commitment of the American people. In the case of other conflicts, where there was considerable anti-war sentiment, and especially in cases where the United States did not undeniably win the war, the image of Uncle Sam functioned as a cynosure of criticism of U.S. policies and the government. As a consequence, the last time Uncle Sam made a significant, if ambivalent, appearance in movies before the postmodern era was during World War II. In the musical biopic Yankee Doodle Dandy (1942), James Cagney, playing George M. Cohan, impersonated Uncle Sam in a brief scene. More tellingly, Walter Huston, in the expurgated prologue to John Ford and Gregg Toland’s December 7th (1943), portrayed a complacent Uncle Sam whose vacation in the Hawaiian Islands is cut short by the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, as mentioned above. The film features a debate between Uncle Sam and his conscience, ‘Mr. C’, who chides him for his isolationism and relaxed attitude. As Uncle Sam dreams, viewers see scenes of Japanese espionage conducted through the Japanese embassy that receives reports from Japanese-Americans that are transmitted to Japan through short wave radios and in the diplomatic pouch. The message of the prologue is clearly conveyed by a sports metaphor: Unlike World War I, ‘this time the U.S.’s going to be in there pitching.’ From the end of World War II to the mid-1990s Uncle Sam seems to have fallen into desuetude in Hollywood—the Cold War was not conducive to patriotic action but rather to heightened paranoia about subversion. It may be, too, that the use of the iconic figure, becoming more critical, was less appealing to filmic representation. Then, too, wartime use of the figure in newspaper editorial cartoons, especially those of artists like Theodor Seuss Geisel (Dr. Seuss) and Rube Goldberg made Uncle Sam more readily available to a popular audience and empowered a more critical use of the icon. Perhaps the ultimate in sacrificing the symbol but failing to preserve the substance is Uncle Sam’s starring role in the campy low-budget slasher Uncle Sam: I Want You Dead! (Lustig 1997). The video box features a Fresnel lens cover. One angle shows Sam in the conventional Flagg posture with the legend ‘Uncle Sam—I Want You,’ but when tipped an image of a zombie Uncle Sam is superimposed and the word ‘DEAD’ in red letters is added. Reprising the postmodern formulaic doppelganger Sam, the plot revolves around M.Sgt. Sam Harper, killed by friendly fire in Kuwait during Desert Storm, who rises from the dead as a retributive avenger, killing an anti-war, draft-dodging teacher, the boyfriend of his former wife (a local deputy, and tax cheater), flag burners, a youth who sings a disrespectful version of the national anthem and moons the crowd, a peeping Tom, a lascivious Air Force sergeant who preys on aggrieved widows, and a corrupt congressman. Harper masks his fried features and dons an Uncle Sam costume. All of his executions take place during the annual Fourth of July festivities and involve the death of false versions of American icons—the peeping Tom, for example, appears as Uncle Sam. Zombie Sam spells the death of the American Dream, but in the end is destroyed by his nephew, Jody, and Jed, a black Vietnam veteran. But in the process, Jody’s house is destroyed. Not only has Uncle Sam materialized as a crazed threat to Americans, but has effectuated the destruction 188

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Illustration 4: On the Fourth of July, Uncle Sam impales a policeman on the American flag in Uncle Sam: I Want You Dead! Uncle Sam © Gable Productions, 1996.

of the domestic hearth, the cradle of the nation. A dark vision, indeed, mirroring the polarized political landscape of contemporary America, in which a vocal minority supports a conspiracy theory rooted in profound distrust of central government and the domestic and foreign policies of the nation that are viewed as inimical to the popular interest. The appeal of a dead Uncle Sam seems very strong in a post-9/11 America, engaged in a seemingly unending war on terror, bitterly divided over domestic policy, battling an intransigent economic crisis, facing intractable problems, and in a popular culture that seems consumed by rampaging hordes of the living dead. Indeed, one of 2011’s popular calendars is Zombies, which features a mimetic Flagg cover illustration of dead Uncle Sam, bearing the caption ‘We want your BRAIN!’ The illustration for July recapitulates the cover with the more traditional legend ‘I want YOU.’

Popular Response and Utility of the Iconic Figure The most popular representation of the figure, however, has been the iconic Flagg Sam. The original poster has been repeatedly reproduced, frequently parodied, and appropriated with equal enthusiasm by opposite ends of the political spectrum. Popular publications have also parodied the famous poster image—Alfred E. Neuman’s famous ‘who needs you’ cover of Mad (April 1969) and the earlier Mad cover that replicated the enlistment poster and showed Neuman alongside, pointing at himself, of July 1959. Some recent and more iconographic uses of the formulaic pose include Vietnam era anti-war posters that reverse the gesture, giving the finger to recruiters; a skeleton Sam beckoning with the logo ‘I want You for the U.S. Army’; a bandaged Sam saying, ‘I Want Out’; and an Uncle Sam giving the peace sign and saying ‘I want peace!’ In the post-9/11 era, more aggressive images have 189

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prevailed—bearing such legends as ‘I want you to love your country,’ and giving the finger, saying ‘to those responsible, we’re coming for you,’ and ‘Hey, Osama!’ The Flagg Sam has proven to be a most durable and readily adaptable metonymic representation of national identity that has accommodated a broad range of ideological perspectives. These examples of both a resistive and orthodox reading of the iconic figure, drawn from counter-cultural and ultra-patriotic sources alike, are illustrative of the extraordinary elasticity of the Uncle Sam character. Since he is taken to be the most readily recognizable expression of American exceptionalism and American ideals, he can stand as a champion of those who wish to valorize and validate national policies, especially war and interventionist ventures, as well as a variety of dissidents from anti-war protestors to socialists to anarchists who can use his image to critique American social, political, and economic organization, as well as contemporary policies with which they disagree. As an empty sign into which a diversity of signifiers may be inserted, Uncle Sam serves as the ideal vehicle for expressing popular reaction to the divergence between ideals and reality, theory and praxis in American culture. As Roland Barthes argues in ‘Myth Today’, originally published in 1957, the ubiquity of the iconic sign assumes immediate but very generalized identification; it sacrifices the whole historical, political, ideological memory associated with the figure so that it can be reappropriated for disparate signification. As he matured from the beardless youth Brother Jonathan, he emerged in Flagg’s incarnation as no longer a befuddled, blundering, and bamboozled figure and feebly uxorious husband, but as a stern and demanding patriarchal one. But as post-World War II experience has eroded bedrock certainty about key ideological principles, Uncle Sam has become an embattled icon. Despite his extraordinary adaptability as a national symbol and the persistent popular need to reaffirm national ideals, however flawed in their implementation, his recent schizophrenic persona in popular culture, his impotent confusion and qualms of conscience about the nation’s past, and ultimately his death and zombification, give evidence of uncertainty in the popular mind about the validity or relevance of this historic symbolic embodiment of the national spirit. Indeed, Uncle Sam seems curiously dated, irrelevant to the demographic realities of contemporary America. He has remained throughout his history a pasty-complexioned white male (blond when drawn as young). Since the decline of his female companions in the early twentieth century, there have been few female impersonators (other than dancers in musical sketches) as well as few Black Uncle Sams, and none with other ethnic associations. National consensus only slowly and grudgingly came to include these groups in the category of full citizenship, but Uncle Sam seems not to have caught up to the progress of democracy. A made for television, presumptively naïve film, Uncle Sam Magoo (Levitow 1970), is exemplary: Distressingly exclusionary, African Americans make a barely token appearance as ‘talking heads’—Martin Luther King and Booker T. Washington. Native Americans appear as simple-minded and feckless or, like the plump Pocahontas, smitten with the white man. After his selective sprint through U.S. history in the ‘supporting role’ of Uncle Sam, the myopic Magoo, with unintentional irony, agrees to reprise the role for 190

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another season. The film seems to imply that a willful near-sightedness and a facile ability to rewrite history are essential components of the faith in Uncle Sam. Yet still, Uncle Sam abides as the nation’s central icon. Through the ambivalently complex meanings he bears, his image has maintained its power even as the tide of history has unrolled around it. Insofar as it has been effectively separated from the government itself, it has provided a powerful medium for editorial cartoons critical of contemporary policy or expressive of frustrations with resistance to change. It has been a means of channeling popular affection with minimal compulsory patriotic baggage. For all political persuasions, it offers a nostalgic link to an imagined simpler, more unified, more idealistic America. Nevertheless, currently Uncle Sam is experiencing a crisis of faith as evidenced by the frequent premature announcements of his demise and his encore as a revenant. A recent Internet ranking of American pop icons, based on a very limited survey and providing a rather limited and restrictive range of selections for participants, as of mid-November 2011 finds Uncle Sam in position twelve, trailing Bugs Bunny, Homer Simpson, Babe Ruth, Michael Jordan, Marilyn Monroe, Mickey Mouse, and Elvis Presley. Interestingly, in this listing, Martin Luther King is in spot number two, and Superman ranked fifth. Despite its limitations and lack of statistical validity, the survey does suggest the relative unimportance of Uncle Sam as a pop culture figure, particularly among young, Internet-savvy Americans. ‘An Icon,’ the survey declares, ‘somehow represent[s] American character, good and bad’ (redleg13 2007: par. 1). Alex Ross dramatically made this point in the spin-off T-shirt for Uncle Sam, a composite portrait of Uncle Sam made up of an inclusive group of Americans from all ethnic backgrounds that underscores the fact that ‘in postmodernity pop imagery serves as a point of departure, a source of inspirations but also as a recyclable material that can be refurbished, reinvested, revolved as well as parodied, satirized and ridiculed’ (Blatanis 2003: 14). Whether the iconic Uncle Sam, as defined by such popular usage as posters, editorial cartoons, stickers, decals, and collectibles (like bobble-heads) can continue to serve as an inspiration, can be reinvested with a viable spiritual power for the next century; whether he can become a catalytic symbol for a more inclusive America, a country of greater equality; or whether he will remain a symbolic embodiment of contested national identity, an anodyne for irrational fear of change and an increasingly marginalized nostalgic fantasy in an impugnably divided America, only time will tell.

References Anon. (1903), The American Soldier in Love and War. Studio City: American Mutoscope and Biograph Co. Anon. (1919), Uncle Sam and the Bolsheviki Rat. Detroit: Ford Motor Company. Beranger, George (1920), Uncle Sam of Freedom Ridge. n.p.: Harry Levey Productions. 191

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Blatanis, Konstnatinos (2003), Pop Culture Icons in Contemporary Drama. Cranbury: Rosemont Publishing & Printing. Boime, Albert (1998), The Unveiling of the National Icons: A Plea for Patriotic Iconoclasm in a Nationalist Era. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Clampett, Bob (1942), Any Bonds Today? Hollywood: Leon Schlesinger Productions. Czulewicz, Gerald E. (1995), The Foremost Guide to Uncle Sam Collectibles. New York: Collector Books. Darnall, Steve, and Alex Ross (1998), Uncle Sam. New York: Vertigo Comics. Edison, Thomas A. (1896), The Monroe Doctrine. New York: Edison Manufacturing Company. [Fidcuddy, Frederick Augustus] (1816), The Adventures of Uncle Sam in Search of His Lost Honor. Middleton: Seth Richards. Fishwick, Marshall (1970), ‘Introduction,’ in Ray B. Browne & Marshall Fishwick (eds.), Icons of Popular Culture. Bowling Green: Bowling Green University Popular Press, pp. 3–12. Ford, John, and Gregg Toland (1943), December 7th. Washington, D.C.: U.S. War Department. Gaiman, Neil (1998), ‘Preface,’ in Steve Darnell & Alex Ross, Uncle Sam. New York: Vertigo Comics, n. pag. Gray, Justin, Jimmy Palmiotti, and Daniel Acuña (2007), Uncle Sam and the Freedom Fighters #5. New York: DC Comics. Johns, Geoff, and George Pérez (2005), Infinite Crisis #1. New York: DC Comics. Kaplan, Amy (2002), The Anarchy of Empire in the Making of U.S. Culture. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Ketchum, Alton (1959), Uncle Sam: The Man and the Legend. New York: Hill and Wang. Keller, Morton (1968), The Art and Politics of Thomas Nast. New York: Oxford University Press. Levitow, Abe (1970), Uncle Sam Magoo. Los Angeles: United Productions of America. Lustig, William (1997), Uncle Sam: I Want You Dead! New York: A-Pix Entertainment. Matthews, Albert (1908), ‘Uncle Sam,’ Proceedings of the American Antiquarian Society, 19, pp. 21–65. Miller, Ashley (1912), Children Who Labor. New York: Thomas A. Edison, Inc. Morrison, Grant, and Alex Sinclair (2007), 52 #52. New York: DC Comics. Morrison, Grant, and J. G. Jones (2008), Final Crisis # 4. New York: DC Comics. Musser, Charles (1990), The Emergence of Cinema: The American Screen to 1907. Berkeley: University of California Press. Ostrander, John, and Tom Mandrake (1996), The Spectre, Vol. 3, #37. New York: DC Comics. Paulding, James K. (1868), The New Mirror for Travellers and Other Whim-Whams: Being Selections from the Papers of a Retired Councilman, erewhile Known as Lancelot Langstaff. New York: Scribners. redleg13 (2007), ‘The Greatest American Pop Icon,’ Rankopedia [online], n. d., http:// www.rankopedia.com/Greatest-American-Pop-Culture-Icon/Step1/4662/.htm. Accessed 2 November 2011. Thomas, Roy, and Rick Holberg (1984), All-Star Squadron #31. New York: DC Comics. Thomson, Mortimer Neal [as ‘Doesticks, Q. K. Philander’] (1856), Plu-Ri-Bus-Tah, A Song That’s By No Author. New York: Livermore & Rudd. Wein, Len, and Dick Giordano (1973), Justice League of America #107. New York: DC Comics. 192

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Notes 1 This was a boasting slang term of Mississippi River boatmen that entered popular usage ca. 1810 and was later appropriated by Davy Crockett and burlesqued in the Crockett Almanacs. 2 This avatar of Uncle Sam clearly owes much to the earlier superhero in the service of the U.S. government, the clairvoyant, time-traveling, tele-potential Dr. Manhattan (Dr. Jon Osterman), who had his origin in 1983 in the Watchmen. Dr. Manhattan was himself based on Captain Atom, who originated in 1960. 3 The Anti-Life Equation was the negative expression of the Life Equation. It has received various definitions, but, in essence, was understood as a formula for gaining total control of the free will of all sentient and intelligent races in the universe. Its master enjoys absolute control through inducing despair and an enfeebled sense of self-worth through feelings of isolation, alienation, and abandonment. 4 Infinite Crisis was a seven-issue DC Comics series (2005–2006) that returned to the world of the Multiverse, created in the twelve-part series Crisis on Infinite Earths (1985). That world was one of multiple parallel Earths peopled by alternative versions of characters from the DC superhero stable. The DC Universe is neatly divided into a pre-Crisis and a post-Crisis period.

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Chapter 9 Lois Lane: The Making of a Girl Reporter Peter Lee

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o stay relevant in the fast-changing fads of public taste, icons—and their promoters— must navigate the murky milieu of social change. At the same time, symbols have a political dimension of their own that reflects a hierarchical structure, changes notwithstanding. In particular, a gendered organization persists in the public perception of cultural markers. For instance, Superman has preserved his reputation as the epitome of flag-waving Americanism. While Superman embodies American exceptionalism to this date, the public perception of gender roles has altered over time. Lois Lane, Clark Kent’s coworker who debuted alongside the mild-mannered reporter in 1938, has remained in the public eye by responding to political and social developments over time. As Superman appeared in other media, including film, radio, and television, Lane’s increased exposure enticed creators to make sure she appealed to the largest common denominator. Ironically, this approach has diminished Lane’s growth as a character. She has primarily remained a lovelorn damsel in distress, throwing herself in his arms as often as villains threw her from dizzying heights; a role that still haunts her iconic image, even though creators and fans have attempted to unchain the girl reporter’s subservient status from Superman in recent decades. Despite these efforts, Lane’s iconic stature refuses to accommodate independence or equal footing with Superman. Lane’s subordination to Superman demonstrates a gendered politics of icons: As long as Superman champions ‘truth, justice, and the American way,’ Lane will remain anchored as the male hero’s dependant, the feminine innocent whose continual jeopardy justifies the existence, and eventual triumph, of her savior. Lane’s incarnations are visual testaments to the longevity of this structure of symbols in American culture. Lois Lane: Deep-Rooted Origins For Lane to remain attached to Superman, it was crucial that her profession reflect the Man of Steel’s own moral crusade. In the early twentieth century, ‘sob sisters’ in particular examined social ills with pathos, which boosted the sales of a sensationalistic press and placed physical and metaphorical womanhood in key roles in the development of celebrity (Lutes 2006: 6). With an increasing number of men unemployed during the Great Depression, women adopted male characteristics in order to compete: They spoke loud and fast, swore, and aggressively pursued their careers. In 1936, reporter Ishbel Ross summed up her peers as ‘a paradoxical person, gentle in her private life, ruthless at her work […] the shrinking

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ones are often the lion-hearted; a feather may rock the Amazon’ (1936: 8). News reporting as a vocation for outspoken women received official acclaim in 1937—one year before Lois Lane’s debut—when Anne O’Hare McCormick became the first woman to win the Pulitzer Prize in journalism. Three years earlier, two teenagers, Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster, conceived of a ‘superman’ that eventually became an extra-terrestrial do-gooder. The Last Son of Krypton had more earthly roots in American culture than what meets the eye at first. Kent owed his name to actor Clark Gable, and ‘Metropolis’ came from Fritz Lang’s 1927 futuristic city (Dooley 1987: 29). Similarly, tough women journalists pervaded film long before Lane’s debut, including hard-boiled dramas such as Five Star Final (1931) or The Final Edition (1932), sentimental Americana like Mr. Deeds Goes to Town (1936), and comedies such as Four’s a Crowd (1938). Throughout Lane’s early years, the fast-talking, wisecracking, girl reporter continued to be a staple in American cinema in movies such as The Philadelphia Story (1940), Meet John Doe (1940), His Girl Friday (1940), and Woman of the Year (1941). Siegel was especially fond of Torchy Blane, the central character of a movie series in the late 1930s characterized as ‘the Lady Bombshell with a Nose for News’ (Daniels 2004: 20). As one film scholar observes, cinematic female journalists adopted ‘male-oriented names and modes of dress designed to downplay their femininity’ (Ness 1997: 72), just as Ross had noted in her memoir. Siegel and Shuster also named Lane after Lois Donaldson, a reporter at their high school newspaper, and Lois Amster, whom Shuster described as a ‘very pretty, nicely-put-together girl’ (quoted in Dooley 1987: 29). Lane emerged on paper as a confluence of personal and public personalities.

Lane’s Early Years: Hard-boiled in Hard Times When readers first see Lois Lane in Action Comics #1, she is employed at The Daily Star. She reluctantly agrees to a date with rookie reporter Clark Kent, whose ‘steady assignment’ (Siegel 1938) is to cover the super-human phenomenon that has recently appeared. That night, Lane refuses to dance with a mobster and is kidnapped. Superman drops in front of the gangster’s car, smashes it to bits, and advises Lane ‘not to print this little episode’ (Siegel 1938). Lane ignores him and tells her editor, George Taylor, that she sighted the Man of Tomorrow the night before. Taylor soberly dismisses Lane’s wide-eyed enthusiasm with ‘Are you sure it wasn’t pink elephants you saw?’ (Siegel 1938). In Superman’s earliest appearance, Lane’s independence in a respected career for women is evident. Other than background secretaries, Lane is the sole female in an institution run by men. To compete with males, Ishbel Ross had emphasized that a girl reporter ‘must be free to leap nimbly through fire lines, dodge missiles at a strike, board a liner from a swaying ladder, write copy calmly in the heat of a Senate debate, and count the dead in a catastrophe’ (1936: 1). Taylor’s response to Lane implies that the girl reporter does not carry the same weight as her fresh rival, and Lane bitterly resents Kent, whom she initially dubs a ‘spineless, unbearable coward’ (Siegel 1938). 198

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Given the derring-do status of women reporters in the public eye, Lane’s frustration is understandable. However, her role as a supporting character to Kent’s alter ego ensured that she would enjoy only a secondary role to the Man of Steel and Kent. Lane settled into such a niche in Superman’s exploits. Early on, Superman established himself as a champion for the oppressed, as he battled corrupt politicians and shady businessmen whom the inept police could not deal with. Lane, a social-crusading reporter who shares Superman’s sentiments, if not his ability, finds herself in constant crises as the well-meaning female citizen who requires Superman’s protection to survive such an uncertain period in American history. This formula worked: Superman’s success earned him his own title in 1939, and he would co-star in World’s Finest Comics as well as a newspaper comic strip, a radio program, and movie serials. Kent is also rewarded, but at Lane’s expense, whose job performance necessarily suffers to maintain her dependency on the Man of Steel. Her subservient role is later compounded by her growing love for him. Already in Superman #2, Taylor recognizes Kent’s superior job performance and demotes Lane: Lane: Taylor: Kent: Lane:

I won’t stand for it! You can’t do this to me! I’m sorry Lois. But it’s back to the Lovelorn column for you. It’s safer, anyway! [To Kent] Clark […] I’m promoting you! Gee … That’s swell! For you! [To outside staff] Oh, how I hate Clark Kent! I tell you, he deliberately set to take my job from me! (Siegel 1939)1

As a result, Lane was secondary to Kent, both in the workplace and in the minds of creators and readers. With the United States soon to enter World War II, comic books reinforced her duty to need continual rescue by Superman, just as the nation was readying its population to battle totalitarianism abroad. Although Lane’s purpose was firmly established by 1941, Siegel and Shuster had crafted Lane from a culture that had celebrated the resourceful girl reporter, and Lane’s early years reflected the resourcefulness of reporters such as Nellie Bly and Ishbel Ross. The creators emphasized Lane’s gender, acknowledging the success women have attained in journalism, while, at the same time, using Lane’s femininity to reinforce her larger purpose of relying upon Superman, whose stamina ultimately outmatches the girl reporter. In Superman #7, editor Perry White refuses to let Lane investigate a case where citizens mysteriously explode upon contact because ‘it’s too dangerous […] for a woman!’ Lane storms off, fuming, ‘If White thinks he’s going to keep me off this yarn just because I was born a female, he’s got another guess coming’ (Siegel 1940). Being human, Lane succumbs to the predicament, unable to move less she combusts, while Kent remains immune, solves the case, and writes another headline. While White and Superman tried to dissuade Lane from chasing after front-page news, her creators rounded out their girl reporter as something more than an ingénue 199

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for Superman. She inspires Jimmy Olsen in his first appearance. An ambitious copy boy in Superman #13, Olsen volunteers for assignments, but only meets rejection from White and Kent. After Olsen sees Lane misdirect Kent on a hot story, he adapts Lane’s tactics and stows away in her car, reasoning, ‘If I waited for a chance to be handed to me, it may never come! I’ve got to be like Lois—make my opportunities’ (Siegel 1941a). In Superman #18, White takes a vacation and Lane assumes his responsibilities. Lane promptly informs Kent that she ‘promote[s] [him] to writing the lovelorn column’ (Siegel 1942a)—her own hated position.2 Later, Lane even temporarily ran Gotham City’s Gazette (Hamilton 1956). This carnivalesque role reversal endured for decades, and, for Lane, emphasized her esteemed professional heritage, while simultaneously showing that, even if she temporarily ascended higher than Kent, Superman still topped her accomplishments in the end (Binder 1958; Dorfman 1965). Lane’s profile among The Daily Planet staff underscored her value as more than a mere coworker. Historian Nancy A. Walker posits that many women’s magazines affirmed that domesticity equals democracy; promoting the home front was akin to preserving the American way of life (2000: 69–78). Although she was infatuated with Superman, an undomesticated, unmarried Lane easily sheds traditional womanhood in the pursuit of news, having no family to hinder her career.3 Discarding such gender roles could prove unwise: The historian Maureen Honey argues that formula fiction in The Saturday Evening Post suggested that while women could efficiently run businesses when men went to war, as Lane could run The Daily Planet when need be, hardened career women ‘came under attack as a cold-hearted, power-hungry machine[s]’ (1984: 71). While Lane swooned over Superman, her creators made sure she had a soft spot for the more human boys at home. Lest Lane appear too unfeminine, and, therefore, unpatriotic, her creators enlisted Lane in the Allied cause by depicting her in a supporting role to Kent as she tries to bolster his fragile masculinity; when he fails to act, Lane berates her passive partner. Except for his cowardly demeanor, Lane admires Kent. In a typical scenario from World’s Finest Comics #2, an ‘Unknown X’ runs the ‘most thorough organization of criminals the city has yet seen’ (Siegel 1941b). A citizens’ committee led by a Mr. Jameson opposes the mysterious menace. Kent decides to tackle the story and a grinning Lane comments, ‘Good for you, Clark’ (Siegel 1941b). Jameson informs Kent that the Unknown X ‘intends to wipe out both of [them]! Therefore, [he’s] leaving town at once’ and suggests Kent ‘do the same’ (Siegel 1941b). As seen in Illustration 1, Kent heeds the cautionary note, which causes Lane to lash out, calling their masculinities into question. On the next page (see Illustration 2), Lane attempts to strengthen Kent’s backbone, telling him to rise to the challenge and bring the Unknown X down. Kent quivers and Lane storms off. Of course, Kent’s timidity is an act. In the final panel, Kent delivers his headline, and Lane congratulates him (‘May I add my congratulations, Clark!’ [Siegel 1941b]). As the reader witnesses, the reporter has reaffirmed his manhood in both words and deed. Lane does not have much of a role in this installment, other than to berate and then applaud Kent. Although at times Lane beat Kent to the headlines, readers knew that Lane’s victories 200

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Illustration 1: Lois questions Kent’s masculinity following his cautionary note. World’s Finest Comics #2 © DC Comics, 1941.

Illustration 2: Lois tries to strengthen Kent’s backbone, but fails. World’s Finest Comics #2 © DC Comics, 1941.

were pyrrhic. One typical ending is the final panel in Superman #23 (see Illustration 3): ‘[E]very time we go out on a big story together, I win a front page byline—and you lose your opportunity to be as good a reporter as I am!’ Lane boasts. Breaking the fourth wall by looking at the reader while addressing Lane, Kent replies, ‘Oh! I guess you’re right, Lois! But then, I don’t pretend to be Superman’ (Cameron 1943). He and the audience share an agreement that, Lane’s bylines aside, Superman triumphs in everything, including the battle of the sexes. 201

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Illustration 3: Kent breaks the fourth wall and thus indicates an agreement between him and the audience that Lois only believes to be ‘better’. Superman #23 © DC Comics, 1943.

Although Lane does not see Kent as an ideal partner, she finds such an equal in Superman. Unfortunately, Superman’s super genetics make him far above her reach; she is, as one historian suggests, unable to ‘propagandize for romance’ (Hartmann 1984: 164), since Superman ignores her overtures, and she, in turn, spurns Kent. However, Superman has reason to worry over Lane’s prowess as a reporter, as she begins to uncover his secret identity. Writers denied Lane this victory (even though her dog knows Kent’s secret: ‘Boy,’ the dog thinks, ‘some girls can be awful dumb sometimes’ [Finger 1944]). Nevertheless, Lane’s ceaseless snooping and subsequent puzzlement when Kent scoops her up haunts Superman, who knows that his career would end should she succeed. In Superman #19, the reporters screen Fleischer Studio’s animated Superman serial. Fearful that the cartoon might reveal his identity, Kent distracts his date from watching the show and forces her to leave early. Lane is furious that Kent has spoiled her evening, but she would have been angrier had she seen the cartoon’s conclusion: The animated Lane lands the front-page, and Kent admits, ‘You deserve all the credit’ (Siegel 1942b). While the cartoon, a fictionalized account in a comic book reality, confirms Lane as a celebrity among her fellow Metropolites at home (as well as the movie-going public who saw Fleischer’s animated shorts), the cartoon also allows Lane to shatter her ties to Superman completely, as acknowledged by a sincere Kent, if only for one panel. That the ‘real’ Lane could not see this unconditional triumph reinforced her creators’ view that Lane was restricted to a 202

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supporting role to her mild-mannered partner. When Superman jumped to radio in a single bound in 1940, Lane soon followed, and new and old fans alike could witness Lane as a brass reporter who cracked wise and mocked the soft-spoken Kent in the fast-paced newsroom, where only the fittest survive. In ‘The Atomic Beam Machine’ (Anon. 1940), Kent attributes his first scoop to luck, and Lane scoffs that she’s on to his game: ‘I’ll say you were lucky. You’re the white haired boy, huh? Got the Old Man [Perry White] hypnotized. He thinks you’re Horace Greely.’ Kent sputters and Lane snaps, ‘Oh, don’t act so dumb,’ and accuses him of making up an atomic threat to The Daily Planet. Of course, Kent demonstrates that Lane is the reporter lacking in journalistic know-how, as Superman rescues the presses, saves Lane from a falling plane, and scores the scoop by the next thrilling episode. The early Lois Lane had the backing of the strong reputation women reporters held in American culture, and, with the onset of the World War II, incorporated the ‘can-do’ philosophy of Rosie-the-Riveter-type propaganda, which allowed a limited expansion for women’s roles. Unfortunately, Lane was unable to break free from Superman, as she was hampered by White’s sexism and Kent’s in-jokes to audiences; the consistency of which suggests that readers approved of Lane’s narrow role. Whether in monthly/bimonthly/ quarterly comics, on the silver screen in animation and live-action in weekly installments, or on the airwaves three to five times a week, Lane was a product of the male-dominated media selling Superman to consumers at home and to the boys overseas, themselves fighting for the American way. Radio and movie serials cast actresses who gave life to Lane and provided a real-life reinforcement of her character as a subordinate for the brawny Man of Steel, regardless of her brash newsroom bravado. After World War II, Lane took on a limited role, as a rigid enforcement of gender roles became solidified during the Cold War.

Lane in American Containment Lane’s success outlived her original creators’ tenure in comics. Clark Kent failed the draft, but Siegel did not, and with him overseas and Shuster’s eyesight failing, DC supplemented their work with other writers and artists who began to reshape Lane’s role in American postwar culture. Starting in Superman #28, Lane starred in a sub-feature, entitled ‘Lois Lane, Girl Reporter.’ In these episodes, Lane scores the front-page at the expense of the male coworkers who poke fun at the girl reporter, but her victories also underscore a return to more traditionally feminine activities. In the first installment, Lane coaxes a suicidal youngster suffering from an unrequited love and wins his heart in the process (Cameron 1944a). In the next issue, Lane catches some crooks while conducting a bakeshop interview for the newspaper’s ‘Housewives Marketing Hints’ column (Cameron 1944b). Lane earned her bylines, but her assignments foreshadowed a new direction for her in the postwar decades. Lois Lane was not the only fictional female journalist to undergo a change during the postwar decades. One film scholar notes that journalists in American cinema also 203

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experienced a transition. To compete with the rise of broadcast television, movies became grander on a technical scale, including the advent of widescreen formats, increased use of Technicolor, and newly acquired stereophonic sound. To showcase this leap in technology, many films were romantic musical remakes with ‘leading characters who spent more time bursting into song than bursting into the editor’s office’ (Ness 1997: 367). This switch to lyric-laden fantasy relegated the older, hard-boiled newshounds to the cutting room floor, as they were ‘regarded as something of an anachronism’ (Ness 1997: 367). Like the movie industry, the comic book industry was not immune to shifts in postwar American society. As the public eye that once glamorized women reporters turned toward nuclear family life, the superhero genre collapsed in favor of romance and teenage titles such as Pep Comics, starring Archie Andrews (Robbins 1999: 9; Simon & Simon 2003: 110). Archie’s unending dilemma between Betty and Veronica rivaled Lane’s romance with Kent and Superman. In response, Lane left behind her gutsy girl reporter persona to compete with her rivals from Riverdale. Having been denied advancement in the workplace, Lane acquiesced to a strict dependency status as Superman’s love interest, which fit DC’s eager participation in the booming genre of broken-hearted ingénues and also reinforced the United States’ larger struggles to retain its cultural traditions while redefining its hegemonic postwar national identity. Superman artist Curt Swan, who began illustrating Superman in 1948, states that he ‘tried to draw [Lane] pretty,’ but notes that, at times, editor Mort Weisinger wanted artist Kurt Schaffenberger to draw Lane because Swan ‘didn’t draw her pretty enough’ (1987: 43). Lois Lane’s journalistic aspirations were not very pretty, either. The New York Times reporter Nan Robertson, a self-described ‘cub’ starting out in the 1950s, reminisced that for a long time thereafter, women were almost never sent to cover the kinds of stories that won the Pulitzer Prize—the kinds of stories that men in journalism, talented and untalented, energetic and lazy, were sent to cover as a matter of course. That was the way of the world then. (1992: 18) Along similar lines, sportswriter Mary Garber acknowledges that, after an influx of women sportswriters during World War II, most of them left the field after the war’s end (1994: 383). Lane also began to reflect the postwar turn of female journalists. Her feature folded in 1946, and when The Daily Planet temporarily closes in Superman #79, Lane finds work as a waitress, but learns that filling out an order blank is not the same as hammering out the news on a typewriter (Hamilton 1952). In 1947, Lane believes she has acquired super abilities and decides that ‘Superwoman’ is her true calling. However, Lane’s crusading proves short-lived when her new-found strength threatens her social life: ‘If being a Superwoman means being a wallflower, I’m through’ (Schwartz 1947). In tears, Superwoman realizes that she cannot occupy dual roles as both the innocent feminine and a figure to champion the ‘American 204

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way’ congruently, so she sacrifices the latter.4 In Superman #58, Lane tries to transfer her Superman fixation to Kent for a more reciprocal relationship. In the end, she tells Kent that ‘newspaper reporting is [her] first love [and] Superman was [her] second, but [Kent is] only third.’ Nevertheless, Lane spends the night wishing that ‘some day […] somehow, [she was] going to marry Superman’ (Woolfolk 1949). Similarly, a flashback depicts a teenage Lane informing young Kent that ‘any girl [was] superior to a boy […] that is, any boy but Superboy […] and [he was] no Superboy’ (Finger 1948). Lane’s bravado ultimately outscooped her rival, but her obsession with the Boy of Steel set a pattern that followed her into adulthood. Creators played up Lane’s love life by introducing romantic competitors for Superman. In 1952 Lane met her main rival for Superman’s affections in Showcase #9 (Coleman 1957): Lana Lang. Like Lane, Lang is a reporter, but the two spend their rivalry trying to steal Superman’s heart rather than headlines. By the decade’s end, Lane had accepted that becoming Superman’s housewife would never happen. In a story that introduces rival Lori Lemaris, Lane pouts that Superman would ‘never ask [her] to marry him because it would mean giving up his Superman career[.] [She] suppose[s] he’ll never ask that of any woman’ (Finger 1959). DC Comics knew the answer to Lane’s musings. One editor acknowledged the limits of Lane’s journalistic career: As everyone knows, Lois is possessed of an insatiable curiosity and, being a typical woman, she is constantly trying to discover the secret of Superman’s identity for herself. You can bet that if she ever did learn his identity, she certainly wouldn’t reveal it to anyone or publish it in The Daily Planet. (Bridwell 1972) Nelson Bridwell added that ‘everybody knows that no woman can keep a secret,’ thus negating Lane’s possibility of learning Kent’s alter ego. In addition, Lane could never marry him. Bridwell explained, ‘Lois is in love with Superman, not Clark—yet she could only be safe from his enemies as Mrs. Kent. Sure, he could reveal his identity to her, but if Superman’s girl suddenly married Clark, people would start guessing why.’ He concluded that ‘for the record—we’re rooting for Lois, too’ (1972). Editorial support for Lane led to her own series in 1958, Superman’s Girlfriend, Lois Lane. It was appropriate that Superman had the top billing. Throughout her own title, Action Comics, and Superman, creators placed Lane at the altar, with suitors including Jimmy Olsen (Superman’s Pal, Jimmy Olsen #21 [Binder 1957]), Batman (Superman’s Girlfriend, Lois Lane #89 [Dorfman 1969]); Satan (Superman’s Girlfriend, Lois Lane #103 [Kanigher 1970]), a ‘red’ Superman (Superman #162 [Dorfman 1963]), a ‘second’ Superman (Superman’s Girlfriend, Lois Lane #132 [Bates 1973]), an ‘ugly’ Superman (Superman’s Girlfriend, Lois Lane #8 [Bernstein 1959]), and random strangers (Superman’s Girlfriend, Lois Lane #20 [Siegel 1960]). At the same time, readers supported Lane’s role as they filled her letter columns suggesting Lane’s possible marriages to assorted characters. 205

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Despite the overwhelming consensus concerning Lane’s purpose, a darker undercurrent hinted at the limits of Lane’s role in Cold War culture. Imaginary tales in particular allowed readers to fantasize about Lane’s wedded life, but signs abounded that, should Lane marry Superman, she would meet the same unfulfilled lifestyle detailed in Betty Freidan’s The Feminine Mystique. In one make-believe tale in Superman’s Girlfriend, Lois Lane #20, ‘which may, or may not, ever happen’ (Siegel 1960), the Kents adopt Superman’s orphan cousin, Linda (Supergirl) Lee, and Mrs. Kent agrees to become a full-time mother. Supergirl makes household chores nonexistent, and Mrs. Kent feels inadequate: ‘When they do my work at super-speed, it … makes me feel … useless … they’re trying to be helpful … but a woman likes to feel needed!’ Mrs. Kent passes her time knitting ‘like somebody’s grandmother,’ mourns her lost career, and nags her husband and daughter. Becoming ‘an outsider … in my own home,’ Mrs. Kent sobs, ‘T-they don’t need me! … But I want this to be happy family! I’ll keep trying … to make a go of it’ (Siegel 1960). Mrs. Kent fails, as a meddlesome social worker decides she is an unfit mother and takes Linda back to the orphanage. Other imaginary tales also had tragic outcomes: In another case, Lane marries Superman, but dies shortly thereafter (Schaffenberger 1954). Although DC hinted at the possible unhappy lifestyle should Lane achieve her dreams of marrying Superman, creators reinforced Lane as a symbol of contained womanhood during the Cold War. Despite the limitless narrative possibilities for Lane in an imaginary realm, writers concentrated on Lane’s make-believe weddings, refusing to allow Lane to grow in other dimensions. Although Lane might encounter a tragic married life and yearn for a career and independence, creators would deny Lane from knowing this in ‘real’ life. Superman consistently thwarted her schemes and maintained his hegemonic symbolism of ‘the American way’ above the grasp of mere mortals. Lane took her cherished career for granted, and her job became secondary to her chasing of Superman. Lane was frustrated in her attempts to woo the Man of Steel, yet she continued to do so with gusto. Thus, Lane conformed to Cold War ideology: Her dreams for an idealized matrimony were a source of stability in the political uncertainty of the Cold War, without the risks of encountering Friedan’s problem that has no name.5 Younger readers themselves were not confined to the four-colored pulp pages, and as they came of age, Lane’s status as a Cold War icon proved a façade that shattered with the Cold War consensus itself.

Mod and Mad: A New Direction As a representation of internal dissent concerning the popular role of 1950s womanhood, Lane conformed to the cultural mold as a domestic figure. Subtexts in stories suggested that Lane had the potential for more. In the stories that appeared throughout the 1950s and early 1960s, Lane still envisions herself as a social crusader and at times becomes a temporary superhero to ‘combat crime and aid the world’ (Coleman 1958). Lane also keeps her reputation as ‘the number one reporter in the United States’ (Bernstein 1961) and 206

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lectures aspiring journalists. Conversely, Superman continues to acknowledge that ‘Lois’s scoop-mania always gets her into trouble’ (Hamilton 1953). While Lane does not engage in bra-burning or any of the more visual displays of women’s activism of the following decades, her career and independence—when not chasing Superman—signifies some solidarity with the emerging women and youth movements. Lane slowly changed with the shifts in America’s cultural milieu; however, the motives behind her new direction were not entirely ideological. In the 1970s, DC lost its position as the largest comic book publisher to Marvel, who directly addressed the cultural and generational conflicts in American society. DC imitated Marvel, although Lane resisted social change. In a mid-1970s tale, the girl reporter tries to uncover Superman’s secrets, which prompted one reader to respond with mixed feelings to this ‘old-fashioned’ tale (Bates 1975b). Although Lane retained the qualities of a journalistic snooper, ‘which any true fan knows she is,’ the reader found the story ridiculous. ‘She’s been clue-snatching so long she can no longer discern real clues from normal going-ons’ (Rodi 1975). For the first time, readers acknowledged Lane as a representation of womanhood, openly criticized stories, and urged Lane to adapt to changing times. Despite some outmoded storytelling, Lane’s forays into feminism led to an expanded role during this decade. In issues from the 1970s, Lane addresses racism and political corruption in Metropolis, updates her wardrobe to incorporate more flashy outfits dyed in flamboyant colors, learns Kryptonian karate as a means of self-defense, and fends off sexual harassment from a sportscaster. Rival Lana Lang disappears from the comics, and Lane stops suspecting Kent as Superman (Bates 1975a). Instead, Lane refocuses her energy to host a talk show. Although television journalist Leslie Stahl recalls that, in the early 1970s, she had to surmount her own ‘femaleness’ and audiences who didn’t want to see ‘wrinkles, jowls, and paunches’ on women reporters, Lane makes a smooth transition (1999: 11; 78). One male fan approved, writing: At last our girl reporter has stopped skipping through the fields of clovers carelessly flaunting death, or deviously attempting to uncover Superman’s alter-ego. She has faced the real world of today […]. Lois is slowly but surely developing into a real human being who lives and breathes. (Gibson 1971) Despite the shift in character, Lane’s ‘liberation’ from 30 years of established history was not complete, nor could she separate herself from Superman. On one cover, Lane attempts to do so, ripping off ‘Girlfriend’ from her title and shouting, ‘Get out of my magazine, Superman! I’m leaving Metropolis to start a new life … one that doesn’t include you!’ The story declares that it’s ‘splitsville for Lois and Superman’ (Dorfman 1968), because Superman decides to spend Lane’s birthday crushing cars in a junkyard. Lane leaves Metropolis, becomes a nurse, falls in love with a comatose astronaut, revives him, and after using some experimental drugs, becomes telepathic and clairvoyant. Nevertheless, Superman remains uppermost in Lane’s thoughts, and she loses everything by the issue’s end. 207

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Lane’s new social awareness and her waffling between the extremes of love interest and liberation accrued backlash from both male and female readers. DC played it both ways, attempting to create controversy and generate profits. One letter groused that Lane ‘is one rotten lady! After loving Superman for so long, she goes and dumps him! How illogical can any one person be?’ The columnist responded: I agree with you that any gal who gives up what Lois gave up must have a screw loose. Women keep marching and protesting for more rights, but the ones who have the rights take them for granted. Lois apparently never appreciated what she had—a good job and a great guy. So he bossed her around. So what? (Koralik 1972) Lois Lane’s conflicting characterization contributed to her series’ end in 1974. The last issue gives no reason for its demise and urges readers to follow her in the anthology title Superman Family, which included Jimmy Olsen, Supergirl, and Krypto, the Superdog. The ‘real’ Lois Lane was unable to resolve her symbolic womanhood among readers who wanted Lane to be ‘liberated’ or to maintain a role as a damsel in perpetual distress. That Lane leaned toward the former in a bid to gain independence from Superman led to her title’s cancellation. In shedding her protector, Lane symbolically experiences her coming-of-age: In shunning Superman’s super-Americanism, she, like many of her younger readers in the 1970s, rebelled against the American establishment at home and hegemony abroad. Superman Family restored the traditional order by re-inventing Lane in a sub-feature entitled ‘Mr. and Mrs. Superman’. Unlike ‘imaginary stories’, this continuity was ‘real’, albeit set in an alternate reality, with Lane graduating from Superman’s girlfriend to his wife. Despite the premise of Lane and Kent being married (retroactively set during the 1950s, as if confirming the ideology behind Lane’s postwar role), this new continuity reinforced Lane’s dependency upon Superman by marrying him. Furthermore, ‘Mr. and Mrs. Superman’ (not ‘Mr. and Mrs. Kent’, even though Lane originally accepts Kent’s proposal) avoided the sudden life-shattering events of the destructive ‘imaginary stories’. Instead, the creators initially opted for mere cosmetic changes: Kent is promoted to editor, and Lane continues as a supporting character to Superman at home and Kent at work. Although the continuity grows increasingly complex and Superman undergoes some emotional growth, Lane herself changes little. Instead, she remains content as Superman’s wife, knowing that her husband would save her should danger arise. Lane is denied new directions despite her marriage; unlike her imaginary versions, this Lane does not have children, nor does she explore a life as Superman’s wife. DC played it safe: After toying with Lane’s potential matrimony in hypothetical scenarios that foretold doom should her character fundamentally change, DC allowed Lane to wed in an alternative timeline, but maintained a conservative continuity for the character. In the ‘real’ continuity of Superman and Action Comics, Lane managed to acquire an outlook beyond being Superman’s girlfriend, even though it ended her series. DC assured readers 208

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that in all other timelines, Lane’s future is limited as she awaits her hero—husband or otherwise—to save her. With overlapping continuities and increasing confusion over what constituted the official reality of DC’s Superman narrative, DC opted to ‘reboot’ its history entirely and construct Lane as a 1980s ‘modern woman’ with no ties to her 50-year history. Historian Les Daniels describes DC’s revamped Lois Lane as a Pulitzer Prize-winning ‘modern feminist: a weight-lifting, gun-toting, fist-fighting fashion plate’ (2004: 160). Writer/artist John Byrne asserts that he based Lane upon Siegel’s and Shuster’s original concept and references Hildy Johnson from the 1940 movie His Girl Friday as a ‘perfect template’ for Lois Lane; after all, ‘she survived before Superman arrived on the scene, and it would be reasonably safe to assume she would have continued to survive without him’ (1994: 5). Lane actually predates the film by two years; nevertheless, Byrne harkened back to the 1940s era to re-introduce the self-sufficient girl reporter for modern readers. Byrne’s deliberate revamp of Lois Lane in the 1980s confirmed the character’s continuing embodiment of the ‘girl reporter’ in American culture. In an age of recognized newscasters on television, such as the all-star cast on 60 Minutes, Lane retained the glamour of the modern celebrity journalist, such as Katie Couric; their attractive faces are as important as the news they relay (cf. Klein 2008). As evidenced in Lane seeing herself in a 1942 cartoon, Lane has always been a celebrity, and citizens and criminals freely associate Lane with Superman’s name, either as a snoopy reporter or as a ‘girlfriend’. In 2006, DC selectively commemorated the early incarnations of Lane, avoiding her Cold War depictions. In another cleaning of its continuity, DC presented a flashback sequence with Superman narrating and Lane as a force for independent womanhood (see Illustration 4). The flashback highlights

Illustration 4: In more recent representations, Lane is clearly depicted as a woman who knows what she wants, a fact that even Superman (who narrates the flashback depicted here) acknowledges. Infinite Crisis #5 © DC Comics, 2006.

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Lane as a sob sister who can tackle assignments with aplomb, as White does not consider assignments too dangerous for this girl reporter. Lane’s character is reinforced by the World War II propaganda in the background, which extols the strength of womankind, and by Superman’s concluding caption (off panel) that Lane was ‘more super than [he] could ever be’ (Johns 2006). What creators have left behind is the 1950s and 1960s Lois Lane; the love-sick reporter is unsuited for storytelling, especially since Lane married Kent in 1996. In Byrne’s version, Lane plays a damsel to land an interview with Superman. After seeing through this ruse, Superman muses, ‘Quite a woman, that Lois Lane. Quite a reporter, too’ (Byrne 1986). The public consciousness, unaware of the changes in DC’s continuity or Lane’s alternate selves, viewed her primarily as the lovelorn woman long established by other forms of media. Cultural critic Susan Douglas suggests that the women’s movement has created a media backlash in recent decades in which the positive aspects of feminism, such as Lane’s re-assertive self, have been mowed over by a resurgence of overtly sexist femininity: ‘girl power’ has given way to ‘girls gone wild’ (2010). Although men have created Lane and have controlled the media, Lane’s consistent and overarching role over the decades has ingrained her as a necessary dependant for Superman to rescue: she demonstrates the triumphalism of the American Way. To incorporate the feminist critiques of the late twentieth century, cultural venues outside of comics—catering to a more general audience than the comic book aficionados wrapped up in story continuity—have glamorized Lane’s character by heightening the sexual potentialities between her and the Man of Steel: Lane herself can be a girl gone wild. During the mid-1980s, long after the forlorn Lane had ceased in comics, The New Scientist ridiculed this image, pointing out that if Lane ‘had humped a hippopotamus or, for that matter, a daffodil,’ these Earthly organisms are ‘biologically more closely related to Ms. Lane than is Superman’ (Love 1983: 41). As late as 1995, the tabloid Weekly World News spotlighted a ‘Lois Lane Syndrome’, diagnosing that women who ‘desire a real, live Superman’ are destined for an ‘unhappy, lonely, and frustrated’ existence (Roberts 1995: 6). While the comic book industry and fans have cured Lane of this ‘syndrome’, the general public thinks of Lane less as a modern woman on her own terms, but rather gives Lane’s traditional role more importance: that of a woman eternally awaiting rescue from her hero. Other media venues reinforced Lane’s traditional status. Accompanying the tabloid article was a photo from the then-new television series Lois and Clark: The New Adventures of Superman, a program that concentrated on the sexual tension between the titular reporters (and was cancelled one season after Lois and Clark married; the legitimizing of such copulation lessened the show’s risqué appeal). As late as 2006, the feature film Superman Returns gives Lane little screen presence, other than as a single mom caring for Superman’s love child. This Lane had won a Pulitzer Prize because of an article declaring the world’s (and her own) independence from Superman, symbolized by an engagement to a mere human. When the Man of Steel does return, Lane’s engagement conveniently ends, and Lane finds herself in peril once again. 210

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Lois Lane remains a cultural icon in the public mind; her name is recognized, as is her role in American culture. In the rare cases where Superman has appeared without Lane, as in the film Superman III (Lester 1983), her absence demands an explanation (Kent sojourns to his small-town roots in the Midwest and meets Lana Lang, who substitutes as a love interest; Lane vacations in the opposite direction in Bermuda). The Man of Steel remains a representation of republicanism: he champions nuclear disarmament in the lackluster Superman IV: The Quest for Peace (Furie 1987) or battles fugitive Kryptonian tyrants who demolish the White House and Mount Rushmore in the blockbuster Superman II (Lester & Donner 1980). In the latter film, Lane learns Kent’s dual identity and romances him for an interim, but the status quo is restored by the final reel. That Kent was willing to give up his powers in Superman II for Lane’s hand reinforces editor Nelson Bridwell’s policy that Lane could never become Superman’s wife, lest Superman surrender his career for fear of injuring her. The film confirms for the mass public that, given the choice between defeating despotism and bedside bliss with Lane, Kent selects the former. By default, Lane plays the endangered love interest as Superman saves the world. The one instance when Superman fails to save Lane, most notably in the first Superman feature film (Donner 1978), the Man of Tomorrow cannot accept her death and reorders the space-time continuum to bring her back. Superman’s failure to save Lane threatens his own identity. Despite this ‘hold’ over Superman, Lane still remains Superman’s dependant on celluloid: In one moment, Lane lands an exclusive interview and boldly asks Superman if he likes the color pink. The narrative pauses for a beat as Lane shields her embarrassment for asking such a question, but Superman gracefully saves the reporter’s face by responding that he likes pink ‘very much’. Although comic books may recognize that Lane has grown beyond the trappings of her earlier and cross-media incarnations, the long-lasting purpose of Lois Lane still pervades her original medium. In 2003, writer Jeph Loeb, who has written various Superman titles, acknowledged Lane’s enduring role in Batman #612, in which the Dark Knight awakens a brainwashed Superman by endangering his Daily Planet coworkers. Given a choice between White, Olsen, and Lane, Batman deduces that the Man of Steel will always save the latter. Lane is dropped off a building, Superman plays his part, and all ends well (Loeb 2003). In recent decades, creators and readers have attempted to craft Lane as a more liberated woman, reflecting the shifts in the cultural milieu during the sexual revolution. This revisionism has not been completely successful in comic books and other media, including film and television, which continue to confirm Lane’s primary duty as a damsel in distress for Superman: the personification of Americanism who champions the innocent and helpless. Comic book readers may beg to differ, citing stories and instances that demonstrate that the intrepid girl reporter is a modern woman, containing multiple facets beyond a singular role. Ironically, since comic book audiences are diminishing in number, the modern Lane is a figure that is seen by fewer readers in the present day, as the comic book Lane finds herself in competition with incarnations in other media, which have comfortably linked Lane to a feminine role. Conversely, Lane’s own subservience under Superman’s sweeping figure 211

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must be timeless, as Lane’s secondary status hints at the United States’ self-perception as a domestic and international Superman: a guardian figure protecting the feminine innocents at home and abroad, forever bringing forth truth, justice, and the American way to save the day. References Anon. (1940), ‘The Atomic Beam Machine,’ The Adventures of Superman, Episode 7. New York: WOR. Bates, Cary (1973), ‘The Second Superman!’ in Superman’s Girlfriend, Lois Lane #132. New York: DC Comics, n. pag. (1975a), ‘Clark Kent Calling Superman … Clark Kent Calling Superman!,’ in Action Comics #446. New York: DC Comics, n. pag. (1975b), ‘Superman’s Mystery Masquerade,’ in Superman #283. New York: DC Comics, n. pag. Bernstein, Robert (1959), ‘The Ugly Superman!’ in Superman’s Girlfriend, Lois Lane #8. New York: DC Comics, n. pag. (1961), ‘The School for Scoops!’ in Superman’s Girl Friend, Lois Lane #29. New York: DC Comics, n. pag. Binder, Otto (1957), ‘The Wedding of Jimmy Olsen,’ in Superman’s Pal, Jimmy Olsen #21. New York: DC Comics, n. pag. (1958), ‘The Super-Sword!’ in Superman #124. New York: DC Comics, n. pag. Bridwell, E. Nelson (1972), ‘Letter,’ in Action Comics #415. New York: DC Comics, n. pag. Byrne, John (1986), ‘The Story of the Century!,’ in Superman: The Man of Steel #2. New York: DC Comics, n. pag. (1994), ‘Lois & Clark: An Introduction,’ in Jenette Kahn (ed.), Lois & Clark: The New Adventures of Superman. New York: DC Comics, pp. 1–5. Cameron, Don (1943), ‘America’s Secret Weapon!’ in Superman #23. New York: DC Comics, n. pag. (1944a), ‘Lois Lane, Girl Reporter,’ in Superman #28. New York: DC Comics, n. pag. (1944b), ‘Lois Lane, Girl Reporter,’ in Superman #29. New York: DC Comics, n. pag. Coleman, Jerry (1957), ‘The Girl in Superman’s Past!’ in Showcase #9. New York: DC Comics, n. pag. (1958), ‘Lois Lane’s Super-dream!’ in Superman #125. New York: DC Comics, n. pag. Daniels, Les (2004), Superman: The Complete History. San Francisco: Chronicle Books. Donner, Richard (1978), Superman. Burbank: Warner Bros. Dooley, Dennis (1987), ‘The Man of Tomorrow and the Boys of Yesterday,’ in Dennis Dooley & Gary D. Engle (eds.), Superman at Fifty: the Persistence of a Legend. Cleveland: Octavia, pp. 19–34. Dorfman, Leo (1963), ‘The Amazing Story of Superman-Red and Superman-Blue,’ in Superman #162. New York: DC Comics, n. pag.

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(1965), ‘Lois Lane, Daily Planet Editor!’ in Superman’s Girlfriend, Lois Lane #54. New York: DC Comics, n. pag. (1968), ‘Get Out of my Life, Superman!’ in Superman’s Girlfriend, Lois Lane #80. New York: DC Comics, n. pag. (1969), ‘The Bride of Batman!’ in Superman’s Girlfriend, Lois Lane #89. New York: DC Comics, n. pag. Douglas, Susan (2010), The Rise of Enlightened Sexism: How Pop Culture Took Us from Girl Power to Girls Gone Wild. New York: St. Martin’s. Finger, Bill (1944), ‘A Dog’s Tale!’ in Superman #31. New York: DC Comics, n. pag. (1948), ‘How Clark Kent Met Lois Lane,’ in Adventure Comics #128. New York: DC Comics, n. pag. (1959), ‘The Girl in Superman’s Past,’ in Superman #129. New York: DC Comics, n. pag. Furie, Sidney J. (1987), Superman IV: The Quest for Peace. Burbank: Warner Bros. Garber, Mary (1994), ‘Women and Children are not Admitted to the Press Box,’ in Ron Rapoport (ed.), A Kind of Grace: a Treasury of Sports Writing by Women. Berkeley: Zenobia Press, pp. 377–384. Gibson, Scott (1971), ‘Letter,’ in Superman’s Girlfriend, Lois Lane #114. New York: DC Comics, n. pag. Hamilton, Edmond (1952), ‘The End of The Planet!’ in Superman #79. New York: DC Comics, n. pag. (1953), ‘The Seven Secrets of Superman!’ in World’s Finest Comics #62 New York: DC Comics, n. pag. (1956), ‘The Super-Newspaper of Gotham City,’ in World’s Finest Comics #80. New York: DC Comics, n. pag. Hartmann, Susan M. (1984), The Home Front and Beyond: American Women in the 1940s. Boston: Twayne Publishers. Honey, Maureen (1984), Creating Rosie the Riveter: Class, Gender, and Propaganda during World War II. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press. Johns, Geoff (2006), ‘Faith,’ in Infinite Crisis #5. New York: DC Comics, n. pag. Kanigher, Robert (1970), ‘The Devil’s Bride!’ in Superman’s Girlfriend, Lois Lane #103. New York: DC Comics, n. pag. Klein, Edward (2008), Katie: The Real Story. New York: Three Rivers Press. Koralik, Kathy (1972), ‘Letter,’ in Superman’s Girlfriend, Lois Lane #124. New York: DC Comics, n. pag. Lester, Richard (1983), Superman III. Burbank: Warner Bros. Lester, Richard, and Richard Donner (1980), Superman II. Burbank: Warner Bros. Loeb, Jeph (2003), ‘The Battle,’ in Batman #612. New York: DC Comics, n. pag. Love, Milton (1983), ‘Incompatible Relations,’ The New Scientist, 100: 1378, p. 41. Lutes, Jean Marie (2006), Front Page Girls: Women Journalists in American Culture and Fiction, 1880–1930. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Ness, Richard R (1997), From Headline Hunter to Superman: A Journalism Filmography. Lanham: Scarecrow Press.

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Robbins, Trina (1999), From Girls to Grrrlz: A History of Women’s Comics from Teens to Zines. Vancouver: Raincoast Books. Roberts, Elaine (1995), ‘Women who Yearn for a Superman will never find Happiness,’ Weekly World News, 17 January, p. 6. Robertson, Nan (1992), The Girls in the Balcony: Women, Men, and The New York Times. New York: Random House. Rodi, Bob (1975), ‘Letter,’ in Action Comics #450. New York: DC Comics, n. pag. Ross, Ishbel (1936), Ladies of the Press: The Story of Women in Journalism by an Insider. New York: Harper & Brothers. Schaffenberger, Kurt (1954), ‘The Three Wives of Superman,’ in Superman’s Girlfriend, Lois Lane #51. New York: DC Comics, n. pag. Schwartz, Alvin (1947), ‘Lois Lane, Superwoman!’ in Superman #45. New York: DC Comics, n. pag. Siegel, Jerry (1938), ‘Superman,’ in Action Comics #1. New York: DC Comics, n. pag. (1939), ‘Superman Champions Universal Peace!’ in Superman #2. New York: DC Comics, n. pag. (1940), [‘The Gay City Plague’], in Superman #7. New York: DC Comics, n. pag. (1941a), ‘Superman Vs. the Archer,’ in Superman #13. New York: DC Comics, n. pag. (1941b), ‘The Unknown X,’ in World’s Finest Comics #2. New York: DC Comics, n. pag. (1942a), ‘The Man with a Cane,’ in Superman #18. New York: DC Comics, n. pag. (1942b), ‘Superman, Matinee Idol,’ in Superman #19. New York: DC Comics, n. pag. (1960), ‘Lois Lane’s Super-daughter,’ in Superman’s Girlfriend, Lois Lane #20. New York: DC Comics, n. pag. (1963), ‘Dear Dr. Cupid!’ in Superman’s Girlfriend, Lois Lane #45. New York: DC Comics, n. pag. (1999), Superman: The Dailies, 1939–1940. Northampton: Kitchen Sink Press. Simon, Joe, and Jim Simon (2003), The Comic Book Makers. Lebanon: Vanguard Publications. Stahl, Leslie (1999), Reporting Live. New York: Simon and Shuster. Swan, Curt (1987), ‘Drawing Superman,’ in Dennis Dooley & Gary D. Engle (ed.), Superman at Fifty: The Persistence of a Legend. Cleveland: Octavia, pp. 37–45. Walker, Nancy A. (2000), Shaping Our Mother’s World: American Women’s Magazines. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi. Woolfolk, William (1949), ‘Lois Lane Loves Clark Kent!,’ in Superman #58. New York: DC Comics, n. pag.

Notes 1 Siegel and Shuster elaborated on the story in the newspaper strip. The February 1, 1939, sequence shows Kent waiting for an interview and overhears Taylor telling Lane that unless she cracks her case, ‘it’s back to the Lovelorn column for you’ (Siegel 1999: 21; 43). The strip played up Lane’s determination to return to her position as a news reporter, which she achieved in mid-1939. The Daily Planet bumped her scoop to the inside pages due to a reallife headline: War had broken out in Europe (Siegel 1999: 164). 214

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2 Lane filled in for the Lovelorn column as late as 1963; see Siegel (1963). 3 In the 1940s, Lane’s mother appeared once. Lane’s only other relative was a niece, Susie Tompkins. 4 Supergirl debuted in 1959 and initially encountered the same dilemma: aiding the oppressed or living a domestic lifestyle. Supergirl selects the former, although Superman relegates her to an orphanage as his ‘secret weapon.’ In her civilian identity, Supergirl maintains the orphanage, supervises the younger children, and flirts with boys. 5 The Comics Code, which became enforced in 1954, certainly contributed to Lane’s onedimensional role during this period. The Code was a response to fears that comic books were contributing to juvenile delinquency and was instituted to censor objectionable material from comics. Lane could challenge the Cold War consensus, but only in imaginary stories, and was unlikely to live out this hypothetical storyline anyway.

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Chapter 10 War in Four Colors: The Battle between Superman and Captain America for America’s Hearts and Minds during World War II B. Keith Murphy

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he 1930s were a tough time for many of America’s longest-held icons. The decade began on the heels of the largest stock market crash in U.S. history. A six-year-long dust bowl ravaged the country’s agricultural belt, leading to famine and mass migrations of economic refugees. Most Americans suffered through the Great Depression, an economic apocalypse that left millions unemployed, bankrupt, homeless, and standing in soup lines. Tensions between and within nations grew. Small wars erupted across the globe. The League of Nations, a body designed to prevent another world war, collapsed. Authoritarian regimes and fascist tyrants appeared, led by Germany’s Adolf Hitler and National Socialism. War loomed on the horizon, and Americans again feared they would be drawn into another ‘European conflict’ where tens of thousands of American boys would fight and die on foreign soil in a war that many Americans saw as a war aimed at protecting foreign interests. At home, president Franklin Delano Roosevelt engineered a new social welfare strategy, the ‘New Deal’, an ambitious plan for the government to lift the people out of the Depression. Yet this new deal smacked of socialism, and in the eyes of many Americans, it marked the death of such American icons as the ‘rugged individualist’ and the immigrant who succeeds through hard work and belief in the American Dream. The economy worsened, and the threat of war grew; young Americans looked for heroes to lead them. Finding none among the ranks of mere mortals, they turned to the bread and circuses of these dire times. ‘Bread and circuses’, or the contemporary popular entertainment, included film, sport, spectacle, and popular literature, yet many of those diversions remained too costly for the masses. One form of popular literature was directly aimed at them: the pulps. These were cheap, sensational stories that featured boilerplate spy, detective, Western, and science fiction adventure tales, in which mere mortals engaged in heroic, melodramatic acts while defeating evil and rescuing maidens. The protagonists, mere mortals, were hardly the stuff of legends. In the 1930s, America needed more than mere flesh and blood to save them from themselves; they needed new gods. Pulp publishers were quick to deliver divinity. To do this, they had to create an entirely new form of literature and a new, iconic hero, who was derived from the most ancient and iconic of literary forms.

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Enter the Gods As Christopher Knowles writes, ‘As America struggled to emerge from the Great Depression, the symbols and stories of the old gods reentered American culture’ (2007: 112). Indeed, these new American gods arrived in the spandex-clad form of the superhero in June of 1938 with the publication of Action Comics #1, which began the larger-than-life serial narrative of Superman. Action Comics was an instant commercial hit, quickly selling an unheard of half a million copies per issue (Daniels 1998: 35). The immediate commercial success of Superman led to a population explosion of cape-and-cowl-clad super heroes and heroines. As American involvement in World War II grew more likely, these new godlings sprang into action against the Axis. Many superheroes ‘wrapped themselves in the flag’ in an attempt to strike iconic poses and become the bearers of American values. Despite the sheer number of competitors, including Miss America and Uncle Sam, only one character rose during the war to challenge Superman’s bid for iconic status: Captain America (Cap’). Cap’ was created expressly for readers in a nation that knew it was about to be dragged into a war. First published in March 1941 by Timely (later Marvel) Comics, Captain America Comics #1 introduced the protagonist as a ‘4-F’ weakling, unfit for military service who, when given a special serum, became a ‘super-soldier’. In a chain mail costume based on the American flag, Cap’ was a super-patriot, fighting Nazi sympathizers just a few pages into his origin story. During the war, Superman and Captain America, two symbolic titans, two heroic saviors, each utilizing heavy religious symbolism and allegory in their tales, fought for supremacy in the comic book publishing world. By the war’s end, only one had achieved the status of American icon or American secular god, while the other was, literally, put on ice. This chapter examines the combat between the protagonists of these two serial narratives in order to shed some light on why only one of the popular characters ‘lived’ to become a universal icon. The tale of these battling characters has, as do all good tales, three acts: the story behind the characters and their narratives, the symbolic importance of the characters’ godly origins, and the characters’ inevitable death and resurrection.

Superman as Sol Invictus Superman’s origin, for many years, was believed to have been merely the result of teenage fantasy fulfillment. Cleveland, Ohio, teens Joe Shuster and Jerry Siegel supposedly came up with the character as a way to meet girls and to make money in the comic strip business. However, it seems that the true origins of Superman date back to the robbery of a haberdashery on the night of June 2, 1932. On that fateful night, three men stole a suit of clothes from the store owned by Lithuanian-Jewish immigrant Mitchell Siegel. During the crime, Siegel, aged 60, died of a heart attack (Colton 2008: par. 1).1 Mitchell Siegel was the father of 220

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Superman co-creator Jerry Siegel, and the shock of this senseless tragedy would later influence Siegel’s Superman narrative. Siegel and Shuster’s original version of Superman, which they unsuccessfully pitched to publishers for five years, portrayed the protagonist as a villainous and ‘grim, flying avenger’ (Colton 2008: par. 1) and was completed in 1933, just a year after Siegel’s father died. This correlation reveals that Superman originally arose from the feelings of vulnerability felt by a young man who lived in a society of Americans who felt vulnerable to the rising tide of crime around them, ongoing economic hardship, and the looming threat of war. Siegel lost his father at a time when fathers still played the role of godlike protector in the lives of young men, and perhaps he looked to create a new god who would be invulnerable and could protect the innocent from harm. For Siegel, Superman was, in many ways, a symbol of his desire to feel shielded from harm. This first Superman was a bald, cold, malevolent super-genius. He was a distant, yet omnipotent and all-knowing, in short, godlike, being. Publishers failed to find the character appealing because this version of the character did not have the makings of an icon. In order to increase appeal and attain iconic status, the character, as a symbol, must embody clear, powerful, and usually positive, value-laden meanings. On a secular level, such icons are symbols that become infused with the meanings of a place, a certain time, a way of life, a worldview, and the moral codes of a secular movement. A prime example of just such an icon distilled into an abstracted symbol is the stylized Superman insignia, which has become a commercially neutered icon for teens and adults who wish to identify themselves with the ‘Man of Steel’. It is worn on T-shirts, belt buckles, and purses, and some even choose to have the symbol permanently tattooed onto their skin as a display of alliance with the values that they ascribe to the character who originally wore the shield-like insignia. How did Superman, as a symbol, make the move from unappealing character in a weak story to a protagonist worthy of such heroic status? The transition began with a restructuring of the character. Instead of making Superman a super-genius, a trait more suited for the prose-heavy pulp novels, the character’s attributes were geared toward the new, more strongly visual signifying system of the comic book. As Les Daniels has succinctly observed, Superman was constructed as ‘the ultimate acrobat and strong man. He was in the mighty tradition of heroes who are legendary in every culture, from Samson and Hercules to Beowulf, and he fought against crime and tyranny and social injustice’ (1998: 18). Through the combination of all these traits, Superman ‘became the champion of the American way’ (Daniels 1998: 18). Yet for many readers, the most appealing aspect of Superman was his dual identity, which was critical to making the character salient to the young textual community, as it made the godlike protagonist someone they could emulate and internalize. As Umberto Eco explains: Clark Kent personifies fairly typically the average reader who is harassed by complexes and despised by his fellow men; through an obvious process of self-identification, any 221

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accountant in any American city secretly feeds the hope that one day, from the slough of his actual personality, a superman can spring forth who is capable of redeeming years of mediocre existence. (1972: 15) In other words, here was a god playing at being a man, walking among mortals, protecting the meek, and romancing the beautiful, and within this ongoing tale lies the unspoken promise that each reader is a potential god as well. And indeed, in Action Comics #1, not merely was a god born, and American readers were quick to respond to the symbol in the new literary form of the comic book. Even though only 200,000 copies of Action Comics #1 were printed, it was from that small print run that a new industry emerged and an American icon was born.

The Narratives Give Birth to New Gods Once a narrative has been created, it must be disseminated or ‘chained’ (Murphy 1999: 5) out across a group of listeners/readers. Those who accept the worldview of the narrative become part of a textual community of individuals who are united by the worldview articulated by the narrative. A prime example is the membership of a church. United by the shared value system of the common religious narratives (whether sermon, lesson, holy writ, or any other shared interpretation of the group’s core ideas), the group comes to share a worldview. They are then a part of a special group, the chosen or ‘illuminated’ ones who share the ‘truth’, while the non-believers outside the group become heathens or heretics. A ‘we/they’ dichotomy can emerge, as adherents to a particular set of narratives can become quite attached to their shared view of the world. Such a sense of community arose with Superman fans, thanks to shrewd, aggressive marketing. Despite a small print run, the initial sales of Action #1 were strong. Even though six more issues were printed before Superman again graced the cover of Action Comics, DC was selling 500,000 issues per month, and sales totals had reached one million copies per issue by 1940 (Daniels 1995: 22; 1998: 78). Selling the comics was the beginning of the process of chaining the worldview and creating the textual community. Although the first three issues sold well, the nationwide readership was not yet accepting, or better yet, demanding the worldview. DC first had to transform a simple comic book hero into the transcendent symbol—that is, the icon—that the readership needed as a moral beacon during this dire era. To create that desire in the flock, some changes had to be made. John Kobler, in the June 21, 1941, issue of the Saturday Evening Post, profiled Siegel and Shuster and wrote that the first three issues did not mark Action as the next new hot trend, ‘[b]ut with the fourth, Action Comics spurted […] ahead of its fellow publications’ (quoted in Goulart 1991: 78). What changed between issues three and four that led to the explosive growth in the chaining of the worldview? Part of the change had to do with 222

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clarifying the moral code of the narrative. Initially, Siegel and Shuster’s character was a somewhat complex, socially progressive activist trying to reform an evil society, as is evident from the plot of the Superman tale in Action #1, in which Superman rescues a prisoner from a lynch mob. As Les Daniels highlights, ‘[l]ynchings were still a real problem in the 1930s and, there was implied condemnation of capital punishment in Superman’s efforts to prove that someone had been unjustly sentenced to die in the electric chair’ (1995: 22). Only a few pages later, Superman ‘drop[s] in on a wife beater and [teaches] him the error of his ways’ (Daniels 1995: 22), before Superman’s first appearance ‘end[s] abruptly with the hero embarked on an even more radical campaign: fighting corruption in the United States Government’ (Daniels 1995: 22). Despite the moral rectitude implied in Action #1, Superman was still quite rough around the edges in his early adventures and lacked ‘a proper code of conduct’ (Daniels 1998: 41). As Daniels writes, ‘[i]n the first newspaper adventure, Superman had deliberately torn the wings off a plane full of bad guys. The plane crashed in flames, its passengers presumable punished for attempting to do away with Lois Lane’ (1998: 41). However after editor Whitney Elsworth was added to the team, ‘Superman was forbidden to use his powers to kill anyone, even a villain’ (1998: 41–42). With Elsworth’s clear moral code attached to Siegel and Shuster’s sense of social reform, the overall fantasy theme found its moral grounding; again the meaning of Superman as a symbol was manipulated. The tales became simplistic, clear-cut tales of good vs. evil, with no question as to who was going to win. However, this lack of suspense had become a generic expectation of the textual community. In fact, it was exactly that comfortable sameness for which they were turning over those hardearned depression-era dimes. As Jules Feiffer already observed in the 1950s: What matter that the stories quickly lost interest; that once you’ve made a man super you’ve plotted him out of believable conflicts; that even super-villains, super-mad scientists and, yes, super-orientals were dull and lifeless next to the overwhelming image of that which Clark Kent became when he took off his clothes. So what if the stories were boring, the villains blah? This was the Superman show—a touring road company backing up a great star. Everything was a stage wait until he came on. Then it was all worth-while. (1956: 20) The second part of the equation required buy-in from the publisher. In the early going, Liebowitz, co-publisher of Action Comics, had no great faith in the commercial value of Superman as a product, a symbol, or a potential icon. As such, Liebowitz, […] [a] careful man, a cautious man, after the first issue of Action Comics was sent to the printer […] [and] instructed Sullivan, the editor, to replace Superman on subsequent covers with commercially safer pulp-influenced images like parachutists, big game hunters, Canadian Mounties, and Giant Gorillas. (De Haven 2010: 49) 223

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It was the sound of dimes falling into DC’s cash registers thanks to the spurt in sales of Action Comics #4 (a spike that pushed Action’s sales levels noticeably ahead of competing titles) that caught Harry Donenfeld’s attention. He wanted to know what was behind this newfound income stream so that he could capitalize upon it, so he conducted a ‘newsstand survey’. As Ron Goulart remarks: ‘The survey quickened his brightened hopes. Children were clamoring not for Action Comics, but for “that magazine with Superman on it.” Quivering with excitement, Donenfeld ordered Superman splashed all over the cover of succeeding issues. They sold out’ (1991: 78). Saturating the covers of Action with archetypal images of Superman paid off, both financially and as a part of the process of chaining the worldview. Action sales rose to half a million within a few issues and, by 1941, 900,000 copies were being sold. To capitalize on the success, a second book, titled Superman (dated summer 1939), quickly reached a readership of 1.25 million. Less than a year after his debut, Superman was popular enough to headline World’s Fair. Superman was soon appearing regularly in World’s Best Comics (formerly World’s Fair, later World’s Finest Comics) and All Star Comics. By October 1941, a Superman comic (or a comic featuring Superman) hit newsstands nearly every week, to be purchased by a textual community now numbering more than a million, who avidly read, re-read, and shared the fantasies and adopted the appropriate worldview. DC symbolically formalized the bond between members of the textual community and their icon by creating the ‘Supermen of America’ in 1939. Hundreds of thousands of believers received their certificate, signed by Clark Kent and suitable for framing, extolling them to ‘[P]ledge to do everything possible to increase his or her STRENGTH and COURAGE, to aid the cause of JUSTICE, to keep absolutely SECRET the SUPERMAN CODE’ (quoted in Daniels 1998: 47). Members also received a membership button for their dime. Profit plus chaining and reinforcing the value system was vital to the publisher. Membership meant receiving narratives that reinforced the worldview of Strength, Courage, and Justice, and offered the member a secret that had to be kept from some looming evil, all of which was an appealing way to view the world at the time and reinforced the core messages of the worldview. DC continued to chain and reinforce the message through marketing, as the company began to sell Superman merchandise as early as 1940—from puzzles and trading cards to paper dolls and candy. This made Superman a readily recognizable figure among what DC thought was their target audience, children. As chaining, though, it was more successful as a revenue stream and as a means of marketing the icon than they could have hoped, yet the Superman phenomenon was still just starting. DC’s daily newspaper strip appeared nationwide, effectively chaining the worldview to a broader audience who, in turn, clamored for more. DC was happy to comply, expanding the Superman narrative to radio in 1941,2 the dominant entertainment medium of the day. The popularity of the Adventures of Superman radio show was due in part to the strength of the production, as well as a textual community who were eager to receive the message:

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The Adventures of Superman premiered on February 12, 1940, and earned such high ratings that it was picked up in 1942 by the Mutual Network […]. Adults were hearing the program too, and Superman was becoming a household word in millions of homes all over America. (Daniels 1998: 52) The Man of Steel hit the silver screen in 1941 with the animated film shorts produced by Fleischer Studios. With the success of these cartoons, DC had managed to introduce the American public to their leading man through every major media outlet of the day, and the fans were ready for more. A sense of community was created among comic readers who shared the common experience of reading the Superman titles and the newspaper strip, watching the film shorts and listening to the radio show. They would discuss the latest adventures of the Man of Steel and became emotionally invested in the serial progression of the narrative. As Ernst Bormann explains, this was the perfect storm for creating a textual community or for creating an icon: The communicative process of sharing group fantasies creates common beliefs and motives for the people involved. We have data indicating that this group of people have participated in communication episodes in which they have shared fantasy dramas and have created an aspect of their social reality with its associated beliefs and motivations. Members of the community who have participated in these communication episodes can now be anticipated to act in accordance with the beliefs and motives they share with each other. (1982: 304) This community, from the card-carrying Supermen of America to adults who only listened to the radio show, had become true believers. The comic books and strip had constructed their worldview, and the radio show reinforced and reinvigorated it. Millions of others, including all demographics that had access to a radio or newspaper, were being exposed daily to the fantasies and were being persuaded to see the world through this particular value system. With this multi-pronged attack, Superman was winning over the hearts and minds of America. In just over two years, this simple narrative fantasy, told in a narrative form that had been disparaged as childish ephemera, created a worldview around an ongoing plot, a cast of characters, and, at the center of it all, an icon whose meaning had been carefully manipulated, at this point, to mean only: ‘Strength, Courage and Justice’. The depth of penetration and the level of saturation these fantasies reached within the American public within two years time, from a purely marketing view, are staggering. From the view of chaining out a worldview, it was a job that required a superman.

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Clash of the Titans Superman’s path to print was filled with battles and, once there, Superman stood as creator god, the Zeus, Odin, or Jupiter of his realm. The greatest challenge to him came from his progeny, those who were created in his image. As the first of the comic book superheroes, the perfect form of the genre, Superman reigned as the archetype. The financial success reaped from the publication of the Superman narratives meant that every comic publisher was intent on creating their own version of Superman. It started with a trickle. The Arrow and the Crimson Avenger preceded the first direct Superman swipe: Wonder Man. Then came National’s second big hit, Batman, and Fox’s successful character, the Blue Beetle. Suddenly, superheroes, masked avengers, and other strange protagonists were popping up everywhere and trying to knock Superman from his pedestal. Many of the new heroes were wrapped in the flag and attempting to spin a more patriotic fantasy than Superman. Pep Comics introduced their patriotic hero, the Shield, while Fawcett debuted the adventures of Minute Man. USA the Spirit of Old Glory was Quality’s new mixture of patriotism and macho sex appeal, while Quality also published the tales of a stunning super-heroine named Miss America. As

Illustration 1: Mickey Mouse joins in the symbolic battle against the Axis powers in a secret mission in Berlin. ‘Mickey Mouse on a Secret Mission’ © Disney, 1943. Used under license from the Walt Disney Company.

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the nation drew toward war, nearly every protagonist grabbed a flag. Even Mickey Mouse became a Nazi fighter. By 1941, the heavens and earth were filled with the gods of war.

Captain America: Man-Made God Captain America’s tale begins in late 1939, as a struggling pulp publisher, Martin Goodman, decided to give comic books a try and launched his line with Marvel Comics #1. Goodman’s publishing house, Timely, followed the latest fad and published tales of godlike superheroes. None of Timely’s narratives sold anything like Superman’s titles. However, by the spring of 1940, after the Nazi Blitzkrieg had taken Poland, Denmark, Norway, the Netherlands, Belgium, and even France, ‘Congress realized America might soon be at war and encouraged various publishers to promote literary themes that inspired national patriotism’ (Ro 2004: 13). Captain America creator Joe Simon once reminisced: ‘There had never been a truly believable villain in comics […] [b]ut Adolph Hitler was alive, [and] hated by more than half the world’ (quoted in Ro 2004: 13). With the perfect villain lined up, Simon and his partner Jack Kirby decided to create their superhero in the mold of Superman, but with a twist; drawing on the traditions of mythological heroes, they made their superhero a soldier (Ro 2004: 13). Just as Achilles had received his (near) invulnerability from the gods with a quick dip in the River Styx, Captain America’s power was a gift from the American secular gods of science and technology. For Simon, this warrior god could serve multiple purposes, ‘In addition to allowing Simon to humiliate the Nazis, this idea would bring in good money’ (Ro 2004: 13–14). Ron Goulart writes: ‘Captain America was created for a time that needed noble figures,’ Kirby once recalled. ‘We weren’t at war yet, but everyone knew it was coming. That’s why Captain America was born; America needed a superpatriot.’ As to their new hero’s appearance […] ‘[d]rape the flag on anything, and it looks good. We gave him a chain mail shirt and shield like a modern day crusader. […] He symbolized the American dream.’ (1991: 117) As such, Captain America was the protagonist of an epic heroic narrative modeled after the heroes of Greek mythology, who would battle against and ultimately defeat the consummate contemporary villain. This is an ancient form of tales of the gods and their heroes: the epic quest that pits a demi-god or heroic figure chosen by the gods against an antagonist who is his evil doppelganger. Through the allegory, the reader is given an example of which of the moral paths, as represented by hero and nemesis, is the proper path to follow as, through battle, the hero will inevitably destroy his nemesis. Appropriately, Cap is recruited, enhanced, and appointed by the secular deities of the day—government scientists—a clear indication of the secularization of religion. 227

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In order to attract converts from the textual communities already existing around previously established superheroes, the Captain America narrative had to quickly communicate, in an archetypal fashion, the epic nature of his quest. Simon, Kirby, and Goodman accomplished this with one iconic punch.

One Punch and a Great Hero is Born How could one image of a then unknown superhero punching Adolf Hitler impact Captain America Comics #1 and the burgeoning narrative vision resting behind that cover? Much of America was still against becoming involved in another foreign war. Roosevelt had campaigned for his third term as president on the promise that America would stay out of the conflict. Why, then, would a comic book hero draped in the flag and punching Adolf Hitler in the face be a good investment for Timely or be critical to crystalizing the symbolic message of the entire serial epic in one image? As Roy Thomas explains: Because that glorious sock to Adolf ’s Aryan jaw is not just the cover of Captain America Comics #1. Rather, it’s the very essence of what Captain America himself—as a hero and as a concept—was all about. […] DCs [sic] Superman spent his first few years as a pacifist, making two national leaders (admittedly both European) duke it out rather than sending their young men to do their fighting and dying for them—and that, even as the Nazi juggernaut stood athwart nearly all of western Europe, the Man of Tomorrow kept aloof from the fray, content to battle Luthor’s latest death ray or send a few more bank robbers off to jail. […] But Captain America was the real deal […] Goodman did [however] have a ‘problem’ with the idea of Hitler being the heavy … But Goodman’s problem, Joe [Simon] says had nothing to do with America’s official neutral status—only his fear that Hitler might somehow get himself killed before the first issue came out … (2005)3 With one well-timed right hook to Hitler’s jaw, Simon and Kirby stripped away any moral ambiguity that may have accumulated in the semantic system surrounding the superhero by supplying a clear, inarguably evil Other, who was conveniently not American. Questions of the origins of American criminals, which haunted the villains fought by crime fighters such as The Arrow and Batman, were obliterated. As a result, the dark side of democracy was instantly overshadowed by the darkness of Hitler’s national socialism. As Marvel editor Roy Thomas put it: ‘The day they [Simon and Kirby] had Cap punch out Hitler’s lights on that cover, they became America’s poster boys for democracy’ (2005). The dynamic new means of communicating the narratives combined with the patriotic appeal of the starspangled new avenger and his clearly defined moral dichotomy (America = good vs. Axis = evil) made Cap’ an instant hit. Captain America Comics #1 quickly sold a million copies. 228

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Illustration 2: One punch heralds the symbolic creation of an epic hero. Captain America TM and © Marvel Entertainment, LLC. Image used by permission from Marvel Entertainment, LLC.

The enormous sales numbers meant that the worldview was immediately chained to young men across the United States. The worldview in the comics began to foster its own textual community. Utilizing tactics similar to those employed by DC, the chaining of the message was reinforced, as the publishers used extra-narrative techniques to create and reinforce ties to the textual community: Captain America issued an invitation to its young readers to become involved in the fight for freedom as ‘Captain America’s Sentinels of Liberty.’ For ten cents, readers could receive a badge recognizing their role in the ‘war against spies and enemies in our midst who threaten our very independence.’ Each member signed an oath: ‘I solemnly pledge to uphold the principles of the Sentinels of Liberty and assist Captain America in his war against spies in the U.S.A.’ (Jewett & Lawrence 2003: 33) 229

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The book’s popularity was also boosted by the presence of a narrative device the Superman serial narrative lacked: a ‘foil’, a character who serves to reflect, reinforce, and enhance the primary traits of the protagonist. In the case of Captain America, the foil was his sidekick, who served not only to help the reader understand the values for which Cap’ stood, but also as an avatar for the reader. Bucky took on the role of an irony-laden Cassandra when Issue #9 of Captain America Comics hit the newsstands in the late summer of 1941. Bucky chained out this specific message to the Sentinels of Liberty: In order to be prepared for aerial attacks on our nation if they ever occur, I order all you Sentinels to make note of every plane you see in the sky. Try to discover which direction the plane is flying in, how fast it is going, how high up it is, and facts like that. Then, in the event of an aerial attack, you Sentinels will be able to do your share in spotting enemy planes and warning the authorities! (Uslan 2009) On December 9, 1941, the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor, igniting American passions for war. Bucky had predicted it. He told the children to be on the lookout for the barbarians at the gates; but, since he was also a child, no one listened. Even though Captain America’s narratives utilized a dual identity, complete with bumbling oaf Steve Rogers as the human who is given godlike powers, the reader is always reminded that this hero is a human playing at being a god. While this may be wish fulfillment for the reader, the reader has little common ground with the blond-haired, blue-eyed, perfectly formed human Steve Rogers.4 The human they may have identified with was destroyed by scientist gods on page one of the first issue. As a result, Bucky, the sidekick, had to stand in as the empathic interface between reader and hero. The worldview created in the tales of Captain America’s epic battle against the evil Axis powers was expertly chained out by Simon, Kirby, Goodman, and the rest at Timely, who worked to push their epic hero to the forefront of the glut of comic book super-patriots who emerged during the war. From the iconic punch to Hitler’s face to the effective use of a sidekick and various marketing devices, Timely had successfully chained the Cap worldview to a textual community of a million strong and was now ready to take on the creator of the comic book superhero genre himself—Superman.

Death and Resurrection All superheroes are, essentially, secular saviors. Unlike the saviors portrayed by religion, superheroes provide concrete salvation from a ‘tangible, unambiguous event’ (Knowles 2007: 111). Unlike Christ, most comic book saviors do not prove their divinity and save the souls of all humanity through execution and resurrection three days later.5 However, as both Captain America and Superman fought for the hearts and minds of America during the war 230

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years, both characters experienced symbolic deaths, but only one found the strength to rise again. Superman’s death as an icon occurred when DC realized he had become their golden calf. DC had accomplished a marketing miracle between June 1938 and the summer of 1940. Superman’s rise to commercial icon made the character more important as an asset to the company than as a paragon of virtue. This change in the way the company viewed their leading character was even evident in the stories, for Superman had come to represent the establishment: When populism vanished, so did Superman’s sarcasm, his cocksureness, and an admirable capacity for moral outrage. In the beginning Superman offered his assistance, now the good citizens of Metropolis clamored for it, they expected it. Originally, civil authorities chased him as a hooligan, an outlaw—now they designated him an ‘honorary policeman’ and charged him with things to do […]. Only three years along in his career, Superman no longer seemed to be having so much fun. Heroing had become a job. (De Haven 2010: 73–74) As a corporate man, Superman was the big, blue policeman, a defender of the status quo. As early as 1940, DC envisioned Superman wielding his power on a much larger stage. Despite

Illustration 3: Look magazine’s Superman story: A tale that was almost more dangerous to the Man of Steel than kryptonite. ‘What If Superman Ended the War?’ © DC Comics, 1940.

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the imitators, the other super-patriots, it was obvious to most Americans that Superman was the only ‘man’ to end the war in Europe. A fact so obvious to Look magazine, one of the nation’s most popular magazines, that they commissioned Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster to explain ‘How Superman Would End the War.’ Their two page piece showed Superman capturing Hitler and Stalin (not yet an American ally) and dragging them before an international tribunal, but not even comics could continue this kind of wish fulfillment. (Daniels 1995: 65) This narrative, essentially showing Superman ending the war, created cognitive dissonance for the reader, for, as nice as it might have been for Superman to have brought peace to the world, all readers had to do was listen to the mundane conversation around them, and it would become evident that the war was not over. This, in turn, collapsed both the narrative and the cluster of meanings surrounding the symbol, which had been building in the readership’s worldview. The readers knew they had been betrayed. The suspension of disbelief, which allows such a narrative worldview to be constructed, was removed, and the entire worldview collapsed like a house of cards. In a sense, the invulnerable Superman died the day that his loyal following saw the piece in Look. DC had extended Superman too far into the affairs of men, which allowed his message to become too fragile, and he was crushed by the sheer weight of those who expected him to do no wrong. To recover their savior, their godhead, DC had to act quickly. DC did this by wisely refusing to involve Superman in combat stories during the remainder of the war, allowing him to regain his perch atop ‘Mt. Olympus’, from where he could advise mere mortals in the morally correct and proper ways of waging war. That editorial decision did not stop DC from milking the war for profit and turning their signature character into a powerful meaning-laden symbol. As Ian Gordon explains, after running a story where Clark Kent failed his draft board physical (the physicians thought him nearly blind because, with his x-ray vision, he ‘accidentally’ read the eye chart in an adjoining room), DC ‘used the Second World War to make Superman not only a defender of virtue and wholesomeness, but synonymous with American democracy. All six 1941 Superman comic books contained war-related stories about saboteurs, terrorists, and fifth columnists’ (1998: 137). Superman, along with the other heroes who DC had created to fill in his pantheon, fought the good fight on the home front. In their narratives, the DC heroes stayed home to protect America, where in reality they had moral and political impacts on the worldview of their readers. As the war moved forward, the creative and editorial forces behind Superman’s role as America’s protector changed, as his ‘patriotism was expressed more subtly, expressed but not flaunted, and usually on the covers of his comic books, rarely inside’ (De Haven 2010: 80). Indeed, ‘the Man of Steel pretty much stayed out of the war’ (De Haven 2010: 80). 232

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Even with Superman on the sidelines, fighting saboteurs back home, ‘The Army sent his patriotic adventures to GIs around the world’ (Friedrich, Austin, and Simpson 1988: par. 24). According to Robert Jewett and John Shelton Lawrence, ‘[s]o identified was the fighting Superman with “truth, justice and the American way” that comic books were widely sold to GIs during World War II, surpassing the popularity of more “adult” publications such as Life, Reader’s Digest, and the Saturday Evening Post’ (2003: 32). The fantasies were now being chained, not only through the media, but through the military’s own decision to make Superman comics an essential part of the war effort. As GIs traded their dog-eared copies to British soldiers and civilians, the Man of Steel made his first steps toward becoming an international icon representing the best of American values. It was through this chaining, in combination with the editorial decision to not become directly involved in the war that the Man of Steel was born again. Because Superman had not been tied to the war overseas, once this war ended, he was able to continue his role as American hero and crime fighter par excellence. Even in the optimism of a ‘victorious’ post-war America, there were still criminals to be fought and wrongs to be righted back home. As a result, Superman, unlike Captain America, survived the war. His legions of followers still needed his weekly moral guidance, which would soon be reinforced by a weekly show on the 1950s addition to the mechanisms for chaining fantasies: television. The god of war returns to the role of righteous savior. The Man of Steel was here to stay.

The Chains of Godhood Death, of a behind-the-scenes nature, would also strike Captain America at his height of popularity. The question is: Could he find a way to be born again as well? When death came to seek Cap’, the worst harm to him and the worldview that had been created did not come from anyone outside Timely; it came from within. When Goodman purchased Captain America from Simon and Kirby, the creators had arranged a lucrative deal with Timely that included 15 percent of the profits. After a few issues, the pair realized that they did not seem to be getting the kind of paycheck 15 percent of a million-selling book should bring. Rather than fight with Goodman, the pair quietly negotiated a rich contract with National (DC) and defected to the enemy (Evanier 2008: 58). Captain America #10 was their last Captain America work for Goodman. While Captain America soldiered on, the comic lost the traits that made it unique. Al Avison and Alex Schomburg tried to keep Cap’ relevant by making certain that the book had some of the best covers of the war years with Avison’s grotesque Nazi and Japanese villains and filled the stories with Schomburg’s barely contained action. Captain America Comics continued to sell. Even without Simon and Kirby, the book contained a winning formula for that era: grotesquely evil villains making grand plans to destroy all that is American and an all-American hero who overcomes horrific odds before defeating villainy and saving 233

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the day. ‘Captain America summed up all the energy and reckless fun of comics in the forties’ (Goulart 1991: 118). However, when the war ended in 1945, the warrior hero, whose assigned mission had been to combat foreign enemies, suddenly found himself essentially out of a job. With the vanquishing of the real-world villain who had been so instrumental in Cap’s genesis, the Cap narrative soon began to fade. After the war, the efforts to transform Cap into a soldier fighting the Communist threat proved short-lived. The Cold War, fought in secret via proxy warriors in obscure countries, had no need for a muscle-bound, flagwearing Super-American. In the 1950s, while Superman was consolidating his dominance as the American superhero and expanding into new media, Cap disappeared from the scene, only to be revived much later as a member of The Avengers.

Conclusion This examination provided the opportunity to examine the origin, spread, and fate of a pair of competing narrative mythoi. What is unique about the comparison is that the historic record has preserved many of the personal exigencies that impacted the development and growth of the narratives as well as the impact of the social, economic, and military concerns of the day. Through this explication, one point stands clear: Narratives built using themes and images from traditional religious allegory have, at least in times of crisis, uncertainty, and conflict, the most profound impact on American audiences. In times of great national crisis, Americans most readily identify with narratives that utilize religious forms and elements, even if the new narrative is carrying a secular meaning. During World War II, the most popular and iconic comic book heroes, Captain America and Superman, were constructed on the scaffolding of older religious tales. Yet, the question that emerges is: How can the different post-war fates of these two figures be explained? Looking at Captain America first, it is clear that he was modeled on the mythic hero, who is granted great powers by a higher authority (i.e., the gods) and then assigned a task or quest. It is clear that Captain America comes from the tradition of the epic hero. Whether Jason, Beowulf, Achilles, Joshua, or Gilgamesh, these heroes are granted a boon of power from a god (or gods). With this power, they go forth and fight the evil endangering that god’s worshippers. For instance, the Old Testament’s Samson and his penchant for collecting Philistine foreskins is a narrative that is not unlike that of Captain America. Samson’s gift of strength was related to his long hair, through which, as long as he avoided barbers, he would have the strength of many men and could use it to kill multiple Philistine soldiers with the jawbone of an ass. Cap’s gift, great strength and dexterity, came from one of the new gods of the 1940s, science. The scientific serum turned him into a super-soldier, a hero of his age. Yet, heroes are not immortal. They are given a quest to achieve, or they serve a time in the protection of the people, but their time eventually passes. When the war is over or the quest is accomplished, the hero retires and moves onto a second, immortal 234

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life granted to him by the poets’ stories of his heroic exploits. The hero was a man of his time, and Cap’s time, as is evident from his origin story as related by his creators, was World War II. His mission was to fulfill the promise made with that first iconic punch delivered to Hitler’s jaw (or to hang around in stories until the real soldiers delivered the goods). Although the 2011 Hollywood movie proves that the icon still lives on, the fact that it is set in the 1940s and deals with Cap’s role in World War II demonstrates the spatiotemporal immovability of the Cap’ legend. While Cap was the hero, drafted from among mere mortals to save America from a specific threat (i.e., Hitler), Superman from the beginning was a kind of god, sent from a different world to save America from its own worst qualities. This should sound familiar, as it echoes the origin narratives of Moses, Zeus, Thoth, Christ, and a number of protagonists who were either extremely powerful gods, emancipators, Kings of Kings, or a combination of the above. Superman stood above and apart from man, as evidenced by his clumsy alter ego Clark Kent. Just like the Greco-Roman gods, Superman played at being human to walk among us, only interfering to protect the righteous weak and to teach important lessons. Like Christ, he was an aspect of God made flesh to save us from our own human weaknesses, as manifested in those evil Americans who failed to worship at the altar of ‘Truth, Justice, and the American Way.’ It is in this continuing fight against the evil within that his godhood becomes apparent: In his extraterrestrial origins and the shining purity of his altruism, some […] have detected a divine aura. […] Experts have pondered the fact that Superman’s original Kryptonian name Kal-El resembles Hebraic syllables meaning ‘all that God is.’ Greek and Norse mythology have been invoked to show Superman resembles a god who comes to earth and walks among men in mortal guise. Screenwriter [David] Newman sees yet more exalted implications in the legend. ‘It begins with a father who lives up in heaven, who says, “I will send my only son to save earth.” The son takes on the guise of a man but is not a man. The religious overtones are so clear.’ (Friedrich, Austin, and Simpson 1988: par. 15) In the end, Superman was perhaps the first fictional character, certainly the first comic book character, to have been successfully chained into a ‘universal icon’ (Daniels 1998: 11), and Cap’ wound up frozen in ice until his rebirth in the 1960s. Superman’s adventures are chronicled in the industry’s longest running titles, big-budget Hollywood movies, primetime network television, and on the Internet. However, perhaps the most powerful testimony to Superman’s iconic power comes from a ‘real-world’ story told by the man who first brought Superman to the silver screen—Christopher Reeve: It’s very hard for me to be silly about the role of Superman […] because I’ve seen firsthand how he actually transforms people’s lives. I have seen children dying of brain tumors, who wanted, as their last request to talk to me, and have gone to their graves with a 235

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peace brought on by knowing that their belief in this kind of character is intact. I’ve seen that Superman really matters. It’s not Superman the […] cartoon character their [sic] connecting with; they’re connecting with something very basic: the ability to overcome obstacles, the ability to persevere, the ability to understand difficulty and to turn your back on it. (quoted in Friedrich, Austin, and Simpson 1988: par. 16) This powerful influence on the lives and beliefs of real children shows the enduring power of this icon. And it is not just children. One need only think of the many people of all ages who wear T-shirts emblazoned with the condensed symbol of this iconic system, the red ‘S’ on the golden background, or those who have even tattooed this image on their bodies to see that the icon continues to resonate with people of all ages to this very day.

References Bormann, Ernest G. (1982), ‘Fantasy Theme and Rhetorical Vision: Ten Years Later,’ The Quarterly Journal of Speech, 68, pp. 288–305. Colton, David (2008), ‘The Crime that Created Superman: Did Fatal Robbery Spawn Man of Steel?’ USA Today [online], 25 August, http://www.usatoday.com/life/books/news/2008-0825-superman-creators_N.htm>. Accessed 26 January 2011. Daniels, Les (1995), DC Comics: Sixty Years of the World’s Favorite Comic Book Heroes. Boston: Bullfinch Press. (1998), Superman: The Complete History. San Francisco: Chronicle Books. De Haven, Tom (2010), Our Hero: Superman on Earth. New Haven: Yale University Press. Eco, Umberto (1972), ‘The Myth of Superman,’ trans. Natalie Chilton, Diacritics, 2: 1, pp. 14–22. Evanier, Mark (2008), Kirby: King of Comics. New York: Abrams. Feiffer, Jules (1956), The Great Comic Book Superheroes. New York: Dial Press. Friedrich, Otto, Beth Austin, and Janice C. Simpson (1988), ‘“Up, Up and Awaaay!!!”: America’s Favorite Hero Turns 50, Ever Changing, But Indestructible,’ Time [online], 14 March, http:// www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,966978-6,00.html. Accessed 25 January 2011. Gordon, Ian (1998), Comic Strips and Consumer Culture: 1890–1945. Washington: Smithsonian Institution Press. Goulart, Ron (1991), Over 50 Years of American Comic Books. Lincolnwood: Publications International. Jewett, Robert, and John Shelton Lawrence (2003), Captain America and the Crusade Against Evil: The Dilemma of Zealous Nationalism. Grand Rapids: William B. Erdmans Publishing. Knowles, Christopher (2007), Our Gods Wear Spandex. San Francisco: Weiser. Murphy, B. Keith (1999), ‘Revisionist Reality: Alpha Flight 106 and the Marvel Universe,’ The Journal of the Georgia Association of Historians, 20, pp. 1–24. 236

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Ro, Ronin (2004), Tales to Astonish: Jack Kirby, Stan Lee and the American Comic Book Revolution. New York: Bloomsbury. Thomas, Roy (2005), ‘Introduction,’ in Joe Simon & Jack Kirby, Marvel Masterworks: Golden Age Captain America, Vol. 1. New York: Marvel Comics, n. pag. Uslan, Mark (2009), ‘Introduction,’ in Joe Simon, Jack Kirby, Stan Lee, Al Avison, and Syd Shores, Marvel Masterworks: Golden Age Captain America Comics, Vol. 3. New York: Marvel Publishing, n. pag.

Notes 1 The irony of this is that the events surrounding Mitchell Siegel’s death served as foreshadowing of many superhero origin myths to come where, despondent over the senseless death of a parent, spouse, child, best friend, an uncle who was like a father, or all of the above, the hero swears vengeance on all villains—often while standing over the grave(s) of those so recently lost. This is the archetypal origin fantasy theme of Batman, the Punisher, the Crow, Spiderman, Rorschach, and a myriad of other characters. This fantasy theme works because it strikes a believable—and all-too human—chord in the reader in that each of us question how we would react to protect those who we love. 2 This is where the phrases ‘Up, up and away!,’ ‘Look, up in the Sky! It’s a bird. It’s a Plane …,’ and ‘This is a job for … Superman!’ originated. 3 The brain-trust behind Captain America Comics knew a good thing when they saw it; issue no. 2 also featured Cap’ slugging Hitler. 4 In many ways, the super-soldier-serum-infused Steve Rogers is a model of Aryan perfection. More irony. 5 It is true that DC would have the Superman narrative include just such a series of events beginning in 1992. However, they did wait almost fifty years to draw this direct allegory between Superman and Christ.

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Chapter 11 Myth and Materiality: The Duality of Grace Kelly Ana Salzberg

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n her memoirs, famed costume designer Edith Head wrote of her experiences working with Grace Kelly. She noted that upon the announcement of the star’s engagement to Prince Rainier of Monaco in 1956, the press ‘besieged’ her demanding anecdotes about Kelly. Head replied: ‘Grace doesn’t allow anecdotes to happen to her’ (1959: 152). Related in a pithy, even off-hand tone, Head’s remark nonetheless resonates in a consideration of the greater complexities of Kelly’s persona. It asserts the actress’ distance from trite episodes that court press coverage, even as it is ultimately (and ironically) an anecdote about her; it describes Kelly as in control and inaccessible, yet it speaks to the frenzied media attention that claimed her for the public. However concisely, Head’s reminiscence frames a Grace Kelly both removed from the more indelicate aspects of popular culture and inextricably linked to them, depicting a figure at once absent and present. She is, then, a paradox. In 1963, sociologist Violette Morin studied the duality of Kelly’s public persona in an article entitled ‘Les Olympiennes’. Placing her among those iconic figures whose gifts of talent and beauty enable them to surpass the constraints of mortality, Morin remarks that Kelly—in her superlative existence as both movie star and princess—bears an idealized identity that nearly ‘defies reality’ (1963: 112).1 Indeed, Morin goes on to define the fundamental paradox at work in the creation of an Olympian: The entity ‘is in fact a man made into a god, but at the same time he is a God made into a man’ (1963: 118).2 More than 40 years after the publication of Morin’s article, and 28 years after her own passing, the phenomenon of an im/mortal Grace Kelly remains undiminished. Numerous biographies and documentaries have investigated her life, and uniting these myriad examinations of Kelly’s legacy is a fascination with the very duality that underlies Head’s anecdote and drew Morin’s critical attention—a duality that exceeds the juxtaposition of ‘movie star’ and ‘princess’ to include the ambiguities of her very person. Grace Kelly is both the princess in a modern fairy tale and the subject of sensational Hollywood lore, a determined actress who triumphed in her profession and the Serene Highness of Monaco who, following her royal marriage, never made another film. Commenting upon the star’s roles as a ‘Hitchcock Blonde’, critic Stella Bruzzi notes that Kelly’s ‘perfection’ as such lies in her ‘ability to sustain [the] duality’ between ‘pure and sexy’ (2000: 206)—thus reflecting the director’s own description of her as a ‘snow-covered volcano’ (quoted in Lacey 1994: 11). Truly, Kelly and her mystique recall Lévi-Strauss’ contention that ‘mythical thought always progresses from the awareness of oppositions toward their resolution’ (1963: 224). Yet an exploration of the evolution of Kelly’s iconicity suggests that the duality so analyzed in retrospective accounts actually formed the basis of her appeal from the inception of her

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public life—or, more precisely, from the inception of her relationship with visual media. Throughout her œuvre of still photography and motion pictures, the paradoxical elements of Kelly’s persona find material expression. In this way, an existential affinity between the complexity of the star’s photogenic impact and the construction of her myth is revealed. Three defining moments in Kelly’s career present a figure simultaneously evoking notions of the authentic and the illusory: the 1955 Howell Conant photography sessions for Collier’s magazine, her work as the archetypal ‘Hitchcock Blonde’ as well as in roles in Mogambo (Ford 1953) and The Country Girl (Seaton 1954), and, finally, the series of photos taken by Conant for Life magazine on Kelly’s nuptial voyage.3 Drawing on theorists Roland Barthes and Vivian Sobchack, the following consideration of these media events proposes that the Kelly iconography relates to broader dialectics of stardom: the interplay between authenticity and illusion, the corporeal and ethereal. In the ambivalent quality of her photographic presence, Kelly personifies Morin’s assertion that an Olympian star must ‘have the art of ascending even as [s]he remains down to earth’ (1963: 118).4

Nature and Design Through his conceptualization of the ‘air’ surrounding a photographed entity, Roland Barthes engages with parallel questions of ascension and gravity. In Camera Lucida, he writes of the air as an ethereal quality radiating from the human form, ‘what is given as an act of grace’ in the exchange between camera and subject. Uniting natural form and supernatural ‘bright shadow’, the camera captures a moment of transcendence in which the photographed figure evolves from mere indexical imprint—‘a sterile body’—into a being of physical and spiritual resonance (2000: 109–110). Indeed, phenomenological theorist Vivian Sobchack has explored the sensory affect of this relationship between camera and subject, proposing that the photographic process helps to shape an entity’s perception of his/her lived body, or ‘being-in-the-world’, as it impacts both self and others (2004: 136). Photography functions, in Sobchack’s words, as a ‘material process […] result[ing] in a material form’ (2004: 142). Capturing not only the human figure but also the spatio-temporality of a particular instant, the photograph itself may in turn be possessed and circulated. This literal objectification both ‘materializes and authenticates experience, others, and oneself as empirically real’ (2004: 143).5 As both Barthes and Sobchack contend, however, the sensorial stakes shift as motion transforms a given photographed experience from a single instant to an evolving sequence. Barthes discusses the aesthetic contrast between the stasis of the photograph and the dynamic ephemerality of the filmic ‘passing’ before the eye of the camera (2000: 78). He remarks that though the photograph stands complete and unto itself within its frame, the restless film ‘is impelled, ceaselessly drawn’ (2000: 90) forward in its search to depict other phenomena. Within this motility lies the liberation of the film’s human subjects, allowing them to ‘emerge […] [and] continue […] living’ (2000: 57) an existence independent of the 242

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single shot. Sobchack also reflects on the subject’s emergence from the photograph, noting that where a still picture captures an instant, cinema engages with the duration of time and space; and where a photograph evokes the sensation of a lived temporality even as it transforms it into an ‘eternal timelessness’ (2004: 146), cinema enacts that phenomenon of existence. In granting motion to pictures, film does not so much ‘authenticate’ the reality of a given experience through its objectification as it inhabits that experience, establishing a mobile subjectivity from which to ‘accumulate’ perceptions and declare its own being-inthe-world (2004: 147). As one of the most photographed women of the 1950s, Kelly’s presence in both still and moving pictures attests to the complexity of this dialogue between figure and photographic medium—the interplay, that is, between the star’s embodied occupation of time-space and the camera’s capacity to perceive and preserve the subject’s existential interlude. Hollywood colleagues, however, characterized Kelly herself as an extension of that highly photogenic being projected on movie screens and glimpsed in print publications. As if to substantiate the sheer authenticity of her appeal, they described a merging between her image and her extra-photographic identity: Head maintained that ‘she dressed like Grace Kelly, and she was Grace Kelly’ (1959: 149), and co-star Cary Grant remarked that Kelly made acting ‘look so easy. Some people said Grace was just being herself. Well, that’s the toughest thing to do if you’re an actor, because if you’re yourself, the audience feels as though that person is living and breathing, just being natural’ (quoted in Spada 1987: 152). Stella Bruzzi finds that these statements are evidence of the perception of Kelly’s ‘fluid transition from woman to icon,’ with the star’s image seen as ‘an effortless extension of her real self ’ (2000: 206)—this famed continuum indeed arguably paralleling the Barthesian ‘act of grace’ that united her corporeal and ethereal selves in a photograph. Aligning her personal appearance with the fashion iconography of her star persona (‘dressed like Grace Kelly’), perfecting the technique of ‘just being natural,’ the nuances of the Kelly effect suggest that the actress’ savoir-faire pur, to borrow a phrase from Morin (1963: 110), lay in her ability to elide the distinction between nature and design. In this way, Kelly stands as an emblematic subject of what Richard Dyer has called the ‘rhetoric of authenticity’ (1991: 137) surrounding stars, or the cohesion of various media texts that affirm the genuine talent and ‘star quality’ (1991: 133) of a performer. He cites the use of various ‘markers’ of genuineness; those images, gestures, and words of a star that convey his/her refreshing ‘lack of control, lack of premeditation and privacy’ (1991: 137) amid the overdetermined star-products of Hollywood’s dream factory. Yet Dyer also comments on the fundamental irony at work in such a process: Even though media texts are, in fact, machines of the star system, a veritable industry of the controlled and premeditated, they nonetheless stand as the collective ‘source’ for the very expressions that authenticate a star image (1991: 135). With this in mind, the following analysis of Kelly’s presence in three divergent media texts seeks to neither prove nor disprove her naturalness but rather to trace the constellations of mergings and ruptures between Kelly’s myth and her photographic and cinematographic beings-in-the-world. In so doing, the rhetoric of authenticity cedes to a direct engagement with the paradoxes that generated her iconicity. 243

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Acts of Grace: Jamaica, 1955 In 1955, following an intense year of shooting and promoting films, Kelly and her sister traveled to Jamaica for a vacation. The interlude quickly evolved into a working holiday, as Kelly invited Howell Conant to join her and shoot the photographs that would accompany a feature in Collier’s weekly magazine. Conant, a portrait and fashion photographer, captured Kelly in a number of milieux far removed from the conventional studio setting: reclining on the patio of her vacation home, shopping in a marketplace, and relaxing on the beach. The sessions were casual, lacking the overtly staged quality that determined most representations of film stars. As Kelly biographer Donald Spoto points out, studio-era stars had theretofore worked with photographers who, by carefully lighting and retouching pictures, ‘fed the dream machine’ (2010: 150–151) of Hollywood ideality. Yet the Jamaica series eschewed these cosmetic devices and instead introduced an alternative ‘dream’ of the ideal star—a figure of a more immediate vitality who remained, at the same time, not wholly accessible. (It is a dream that, as the photo retrospective Remembering Grace asserts, resonates as ‘iconic’ and ‘alluring’ decades after its realization [Conant 2007: 18].) Intimate but not intrusive, the sessions exemplify the style of photography that would come to define Kelly and Conant’s œuvre, a genre that Conant termed ‘semi-candid’ (1992: 10). Reflecting on his working relationship with Kelly (which lasted until her death in 1982), Conant explains, ‘Grace had definite ideas about how she wanted to look. Though she rejected the traditional studio image, she disliked the sloppiness of candid photography, too’ (1992: 14). Seeking what he called a ‘middle-ground’ between the overproduced and the arbitrary, Conant and Kelly shared the understanding that he would not photograph her when she did not wish to be, and that he would only publish photos of her that she had approved (Conant 1992: 10–14). Bruzzi states that Kelly ‘defined her iconic status rather than be defined by it’ (2000: 207), and certainly Kelly’s role in conceiving of the ‘semi-candid’ evidences such a process of attempted self-definition—as well as a structuring paradox shaping her iconicity. For even as the Jamaica sessions engage with Dyer’s markers of authenticity—lack of control, lack of premeditation, and privacy—their very conceptualization bespeaks a highly methodical approach to the construction of Kelly’s star image. The photographs present, that is, a deliberate spontaneity and a cultivated naturalness. The very constructedness of this image, however, attests to Kelly’s agency in defying the constraints of the star system.6 In 1957, Thomas Harris published a study on the intensive publicity build-up surrounding celebrities, focusing specifically on Kelly and Marilyn Monroe. He maintained that each studio assigned its stars stereotyped attributes, ensuring that ‘the star become […] a symbol to an unseen mass audience whose only contact with him/her is through the indirect means of the media’ (1991: 40). In their strategic suffusion of popular culture, publicity departments laid claim to the star image, expressing an authority that, by the mid-1950s, had dramatically diminished with the collapse of the studio system and the advent of television. With this historical context in mind, Kelly’s Jamaica sessions stand as a unique moment in star-making—particularly for a celebrity who, as Harris notes, rarely spoke 244

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for herself in studio publicity. Whereas the media featured statements from Kelly’s co-stars testifying to her ‘lady-like qualities’, there remained ‘a dearth of comment from the star herself as if it would be beneath her dignity’ (1991: 42) to engage in self-promotion. Yet in the Jamaica series, the symbol of patrician glamour highlights her dynamic being-in-the-world and, moreover, her identity as an active designer of her star image. If, to return to Sobchack’s terms, photographs ‘can be objectively possessed, circulated, and saved’ (2004: 142), which is especially true of those images published in fan magazines, then the actress’ part in the creation of the semi-candid genre stands as an act of literal self-preservation. Offering glimpses of herself while withholding total revelation, Kelly mediates her own imminence to lens and viewer. Most striking in its evocation of this balance between distance and proximity is the shot framing Kelly’s head and shoulders from a 3/4 perspective as she rises from the sea: hair wet and slicked back, shoulders bare, and her gaze direct. Lacking ornamentation, the image (which appeared on the June 24, 1955, cover of Collier’s) crafts a continuum of natural materiality: Kelly’s fair skin and hair perceived as an extension of the light on the water, her blue eyes reflecting the azure tones of the sea. Conant observes, ‘You trusted Grace’s beauty; you knew it was not built from clothes and makeup’ (1992: 25). And here, the near-mechanical question of ‘building up’ Kelly’s popular image shifts toward an exaltation of her as a wholly organic figure. Her being-in-the-world expressly evolving from the elements of that world, Kelly’s bodily self aligns with what Sobchack has called ‘the flesh of the world’ (2004: 301), even as the sheer harmony of this alliance between human and natural beauty evokes a sense of the otherworldly. Morin maintains that the im/mortal Olympian must negotiate a delicate balance between ‘ascending too high or descending too low’ (1963: 119) in the crafting of persona. Truly, the equanimity of Kelly’s gaze as she returns the look of the lens provides the centering point in the composition’s broader engagement with the actual and ideal.7 In so refining the portrait-medium to include only the essential elements of Kelly’s lived body and its environs, the simplicity of the image belies the complexity of its execution. After appearing in a pool scene in one of her films, Kelly wanted to achieve a similar natural effect for this photo shoot. Conant took eight photographs before capturing the shot, the original concept of which had included Kelly wearing a scuba mask (Conant 1992: 12). Yet even the series of photographs that move from such an expressly naturalistic milieu and do feature props convey a spare elegance, as exemplified by a number of shots of Kelly wearing a tailored shirt-and-shorts ensemble. As she leans against a porch pillar, her hair pulled back in a ponytail and holding a scarf, Kelly appears, as Conant describes it, ‘natural, unpretentious’ (1992: 25). Diverging from the timelessness of the water portrait, the styling of these shots presents a more contemporary look. Although, at the same time, the palette of the light blue blouse, khaki shorts, and rose-colored scarf seem to offer textural dimensionality to the background tones of sea and sky rather than defer to trends of the day. Indeed, where the water portrait merges Kelly’s body with ‘the flesh of the world’, a concern with the process of materialization defines these photographs. With an out-of-focus background only alluding to sun and beach, Kelly in the clarity of the foreground stands as an embodied concentration of these diffused elements. 245

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Sobchack has proposed that in the transformation from dynamic moment to possessed object, a still photograph prohibits the existential momentum of the lived body; though it may, as she notes, ‘imaginatively catalyze […] an animated drama’ in the ‘parallel’ registers of ‘memory or desire’ (2004: 145). This theorization of a semi-animated medium recalls the stylistic tenets of the semi-candid genre: gesturing toward the revelation of a complete figure while preventing total exposure; capturing moments of the star’s immediate experience while guarding her existential integrity. The drama evoked by the Jamaica sessions is ultimately one borne of the interplay between the imminent and remote, suggesting that even as Kelly shares the impact of her Barthesian air in an ‘act of grace’, the star’s ‘luminous shadow’ exists for public contemplation rather than consumption.

Moving Pictures Between the years of 1951 and 1956, Kelly appeared in eleven films—a relatively brief career that nonetheless stands as one of the most celebrated in Hollywood history. In 1952, Fred Zinnemann’s High Noon introduced Kelly to audiences as what the director called ‘a new face’ (quoted in Spada 1987: 82), and the star herself later recalled his part in shaping that new talent: ‘He’s the one who taught me to […] let the camera do some of the work. On the stage you have to emote […] and I’m afraid I overdid it. He taught me […] how to take it easy’ (quoted in Spada 1987: 86). Kelly went on to work with directors like John Ford and, of course, Alfred Hitchcock, and to co-star alongside Grant and James Stewart, masters of underplaying. In each of these subsequent films, she never ‘overdid’ a performance; as Spoto describes it, she instead conveyed ‘a mysterious amalgam of presence and reserve’ (2010: 198). Bruzzi characterizes this effect in sexual terms, commenting on the juxtaposition of ‘a suggestion of purity’ and the ‘smoldering eroticism’ so enthralling to Hitchcock (2000: 205–206). Hitchcock remarked, ‘It is important to distinguish between the big, bosomy blonde and the lady-like blonde with the touch of elegance, whose sex must be discovered’ (quoted in Bruzzi 2000: 205). Discovered, that is, by a camera that must—to use Kelly’s words—‘do some of the work.’ The question of Kelly’s cine-erotic impact may be linked, then, to her embodied relationship to the medium itself. Just as the paradox of a semi-candid imminence/remoteness defines Kelly’s air in still photography, so, too, does a fundamental duality underlie her filmic image: one between stasis and action. John Orr has written of Kelly’s physical impact in her Hitchcock appearances, noting that the director calls upon her ‘fluid presence’ (2005: 120) in a glamorous evocation of the serene as well as the sexual. Yet in her roles as inhibited women in Mogambo (Ford 1953) and The Country Girl (Seaton 1954), Kelly employs what Conant once called a ‘dancer’s awareness of her body’ (1992: 18) to express the heroines’ stifled sensuality—diverging from the alluring action of the Hitchcock Blonde to the restraint of unhappy characters. Recalling Barthes’s commentary, the moving image enables Kelly and the ambiguous self-revelation/-preservation of her photogénie to ‘emerge’ from a 246

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single frame and transform into an animated existence. Through a dialogue of attraction and resistance between Kelly and the camera, what Sobchack terms the ‘lived momentum’ (2004: 145) of cinema itself is heightened by the actress’ corporeal versatility—her spectrum between motion/seduction and stillness/sexual reservation granting further dimensionality to the spatio-temporal evolution of the films. Taking place on a safari in Kenya, Mogambo follows the ill-fated love affair between Victor, a world-weary hunter played by Clark Gable, and Linda (Kelly), the sheltered wife of an anthropologist. The opening scenes establish Linda/Kelly’s discomfited being-in-theworld, a vacillation between deliberate and flustered action: She sits primly upon meeting Eloise, the brash foil played by Ava Gardner, when just scenes before she has spastically slapped Victor in a moment of crisis. In a subsequent sequence, she sets off determinedly through the jungle to ‘get [her] bearings’ and literally falls into a trap. Playing Linda as utterly constrained, Kelly modifies her signature grace to give form to a desiring but inhibited heroine. This conflict reveals itself when Victor rescues Linda from her disastrous walk. Carrying her back to the house, he follows her to her bedroom door—only to have Linda hold him away at arm’s length. It is from this distance that the camera frames the following medium close-up of Linda/Kelly, as Victor/Gable aggressively tears a scarf from her hair, wraps it around her neck, and tries to pull her closer. Though the expression in her eyes shifts between indignation and longing, Linda/Kelly herself remains still, resistant in a pose of passive attraction. Admittedly melodramatic, the plot’s tension between convention and liberation nonetheless finds poignant representation in the actress’ corporeal expressivity. Finally leaning in for Victor’s kiss, looking eager in his embrace, running through the veldt, and turning gawkily to wave to him—Kelly-as-Linda brings a gravitas to the Technicolor spectacle. Her final scene violently concludes this frustrated locomotion, as she comes upon Eloise and Victor in a drunken ménage. Linda/Kelly holds herself erect in a shaking enactment of her prim posture, but then breaks down convulsively. Falling forward in sobs, she grabs blindly for a gun and shoots Victor. Awkward even in its desperation, Linda/ Kelly’s action is ultimately that of a woman uncomfortable with motion—no matter whether it brings her closer to fulfillment or asserts feelings of betrayal. As Linda’s first encounter with Victor demonstrates, she finds safety, but not satisfaction, in stasis. In The Country Girl, no such exotic interludes mitigate Georgie Elgin’s confinement. Winning an Academy Award for her performance, Kelly portrays a woman persecuted by Frank (Bing Crosby), her alcoholic husband and former stage star, and Bernie (William Holden), the director who gives Frank a second chance on Broadway. Filmed in black-and-white in a realist style, Country presents a bedraggled heroine: Dressed in drab clothes, wearing glasses and no makeup, the character is not prim but beleaguered, enduring an existence of thwarted motion in cramped flats and dressing rooms. When Bernie attempts to embrace her later in the film, Georgie/Kelly shifts between a frozen stoicism and jerky, abrupt deflections—the actions of a woman who has used her body to, as she states, ‘nurse, guard, coddle’ her husband rather than respond to passion. After Bernie has finally kissed 247

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her, Georgie turns her back to him and stands motionless until he exits. Yet at the end of the scene, the camera holds on to her image as she clutches her arms in remembrance of the embrace, beginning to respond to the sensory echo of desire. Accordingly, Bernie’s attentions inspire a change in Georgie, who has not, as she relates, been ‘looked at […] as a woman for years and years.’ She next appears in the image of a familiar Grace Kelly: evening gown, pearls, upswept hair. The transformation from frustration to liberation is not complete, however, until the last moments of the film, when Georgie/Kelly’s stasis turns to motion. After Frank has given his blessing to Georgie and Bernie’s romance at a cocktail party celebrating the Broadway opening, she realizes her abiding love for him. Georgie’s active decision translates into real action as she runs after Frank. Uncertain at first, Georgie/Kelly increases momentum until—framed in an expansive long shot—her minute form moves swiftly over deserted city streets to catch up with Frank. This ‘happy ending’ gestures toward redemption for both Frank, sober and successful, and Georgie, free to choose between two men who love her. That she utilizes this motion to return to Frank, however, suggests that like Linda before her, Georgie can only run so far. Indeed, the last images of Kelly in both films present her characters walking away from the camera, arm-in-arm with their husbands. If limitation and resistance temper Kelly’s (semi-)motility in Mogambo and Country, then expansiveness and fluidity define her motion in Hitchcock’s Rear Window (1954) and To Catch a Thief (1955). As Orr remarks, the director ‘turns her into a serenely performative icon’ (2005: 116) in his films, a motion picture parallel to the self-possessed/-presenting figure in Conant’s shots. In his study of Hitchcock, Orr theorizes a ‘triptych effect’ for those stars who appear in three of the director’s works, a tri-filmic construction capturing ‘the shift, the transfiguration’ as ‘the icon moves from one screen to the other’ (2005: 124–125). Orr reads Kelly’s personal triptych effect in terms of motion: Margot, the trapped victim of her husband’s plotting in Dial ‘M’ for Murder (Hitchcock 1954); Lisa, the self-aware career-girl courting a reluctant James Stewart in Rear Window; and Francie, the heiress who ‘catches’ Grant on the Riviera with ‘dangerous and elegant motion’ (2005: 125). Yet in drawing from Orr’s notion of the triptych effect, a consideration of Kelly’s greater cinematic embodiment reveals a similar tripartite affect, a range of corporeal expressivity marked by registers of stasis and inhibition/imprisonment (Linda, Georgie, Margot), poised selfconfidence (Lisa, the transformed Georgie), and, finally, the momentum of self-assertion in the pursuit of desire (Francie).8 Through this dynamic continuum, Kelly exists on-screen as, to cite Sobchack’s definition of a lived body, ‘a sentient, sensual, and sensible ensemble of materialized capacities and agency’ (2004: 2). It is, in fact, Kelly’s sensory impact that Hitchcock juxtaposes with the aura of the ideal feminine, crafting a fundamental nexus between the bodily and ethereal that gives rise to what Bruzzi describes as the star’s ‘ambivalent and subtle sexuality’ (2000: 205) in Hitchcock’s films. The critic goes on to state that Hitchcock fetishized this ambiguity (2000: 205). Yet more than reduce Kelly to a ‘fire-and-ice’ cliché, Hitchcock presents a figure of existential capaciousness. As projected on Hitchcock’s triptych screen, Kelly is both vulnerable and exuberant, statuesque in her classical beauty and refinement, yet intense in her physical desires. Through the eloquence of 248

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Illustration 1: The sensuality of the kiss is heightened by Lisa’s/Kelly’s active movement and the camera’s meditation on her face. Rear Window © Paramount Pictures, 1954.

her sentient and sensual being, then, Hitchcock’s Kelly explores the interplay between the carnal and the ideal. The classic close-up kiss in Rear Window makes manifest this exchange: Kelly moves toward the camera until her face suffuses the screen, then appears in profile as she kisses Stewart in slow motion—the purposeful sensuality of the act heightened by the camera’s own deliberate meditation on her face. Moreover, the languid but relentless succession of frames that cohere in the action of Kelly’s kiss invites the contemplation of cinema’s capacity, as Sobchack describes it, to represent ‘activity coming into being and being’ (2004: 146). Here, however, such momentum takes place in an oneiric rather than realist temporality, as the shot frames both Kelly’s earthly passion and the otherworldly rapture of its enactment. Such an image represents, as Orr notes, a release from Kelly’s previous Hitchcock incarnation as Margot, the betrayed wife in Dial (2005: 121). After killing the man whom her husband has hired to murder her, Margot is herself accused of murder. In a medium close-up condensing the duration of the trial, Kelly stands in silence, her movements confined to the heaving of her chest and the turning of her head to regard off-screen accusers. The sensorial impact of the scene centers on the question of action, which is denied to an imprisoned Margot, who is, in fact, punished for her fatal reaction, and limited to the lighting that changes from tones of blue to a blinding red. Throughout the shot, these lights steadily bleed the vitality from Margo’s image, just as her husband’s perverse pleasure in plotting against 249

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Illustration 2: Kelly infuses the Hitchcock Blonde with a stillness that transcends time and space. Dial ‘M’ for Murder © Warner Brothers, 1954.

her overpowers the buoyancy that had characterized Margo’s movements at the beginning of the film. More akin to Linda and Georgie than Lisa and Francie, Kelly’s portrayal of Margot infuses the experience of the Hitchcock Blonde with pathos rather than passion; a stillness of being that, as the design of the shot suggests, transcends conventions of time and space. In her final Hitchcock role, however, Kelly unites stasis and action in a performance exalting her entire range of motion. When introduced to Robie, Grant’s charming thief, Francie’s regal demeanor inspires him to call her ‘quietly attractive’—an appraisal overturned moments later when he walks her to the door of her hotel suite. All but gliding into the room, she turns and reaches up to kiss him in a single fluid motion, the duality of her statuesque remoteness and what Orr calls a ‘predatory’ (2005: 125) gesture reverberating as a promise of preternatural sensuality. It is in the climactic love scene, however, that the union between ideal and earthly reaches its apotheosis. Standing before a night sky filled with fireworks, Francie/Kelly seduces Robie/Grant with both her diamond necklace and her nearly hypnotic motions. As she acts out a theoretical burglary, moving between the light of the window to the shadows, Kelly-as-Francie’s white gown and diamonds, as well as a green glow from the outside display, lend her form an 250

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Illustration 3: Francie’s (Kelly’s) natural beauty channels the sublime to become a supernatural force. How to Catch a Thief © Paramount Pictures, 1955.

otherworldly luminosity. Her performance concludes with her settling suggestively on the sofa with feline languidness. Offering herself to the gaze while drawing it toward her, Francie/Kelly compels both the camera and Robie/Grant’s pursuit, inspiring the climactic kiss that, intercut with shots of the fireworks, merges fleshly pleasures with an incendiary spectacle. Recalling the im/mortal Olympian of whom Morin wrote, Kelly-as-Francie exists as a paradoxical being whose natural beauty becomes a supernatural force and whose corporeal form channels the sublime. Here, the slow motion of Lisa’s kiss evolves into a more kinetic lyricism, and the unhappy stasis of Linda, Georgie, and Margot transforms into the purposeful fulfillment of desire. After Kelly’s motility in To Catch has carried her to Grant’s embrace, she comes to rest between the mortal and the fantastic: half woman, she has given herself to her lover, and half goddess, she holds part of herself back.

Beginning the Conclusion: Voyage to Monaco, April 1956 In her 1963 article, Morin describes the vexed quality of Kelly’s public roles: ‘the actress has been replaced by the princess, and she is only a princess by marriage’ (1963: 112).9 Yet through the media discourse cementing her glory as a public figure, Kelly remained an Olympian phenomenon; she existed, in Morin’s words, as both ‘the star that she no longer really is and the princess that she hardly is’ (1963: 112).10 Published not ten years after her 251

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marriage, the comments address a limbo of identities that Kelly anticipated on her nuptial voyage. As she recalled, ‘The day we left … our ship was surrounded by fog, and that’s the way I felt […] I couldn’t help wondering, “What’s going to happen to me? What will this new life be like?”’ (quoted in Spoto 2010: 189). The photographs taken by Conant on the voyage, however, present Kelly’s sense of the unknown in terms of anticipation rather than trepidation. As Kelly’s personal photographer, Conant captured a number of semi-candid images that frame an exuberant bride-to-be: playing charades, laughing with friends, strolling along the decks with her dogs. Barthes has written of the viewer’s relationship to the punctum, or point of striking attraction, within a photograph, defining it as both an unsettling element within the composition and the realization of the photographed subject’s mortality, for the picture depicts both ‘this will be and this has been’ (2000: 96), with only ‘a simple click’ (2000: 92) of the camera providing the boundary between life, present at the moment of the shot, and death, haunting the final composition. This poignancy especially shades images of icons like James Dean and Monroe, figures whose untimely deaths imbue their photographs with an aura of imminent tragedy. Undoubtedly, Kelly’s death in a car accident at the age of 52 was both untimely and tragic, yet this series of photographs depicting ‘Grace Kelly’ on the cusp of ‘Princess Grace’ introduces another, more conditional temporality to her affect. The images inspire the viewer’s contemplation of potentiality—of what could be for Kelly. Moving between America and Europe, shifting from Hollywood stardom to an as-yet undetermined royal life, the Kelly pictured in the voyage series bears a transitional beingin-the-world—an ambiguity now extending from her persona and photographic materiality to include her very identity. No longer wholly a movie star and not yet a princess, Kelly here occupies a suspended context in which past successes cede to expectations for the future, and the present moment serves as the threshold to an imminent unknown. In Kelly’s words, she wondered ‘what sort of world was waiting […] on the other side of that fog’ (quoted in Spoto 2010: 189). Though historical perspective enables the viewer to know what was for the actress, the images nonetheless make manifest her period of indeterminacy. Indeed, the register of what could be as evoked by these photographs provides a temporal parallel to the very duality of Kelly’s photographic presence—her nexus between the corporeal and ethereal akin to this pause between past/present action and the promise of the future. Such questions of potentiality and suspension imbue the images of Kelly playing charades with a particular resonance. Acting out the unlikely phrase ‘watch the danger line,’ Kelly stands before a small audience of friends and family. In a cocktail dress and glasses, she gestures expansively, taps her arm to indicate syllables, and finally kneels on the floor with a dramatic bow (Conant 2007: 103). With a near-vertiginous effect, the compositions manage to capture the defining dualities of Kelly’s iconography: Charades is itself predicated upon a dialogue between physicality and abstraction, calling upon sensory and mental associations in a bodily articulation of written phrases. Moreover, as in the Jamaica sessions, Kelly’s presence bespeaks both detachment and intimacy, an engagement with the performative even in a personal context. The photographic process transforms motion into stillness in a 252

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distillation of her versatile corporeality. Finally, the very nature of game-playing demands an investment in what could be, the hopeful taking of action in the present without knowing its future result. The concluding image of the series, in which Kelly has folded herself over in an extreme bow, finds her suspended in such a pause. With her hands pressed to the ground, her engagement ring visible to the right of the frame, Kelly may have just completed the arc or be about to push herself back up; it may be a gesture of triumph or an admission of defeat. Without doubt, however, she has bowed out gracefully. After beginning the life that ‘was waiting on the other side of that fog,’ Kelly would reflect upon the duality that shadowed her personal life: I had to separate myself from what had been Grace Kelly […]. I could not be two people—an American actress and the wife of the Prince of Monaco. So during those first years, I lost my identity […]. Then, gradually, I joined up with myself again. (quoted in Spoto 2010: 193) Even after reclaiming her identity, Kelly never reclaimed her screen career. Early in their marriage, Rainier determined that his wife should retire. However, in 1962, the Palace announced Kelly’s acceptance of the title role in Hitchcock’s Marnie. Yet circumstances that remain vague required Kelly to withdraw from the project. As a friend of Kelly’s remarked, ‘She never thought she would have to give up acting forever’ (Spoto 2010: 200)—but, with what her husband acknowledged as ‘melancholy’ (Spoto 2010: 208), Kelly did.11 With such elements of triumph and tragedy, golden-age glamour and royal romance, the life story of Grace Kelly remains a narrative of Olympian scope. Kelly herself, though, resisted such idealizations. As she declared, ‘The idea of my life as a fairy tale is itself a fairy tale’ (quoted in Spoto 2010: xviv). Indeed, turning from biographical lore to a consideration of the dualities of her œuvre reveals that Kelly’s photographic being-in-the-world rivals her myth in its compelling complexities. Intrinsic to Kelly’s legend are the notions of her simultaneous withholding and presenting of self, her union of the carnal and ideal. Yet such ambiguities exceed the abstractions of persona to find material expression in her photographic legacy. Published in collections, edited in documentaries, and screened in retrospectives and home viewings, Kelly’s image continues to be sought after by an admiring public. The very nature of her image, however, prevents its complete possession. For whether designing a semi-candid moment, matching and resisting the movie camera’s motion, or pausing in a suspended temporality, Kelly inhabits the frame while alluding to—to borrow from Barthes—a ‘life external’ (2000: 57) to its parameters. Like the subject of Head’s inadvertent anecdote, Kelly remains both present and absent. References Barthes, Roland (2000), Camera Lucida, trans. Richard Howard. London: Vintage. Bruzzi, Stella (2000), ‘Grace Kelly,’ in Stella Bruzzi & Pamela Church Gibson (eds.), Fashion Cultures: Theories, Explorations and Analysis. London: Routledge, pp. 205–208. 253

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Conant, Howell (1992), Grace. London: Harper Collins. (2007), Remembering Grace. New York: Time. Dyer, Richard (1991), ‘A Star is Born and the Construction of Authenticity,’ in Christine Gledhill (ed.), Stardom: Industry of Desire. London: Routledge, pp. 132–140. Ellis, John (2007), ‘Stars as a Cinematic Phenomenon,’ in Su Holmes and Sean Redmond (eds.), Stardom and Celebrity: A Reader. London: Sage, pp. 90–97. Ford, John (1953), Mogambo. New York: Loew’s. Harris, Thomas (1991), ‘The Building of Popular Images: Grace Kelly and Marilyn Monroe,’ in Christine Gledhill (ed.), Stardom: Industry of Desire. London: Routledge, pp. 40–44. Head, Edith, with Jane Kesner Ardmore (1959), The Dress Doctor. Kingswood: The World’s Work. Hitchcock, Alfred (1954), Dial ‘M’ for Murder. Burbank: Warner Brothers. (1954), Rear Window. Los Angeles: Paramount. (1955), To Catch a Thief. Los Angeles: Paramount. Lacey, Robert (1994), Grace. London: Pan. Lévi-Strauss, Claude (1963), Structural Anthropology, trans. Claire Jacobson & Brooke Grundfest Schoepf. New York: Basic Books. Morin, Violette (1963), ‘Les Olympiens,’ Communications, 2, pp. 105–121. Orr, John (2005), Hitchcock and 20th-Century Cinema. London: Wallflower. Seaton, George (1954), The Country Girl. Los Angeles: Paramount. Sobchack, Vivian (2004), Carnal Thoughts: Embodiment and Moving Image Culture. Berkeley: University of California Press. Spada, James (1987), Grace: The Secret Lives of a Princess. London: Penguin. Spoto, Donald (2010), High Society: Grace Kelly and Hollywood. London: Arrow.

Notes 1 This and subsequent quotations from Morin are my translations of the original French text; here ‘défier la réalité’. 2 ‘L’Olympien est en effet un homme fait Dieu mais en même temps un Dieu fait homme.’ 3 These series of photographs may be found in, among various other Kelly retrospectives, two compilations of her work with Conant: Grace (1992) and Remembering Grace (2007). 4 ‘Ils ont l’art de monter en restant à terre.’ 5 In related terms, John Ellis has proposed a parallel between the star image—with its paradoxical evocation of ‘ordinary and extraordinary’—and the ‘photo effect’, or ‘the paradox that the photograph presents an absence that is present’ (2007: 90). He goes on to state that motile medium of cinema suggests, but not necessarily ensures, the ‘synthesis’ of these ‘incomplete’ registers (2007: 90). While this study will engage with questions of presence and absence, it diverges from Ellis’ notion of a ‘fragmented’ star image and, instead, utilizes embodied approaches that privilege the singular duality of Kelly’s effect and the substance of her being-in-the-world.

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6 Kelly, indeed, approached her entire career with just such a sense of agency. As Spoto notes, she regularly refused mandated roles from MGM and instead campaigned for better parts (2010: 114–116; 125–128). 7 It is interesting to note that Collier’s ‘flipped’ the image for its cover—thus breaking, however inadvertently, with the Western tradition of left-to-right positioning that suggests the subject’s movement. (With thanks to Michael Fuchs for this insight.) It could perhaps be argued that such a modification—not only altering Conant’s original composition but also limiting the sense of Kelly’s motility therein—reflects the magazine culture’s Sobchackian possession and circulation of images; a process that, again, speaks to the complexities of Kelly’s ‘momentum’ and agency within the series itself. 8 In her final two films, The Swan (Charles Vidor, 1956) and High Society (Charles Waters, 1956), Kelly utilized the expressly elegant fluidity that marked her last two Hitchcock appearances. 9 ‘L’actrice a été remplacée par la princesse et la princesse ne l’est que par alliance.’ 10 ‘Elle est […] la star qu’elle n’est plus réellement et la princesse qu’elle est très peu.’ 11 Spoto concludes that a miscarriage prevented Kelly from making the film—an assertion that, though thoroughly researched, remains unauthorized by the Palace (2010: 202–203).

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Chapter 12 ‘Its Own Special Attraction’: Meditations on Martyrdom and the Iconicity of Civil Rights Widows Brenda Tindal

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f scholar Trudier Harris’ suggestion that ‘martyrdom is its own special attraction’ (2001: 289) is true, then what do we make of the grieving female subject whose public life bears the imprint, or in some instances the burden of a martyr’s legacy? To be sure, one of the most dramatic, albeit tragic, ways in which African American women entered the national imagination during the Civil Rights era was through the mortality and martyrdom of black boys and men. Who could forget the visage of Mamie Till Bradley, her face etched with agony and her entire body leveled by the weight of sorrow, at the homegoing service for her fourteen-year-old son Emmett Till (see Illustration 1)? While visiting his maternal family in Money, Mississippi, during the summer of 1955, Till—a Chicagoan and largely unfamiliar with the South’s racist underbelly—was kidnapped, bludgeoned, and shot in the head for allegedly flirting with a white woman. His body, nearly unrecognizable, bloated, and barbwired to a cotton gin fan, was found floating in the Tallahatchie River three days later. With coverage by black news publications such as Jet magazine and the Chicago Defender, Till Bradley gave agency to her son’s disfigured body by displaying his remains in an open casket funeral, where it was instantly transformed into a national monument of black suffering. She made visible ‘what white southerners had carefully, violently, rendered invisible’ (Henninger 2007: 43). With this courageous act, Till Bradley dared the whole nation to bear witness to the horrors of ‘Southern justice’, single-handedly heightened the clarion call for civil and human rights, and offered up her son as the movement’s ‘sacrificial lamb’.1 But, as historian Ruth Feldstein has posited, the media’s construction of Till’s murder ‘revolved around the contested [racialized] meaning of motherhood and respectability’ (2000: 89) and brought Till Bradley’s performance of bereavement into sharp focus. In assuming the role of mater delorosa (mother full of grief), Feldstein explains, ‘Bradley injected motherhood more forcefully into the political landscape of liberalism and defined herself as a political subject’ (2000: 89). In this gendering of mourning, Feldstein underscores the political uses of grief within the realm of American public life. Furthermore, she highlights the important intervention Till Bradley made by politicizing her son’s grisly murder and, in turn, motherhood. In this regard, the grieving female subject, like the masculinized martyr, is indeed ‘its own special attraction’ (Harris 2001: 289). Nearly a decade after Till’s lynching, the murders of Medgar Evers in 1963, Malcolm X in 1965, and Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., in 1968 marked an epoch in the nation’s relentless cycle of hate crimes and political assassinations.2 Coinciding as it did with the assassinations of President John F. Kennedy and Senator Robert F. Kennedy in 1963 and 1968, respectively, this macabre series of violent acts also contributed to the burgeoning

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Illustration 1: Mamie Till Bradley and unidentified persons at her son’s funeral in 1955. Image courtesy of Press-Scimitar Photo, Special Collections, University of Memphis Libraries.

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ranks of women—black and white—who, like Till Bradley, were thrust into the everexpanding sorority of bereaved mothers and wives. It is within this context that Myrlie Evers-Williams, widow of Evers, Betty Shabazz, widow of Malcolm X, and Coretta Scott King, widow of Dr. King, entered the mediascape as ‘movement widows’—a term used within this chapter to refer to prominent African American widows who emerged from the social and political milieu of the modern Civil Rights movement.3 While this chapter is in part a meditation on martyrdom, it is also concerned with the iconicity of movement widows. As Isabel Molina Guzmán and Angharad N. Valdivia have argued, iconicity—when framed as a form of representation—is not limited to the iconic status of a subject. Instead, it ‘involves the transformation of meaning that arises through the interactive relationship between images, the practices surrounding that image, and the social context within which the image is produced and received by audiences’ (2004: 209). With this in mind, a semiotic reading of photojournalistic discourses related to the deaths of Civil Rights martyrs offers a critical vantage point from which to consider the early representational differences between Evers, Malcolm X, and King, and how such delineations inform the ways in which their widows were configured within American public life. This chapter begins this process by examining the varying ways Life—arguably the foremost news magazine of the twentieth century—editorialized the assassination of fallen black leaders and, in turn, the manner in which movement widows were appropriated within such coverage. Even a cursory glance is enough to reveal that Life was influenced by the national preconceptions of Evers, Malcolm X, and King’s political personas. However, a closer reading of this periodical reveals even more about mainstream media and the sociopolitical determinants that shape the memory and meaning of iconic martyrs and their widows.

Of Life and Death Given the nature of this study, there are a variety of periodicals that would merit examination, including Time, Newsweek, Look, Jet, and Life’s African American counterpart, Ebony magazine. However, Life’s significance and its distinct tapestry of photography and prose have been instrumental in transforming the universal events of American life and death from pedestrian to iconic. Indeed, Life’s ubiquitous influence is engendered in its credo: ‘for mankind to see and be instructed’ (Harrison 2002: 166). As a leading purveyor of the photoessay genre with a global readership, it is safe to assume that Life, during its greatest period of prosperity and circulation, stood as an authority on American culture and society. The race conundrum and the exigency of the black freedom struggle were no exception. Life’s 10x16 format, glossy pages, and signature red and white LIFE logo magnified the nation’s leading stories and gave the shocking photos emanating from the Civil Rights drama a ‘vividness and sense of enormity that newspapers couldn’t touch’ (Roberts & Klibanoff 2006: 322). The heartrending images and stories—protestors being pummeled by police batons, snarled at by angry canines, shocked with electric cattle prods, and beaten down by the 261

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pressure of water cannons—are visual and textual narratives of the nation’s race war and its casualties. Interestingly, Life’s representation of the death and funerals of Civil Rights martyrs worked to situate these political actors within the Manichean battle of ‘good’ versus ‘evil’. This binary construction cast the World War II veteran who set out to ensure freedom and democracy at home (Evers) and the charismatic Baptist clergyman who espoused the Christian tenets of love and understanding (King) as representations of ‘good’. Moreover, Evers and King had protested in the way Americans preferred: nonviolently. These portrayals were juxtaposed with the construction of a black Muslim whose checkered criminal history and ‘by any means necessary’ polemics rendered him as ‘evil’ (Malcolm X). The comparisons between Evers, King, and Malcolm X are further enlarged considering their ‘place’ within the pantheon of American martyrdom. Evers, the first Mississippi field secretary for the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), was ‘Mississippi’s martyr’. Notwithstanding the national implications of his activism, Evers’ martyrdom has been regionalized and largely commemorated at the local level. The Southern provenance of Evers’ celebrity is appropriate given his feverish commitment to making the United States a better place for African Americans, starting with rural Mississippi, where his political campaign was predominately waged. The publicity Evers’ death received in Life magazine can be read on one level as a matter of national concern and memoriam. However, it also seems to suggest that Evers’ death and funeral was an opportune moment to further position the South, particularly Mississippi, as the crucible of race relations, while casting the nation as the cradle of racial liberalism. Malcolm X’s militant opposition to the American establishment prevents him from fitting neatly into the domain of martyrdom. One could argue that his former affiliation with the Nation of Islam (NOI), his presumed militancy, his mockery of President John F. Kennedy’s assassination, and perhaps the way he died—reportedly at the hands of NOI members—not only branded him as ‘evil’, but also meant that there were competing opinions regarding his martyrdom. Though Malcolm X’s fierce politics and sartorial sensibility (e.g., astrakhan hat and brown line glasses) eventually made him a postmodern hero and cultural icon by the 1990s, this was not always the case.4 Before the 1990s reformation of his image, in some circles Malcolm X was an ominous figure and was largely condemned as religiously deviant, violent, unpatriotic, and thus the antithesis to prescribed notions of American heroism. In other camps, his lumpenproletariat roots appealed to intellectuals and urban dwellers alike. They gravitated toward his beguiling smile, quip, and sidewalk evangelism on Black Nationalism. To this group, he was an avatar of African American masculinity, brilliant and impressively stalwart in his commitment to black self-determination. Nonetheless, at his death, Malcolm X was at once a villain and cultural hero—a duality that emerges within Life’s coverage of his assassination. Arguably, of the three martyrs, King’s death has had greater pathos. The founding of the Martin Luther King Jr. Center for Nonviolent Social Change, a federal holiday in observance of his birthday, and, more recently, the construction of a monument on the national mall in 262

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his honor, are but a few examples of his enduring legacy and beatification. But even before his death, King had emerged as a national martyr—destined to be a transhistorical figure. His public theology—infused with democratic idealism, Christian ethics, classical intellect, and the tenets of civil disobedience—made his death all the more symbolic. In many respects, King was the ‘altar’ for white American atonement and redemption. For African Americans, he was a symbol of their own greatness and vulnerability, or to borrow from Gordon Parks, ‘in death [King] made us know who we are and what we are. He made us know that we were still in a land of oppression and assassins’ (1968: 29). Life devoted nearly sixteen pages in one issue to the funeral and death of Reverend King, the ‘drum major for justice’ and the dean of moral conscientiousness and integrity, compared to the five and six pages for Evers and Malcolm X’s deaths, respectively. Movement widows, too, were subjected to the hierarchy of martyrdom and its attendant representational and reputational politics. By virtue of their hypervisibility—signifi ed by their presence on the covers and within the pages of Life—Evers-Williams and Scott King were configured as widows par excellence. Their pictures, many of which featured them tending to their grieving children and sitting in quiet dignity at their husbands’ funerals, could easily be read as sacred iconography. These images echo E. B. and E. C. Kellogg’s nineteenth-century lithograph The Prayer of the Fatherless (c. 1842–1848). Kellogg’s print of a widow cradling an orphan is inscribed with the biblical idiom: ‘We beseech thee, O’ Lord to defend, and provide, for the fatherless children, and widows and all that are desolate and oppressed’ (Pike & Armstrong 1980: 96). The pious depictions of movement widows, even without the sacral epitaph, were visually gripping. As a testament to this, an image of Scott King with her daughter, Bernice, laying in her lap at King’s 1968 funeral was so compelling that it earned photographer Monetta J. Sleet, Jr., the 1969 Pulitzer Prize in Photography.5 In contrast, Shabazz was marginalized within Life’s coverage of her husband’s assassination. Despite being his wife of seven years, mother of his six children (two of which were unborn at the time of his death), and having witnessed his murder at the rostrum, it is remarkable that she was not provided the prominent visual and narrative space accorded to Evers-Williams and later to Scott King. In fact, interested parties had to refer to Ebony magazine to find a cover feature and story on Shabazz. Even in this case, however, it did not appear until June 1969, four years after Malcolm X’s slaying. Malcolm X’s controversial and hotly contested place within the political landscape of his time undoubtedly affected the way he and Shabazz were mobilized in the national imaginary. In this regard, Life’s Janus-faced approach reveals its complicity in manipulating national sentiment and its role in mythologizing the movement’s tableau of martyrdom and mourning. Specifically, the way Evers-Williams, Shabazz, and Scott King were covered in this publication (and in some cases, conspicuously not covered during their darkest hours) says much about the media’s canonization of martyrs and its role in dictating who should be mourned, to what extent, and whose mourning is worthy of explicit public acknowledgement. 263

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Contextualizing Movement Widows Often described as ‘brave’, ‘dignified’, and ‘graceful’ mourners, movement widows have lived most significantly in the national conscience as paragons of grief, exemplars of respectability and motherhood, and as custodians of their husbands’ social memories. These notions of Evers-Williams, Shabazz, and Scott King have been mediated primarily, though not exclusively, through the mainstream media and by personal and cultural expectations. To be sure, black women have long been idealized as formidable and relentless in spirit and stamina. For example, Harriet Tubman, Sojourner Truth, and Fannie Lou Hamer, to name a few, have been operationalized as the epitome of the ‘strong black woman’, due in part to their storied resilience in the face of incredible adversity.6 Notwithstanding its problematic connotations and measurable consequences, the ‘strong black woman’ rubric is often employed as a redemptive category. While black women are readily identified as ‘strong’ and ‘brave’, they are rarely defined as ‘ladies’ without exciting suspicion. A clear testament to this is found in a cryptic letter addressed to Scott King, dated April 9, the day King was buried. Responding to Mrs. King’s comportment during her husband’s televised funeral, the anonymous author wrote: ‘Just who did you think you were—another Mrs. JF Kennedy??? To me, you were just another wig covered [sic] burr-head plotting more riots to carry on the Black Kings’ [sic] program.’7 Here, Scott King is perceived as a threat to the cultural stability of whiteness and hegemonic femininity, while Jacqueline Kennedy is invoked as its exemplar. In the racist imaginary, the idea that a black woman could rival the style and composure of ‘Mrs. JF Kennedy’ contravened the concept of ‘ladyhood’. Understood as the domain of white womanhood, ladyhood—anchored by the moral precepts of domesticity, purity, piety, and submissiveness—has historically been positioned as a virtuous pedestal inaccessible to African American women. Black womanhood has been maligned and has endured its share of dubious assumptions, many of which have placed black women on the periphery of respectability, matrimony, and thus widowhood. However, Evers-Williams, Shabazz, and Scott King are exceptional in that they represent a coalescing of strength and femininity that defies racialized conceptions of American womanhood. In this regard, the movement-widow paradigm functions as an alternative lens through which to re-imagine the complexity of black women’s lives in the public sphere, in general, and as grieving subjectivities, in particular. Furthermore, as the moral compasses through which the nation remembers its fallen black heroes, movement widows operate as counter-narratives to popular scripts mediating black female corporeality in American culture and society. Aligned as they are with social movements that were predicated on respectability and with the men who fought on their frontlines, movement widows had to carefully govern their public and private lives. A movement widow who failed in this task ran the risk of dishonoring her husband’s political reputation, at best, or precipitating the complete erasure of her spouse from the annals of civil and human rights, at worst. In this way, movement 264

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widows are monumentalized as political symbols, if not conduits of men who ‘died for the cause.’ Naturally, the modus operandi of those bequeathed such legacies was to perform in a manner that served the memory of the dead and preserved the integrity of the movement. After all, giving one’s life represents the highest service one can offer to a cause and, in most cases, ensures martyrdom. From this perspective, resilience, rectitude, and equanimity can be read as hallmarks of ‘proper’ widowhood. In her autobiography Watch Me Fly, EversWilliams elaborates on this concept when she proclaims: The fact was, I didn’t think I could deal with Medgar’s death. In those first crushing months, I automatically chauffeured the two older children to and from school, took care of threeyear old Van, prepared meals, ran errands. Sometimes I even smiled at people, acting sweet, appreciative, forgiving. I had to carry on. I feared that if I became too abrasive, expressing the true extent of my deep hatred, my family and I would be shunned. I would not have been seen as the ‘proper’ civil rights widow, and worst of all, Medgar might be forgotten, I could not allow myself to believe that his death was in vain. So I acted the part of the brave martyr’s wife. (1999: 49–50; my emphases) For movement widows, in particular, their displays of strength and emotional control worked to cement their husbands’ legacies of heroism and masculinity and sustained their cultural and political relevance. Against the backdrop of an era that was as acrimonious as it was heroic, suffering, or what scholar Debra Walker King calls ‘blackpain’, was a ‘powerful resource for the advancement of civil rights and justice’ (2008: 58). While King refers to the various forms of torture and trauma to which black bodies have historically been subjected (e.g., lynching, rape, castration, burnings, whippings), the solemn pageantry of grieving black women functions as a different kind of blackpain, complete with its own set of political and didactic ends. According to Evers-Williams, the NAACP used Evers’ assassination as an opportunity to ‘reestablish itself as the preeminent civil rights organization’ (1999: 121). Having noted an increase in the organization’s membership after her enlistment, Evers-Williams continues, ‘the children and I, became a powerful public relations tool’ (1999: 121; my emphasis). Her admission is demonstrative of the important role she played as steward of her husband’s legacy and the political capital she provided for the movement and causes for which he had risked his life. Mamphela Ramphele—a movement widow in her own right8—emphasizes the liminal position of being the widow of a martyred leader and the social phenomenology of pain and suffering in her essay ‘Political Widowhood in South Africa: The Embodiment of Ambiguity.’ She writes: ‘Political widowhood raises questions […] about the extent to which social space is created or denied for the public expression of pain, loss, and suffering of individual social actors’ (1997: 99). Notwithstanding the cultural, temporal, and geopolitical differences that separate South Africa from the United States and, of course, the Anti-Apartheid movement 265

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Illustration 2: A Martyr—and the Negro Presses On, Life, June 28, 1963. Photograph by John Loengard, © Time, 1963.

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from the Civil Rights struggle, my conception of ‘movement widowhood’ extrapolates upon Ramphele’s ‘political widowhood’. More specifically, the idea that ‘certain women’s bodies’ (1997: 101) are monumentalized by the political apparatus while others dwell in obscurity is especially relevant to my analysis. Regarded as a sacred triumvirate, Evers-Williams, Shabazz, and Scott King’s narratives of loss and mourning have been erroneously homogenized. For example, in U.S. cultural parlance, they have been variously referred to as ‘a society of three’, ‘the Three M’s’, and the ‘Civil Rights widows’ (Rickford 2003). These eponyms, each reflective of the common threads that connect the lives of these women, also work to eschew the nuances that shape their individual trajectories and expressions of grief. In this regard, this chapter challenges the impulse to imagine these women as a bereaved monolith.

Myrlie Evers-Williams On the June 28, 1963, cover of Life magazine, an African American woman was featured wearing an expression of grief, complete with dark pillbox hat, white elbow-length gloves, a two-strand pearl necklace, and an ebony shift dress (see Illustration 2). She is pictured with a bereaved child. Together, their anonymity is only resolved by the small caption that reads: ‘MEDGAR EVERS’ WIDOW CONSOLES HER SON AT FUNERAL SERVICE.’ This photograph of the newly widowed Myrlie Evers-Williams and her son, Darrell Kenyatta Evers, has since become part of the iconography of the modern Civil Rights movement, forever casting Evers-Williams as the widow of a fallen hero and the mother of his children. Photographer John Loengard’s picture of Evers-Williams and her grief-stricken son elicited widespread sentimentality from Life readers, upon which the publication capitalized with its July 12, 1963, issue. One reader from Cincinnati, Ohio, described the photograph as a ‘poignant portrait of grief […] so unforgettably etched on the viewer’s conscience, cannot help but win support for the cause [Evers] espoused’ (Life Magazine 1963b: 21). Another letter from a reader in Santa Cruz, California, added that ‘this single picture should supply us all with the material for a lifetime of atonement’ (Life Magazine 1963b: 21). The photo’s compelling articulation of grief, exemplified in young Darrell Evers’ face, coupled with Evers-Williams’ staggering display of composure and stateliness, led Mrs. Dennis Oakes of Hollywood, Florida, to write a letter of apology on behalf of white Americans, in which she urged: Let every wife and mother look at the tears on her face. Remember them every time the word ‘nigger’ is used in front of our children. We are the people who are going to mold the minds of our babies. We are the ones who will plant the seed of prejudice. (Life Magazine 1963b: 21) That Evers-Williams—a black woman, deprived of full citizenship and now charged with the task of being a single parent, in 1963, no less—stood as a moralizing figure, from whom 267

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white mothers could take cues in promoting the social conscience of their own children, is profound. The photograph and cover story did more than capture the imagination of a sympathetic readership. In fact, as demonstrated in the aforementioned responses, it had the uncanny ability to make legible both the cost and legitimate aims of the black freedom struggle. It refashioned notions of black motherhood and suggested that even in the face of tragedy, black women could emerge as paragons of strength and ladyhood. Even though one should bear in mind that these ‘Letters to the [Life] Editors’ undergo editorial selection, collectively, they say much about the impact of Evers’ death on the reading public and even more about the didactic quality of this representation of Evers-Williams as dignified widow and attentive mother. Embodied in the constellation of letters is a sense of collective empathy, or what Debra Walker King cogently refers to as ‘civilizing guilt’, which she suggests occurs once the witness to blackpain actively couches what he or she sees in terms of privilege and disadvantage, right and wrong, moral and immoral, pride and shame. It encourages the perpetrators of harm, as well as agents of vicarious assault (those that witness blackpain but do not participate directly in it), to respond by changing the circumstances of inequality and injustice through social action. (2008: 58) In one sense, like the letters to the editor, the June 28, 1963, issue engages with the discourses of civilizing guilt. More specifically, the cover image of Evers-Williams and son are buttressed by an editorial, a requiem written by the widow, and other images that are endowed with the principle themes of civilizing guilt: acknowledging blackpain and the ways in which social and political inertia perpetuates it. For instance, in ‘Martyr to an Immoral System,’ Life editors summed up the ethos of Jackson, Mississippi, as a ‘system that breeds its own violence,’ and therefore, a place in conflict with the ‘laws and spirit of the nation’ (Life Magazine 1963a: 4). Such progressive rhetoric makes the argument that there was a national [white] consensus regarding the iniquities of racism. Furthermore, it suggests that it was those uncooperative white Mississippians who were responsible for Evers’ death, and as such, guilty of aiding and abetting the country’s miscarriage of equality and justice for its black citizenry. This notion of racial liberalism is further engendered in Life’s claim that ‘white people, North and South, approve[d]’ of dismantling the racial caste system. Here, Life seems to argue that by 1963, racism was no longer en vogue, and the South, specifically Jackson, Mississippi, was lagging behind in the areas of race relations. Perhaps most illustrative of the article’s use of civilizing guilt is the question: ‘when are [the white moderates in Jackson] going to make themselves heard?’ on the matter of black disfranchisement. Here, Life editors draw a correlation between the indolence of political centrists and the persistence of black debasement in the South. Ultimately Life’s discourse of civilizing guilt works to localize, if not regionalize, Evers’ martyrdom. 268

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Coretta Scott King As the narrative of the black freedom struggle grew to be one of America’s most compelling news stories of the twentieth century (Roberts & Klibanoff 2006: 7), the death of Dr. King was a monumental climax in this riveting drama. During his life, news stories about King and his gospel of nonviolence were constantly covered in Life magazine and other mainstream news publications, and so was his death. More immediately, King’s death inspired a succession of coverage in Life in April 1968, the month and year an assassin’s bullet took his life. Under the auspices of a ‘Week of Shock’, the April 12 publication issued notice of King’s death alongside reports regarding the de-escalation of violence in Vietnam and President Lyndon Johnson’s decision not to re-run for the presidency. Nevertheless, ‘Martyrdom in Memphis’ was the leading story, for the magazine created what amounted to a cover story tribute to the ‘apostle of nonviolence’, complete with a portrait of King underlined with his dates of birth and death. In contrast, the locus of the April 19 issue was King’s funeral and processional in Atlanta, Georgia, and the spasm of rioting that took place in urban enclaves throughout the United States. Indeed, the funeral for King was a colossal occasion complete with celebrities, dignitaries, movement leaders, journalists, and community folks alike. According to journalist Rebecca Burns, King’s burial ceremony was ‘the largest funeral staged for a private U.S. citizen’ (2011: 138), drawing an estimated 150,000 mourners. Life’s cover story honed in on one mourner in particular: ‘Mrs. Martin Luther King’ (see online companion). At the most obvious level, the cover, laden with strength and pain, is evidence of an American tragedy. The close-up of Scott King’s profile highlights a peculiar intermingling of beauty and grief—the nascent stages of her stoic performance as movement widow. Her head, regally elevated and decorated by manicured curls and an ornate toque and veil, seems to foreshadow her graceful stewardship of King’s legacy. There is, of course, nothing unique in Life’s editorial decision to use a photograph of Scott King at her husband’s funeral service on their cover. After all, Evers-Williams had received similar photojournalistic treatment, and as the famous Life photographer Alfred Eisenstaedt once stated: ‘[S]uffering looks much better in pictures. […] It’s much more dramatic than happiness’ (quoted in Loengard 1998: 11). However, this picture of Mrs. King conveys a different message than those implied by the other covers under discussion. Photographer Flip Schulke’s image positions Scott King as an icon of bereavement and one with whom the nation mourns. This is further emphasized by the issue’s headline, ‘America’s Farewell in Anger and Grief,’ which is suggestive of how King’s assassination advanced an interesting dialectic between race and national belonging within public discourse. That is to say, only in King’s death did he and Mrs. King ‘belong’; during his life, however, their race precluded full citizenship—the ultimate marker of one’s acceptance within the nation-state. Dominated by the iconography of mourning and ritual, Life deployed visual and textual imagery that went beyond a report of King’s funeral. Instead, it memorialized him in such a way that its readers could ‘participate’ in the nation’s melancholy. Included in this issue were 269

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vivid—almost tangible—images of the entire King family sitting on Ebenezer’s front row pew; of Vice-President Hubert Humphrey ‘expressing the nation’s sorrow—and his own’; of activist Stokely Carmichael issuing his condolences to Mrs. King; of a tearful Ralph Bunche, who was then the Under-Secretary-General to the United Nations; and of the seemingly endless funeral processional. The photographs were complemented by photojournalist Gordon Park’s article ‘A Man Who Tried to Love Somebody,’ and an excerpt of Scott King’s speech, given in King’s stead at the sanitation workers strike and rally in Memphis, Tennessee, where she asked the probing question: ‘How many men must die?’ The excerpt of Scott King’s speech in Life works in concert with the cover photo in terms of centering her within the memorial discourse and providing her with the textual venue to place King’s life, death, and philosophy into context. She urges the audience: And those of you who believe in what Martin Luther King, Jr. stood for, I would challenge you today to see that his spirit never dies and that we will go forward from this experience, which to me represents the Crucifixion, on toward the resurrection and the redemption of the spirit […]. I believe that this nation can be transformed into a society of love, of justice, peace, and brotherhood where all me can really be brothers. (quoted in Parks 1968: 34–35) For Scott King, this was not just an appeal to African Americans, but to the nation; thus she charged all Americans with being accountable for the creation of a place where ‘all men can really be brothers.’ Furthermore, she employs pious rhetorical strategies (e.g., ‘Crucifixion’, ‘redemption of the spirit’, and ‘resurrection’) that transfigure King’s death and seemed to encourage her audience to continue to do the unfinished work that her husband left in his wake. In doing so, she emerges as the ‘appropriate’ purveyor of King’s Christian message of civil disobedience and black respectability, if not a proxy serving in his honor. Nonetheless, this would not be the last time that Life accorded Scott King space in its magazine. In fact, Life published excerpts from her memoir My Life with Martin Luther King, Jr. (1969) in the September 12, 1969, and the September 19, 1969, issues, entitled ‘He Had a Dream’ and ‘Tragedy in Memphis: The Assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr.,’ respectively. While Life seemed to make a noticeable attempt in accommodating Scott King in its pages, the same cannot be said for Malcolm X’s widow, Betty Shabazz.

Betty Shabazz In her book The Suffering Will Not Be Televised: African American Women and Sentimental Political Storytelling, Rebecca Wanzo argues that black women are ‘frequently ineligible as sympathetic objects for media and political concern’ and they have ‘struggled to gain political currency against narratives that often exclude them from stories of proper’ victimhood (2009: 2–3). While Life deemed Evers-Williams and Scott King appropriate sympathetic 270

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objects, Shabazz was not elevated in this way. She, after all, was the widow of a man regarded as the ‘Apostle of Hate’ (Rickford 2003: 248). Perhaps the greatest testament to Malcolm X’s distorted legacy and its residual effect on Shabazz is Life’s March 5, 1965, issue. On its cover is an image of the ‘bombed out’ NOI Mosque No. 7 in Harlem, New York, trailed by the melodramatic headline ‘A Monument to Negro Upheaval: Death of Malcolm X and the Resulting Vengeful Gang War’ (see Illustration 3). Shorn of the veiled widow and weeping child, this issue veers far away from the elegiac visual and textual tropes used in the narrativization of the deaths of Evers and King. To further explicate the cover story, a leading editorial entitled ‘The Violent End of the Man Called Malcolm X’ initiates the discussion of his tragic fall. Here, Malcolm X is defined as ‘the shrillest voice for black supremacy,’ and the author writes that Malcolm X was notorious for harangues that ‘flay[ed] the hated white man.’ To make matters worse, unlike Evers and King, Malcolm X did not die from the rope and faggot, per se. Instead, his death was made all the more horrible because his alleged assassins were not ‘Whitey’ as the article proclaims, but ‘members of his own race’ (27). To illustrate Malcolm X’s ‘violent end’, Life editors relied on the economy of photographs taken shortly after a fusillade of bullets ripped through his chest. With reproach, one Life reader from Boston, Massachusetts, wrote of the magazine’s import of these images: ‘The pictures of the slain body of Malcolm X sickened and disgusted me […]. If this is your way of “getting even” with a man you happened to disagree with, it is a very cheap one’ (Schumann 1965: 25). In a similar vein, another photograph in particular captured Mrs. Shabazz kneeling over her husband’s expired body and sobbing: ‘They killed him’ (Life Magazine 1965: 27). If Shabazz’s presence during Malcolm X’s assassination is dramatic, then the fact that his children were also eyewitnesses is astonishing. Ironically, these details are conspicuously absent from the editorial. The elision of this information suggests the avoidance of any type of sympathy that might emanate from the mother-widow-martyr imagery as a textual frame. In fact, the story of Malcolm X’s death and his survivors yields to the narrative of fratricide, urban mayhem, and vendetta. Perhaps it is difficult to vilify Malcolm X and then, in the same breath, ascribe to him the virtues of American manhood: being both a father and a husband. Published six days after Malcolm X’s February 27 funeral, it is equally revealing that Life did not cover this major event. The death rites of martyrs were an enduring trope in Life’s memorialization and photojournalistic discourses. For instance, the funerals of Evers, JFK, King, RFK, and even the death of a less publicized martyr and cleric, Reverend James Reeb, merited cover stories. Furthermore, for fallen heroes, the funeral is a ‘form of political theater that has to be managed to achieve the desired outcomes for the political formation involved’ (Ramphele 1997: 106). It is also an important moment in which the bereaved family (including the political family) becomes central to the tableaux of death and martyrdom. Since Malcolm X’s funeral was obviously not covered by Life, Shabazz’s position as movement widow was compromised, and the grief work that comes with this role was effectively ‘disenfranchised’.9 Absent are the photographs of the stately widow, wearing the veil of grief. Nor was there space reserved for Shabazz to write a requiem in honor 271

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Illustration 3: The ‘bombed out’ Nation of Islam Mosque No. 7 in Harlem, New York, featured on the cover of Life’s March 5, 1965, issue. Used by permission from the Estate of Nat Fein.

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of Malcolm X, as was previously afforded Evers-Williams. Curiously, however, Life editors enlisted Gordon Parks, who wrote an article that offset the censorious lead editorial. The inclusion of Parks’ piece ‘I was a Zombie then—Like All Muslims, I was Hypnotized’ in the same issue illuminates the Manichean battle over the memory of Malcolm X in American society. The article was also a dangerous undertaking, and Parks was fully aware of this before his contribution went to print. A day after the magazine had published the story, Parks was informed that he was a moving target for no less than four assassins, and the Time-Life offices received a bomb threat (Parks 2005: 228). Seemingly undaunted, Parks was able to strike a balance between the proclivity to characterize Malcolm X as pariah, on the one hand, and the black world’s ‘own black shining prince’ (Davis 2010: 29), on the other. Having previously gained access to the Black Muslim society in May 1963, and having taken a particular interest in Malcolm X’s meteoric rise to the helm and his epic fall-out with the NOI, Parks writes: Death was surely absent from his face two days before they killed him. He appeared calm and somewhat resplendent with his goatee and astrakhan hat. Much of the old hostility and bitterness seemed to have left him, but the fire and confidence were still there. We talked of those months two years ago when I had traveled with him through the closed world of Muslimism, trying to understand it. […] I recalled the constant vilification of the ‘white devil,’ the machinelike obedience of all Muslims […] [b]ut, most of all, I remembered Malcolm, sweat beading on his hard-muscled face, his fist slashing the air in front of his audience: ‘Hell is when you don’t have justice! And when you don’t have equality, that’s hell! And the devil is the one who robs you of your right to be a human being!’ […] Malcolm said to me now, ‘That was a bad scene, brother. The sickness and madness of those days—I’m glad to be free of them. It’s a time for martyrs now. And if I’m to be one, it will be in the cause of brotherhood.’ (Life Magazine 1965: 28) Park’s article puts forth a transfigured Malcolm X—more tolerant of his multi-ethnic Muslim brethren, critical of his days as the NOI’s most controversial leader, and humming the tune of a kind of universal ‘brotherhood’. It is also here in Park’s article that the reader gathers a fuller textual and visual sense of those left in Malcolm X’s wake. Though images of the funeral were not employed, the article included an enlarged photograph that featured Malcolm X with Shabazz and their four children at a rally in Harlem, just days before his assassination. There were also pictures of him with other public figures, such as New York pastor and Congressman Adam Clayton Powell and prizefighter Muhammad Ali, who assumed an important role in Malcolm X’s public and private life. These photographs worked to situate Malcolm X within a conjugal and political family that extended beyond the NOI, thus incorporating his role as father, husband, and comrade. Together, the lead editorial and Park’s article form an interesting dialectic about Malcolm X’s complicated place as both pariah and hero in the national imaginary. Such an approach allowed Life to capitalize on the newsworthiness of Malcolm X’s death and would appeal to 273

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the sensibilities of both his detractors and admirers; by doing so, Life, at least on the surface, remained neutral on this matter.

Conclusion The caption for the cover photograph of Coretta Scott King in Life’s April 19, 1968, issue reads: ‘Mrs. Martin Luther King at the funeral service.’ This referent to Scott King consistent with the customary courtesies extended to [white] married women during the mid-twentieth century—an affirmation of respectibility and social standing. In comparison, on Life’s covers related to the deaths of Evers and Malcolm X, Myrlie Evers-Williams is referred to as ‘Evers’ widow’ and Shabazz goes unacknowledged altogether. Details such as these illustrate not only the rapport between semantics and photography in journalism, but also the interplay between the reputations of martyrs and the representation of their widows. Some obvious questions, which this chapter has attempted to answer, are: What role does mainstream journalism play in deciding whom should be mourned, to what extent, and whose mourning is worthy of public attention? What are the implications? Answering these questions, to borrow from Rebecca Wanzo, ‘requires attentiveness to complicated calculus that results in some victims being privileged and others overlooked in U.S. culture’ (2009: 2). To this end, Life magazine actively participated in such ‘complicated calculus’ by incorporating representational and reputational politics that worked to affirm and, in some instances, undermine popular notions of Civil Rights martyrs. In doing so, figures such as Myrlie Evers-Williams and Coretta Scott King achieved, in part, iconic status through their personal loss and pain, becoming icons of mourning. They not only inherited their husbands’ legacies of goodwill and heroism, but also went on to perpetuate it. In the case of Betty Shabazz, her identity as movement widow was effectively compromised as the nation debated (and continues to negotiate) Malcolm X’s place within the annals of American martyrdom. In other words, Malcolm X’s vacillating national reputation (between pariah and hero) rendered Shabazz, at best enigmatic; at worst, ‘illegible’ as a ‘sympathetic [object] for media and political concerns’ (Wanzo 2009: 2–3). Finally, if the deaths of martyred Civil Rights leaders such as Martin Luther King, Jr., Medgar Evers, and Malcolm X are now symbols of America’s turbulent yesteryears, then movement widows, and specifically the way they were configured within the national imaginary following their husbands’ assassinations, say much about how the nation remembers the movement and its fallen black leaders. In light of this, Scott King, Evers-Williams, and Shabazz are unequivocally ‘their own special attraction’ (Harris 2001: 289).

References Beauboeuf-Lafontant, Tamara (2009), Behind the Mask of the Strong Black Woman: Voice and the Embodiment of a Costly Performance. Philadelphia: Temple University Press. 274

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Burns, Rebecca (2011), Burial for a King: Martin Luther King Jr.’s Funeral and the Week that Transformed Atlanta and Rocked the Nation. New York: Scribner. Davis, Ossie ([1965] 2010), ‘Eulogy for Malcolm X,’ in Catherine Ellis & Stephen Drury Smith (eds.), Say It Loud!: Great Speeches on Civil Rights and African American Identity. New York: New Press, pp. 25–29. Doka, Kenneth J. (1989), Disenfranchised Grief: Recognizing Hidden Sorrow. Lexington: Lexington Books. Evers, Myrlie (1963), ‘He said he wouldn’t mind dying—if …,’ Life, 28 June, pp. 34–37. Evers-Williams, Myrlie, with Melinda Blau (1999), Watch Me Fly: What I Learned on the Way to Becoming the Woman I was Meant to Be. New York: Little, Brown, and Company. Feldstein, Ruth (2000), Motherhood in Black and White: Race and Sex in America Liberalism, 1930–1965. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Guzmán, Isabel Molina, and Angharad N. Valdivia (2004), ‘Brain, Brow, and Booty: Latina Iconicity in U.S. Popular Culture,’ The Communication Review, 7, pp. 205–221. Harris, Trudier (2001), ‘The Power of Martyrdom: The Incorporation of Martin Luther King Jr. and His Philosophy into African American Literature,’ in Brian Ward (ed.), Media, Culture, and the Modern African American Freedom Struggle. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, pp. 273–291. Harrison, S. L. (2002), Twentieth-Century Journalists: America’s Opinionmakers. New York: University Press of America. Henninger, Katherine (2007), Ordering the Façade: Photographs and Contemporary Southern Women’s Writing. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. Hudson-Weems, Clenora (1994), Emmett Till: The Sacrificial Lamb of the Martin Civil Rights Movement. Troy: Bedford Books. King, Debra Walker (2008), African Americans and the Culture of Pain. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press. Life Magazine (1963a), ‘Martyr to an Immoral System,’ Life, 28 June, p. 4. (1963b), ‘Letter to the Editors,’ Life, 12 July, p. 21. (1965), ‘The Violent End of a Man Called Malcolm X,’ Life, 5 March, pp. 26–27. Loengard, John (1998), LIFE Photographers: What They Saw. Boston: Bullfinch. Morgan, Edward P. (2006), ‘The Good, the Bad, and the Forgotten: Media Culture and Public Memory of the Civil Rights Movement,’ in Renee C. Romano and Leigh Raiford (eds.), The Civil Rights Movement in American Memory. Athens: University of Georgia Press, pp. 137–166. Parks, Gordon (1968), ‘A Man Who Tried to Love Somebody,’ Life, 19 April, pp. 28–39. (2005), A Hungry Heart: A Memoir. New York: Washington Square Press. Parks, Sherii (2010), Fierce Angels: The Strong Black Woman in American Life and Culture. New York: Random House. Pike, Martha, and Janice Gray Armstrong (1980), A Time to Mourn: Expressions of Grief in Nineteenth Century America. Stony Brook: Museum of Stony Brook. Ramphele, Mamphela (1997), ‘Political Widowhood in South Africa: The Embodiment of Ambiguity,’ in Arthur Kleinman, Veena Das, and Margaret Lock (eds.), Social Suffering. Berkeley: University of California Press, pp. 99–118. Rickford, Russell J. (2003), Betty Shabazz, Surviving Malcolm X. Naperville: Sourcebooks. 275

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Roberts, Gene, and Hank Klibanoff (2006), The Race Beat: The Press, the Civil Rights Struggle, and the Awakening of a Nation. New York: Vintage Books. Schumann, Bettina (1965), ‘Malcolm X [Letter to the Editor],’ Life, 26 March, p. 25. Wanzo, Rebecca (2009), The Suffering Will Not Be Televised: African American Women and Sentimental Political Storytelling. Albany: State University of New York Press.

Notes 1 Scholars such as Clenora Hudson-Weems (1994) have been instrumental in establishing Emmett Till as the sacrificial lamb of the black freedom struggle. By doing so, Till is acknowledged as one of the youngest martyrs of the era, and his death in 1955 is considered a major catalyst of the modern Civil Rights movement. 2 The Sixteenth Street Baptist Church bombing that occurred in Birmingham, Alabama, on September 15, 1963, which claimed the lives of four little girls—Denise McNair, Carole Robertson, Cynthia Wesley, and Addie Mae Collins—should be mentioned, as should the deaths of James Chaney, Andrew Goodman, and Michael Schwerner—three Civil Rights workers who were murdered in Mississippi on June 21, 1964. These racially motivated murders, among others, added to the increasing toll of martyrs and grieving subjects that emerged from the social and political milieu of the Civil Rights struggle. 3 Betty Shabazz’s biographer Russell J. Rickford (2003) also uses ‘movement widow’ as a referent to the three women discussed in this chapter. However, my work elaborates upon this term by considering the cultural, social, and political implications of being the widow of martyred Civil Rights leaders. 4 With the renewed interest in Malcolm X in the genre of rap, coupled with Spike Lee’s release of the biopic Malcolm X in 1992, the 1990s marked the resurgence in the commodification and appeal of Malcolm X in black popular culture. For more on contemporary media culture and iconization of Civil Rights leaders, see Morgan (2006). 5 With this image, Moneta J. Sleet was the first African American to win a Pulitzer Prize in the Feature Photography category. 6 Tamara Beauboeuf-Lafontant (2009) also identifies these three women among others in a searching analysis of the ‘strong black woman’ in her introductory chapter. See also S. Parks (2010). 7 This letter was digitized and included in the Morehouse College Martin Luther King, Jr. Collection held at the Robert W. Woodruff Library of the Atlanta University Center. 8 Mamphela Ramphele was romantically involved with Stephen Biko, founder of the South African Student’s Organization and leader of the Black Consciousness Movement, at the time of his death in 1977. Though Ramphele and Biko were never formally married, she situates herself as ‘“a political widow who could never be,” but is nevertheless pursued by interest parties as someone who should be socially classified as a widow’ (1997: 102). 9 In Disenfranschised Grief: Recognizing Hidden Sorrow, Kenneth J. Doka argues that disenfranchised grief is ‘grief that a person experiences when he incurs a loss that is not or cannot be openly acknowledged, publicly mourned, and or socially supported’ (1987: 315; my emphasis). 276

Contributors

Bradley Bailey is assistant professor of modern and contemporary art history at Saint Louis University. His primary area of research is the influential artist Marcel Duchamp, on whom he has co-authored Marcel Duchamp: The Art of Chess (Readymade Press, 2009) and published numerous articles. Bradley’s exhibitions ‘Marcel Duchamp: The Art of Chess’ at Francis M. Naumann Fine Art in New York and ‘Out of the Box: Artists Play Chess’ at the World Chess Hall of Fame in Saint Louis have been reviewed in The New York Times and ARTnews, among other publications. He is currently working on a chapter on the artist Marcel Dzama for a book forthcoming from Abrams Books. Karina Eileraas is currently a visiting scholar with the Center for the Study of Women and a visiting assistant professor in the Women’s Studies Department at UCLA. Her first book, Between Image and Identity: Transnational Fantasy, Symbolic Violence, and Feminist Misrecognition, was published by Lexington Books in 2007. Michael Fuchs recently earned a Ph.D. in American Studies from the University of Graz, Austria, with a Ph.D. thesis on self-reflexivity in horror cinema and is the co-editor of Landscapes of Postmodernity: Concepts and Paradigms of Critical Theory (LIT Verlag, 2010) and Placing America: Space and American Culture (transcript Verlag, 2012). Michael’s research interests include game studies, transmedia storytelling, horror and adult cinema, and American television. Currently, he is working on three book projects—a revision of his dissertation, a monograph on textual play in video games, and a book on the TV show Supernatural. Susanne Hamscha is an adjunct professor in American Studies at Georg-August-Universität Göttingen. She holds a Ph.D. in American Studies from FU Berlin, where she was a Ph.D. fellow in the Graduate School of North American Studies (John-F.-Kennedy Institute). In her dissertation she analyzes how the ‘Americanness’ of American culture is performatively constituted in nineteenth-century American literature and contemporary pop culture. Her research interests include nineteenth- and twentieth-century North American literatures and cultures, popular culture, performance studies, film studies, body studies, and gender theory. Louis J. Kern is Professor in History at Hofstra University, where he teaches cultural history and theory, cinema studies, and American literature. His scholarly interests include popular

ConFiguring America

culture and the study of sexuality and the body. He has published widely in these areas, including his monograph An Ordered Love: Sex Roles and Sexuality in Victorian Utopias (North Carolina UP, 1981) and the edited collection Women in Spiritual and Communitarian Societies in the United States (Syracuse UP, 1992). Peter Lee is a doctoral candidate in the History and Culture Program at Drew University, New Jersey, where he specializes in American culture. He has contributed to Americana: The Journal of American Culture, The Bright Lights Film Journal, Thymos: The Journal of Boyhood Sudies, and Comic Books and the Cold War, 1946–1962: Essays on Graphic Treatment of Communism, the Code, and Social Concerns (McFarland, 2011). Leopold Lippert is a Ph.D. candidate in American Studies at the University of Vienna and is currently a research and teaching associate in the Department of American Studies of the University of Graz, Austria. His Ph.D. project, tentatively entitled ‘Performing America Abroad’, deals with the ‘Americanness’ of Austrian cultural and academic practice. He has published on American drama and queer film and situates his research at the intersection of queer theory, performance studies, and transnational American studies. B. Keith Murphy is currently the interim dean of the College of Arts and Sciences at Fort Valley State University, Georgia. A full professor in English, Keith holds a Ph.D. in Rhetoric from Ohio University and a Master’s in Communication from Miami University. He has a lengthy track record of publications in books, journals, and reference works. Keith’s research interests include comic books, rhetorical theory, conspiracy theory, terrorism, military history, and sports. He has also worked in the media as both a free-lance writer and a radio news and sports reporter. Michael Phillips is a Ph.D. candidate in American Studies at the University of Graz, where he serves as a lecturer at the English Department. In his Ph.D. thesis, he explores the representation of iconic music stars in various cinematic genres and how these images help construct subject positions for various groups within the audience. Mike’s research interests include postmodern literature, American icons, rock music, and film studies. Klaus Rieser is Associate Professor in American Studies at the University of Graz, Austria, where he teaches Cultural Studies and Film Studies. Klaus is the (co-)author of Passagen zum Ende des Regenbogens: Ethno-Amerikanische Pidgin- und Interkulturen im Migrationsfilm [‘Passages to the End of the Rainbow: Ethno-American Pidgin- and Inter-Cultures in Migration Films’] (Wissenschaftlicher Verlag Trier, 1996), Daughter Rite und Daughters of Chaos: Filmanalysen [‘Daughter Rite and Daughters of Chaos: Film Analyses’] (Wissenschaftlicher Verlag Trier, 1996), and Borderlines and Passages: Liminal Masculinities in Film (Die Blaue Eule, 2006) and co-editor of What is American? New Identities in 280

Contributors

U.S. Culture (LIT Verlag, 2004), Icons and Iconicity (LIT Verlag, 2006), and Localizing Global Phenomena: The Contact Spaces of American Culture (LIT Verlag, 2012). Mary S. Sacks is Associate Professor of History at Albion College in Michigan. She holds a Ph.D. from UC Berkeley and is the author of Before Harlem: The Black Experience in New York City Before World War I (Pennsylvania UP, 2006). Marcy has a lengthy record of publications in journals (including American Studies and Journal of Urban History), edited collections (including Slavery in New York, New Press, 2005), and encyclopedias (including The Essential Lincoln, Congressional Quarterly Press, forthcoming, and The Encyclopedia of African American History, Oxford UP, forthcoming). Ana Salzberg recently completed her Ph.D. in Film Studies at the University of Edinburgh. She has published articles on Marilyn Monroe and William Wyler, as well as Hitchcock’s Vertigo and Walter Murch’s Return to Oz. Jolanta Szymkowska-Bartyzel, Ph.D., is currently employed at the Institute of American Studies and Polish Diaspora, Jagiellonian University (Krakow, Poland). She is one of the founders and editors of Ad Americam: Journal of American Studies and has published on female stereotypes in Hollywood cinema, Polish perceptions of ‘Canadianness’, and American myths as perceived in Poland. Her main research foci are American film and mass media communication. Brenda Tindal is a native of Charlotte, North Carolina, and a Ph.D. candidate in History and Culture within the Graduate Institute of Liberal Arts at Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia. She is currently completing a dissertation provisionally entitled ‘More Than the “Ceremonious Symbol”: Movement Widows in American Public Life, 1963–2006,’ in which she explores the political and intellectual trajectories of iconic African American widows who emerged from the social and political milieu of the Civil Rights–Black Power movements. In addition to her doctoral studies, Brenda is the 2011–2012 Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS) fellow at Princeton University.

281

Index

A alien 98, 99, 100, 106, 110, 138, 185 Adorno, Theodor W. 119, 130n–131n advertising 71–72, 117, 158 African American 33, 39, 49–63, 64n, 70–71, 73–74, 76, 86–87, 91n, 187, 259–274, 276n; see also segregation AIDS 45, 111, 136–137 alternate reality 182, 208 Althusser, Louis 7, 11, 12, 79 Altman, Charles F. 160 Altman, Rick 160 American Dream 5, 7, 55–56, 60–61, 108, 184–185, 188–189, 219, 227; see also rags-to-riches story American Girl dolls 28–41, 36 Americanness 3, 5–7, 100, 117–119, 127, 135, 137–138, 161; see also collective imagination; see also collective memory; see also cultural values; see also imagined community; see also nation Anderson, Benedict 30, 67 Anderson, Laurie 103–105 Angelou, Maya 56, 59 appropriation 7, 10, 12–13, 40–41, 57, 59, 78, 83, 84, 98, 104, 110, 111, 114n, 121–122, 125, 127–128, 135, 155, 172, 175, 181, 185, 187, 189, 190, 193, 261; see also parody; see also queering; see also resistance; see also subversion; see also transformation archetype 142, 162, 226 Arnold, Benedict 79 Asian American 31, 35, 45, 108

assimilation 31–35, 38–40, 108 authenticity 4, 85, 110, 120–121, 127, 128, 131n, 155–156, 162, 242–244 authority 160–161, 177, 234, 244 authority and masculinity 100, 103–106, 173–174 authority and race 39, 51, 55, 100, 103–106 authority, subversion of 98, 151, 163 B Barbie 41, 45n Barthes, Roland 10–11, 190, 242–243, 246–247, 252–253 baseball 57, 60 basketball 85 Batman 100, 110, 205, 211, 226, 237n Baty, S. Paige 118 Benjamin, Walter 120–121, 131n Bergfeld, Sarah Elizabeth 100 Berlant, Lauren 6–7, 30, 34, 38–39, 40, 45n Białostocki, Jan 153–155 Birth of a Nation, The 55 blackface 70, 187 body 76, 79, 119–122, 126, 127, 129, 130n, 242, 245–248 body and gender 122, 127, 136, 138–139 body and race 29–32, 38, 73 body and embodiment 3, 4, 5, 67, 68, 221 Bonanza 161 Bormann, Ernst 225 boxing 50, 59, 60 Braddock, Jim 59–60 Bridwell, Nelson 205, 211 Brokeback Mountain 135–136, 142–146, 143

ConFiguring America

Buffalo Bill 160 Bugs Bunny 187 Butler, Judith 41

cultural values 3, 6–7, 67–68, 73–74, 79–84, 87, 97–101, 160–164, 171, 184, 220–221, 224–225, 233 communism 104, 139, 151, 159–160, 163, 165n Conant, Howell 242, 244–246, 251–252, 254n–255n consumer society 30–33, 39–40, 101, 117–119, 123–128, 130n–131n, 140–142 Cooper, Gary 151–163, 152 Country Girl, The 242, 246, 247–248 cowboy 135–139, 142, 144–146, 148n, 152, 153, 155, 158, 160–165 Crockett, Davy 193n Crosby, Bing 247

C Cagney, James 188 camp (style) 13 capitalism 12, 14, 83, 119, 123, 125, 128, 176, 187 Captain America 81–82, 91n–92n, 220, 227–230, 229, 233–235, 237n Carrell, Steve 78, 91n Carter, James Earl (‘Jimmy’) 57 cartoon 53, 80, 81–82, 177–179, 178 cartoon, animated 82–83, 131n, 187 Cartwright, Lisa 75 celebrity 4, 10, 14, 21n, 68, 110, 119, 127–128, 130n, 197, 202, 209, 244–245, 262 celebrity studies 4, 21n Chagoya, Enrique 108–110, 109 Civil Rights movement 259–274; see also Double V campaign Civil War (American) 67, 178, 179, 185 Clark, Kenneth and Mamie 33 class 6–7, 10–11, 31, 32, 34, 39–40, 50, 73–74, 76, 108 Cody, William F. see Buffalo Bill Cold War 100, 102–105, 139, 160–161, 188, 206, 215n, 234 collage 109, 159 collective imagination 5–6, 28–30, 67, 155, 163–164; see also Americanness collective memory 5, 27–28, 30–32, 34–35, 40, 62, 120, 273; see also commemoration; see also memory Columbia (U.S. symbol) 176–177, 179, 184, 185 comics 81–82, 97–101, 181–186, 197–212, 219–236; see also cartoon commemoration 4, 262 commodity culture 14, 40–41, 72, 73, 79, 87, 117–127, 141, 276n; see also fetishism

D Daniels, Les 98, 106, 109, 198, 209, 220, 221, 222, 223, 225, 232, 235 Darnall, Steve 182, 183–184 da Vinci, Leonardo 117, 154 De Haven, Tom 110, 223, 231, 232 Deleuze, Gilles 121 democracy 10–12, 49–50, 55–56, 61–62, 97–101, 103, 119, 131n, 142, 156, 163, 173–174, 200, 228, 261–262 Dial ‘M’ for Murderer 248, 249–250, 250 digital age 8, 14, 39, 87; see also Facebook; see also internet; see also Web 2.0; see also YouTube doppelganger 181–185, 188, 227 Double V campaign 49, 55 DuCille, Ann 32–33, 34, 35, 39 Duchamp, Marcel 107 Durant, Kevin 81, 91n–92n Du Bois, W. E. B. 49 Dyer, Richard 4, 13, 21n, 156, 243–244 E Eco, Umberto 153 Edelman, Lee 136–137, 148n Eisner, Will 181 286

Index

Emerson, Ralph Waldo 86 eugenics 28, 32, 35, 37, 39, 45n, 50, 60 Evers, Medgar 259, 262, 271 Evers-Williams, Myrlie 263–269, 266, 274 exceptionalism (American) 5–6, 190, 197

genre 98, 158, 160, 164, 226–227, 244, 245, 246 Gentlemen Prefer Blondes 122–123, 123 geopolitical aesthetic 6 globalization 3, 6, 41, 72, 139, 151, 160, 162 Gilbert, Dan 78–79, 91n Gorbachev, Mikhail 139 Gorn, Elliot J. 50 Goulart, Ron 224, 227, 233–234 Grange, Harold 67–69 Grant, Cary 243, 246, 248, 250–251 Grant, Ulysses S. 179 Gray, Jim 76–77, 77 Gray, Jonathan 142 Great Depression 49, 98, 197–198, 219 Grossberg, Lawrence 12 Grosz, Elizabeth 130n

F Facebook 14, 91n fandom 12, 29–30, 57, 71–72, 74–79, 81–87, 137, 140–142, 148n, 197, 207, 210, 225 Fanon, Frantz 28, 44n femininity 29–32, 39–41, 122, 125, 177, 197–212, 248, 264; see also womanhood fetishism 119, 120, 127 fetishism, commodity 33, 39 film 139–140, 142–144, 156–161, 186–189, 198, 210–211, 235, 246–251 Fingeroth, Danny 97 Fiske, John 101, 123–125, 141–142 flag (American) 4, 77 Flagg, James Montgomery 171, 180–181, 185, 189–190 football 67–68 Ford, John 188, 242, 246 Fourth of July 188–189 freedom 108, 151, 159, 162–163, 183, 261–262, 268–269 Freeman, Elizabeth 136, 137 Freidan, Betty 206 frontier 5, 112, 114n, 138–140, 142, 146, 147n; see also West

H Halberstam, Judith 136–137 Hamlet 139–140 Haraway, Donna 39, 45n Hariman, Robert 12 Harris, Trudier 259, 274 Hawks, Howard 122 Hayward, Tony 82–83 Heffernan, Nick 6 hegemony 98, 125, 140, 184, 208; see also power heroism 70, 72, 159, 219–235, 237n heroism and gender 197, 209–210 heroism and iconicity 67–68, 85 heroism and individualism 85–86, 161–162 heroism and martyrdom 262, 265–266, 273–274 heroism and politics 153, 155 heroism and race 55–56, 87 heroism and society 85–86, 97, 161–162 heroism and worship 71 heterosexuality 102, 138, 142, 148n; see also sexuality High Noon 152, 155–157, 159, 246 Hills, Matt 72

G G.I. Joe 45n Gable, Clark 198, 247 Gaiman, Neil 184 Garland, Judy 13 gender 30–32, 37–38, 40, 98, 124–127, 197, 199–200; see also body; see also femininity; see also masculinity; see also sexuality 287

ConFiguring America

Hitchcock, Alfred 241–242, 246, 248–250, 253, 255n Hitler, Adolf 49, 99, 219, 227–228, 229, 230, 231, 232, 235, 237n Holden, William 247 Hollywood 118, 122, 126–127, 131n, 135, 139, 143–144, 151, 155–156, 160, 243–244, 246, 252, 266 homogeneity 37, 39, 106, 125, 141 homosexuality 102, 140, 142, 144; see also queering; see also sexuality hooks, bell 40 Horkheimer, Max 119, 130n–131n How to Catch a Thief 248, 250–251, 251 hybridity 6, 16, 38, 144, 158

J Jackson, Andrew 174, 177, 178 James, LeBron 69–87, 91n, 75, 77 Jameson, Fredric 3, 6, 21n Japanese Americans 105–106, 188 Jefferson, Thomas 173 Jenkins, Henry 83, 140–142 Jewish (American) 37, 38, 40–41, 45n, 55, 97–98, 112, 220 Jim Crow laws 49, 51 Johnson, Jack 50, 59 Jordan, Michael 71, 73–74, 85, 91n, 191 journalism 198–199, 204, 261–274 Juncker, Clara 118 K Kaplan, Amy 186 Kaplan, E. Ann 122, 124–125 Katyn massacre 162, 166n Kelly, Grace 119, 241–253, 249, 250, 251, 254n–255n Kennedy, John F. 117, 139, 259, 262, 264 King, Debra Walker 265, 268 King, Martin Luther 62, 190–191, 259, 262, 269–270, 274, 276n Kirby, Jack 227–228, 230, 233 Kirk, James T. 135, 138–142, 145, 148n Klinger, Barbara 78, 144 Korean War 181

I iconic figures and ambiguity 128, 185 iconic figures and repetition 117–129 iconic figures, theorizing 3–15, 67–69 iconic photographs (Robert Hariman & John L. Lucaites) 12 iconic turn (W. J. T. Mitchell) 14 iconicity 3, 5, 8, 15, 17–19, 68–69, 78–79, 111, 119, 137, 148n, 241, 243–244, 261 iconization 14, 117, 276n iconology 21n, 153–154 identity 27–41, 67–69, 102, 107, 121–122, 161–162, 252–253; see also national identity ideologeme 3 ideology 5, 7, 11–12, 21n, 68, 79, 97, 118, 125, 127, 139–141, 154, 160, 163, 171, 177, 186–187, 190, 206–208 imagined community 5–6, 30, 67 imitation 98–99, 117, 121, 144, 232 immigration 38, 110 imperialism 110 individualism 85, 139, 161 inscription 8, 152, 155–156, 177, 185 internet 14, 79, 191, 235; see also digital age interpellation 7, 180 intertextuality 80–83, 101, 124, 139, 144

L Laclau, Ernesto 10 Lady Liberty 176–177, 179 Lane, Lois 99–100, 102, 114n, 197–212, 201, 202, 209, 214n–215n, 223 Lee, Ang 135, 142, 144 Lee, Spike 276n Legman, Gershon 98–99 Lévi-Strauss, Claude 241 Lichtenstein, Roy 102–103 Life magazine 242, 262, 266, 268–269, 271, 273–274 Lippard, Lucy R. 105–106 288

Index

logo 10, 101, 155–156, 159, 184, 189, 261 Lohan, Lindsay 118, 121, 126–128, 131n–132n Longfellow, Henry Wadsworth 174 Louis, Joe 49–62, 64n, 53, 54, 58 Lucaites, John Louis 12 lynching 79, 259, 265

myth 5–6, 52, 55, 73, 85–86, 97, 102, 105, 127–128, 137–139, 145–146, 190, 234, 237n, 242–243, 253; see also American Dream; see also cowboy; see also frontier; see also West mythology (Ancient) 71–72, 109, 227–228, 235

M Madison, James 173 Madonna (artist) 4, 117, 121–126, 124, 128, 131n Malcolm X 259, 261–263, 270–271, 273–274, 276n manhood 59, 180, 200, 271 Manifest Destiny 5, 136, 138 marginalization 7, 12, 98, 106, 140–141 Marxism 104 masculinity 73, 102, 125, 135–136, 138, 142–143, 146, 161–162, 177, 185, 262, 265; see also manhood mass culture 117, 119, 140–141 mass media 6, 11, 68, 120–121, 127–128, 131n, 141–142 McLuhan, Marshall 98 melting pot 39 memory 5, 40–41, 190, 246, 261, 265; see also collective memory meritocracy 84–85 Metz, Christian 11–12 Mickey Mouse 21n, 108, 191, 226, 227 Mitchell, W. J. T. 3 Mogambo 242, 246–248 Monroe, Marilyn 4, 102, 117–128, 123, 130n–132n, 191, 244–245, 252 Morin, Violette 241–243, 245, 251, 254n Morrison, Toni 33 Mouffe, Chantal 10 multiculturalism 33, 103, 111–112 multiethnicity 30–31 multiraciality 16, 29, 31–33, 41, 44n, 111 music video 103, 117, 121–122

N NAACP 56–57, 262, 265 nation 55–57, 60–62, 67–71, 79–80, 143–146, 154, 161, 171–191, 219–220, 230, 261–264, 268–270, 273–274 national identity 3, 5–7, 28–41, 44n, 69, 97, 128, 135, 171–172, 177, 179, 190–191, 204, 269 national imaginary 29, 31, 144, 263, 273–274 National Symbolic 6–7 naturalization 10, 108 Nazi 49, 60, 161, 220, 227–228, 233 New Deal 98, 181, 219 Nike 71–72, 74–76, 75, 79, 82, 84–85, 87, 91n Nora, Pierre 5 norm 10–12, 38–39 nostalgia 29–30, 39, 52, 125, 191 O Obama, Barack 6–7, 29, 44n occupy movement 14 Olsen, Jimmy 100, 200, 205, 208, 211 Other 37–38, 98–99, 102, 106–108, 228 Ott, Brian 137, 140 P painting 27, 72, 102–103, 105–106, 109, 111, 114n, 117, 126, 154–155 Panofsky, Erwin 21n, 153–155, 165n Parks, Gordon 263, 270, 273 parody 17, 78, 83, 125, 135, 144–146, 174 Parry, Keith 68, 71 patriotism 29, 44n, 55, 99, 171, 175, 179, 182, 185–187, 226–227, 232 Pearl Harbor 188, 230 289

ConFiguring America

performativity 41, 71, 75, 79, 103–104, 117–118, 120–126, 128, 130–131n, 159–160, 187, 199, 246–247, 250–251, 259, 269 Pearlstein, Philip 102, 114n photography 10–11, 35, 37–38, 103, 131n–132n, 155, 242–244, 246, 252–253, 261, 263, 274, 276n pictorial turn 3 Pike, John 14 pilgrims 67 Pocahontas 176, 190 Poland 151, 153, 158, 160–164, 165n–166n, 227 polysemy 101 pop art 102 popular culture 6, 28, 32–33, 45n, 79, 101, 103, 111, 117–119, 121, 125, 137, 141–142, 171, 185, 189, 190, 241, 244, 276n pornography 131n Posnanski, Joe 76 posters 7, 72–74, 106–107, 117, 119, 151– 159, 161, 163, 165n, 180–181, 185, 189, 191, 228 postmodernism 103, 155 power 6–7, 10–13, 73, 83, 97–101, 123–125, 130n; see also hegemony; see also resistance; see also subversion

Ramphele, Mamphela 265–267, 276n Randolph, Philip A. 49, 55 Reader’s Digest 3–4 Reagan, Ronald 61, 64n, 163 Rear Window 248–249, 249 reception 100–101, 141, 148n, 155–156 Red Scare 187 Reeve, Christopher 235–236 Regalado, Aldo 98 religion 21n, 27, 40–41, 57, 68–69, 71–72, 102, 108–110, 114n, 220, 222, 227, 234–236, 263 repetition 8, 117–129 reproduction, biological 136–138 reproduction, mechanical/digital 117–129, 130n–131n, 189–190 reproduction, symbolical 138–140, 142 Republican Party 61, 97, 162–163, resistance 12–13, 40–41, 87, 118, 125–126, 136, 141–142, 144–145, 161; see also appropriation revisionism 98–99, 137, 211–212 Rice, Grantland 69 ritual 6, 8, 84, 160, 269–270 Rock, Chris 45n Roosevelt, Franklin D. 179–180, 219, 228 Ross, Alex 111, 182 Rudd, Paul 78 S Sandvoss, Cornel 142 Sarnecki, Tomasz 151–164 Saul, Peter 103, 114n Schefer, Jean-Louis 153 Schmeling, Max 49, 51, 54, 56–57, 59 Science-Fiction 135–142, 144–145 Scott King, Coretta 261, 263–264, 267, 269–270, 274 segregation 33, 49, 52, 57, 79, 110, 187 semiotic excess (John Fiske) 101 Serrano, Andres 110–112, 114n sex 142–143, 145

Q queering 40–41, 45n, 102, 136–137, 140–146, 148n R race 7, 27–41, 44n–45n, 98–99, 105–111; see also African American; see also Asian American; see also body; see also Japanese American; see also multiraciality; see also whiteness radio 56–57, 62, 203 rags-to-riches story 49, 61, 69–71 Ramos, Mel 103 290

Index

sexuality 73, 122–123, 127, 135–136, 143, 148n, 246, 248; see also heterosexuality; see also homosexuality Shabazz, Betty 261, 263–264, 267, 270–274, 276n Shimomura, Roger 105–106, 105, 114n Shuster, Joe 98–99, 198–199, 203, 209, 214n, 220–223, 232 Siegel, Jerry 98–99, 198–199, 203, 209, 214n, 220–223, 232, 237n Simon, Joe 227–228, 230, 233–234, simulacrum 118–119, 121 Sklaroff, Lauren Rebecca 50, 55 slash fiction 141–142, 145, 148n slavery 49–51, 73–74, 175 Sobchack, Vivian 242–243, 245–249, 255n Solidarity movement 151–152, 155–157, 159, 163, 165n South Park 82–83, 83 Soviet Union 101–102, 139, 151, 158–160, 162, 166n spectacle 76–77 spectacle, female 122–123, 250–251 Spider-Man 80–81, 91n, 237n Spock (Star Trek character) 135, 137–139, 141–142, 145–146, 148n sports 47–63, 67–87 Sports Illustrated 70–71, 73, 91n Star Trek 135–142, 145–146, 148n stardom 56–59, 68, 118–122, 130n, 138, 152, 155–159, 164, 241–253 star studies 4, 11, 21n Steinem, Gloria 122 stereotype 31–34, 37–38, 52–56, 72–73, 76, 108, 119, 125, 136, 139, 187, 244 Stern, Bert 126–128, 131–132n Stewart, James 246, 248–249, 249 structures of feeling (Raymond Williams) 3, 21n struggle over meaning (John Fiske) 101, 118, 125 Sturken, Marita 75

subaltern 41 subordination 7, 12, 51, 64n, 101, 125, 141, 197 subversion 7, 12–13, 121, 126–127, 181–182 Supergirl 206, 208, 215n Superman 4, 7, 10, 97–114, 197–212, 201, 202, 209, 219–236, 231 T television 82–83, 135, 138–139, 210, 233 temporality 136–146, 147n textual poaching 140–141; see also appropriation Till Bradley, Mamie 259–261, 260 Till, Emmett 259 transformation 5–6, 103, 121–122, 261 transnational 5–7 trauma 31, 33, 35, 265 Turner, Frederick Jackson 136 Twitchell, James 155 U Übermensch 99 Uncle Sam 171–191, 178, 180, 183, 189, 193n Undiscovered Country (Star Trek VI) 137–140, 138 V visual arts 102–103, 104–111, 155, 158–159 Vogue 73–74, 126, 131n W Wałęsa, Lech 151–153, 157, 165n Wanzo, Rebecca 270, 274 Warburg, Aby 153–154 Warhold, Andy 102–103, 107, 117, 119–121, 130n–131n Warner, Michael 12 Web 2.0 84, 141, 144; see also digital age Wertham, Frederic 99 West 135, 155, 160–162, 164–165; see also frontier 291

ConFiguring America

West, Cornel 73 Western (film genre) 160–164 whiteness 28–29, 31–33, 38–41, 51–55, 87, 264 Wild West 155, 160–162, 164–165 Willard, Jess 50 Wilson, Woodrow 55, 186 womanhood 197, 200, 206–209, 264 Worland, Rick 137–139 World War I 179–181

World War II 29, 55, 105–106, 114n, 199, 203, 220, 232, 235 Wright, Richard 51, 57 Y Yang, Jun 106–108, 107 YouTube 14, 75, 78, 82–83, 135, 141–142, 144 Z Zinnemann, Fred 152, 246 zombie 182–183, 188–189

292

ICONIC FIGURES, VISUALITY, AND THE AMERICAN IDENTITY

CONFIGURING EDITED BY KLAUS RIESER, MICHAEL FUCHS, MICHAEL PHILLIPS

Elvis Presley. Marilyn Monroe. LeBron James. They’re all American, of course, but like many cultural figures who hail from the United States, they have names and faces known the world over. ConFiguring America brings together a series of incisive essays that analyse a wide range of such figures: those who embody America’s tendency to produce celebrities and iconic personalities with global reach. Drawing on theoretical insights from a variety of fields—including cultural iconography, visual culture, star studies, and history—a diverse group of international contributors sheds light on how these figures and their media representations construct America’s image beyond its borders. An important addition to an expanding field, ConFiguring America will deepen readers’ understanding of celebrity, iconography, and their worldwide implications. Klaus Rieser is chair of the Department of American Studies at the University of Graz, where Michael Fuchs teaches classes on American literature and culture and Michael Phillips is a lecturer in the English Department. www.configuringamerica.com

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