The 54th Academy Awards

The only Oscars ceremony that had a specific effect on my life happened thirty years ago, when I was six years old. It was the 54th Academy Awards, and On Golden Pond was our local hero, having mostly been filmed about ten miles away from my house. Everybody I knew seemed to have at least a little connection to it somehow, or claimed to. At six years old, I didn't really understand what any of it meant, but I knew how much the adults seemed to care, and how special the moment seemed to them. The movie immediately became an indelible part of my life.

If that had been it, I'd look back on the 1982 Oscar ceremony with the sort of gauzy nostalgia that fills the movie. But Ernest Thompson won an Oscar that night for adapting his play into a screenplay, and I've known Ernest now for an amount of years neither of us will admit to, and worked with him on numerous local projects. We have really different aesthetics, and I love that — he's been at times the ideal teacher, editor, and director for me because he would never approach a story the way I do, and vice versa. He's intimidatingly smart and articulate, and so better than anybody I've ever met at steering me away from self-indulgent flourishes. (Ernest's commentary track on the anniversary edition DVD of On Golden Pond is a gem, and gives a good sense of his tell-it-like-it-is personality.)

Golden Pond is as close to a part of my DNA as a movie can be, and it's a film that is sacred to folks around here, because Squam Lake still looks quite a bit like it did in the movie, and plenty of people remember seeing Henry Fonda, Jane Fonda, Katharine Hepburn, and Dabney Coleman around town.

I hadn't paid much attention to what the other nominees were that year until recently. If I remembered anything, it was that Chariots of Fire won for Best Picture and Ernest beat Harold Pinter for Best Adapted Screenplay (Pinter's adaptation of The French Lieutenant's Woman verges on genius, finding cinematic/dramatic ways to replicate the novel's very novelistic complexities of narrative and structure, making an "unfilmable book" into a generally interesting film. I'm glad Ernest won, though.) But though 1981 was hardly an annus miribilis for cinema, there was some interesting work released that year. Among the movies not getting major notice from the Academy, there was Fassbinder's Lola and Lili Marleen; Blow Out; Coup de Torchon; Escape from New York; The Road Warrior; Mommie Dearest; Ms. 45; My Dinner with Andr矇; Pennies from Heaven; Polyester; Scanners; Thief; Time Bandits; and a bunch of horror movies: American Werewolf in London, The Evil Dead, Friday the 13th pt. 2, Halloween 2, The Howling, Wolfen, etc. (It was a good year for werewolves and slashers.)

The nominees for Best Picture were a fairly diverse lot: On Golden Pond, Chariots of Fire, Atlantic City, Raiders of the Lost Ark, and Reds. People are saying this year is a particularly nostalgic one for the Academy, but look at that list — the only movie on there that takes place in the present in Golden Pond!* That tends to be how the Best Picture nominees go. It's not easy to find a set of Best Picture nominees where the majority are concerned with present-day realism. (I'm not saying there should be. But to be surprised that the Oscars favor nostalgic or historical films is to be surprised that the Oscars are the Oscars.)

I have great love for the great mess that is Reds, but it wasn't until I looked at the various Oscar nominees and winners that I realized it came out in the same year as Ragtime, another politically-charged film about the early 20th century. While Maureen Stapleton won the Best Supporting Actress Oscar for playing Emma Goldman in Reds, the character of Emma Goldman was cut out of the film of Ragtime (though a scene with her is available as an extra feature on the DVD). I hope in the coming weeks to revisit both films and write about them a bit here.

For now, though, I just wanted to note that 30 years have passed since On Golden Pond was at the top of the world. For me, that fact alone presents plenty to get nostalgic about.


*Update: As Patrick Murtha points out in the comments, my memory of Atlantic City (which I haven't seen in at least a decade) is faulty. Though I remember it as set in the past, it's set in my past, not the movie's past. So I was wrong. Golden Pond and Atlantic City are both set in their own present, but both are certainly concerned with the past and nostalgia, so my larger point remains.

On Stand By Me

The House Next Door has now published a piece I wrote for the 25th anniversary of Stand By Me:

During the summer of 1986, my friends and I all thought Stand By Me was the greatest movie ever made, and we were sure it had been made for us, because though the characters in the film were a year or two older than we were, and though the story was set during our parents' teenage years, we could all see ourselves in one of the four main characters. No film had ever seemed more real to me, more true, more beautiful. I was ten years old.

A Stranger Comes to Town...

Via Tempest Bradford I read the call for stories for a proposed anthology called Dark Tales of Lost Civilizations. The title and description are utterly screaming out for submissions filled with casual, ignorant, and textually-inherited exoticization and racism.

The "lost race / lost civilization / lost world" story derives from an imperialist history and view of the world, but at its most benign it's a version of the old "a stranger comes to town" story, with the stranger as the explorer and the town as the "lost" place. ("Lost" only to the stranger; to the inhabitants, it's been there all along and this "lost" talk is very odd, though maybe helpful if you're seeking to build a tourist industry.)

On Twitter, Cheryl Morgan wonderfully suggested, "What you need is an anthology full of brown people discovering the lost society of the USA. Gods of Mt. Rushmore?" David Moles said he'd already written that story with one of his Irrational Histories: "9th baktun, 9th katun, 2nd tun (AD 615)". I piped in suggesting Zakes Mda's Cion, a marvelous book about a South African who comes to the U.S. in 2004 and discovers it to be full of strange rituals and bizarre, fascinating people.

And then I thought of a few more such stories, and came up with a potential and vastly incomplete reading list for potential contributors to Dark Tales of Lost Civilizations, should they desire to try to avoid unfortunate implications in their stories. So, in addition to David's story and to Cion, I would suggest...

• Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe
• Terra Nostra by Carlos Fuentes
• Wild Seed by Octavia Butler
• In the United States of Africa by Abdourahman A. Waberi 
• Blonde Roots by Bernardine Evaristo
• Gone Primitive by Maria Torgovnick
• Gunfighter Nation by Richard Slotkin
• 1491 by Charles C. Mann
• The African City: A History by Bill Freund
• Colonialism and the Emergence of Science Fiction by John Rieder

Lists can get overwhelming, so I'll stop there, with five books of fiction and five of nonfiction. Any one of those books would be informative for somebody trying to write about strangers and towns, I think, and a few of them together might create some interesting resonances.

I'm pretty ignorant of Asian fiction and histories, so that's an obvious lack in the list.

Any suggestions to add to my list are welcome, and I'd especially love to learn about books that expand and complexify our understandings of civilizations we might otherwise consider "lost".

Where I Lived and What I Lived For

I taught for nine years at the New Hampton School, an independent boarding school in central New Hampshire (from which I also graduated as a student). During my first three years, I lived as a dorm parent in the oldest building on campus and one of the oldest in town, Randall Hall. Randall was a legendary building, having been hauled across town at the beginning of the 20th century brick by brick and rebuilt. By the time I lived in it with 30-35 junior and senior boys (mostly hockey players), it was in desperate need of repair.

During my third year in Randall, I had become, by default, the dorm head, in charge of everything having to do with the dorm. There are few things in the world I hate more than being an administrator, and so I did what I have always done with such positions: used it to get the heck out! I lived the next six years in an apartment in a house owned by the school.

Despite its historical value, Randall could not ultimately be saved. Structural engineers reported that any work was likely to collapse the building. Estimates of what it would take to refurbish it to make it safer and more efficient ran to the tens of millions of dollars, and the only promise was that the ultimate effect would be a building that remained less than ideal. So New Hampton made a very difficult decision: to tear Randall down and build a new structure in its place. And that's what they did, and beautifully so. The new Pililas Math-Science Center fits remarkably well with the three antique buildings around it, and is a massive improvement over the previous facilities. I toured it back in June, and was amazed that the building I had known so intimately had metamorphosed into this.

It was strange to stand where my apartment had been -- the space is now an airy stairwell. It was where my cats, Vanya and Masha, had sat on big windowsills and looked across at the building that housed my classroom. (One year, I was assigned to a room that looked right back at my apartment, and so I would sometimes require my students to wave to the cats.) I wrote a really bad novel in Randall one year, going downstairs to a tiny office and working on an ancient computer so I could get away from the noise of the third and fourth floors, where the students lived. Often, as a warm-up, I would write reviews on Amazon.com, which ended up being good training for this blog. (It's amusing to me now that the novel, which I thought was the important project at the time, turned out to be awful, but without having done the reviews, I might never have created this blog, which has been an important part of my life for the past six years. Oh, and we seemed to have turned 6 two days ago. Happy birthday, blog!)

I learned most of what I know about teaching at a boarding school while living in Randall, because, as anybody who's done it can tell you, there's nothing like the insanity and exhilaration of the first three years. There were many moments where I was within inches of a nervous breakdown, but they were also in many ways the best -- or, perhaps, most intense and vivid and passionate -- years of my life.

So here's to you, Randall Hall. The first thing that got demolished was the apartment I'd lived in during my second and third years. (The last person to live in that apartment was one of my fellow members of the class of '94, and one of my best friends.) Here's a video I discovered this morning of the demolition--

G.I. Joe

Of course, most of my reading time is spent in my wood-panelled library, smoking my Meerschaum pipe and contemplating the imbrication of hegemonic discourses. Over the past two days, however, I decided to set aside some light reading I was doing (Wittgenstein's Tractatus, which I tend to think of as the Goodnight Moon of philosophical texts) and instead plunge into two books someone at Del Rey had sent to me: G.I. Joe: Above & Beyond and G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra, both written by one Max Allan Collins.

The two novels are media tie-ins -- the second is a novelization of the screenplay for the upcoming film of the same title, and the first is a prequel to that. I haven't read too many media tie-ins (the only other that comes to mind is the novelization of Batman, which I read when I was about 13), but I am open to new experiences, and the fact that these two are about G.I. Joe sealed the deal.

Before I inhabited a wood-panelled library and smoked a Meerschaum and contemplated the imbrication of hegemonic discourses, I grew up in a gun shop (literally; it was attached to the house). I was seven years old when the G.I. Joe action figures hit the market -- and I got them all. I was not allowed to read comic books (they rot your brain), but an exception was made for the G.I. Joe comics. I watched the animated TV show every Saturday morning. I was hardcore.

I was also a bit of a young literalist -- early on, I decided it was problematic if my action figures killed each other, because I didn't think they could become zombies. My friends lacked this qualm; they routinely killed and resurrected their toys. This made no sense to me, and so I tried hard to avoid playing with my friends. I didn't want their zombie Joes infecting mine. Instead, I spent hours and hours creating complex d矇tente situations.

As you can see, then, reading the new novels was something I simply could not avoid. I was particularly interested to see how the various creators (screenwriters, Collins) handled the problem of killing people. (The animated show had a simple solution: explosions and gunshots are not deadly. This was a dangerous message to the youth of America, but a useful trick for keeping the many important characters alive for the next episode.)

The novels (and, presumably, movie) handle death mostly by killing people who are not regular characters. There are, for instance, in The Pit, many random, unnamed Joes who serve as cannon fodder while the the action figures still get to make it through okay (with various cuts, bruises, etc.). There is one exception to this, but I shan't reveal it.

Both books are origin stories, with Above and Beyond being the tale of Duke and Ripcord's first encounter with the G.I. Joe team and The Rise of Cobra being the tale of how they join G.I. Joe and what creates Cobra (though Cobra as we know it does not appear until the final pages). Above and Beyond is a better novel -- more focused, with an effective and affecting downer for an ending -- while The Rise of Cobra is very much a screenplay that has been fleshed out in prose. I was very curious to know the movie's take on the characters and story, so I was fascinated by the novel, but without having yet seen the film I can't say if it offers anything the movie doesn't.

The changes made to the characters and background of the 1980s G.I. Joes are not terrible -- the group has been globalized instead of being part of the U.S. government: they are now a super-secret force approved by various countries to use any means necessary to destroy particularly cunning evil-doers, and the crew has been internationalized. Backstories are different, too, given that originally many of the main characters had been in Vietnam. Some of the biggest changes are to the stories of The Baronness and Cobra Commander, but to say any more about that would be to give away some of the biggest surprises of the two books...

The 1980s version of G.I. Joe feels to me like a mashup of Doc Savage, Rambo, and The A-Team. The new version still has a whiff of the Doc Savage novels, but with a big dollop of the James Bond movies during the Pierce Brosnan era added. The Rise of Cobra has an especially Bondesqe villain trying to take over control of the world and destroy it at the same time. Above and Beyond is more restrained, with a villain who merely wants to take over all of South America. As with Bond, the ideal audience seems to be adolescent heterosexual boys and maybe some lesbians -- the women are inevitably described as "attractive", while the men are muscular or smart or evil or something else, but never "attractive" (entirely contrary to my own experience, since even at a young age I thought those boys were hot!), and the books are full of soldiers who have lots of fun weapons and who never use a word stronger than "ass" or "bastard". Talk about fantasy!

A political analysis of the books is beyond my abilities, though it could be amusing -- the 1980s G.I. Joe helped post-Vietnam War kids feel good about the military and its endeavors and fear an imaginary all-powerful terrorist force that only a special branch of the U.S. military was skilled enough to combat. In Above and Beyond, the U.S. military and the Joes intervene in a fictional South American country when the saintly free-market-loving president is assassinated and the socialist rebels (who want to nationalize all the country's oil, presumably to make it more like Alaska) are blamed, though it is obvious from the beginning that a power-hungry, apolitical old general is really to blame, allowing a reconciliation between the free-marketeers and the socialists at the end that is brokered in a church -- God and guns being, apparently, the things socialists and capitalists can agree on. The Rise of Cobra is more of a War on Terror allegory, a super-heroes vs. super-villains story, but instead of vigilante super-heroes, the Joes are actually sanctioned by the leading countries of the world in their extra-legal activities (well, except for a brief moment when they have to go rogue, but it all works out for the best, so everybody loves them again in the end). Thus, the world's most powerful and organized and wealthy terrorists must be defeated by the world's best soldiers, with everybody scrambling to see who has the best gear and the best one-liners.

It's enough to make the eight-year-old in my heart swoon!

But now that I have digested the child within, I am returning to my wood-panelled library and my pipe...