Why Are There Police in Monty Python and the Holy Grail?

January 14, 2015March 25, 2015Chuck Caruso Academia, Crime & Detective Fiction, Cultural Criticism, Film & Television Tags: detective, Enlightenment, Monty Python and the Holy Grail, scholarly readings Leave a comment

I recently revisited one of my favorite comedy films with my friend and colleague, Dr. Meg Roland. Meg is presenting a short talk at the Oregon Museum of Science and Industry (OMSI) this week in advance of their screening of Monty Python and the Holy Grail. Meg is probably one of the top medievalists on the west coast, so it’s no surprise that she would be asked to give her professional opinion of the English troupe’s take on the legend of King Arthur.

Meg’s a good friend and I was happy to play along, but I didn’t expect watching the film to touch on my own scholarly interests as heavily as it did. I hadn’t actually watched Holy Grail for probably twenty years, but I’d seen it so many times in high school that my friends could quote long passages from it verbatim in outrageous British accents.

Okay, yes, I might as well admit it. I was one of those socially awkward nerdy kids who felt more at home with the tabletop adventures I had playing Dungeons & Dragons than I did venturing across the darkened auditorium at a high school dance to brave asking one of the girls to dance.

This was way before being a nerd was cool. Believe me, it was painful at the time.

This was also long before I found that my endless fascination with detectives and with crime and horror fiction could translate itself into a rich academic life. (N.B.: I mean “rich” here in the sense of fulfilling, not remunerative; the scholar’s life these days seems to include a vow of poverty.)

In the old days, when I would watch Holy Grail with my friends and quote the lines along with the actors, we tended to ignore the strange intrusions of the stuffy historian killed by the knight and the subsequent interruptions by the uniformed police trying to arrest the professor’s killer. But imagine my surprise in discovering upon re-watching the film now that these oddly modern intrusions by the cops, the weird interludes that formerly seemed to disturb the magic and humor of Arthur’s quest, can actually be seen as advancing a relatively insightful argument very closely related to my own scholarly interests.

A lot of the laughs in the film derive from the conflict between pre-Enlightenment and post-Enlightenment modes of thought. The witch trial scene, for example, gives us poignant parody of scientific thought where pre-Enlightenment thinkers struggle to understand cause and effect. The rabble, of course, doesn’t care about mastering logic. They just want an officially sanctioned excuse to burn the poor woman they’ve dressed up as a witch. King Arthur and Sir Bedevere are earnestly trying to gain a deeper understanding of natural laws, even as their bumbling attempts spark our laughter.

But this push toward post-Enlightenment thought is telling because the rise of science and rationality ultimately spells the end of the myth and magic of King Arthur and his knights as well as the pageantry and glory of monarchy and church.

At the core of the cultural shift during the Enlightenment is a radically new way of understanding truth. No longer would Truth come from on high, handed down by God through his chosen representatives on earth. The new truth becomes understood as a narrative construction told from interwoven and sometimes contradictory points of view.

After the Enlightenment, instead of Truth with a capital “T,” we are left with a contingent and fragile truth, now forever with a lower-case “t.”

Consider how the scientific method works. We come up with a hypothesis and then we test it against evidence. If the original hypothesis doesn’t account for all the available evidence, we must revise it.

Our courts of law start to work in the same way. Rival lawyers develop competing narratives. Juries decide which story seems to best explain every existing piece of evidence. Once the jury votes, the judge declares that version to be the verdict in the case and pronounces a sentence.

The post-Enlightenment gives rise not only to new forms of government, like American democracy, but also to police forces charged with maintaining law and order on behalf of the citizenry. Initially the police are only charged with preventing unrest and stopping crimes in progress, but fairly quickly it becomes clear that the police and courts need a way to deal with crimes that have already been committed but for which there is no clear culprit. They need specialists who can apply the scientific method to solving mysterious crimes and serve as consultants to the police. They need the detective.

Not coincidentally, the detective figure becomes the hero of our new post-Enlightenment literature. The Enlightenment had already destroyed the magic of Arthurian romance, so we needed a new heroic to populate a new sort of “realist romance,” a figure who could embody the ideals of the new era.

We need somebody who can arrest our long-standing enthusiasm for these ridiculous stories of knights and sorcerers and holy grails.

That’s precisely the exchange enacted by the close of Monty Python and the Holy Grail. After all the fun and laughter and silliness, we need to be serious grown-ups who establish law and order. The film’s tweed-clad historian is slaughtered by a knight after he breaks the fourth wall, addressing the audience about Arthurian stories as if they were fiction.

The irony, of course, is that the historian and his ilk are the ones actually killing off the old tales (at least metaphorically), even if the knights are better armed. Culturally speaking, Arthur and his knights are living on borrowed time. Eventually, the police arrive at the end of the film to dispel illusion entirely as they stop the action, throw Arthur into the back of a police van, and then break the film’s fantasy entirely by shoving the cameramen away, and placing a hand over the lens, and saying it’s all over. There’s nothing to see here, folks. Move along.

But of course we can’t give up on these tales. We love our heroes. We need somebody who can replace the old quests with a hero’s quest of this own, which is precisely what detective stories do and why they follow almost exactly the same pattern as the older quest stories.

We swap the holy grail for the Maltese Falcon and we’re back in business.

The Park for Dead People

October 12, 2014October 13, 2014Chuck Caruso Cultural Criticism Tags: Boise, cemeteries, death, grave markers, graveyards, pioneers Leave a comment

My mother tells me that as I child I referred to the cemetery as “the park for dead people.” From the mouths of babes, the truth rushes forth.

While attending an academic conference in Boise, I took a break from things to hike into the foothills and to visit the old pioneer cemetery. It was a quiet and haunting place, this small collection of graves inside a wrought iron fence. The October afternoon was warm and the flag on its pole flapped in a gentle breeze.

I walked down the rows of graves, reading the headstones and imagining the lives of the people buried there. I imagined too the lives of those who have known them and left them here to rest from the cares of the world in this park for dead people.

It still seems an apt description to me — the park for dead people. We might argue that libraries serve much the same function. Like the stretch of library bookshelf, a hard-won plot of textual territory, the cemetery is a modest patch of land dedicated to the idea of honoring our forebears and remembering the past.

There are cultures that believe you don’t pass into the next stage of death until there is know one left alive who remembers you. So, I was especially touched to see that someone visiting earlier had placed a small stone atop each grave marker that said “Unknown,” a token to remember the humanity of those who were forgotten even when they were alive.

Inadequate perhaps, but at least it’s some sort of acknowledgment of what came before. We can be a fickle and forgetful people. The pressures of daily life occupy us so completely that we often lose the long view, that life is brief and fragile. But cemeteries remind us that previous generations were once as we are now, up and moving around, rushing through their own brief span of time, moving across the country, building houses, laughing, loving, living.

Analyzing the Title of The X-Files

September 9, 2014September 20, 2014Chuck Caruso Conspiracy Theories, Crime & Detective Fiction, Cultural Criticism, Film & Television, Science Fiction & Fantasy Tags: Freud's uncanny, rationalism, The Twilight Zone, The X-Files Leave a comment

The first and most superficial meaning of the show’s title refers to the cases that Special Agents Mulder and Scully work during the series. Within this diegetic framework (that is, within the fictional world of the show), the X-Files are a collection of FBI “cold cases” that have not been closed because they contain one or more elements that lack plausible, rational explanations. As such, the X-Files are quite literally the mysteries being investigated.

images-114

Nicknamed “Spooky” by his fellow FBI agents and given a windowless basement office to signify his marginalized status, Agent Mulder is the keeper of these X-Files. His role in the series is to serve as the voice of credulity. He’s the one who gives the series its first catchphrase, “I want to believe.”

The series is launched in the pilot by Agent Scully’s new assignment as Mulder’s partner. The pairing makes sense because Scully’s training as a medical doctor gives her the enlightened rationality that Mulder seems to lack. If Mulder is too gullible, Scully is a skeptic. Also, even though Scully is putatively the junior partner with less experience in the Bureau, her FBI supervisors make clear to her that her job is not only to work with Mulder to close X-Files by finding rational explanations for them, but also to keep an eye on Mulder personally and to report back to the supervisors about his questionable activities.

So, the agents’ job is to research and to close these X-Files, but of course the logic of the series quickly reveals itself. Mulder and Scully are confronted with some answers but not all, and most episodes end by maintaining the insolvability of the mystery in question. The X-Files can never be fully closed because the “truth” of each case never allows itself to be read.

Another way to read the title of the series is to see the X as representing “ex-“ the Latin prefix for “out of” or “from.” As a prefix, ex- can also mean former. As a preposition, the word ex often means “without” or “excluding.” Tying this back to the internal logic of the show, these then are files that are outside or not included in the main body of files. They are outliers, both literally and figuratively. This descriptive way of looking at the X-Files then also makes a clear allusion to the show’s obvious antecedents in American television. Both “Twilight Zone” and “Outer Limits” presented similar types of episodes that explored the supernatural, the creepy, and the weird. Not surprisingly all three of the shows have titles that refer to their status as being somehow outside normal experience or existing in a some sort of a liminal space. The “twilight zone,” for example is neither day nor night but always in between. Again, I haven’t been researching the show, but I wouldn’t be surprised if Chris Carter, the creator of The X-Files, cites these other shows as influences on his own series. In fact, I’d be surprised if he didn’t.

Continuing this idea of the X-Files belonging to a liminal space, the X in the title is also the Greek letter chi that is often representative of a crossing over or a transition. We see this in everyday usage on road signs that say “Xing” rather than spelling out the word “crossing.” In that sense, the title of the series suggests that it offers place of transition or crossing over for its characters and its audience.

Finally, as a label for the series, this title possesses a final key virtue: it is at once familiar and unfamiliar (which, by the way, is precisely Freud’s recipe for the uncanny). For now, we can just observe that we know what files are. They’re boring, mundane collections of information. Whether on the computer or in manila folders in a big metal cabinet, most of us probably have to deal with files at work all the time. But we don’t initially know what the X stands for, so this adds a dimension of mystery to the title and makes it all the more memorable.

Further, our experience of the show corresponds directly with this initial hit from the title. The X-Files follows the basic pattern of a police procedural with federal agents, the structure of each episode is familiar. A crime or other mysterious event happens, Mulder and Scully go to investigate, they find clues, begin to structure plausible solutions, etc. Yet the discoveries these detective figures make are often unexpected and sometimes defy explain within the normal limits of modern rationalism.

That this standard-issue, late 20^th-century rationalism itself has an ideological agenda is where the show begins to venture into conspiracy theory. We tend to imagine that at least as far as science and technology go, we live in a post-ideological world, but The X-Files clearly wants to challenge this notion. Still, I’ll leave that can of worms on the shelf until a future post.

Jim Thompson Novels Reissued

September 5, 2014March 19, 2015Chuck Caruso Book Reviews, Crime & Detective Fiction, Cultural Criticism, Film & Television Tags: Black Lizard, Dimestore Dostoyevsky, Geoffrey O'Brien, Jim Thompson, Killer Inside Me, Mulholland Books, Pop 1280 Leave a comment

I’m thrilled to see that Mulholland Books has reissued such a sizable chunk of the Jim Thompson oeuvre. The time is ripe for a new generation to discover this “Dimestore Dostoyevsky,” as noir scholar Geoffrey O’Brien dubbed him in the afterward to Black Lizard’s 1986 edition of After Dark, My Sweet. The Vintage arm of Random House sensed that Barry Gifford and company were onto something and snatched up the Black Lizard imprint.

Vintage subsequently made quite a few Thompson novels available in the more aesthetically pleasing trade paperback format. Still, those books came out over twenty years ago and can be hard to find. Sadly too, Vintage quit digging so deep into the catalogue of forgotten writers like David Goodis and Harry Whittington and used their version of Black Lizard mostly to produce new editions of Chandler and Hammett who are formidable talents of course but who had already been readily available.

As I argued in my own Master’s thesis a few years back, Thompson still deserves a much larger audience than he’s ever managed to attract in the US, but his vision is perhaps too unrelentingly dark to achieve mainstream acceptance here. Thompson’s Marxist sympathies shine through in his savage critiques of America’s capitalistic positivism and that makes folks uneasy. So too does his insistence that criminal misfits and killers are not the monstrous others we’d like to believe; the ugly face of humanity is right there in the mirror if we’re willing to take an unflinching look. Indeed, Jordan Foster gets it exactly right in the title of her piece for Publishers Weekly: “The Killers Inside Us.” This is the mark of Thompson’s break from our post-Enlightenment pieties.

The French get Thompson, which is perhaps why we still use the French word noir to describe this sort of crime fiction. The best film adaptation of a Thompson novel is probably still Tavernier’s Coup de Torchon, which moves Pop. 1280 to French West Africa. As O’Brien writes in that afterward, the average reader of mystery fiction “wants his anxieties alleviated, not aroused,” which is why cozies are so popular with invalids and retirees. And perhaps it’s true that most crime fiction is essentially “conservative” in that it tends to resolve any rupture in the social order (such as murder or theft) by reasserting that order and ensuring that the lawless are appropriately punished.

But Thompson doesn’t work that way.

A relentless experimenter in literary forms, he continually breaks genre conventions to claw through that paper-and-ink barrier that separates author and reader. The end of Savage Night is a case in point, but there are plenty of other examples. One of Thompson’s crazed narrators unravels so completely that divergent voices occupy alternating lines in the final pages of the novel.

Personally, I’m seizing on this excuse to refresh my memory of some favorite titles and revisit the ones I don’t recall as well. Thompson’s work always rewards multiple visits and he scarcely ever wrote a novel longer than 50,000 words.

Cheers to Mulholland for reissuing these novels with new forewords by a number of today’s best crime writers (with a few curious omissions). Here’s hoping Thompson gets under the skin of a whole new generation of readers.

(Re-)Watching The X-Files

September 3, 2014September 11, 2014Chuck Caruso Conspiracy Theories, Crime & Detective Fiction, Cultural Criticism, Film & Television, Science Fiction & Fantasy Tags: analysis, Freud's uncanny, Netflix streaming, The X-Files, unheimlich Leave a comment

Thanks to Netflix streaming services, I’ve recently been re-watching The X-Files in order from the beginning. I have an abiding interest in conspiracy theories so the show is a natural fit for me. However, while I enjoyed the numerous episodes I saw back during the show’s original run from 1993 to 2002, my life at that time wasn’t such that I could watch anything too religiously. So I missed a lot.

For the most part, the episodes worked as stand-alones since this era when shows like The X-Files and Buffy the Vampire Slayer were first pioneering their ideas of multi-season story arcs, a bold move back in the 90’s, before the advent of Netflix or Hulu or other “on demand” television providers. It’s true that shows were released on VHS tapes but these still had nowhere near the social currency currently enjoyed by DVD boxed sets in the 2000’s, and they lacked the commentary tracks, alternate takes, and other special features now routinely available on DVD.

The release of shows in DVD boxed sets marked the potential for endless re-watching, but binge-watching a series doesn’t seem to have gained quite the popularity it currently enjoys until shows started appearing via online streaming. As few as five or ten years ago, you still would have had to swap out the DVD in your machine every hour or two. Now you don’t even have to buy anything, just subscribe to an inexpensive monthly service, and if you do nothing but keep watching, Netflix streaming will run episode after episode of a show one full season at a time, and it even conveniently edits out the opening credits so you don’t have to sit through those repeatedly.

Instead, you can stare in full spectatorial wonder without so much as touching your TV’s remote or the screen of your iPad from sunrise to sunset. Or perhaps, as is more commonly the case, from sunset to sunrise, when you groggily turn on your side and hope to catch a short nap before the world expects you as a civilized person to make your first dignified appearance for the day.

I’m not much of a binge-watcher, but clearly the current technology has opened new frontiers in sleep deprivation and social catch-up-ism. Miss the first season or three of that show everyone seems to be gabbing about at the water cooler? No problem. Just bluff your way through a cursory chat and then power through the requisite material over the weekend. Just like with Wikipedia and Shazam, we’ve never had such rapid ability to fake and amass cultural literacy. There’s really no excuse anymore for not watching everything.

Personally, I tend to watch shows and films like I read books, slowly to savor them and to give some attention to detail. For me, the joys of analysis always overmatch our contemporary drive for sheer consumption. I recall a few terms back when I had an undergrad boast to me that his Netflix queue showed that he’d watched over 10,000 films, but I wasn’t overly impressed by this factoid since he had a hard time performing a decent critical analysis of any of the stories or novels we read in class. Shoveling massive amounts of media into your head doesn’t mean you’re actually digesting it,, which is why I have a bit of a hard time watching things that don’t satisfying my interpretive impulse.

Fortunately, only half way through the first season I’m already finding The X-Files holds up. Yes, the clothing and hairstyles are a bit dated. And the technology is occasionally quaint, like when Scully gets paged at dinner and needs to find a pay phone or when Mulder develops old-fashioned rolls of film in a chemical bath or gets lost in the woods and can’t call anyone for help or look up his location on GPS. But these are minor details. The central premise of the series and various phenomena and conspiracies taken up by the individual episodes are still as rewarding and intriguing as they ever were.

I’m taking notes as I go and plan to use episodes along the way to launch into broader discussions here. For example, the pilot starts with the reliable and rational Scully first receiving her assignment to work with conspiracy-minded Mulder. Her exchange with the FBI bosses and her subsequent initial encounter with Mulder warrant some closer scrutiny. Similarly, the second episode, about a missing Air Force pilot, contains the series’ first truly uncanny moment and it’s something I think could serve as the basis for a larger exploration of Freud’s notion of the unheimlich.

Not that all my planned posts will be so densely theoretical, diving into psychological or philosophical esoterica. Not at all. It’s television after all. It’s meant to be entertaining. So you can count on me to also explain why I think The X-Files could be looked at as the anti-Scooby Doo. See, fun!

Finally, this particular post launches a couple new categories for my blog, “television” and “conspiracy theories.” I’m hoping the introduction of both these topics will prompt me to blog more regularly. Next time I write about The X-Files, I plan to start by examining its trio of catch phrases: “The truth is out there,” “Trust no one,” and “I want to believe.” Evocative statements, but what does each of these really mean?

Teaching Video Game Theory, Part Two

August 17, 2014September 11, 2014Chuck Caruso Academia, Cultural Criticism, Video Games Tags: #gamertheory, academic study, analysis, digital age, digital humanities, humanities, liberal arts, teaching video games, video game theory, video games Leave a comment

What Video Game Study Can Do for Academia

In my last post (“Teaching Video Game Theory, Part One: What Academic Study Can Do for Video Games”), I argued that video games deserve critical attention. But the question remains whether video games have anything essential to offer in return. What benefits can the inclusion of video games offer to Culture & Media Studies?

Well, in many ways the humanities are suffering. It’s no secret that universities around the world are in financial straits. While cutting budgets and raising tuition, administrations are looking at the numbers. And the liberal arts are not pulling their weight. According to a New York Times article about the global crisis in liberal arts, the number of students studying the humanities at Harvard has halved in the last 50 years. Yet another NYT piece about waning student interest in the humanities reports that although nearly half of faculty salaries at Stanford University go to professors in the liberal arts, only 15% of recent Stanford grads have majored in those disciplines. Those are alarming trends and suggest the humanities are fundamentally unsustainable. At least as they are currently imagined.

In response to this crisis in the humanities, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences issued a report last year stating: “At a time when economic anxiety is driving the public toward a narrow concept of education focused on short-term payoffs, it is imperative that colleges, universities, and their supporters make a clear and convincing case for the value of liberal arts education” (32). This report also stressed the importance of facing the new challenges of the Digital Age.

So, how do we do that? How do we make the case that a liberal arts education is worthwhile especially with the advent of the Digital Age?

Well, teaching video games is a start. We need to bring this powerful cultural medium into the classroom and engage students on their own terms. Over the past decade I’ve become aware that fewer and fewer of our students read for enjoyment. But nearly all of them use significant amounts of their free time to play video games. Male or female, younger or older, they choose to experience these video game “texts” of their own free will.

I already argued last time for the significance of video games as cultural artifacts. Every year more academic studies of video games are published and certain trends of intellectual thought about games have already begun to emerge.

All of this scholarly focus on video games is performing interesting and culturally important work; however, as academics we need to do more to translate this emerging discipline into the classroom experiences of our students.

They crave it. Not only that, but they deserve it. And so do we.

Video games can revitalize the humanities.

In order the remind the world how valuable a liberal arts education can be, we first need to entice students into taking our classes and then we need to make the classroom experience meaningful enough that they want to pursue degrees in our disciplines. When students are clamoring to study the humanities, financial support become available.

Three keys to attracting students are relevance, fun, and depth.

Relevance. Students want to take classes and study subject that connect to their actual lives and provide them with better ways of understanding the real (and often virtual) world they inhabit on a daily basis. For a class to be relevant, it needs to provide students with the analytical tools that help them interpret the information that bombards us from every side. Part of this is learning to ask the right questions. Part of it is learning how to understand the stuff our social interactions are made of – language and ideas and assumptions and rhetorical strategies. When it comes to teaching critical thinking and effective reading and writing skills, the humanities are not just relevant but central. There’s a reason two out of the three basic R’s of education are in the humanities! Yes, ‘rithmetic is important, but try surviving a day in the Digital Age without reading and writing.

Fun. Students learn best when they’re having fun. This is why so many young people retain seemingly endless minutia about the video games they play (which they experience as fun) and recall so little about that boring world history or chemistry class where they were forced to memorize dates or formulae. Fun lights up the brain like a Christmas tree. Just look at all those presents! By contrast, boredom shuts down the mind. “Eat your peas” and “do your chores” do not inspire enthusiasm and engagement. Psychological studies bear this out and pedagogues are already busily trying to create “useful” video games that can surreptitiously indoctrinate players with real world information.

Depth. This one is trickier, but in some ways it’s the secret ingredient because it’s key to what students crave from classes. Relevance and fun are both very important, but alone they cannot complete the circuit of education. The avid mind of a student wants to think new thoughts, to make surprising connections, to explore uncharted areas, to see the ordinary as strange and to view the strange as ordinary, to learn how to ask important questions and how to find interesting answers, to discover the mysterious joys of an intellectual life.

Video games offer a powerful way to provide students with relevance, fun, and depth. Not only is that good education; it’s where the humanities shine.

**This essay is cross-posted on the Marylhurst Blog.**

Teaching Video Game Theory, Part One

August 12, 2014September 10, 2014Chuck Caruso Academia, Cultural Criticism, Video Games Tags: #gamertheory, academic study, analysis, L.A. Noire, Portal, teaching video games, video game theory, video games 8 Comments

What Academic Study Can Do for Video Games

This past spring I presented an academic paper on issues of spatial representation in the video game Portal at the annual Society for Textual Studies Conference. My paper fit well with papers by my fellow panelists, including Marylhurst’s English Department chair Meg Roland, who offered important new insights on early modern maps, and recent Marylhurst alumna Jessica Zisa, who presented a smart paper on social and natural spaces in Sebold and Thoreau. As it turned out, the juxtaposition of our various analyses provoked a lively discussion with the audience. But as we jostled out of the room after our session, I couldn’t help overhearing one of the curmudgeonly older professors grumbling, “I can’t believe there was an academic paper about a video game!”

But why not? Did I do something wrong? Was I squandering my mental energies and straining my peers’ patience with a topic beneath scholarly attention?

As you can imagine, I’ve thought about this a lot for a while, but the more I considered the issue the more important it seemed to me that I continue studying video games.

In fact, I “doubled down,” as they say. I’ve already presented another conference paper on the video game L.A. Noire‘s adaptation of the detective genre, and this fall I’m attending a semiotics conference to discuss the paradoxical fantasies of military first-person shooter games. Not only that, but I developed a reading list that turned into a syllabus, and this summer I’m proud to say that I’m teaching Marylhurst’s first ever Video Game Theory class.

So, I suppose I have some explaining to do. Why is a 19th-century Americanist with expertise in textual studies and psychoanalytic criticism spending his time playing video games? Even worse, why is he talking about it in public?

Video games are no longer the exclusive province of nerdy teenaged boys who live in their parents’ basements. Recent demographics studied by the Entertainment Software Associations show that over half of American households own a dedicated gaming console, the average gamer is 31 and nearly 40% of gamers are over 36. While men do still edge out women among the gaming population, currently 48% of gamers are women.

And, beyond these basic stats, we really need to recognize that it’s not just about online fantasy games or military shooter games. Just about everybody has a game or two on their phone these days. Angry Birds anyone? Farmville? Flow? These games are changing how and when we communicate with each other. Some people use Words with Friends as an excuse to chat more frequently with friends and relatives over distance. Others use a regular online gaming night to maintain group friendships across the miles that separate their homes.

Games have been adapted to create fitness programs like Fitbit and Nike+. There are community-oriented good Samaritan game-type apps like The Extraordinaries app or the app that notifies CPR-trained specialists if someone in their vicinity needs help. Apart from the studied benefits of video games helping autistic kids adapt to social rules and learn how to communicated, there are also games specifically designed to help a variety of medical patients recover better and faster.

Beyond the stereotypes about video games that persist, what are some of the other reasons we need to think critically about this topic? For one thing, video games are big business, with the gaming industry generating over $21.5 billion last year. 2013’s top-selling game, Grand Theft Auto V, made over a billion dollars in its first three days. Compare that to other media. Top-grossing film Iron Man 3 also made over $1 billion in worldwide ticket sales, but it took nearly a month to hit that mark. Runaway bestseller Fifty Shades of Grey shattered every publishing record by selling 70 million copies in the U.S.–in both print and e-books. Counting those all at $15 (the print price), that’s also over a $1 billion, but it took a couple years to reach and it’s exceedingly rare.

Yes, I know it’s funny to hear an English professor measuring cultural significance by looking at sales figures. I know money isn’t the be all and end all of social values, but it’s a strong indicator. We all fundamentally “know” that books are obviously better and more serious works of art than movies, and even TV shows and comic books are infinitely more important than video games.

And yet… can we really just assume (or even argue) that either Fifty Shades of Gray or Iron Man 3 is an inherently superior cultural artifact than Grand Theft Auto V? In fact, do we even want to try to assert that position?

Granted, part of our job in academia is to serve as a standard bearer for important works from the past, to ensure they are not forgotten. As a 19th-century literary scholar, I’m acutely aware of this duty and I’m proud to say that I routinely inflict canonical “high literature” on my students, many of whom I actually convince to enjoy the experience and continue it of their own free will. But part of our job too should be showing our students how to use these powerful analytical tools at our disposal to analyze cultural artifacts that the general public chooses to experience on their own. What good are these various apparatuses we develop if they only apply to analyzing the works of “high culture” that Academia elevates to special, masterpiece status? Shouldn’t we also be able to apply our tools to “low-brow” works created primarily to entertain?

I think so. And I’m not alone. In fact, English professors have been expanding the canon from the very beginning. It’s a slow and painful battle, but notice how (despite the vestigial name) English Departments now routinely teach American literature. We take it for granted now of course, but that wasn’t always the case. We even teach post-colonial “world” literature and regularly include works of “popular” fiction in our academic purview. It’s much the same throughout the humanities. For years now Culture and Media scholars have been analyzing films and television and comic books, so isn’t it time we stretch ourselves to include video games in our conversation?

Whatever one thinks of them, video games are cultural artifacts. They are “texts” of a sort, and as such they communicate meaning. Furthermore, as we know, people are choosing more and more to experience these video game “texts” on their own in preference to reading or even to watching films. So, isn’t it better for us to teach our students how to apply critical thinking and analytical tools to these new texts?

It doesn’t mean that we will quit teaching Chaucer and Shakespeare. Not at all. But it means that we must also find a way to discuss Grand Theft Auto and Call of Duty.

*A slightly edited version of this multi-part essay is being cross-posted on the Marylhurst Blog.*

The Liberal Arts Make Us Free

July 22, 2014September 10, 2014Chuck Caruso Academia, Cultural Criticism Tags: critical thinking, empowering students, humanities, liberal arts, nonstrategic disciplines, what can you do with an English degree? Leave a comment

Last winter, the New York Times ran an article (“Humanities Studies Under Strain Around the Globe“) about the current crisis facing humanities departments at universities around the world. While the humanities have long weathered criticism that they are impractical or irrelevant in the “real world,” and cuts to humanities funding are nothing new, the present situation seems worse than ever. Now more than ever, those of us in the liberal arts need to fight for our existence and demonstrate the value of our disciplines. Not just to politicians but also to the increasingly non-academic administrators who manage our schools under the ubiquitous common (non)sense idea every public entity needs to be “run like a business.” (More about this in a future post.)

Even more importantly, we need to convince undergraduates that studying the humanities is meaningful, that a liberal arts degree provides a valuable education with essential elements not available in other more “practical” disciplines. That “soft skills” like critical thinking and sophisticated communication can prove just as significant to one’s life and career as understanding accounting principles or knowing the fundamentals of biochemistry. Unfortunately, we in English departments and other humanities haven’t been doing a very good job of demonstrating the centrality of our role in higher education, so we’re being perceived as peripheral. As dispensable.

Harvard reports that the number of students studying humanities has halved since 1966. According to a related piece in the NYT, although nearly half of faculty salaries at Stanford University are for professors in the humanities, only 15% of recent Stanford grads have majored in the humanities. Florida governor Rick Scott recently suggested that humanities students should pay higher tuition as a penalty for pursuing “nonstrategic disciplines.” Public response to the proposal has been relatively anemic. An online petition against the proposal gathered only 2,000 signatures and could only muster the weak argument that differential tuition would result in the “decimation of the liberal arts in Florida.”

Sure that sounds terrible, if you happen to care about the “liberal arts.” But it seems that most people don’t have much idea what their loss means to our culture. The “liberal arts” (English, all the other languages, literature, culture and media, philosophy, classics, etc.) represent the highest ideals of a university education. If abstract and theoretical rather than practical, the liberal arts are those disciplines designed to empower students as individuals, to inculcate the wisdom and responsibility that allows them to be good citizens, to inspire them to work for ideals and to pursue social justice, to help them serve as productive, compassionate and innovative leaders.

By contrast, the hard sciences seem almost limited by that very practicality they tout. Never mind their absolute faith in the ideological oxymoron of “scientific progress.” (I plan to discuss this at some length in a later post.) Set against the philosophical depth of the liberal arts, professional degrees and certificate programs (MBA, MD, CPA, DDS, etc.) seem like glorified trade schools.

This goes straight to why the humanities are often called the “liberal arts.” Regardless of whatever Gov. Scott may believe, they are not “liberal” (as opposed to “conservative”) in the narrowly American political sense that tends to equate them with bleeding-heart socialist ideologies. In fact, the liberal arts do not have a fundamental political bias at all. They are “liberal” in the sense of liberating, of making one free, of freeing students to think for themselves, of teaching one how to imagine what freedom means, of exploring ways to experience human freedom.

What could be more important than liberal arts to education in a democratic society? What could be more central to human experience or more vital to a meaningful life?

Earning My Hood and Tam

June 25, 2014September 11, 2014Chuck Caruso Academia Tags: doctorate work, finishing PhD, surviving grad school, writing a dissertation Leave a comment

It’s been over ten years since I completed the course work and passed the qualifying exams for my Ph.D. from University of Washington. Over ten years since the graduate school sent me that little certificate saying that I had been advanced to candidacy for my doctorate. But over the years, one thing after another seemed to get in the way of my finally finishing the degree. I sometimes wondered if I’d ever escape the doldrums of being ABD (all but dissertation).

What took me so long?

Well, first of all there was intellectual burnout and disillusionment with academia. Five years of graduate level coursework is a major push. Not that I didn’t find it educational and rewarding at some level, but you go into graduate literature study primarily for the love of reading and that tends to get burned right out of you. Yes, I read, and read, and read some more. But I didn’t read very many novels. And the novels I read were more for edification than enjoyment. I mostly read a bunch of philosophy and theory and “secondary” criticism. After I finished my coursework and exams, I don’t think I read a book for pleasure for a full year, and that’s probably the first time I’ve gone that long since I learned to read.

Interestingly, when I finally started picking up books for fun again, I found myself reading mysteries and science fiction.

The second big delay for me was falling in love with Petra. Okay, so I’d been in love with her for a long time, but I mean that we finally started a relationship together and I moved to Portland to be with her. Nothing distracts you from the other cares of the world quite like a new relationship. And this was a good one. She’s the love of my life to this day.

Third, I was broke and needed to make money. The joke had always been that every temp job I worked during grad school ended up offering me a full-time job. But when it came time to find a way to make decent money, I landed in a field I’d never expected. My “soft skills” scored me a position developing an on-the-job training program in medical research administration. But the longer I stayed, the more I started to become a valued resource in the office where I worked. By the time I left seven years later I’d moved up to senior manager level. It was good work and I was blessed with wonderful co-workers, but in the end it just wasn’t my calling. I realized I wanted to be a literary scholar and not a hand maiden to medical researchers. The money was hard to walk away from – top researchers can afford to have MFAs and humanities PhD’s as their underlings, drafting their email and writing their grant applications – but in the end it just wasn’t for me.

Fourth, once I decided to finish, I had to get myself back up to speed. Figuring out how to read and to write scholarly discourse again was like learning a foreign language. It took an incredible amount of time to catch up on the research into Poe and his work. Plus, I needed to get current with textual studies and immerse myself into psychoanalytic theory. Fortunately, I’d been teaching adjunct all along and my academic peers at Marylhurst University proved to be remarkably generous with their time and knowledge. Endless conversations and academic discussion helped me find my way back into the fold. Both Dr. David Denny and Dr. Meg Roland were absolutely invaluable to me as intellectual peers. Without the two of them, I never could have gotten my dissertation done.

Fifth, I had a remarkably patient and persistent advisor. My committee chair, Dr. Mark Patterson never stopped believing that I could finish my dissertation. Even more inspiring, he expected me to produce important work that demonstrated the true extent of my grappling with Poe’s vexed position in the American canon and the depth of my insights into how Poe’s poetic theories informed his fiction and poetry. With Mark’s constant encouragement, I discovered truly innovative ways of understanding Poe. In short, I found the core of my academic career. My admiration for Mark’s intellectual rigor is surpassed only by my gratitude for his kindness and generosity. He’s truly a scholar and a gentleman.

Sixth, it’s a lot of work. No really. I don’t think you quite understand. It’s a lot of work.

Seventh, life tends to get in the way. Just when you think that you’re in the final stretch, your plans are derailed by financial worries or a family emergency or a sudden health crisis. We had more than our share of bumps in the road. But then again one of my favorite quotes is from John Lennon: “Life is what happens while you’re busy making other plans.” Truer words.

Eighth, you decide to just get it done. The final push isn’t pretty, but when you’ve been working at it long enough and hard enough, there comes a moment when you tell yourself and everyone around you that this time you’re really going to get it done. And one way or another, you do.

Here’s nearly 80,000 words on how Poe’s poetic theories give rise to the horror in his poems and stories.

My dissertation

Here’s my graduation selfie.

Petra wasn’t able to attend my graduation ceremony. Our basement flooded the weekend before and someone needed to stay home to deal with the plumber and the contractors, but we were used to these minor setbacks along the way. The victory was sweet anyway. And we had a toast together when I got home.

Boy, am I glad to be done.

The Revitalization of Heroic Fantasy

January 9, 2014September 11, 2014Chuck Caruso Book Reviews, Cultural Criticism, Film & Television, Science Fiction & Fantasy Tags: Barbie Benton, Deathstalker, epic fantasy, fantasy criticism, Game of Thrones, George R.R. Martin, James Branch Cabell, Joe Abercrombie, Tolkien Leave a comment

A week or so ago, I read a blog post about how epic fantasy is a big waste of time. The author of Pop-Verse argues, somewhat convincingly that 1) “The motherfuckers are too long,” 2) “They are … stylistically similar/identical,” and 3) “They don’t really say anything.” He has a point. After having recently stayed up late to watch the incredibly disappointing, low-budget fantasy picture Deathstalker (1983), a Barbie Benton vehicle with only a few giggling breasts and taut frolicking buttocks to (almost) redeem it from the cinematic dustbin, I’m tempted to agree. Maybe heroic fantasy truly is inherently lame.

The tropes of arrogant adventurers, wily wizards, and damsels in distress were already tired by the time they found themselves being recycled into Victorian retellings of dragons and heraldry and deeds of daring-do, and they grew little less tedious even when spilling forth from the pens of literary giants like Tolkien and Eddison and Branch Cabell. Their novels are readable, even admirable, but these days their magic is accomplished primarily through a deliberate leap of faith, a willing suspension of contemporary expectations for rousing storytelling. The novels ultimately seem quaint and charming rather the compelling and vital.

After a brief infusion of surging hot blood provided by Robert E. Howard’s Conan stories during the 1930’s, these well-worn romances grew even more wearisome in the hands of rank imitators sucking their way through the insufferable 70’s. Writers like Brooks and Donaldson churned out trilogy after trilogy and could find nothing new to bring to the genre. Indeed, even in the hands of relative innovators like Michael Moorcock and Roger Zelazny, or under the marvelous ministrations of self-conscious prose stylists like Fritz Leiber and Avram Davidson, the fantasy tale continued to wane inexorably through the closing decades of the twentieth century. Personally, I enjoyed the familiar terrain of David Gemmell’s Deathwalker novels and the titillating arabesques of Cole and Bunch’s Far Kingdoms, but neither could finally breath fresh life into the corpse of heroic fantasy.

The genre might have been gracefully buried there. We might have happily reread Tennyson’s Idylls of the King and Sir Walter Scott’s Ivanhoe and Alexander Dumas’s musketeer novels and been spared the misery of reading any more such lackluster modern recountings of ersatz Arthurs, leftover Lancelots, and make-believe Merlins. Worse things could have happened. But fantasy wasn’t dead. Dungeons & Dragons had inspired the imagination of a new generation. And the collectible card game Magic: The Gathering left a generation poised for the young adult fantasies of Harry Potter and Eragon. The message to other writers was clear… there may be a dragon slumbering on the top of it, but there’s gold in them there hills.

Then along came the new century, and along with it there emerged some truly powerful new voices in heroic fantasy. George R.R. Martin, despite is overly allusive middle initials, proved himself a powerhouse of fresh ideas in fantasy. He dispensed with Victorian pieties, brought Machiavellianism to Middle Earth, and put sex and violence back where it belongs as central to the genre. Has there even been a more wonderfully complex character than Tyrion Bannister this side of the Bard himself?

The HBO adaptations of Martin’s Westeros leave me a bit over-heated. Not that I mind attractive flesh bouncing bountifully for my viewing pleasure, but it’s a bit distracting from the considerable storytelling virtues I found when reading Martin’s novels. I loved the shifting perspectives, the fully imagined world with serious interpersonal struggles and deadly political challenges. The series still has those elements, to be sure, but it also devotes a fair number of scenes to bawdy spectacle. Far be it from me to complain. The series is a thoroughly enjoyable hit, and it has TV junkies plowing their way through massive novels they might never have attempted. I’m just saying, the novels are better than the series. And we can leave it at that. The problem with porn, even of the soft-core variety, is that once a sex scene is over you have a hard time finding your way back to the main story. The intrusion of one’s own physical desires creates a barrier to the continued suspension of disbelief and the object of entertainment risks becoming ridiculous. Or worse, tedious.

The other contemporary fantasy writer that has me very excited about the resurgence of the genre is Joe Abercrombie. While he has not (yet) been graced with a television series (or even a film) to launch him into the mass-media stratosphere, his novels bring to high fantasy the same sort of gritty realism that Martin’s do. But there’s even something extra to Abercrombie. Much as I love Martin’s epic scope and wonderful way with characterization, he never quite captures the perverse gallows humor of the genre in quite the way Abercrombie manages. After all, there’s a lot of blood and shit to be spilt on the way to slaying dragons and topping fairy kingdoms. Abercrombie shows how it’s done.

Do yourself a favor and start with Abercrombie’s 2007 debut The Blade Itself, a title taken from the Homer quotation, “The blade itself incites deeds of violence.” You’ll never feel yourself in more sympathy with a crippled turned government torturer. These are fantasy novels that push the limits of the genre and reveal again the hidden depths of social significance that first made Malory and Tennyson meaningful.

Chuck Caruso

crime writer & poe scholar

Author: Chuck Caruso