Dad Rock: Pop Culture I Learned from My Father

Happy Father's Day, y'all!

This being a blog primarily dedicated to pop culture, the subject matter has strayed away from anything too personal. Obviously, all criticism and ideas are personal to an extent—I can't help but bring the baggage of history and real life into my writing. Still, as far as I can tell, this blog hasn't exactly been rife with personal anecdotes, and I'm assuming most people who read this blog and haven't met me in real life probably don't know much more about me besides my undying love for "Call Me Maybe" (P.S. "I Really Like You" is great, too).

But dad-gum, it's Father's Day, and I'm feeling sentimental, so here's a short, somewhat personal post for your reading pleasure.

It's hard to state absolutes absolutely, but I feel pretty confident in the one I'm about to say: no one has had a greater influence on my development as a pop culture consumer than my dad. When I was growing up, Dad brought home Hollywood classics from Blockbuster (remember those?); recommended books from the library; played the albums he loved (on tape and CD, of course—he's a pragmatist, not a vinylist) at home and in the car; took me and my siblings to the movies; defended edgier content from my more judicious mother (love you, Mom!); talked to me about the things I liked to read, watch, listen to. And I sucked it all in. Basically, my father laid down the foundations for my present-day tastes in movies, music, literature, television, and the way I talk and debate about all of the above. To put it more trivially: without my dad, there's a very good chance this blog may not have ever existed. That's one among many, many, many things I have to thank my dad for, but it's something that seems especially appropriate to celebrate in this venue.

So, in celebration of the man's unending influence on my artistic tastes, here are five important works of pop culture that I have Dad to thank for bringing into my life.

The Emperor's New Groove
My father used to have this tradition—whether conscious not not, I'm not sure—of renting movies whenever my mom was gone from the house on a weekend church retreat. In fact, the two things you could always count on bookending those weekends were the rental of a movie at the beginning of the weekend and a frantic straightening up of the house at the end. These movies were often kind of forgettable family fare (I think he got Cats & Dogs once), but every once in a while, he struck gold. The richest vein he ever struck was when he brought home that white, blue, and gold rental VHS copy of Disney's one-off expedition into Looney-Tunes-esque meta-gaggery, The Emperor's New Groove. We loved it, and it soon became a family favorite. I still rank this movie among my favorite Disney features, and it's also one of my favorite animated movies ever.

Lord of the Rings
Back in 2001, when Peter Jackson's Fellowship of the Ring hit theaters, it was my dad and his longtime Tolkien fandom that convinced my mom to make a family outing of seeing the movie. Growing up, I used to stare at Dad's copies of the Lord of the Rings books with a mix of curiosity and trepidation; when I was very young, I was unsure from the sketched images on the covers if these books were fiction or nonfiction, and Tolkien's impressive eyebrows on the "About the Author" picture on the back of the book looked like they were liable to swallow me whole if he looked my way. Then came the movies. We were visiting family in Maryland at the time of Fellowship's release, so my aunt, uncle, great uncle, and grandparents came, too. I have no idea what crazy multiplex we ended up going to, but it was like an hour away and decorated with a faux-ancient Egyptian chic. I remember walking by hollow-feeling pillars and the sandy, staring eyes of several sphinxes before entering the dark, relatively less unnerving sanctity of the theater. Anyway, I loved the movie and listened eagerly to my father explaining the byzantine details of Middle Earth mythology for the entire hour-long ride back to my aunt's house. It wasn't long after that that I borrowed Dad's copies of Tolkien's novels and read them on my own in the course of about a month.

Isaac Asimov
I went through this stage in early middle school where I thought that I had read all the good books there were. It wasn't arrogance or anything like that—more disappointment, actually. I had run out of Beverly Cleary and Encyclopedia Brown and Choose-Your-Own Adventure books and had read all the classics that I could understand and knew about from Wishbone. I had also had an extremely dry run at the library recently, where all I could find were these lame historical fiction novels that always tried just a little too hard to teach its readers about Victorian England or Ancient Greece and not nearly enough time on story. If you've spent any time in a children's library, you know what I mean. Enter Dad, who one day at the library hands me a short story collection by this guy named Isaac Asimov. He tells me that "The Last Question" is his favorite and points out a few others that are good, too. I go home and climbed into my bunk bed—I slept on top—and read all six-ish pages of "The Last Question" in one sitting. Bruce Springsteen talks about that single snare drum beat at the beginning of "Like a Rolling Stone" kicking open the door to your mind; I can say much the same thing about Isaac Asimov in general and "The Last Question" in specifics. My father's putting that book in my hand opened my mind to not just Asimov's sprawling works but also adult fiction, science fiction, and the entire genre of the short story. It's probably the most significant turning point ever in my reading habits.

Nirvana
I don't think my dad has ever owned a Nirvana album (he's always been way more of a classic rock and New Wave guy—when he isn't listening to jazz or classical, that is—dude's got eclectic taste), but you could bet that whenever he caught "Smells Like Teen Spirit" or "Come As You Are" on the car radio, he'd be jamming out for the next four minutes. I later went on to be a pretty big Nirvana fan myself, and I credit that largely to the early exposure riding in Dad's car. Even so, it took me until college to realize that Dad was quoting "Smells Like Teen Spirit" when he'd whistle a few bars and sing, "I found it hard, so hard..." I'd always assumed it was some rockabilly song. My father has many talents, but singing is not one of them.

The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy
One time in middle school (this was post-"The Last Question"), I asked my dad if he had any good books to recommend. He gave me his copy of Douglas Adams's The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. As with Lord of the Rings, I'd always been a little weirded out by the cover when I'd seen the book on his shelf (for some reason, I found the deep grooves in the hitchhiking hand's palm to be way more unsettling that the eyeless green planet monster with the arms). To this day, it's one of the funniest books I've ever read. I laugh out loud very seldom when I'm reading, but the scene with the sperm whale gave me such an acute case of the giggles that I had to shakily set the book aside and bend over until I calmed down.

And that's just five. When I was brainstorming for this post, I came up with over ten without even trying, and that's barely scratching the surface of all the stuff my dad showed me. In the context of a lifetime, introducing someone to a good book or movie or band may seem like a relatively inconsequential action. And maybe it is. But it never felt that way. What it felt like was one person connecting with another through a shared love of art, joy, humor, wonder, mystery, angst, and complex fantasy worlds with appended histories. And that feeling of contact, of not being alone, made a big difference. So thanks, Dad. I love you lots. Happy Father's Day!

Until next time!

100 Years...100 Movies 49-51: Intolerance, The Fellowship of the Ring, West Side Story

Hello all! I'm working my way through AFI's 100 Years...100 Movies list, giving thoughts, analyses, and generally scattered musings on each one. For more details on the project, you can read the introductory post here.

Epics, epics, epics. Well, I guess West Side Story isn't truly an epic, but whatever. All three of these movies push the 2.5-3 hour mark, and that's all I'm going to say about that. I had my fill of griping about movie length way back at the beginning of the list. Anyway, enjoy the films! I sure did. Well, most of them.

49. *Intolerance (1916, D. W. Griffith)
So, this one's a biggie. Everything I've ever read about Intolerance points to it as a major innovation in the history of film, and its director, D. W. Griffith, is one of the giants of Silent Cinema. And then there's its colossal, ridiculous, utterly breathtaking ambition, a 3+ hour epic that cross-cuts between four distinct historical settings and storylines, which makes the film literally a biggie. On a more subjective note, Intolerance is big for me and specifically for this blog series because giving myself an occasion to watch Intolerance was one of the main reasons I started my trek through the AFI 100. I'll be honest, though: prior to (and even a couple hours into) this first viewing, my interest in this movie was primarily academic. I wasn't exactly itching to watch it (I mean, at the risk of sounding horribly prejudiced, it's an epic-length silent drama—if that description makes you want to drop everything and watch it right away, well, you're a more sophisticated viewer than I), but based on its reputation and influence, I knew it was one of those movies I had to see if I wanted to be serious about rounding out a knowledge of film. Well, Reader, I have seen Intolerance, and it pretty much blew me away. Now, I'm not gonna lie: stretches of the movie (heck, whole historical timelines—why is the St. Bartholomew's Day Massacre in here?) made me restless enough to glance at the clock, and I watched the thing in two sittings. But the payoff was magnificent. Foremost, Intolerance looks lavish. Back when I wrote about Gone with the Wind [1], I mentioned how awe-inspiring those "cast-of-thousands" shots are, but Intolerance's setpieces make Gone with the Wind's look like they were done with Fisher-Price toys. The grandeur of the Babylon sequences in particular is at a level I don't think I've seen in any other film, and Intolerance basically solidifies this idea that's been brewing in my head recently, that for all the advantages of CG-enhanced cinema, digital crowds and sets can't hold a candle to the majesty of those giant Hollywood shots of actual crowds from the old epics. All that spectacle is great fun to look at; however, the thing that pulls everything together is Intolerance's emotional power. It's a slow-builder for sure, but once it gets going, there's nothing stopping the panoramic humanity of the picture. The last ten minutes are deeply moving in a way that I never expected in my anticipation of seeing this film. All that is to say, if this can be said of a nearly ninety-year-old movie: believe the hype.

50. The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring (2001, Peter Jackson)
And speaking of hype, if there's an Intolerance of my generation, Peter Jackson's Lord of the Rings trilogy is it. By that I mean that it's a work of filmmaking so enormous in its ambition, so successful in its combination of sweeping spectacle and equally sweeping pathos, so influential in terms of how much it changed the tone and vocabulary of mainstream American cinema, that it's sure to be turning up on lists like AFI's from now on, if only for its sheer historical significance. For whatever reason, Jackson's LOTR has fallen in critical estimation in the years since its original theatrical run (just check out how few of those "Best of the Decade" lists from 2009 made room for any of the three films). I, however, still love these movies as much as when I was first seeing them (and Fellowship is probably the best of the lot—well spotted, AFI), so rather than dwell on the good and the bad of this movie, I just want to point out something that's maybe kind of obvious: the early 2000s was this weird wonderland of a time when studios made major risks by handing over huge, expensive genre projects to idiosyncratic, totally un-four-quadrant indie directors, and The Lord of the Rings is Exhibit A in this trend. I mean, Peter Jackson, a man who up to that point was known mostly for splatterhouse horror and black comedy, a man who had not had one major mainstream hit, was given the reigns to one of the single riskiest, most enormous cinematic undertakings ever. Like, holy cow, what divine accident caused one of those profit-counters at New Line Cinema to sign off on that?? And then you've got people like Sam Raimi (like, Evil Dead Sam Raimi!), Alfonso Cuarón, and Guillermo del Toro put in charge of big-budget productions of Spider-Man, Harry Potter, and Blade, respectively, only a year or two later. I mean, golly. What was even crazier was that each of those directors made movies out of those properties that felt true to their filmography. The Lord of the Rings movies feel like Peter Jackson movies, by gum, which is really saying something given the number of eyes those films no doubt had to pass by before reaching the final cut. All that is to say, the blockbuster world of 2014 feels a lot more committee-run and a lot less personal than it did even ten-to-fifteen years ago, and for as many successes as that's brought (I like the Marvel Cinematic Universe a whole lot, guys), I sometimes miss the days of The Fellowship of the Ring's production. Which is probably a judgement totally clouded by nostalgia and historical revision on my part, but whatever.

51. *West Side Story (1961, Robert Wise)
Basing the plot of a movie on Romeo and Juliet is one of the few ways to guarantee that I will not like a movie. Reader, I just don't like that play. One of the main reasons for this is that Romeo and Juliet are stupid, irritating, and (worse) insufferably dull characters. YOU GUYS JUST MET EACH OTHER, THERE'S NO WAY YOU'RE IN LOVE, GAAHH. Ahem. Sorry. I've heard people argue that that was Shakespeare's point, that Romeo and Juliet's cooperative vapidity is meant to show the foolish idealism of young love, blah blah. Well, maybe, but that doesn't change the facts that I just can't stand either of them and that they're uninteresting to read about/watch. So, given all that, it should come as little surprise to anyone that I did not really care for West Side Story. In all fairness to the movie, the deck was pretty stacked against it to begin with; in addition to everything I've already written here, there's also my well-documented tepidity for movie musicals in general [2]. And in further fairness to the movie, I enjoyed pieces of it. The social dynamics of both the gangs and the immigration issues are handled with an impressive degree of sophistication and honesty (especially for a mainstream Hollywood musical), with the film striking in interesting balance between fatalism and personal agency as instigators of tragedy. The show also has a few songs I enjoy, with my favorite probably being the surprisingly thematically complex "Gee, Officer Krupke," although I make room in my heart for the "Tonight Quintet" and "Jet Song," too. The majority of the songs, though, I find kind of boring and background-music-y, and the movie is far too fond of extended wordless dance numbers that are great fun live but rather a chore to sit through in a film. And of course, there's no saving Tony and Maria (your Romeo and Juliet proxies) from being boring as Elmer's glue, so their sections of the movie have all the vibrancy of a pile of rocks with no moss. That's a death knell for the film, which makes these sections its primary focus. Once their plot dovetails with the gang violence, it picks up a little, but by then, it's too late to make me feel anything for those two. Does that make me heartless? Maybe. But dang it if I just look at the clock whenever Tony shows his dopey face.

And BAM! I'm halfway through this list! Unfortunately, I'm more than halfway through the summer, which means that this project will carry over into the school semester... which means that my pace through these movies will slow significantly come mid-August. Oh well. As always, feel free to let me know what you think of these write-ups. Until next time!

If the spirit moves you, you can look back at the previous post, #s 46-48, here.
Update: The next post, #s 52-55, is up here.

1] If you want to feel weird things about the passage of time and cinematic evolution, think about this: there are twenty-three years between the release of Intolerance and the release of Gone with the Wind. That's about the same amount of time separating us from Terminator 2, Beauty and the Beast, and The Silence of the Lambs.

2] For the record, I've seen this performed live on the stage as well, and per usual, I enjoyed the show quite a bit. It's just movie musicals, man. They'll get ya.

Christian and Non-Christian Influences in High Fantasy Literature

For the longest time, I was a big fan of high fantasy. The Chronicles of Narnia were some of the first "grown up" books (i.e. more words than pictures) I ever read, and by the time I got to middle school, I was devouring Lord of the Rings, Ursula K. Le Guin's Earthsea books, and whatever Terry Brooks was writing at the moment (which I can now scarcely remember, such was Brooks's impact on me apparently). Sometime late in high school, I kind of fell out of the genre, though I still enjoy reading a good epic quest from time to time[1]. But anyway, the point is that I read a lot of that sort of thing.

One particular series that stands out in my mind is Susan Cooper's The Dark Is Rising sequence, which is really the main event of this post. The more I think about this series, the more it feels to me like a complete anomaly in the high fantasy genre.

For those who don't know[2], The Dark Is Rising sequence is a series of five children's books (although they probably would have been classified as YA novels if such a distinction existed at the time) written in the '60s and '70s during the post-LoTR explosion of epic fantasy literature. The main premise of the books is this: throughout history two forces—the Light and the Dark—have fought for control over Earth. The Old Ones, an ancient order of protectors allied with the Light, have to collect five magical artifacts to defeat the Dark, which is (you guessed it) rising for one final battle in which the fate of the planet hangs in the balance, and in order to do so, the Old Ones recruit several British schoolchildren (among whom is Will Stanton, a sort of Chosen One) to help them save the world. Pretty standard high fantasy stuff, right? Well, sort of.

Now, there is a whole host of reasons why The Dark Is Rising stands out as a non-standard entry in the fantasy canon, but here's the one I want to focus on in this post: unlike almost every other fantasy series I read growing up, this series values its pagan influences over its Christian ones.

Pretty much every modern fantasy epic has two major influences on its storytelling and world-building philosophies: medieval Christianity and pre-Christian European mythology[3]. From medieval Christianity, we get the setting (castles, noble knights, etc.) and the overriding storytelling morality of absolute good vs. absolute evil (including the accompanying imagery—white=good; black=bad). From European paganism, we get wizards/druids, dwarves, magic rings, and pretty much all the other mythical trappings. Of course, that's an oversimplification of the factors at play in fantasy, but I do think (please correct me if I'm wrong) it's broadly accurate.

What ends up happening in most traditional fantasy sagas is that the pagan elements (aka the magic) work in service of Christian ones. Consider (as anyone must when discussing this genre) Tolkien. Lord of the Rings has pagan influences aplenty: magic items, monsters, cloaked figures who perform ancient ceremonies—all that comes from pre-Christian Norse and Celtic mythology; Tolkien even cribbed some of the names (Gimli, for instance) directly from Norse myth. But the storytelling ends to which Tolkien puts these influences to use are decidedly Christian. Lord of the Rings, with its redemptive plot arcs, corruptible humanity, and figures of pure good and evil, is an undeniably Christian work that uses its non-Christian elements as tools. The same thing happens in most other fantasy epics I'm familiar with. The individual components may harken back Norse, Celtic, or even Greco-Roman mythology, but the central philosophy and storytelling devices are more in-line with Christian thought[4].

Cernunnos, letting it all hang out

That's not really the case with The Dark Is Rising. Sure, the series has Christian influences (the books make frequent allusions to churches, King Arthur pops up in conversation from time to time, and iconography like crosses plays an important role in the plot), but as the sequence progresses, pre-Christian Celtic narratives crop up more and more. For example, Herne the Hunter (a folk figure often connected with Celtic deity Cernunnos) makes a prominent appearance in the second book, while the third book is entirely focused on a town's annual "greenwitch" offering, which seems to be a benign version (read: no killing) of the Druid wicker man tradition. By the fourth book, it's revealed that three powers (not just the Light and Dark) rule over the world, effectively doing away with binary morality. And these aren't just passing allusions; these are major mythological touchstones for the sake of themselves, without any sort of Christian endgame. By the end of the series, it's clear that The Dark Is Rising is first and foremost interested in ancient traditions that predate Christianity's arrival in the British Isles, and it uses its fantasy structure to build a story more in-step with those traditions than any Western ideology. In a way, it's reminiscent of the original Wicker Man movie, only without all the human sacrifice and horror—how a mostly Christian (or at least Western) premise gives way to an exploration of how ancient Celtic traditions override modern sensibilities.

In a way, The Dark Is Rising takes the medieval Christian tendency to appropriate pagan traditions for theological ends (just check out the historical origins of our Christmas and Halloween celebrations) and turns it on its head, using high fantasy, a genre typically associated with Christian mores, to explore old Celtic beliefs. That's pretty fascinating stuff, even if I for one identify much more (aka completely) with Christianity than Celtic paganism.

Not the bees... oh wait.

I feel like I need to end this discussion by reiterating that I haven't paid nearly as much attention to the genre recently as I did in my middle and high school years. If I ever was an expert on epic fantasy, I certainly am not one now. Furthermore, I've never been an expert on mythology. So take all these ideas with a grain of salt. This post is more of a rambling muse than a well-researched treatise on the subject. If any of you out there know more on either subject, I'd love to hear about it!

As always, I'm super willing to discuss anything you might bring up, and moreover, I'm sure I've said something reductive, stupid, or just plain wrong in the above paragraphs. So let me know what you think. Thanks so much for reading.

Until next time.


1] In fact, I just finished Neil Gaiman's American Gods, which is pretty much a high fantasy novel set in the contemporary USA.

2] Judging from its ubiquity in libraries, I think there must have been a time when this series was at least semi-popular, but I rarely hear it discussed nowadays. Aside from a go-nowhere attempt to adapt the books into a series of movies with The Seeker (which I haven't seen but is by all accounts pretty lousy), I get the impression that not too many people pay attention to The Dark Is Rising sequence anymore. Maybe I just fly in the wrong circles, though, so apologies if I'm pretending like these books are more obscure than they are.

3] You could probably say, more accurately, that every modern fantasy epic has one influence, Lord of the Rings, and that Lord of the Rings is the one directly influenced by Christianity and paganism.

4] I'm not saying that fantasy authors always have Christian intentions or identify with the Christian religion (though that certainly seems to be the case with J. R. R. Tolkien and his fantasy co-conspirator, C. S. Lewis), but the conventions of 20th-century English-language fantasy do tend toward broadly Christian ideology, even if not in an explicitly theological way. Maybe a better way to put it is that they represent the generally Western way of thinking most closely aligned with Christianity. Even Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials trilogy, as explicitly anti-Christian as it may be, still uses Western Christianity as a primary philosophical touchstone, if only to refute it.