Myth and History in American Memory

Course planning

In the summer of 2021, I was asked to teach Myth and History in American Memory for the Department of American Studies at UNC-Chapel Hill. As I began to plan for the course, I wondered about the notion of “American Memory” and how it could be described in cultural contexts. I’m less inclined to think about memory as the way our culture remembers its past in favor of an approach that considers how the past is reified in a variety of communicative forms. We live in an era where information is readily available in networked, digital archives; the past is literally at our fingertips. Therefore, the question to ask about memory is what version of the past is represented in our visual field, and perhaps more importantly, how does this representation diverge from our understanding of history? With this basic question in mind, I decided to ground the course in an analysis of how the 1950s is mediated in contemporary American culture so students would have a tangible reference to the way the past materializes in the public domain.

The blockbuster film Back to the Future (1985) not only inspired my course planning, it offered a mediated representation of the 1950s to analyze while also providing an unexpected roadmap to a specific cultural moment replete with material to study. In the film, Marty, the main character, inadvertently travels back to 1955 after an experimental mishap. As it happens, he arrives in a fictionalized midwest town during the throes of a tumultuous decade which is underrepresented in the film. Instead, the plot centers on the financial misfortunes of a white family and their emasculated patriarch.

As the fictionalized version of the era unfolded in film, photographers like Gordon Parks and Robert Frank were at work documenting life in the United States. The film Rebel Without a Cause was released in the middle of the decade, and the photography exhibit “Family of Man” opened at the Museum of Modern Art under the direction of Edward Steichen at about the same time. James Baldwin’s novel Giovanni’s Room would be published in 1956, and the now classic (and rightfully reappraised) children’s book The Cat in the Hat was published the following year. Also in this decade, Parker Brothers developed the board game Careers, which required players to develop a formula for success based on a valuation of fame, money, and happiness. (We played the game in class to better understand the social context.) These cultural texts represented our primary source material. In a sense, we revisited the decade through this material to better understand its contemporary representation.

Instructional talk

I use an experiential learning model in class that usually begins with a close-reading of cultural text which is followed by a small group discussion to generalize new information. After this discussion, I provide additional context to further our understanding of whatever is at issue in the analysis before introducing a reflection exercise. As the conversation unfolds in class, I sometimes find the need to push the discussion further by pointing to specific connections with the primary source material. I presented the below talk to the class after we had watched and discussed the film Rebel Without a Cause (1956). By this time in the semester, we had already analyzed Robert Frank’s The Americans. In the brief talk, I use a scene from Charlie Chaplain’s Modern Times to reinforce the agency of film as critical commentary (Sturken and Cartwright 2009). The talk follows:

What do you see?

In the above photograph, Robert Frank manages to subvert the Mammy trope that we’ve seen in other cultural texts because an actual caretaker is represented in the composition. This image, for instance, is at odds with its fictionalized configuration in films like Rebel Without a Cause. Recall the construction of Plato’s home life. The maid, an unnamed African American woman, becomes the de facto parental figure in the absence of his parents, which has fatal consequences for the effeminate Plato. The film implies that her failures as a surrogate parent passively contributed to Plato’s waywardness. And to be sure, the absence of his parents is what created the space for her to emerge in this role. So, the failure is their failure as well, which is really what the movie is about despite its celebration of the rebel icon – the consequences of familial instability, which unfortunately is idealized in the film. But what about the woman photographed by Robert Frank? What does this image communicate about the family?

The point of this comparison is to distinguish between how something is represented in cultural contexts and how it is actualized by people who live something different.

In a similar way, a normative understanding of gender roles was mobilized in the I Love Lucy episode that we watched on Tuesday. The entire comedic enterprise relied on the transposition of those gender roles. Think about this. The antics of Ricky in the kitchen trying to cook seemed to inspire the most laughter from the audience. Why is this? Was it because of Ricky’s vaudeville-like performance as he slipped on the kitchen floor and fumbled with two chickens? Or was it because the audience understood that he could not cook, that he was posing as a housewife? And perhaps more importantly, the audience affirms this extra-textual understanding through their laughter.

Now, let’s consider the scene from the Charlie Chaplin film Modern Times again.

Is it funny? Well, ultimately that’s a subjective question impossible to discern for a variety of reasons, the least of which is guessing at what a 1936 audience may recognize as humorous. The more important question to ask is what is Chaplin trying to convey through his performative art?

Well, the scene begins with a man, presumably in a control room (and in charge) – the hint a surveillance resonates here – who tells a shirtless man to speed up production. (Why is this man shirtless, by the way?) Anyway, this increased production causes problems for Chaplin’s character, who diligently, though unsuccessfully tries to keep up the pace – at one point being literally sucked into the machinery, which has already figuratively entrapped him. This is the point of the movie.

What does Chaplin do when he becomes entrapped in the machinery? Does he try to escape? No, he passively moves through the system, even turning his wrench when the cogs stop briefly because that is what he’s been acculturated to do. Fortunately, the machine spits him out again, but he cannot stop turning his wrenches. It’s all that he knows. They have become a part of who he is, which Chaplin signals by raising the wrenches to his head as if they are some kind of accoutrements. Of course, this capitalist entanglement is a figurative dance, one he cannot stop, even when he leaves the factory space and moves onto the sidewalk, having been lured by buttons that look like the objects he’s been turning.

First buttons, then a fire hydrant, and then buttons again on the topcoat of a woman walking toward him. This is an important scene. Chaplain doesn’t chase the woman to assault her – though that is what he is doing – he’s lured by an object which he’s been acculturated to turn. He can’t escape the impulse, even when he’s not inside the factory. Fortunately for the woman, there’s an institutional figure present to hedge Chaplin in. So, he runs back into the familiar environs of the factory to escape where he’s nabbed by that shirtless man.

Again, why is he shirtless?

My real point here is that within the diegetic space of this film – and by diegetic, I’m simply referring to the representation of life in the plot – Chaplin is criticizing the capitalist enterprise. Is he subverting the system or reproducing it in his work?

This brings me back to Rebel Without a Cause. Does the film subvert the idealized family or reproduce that formation?

If it reproduces that formation, then why does it operate differently in public memory? Why is it remembered as “an allegory of growth and the painfulness of growth,” to quote Jay Carr, or as “a ground-breaking attempt to portray the moral decay of American youth, critique parental style, and explore the differences and conflicts between generations,” to quote whomever made that claim on Wikipedia. To be more specific about this dissonance, why did the architects of Town Square choose to hang a picture of James Dean in their diner and not one from Robert Frank’s The Americans?

To ask this question is to ask why does Rebel Without a Cause operate as myth – a representation that glosses over underlying ideas or epistemologies that may force us to contend with uncomfortable truths like why our culture asked African American women to raise white children while disavowing their worth as human beings?

…or why someone like these young people, photographed by Robert Frank in 1956, lie dead on the steps of a planetarium as James Dean coyly introduces his new love, Judy, portrayed by Natalie Wood, to his parents, who have now returned to their familiar and stable heteronormative roles.

Student feedback about the course

“I’ve really enjoyed this course, despite the difficulties I experienced taking it. Examining the way the 1950s as a decade exist in American memory is fascinating. I found the course structure, even on the accelerated pace necessary for the summer session, to be engaging and thought provoking. As difficult as it has been in online classes, the way you structured the course allowed for interesting discussion and engagement.”

“This class has been very helpful in developing deeper critical thinking skills within me. I’ve always thought of myself as someone who tends to think beyond the surface level when it comes to most topics, but throughout this semester I’ve realized that even once you believe you’ve come to a conclusion, it’s important to examine why and how that conclusion came to you. Through looking at the normative ideas held in the 1950s and studying different interpretations and extrapolations about those ideas, I’ve become more aware of some stereotypical or unfounded beliefs within myself.”

“I enjoyed your approach to the material using primary sources and allowing us to put some thought into the subject before introducing an alternative view or opinion of it. I thoroughly enjoyed the open discussion format as well. It was always interesting to listen to the various perspectives and opinions we had just contained in our classroom alone.”

“Before this class, I was aware of images of the 1950s and the common perception that this time period was the golden age of America, when the economy was booming and suburban family life emerged. I knew that there were problems in the 1950s though, including systemic racism, threat of nuclear war, and more, but this class has helped me see these many problems and reshape my memory of the 1950s from simply a golden age. The piece of media that I found most interesting and eye opening towards the 1950s when we researched it was Robert Zemeckis’s film Back to the Future.”

“While some people remember the 1950s as a beautiful land of perfectly functional families and people working together to progress America for the good, it can also be remembered as an extremely scary time of segregation and hatred towards minorities, a constant fear of Communism and a push towards consumerism in the face of uncertainty. While people were admiring the star icons of the newly available television, others were suffering from the realities of living in a society where perfection was the standard and outsiders were seen as different and a threat to the functional members of society.”

Select secondary reading

Barker, Timothy. “Television in and out of time.” In Digital Memory Studies: Media Pasts in Transition, 173-189. New York: Routledge, 2018.

Bederman, Gail. “Theodore Roosevelt,” in Manliness and Civilization: A Cultural History of Gender and Race in the United States, 1880-1917. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995.

Bollmer, Grant D. “Culture and Technique.” In Theorizing Digital Cultures, 2-13. London: Sage Publications Ltd., 2018.

Breines, Wini. Young, White, and Miserable: Growing up Female in the Fifties. Boston: Beacon Press, 1992.

Carosso, Andrea. Cold War Narratives: American Culture in the 1950s. Bern: Peter Lang, 2013.

Deloria, Philip. Indians in Unexpected Places. Lawrence, KS: University Press of Kansas, 2004.

Doss, Erika. Introduction to Looking at Life Magazine, 1-20. Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, 2001.

Erll, Astrid. Memory in culture. Translated by Sara B. Young. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011.

Hillis, Ken, Michael Petit, and Kylie Jarrett. Introduction to Google and the Culture of Search, 1-29. London: Routledge, 2012.

Hoskins, Andrew. “The Restless Past.” In Digital Memory Studies: Media Pasts in Transition edited by Andrew Hoskins, 1-24. New York: Routledge, 2018.

Jemielniak, Dariusz. Common Knowledge? An Ethnography of Wikipedia. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2014.  

Linfield, Susie. “A little history of photography criticism.” In Cruel Radiance: Photography and Political Violence, 3-31. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010.

Lipsitz, George. The Possessive Investment in Whiteness: How White People Profit from Identity Politics, 1-23. Twentieth Anniversary ed. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2018.

May, Elaine Tyler. “Containment at Home: Cold War, Warm Hearth.” In Homeward Bound: American Families in the Cold War Era, 19-38. 1988; New York: Basic Books, 2008.

Millett, Kate. “Theory of Sexual Politics.” In Sexual Politics, 23-58. 1969; New York: Columbia University Press, 2016.

Mitchell, W.J.T. “There are no visual media.” In Visual Culture Reader, edited by Nicholas Mirzoeff. New York: Routledge, 2013.

Nel, Philip. Was the Cat in the Hat Black?: The Hidden Racism of Children’s Literature and the Need for Diverse Books. New York: Oxford University Press, 2017.

Sturken, Marita and Lisa Cartwright. “Modernity: Spectatorship, the Gaze, and Power.” In Practices of Looking: An Introduction to Visual Culture. New York: Oxford University Press, 2018.

Taylor, Charles. “What is a Social Imaginary.” In Modern Social Imaginaries, 23-30. Durham: Duke University Press, 2004.  

Upton, Brian. “Defining Play.” In The Aesthetics of Play, 9-21. Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press, 2015.  

Wallace-Sanders, Kimberly. Mammy: A Century or Race, Gender, and Southern Memory. University of Michigan Press, 2008.  

Zerubavel, Eviatar. “The Social Shape of the Past.” In Time Maps: Collective Memory and the Social Shape of the Past, 11-36. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003.