Guest Post: Did 'the man who invented Christmas' plagiarize Jesus?

Matthew Robert Anderson, Concordia University

Everyone knows the story of Scrooge, a man so miserly his name has become synonymous with penny-pinching meanness. Scrooge’s conversion from miser to benefactor has been told and retold since Charles Dickens first wrote A Christmas Carol in the fall and winter of 1843. Ebenezer is a wonderful character, so richly portrayed and fascinating he’s echoed in stories from The Grinch to It’s a Wonderful Life.

Pop culture has embraced both Dickens and his tale. With this season’s The Man Who Invented Christmas, Hollywood has done it again.

But who was Scrooge before he was, well, Christopher Plummer? The inspiration for the crotchety Christmas-hater may have been those who put Dickens’ own father into debtor’s prison and were responsible for young Charles working in a shoe-blacking factory.

Some Dickens scholars believe the author’s 1843 visit to sooty Manchester, or to “the black streets of London,” (as he described them in a letter to a friend) influenced him. It may be that the fable was a moral reminder from Dickens to himself, as he teetered on financial ruin. This is the theory proposed in the book by Les Standiford on which this year’s movie is based.

Did Dickens in fact invent Christmas, as we know it? Hollywood may think so, but others, like David Parker in his Christmas and Charles Dickens vehemently disagree.

Whatever your opinion, the prevailing wisdom is that A Christmas Carol isn’t particularly religious. As a professor of biblical studies at Concordia University and also a Lutheran minister, I have a different reading.

It’s true that the celebration of the season which Scrooge discovers has much more to do with generosity, family gatherings and large cooked birds, than the Nativity. But maybe those seeking explicit scriptural references in Dickens’ story are underestimating the Victorian novelist’s skill — and his audacity. Perhaps A Christmas Carol contains an alternative to the Bible rather than a simple borrowing from it. And perhaps that’s the point.

Jesus was a master story-teller

Jesus, by all accounts another master story-teller, told a parable that, stripped of Dickens’ English waistcoats, ledgers, fog and shutters, could almost be a mirror to A Christmas Carol:

“There once was a rich man. A poor man named Lazarus lived at his gate, with nothing to eat. Lazarus died and was carried by the angels to Abraham’s side. The rich man also died.”

There follows, in Jesus’ tale, an exchange between the rich man, who is in torment, and Abraham, who acts as the guardian of paradise. It’s hard not to think of the innocent Lazarus as a precursor to Tiny Tim.

First the rich man asks for his own relief from hell. When that’s denied, he pleads: “I beg you, send Lazarus to my father’s house. I have five brothers. Let him warn them so they don’t come to this place of agony.” Abraham replies: “They have Moses and the prophets. They must listen to them.”

“No, Father Abraham!” cries the rich man, “But if someone from the dead goes to them, they will change” (Luke 16:19-31).

One can almost hear the chains of Morley’s ghost rattling. What would have happened if Father Abraham had said yes? Something very like a first-century version of A Christmas Carol.

Let’s not forget that the people of our western English-speaking past, especially artists and writers, were imbued with Biblical references and ideas. As Northrop Frye, among others, has argued, they lived and created in a world shaped by the rhythms, narratives, images and conceptions (or misconceptions) of the King James Bible.

Parable of Lazarus

Was Dickens familiar with Christian scriptures? All evidence points to the fact that he was more acquainted than most. Despite an antipathy to organized religion, from 1846 to 1849 Dickens wrote a short biography of Jesus for his children, titled The Life of our Lord.

He forbade that his small retelling of Jesus’ life should be published, until not only he, but also his children, had died. The “Parable of Lazarus and the Rich Man” was one of eight stories of Jesus that Dickens chose to include in that volume. But in his story of Scrooge, Dickens was too much of a writer to leave Jesus’ parable as is, and his age too suspicious of scripture to leave it “unbroken.”

A Christmas Carol unites the deliciously horrific sensibility of the Gothic movement with the powerfully simple narrative style, joined to moral concern, typical of parables.

Was Dickens perhaps dozing off some Sunday while the rector droned on about Lazarus, until he wakened with a start dreaming of Scrooge? We will never know. But it’s an intriguing possibility.

Happy endings for the rich

Surprisingly, the Sunday after Dickens was buried in Westminster Abbey, Dean Arthur Penrhyn Stanley, preaching on exactly this text, spoke of Dickens as the “parabler” of his age. Stanley said that “By [Dickens] that veil was rent asunder which parts the various classes of society. Through his genius the rich man…was made to see and feel the presence of Lazarus at his gate.”

I would go further: Dickens took the parable, and then retold and changed it, so that the rich man gets a second chance. As a privileged societal figure who had gone through financial difficulties and who cared about the poor himself, Dickens freely adapted Jesus to come up with a story that’s ultimately more about love than judgement.

When confronted with Marley’s spectre, Scrooge, unnerved but unrepentant, addresses the apparition: “You may be an undigested bit of beef, a blot of mustard, a crumb of cheese, a fragment of underdone potato.”

The perceptive reader (or viewer) of A Christmas Carol can point a finger at Marley’s ghost and add: “Or maybe you’re an ironic but hope-filled riff on Jesus, by a famous nineteenth-century author who wanted to write his own story of redemption.”

Dickens not only invented this Christmas genre, but imagined a happy ending for himself in it. He penned an enduring story about the second chance even a rich person can receive, if haunted by persistent-enough ghosts.

The Man Who Invented Christmas (Bleeker Street Media/Elevation Pictures)

Matthew Robert Anderson, Affiliate Professor, Theological Studies, Loyola College for Diversity & Sustainability, Concordia University

This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.

Guest Post: Don Quijote, Man of Free Markets

by Eric Clifford Graf

Economists from the Austrian School have long argued that the free-market mindset, which reached its pinnacle during the classical liberal period of the 18th and 19th centuries, traces its own origins back to the early modern period, especially the ideas of the neo-scholastic thinkers of 16th and 17th century Spain known as the School of Salamanca.

Just to name a few, men like Domingo de Soto (1494-1560), Martín de Azpilcueta (1491-1586), Diego de Covarrubias (1512-77), Luis Saravia de la Calle (1500s), Tomás de Mercado (1525-75), Luis de Molina (1535-1600), Juan de Mariana (1536-1624), and Felipe de la Cruz Vasconcillos (1500s) were keen to define, analyze, debate, and explain things like interest rates, the pricing of goods and services, the causes and effects of inflation, the advisability of different monetary policies, and the relation between supply and demand.

Miguel de Cervantes (1547-1616), author of the first modern novel, Don Quijote de la Mancha (part one, 1605; part two, 1615), was familiar with the School of Salamanca. As evidence, here are five major ideas at the core of free-market thinking which are also at the core of Don Quijote:

Subjective Value
Salamancan and Austrian economists embrace the notion that free and voluntary exchange implies that even two wrongs can make a right. If both of us leave happy, the “true” value of things we exchange matters less than the fact that we exchange them. Tastes, wants, and needs are subjective. Indeed, such differences are precisely why we produce stuff and trade it. Without them we would all be poor, starving brutes.

Examples of subjective value theory abound in Cervantes. For example, in Don Quijote Part 1 Chapter 21, Don Quijote, the eccentric hidalgo (gentleman) asks Sancho, “Do you not see that knight coming toward us, mounted on a dappled gray and wearing on his head a helmet of gold?” The squire is unconvinced: “What I see and can make out ... is just a man riding on a donkey that’s gray like mine, and wearing something shiny on his head.”


The Time Value of Money
In the Protestant world, men like John Calvin and Henry VIII began eroding usury laws around 1550. In Spain, the Salamancans debated. Saravia’s Instrución de mercaderes (1544) marked a transition between different ways of thinking about business; Mercado’s Suma de tratos y contratos (1569) advanced a liberal view of charging interest; Vasconcillos’s Tratado único de intereses (1637) indicated the basic injustice of borrowing money for free.

Cervantes’s critique of usury laws appears in Don Quijote Part 1 Chapter 4’s dialogue between the hero and Juan Haldudo regarding the back pay the peasant owes a shepherd. Don Quijote calculates that “nine months, at seven reales a month” comes to “73 reales,” which includes an interest of 10 reales. It’s a game of perspectives. If we laugh at Don Quijote, we endorse the official policy against interest; if we accept his calculation, we think like rational market participants.

By the way, a surcharge of 10 reales for the use of 63 reales for nine months, or 21% annually, was a reasonable rate around 1600.


Free-Labor Markets
Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels credited Thomas Hobbes as an originator of their materialist assessment of how the world works. They liked Hobbes’s critique of metaphysical thinking but also his understanding of labor as a commodity subject to the law of supply and demand. A fundamental aspect of the transition from feudalism to bourgeois capitalism involved an awareness that we should compensate people for their property or services.

Hobbes was a serious reader of Don Quijote. Throughout the book, squire and hidalgo negotiate Sancho’s salary. In Part 1 Chapter 20, Sancho presses his master: “I would like to know ... just how much a squire made from a knight-errant in those days, and if they were paid on a monthly basis or daily, like bricklayers.” When Sancho threatens to go on strike in Part 2 Chapter 7, Sansón Carrasco, also known as “perpetual diversion and delight of the courtyards of the schools of Salamanca,” offers his services. Don Quijote perceives a market: “Did I not tell you, Sancho, that I would have plenty of squires from whom to choose?”

Stable Currency 
John Maynard Keynes observed that only one man in a million perceives the destructive effects of inflation. Hoping likewise, the Habsburg kings of early 17th-century Spain undertook the first modern industrialized production of fiat money to finance their wars, corruption, and extravagance. The results correlate well with the fall of the Spanish Empire marked by the Treaty of Westphalia in 1648 (see figure below). Artificially induced inflation was criticized by members of the School of Salamanca, especially Mariana. Philip III burned Mariana’s books and the Inquisition charged him with lèse-majesté – insulting the monarch, which was treason.

Purchasing power of the billon cuarto coin reverting to the market value of copper, 1597-1659. The maravedí was one of the era’s units of account. Source: Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago.

In Don Quijote Part 1 Chapter 1, the first metaphor in this greatest work of fiction involves a comparison between Rocinante’s hooves and the decayed purchasing power of the era’s quarter coins. Later, in Part 2 Chapter 17, Cervantes has his hero attack what is first described as the king’s money cart. It’s really a cart carrying the King’s lions, which refuse to fight with Don Quijote. But when he uses gold coins to tip the driver and the lion tamer, bribing them to say he vanquished the beasts, it’s symbolic: gold is a store of value against Philip III’s money. The narrator reports that the lion tamer “promised to relate that valiant deed to the King himself when he arrived at court.”

Sweet Commerce
Montesquieu’s notion of “doux-commerce,” a vision of the positive effects of trade, anticipated Adam Smith, James Madison, David Ricardo, Norbert Elias, Steven Pinker, and Niall Ferguson. Anticipating Montesquieu was Mariana, who said, “There’s nothing more excellent in human life than that good faith by which commercial relations are established and society among men is constituted.”

Don Quijote also concerns this lesson. The protagonist’s madness dissipates as he comes to terms with bourgeois virtues. In Part 1 Chapter 1, he is mismanaging his domestic economy such that not even Aristotle could help him. Just one chapter later, he learns that, unlike chivalric novels, the real world requires payment for goods and services. Fittingly, the innkeeper knights him by pretending to read Latin from an accounting ledger. By Part 1 Chapter 7, our hero grasps that he must finance his adventures: “Hawking one thing and pawning another, all for less than he should have, he came up with a reasonable amount.” Don Quijote is perhaps most bourgeois in Part 1 Chapter 44, where he quietly resolves, without his usual recourse to violence, a payment dispute between the innkeeper and two guests.

The greatest irony involving commerce in Don Quijote is that the marketplace rescues the novel from its own violence against itself. In Part 1 Chapter 9, the narrator explains how he acquired the continuation of the text that ended in the middle of the knight’s battle with the Basque in Part 1 Chapter 8. Asymmetrical information about bundles of paper the narrator finds in Toledo’s marketplace results in their purchase and then the employment of a local Morisco to translate them. Think about this: we couldn’t read the novel past Part 1 Chapter 8 were it not for the miracle of a multiethnic marketplace for goods and services.

Cervantes was a capitalist? An Austrian? A free-market Randian? A libertarian? An English liberal? I hedge by saying he was a precursor.

Nevertheless, when it comes to thinking about economics, there’s a tangible intellectual feedback mechanism amplifying the influence of the first modern novel: Salamancan thoughts on political economy influenced Cervantes; later, proto and classical liberals who also read Salamancans often validated their ideas while reading Don Quijote. John Locke, Thomas Jefferson, and Frédéric Bastiat were also intense fans. But that is another story.

Republished from PanAm Post.

Eric Clifford Graf (PhD, Virginia) is director, writer, and host of Universidad Francisco Marroquín’s Discover Don Quijote de la Mancha, a MOOC (“massive open online course”) available in both English and Spanish.

This article was originally published on FEE.org. Read the original article.

Guest Post: Why America Needs 'Star Wars'

by Stanton Skerjanec

My childhood, like those so many others, was the combination of George Lucas, Steven Spielberg, and, of course, John Williams. I would often sit, perhaps unhealthily, for hours at a time in front of a TV watching VHS tapes of dinosaurs eating people, a professor stealing holy artifacts, and lightsabers crashing. I absorbed it all, and my brothers and I practiced it. We would duel with our plastic (the old sturdy ones) lightsabers, hurting each other's’ fingers and feelings. Around high school, I had somewhat of a “nerd-retreat,” a time when being a fan of Star Wars was for some reason “uncool.” College reopened my love for the great saga, and now, I unashamedly utilize the galaxy far, far away in my classroom teaching economics and government.

Every fandom has its gloriously diverse and vast fan-fiction with theories that range from the plausible to conspiracy. Star Wars, through the former Expanded Universe (dubbed “Legends”) and the official Canon, is ripe with opportunity for fans to write, speculate, and imagine. My three younger brothers and I constantly engage in this activity, debating the merits of Emperor Palpatine as the murderer of Padme Amidala and the like. But while all of this is fun and engaging, it seems to lack a certain gravity of importance. I asked this question a few weeks ago: if it lacks importance, why do so many love to think and talk about Star Wars? What brings millions to engage in such an activity?

The Hero’s Journey through Space
In order to understand this question, we need to understand the definition of a key word: mythos. A mythos is a common set of stories that can be used to explain the world, and more often provide a foundation for a cultural morality. A mythos is not the equivalent of religion. Religion tends to provide an explicit and prescriptive morality. A mythos provides more of a cornerstone worldview, a basic layer for others to build upon with morality.

Any discussion of mythos has to include the renowned mythologist Joseph Campbell, whose seminal work The Hero with a Thousand Faces elaborated on what’s called the “hero’s journey.” Essentially, the hero’s journey is a basic story structure where a seemingly boring individual rises to become a hero with the aid of mentors and friends, and must brave great adventures and villains. Campbell identified the hero’s journey across all cultures. The same basic myth-narrative is repeated in nearly all geographies and ethnicities. The hero’s journey is, at heart, the common human story repeated everywhere.

This monomyth, as it is called, has been studied and examined ever since Campbell’s work was published in 1949. It’s changed here and there, with different scholars adding different things, but it remains more or less the same. The monomyth can be clearly seen through the Star Wars saga, but it is especially clear in Episode IV: A New Hope. 

Luke, a seemingly unbecoming farm boy, is called to the adventure of saving a captured princess from black-cloaked villain, and initially refuses. With the help of a wizardly mentor and a band of equally unbecoming allies, he becomes entrapped in the belly of the beast (the Death Star), from which they escape with their reward (the Death Star plans), but not before Luke endures the pain of watching his mentor (old Ben Kenobi) die. The final trial, destroying the beast, is Luke’s great transformation from the boy on Tatooine to the next generation of warriors (the Jedi Knights).

This is fascinating stuff, and very exciting. Not only was the 1977 cinematic experience great, but the entire saga’s story is wonderful, however much it may be masked by poor dialogue and acting. Film critics have never been a fan of the movies, even for their stories. They say it’s too easy, made for children, cartoonish, etc. I read that as, “This isn’t morally ambiguous, and therefore, it’s not a good story.” Such nihilism is apparently cool, but I don’t buy it. No, the stories aren’t all that complex, but that’s the point. Remember, a mythos is supposed to aid us in developing an understanding of the world from a certain point of view.

Through stories, we lay a foundation to build an ethical code founded in morality. The purpose is to get us to think about how we act and why we act. If we get bogged down in Inception-class complexity, we lose that powerful purpose. 

The story in Star Wars is intentionally simple. The characters aren’t stereotypical, but archetypical, and resonate a certain set of traits we can easily identify. It can sometimes feel like a children’s story, but again, that’s the point. The essence of a mythos should make us wonder in awe, tap into our imagination, bring out our inner child. When I watch these movies, I’m like a giddy boy, relishing in the narrative. When the movie is done, it’s almost as if my inner child, having finished the adventure, returns and consults with my adult on what just happened. That’s mythos: the dialogue between wonder and reason.

The Great American Mythos
The master of this myth-creating process was J.R.R. Tolkien, author of Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit. He saw that England lacked a true mythos, one separated from reality (thus eliminating anything relating to King Arthur and Beowulf). He set out to create an entire universe he could populate with stories; thus was born Middle Earth. His goal wasn’t necessarily to write great stories (which he did), but to provide an epic universe with histories, a genesis (see: The Silmarillion), and languages with dialects. LOTR has a distinctly English feeling to it, one his countrymen could understand. He wrote it so others could think about the world in a certain way. Some of these stories, like The Hobbit, are so relatable they feel like a children’s story.

Now, George Lucas is no Tolkien. He is a controversial creator, one who nearly destroyed his saga. His storylines can be disjointed, almost contradictory, and he can seem self-serving. Nevertheless, his universe is a fountain of myth, and one that resonates with millions of Americans. Why?

America, at its core, is part of Western Civilization, and relies heavily upon its philosophy and religions. As such, it is greatly influenced by the moral idea that there exists objective good and evil. But we are also a multicultural nation, one that has accepted and welcomed many Eastern philosophies as well. As Americans, we are intrigued by the initially exotic beliefs of the East, and we find a certain tranquility in them. We are drawn toward the idea of a Buddhist monk devoid of personal possession and at peace with everything. We see his balance, and we desire it.

Star Wars seeks to establish a clear dynamic between good and evil: the Rebel Alliance and the Galactic Empire, the Jedi and Sith, Luke Skywalker and Darth Vader. There is great conflict between these easily identified sides (I mean, for crying out loud, the lightsaber colors reveal it all). Yet, the theme of balance is always present. Luke literally balances Yoda on his foot upside down while balancing rocks. C’mon. The Chosen One was to bring balance to the Force, a Force which is at once an inanimate energy field made up of microorganisms, and yet also a personal, willing thing. Is this a contradiction? No, it’s the basis of a mythos worldview.

Americans love a good cops and robbers story, the cowboys and Indians conflict. But we also seek a peaceful tranquility of balance. Star Wars gives us that battle, but simultaneously breathes of a harmonious spirituality. Destiny must be fulfilled in this universe, but personal choice never disappears. Americans, historically, believe they have a duty, a manifest destiny, in the world. But liberty is at our heart too, and we can choose to reject this perceived duty. We are drawn to Star Wars because it mimics what we feel in the first place.

Why does this matter? I believe it is very important for great societies to have a basic cultural commonality. For America, we used to be fairly homogenous in our Protestant religion. That’s not the case anymore, and even when it was, there was no unified denomination. Religion doesn’t make the cut to act as our cultural unifier, and politics certainly doesn’t either. We need a myth, one with an acceptable starting point, a Square One. Star Wars is arguably one of the only viable mythos for America. It has such a wide arrangement of characters and messages that different people can gain different things from it. It embraces our Western-Eastern dichotomy, and, quite frankly, it’s pure fun.
We need Star Wars not because it is a masterfully created cinematic experience, has great dialogue, or anything like that. We need it because the story, much like the Force itself, can surround and bind us together.

A version of this article first appeared at the Catholic Beer Club.

Stanton Skerjanec is an economics and government instructor at Liberty Common High School, a classic liberal arts charter school in Fort Collins, CO.

This article was originally published on FEE.org. Read the original article.

From the Archives: UVA English professor Paul Cantor explores zombies and liberty in pop culture

Publisher's note: This article was originally published on Examiner.com on November 16, 2013. The Examiner.com publishing platform was discontinued July 1, 2016, and its web site went dark on or about July 10, 2016. I am republishing this piece in an effort to preserve it and all my other contributions to Examiner.com since April 6, 2010. It is reposted here without most of the internal links that were in the original.

UVA English professor Paul Cantor explores zombies and liberty in pop culture

Speaking at the Mercatus Center at George Mason University on November 14 on the topic, “The Economics of Apocalypse: Flying Saucers, Alien Invasions, and the Walking Dead,” UVA English professor Paul A. Cantor drew upon his research on popular culture to discuss opposing visions of individualism and collectivism in contemporary catastrophe narratives in film and television.

Cantor, a Shakespeare scholar, is author of a recent book, The Invisible Hand in Popular Culture: Liberty vs. Authority in American Film and TV, a follow-up to Gilligan Unbound: Pop Culture in the Age of Globalization, published in 2001. He is also co-editor, with Stephen Cox, of the 2010 volume, Literature and the Economics of Liberty. Cantor and Cox are among the most prominent libertarian thinkers working in the field of English literature today.

After his lecture and an audience discussion moderated by Reason magazine's Jesse Walker, Cantor explained to the Charlottesville Libertarian Examiner why he was looking into the presence of zombie themes in pop culture today.

'Self-reliance'

“These zombie stories are a very interesting way of exploring questions that Americans are interested in,” he said.

What he has noticed in zombie stories, he explained, is that “almost the first thing that results from the zombie apocalypse is the collapse of the federal government. These stories explore what life would be like in a world that was more like the American western, more like the frontier, in which people are forced to rely on their own resources.”

Sometimes, he said, those situations are “frightening but for many of the characters, particularly in The Walking Dead, the experience is empowering. They develop a sense of self-reliance, they face a a challenge, and they meet it.”

In his book, Cantor traces recurring themes in film and TV since the 1950s, a time when there were just three television channels available to most viewers, compared with the hundreds available through cable and satellite services today.

The proliferation of channels, he said, “has really opened up the creativity in television.”

Citing The Simpsons and The X-Files as pertinent examples, Cantor explained that “a lot of shows almost certainly wouldn't have made it onto television in the era of the three networks. It was the Fox Network, the fourth network, that really opened things up.”

'Greater quality'

Despite the increase in the number of networks and shows, he said, “there's a lot of continuity. Again, what I'm seeing in these contemporary zombie narratives is in many ways a reconstitution of what westerns were like in the Fifties. What we certainly have now is greater variety and, frankly, greater quality because people are able to take more creative chances.”

Cantor's new book, The Invisible Hand in Popular Culture, he said, “carries on some of the same issues” addressed in Gilligan Unbound.

One section of the more recent work “is devoted to globalization,” the primary theme of Gilligan Unbound, which was published the same week as the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks on New York and Washington.

“This book has given me a chance to see how things have played out in popular culture” over the past decade, Cantor said.

Writing the book gave him an opportunity to ask “how shows like Fringe, V, Invasion, [and] Fallen Skies have reacted to developments since 9/11 and [a] world with a threat of terrorism but also the problems created by the war on terrorism.”

Flying saucers and totalitarianism

He was also able to compare and contrast pop culture during the Cold War and during the post-9/11 era.

“I look at flying saucer movies in the 1950s,” he noted.

In those days, Cantor said, “the invaders are an image of real foreigners. It's Soviet Communism that's showing up in the flying saucers.”

By contrast, he pointed out, “when you look at shows like V, The Event, Invasion, [and] especially Fringe, the people invading us are us. 'We've met the enemy and he is us.' These shows explore a disturbing image of the American government as having moved in totalitarian directions.”

With so many choices of movies and TV shows to watch, Cantor sometimes relies on serendipity to find what he's looking for.

“It's chancy,” he said.

“Sometimes I just like a show, often because I like the characters or the actors in it. Sometimes I force myself to watch a show because it's obvious it's raising the kind of questions I'm interested in. For example, The Walking Dead, I really just like. It's really well-made, well-done.”

On the other hand, he watches Revolution on NBC “even though I don't think it's such a good show because it fits into my thesis and I've got to consider the evidence” as he continues exploration of libertarian and apocalyptic themes in popular culture.

From the Archives: Cultural critic Paul Cantor assesses the politics of the new TV season

Publisher's note: This article was originally published on Examiner.com on September 30, 2010. The Examiner.com publishing platform was discontinued July 1, 2016, and its web site went dark on or about July 10, 2016. I am republishing this piece in an effort to preserve it and all my other contributions to Examiner.com since April 6, 2010. It is reposted here without most of the internal links that were in the original.

Cultural critic Paul Cantor assesses the politics of the new TV season

While best known in academic circles as a scholar of Shakespeare and of 19th-century English Romanticism, University of Virginia English Professor Paul Cantor is also a well-regarded critic of popular culture whose 2001 book, Gilligan Unbound, took a close look at TV staples from the 1960s through the 1990s, including Gilligan’s Island, Star Trek, The Simpsons, and The X-Files.

Cantor’s most recent book, co-edited with Stephen Cox, is Literature and the Economics of Liberty: Spontaneous Order in Culture, which applies concepts of Austrian economics to the analysis of literary works.

At an event hosted by Students for Individual Liberty on the UVA grounds on September 29, Professor Cantor was in the audience and, afterward, spoke to the Charlottesville Libertarian Examiner about the new television season.

'CSI' and Justin Bieber

His first thought was about the season opening episode of CSI: Crime Scene Investigation (the original franchise, set in Las Vegas).

Paul Cantor

“I read a description of” the episode in TV Guide, he said, and “was a little suspicious of it.”

After viewing the first episode, Cantor suggested that it may have been “first salvo in Hollywood’s attack on the Tea Party,” because, as he described the show, “it more or less treated Tea Party types as if they were some sort of 1960s-style militia, as if they were terrorists.”

He explained that, “on the one hand, it [showed] a gathering of dissident political figures [who] clearly were attacking -- though not by name -- the Obama administration. On the other hand, they were then connected with bombings and terrorist acts,” including exploding a policeman’s coffin at his funeral.

“I’m afraid,” Cantor said ruefully, that “this is the Hollywood take on the Tea Party. This is the beginning of a lot that we’ll be seeing on television.”

Cantor is not alone in his assessment: political commentator Alex Knepper made a similar point on Big Hollywood on Wednesday.

The fact that Canadian singer Justin Bieber made his debut as a dramatic actor in the season opener of CSI was not coincidental, Cantor said.

“They were certainly exploiting” the teen idol’s celebrity, he explained. “Clearly they were trying to get him to get more interest in this episode.”

The producers “probably got a lot of people to watch the show who might not have watched it” otherwise. Bieber “actually gave a surprisingly good performance. He was supposed to convey an aura of innocence and yet then turn out to be involved,” in the domestic terrorism. Moreover, the ending of first show is “setting him up as a returning character.”

'The Event'

Cantor said the new NBC mystery-thriller series, The Event, is “clearly a recycling of The X-Files. I don’t know where it’s headed but it does seem to be the first attempt to portray Obama on television.”

In terms of plot, The Event is “an allegory of the issue of shutting down Guantanamo, though in this case it’s a holding area for extraterrestrials in Alaska. (Don’t ask me to explain that.)”

Veteran TV actor Blair Underwood plays a Cuban-American president, who is also black, and, Cantor said, “he’s being portrayed as a sympathetic character.”

In the second episode, the Underwood character is shown “in charge of things,” Cantor explained, “but there was this amazing line where he was trying to get information out of one of the aliens and he said, ‘I hope I’m not being too narcissistic, I hope I’m not being too obsessed with my place in history.’”

For Cantor, that line “was very interesting because it’s such an accurate characterization of Obama.”

'X-Files,' 'Weeds,' 'Breaking Bad'

Today’s cultural climate, Cantor agreed, is “absolutely” open to conspiracy-type shows along the lines of the 1990s Fox cult hit, The X-Files.

Having written about The X-Files in his book, Gilligan Unbound, Cantor said he gets “annoyed when people treat The X-Files as dead and buried and said it was, ‘a show for the ‘90s.’”

Virtually “half the shows on television now are conspiracy shows,” Cantor said, naming Rubicon, Sons of Anarchy, Weeds, and Breaking Bad as examples.

Shows like Weeds and Breaking Bad, he added, are rather sympathetic to (in this case) drug dealers” and they also “portray DEA officials in a very negative light.”

That, he said, is “an interesting sign of what’s going on in popular culture.”

Cantor’s personal “must-see TV” is Breaking Bad on AMC. He notes that it is produced by X-Files alumnus Vince Gilligan and judges it to be “the most powerful show dramatically.”

As an aside, Cantor adds, Breaking Bad “has a strong libertarian element in it, so I can recommend it on political as well as on aesthetic grounds.”

Guest Post: Why Lord of the Flies is the perfect Christmas gift for 2016

Matthew Whittle, University of Leeds


It’s the story of a society in which democracy descends into tribalism and tyranny. One of a civilisation built by those committed to the rule of law who turn on each other, scapegoating the marginalised and powerless. Ultimately, it’s a reminder of a human barbarism lying just beneath the fragile veneer of decency.

Sound familiar? That’s right: it’s the plot of Lord of the Flies, a novel about a group of English boys who survive a plane crash and are marooned on an island in the South Pacific. After a short period of harmony, a power struggle between the two leaders, Ralph and Jack, causes the group to split. Jack wins out by promising to hunt and kill a common enemy – the strange phantom living in the jungle known only as the Beast. It’s a successful campaign of fear and division.

Lord of the Flies was first published in 1954, largely in response to the rise of Nazism and the horrors of World War II. And yet, in many ways, it speaks directly to the world of 2016, where austerity, the refugee crisis, Brexit and the rise of Donald Trump have emboldened nationalist fervour and stoked societal fragmentation.

The racialised language of tribal “savagery” in the novel quite rightly makes contemporary readers bristle. It marks author William Golding’s failure to move beyond a fundamentally eurocentric and colonialist view of the world. But ultimately, the book’s message is that “savagery” is universal. It is not racially or nationally defined. It’s a moral that encourages us to reflect on just how far-right extremism has crept back into mainstream politics throughout Europe and America.

The far right traffics in the populist language of national allegiance to legitimate racism. America’s so-called alt-right, France’s National Front, UKIP and xenophobic Leavers in Britain all feed off dissatisfaction with globalisation to create enemies within. The solution to complex economic and political realities for these groups is as simple as hunting the Beast. Jack lives on in Trump, Le Pen, and Farage.

The voice of reason

In counterpoint to Jack’s sloganeering and scaremongering, Lord of the Flies gives us Piggy and Simon. The former is a firm believer in scientific progress, but he is also aware that human progress will be halted if “we get frightened of people”. Piggy is debilitated when the boys steal his glasses – his means of vision and clarity – and use them to start a fire. They instantly lose control of the flames, leading to the destruction of part of their new home. Rather than representing the first act of a united civilisation, the making of fire signals the disunity that splits the group and leads, finally, to Piggy’s death at the hands of Jack’s tribe.

If Piggy is “progress” then Simon is “reason”. He knows that the Beast isn’t real and is in fact borne of the boys’ own fear. “However Simon thought of the beast,” we’re told, “there rose before his inward sight the picture of a human at once heroic and sick.” Despite this insight, Simon is regarded as weak and is shunned.

After a lone expedition, he discovers that the Beast is no more than a dead airman – a casualty of the war raging far off in the distance, whose parachute has swept him onto the island. Simon returns to camp to share the news, but the boys’ imagination awakens a blind desire for blood. They no longer see a fellow human being, only a threat to their society. Simon’s screams are drowned out by the “tearing of teeth and claws”.

During his 1962 lecture tour of American universities, Golding discussed his reasons for writing Lord of the Flies:

My book was to say: you think that now the [Second World War] is over and an evil thing destroyed, you are safe because you are naturally kind and decent. But I know why the thing rose in Germany. I know it could happen in any country.

So far, so bleak. And yet, while Golding depicts humankind’s propensity for prejudice, there is a small glimmer of hope. After fleeing the manhunt ordered by Jack, Ralph encounters a uniformed naval officer whose vessel has landed after seeing the smoke rising from the scorched island. As Ralph weeps “for the end of innocence”, the officer turns around to let his eyes rest on his warship in the distance. This final image of the book is a moment of self-reflection. In the savagery and environmental catastrophe of the boys’ rudimentary civilisation, the adult world is afforded a vision of its own folly.

The moral of Lord of the Flies isn’t just that barbarity knows no borders. It’s also that it can be prevented from flourishing through the commitment to a shared humanity. “If humanity has a future on this planet of a hundred million years,” said Golding in his 1962 lecture, “it is unthinkable that it should spend those aeons in a ferment of national self-satisfaction and chauvinistic idiocies.”

The novel may not be a heart-warming Christmas tale, but it gifts us an unflinching portrayal of a society driven by fear. For readers in 2016, it remains both an urgent warning and an invocation.



Matthew Whittle, Teaching Fellow in English (Contemporary and Postcolonial), University of Leeds

This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.

A Look Back at the Making of the First 'Peter Pan' Movie (1924)

With the much-hyped television broadcast of Peter Pan Live!, starring Allison Williams, Minnie Driver, and Christopher Walken, coming up on Thursday, December 4, on NBC, it seems worthwhile to look back on other versions of the classic J.M. Barrie work.  (On Twitter, the show is being promoted as #PeterPanLive.)  This production is a follow-up to last December's virally successful The Sound of Music Live! The cast also includes Broadway veterans Christian Borle and Kelli O'Hara and (relative) newcomers Taylor Louderman, Jake Lucas, and John Allyn as the Darling family.

I have seen Sandy Duncan on stage as Peter Pan and Mary Martin on TV, as well as the 1953 Disney animated production with Bobby Driscoll voicing Peter.  I missed Mia Farrow and Cathy Rigby in the role but, for my money, Jeremy Sumpter was the most heatedly erotic Peter in the movies, but most audiences are not looking for that particular quality in what is usually intended as a children's story.

The first movie presentation of Peter Pan was released in 1924 by Paramount.  It was produced by Adolph Zukor and directed by Herbert Brenon.  Sir James M. Barrie was involved in the project and approved of the casting although -- as the anecdotes recounted below note -- his original screenplay was set aside for one credited to Willis Goldbeck.  The film was shot by renowned cinematographer James Wong Howe.

In 2007,  screenwriter Stewart Stern (Oscar-nominated for Rebel Without a Cause and an Emmy winner for Sybil) appeared at the Virginia Film Festival, where in addition to a shot-by-shot workshop of Rebel Without a Cause he offered opening remarks at a screening of the 1924 Peter Pan.

Stern, then 85 years old, recalls the casting process that resulted in the choice of Betty Bronson as the first screen Peter but he also describes his own experiences in seeing Eva Le Gallienne and Elsa Lanchester on stage as Peter, and the personal touches he received not just from those actresses but also from J.M. Barrie himself.

Here is video of screenwriter Stewart Stern, speaking at the Paramount Theater in downtown Charlottesville on November 3, 2007.  Part I offers some anecdotes about Barrie and the first stage production of Peter Pan and the casting of Bronson in the title role.  (Partial transcript follows the video clip.)

Stewart Stern on Peter Pan - Part I

It always begins with a writer. Sir James Matthew Barrie, who wrote Peter Pan, was a very small Scotsman, barely taller than a child, with a very large head, deep melancholy eyes, a mustache to cover his shyness, and a pipe that made everyone cough.

He rarely smiled but he could wiggle his ears and he mainly trusted children and certain Newfoundland dogs of his acquaintance, whom he would one day roll up into Nana. There were those five little boys in Kensington Gardens whom he fell in love with, and the Davies boys, whom he wisely treated as his superiors, and grew so close to, that in a way he stole them, even as Peter Pan stole the Darling children, and they made up Peter's story together.

It was born as a game they played at Barrie's country house, and it just kept making itself up as he and his boys played it – sometimes this way, sometimes that way – and that's how Barrie put it on the stage and that's why it always keeps changing. That's the character of Peter, too: he won't stand still, never remembers what he did last, and he's always finding new adventures to hide his loneliness inside.

During rehearsals, Barrie would sit huddled in the dark of the Duke of York's Theatre in London, his great coat and bowler hat, watching the children with envy as they practiced flying around the stage, until one days someone asked him what the matter was. He said, “I would very much like to fly, too!”

So, they hoisted him up in the magical arrangement that helps you do it, and flew him around the stage in absolute ecstasy, bowler hat, pipe, greatcoat and all, twinkling like a firefly, until they finally sat him down.

Barrie's favorite critic on opening night was a little boy whom he'd taken to the theatre. And he asked him, what part of it did you like best, when the final curtain came down. And the little boy said, “Oh, the part I liked best was tearing up my program into little bits and throwing them down on the people!” And of all the reviews his play received, Barrie liked that one the most.

In about 1920, my uncle, Adolph Zukor, who started Paramount Pictures, decided to make the first movie of Peter Pan. He had to find the perfect Peter to please Mr. Barrie, so a nationwide search began all across America.

Betty Bronson as Peter Pan

Countless screen tests were made and the best ones were taken to London on an ocean liner by the movie's director, Mr. Herbert Brenon, and by another uncle of mine, Mr. Albert Kaufman, who was Uncle Adolph's studio manager. These men would show the tests to Barrie for him to choose his favorite, and among the candidates was a tiny, 17-year-old girl from New Jersey who had come to Hollywood to break into movies and who called herself Betty Bronson. She banged on every door at Paramount Studios until Mr. Brenon agreed to see her, and she told him that she was born to play Peter, she had to pay Peter, she would play Peter, and so Mr. Brenon had no choice but to make a test.

In the London screening room, the two Americans unreeled those tests for Barrie, day after day, and to break up a long afternoon, Barrie invited them to his flat, overlooking the River Thames, for tea.

They were awed to be at the home of such a famous man, a man great enough to be knighted by the king. Barrie left his guests in the big inglenook by the fire, where he wrote, to go and see about the tea. But while they waited in their straight-back chairs, saying very little, for the whistle at the kettle to come from the kitchen, there was such a long, alarming silence, that they went exploring through the flat, and they finally found Barrie frozen at the kitchen door with his shoes in his hands and his face a mask of terrible guilt. “It's housekeeper's day off,” Barrie said, “and I'm not allowed in the kitchen. Mrs. Porter absolutely forbids me to set foot in it.”

Uncle Al said, “Well, I'll go in. I'll make the tea.”

But Barrie said, “No, no, no, no. She'll be able to tell. She puts things around I have to move out of the way and that gives her hints.”

So that was it for tea.

The very next day, a telegram reached Uncle Adolph's desk in New York. It was from London. “Betty Bronson chosen to play the role of Peter Pan. Signed, Barrie.”

In part two of the video from the Virginia Film Festival, Stern describes the magic of Eva Le Gallienne as Peter Pan (in a production she also directed), and the fright that Elsa Lanchester brought to the role. He describes his own two degrees of separation from Sir James Barrie and his particular attachment to thimbles. (Partial transcript follows the video.)

Stewart Stern on Peter Pan - Part II

The film was a huge success and many of the effects in it – the great broom sweeping the fairies away, Captain Hook's Jolly Roger rising up off the mermaids' lagoon and flying the children home – were all Barrie's own ideas for the movie version, special effects way before their time. And it's a wonderful script to read. It's a complete screenplay and filled with fancy but they decided, no, they wouldn't use it – just this and that of it. And so the movie has a more theatrical look than what might have happened if Barrie had had his screenplay used.

Like all very old children who never grew up – this isn't a hook, by the way, it's to do Charlie Chaplin imitations and it's also a reminder that I'm 85, so I'm only half young – anyway, I have loved Peter Pan my whole life. My first Peter Pan when I was little was the great Eva Le Gallienne. She gave special children matinees at the old Civic Repertory Theatre in New York at 11 o'clock Saturday mornings, and then she went on in the rest of the day to play grown-up roles in the afternoon and evening, in plays like Camille, Romeo & Juliet, and Ibsen's Ghosts, and the next morning she was back being Peter Pan.

But they weren't half as exciting as Peter Pan, those other plays, those grown-up plays. So Saturday after Saturday, my mother moved us up to the cheaper and cheaper seats, up to the tip-tip-top of the theatre, where the poorest children sat on benches that only cost 50 cents.

Sitting on those hard seats, miles above the people, we had the best thrill of anyone in the theatre because at the end, Peter Pan flew, not just over the audience way down there but above the balconies that were below us – there were two that were below us, and then the audience down there – but all the way up here, she touched our hands as we leaned out over the railing and shouted good-bye as she flew past us and then zoomed down to the stage. It was the most thrilling thing I've ever seen in my life and it still stays with me.

Stewart Stern in Charlottesville, Nov. 3, 2007

All children who saw Peter Pan wanted to fly. Until I was ten, I dreamed of flying out my window so many times that one morning I found my bare footprints in the snow on my window sill facing out over New York City, eight floors up. The next my dad had metal guards attached to the window. I could never fly again.

I pleaded with my mom to make me a Peter Pan costume and I wore it everywhere except to school. I'd come home, climb onto my book case in my Peter Pan suit, doing my homework with Peter's rubber dagger stuck in my teeth in case Hook came into the room.

And one day, on Uncle Adolph's golf course, I was up in my usual tree, dressed as Peter and tootling on my pipes, when my father came along with a man I didn't know who had an English accent and wore knickerbockers. When he heard my tootling, as he was about to hit the ball, he said, “Good lord! That's the 'Pirate Song' from Peter Pan. What's it doing in that tree?”

My dad said, “It's just Peter, otherwise known as my son.”

The man peered through the leaves until he found me, and we stared at each other for one long meaningful moment, and I won.

He said, “By George, it is Peter Pan, the real one! Bicarbonate of soda, it is!”

That man with the accent turned out to be Sir William Wiseman, a friend of Barrie's, and a few weeks later a package came in the mail from London, a first edition of Peter Pan and Wendy autographed “To Stewart Stern, kind regards, from J.M. Barrie.”

I wished he had sent me a thimble in it, that silver thing you wear on your finger when you sew a button on, that Peter called a kiss.

My letters from Eva Le Gallienne all had thimbles in them. She'd write, “Bless you, my dear, I send you a very nice thimble.” And my letter from Betty Bronson had thimbles in it, too.

But not Elsa Lanchester's, who came down her flying wire like a black widow spider after its prey and acted the whole part – and she told me this – pretending to be Hitler at the age of 6. Children shook when she came on and they rushed to Captain Hook to comfort them – and Captain Hook was Charles Laughton, her husband.

Stewart Stern is still alive at the age of 92. No doubt, if he watches Peter Pan Live! next Thursday, his TV viewing experience will be warmed by his childhood memories of Peter Pan and the actresses who played him.

Twin Review: 'The Hollow' and 'The Boy Detective Fails'

On September 10, Tim Hulsey and I saw two world-premiere musicals at Signature Theatre in Arlington. Here is my review.

‘The Hollow’ Is Hollow; ‘The Boy Detective’ Not-Quite ‘Fails’

Rick Sincere

Metro Herald Entertainment Editor

Two world premiere musical plays at Arlington’s Signature Theatre are not only being presented in rotating repertory, they are virtually mirror images of each other in tone, theme, and interpretation of the material on which they are based.

The Boy Detective Fails, based upon a novel of the same name, takes dark themes – murder, suicide, mental illness – and presents them in cartoonish colors and bright lights at odds with the underlying source.

The Hollow, a reimagining of Washington Irving’s comic short story, “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow,” takes a well-known gothic satire and nearly empties it of its comedic base, with a dark, brooding set to match its new dark, brooding mood.

* * *

Ichabod Crane (Sam Ludwig). Photo: Scott Suchman.

 

It is a stretch to say that The Hollow is little more than a musical retelling of the familiar Irving story. While the program says the play is "based on” the familiar story, it is more accurate to say that it was suggested (loosely) by characters and situations created by Washington Irving, because the end result bears little resemblance to Irving’s telling of the tale. (Irving’s story, set in 1820s Hudson Valley, New York, has no book burnings, no mute preachers, no rapes, no distant abandoned spouses – all elements invented for this stage production.)

The Hollow borrows a few familiar aspects of Irving’s original – a schoolteacher named Ichabod Crane, a mysterious “headless horseman,” and quirky Dutch-speaking villagers – but transforms them into a modern-day, period-costumed morality play about an American Taliban (or perhaps the Westboro Baptist Church) of intolerant ignoramuses who reject any knowledge not derived directly from the Bible. This sets up a clash with cheerful outsider Crane (he’s from Boston by way of Connecticut) who, like Socrates before him, corrupts the minds of Sleepy Hollow’s youth with such radical books as Gulliver’s Travels, Candide, and Thomas Paine’s The Rights of Man. Needless to say, Irving wrote nothing like this.

Despite the play’s fundamental flaws, there are solid performances by Sam Ludwig as Ichabod Crane, Whitney Bashor as his love interest, Katrina Van Tassel, Harry Winter as Katrina’s father, Baltus, and Noah Chiet as 10-year-old Pieter Claassen. The rest of the cast, unfortunately, plays into the overwrought script and offers little more than two-dimensional caricatures of religious zealots who would sooner burn down the village schoolhouse than allow their children to learn.

Composer-lyricist Matt Conner’s score includes two excellent musical numbers: Katrina’s song of yearning about “Boston” and a trio called “Perhaps” for Ichabod, Katrina, and Pieter, in which they permit their imaginations to run wild. (Something, it seems, that is forbidden in Sleepy Hollow.)

The agitprop tone of Hunter Foster’s deeply flawed book is matched by Matthew Gardiner’s direction while the sets by Derek McLane and costumes by Kathleen Geldard almost make this ill-begotten enterprise worth watching.

* * *

The Boy Detective Fails, though still flawed, succeeds where The Hollow falls short. Even though the main character (Billy Argo, played by Signature regular Stephen Gregory Smith) suffers from OCD or ADHD or Asperger’s Syndrome – it’s never made clear what, exactly, is wrong with him – he comes across as a likable fellow whom the audience wants to cheer on.

Thomas Adrian Simpson & Stephen Gregory Smith.  Photo: Scott Suchman.

Not being familiar with the original source material, it seems that the opening numbers, “Prologue” and “Billy Argo, Boy Detective,” condense what must be about a third of the original novel into a 12-minute expository musical scene. While composer-lyricist Adam Gwon tries to follow the dictum of “show, don’t tell,” the scene has too much “show and tell” – where the Greek chorus describes what the principal characters are doing, as they do it.

If anyone steals the show, it has to be Thomas Adrian Simpson as Professor Von Golum, Billy’s longtime adversary. Von Golum gets three novelty numbers that are quite the highlights of the show: “Old Friends” and “No Such Thing,” both duets with Billy, as well as “Evil,” a scenery-chewing delight he shares with the ensemble.

Billy also gets two affectionate songs with his equally shy romantic partner, Penny Maple (Anika Larsen), “I Like (The Secret Song)” and “Little Mysteries.”

The colorful physical environment created by scenic designer McLane, costume designer Geldard, and lighting designer Chris Lee helps to overcome any of the show’s minor shortcomings. They take full advantage of the expansive stage available to them.

If The Boy Detective Fails has any fundamental flaw, it is that at the end of the show, there is no sense of resolution. The problem is, this is precisely what the librettist – Joe Meno, who also wrote the original novel – seems to intend. That the audience leaves the theatre feeling unsettled and alienated may provide some artistic satisfaction to the creators is really no consolation to the people who bought tickets expecting to see the various plot strands arrive at a logical terminus.

That said, director Joe Calarco’s staging for The Boy Detective Fails – lightheartedly at odds with the central themes of the piece – works precisely because of the juxtaposition. Gardiner’s direction of The Hollow, in contrast, is too earnest by half. Their choices explain the general success of The Boy Detective Fails and the ultimate hollowness of The Hollow.

With a few tweaks to the script (perhaps including some judicious cuts of about 20 minutes of its playing time), as well as a more definitive ending, The Boy Detective Fails might have a life beyond this debut production at Signature Theatre. To salvage The Hollow, however, will require a total overhaul. As currently conceived, the play has little worth saving.

The Hollow and The Boy Detective Fails were commissioned through Signature Theatre’s American Musical Voices Project (AMVP). Both shows continue in rotating repertory through October 16 in The MAX, Signature’s larger performance space, at 4200 Campbell Avenue (Shirlington Village) in Arlington, Virginia. For ticket information, visit the theatre’s web site at www.signature-theatre.org or call the box office at 703-820-9771.

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