Medawar/GreatRecession/Awesomest

Today I read the first fifty pages of Mardi Oakley Medawar’s 1998 novel Death at Rainy Mountain. Medawar is a novelist of Cherokee descent whose novels (usually written with some relation to the mystery genre) are set among the Kiowa and Crow tribes. Rainy Mountain is told from the perspective of Tay-bodal, for two reasons. First, Tay-bodal is an eccentric figure within the tribe and is therefore regarded as something of an outsider. Tay-bodal’s outsider status resonates with the marginality of the detective figure in much detective fiction, making such figures part of their culture and yet distant from it at the same time. Second, Tay-bodal is a healer, and as such evokes the image of the detective as the doctor of his or her society, tending to its wounds and bringing healing and restoration to a culture wounded by acts of violence.

I also read the next fifty pages of The Great Recession in Fiction, Film, and Television. In “Latino Liminality, Exclusion, and Erasure in Great Recession Television: The Case of Treme and Friday Night Lights,” Charli Valdez argues that despite the very real impact of the Great Recession on Latinos, recent US television drama has not responded to this impact by producing complex and nuanced portrayals of Latino characters. Jesseca Cornelson, in “Master, Servants, and the Effaced Middle Classes of Downton Abbey, The Dark Knight Rises, and Falling Skies,” argues that the Great Recession’s impact on social classes has been depicted in various ways in televisual bust culture, principally in the form of nostalgia for more traditional versions of class structure, or more progressive imaginings of reworked class identities. While this blog was on hiatus due to my recent hospitalization, I watched a lot of reality television, and was therefore particularly engaged by Daniel Mrozowski’s essay, “From Hoarders to Pickers: Salvage Aesthetics and Reality Television in The Great Recession.” I was very persuaded by his argument that reality shows about hoarding are attempts to “understand the specific pressures placed on the relationships between people and their possessions by the Great Recession.”

I confess that as I’m recuperating from my recent stay in hospital, I wanted to watch something that wouldn’t tax me too much. However, I clearly sold myself short in choosing The Legend of Awesomest Maximus, a 2011 National Lampoon movie that is a thoroughly awful and bizarre mash-up of Gladiator and 300. Both of these films provide much material for a good spoof, but Awesomest isn’t it. To call it college humor would be to insult the intelligence of even the most puerile college student and really its only interesting feature is to spot the D-list and/or fading celebrities in the cast, such as Kristanna Loken (the memorable terminator in Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines) and, saddest of all, Rip Torn, who deserves so much better than this.