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.”
Every day I read fifty pages of fiction, fifty pages of non-fiction, and I watch a movie. And then I tell you what I think of it all.
Sunday, February 23, 2014
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 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.
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