Harvard University Press Blog

The New Supernatural

Vampires, zombies, Dan Brown. The books sell like crazy, movies fill seats, cash registers ring, young folks swoon. What’s happening? Fad? Trend? Passing fancy? Or the forefront of a reinvention of American Christianity?

That last one, says Victoria Nelson, author of Gothicka: Vampire Heroes, Human Gods, and the New Supernatural. In what’s certainly the first HUP book to include both a photo of a shirtless, shimmering Robert Pattinson and a Guillermo del Toro Hellboy II character sketch, Nelson argues that popular culture is now saturated with a supernaturalism reminiscent of Pre-Modern Christian European culture. But it comes with some new twists: these figures aren’t just evil monsters as in the classic Protestant Gothic, but are semi-divine. And they’re no longer just males—the new heroes are joined by heroines.

Gothicka picks up where Nelson’s widely praised and deeply loved The Secret Life of Puppets leaves off, tracing the movement of this “unconscious religiosity” from what she calls the “sub-Zeitgeist” (“the grab-bag mass market popular culture lying beneath or around or on top of the secular-materialist mainstream”) to the everywhere.

In the years since The Secret Life of Puppets was published, this trend has emerged as a much more explicit spirituality expressed in performance and practice as well as in fiction and film. Where that book tracked, through the end of the twentieth century, the nature of the supernatural in the post-Reformation popular imagination, Gothicka attempts to describe the surprising new turn toward the light taken in the increasingly transformed subgenres of the Gothick. Still accessed through the grotesque and monstrous but displaying some striking new features, the twenty-first-century Gothick is showing signs of outgrowing the dark supernaturalism it inherited from its eighteenth-century ancestor.

We recently spoke with Nelson for an episode of the HUP podcast, wherein you’ll learn all about avatars of self-realization, Protestant iconoclasm, and the watershed moment of Interview with the Vampire. Have a listen:

 

The book covers an awful lot of ground, but Nelson was kind enough to prepare a little “playlist” for us – call it the greatest hits of the new supernatural:

Fiction

• Max Brooks, World War Z
• Dan Brown, The Da Vinci Code
• Matthew Gregory Lewis, The Monk
• H.P. Lovecraft, “The Call of Cthulhu”
• Isaac Marion, Warm Bodies
• Stephenie Meyer, Twilight series
• William P. Young, The Shack

Film and Television

• Alan Ball, True Blood series
• Park Chan-wook, Thirst
• Ruben Fleischer, Zombieland
  
• Patrick Lussier, Dracula 2000
  
• George Romero, Night of the Living Dead
  
• Guillermo del Toro, Pan’s Labyrinth, The Devil’s Backbone, and Hellboy

Graphic Novels

• Jamie Delano, John Constantine: Hellblazer series
• Garth Ennis, Preacher series
• Neil Gaiman, Sandman series

Roleplaying Games

• Chaosium, The Call of Cthulhu
• White Wolf, Vampire: The Masquerade

Videogames

• Capcom, Resident Evil
• Cyan, Myst
• Electronic Arts, Left 4 Dead
• Konami, Castlevania

Those are the primary sources for your crash course in the fusion of post-Christian spirituality and mass media.

And, for super extra credit, pair Gothicka with Brad Gregory’s The Unintended Reformation, or at least spin their podcasts back to back. Here’s Gregory:

 

History and The Help

One of the most-nominated films for this year’s Academy Awards (ceremony this Sunday!) is The Help, directed by Tate Taylor and adapted for the screen by Taylor and Kathrynn Stockett, from the latter’s mega-selling novel of the same name. The film is up for four awards, including Best Picture. A brief synopsis of the plot (via IMDB):

An aspiring author during the civil rights movement of the 1960s decides to write a book detailing the African-American maid's point of view on the white families for which they work, and the hardships they go through on a daily basis.

So, The Help is about race, never an easy subject for Hollywood blockbusters, regardless of literary pedigree. The Help’s tangled layering of a white woman (Stockett) telling the story of a white woman telling the story of black women has been a fairly obvious target for commentary. As has been the Academy’s embrace of the film. No one seems to question the worthiness of the nominated performances by the film’s African American stars Viola Davis (Actress in a Leading Role) or Octavia Spencer (Actress in a Supporting Role). The profession of their characters, however, has not escaped notice. From a NYT opinion piece by Brent Staples:

The troubling thing is that the only two black actors in this year’s Oscar competition are cast as domestics, and would probably not have found meaty, starring roles in other films had they passed on “The Help.” This brings to mind the first black Oscar winner, Hattie McDaniel, who received the award in 1940 for her portrayal of the loyal maid in “Gone With the Wind.” When criticized for often playing a mammy on film, Ms. McDaniel famously said she would rather play a maid in the movies than be one.

Staples’s argument is more about the racial politics of the film industry than about The Help itself, and Davis, for her part, has argued against this position, saying that “The black artist can only tell the truth about humanity, and humanity is messy.” Nevertheless, the film’s own presentation of race in the 1960s in the South has come in for widespread critique, including in a recent open statement from the Association of Black Women Historians (ABWH) to fans of The Help:

During the 1960s, the era covered in The Help, legal segregation and economic inequalities limited black women's employment opportunities. Up to 90 per cent of working black women in the South labored as domestic servants in white homes. The Help’s representation of these women is a disappointing resurrection of Mammy—a mythical stereotype of black women who were compelled, either by slavery or segregation, to serve white families. Portrayed as asexual, loyal, and contented caretakers of whites, the caricature of Mammy allowed mainstream America to ignore the systemic racism that bound black women to back-breaking, low paying jobs where employers routinely exploited them. The popularity of this most recent iteration is troubling because it reveals a contemporary nostalgia for the days when a black woman could only hope to clean the White House rather than reside in it.

Facebook vs. Evolution

The Facebook movie is upon us.  "The Social Network" was directed by David Fincher ("Fight Club") and written for the screen by Aaron Sorkin ("The West Wing"), and by all accounts it's among the best work either has done. The review aggregating site Metacritic has it with a pretty staggering Metascore of 97 out of 100. 

The film is about the founding of the social networking-cum-world conquering site Facebook, which currently boasts over 500 million users around the world, most likely including you. Fincher and Sorkin’s version of the story has the site’s founder, Mark Zuckerberg, making quite a few enemies for himself on his way to helping us all make more friends. So, is it working? Is it useful? Really, how many friends does one person need? 

150. 

That’s not me talking. That’s evolution. 

The number 150 has come to be accepted as the limit to the number of individuals with whom any one person can maintain stable relationships. You may know it as “Dunbar’s Number,” named for Robin Dunbar, anthropologist, evolutionary biologist, and Professor of Psychology at the University of Liverpool. Dunbar describes the figure as the upper limit to the number of people with whom humans can actually form relationships strong enough to rely on. Put another way, it’s the circle of people who will do you a favor. We simply don’t have the cognitive capacity to maintain a greater number of relationships at the level of complexity required for a bond to be “real.” 

Dunbar arrived at the number by working outwards from the social intelligence theory of why primates have such large brains. The theory holds that the complex social world in which primates live spurred the evolution in brain size. Basically, primates are more dependent on their social bonds than other types of animals, and those bonds are also more complex and socially informed. This hypothesis, according to Dunbar and others, is supported by a strong correlation between the size of a group (and hence its social complexity) and the relative size of the neocortex. Dunbar examined these correlations, plotted the sizes of various primate brains against the sizes of their social groups, determined the relationship, plugged in the size of the human brain, and got 150. 

Hypatia: From historical truth to legend to Rachel Weisz (with a stop at Judy Chicago’s The Dinner Party)

What can you say about a fifth-century philosopher-mathematician who was (SPOILER ALERT) stoned to death and then torn to pieces by a mob of early Christians? That she was beautiful and brilliant? That she loved Plato, Ptolemey, and Apollonius of Perga?

Well, yes. And then you can cast her story—as generations of allegorists, from Voltaire to Gibbon to Charles Kingsley have done—as a battle between the waning light of the ancient pagan world, with its amassed wisdom, and the encroaching darkness of Christian dogmatism.

This is also the approach adopted by the new Rachel Weisz/ Google Earth vehicle and Hypatia biopic Agora, directed by Alejandro Amenábar and now in limited release at Cambridge’s Kendall Square Cinema and elsewhere.

Having sat through the movie, which strings together a number of incidents from Hypatia’s life (although, confusingly, she and her disciples don’t age so much as change clothes as time passes), segueing between them by zooming way out to reveal an incongruously satellite-photo-looking spinning globe and then back in to Alexandria; and which is characterized throughout by lots of show-offy oh-hey-now-we-are-spinning! camerawork reminiscent of that in Elizabeth: The Golden Age—we turned with interest to Maria Dzielska’s Hypatia of Alexandria, translated by F. Lyra, in order to untangle historical truth from legend from celluloid.

And it turns out that lots of the most interesting (and tonally odd) parts of the story told in Agora are true. For example, Hypatia really did rebuke a smitten student by showing him her sanitary napkin, as a reminder that human beings fell short of Platonic ideals of beauty, and are thus not appropriate objects of devotion.

The Patriarch (later Saint) Cyril of Alexandria really does seem to have been threatened by Hypatia’s popularity with the ruling class and by her former disciples’ habit of seeking her guidance even after they had risen to the top ranks of Alexandria’s secular and religious leadership. Though he seems not to have planned her murder, he was almost certainly responsible, Dzielska writes, for her defamation in Alexandria and for her resulting unpopularity among the people, which ultimately resulted in her murder.

And Hypatia did teach both Christians and pagans in increasingly Christianized Alexandria, although Dzielska proves that it’s very unlikely that she and her students were in the Serapeum—the temple to the Hellenistic-Egyptian god Serapis—at the time of its 391 destruction by Christians bent on eliminating pagan monuments and idols.

On the other hand, Hypatia was almost certainly about sixty at the time of her death, rather than in the bloom of youth, as Agora and many posthumous legends have portrayed her.

And there isn’t any evidence to support the movie’s assertion that Hypatia (who would have known Ptolemy’s geocentric model of the solar system) worked out that we instead live in a heliocentric solar system, with the planets bound on elliptical orbits around the sun. Very little is known of her actual work, though Dzielska believes that she may have edited the text of Ptolemy’s Almagest and Handy Tables, editions which have in the past been ascribed to her less-talented father, Theon. But presumably—and much as those of us in the thrill-a-minute field of academic publishing would beg to differ—the filmmakers considered scholarly editing insufficiently cinematic for their purposes.

Hypatia is known to us mostly by way of letters written to her and by passing mention in historical accounts; it’s difficult, at this remove, to reconstruct her life with any degree of certainty. What we can know, Dzielska writes, is that the real, historical woman should be remembered as a resident of Alexandria, a mathematician, a philosopher, a teacher, and a woman characterized by her sophrosyne—“a model of ethical courage, righteousness, veracity, civic devotion, and intellectual prowess.” And that that the richly suggestive legend of Hypatia “will continue to unfold along its own course, according to tastes and fashions.”

Hong Kong--City Between Worlds

A superbly thorough review of Leo Ou-fan Lee's City Between Worlds: My Hong Kong in PopMatters today. Michael Buening hits all the right notes in his characterization of Lee's approach to his adopted hometown, a city whose myriad identities require an equal variety of analytic techniques if one is to even come close to capturing what it's like to be in Hong Kong, or to be a Hong Konger:

Uncertainty and transience is part of [Hong Kong's] character and in City Between Worlds Leo Ou-fan Lee uses a variety of techniques—travelogue, revisionist history, cultural deconstruction, and personal essay – to pin down what he calls this “confusion and contradiction” while uncovering the deep communal roots that often go unnoticed by outside commentators.

[...]

The very writing of this book is another way Lee gives voice and creation to “his” Hong Kong. City Between Worlds balances probing intellectual analysis, fierce criticism, and gentle warmth, all imbued with the frustrated love any city dweller will immediately recognize as the elusive grasp to define where one lives.

We couldn't have said it better ourselves. As an added bonus, don't miss Leo speaking about his book at the Harvard Coop this coming Monday (June 23) at 7pm. The Coop is located in the heart of Harvard Square--it's pretty hard to miss. Hope to see you there.

Defending the memory of Upton Sinclair

With There Will Be Blood potentially set to rein in several awards at a certain upcoming ceremony, Ernest Freeberg takes to the pages of the Los Angeles Times to ask us to pour a little oil out for Upton Sinclair, who wrote the book--1927's Oil!--that inspired the film, a bit too loosely, in Freeberg's opinion.

Continuing his engagement with an American radical tradition we often seem all too willing to forget, Freeberg has written Democracy's Prisoner: Eugene V. Debs, the Great War, and the Right to Dissent (coming May 2008), a wonderfully accessible history of American socialist leader Debs' 1920 campaign to go from the jailhouse to the White House, during which he garnered a million votes and unleashed a nationwide protest, by no means confined to the "radical left," against the government's ruthless suppression of dissenting views during the First World War (or "The Great War," as it was known at the time). Led by a coalition of the country’s most important intellectuals, writers, and labor leaders, this protest not only liberated Debs, but also launched the American Civil Liberties Union and changed the course of free speech in wartime.

HUP authors in the flesh

Tomorrow night, November 16, HUP author and American philosopher extraordinaire Stanley Cavell will present a lecture at the Harvard Film Archive called "What is a Musical Epic?: Notes for reading O Brother, Where Art Thou?" Like Cavell, the Harvard Film Archive is a Cambridge institution, so if you're in the area, stop by for what is sure to be an entertaining night. Tickets are $10 (free for Harvard students), and the lecture will be preceeded by a screening of the film.

||| More info here.

Consultants to execs: stop reading

"Why read the book when you could just watch the movie?" is the advice offered by four Italian management consultants in their new book Cinema for Managers. According to BBC News, "the four consultants...say that executives learn little from books":

High-quality films, though, can offer lessons about problem-solving and teamwork as well as focusing on issues such as globalisation and diversity, Mr Bogliari said.

Among the films offered up as fodder for executive enlightenment is Steven Spielberg's The Terminal, a film "whose cheap pathos suggests a bad Chaplin imitation," according to one review.  If it's all the same, we'll just stick to the printed page for now.

RIP, VHS

It's the end of an era--the major film studios have announced that they will no longer be releasing films on VHS. The San Diego Union-Tribune's VHS post-mortem has some funny anecdotes from the time when videocassetes were still the hot new thing:

Watch what you want, when you want it, chirped the jingle for Video Library, a pioneering rental chain that launched in 1979 and grew to 43 stores in San Diego County before Blockbuster bought it out in 1988.

The slogan promised something so novel that figuring out how to follow the advice proved confounding for some first users.

"When I started, that whole first year we could not advertise 'VCR,' because nobody knew what that was," recalls Barry Rosenblatt, Video Library's founder. "We had to call them 'videocassette recorders.'

"And there was rarely a day that somebody didn't rent a cassette, call us up later and ask where to put (the tape) in their TV. It happened time after time."

The VHS era was good while it lasted, especially for movie studios, who leveraged the new medium to increase their revenues to unheard-of proportions. This revenue boom is the subject of David Waterman's Hollywood's Road to Riches, which shows how, beginning in the 1950s, a largely predictable business has been transformed into a volatile and complex multimedia enterprise now commanding over 80 percent of the world's film business. David Ondaatje, writing in the Times Higher Education Supplement, called the book "a thorough economic account of how American film studios and their predecessors have exploited our appetite for movies over the past 60-plus years."

||| Read an excerpt from Hollywood's Road to Riches.

The real story of the Persian Wars

Moviegoers will know that "300", a graphic retelling of the Battle of Thermopylae, has topped the box office charts for several weeks now (although it's apparently now been replaced by the new Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles movie). While "300" was lauded more for dazzling visual effects than solid storytelling, it at least has the virtue of inserting one of history's great stories back into the popular consciousness.

The "great story," of course, is that of the Persian Wars. If the movie and/or the comic book it was based on intrigued you, why not go straight to the source for the "real" story? Herodotus' The Persian Wars, available in our classy green Loeb Classical Library© edition, is one of the first and most famous accounts of military conflict ever written.

Other Loeb volumes that deal in some way with great wars of the ancient world include:

• Aeschylus, Suppliant Maidens. Persians. Prometheus. Seven Against Thebes
• Aristophanes, Acharnians. Knights and Clouds. Wasps. Peace
• Arrian, Anabasis of Alexander
• Caesar, The Gallic War, The Civil Wars, and Alexandrian War. African War. Spanish War
• Euripides, Trojan Women
• Josephus, The Jewish War
• Livy, History of Rome
• Lucan, The Civil War
• Sallust, War with Catiline. War with Jugurtha. Selections from the Histories. Doubtful Works
• Thucydides, History of the Peloponnesian War
• Virgil, Aeneid
• Xenophon, Anabasis

See also Robin Waterfield's recent Xenophon's Retreat: Greece, Persia, and the End of the Golden Age, a look at Xenophon's famous account of ill-fated expedition of a band of Greek mercenaries who traveled east to fight for the Persian prince Cyrus the Younger in his attempt to wrest the throne of the mighty Persian empire from his brother.