Good luck had just stung me

To the race track I did go

She bet on one horse to win

And I bet on another to show

Odds were in my favor

I had him five to one

When that nag came around the track

Sure enough we had won

-Up on Cripple Creek, The Band

Thank god for Bob Dylan. I’m sure that’s something that is said daily, but my reasoning is probably different than most. Instead of being in awe of Dylan for the music he has brought to this world (“Mr. Tambourine Man” is one of my favorites), and the way he has changed rock music, I’m in awe because without him there’s a good chance the Band wouldn’t be a band. Yes, they would have been known for their stint as the Hawks, and as Dylan’s backup band, but we wouldn’t have songs like “The Weight” or “Acadian Driftwood” or “Up on Cripple Creek”.

Soon after leaving Ronnie Hawkins–the musician who initially brought the Band (previously known as the Hawks) together–the Canadian-American band was stung by good luck because they were sought after by Bob Dylan. The Band went on Bob Dylan’s 1965-66 world tour excluding Levon Helm who was at Dylan’s Forest Hills, New York, concert in 1965 where they got booed by the crowd: Helm was quoted saying “I wasn’t made to be booed”. In 1966, though, Helm rejoined the Band and Bob Dylan in West Saugerties, New York, after Dylan got in his famous motorcycle crash. The Band rented a house, well-known as Big Pink, to be closer to Dylan while he was out of the public eye for a little bit. The motorcycle crash ended up having a positive outcome for both Dylan and the Band as they went on to record over 100 tracks together in Big Pink. A number of those tracks went on to be known as The Basement Tapes, arguably some of the best songs written by the two parties.

The story of how and why these tapes were made is one that should be an inspiration to all musicians. They created a little studio in the basement of Big Pink, and sang/composed for themselves: not for a crowd, a studio, or for fame. Robbie Robertson reminisced, “We went in with a sense of humor. It was all a goof. We were playing with absolute freedom; we weren’t doing anything we thought anybody else would ever hear, as long as we lived. But what started in that basement, what came out of it—and the Band came out of it, anthems, people holding hands and rocking back and forth all over the world singing ‘I Shall Be Released,’ the distance that all of this went—came out of this little conspiracy, of us amusing ourselves. Killing time” (Old, Weird America). Their way of killing time led to what some critics say was a stylistic transformation for rock music: you can see this transformation in Dylan’s music as well. He went from albums like Highway 61 Revisited to songs that were more rooted in traditional American music like “I Shall be Released”.  As for the Band, well, they became the Band with their debut album Music from Big Pink. They obviously did not spend a lot of creative energy on the name of their band, or the name of their first album, but it’s okay because it’s quite obvious that they spent a lot of it on their music.

In 1968, “The Weight”, from Music from Big Pink, hit its peak at #63 in US charts-a deplorable rank as Aretha Franklin’s cover of the song hit #19 in 1969. I use the word deplorable because the Band’s version is much more pleasurable to hear. No offense to Aretha Franklin, she has a great voice, but the best part of the original version is the chorus where you can hear up to three different voices all coming together to pitch the perfect imperfect harmony.

This imperfectness is what makes the band so unique; other bands with multiple lead singers–most notably the Beatles with Lennon, McCartney and the occasional Harrison–harmonize so beautifully as though their voices become one. The Band does the exact opposite by providing a different type of harmony: ragged, throaty, asperous, and broken. Musicians harmonize because it sounds better than individually singing/playing-the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. The Band does indeed do this this, but it does it in a way that both the whole and the parts are both equally as good: you’re able to hear the individual voices in the harmony as it goes in and out throughout lines, but you’re able to enjoy the voices together as well. This abnormal harmony is seen in most of their songs: “Acadian Driftwood”, “Atlantic City”, “Up on Cripple Creek”, etc.

The Band was able to create songs that were both meaningful, and meaningless, but both equally gratifying to their audience. Contrary to popular belief, “The Weight” is not meant to be taken as a serious song. Critics have spent years analyzing the song and its biblical references, but Robbie Robertson has said that this song was influenced by the director Luis Bunuel and the characters in his movies. This song was written in Big Pink when they were just fooling around and having fun with music. On the other hand, in 1970, Robertson wrote the song, “The Shape I’m In” which is about the rough spot they were all in after fame started to take its toll on the musicians, especially Richard Manuel. Manuel was an alcoholic in despair which made it hard for the band to keep going as they did before: it took them 4 more years to release a new album, Northern Lights — Southern Cross. 

Unlike Music from Big Pink, Northern Lights—Southern Cross, does having a meaningful background behind the name. It has Northern Lights because of the four Canadians in the band: Robbie Robertson, Garth Hudson, Richard Manuel, and Rick Danko. And Southern Cross because of the one southerner, Levon Helm. This album was especially significant because it marked the first time Robertson wrote about his home land in “Acadian Driftwood”. “Acadian Driftwood” is about the banishment of the Acadians during the French and Indian war: something that could resemble Robertson’s early life. His music career prompted him to travel  from Toronto to the south, an unknown land: even when he lived in Toronto he didn’t exactly feel like a native because he was of Jewish and Mohawk descent. The history behind this song isn’t exactly something that would amuse pop music listeners, and it didn’t as the song didn’t crack the top 100: a shame because it’s one of the more significant songs written by the Band with some of the best vocals.

In 1969, Greil Marcus, a well-respected rock critic, praised the band on sticking together: “It’s something else to found a group that lasts. It’s not a matter of “I-Was-There-When,” though that’s part of it; with so many bands falling apart or kicking out members or just calling it quits, The Band has stuck together” (Review). This was something that Marcus loved about the band, but was unfortunately something that did not last: the Band called it quits after a Thanksgiving Day concert in 1976 after 16 years of being together. Although this would have been a fine ending to their career together as most bands eventually come to an end, the aftermath of the Band was not pleasant. After part of the band regrouped in 1983, Manuel hung himself with a belt in his hotel room after a concert in Winter Park, Florida: he had traces of cocaine and alcohol in his body. Levon Helm, the one American in the group, declined an offer to go to the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame after the Band was inducted into it because he was not happy with how Robertson took sole credit for songs that were written as a collaborative effort. Danko was found guilty of trying to smuggle heroin into Japan in 1996, and then later passed away at 56 in his home in Woodstock, New York. The band member whose life most closely resembles a perfect ending to a movie is Levon Helm. He returned to his house near Woodstock (where the Band’s career kicked off), after developing throat cancer. He could barely speak, but in order to pay for the mounting debts he was incurring he started hosting Midnight Rambles at his barn. His voice miraculously started to strengthen and, in 2004, he was able to belt out classics from the Band. If I were to write a movie on the Band, I would make it so that the ending to the Band was just as good as the beginning, but that just isn’t the shape they were in.

I’m gonna go down by the water

But I ain’t gonna jump in, no, no

I’ll just be looking for my maker

And I hear that that’s where she’s been? Oh!

Out of nine lives, I spent seven

Now, how in the world do you get to Heaven

Oh, you don’t know the shape I’m in

-The Shape I’m In, The Band

 

We’re all consumers of the same culture here in the big USA. Whether you live in New York City, or on the farms of Nebraska we all watch the same movies, hear the same songs, and read the same books. But how many of us really take it in and become obsessed with it? Geek culture, as in Trekkies/Jedis/Potterheads/etc., definitely does.  If you watch a documentary about the conventions that the superfans of these movies attend, you’ll realize why you fell out of your love for Star Trek in the 7th grade–these people are crazy! Most Trekkies have watched all of the episodes and movies, and know the language of the characters, Klingon, and can tell you exactly what every outfit should look like. So, why is it important to be a superfan when it seems dorky and outlandish?

Fan fiction is a way for Star Trekkies, and other sci-fi fan bases, to express themselves. There are many different genres of fanfiction that allows for many opportunities to simply create. Slash fiction takes two characters from the movie, often male, and explicitly illustrates the relationship between the two. This relationship never actually occurs in the movie, but is completely fabricated by the viewers. In Star Trek, the authors of slash fiction describe the intimacy between James T. Kirk and Spock. Although the writers and its audience are mostly female, there has been an increasing number of male viewers. Authors are allowed to do whatever they want with Kirk/Spock, whether it be an extremely pornographic short story or an abstract poem. Within the confines of the stories having something to do with Star Trek, fans are able to invent something completely new.

Conventions, on the other hand, attracts a different kind of fan. While the authors of fanfiction can hide behind a screen and express their devotion anonymously, conventions require you to be present. At these conventions fans dress up as Klingons, Vulcans, Andorians, and all of the other characters in the movie. The meticulous detail that these hand-made costumes have is close to lunacy. Their costumes are exact replicas of the costumes from the original movie down to the stitch. This may seem as though the culture industry has them wrapped around its finger because they’re so invested, but in reality, they often make their costumes their own at these conventions. Geek culture “prompted cross-pollination across geek interests; for example, at the Dragon*Con parade you might find a zombie stormtrooper, mixing Star Wars and Zombie genres” (McCain). Even at these conventions that seem like the people cannot get more culturally brainwashed, you see them making the movies they watched their own.

A common thought is that Star Trekkies are too indulged in culture. According to Henry Jenkins, a professor of Communication, Journalism, and Cinematic Arts at USC, “fans are routinely cast as excessive, over-enthusiastic consumers, too heavily identified with and invested in the media texts they build their fandom around” (Bray). The NBC Saturday Night Live episode called “Get a Life!” expresses the view that “fans don’t have enough critical distance, that they are too immersed, too removed from reality” (Bray). Being removed from reality isn’t always a bad thing. If it means having a mind of your own that doesn’t let everything you watch go right past you, then I want to be removed from reality as well. As weirdas the people at these conventions may seem, their community is one of very few that are able to let their guards down and embrace culture. This community can write fanfiction in their own forms, reflecting their personal tastes and fantasies of the movies we watch so passively.

I’ve been talking a lot about sci-fi movies, and how the fans of this culture are far from passive, but what about the majority of us normal people? Are we passive? On the surface, it may seem so. Yes, there are the Star Trekkies who make their own slash fiction, but the majority of people aren’t a part of this “geek culture”. How many of your friends call themselves a Trekkie, a Potterhead, or anything of that vein? Now, how many of them admit to liking just about any other movie like Ferris Bueller’s Day off or Forrest Gump? I assume most would be on board with the latter simply because a.) they aren’t associated with comic cons and b.) there are so many genres besides sci-fi that people are into. It’s hard to have an incredibly devoted fan culture that Star Trek has with the fan base for Forrest Gump because the consumers of Forrest Gump aren’t dressing up for conventions. This does not mean, though, that they have to be passive because it isn’t a sci-fi movie. If you search, “Forrest Gump fanfiction” on google, hundreds of fanfiction websites will pop up (this works for just about any movie). Even though they aren’t dressing up for conventions, consumers of these other movies are creating their own piece of culture. Mainstream culture provides a medium for self expression, and allows us to xpress how we view any media thrown at us.

But what happens when this culture becomes mainstream? If fans are creating their own form of the culture given to them, isn’t it possible for that form to become the new mainstream culture? Pop culture is, in fact, steered by the tastes of the masses. Take Fifty Shades of Grey for example; this movie was based off of fan fiction from the movie Twilight and is now one of the most popular films. I’m sure this isn’t the only time new movies were made off of fan writing. Even though the consumers aren’t being passive, they are creating the new mainstream. Something about that feels wrong, like we’re being tricked into thinking we’re doing our own thing when we’re actually just creating more of the same.

Catherine Tosenberger mitigates this thought. She, along with other fanfiction writers, wonders why stories like Fifty Shades of Grey are the ones that get their debut when there are so many other stories much better than them. She says that, “many of the best fan stories (as well as many of the mediocre and the worst) are completely unpublishable for reasons that have nothing to do with nebulous assessments of literary quality, and everything to do with the fact that fanfiction is often so deeply embedded within a specific community that it is practically incomprehensible to those who don’t share exactly the same set of references” (Tosenberger). This shows that there is a sort of sacred bubble around fan fiction that cannot be touched that belongs uniquely to the members of that community. Even though there are cases where a story makes it out, for the most part it’s totally their own and can’t be touched.

Popular culture can be constricting, but it can also be freeing at the same time. If you use your creativity to write fanfiction and attend conventions then it gives us a way to be creative. But if we just let it go right through us and keep consuming without making it our own, then it will forever control us. It’s your choice which you want to pick.

References:

 

Bray, John Patrick. “‘There’s Too Many of Them!’: Off-Off-Broadway’s Performance of Geek Culture.” Theatre Symposium. University of Alabama. Oct 2014.

 

McCain, Jessica; Gentile, Brittany; Campbell, W Keith. “A Psychological Exploration of Engagement in Geek Culture: e0142200.” Public Library of Science. Nov 2015.

Tosenberger, Catherine. “Mature Poets Steal: Children’s Literature and the Unpublishability of Fanfiction.” Children’s Literature Association Quarterly. Johns Hopkins University. Spring 2014. Page 4-27.

Have you ever really thought about where our societal norms and rules come from? To get even deeper, how our personal identities form? I never did either before this year, but it’s definitely something worth thinking about. When you look to the past and compare it to the present, you’ll notice that the general concepts of society very minimally change. So, what mediums are used in order to make sure it stays the same through all of the generations? Althusser, a French philosopher, seems to have the answer to all of these questions.

To understand what I’m going to talk about you have to understand Althusser’s philosophy. To put it simply, he believes that we are all governed by an ideology. An ideology is the tool by which other things reproduce, and it controls us and not the other way around. Ideologies support our societal relationships by reinforcing them through movies, TV shows, books, songs, and stories. Most people are not aware that this is what’s happening because it’s all happening subconsciously. It’s so engrained in our culture that we don’t notice it unless we take a deep look at what we’re watching/reading (ENG 117). What we’ll be doing in this essay is figuring out if the movie Rudy has an ideology, and, if so, what the ideology is.

For those of you who have never seen Rudy, it’s a truly touching movie about a football player who has big dreams of playing football for Notre Dame. No one really believes in him, including his family, but he works abnormally hard to get into Notre Dame and eventually play for the team. The movie ends with Rudy making a tackle in the final play of the game for Notre Dame. In this scene, he gets carried off the field on the shoulders of his teammates with his dad in the stands crying tears of joy. 

At first look, you may think that moral of the story is to work hard and all of your dreams will come true. But when you look past the heart-warming scene of Rudy finally being able to step on the field for Notre Dame, and start to think like Althusser, there are a few underlying messages that are not as happy doo-diddy as the movie makes you feel. 

It’s pretty apparent that in the movie, Rudy represents a kid from a low-income household who was only supposed to be a factory worker and nothing more. The other Notre Dame football players, on the other hand, weren’t necessarily portrayed as wealthy, but it is evident that they were better off in all aspects of life than Rudy. There’s a scene in the movie where Rudy tackles the quarterback during practice and the quarterback starts yelling at Rudy telling him how he’s only a practice player and how he’s going to hurt someone if he keeps practicing like that. The coach then grabs the kid by the helmet and tells him that if he had half the heart that Rudy has then maybe he would be an All-American and not a sorry excuse for a football player (Rudy). There’s no hiding the fact that Rudy is the most hardworking player on the team, but even so he only gets to step on the field at the very end of the season for a single play. Our first instinct at the end of the movie is to be happy for Rudy that he finally gets to accomplish his dream of running through the tunnel for Notre Dame, but think about it, he doesn’t nearly get as much out of it as he put in. So, what’s the underlying ideology of this movie that’s being put into our brains?

The ideology of this movie is that no matter how hard lower class citizens work, they’re never going to be good as the upper class citizens who don’t nearly put in as much work. There’s always going to be a divide, and the poor are always going to be working for the rich. At one point in the movie Rudy is asked why he’s killing himself at practice when he doesn’t get anything out of it, and he says, “if I cool it out there, then I won’t be helping you guys win next week’s game” (Rudy). This quote pretty much sums it all up: lower class citizens are there to help the rich. As sad as it is, this has always been the case throughout history.

Another ideology in this movie reinforces the role of the church. When Rudy has no idea where to go or what to do when he finally makes it to Notre Dame, all signs point him towards the priest. Father Cavanaugh is the one who gave him his only chance of getting into Notre Dame. He enrolled Rudy into the local college, and that’s where Rudy got good enough grades to get into Notre Dame. There is no one as influential to Rudy, besides maybe the groundskeeper, in this movie. Also, whenever Rudy felt low-spirited and lost, the church is where he went. This movie puts into our brain that the church is our savior. Another aspect to take into consideration is that Notre Dame is a highly religious school and all Rudy wanted to do was get into this school. In this movie, the school represented Christianity in general. If this is true, then this movie puts into our mind that in order to be truly happy, we have to be “accepted” by God.

Some of these statements may seem absurd to you. That’s how I felt when my English class figured out the ideology of the Terminator 3, and Titanic. Who would’ve ever guessed that the Terminator supports male dominance and rape culture, or that the Titanic reinforces the class structure? I didn’t before I thought about the ideology of these movies, and now these claims seem very evident to me. This is exactly what Althusser, and other philosophers, were talking about when they said we don’t know that we’re being controlled by these ideologies. Unless we try to find the ideology, we don’t notice it, and, therefore, it unknowingly becomes a part of our daily thoughts. This is dangerous because our daily thoughts makeup our personal identity. And since these movies are being watched by thousands of people, we all start to have the same daily thoughts and so it naturally becomes a part of our society. The next time you watch a movie, try to figure out what the ideology is; you might discover something very few people have.

Bibilography:

Rudy. Dir. David Anspaugh. 1993. Film.