Reviews for Eyes Upside Down: Visonary Filmmakers and the Heritage of Emerson

The average rating for Eyes Upside Down: Visonary Filmmakers and the Heritage of Emerson based on 2 reviews is 4.5 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2008-08-29 00:00:00 Lewis Call Stella Adler, Dustin Hoffman, Mel Brooks, Tony Kushner, Wendy Wasserstein ' what do they have in common? They all work in various ways in the American Theatre and they are all are Jewish. Their contributions, along with others, prompt Henry Bial to explore how "mainstream" American entertainment is a crucial site for understanding the relationship between Jews and American culture" (5). Bial offers fresh insights regarding the changing representations of Jews in contemporary American popular entertainment. Jerry Seinfeld might say his long-running situational comedy was "about nothing," or just the foibles of a group of preposterous people living in Manhattan. Henry Bial would say that Seinfeld's "nothing" really signifies "nothing new" with regard to Jewish comedy. Bial points to the insignificance at the heart of Seinfeld's world as really about the significance of the larger Jewish American culture. Seinfeld situates in a contemporary, secular context, the scenarios, themes, and gags emblematic of the past century of Yiddish theatre. With his show he exposes a remarkably Jewish New York and yet avoids the overt identification of Jewishness in order to appeal to a wider mainstream American audience. The identification of this strategy, that intentionally renders Jewishness invisible, is the starting point of Bial's analysis of contemporary Jewish representation. In his chapter "How Jews Became Sexy, 1968-1983," Bial examines how Jewishness came to be perceived (at least in part) as sexually appealing in American popular entertainment. Bial points to Barbara Streisand's central role in this evolution. Beginning with the October 1977 issue of Playboy which contains Streisand's "First in-depth interview" (86) and her photograph on the cover (she is clad in white shorts and a T-shirt adorned with the Playboy logo) which reads, "What's a nice girl like me doing on the cover of Playboy?" (86), Bial explains how everyone's favorite "Funny Girl" represents the exaltation to divinity "of an evolution in the way the Jewish body is perceived by an American audience" (86). Bial investigates the negotiation of ethnicity and explores what it means to be Jewish for Jews and non-Jews. He crafts a pertinent analysis of various methods of "acting Jewish" without the recourse to religiosity (the manifestation of identifiable Judaistic performative elements). Bial terms this performance of Jewishness in mass culture that is able to speak to at least two incongruous audiences, "double-coding" (3). This term predates Bial's use. Bial investigates this phenomenon's meaning in productions from 1947 into the new millennium for how American Jews observe and enact their religious beliefs. Acting Jewish is partitioned into six chapters. The first addresses reactions by "the American entertainment industry to the crisis of Jewish identity in the immediate postwar era" (4). The film Gentleman's Agreement (1947) is examined and its treatment of the question of Judaistic discriminatory practices. The Goldbergs (1949-53), a situational comedy centered around a traditional American Jewish family and Arthur Miller's seminal play, Death of a Salesman (1949) are also explored. The latter play is analyzed in terms of the debate revolving around its "Jewishness, or lack thereof, over the last century." Bial explicates how these models endeavor to address the "double bind, acknowledging the value of Jewish difference while simultaneously stressing the universal brotherhood of all peoples" (31). The third chapter, "Fiddling on the Roof, 1964-1971," continues Bial's discussion of double coding. There he focuses on the 1964 stage version and the 1971 film rendition of Fiddler on the Roof, and contrasts the reception of Jewish and gentile audiences. Bial uses Stuart Hall's "Encoding and Decoding in Television Discourse" (61) as a "communications model of mass culture in which ideological messages are produced, circulated, consumed, and subsequently reproduced" to explain how messages are "polysemic." Thus, Bial posits that we derive multiple meanings while analyzing a text because of the "reading positions" we occupy as "decoder-consumers" (61). In the fourth chapter, "How Jews Became Sexy, 1968-1983," Bial shows how performances of Woody Allen and Barbara Streisand "reconfirm a belief in the desirability of passing and the impossibility of doing so" (106). He extends his discussion of double coding, contrasting Allen's and Streisand's careers and how their "work both drove and benefited from a change in how the sexual attractiveness of the Jewish body" (5) was viewed by both Jews and gentiles. Allen exemplified "the Jew as Sexual Schlemiel . . . . the little man with the big libido and the even bigger sexual neurosis" (92), serving as the stereotype of Jewish sexual insecurity while showing that insecurity as sexually attractive. Similarly, while Streisand does not claim that her Jewish features are classically attractive, Bial notes that "she implies instead that beauty and sexual attractiveness are, like ethnicity, based in performance. She is beautiful because she chooses to act beautiful and sexy" (101). Bial illustrates how the Jewish body has become increasingly recognized as sexually appealing, how it contributes to an au courant circumscription of "sexual attractiveness in American culture more generally" (5). Bial's fifth chapter, "The Desire to Remember, 1989-1997," explores the plays of David Mamet, Wendy Wasserstein, and Tony Kushner. Bial traces how to "look at history as a guide to acting Jewish at the millennium" (5); he thereby underscores the Jewish predilection to represent a vanished or potentially lost Jewish culture. He argues that "the desire to remember," is a fundamental component of acting Jewish. As Bial shows how the memories of a culture are dynamic and contingent, new questions surface to generate a narrative informed by the present and exposing the contested views of the past. Bial's sixth chapter, "You Know Who Else Is Jewish"? encourages readers to discover new approaches for applying a "Jewish-specific reading strategy to a performance text" (138) while remain[ing:] "willing . . . to suspend, though not discard conventional binaries . . ." (141). He cautions us to avoid interpeliating Jewishness "into existing theories and conversations about ethnic, racial, and religious identity in the United States" (141). Here Bial explains that the act of decoding Jewishness serves two purposes. First, it eliminates the essentialized boundaries of ethnicity and religion. Secondly, it asserts a belief in Jewish as a distinct means of identification, a predilection to conceive oneself as part of a Jewish community of readers. Together these reading strategies facilitate the opportunity for one to imagine a meaningful Jewish culture in the absence of the lived experience of being Jewish. Bial's study is a fresh contribution in the examination of performance, as he addresses the performance of racial authenticity, Bial mines new interpretations from the past sixty years of Jewish American performance and finds new insights. Acting Jewish is a respectable contribution to performance studies and an invaluable resource for social historicists and literary and cultural contemporary theorists. The text is readable and moving, unpretentious, and candid. Bial skillfully compelled this reader to keep the pages turning, an accolade for the surprising subtleness of this book, a book that I enthusiastically recommend.

Review # 2 was written on 2013-12-30 00:00:00 R Bruce Deroo "The Battle of the Sexes in Science Fiction" by Justine Larbalestier is the fourth book in the Early Classics of Science Fiction series from Wesleyan University Press, and is unlike any of the other books in the series up to this point. The previous books in the series included whole works of science fiction along with supplementary material. This book is a study of the history of science fiction with respect to women as fans and authors. Justine Larbalestier looks at the period starting in the mid 1920's and continuing up to today. She limits her look to that period, because that is when the genre of science fiction was first identified, and because the 1920's are the starting point for the pulp magazine publications of science fiction. The book covers the portrayal of women in the stories themselves, and how poorly they were written by the male writers and how the male fans objected to the inclusion of female characters. It also covers the female fans and how their letters were treated compared with their male contemporaries. Ms. Larbalestier also talks about the women authors, how there is a perception that they didn't appear on the scene until the late 60's, and the reaction to their stories by fans, other authors, and editors. Lastly, she spends a great deal of space discussing James Tiptree Jr. (i.e. Alice Sheldon) and the award named after him/her. In the stories from the earlier days, the female characters were mostly included to be saved, or purely as a diversion from the meat of the story. The objections of the male fans to these characters thus seemed reasonable to them and the editors, but at the same time they seemed unable to accept the idea that female characters might actually be central to the stories. It is amazing to think that the idea of women as scientists or astronauts would be more unbelievable than the aliens and civilizations which were portrayed in many of the early science fiction stories. Women were clearly seen as a threat to the male dominated genre. One area which is not talked about is the effect of science fiction being dominated by the pulps and shorter fiction. She does not mention or discuss the dynamic of female characters from the few longer works from the early days. The fan letters are at the same time humorous, for how they sound today, and upsetting, for the sexist ideas which many of them contain. Some of the male fans of the time went on to become authors, such as Isaac Asimov, Ray Bradbury, and others. Equally surprising are the responses from the editors, who patronize the few female fans who take the time to write in, although I do think that Ms. Larbalestier sometimes reads more into their responses than is actually there. However, in many cases when I initially thought this, I changed my mind after trying to view the situation from another viewpoint. When discussing the presence of women authors, I can only agree with her conclusions based on my experience. I have been reading a lot of science fiction from that period, and there were several woman authors from the early days of science fiction, and their stories fit right in with those by male authors. The idea that there weren't any, or that their stories are easily identifiable as being by a woman is ridiculous, although I suppose that their ability to write believable female characters might be a give away in some cases, but then again there are some male authors who were able to do that. The discussion of James Tiptree Jr., is a little too long in my opinion; it feels a little repetitive as she already discussed some of the same things earlier in the book. There is a large amount of detail in the discussion of the award which, though interesting within their context, seem out of place with regard to the rest of the book. These problems are small though, and there are few weaknesses in this very interesting discussion of women in science fiction, and the reaction from the male fans, writers, and editors.