Most of the world’s genres have been around pretty much forever. The Iliad and The Odyssey are older than the written word is in Greece, and they set the templates that we still use for action movies, revenge tales, and the road-trip genre. St. Augustine wrote his Confessions (the first autobiography) nearly a thousand years before Gutenberg’s printing press arrived on the scene in Europe. And it’s hard to think of any story that doesn’t have a precedent in the Bible (more on that in a moment). But the detective story is a true outlier here and a true newcomer. Edgar Allen Poe wrote The Murders in the Rue Morgue in 1841, and with that, the detective story was born—and with it the character of the detective as well. C. Auguste Dupin is smart, methodical, and determined, and even in his first appearance you can see where Sherlock Holmes and Hercule Poirot (among others) learned their trade and gained their sense of style. The only thing missing here is the butler. And thank goodness for that, because otherwise we’d be deprived of what is, still, a shocking conclusion.
There’s a moment in the second season of Game of Thrones when Tyrion Lannister (played by Peter Dinklage) opts not for a standard trial (which he knows would not be just), but instead for a trial by combat. It’s a pretty awesome idea and a pretty awesome scene, but it’s also a choice that real human beings were actually able to make in the actual real world. That is nuts! But it is far from the only nuts thing that Game of Thrones borrows from the Middle Ages. In fact, much of the power dynamics and even the personality types are lifted from the England’s War of the Roses. The names are changed, of course, and the dragons are added, but it really is astounding to think that there is a real precedent for the deeply cynical and astoundingly cruel actions of the characters in the series. It’s also astounding to think that people fought to the death with so many weapons that are, essentially, variations of “metal on a stick.” Trial by combat is bad enough in the case of a duel, but if you’re shot in the head at least you die quickly. Death by war hammer is, I think, not a fast or pleasant way to go. (Unless you are fighting Thor.)
George R. Stewart’s novel Earth Abides (1949) is a landmark work of post-apocalyptic (post-plague, more specifically) fiction and was the inspiration for Stephen King’s own classic, The Stand. His academic work of non-fiction, Names on the Land, provides an incredible history of America through the names of its cities, towns, counties, lakes, and mountains. But his most lasting contributing to American pop culture is perhaps found in Storm (1941) and Fire (1948)—two books in which a natural disaster plays the roles of villain and main character. These books set the stage for films like Backdraft, Twister, The Perfect Storm, Contagion, and even Jaws. Storm is also the reason that we now give female names to hurricanes. Stewart doesn’t get a lot of credit these days (perhaps because of the existence of more disastrous disaster films like Dante’s Peak, 2012, Deep Impact, and many, many more), but for an academic, he certainly had an eye for profitable genres. Give that man a movie studio! (And then, please, take that studio back away from him; storms don’t really need a hype man.)
The peripatetic school of Athens. The mail room at William Morris Endeavor. FC Barcelona’s training program. Disney’s Mouseketeers.
The alumni for these programs are, as a rule, extraordinary. They turn into great philosophers, revolutionary entertainers, sublime soccer players, and ’N Sync. And look, this level of success is not surprising if the founder of your program is a world-historical genius—but it is surprising when your students are collectively known as “Mouseketeers.” The list is truly shocking: Keri Russell, Christina Aguilera, Britney Spears, Justin Timberlake, and Ryan “Hey Girl” Gosling. They may not all be sane, they may not all be happy, they may not all be non-Canadian, but they are all absolutely entertaining. I don’t know who finds these Mouseketeers, and I don’t know who makes sure to keep them far away from the Elephantsketeers, but I do know this: That old mouse has to be the smartest and most well-compensated rodent on the face of planet Disney.
Funny women have been around for exactly as long as unfunny men have said that funny women aren’t really that funny. What has not been around forever, however, is funding for movies written by female comedians. The ascendancy of Tina Fey in recent years has definitely changed the look and feel of comedy on film and television, but the rapid release of ensemble comedies like For a Good Time Call (starring Ari Graynor and Lauren Anne Miller) and Bachelorette (written and directed by Leslye Headland)—along with dramas like Take This Waltz (starring Michelle Williams and Sarah Silverman) and Save the Date (starring Lizzy Kaplan and Alison Brie)— shows that movie producers are not blind (to money when it piles up in front of them).
Bridesmaids isn’t a revolutionary movie. The romance in it is pretty standard (if charming); the laughs are solid but also often reliant on bowel movements (a joke as old as time); and the absurdity is straight out of SNL. The one thing it has (missing from other movies of the time) is a believable and hilarious scene in which two comedians (and friends) just talk and laugh together. Not every movie can count on the hyper-dirty, ultrahilarious comic alliance of Kristen Wiig and Maya Rudolph, but female friendship is definitely not a unicorn. Nor are female comedians. So here again, this is a replicable formula. Prior to Bridesmaids, this fact was not in evidence. (If you need some convincing on this point, do a search for “Bechdel test.”) After Bridesmaids, it kind of is. And when this formula gets old, that will be a good thing. It means we will be on to something new.
Some adaptations (like almost every period drama based on a book) are literal. Others (like the films of Stanley Kubrick) are spiritual. Still others (like the films of Quentin Tarantino) are pointillstic mash-ups. But the best adaptations, in my (unadapted) book, are all of the above. Donnie Darko is in that last camp: It combines a fairly literal adaptation of Graham Greene’s incredible short story “The Destructors” with a spiritual adaptation of The Last Temptation of Christ (directed by Martin Scorsese). It also injects both of these works into the larger movie organically (by having the students in Donnie Darko’s class read Greene’s story and then setting the film in the 1980s, when Last Temptation first made waves).
There’s no doubt that these references are part of the reason why Donnie Darko has developed a huge cult following, but due to all of the additional references that the film makes (to Lolita, The Smurfs, the 1988 US presidential election, and so on), it’s easy to lose sight of the fact that, on a macro scale, this really is The Last Temptation of Christ set in the 1980s, with Donnie as Christ, science-fiction taking the place of spirituality, and love, once again, as the answer. It’s a testament to the value of reinventing the wheel every once in a while.
The headline says it all, right? And it sounds crazy, but it’s true. Richard Wagner was an immensely talented, hugely revered composer (and a less talented, less revered, more despised philosopher and anti-Semite) who has had a strangely enormous impact on the world of pop culture. Before his arrival, operas were performed with the lights on, with audience members chattering away, and with a lot of people paying no attention whatsoever to what was going on. He said the German word for “oh, hell no,” and turned the lights off, made the performers on stage more visible, and told the audience to zip the proverbial lip . . . or else. Then, with his Ring Cycle, he sought to make opera into something that was bigger than it had been.
He borrowed heavily from Northern European folklore to create an epic, four-part series that fused music, dance, stage-design, and philosophy into an overarching Gesamtkunstwerk—a “total work of art.” This cycle, in turn, provided the philosophical underpinnings for Terrence Malick’s poetic ode to early America, The New World, but also the thrilling, warmongering chorus behind the cynical masterpiece Apocalypse Now. It also provided the narrative framework and many of the themes for Tolkien’s Lord of the Ring series.
Perhaps his most ubiquitous innovation, however, was his use of leitmotifs—recurring musical themes that were used to identify each character and whose alterations and combinations over time were also intended to offer some insight into a given character’s evolution and/or degeneration. The idea of the leitmotif is now pervasive in almost all dramatic art, but it remains most present in musical scores, where it’s now often used to simply set a scene or announce an arrival. Like the ring, it’s not the tool that matters, it’s how you use it.
So in summary: Wagner—bad man, great artist.
It’s hard to say that the Bible is “underappreciated” since it’s been translated into nearly every language, imported into nearly every country, and put to bed in every open hotel drawer, but the Good Book’s very omnipresence can also make it invisible. This lack of visibility is exacerbated by the fact that the Bible has A TON of different stories in it. So even if you were looking for biblical elements in a space opera, say, or in a song, you’d need either a heads-up that a certain story was coming your way or else a very explicit reference. And since explicit references don’t usually make for great art, well, there we are: a lot of Bible shout-outs go slipping through the cracks.
Star Wars is a relatively recent example of a case where biblical elements were kind of smuggled in, but an even more telling case is contained in Thomas Mann’s multivolume classic Joseph and His Brothers. This was a work that Mann undertook after immigrating to America prior to World War II, and he was inspired by the similarities between Joseph’s ancient story and the classic tale of the American dream. So to put it another way, Mann was hoping to tell a new story by telling an old story and letting us see how American it had become. Or, to invert the formula again, how biblical we now are. It is, in the end, a great story and a great novel because of how little has changed. We’re still human and so is the story and, even when it’s stretched over 2,000 pages, this is still a story that we all want to hear.
Here is just a small sampling of the things that the news provoked, inspired, and/or promoted: the collected works of Fyodor Dostoevsky, In Cold Blood, The Onion, Law & Order, The Wire, crossword puzzles, The Daily Show, South Park, Zero Dark Thirty, Thirty Rock, the collected quips of Jay Leno, a rash of gorilla attacks in New York City (because of copycat gorillas), an equal and opposite rash reaction of tabby cat ingenuity in Long Island (because of copy-gorilla cats), future presidents, ex-presidents, presidential cats—if it’s happening in real life then it happened in the headlines first and it’s coming to a theater near you. Don’t fight it. Just consume it, fear the world, expect the worst, and enjoy your nightmares.
This is a crazy thing to say. The Brothers Karamazov is frequently included in discussions about the greatest book of all time. Arrested Development is frequently included in discussions about the greatest and most-elaborate auto-fellatio puns of all time. If that last sentence makes no sense, be alerted that Tobias Fünke (played by David Cross) hopes, someday, to become a member of the Blue Man Group, and thus has occasion to report, in his words, “I blue myself.”
That joke provides a very small sampling of the tone and reach, as it were, of this much beloved comedy. It also gives a sense of its utter frivolousness. That’s why it came as such a surprise when, in January of 2012, Helen Rittelmeyer wrote an article for First Things (a magazine published by the Institute on Religion in Public Life), in which she outlined the very close similarities between both the families and the plots at the center of these two works. It’s a convincing case. And the realization that a profound work of theology, philosophy, and fiction could be at the heart of something so utterly silly and fun is, I think, a testament to how hard it is to be entertaining, no matter what genre you may be working in. You work with what works. Sometimes the thing that works is drawn from world literature and other times it’s drawn from the intense weirdness of Liza Minnelli—either way, it’s genius.