Staying Up Much Too Late: Edward Hopper's Nighthawks and the Dark Side of the American Psyche Review

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(More customer reviews)Edward Hopper's paintings, well known to almost everyone in this country, are unique in that they convey a sense of loneliness, yearning, suggestions of dark thoughts, pessimism, and hopelessness - not exactly the moods one would want to examine on a daily basis, but certainly painterly images that cause us to pause when we encounter them in museums and collections.
Gordon Theisen is a fine writer and in this book STAYING UP MUCH TOO LATE: EDWARD HOPPOER'S 'NIGHTHAWKS' AND THE DARK SIDE OF THE AMERICAN PSYCHE he manages to successfully use the famous night diner painting of the artist to address the current mental state of affairs seeping into our consciousness. He wisely covers every aspect of the artist's life and work, giving us the necessary details of his life and his idiomatic stance in American art, spreads those ideas into his output thus assuring us that the one painting of the title is not an isolated image, and then begins to apply his ideas to our cultural status - at times not comfortable, but always creatively informative.
If Thiesen strays a bit too far from his title subject, drawing on his own interpretation of concepts he perceives as more than just legitimate diversions, then he can be forgiven by the reader who want more from an author than a term paper presentation. Thiesen indulges in reminiscing about our cultural icons such as diners, cigarettes, coffee, plastic, jazz, war, sex, film noir, and personality disintegration in a time of easy drugs AKA medications. Perhaps these are topics many would not elect to explore, but then they are bookmarks to the greater understanding of where our current culture stands.
If indeed our artists are our shamans then Hopper as Thiesen presents him is a prophet of sorts. Not that the book is depressing as the Nighthawks painting: Thiesen has the good will to engage us in the positive aspects of all of the negatives listed above. There is humor here, but it is humor with an edge. This book, along with other contemporary 'paintings as examples of current thought' books by such authors as Biel and van Hensbergen in their evaluations of Grant Woods' American Gothic and Picasso's Guernica, once again proves that art gives us more than visual delight: art gives us valuable food for thought...and change. Grady Harp, November 06

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Film and Television After 9/11 Review

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(More customer reviews)When I saw the title of this book and ordered it, I thought (as implied by the title) that it was using 9-11 to mark off a time period, and would offer some essays about television and film since then. This is not really what this text is. Published in 2004, but probably written mostly a good deal earlier, the event of 9-11 itself weighs very heavily in virtually all of the essays. I would say 'Film and Television in light of 9-11' would probably be a better title. A couple of the essays in fact deal with how films (specifically 'Manhatta' and 'King Kong', as well as Holocaust documentaries) made before 9-11 appear afterward.
Most of the essays subvert the aura of American exceptionalism (i.e. the mentality that this is the most awful thing to happen to anyone) that surrounds 9-11. Some look at the ways 9-11 was projected into culture, for example the effort to cut the Twin Towers from several projects in the pipeline on 9-11. Whether the towers were cut (incurring the wrath of those who claimed that therefore 'the terrorists won') or not (and thereby eliciting disruptive cheers from audiences when they appeared, as in Glitter) their presence was deeply felt. Another essay describes the way the most disturbing footage filmed on 9-11 has not been screened, and how this footage is slowly emerging on the internet. The author suggests that this will help demystify the event. Relevant, but relatively unknown, foreign films, such as the European collaborative film 9'11''01 (which compared 9-11 to a number of events around the world, practically a taboo in the US) are also described. In the aforementioned essay discussing Manhatta, the way in which the twin towers embodied a sort of monumental modernity that quashed what stood in its way, replacing it with a flat, mathematical order, is noted. This sort of modernity produces targets of terrorism (we might add it finds its opposite in the geography of Afghanistan, where, as Donald Rumsfeld noted, the US military quickly ran out of targets to bomb). The now almost forgotten thriller 'The Sum of All Fears' shows up in several essays, since its depiction of a nuclear bomb detonating in Baltimore makes it relevant. This film made little lasting impact on American culture, suggesting the perils of trying to produce this sort of book so quickly after the event in question. An essay on Malkmalbaf's 'Khandahar' makes an odd reference to NATO troops in Afghanistan as 'peacekeepers' (they are not, by practically any definition of that term), suggesting unintentionally possible complicity of this film with this liberal imperialist mission. One essay describes 24, but only the first season. The show really focused more aggressively on 9-11 themes from the second season on, although the writer's suggestion that the alliance between Jack Bauer and presidential candidate David Palmer echoes the alliance between fire fighters and upper middle class financial workers in the offices attacked on 9-11 is intriguing. The essay comparing the mythology of King Kong-the return of the repressed of the third world, coming to Manhattan, and, in the 1970s version, scaling the Twin Towers--and its relation to Bin Laden was quite good.
The essays in this book are generally interesting. This is a topic it would be worth returning to, now that a good deal of time has past and more perspective can be brought to bear.

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