Transcript Postwar Culture Lecture

Cold War
Culture
How did atomic bomb, McCarthyism,
and consensus affect American
culture and social life?
Ralston Crawford, Tour of Inspection, Bikini, 1946
Jackson Pollock, Convergence, 1952
Jackson Pollock, No. 1, 1949
Jackson Pollock, No. 1, 1950
Jackson Pollock, No. 31, 1950
Jackson Pollock, Blue Poles, 1952
Jackson Pollock, No. 8, 1949
Jackson Pollock, No. 8 (detail), 1949
Jackson Pollock Videos
• MOMA short video: “The Painting Techniques of
Jackson Pollock: One: Number 31, 1950”
• SFMOMA short video: “Jackson Pollock on His
Process”
• Longer version of SFMOMA: Hans Namuth’s
Jackson Pollock 51 (1951, 10 minutes)
Edward Hopper, Nighthawks, 1942
William Garnett, Grading, Lakewood, California, 1950
William Garnett, Trenching, Lakewood, California, 1950
William Garnett, Foundations and Slabs, Lakewood, California, 1950
William Garnett, Framing, Lakewood, California, 1950
William Garnett, Finished Housing, Lakewood, California, 1950
1950s Horror Films
The Fly, 1958
Them, 1954
Outer Space Anxieties
• Sputnik, 1957
Horror Films, the Atom Bomb, and
the Environment
• Common themes in 1950s horror films?
Gender Roles
Dissent and Nonconformity: Women, Domesticity, and Work
June Cleaver or Not?
• Conventional Message:
Domesticity = Appropriate
Gender Roles = Safety =
National Security = “The
Homeland”
• Contestation of
Conventions
o Domestic role conformist or
empowering? – using
maternal role to protest Civil
Defense Drills in NYC
o Working outside the home
o Women in Civil Rights
Movement
o Beat women, bad girls
o Feminism
Traditions:
Victorian Gender Roles
John Singer Sargent
Video
J.S.S. Video #2
Abbott Thayer, “Winged
Figure,” 1889
Abbott Thayer, “The Virgin”
Abbott Thayer, “Angel,”
1889
Thomas Dewing, “Summer,” 1890
Upper Class Gender Roles:
Victorian Separate Spheres
• Men
• Women
Problems with Victorian Separate Spheres?:
1950s Gender Roles
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Father Knows Best
John Wayne and movie westerns
“A Word to the Wives,” 1955
“Leave It to Roll-Oh,” 1940
“Why Study Home Economics,” 1955
“Are You Popular?” (1947)
Gender Roles in Yates’s
Revolutionary Road?
• Men
• Women
Betty Friedan, The
Feminine Mystique, 1963
• Link to Chapter 1
• Article on Friedan and FM, The Atlantic Monthly
• Another article, The New Yorker
Postwar Dissent
Working Outside the Box?
CONFORMITY
Dissent – The Beats
• Playful, tongue-in-cheek style
• Using popular culture, consumer culture, and
elite culture symbols and language in
subversive ways
• Subversive politics, sexuality, lifestyles
• Kerouac, On the Road
• Ginsberg, Howl, America, Supermarket in CA
[audio recordings]
• Ferlinghetti, I Am Waiting
• Ferlinghetti, Sometime During Eternity
• Ferlinghetti, Constantly Risking Absurdity
Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Sometime During
Eternity, 1958
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Lawrence Ferlinghetti, "[Sometime During Eternity]" (1958)
Sometime during eternity
some guys show up
and one of them
who shows up real late
is a kind of carpenter
from some square-type place
like Galilee
and he starts wailing
and claiming he is hip
to who made heaven
and earth
and that the cat
who really laid it on us
is his Dad
Ferlinghetti (cont.)
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And moreover
he adds
It's all write down
on some scroll-type parchments
which some henchmen
leave lying around the Dead Sea somewheres
a long time ago
and which you won't even find
for a coupla thousand years or so
or at least for
nineteen hundred and fortyseven
of them
to be exact
and even then
nobody really believes them
or me
for that matter
Ferlinghetti (cont.)
• You're hot
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they tell him
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And they cool him
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They stretch him on the Tree to cool
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And everybody after that
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is always making models
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of this Tree
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with Him hung up
• and always crooning His name
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and calling Him to come down
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and sit in
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on their combo
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as if he is the king cat
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who's got to blow
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or they can't quite make it
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Only he don't come down
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from His Tree
Ferlinghetti (cont.)
• Him just hang there
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on His Tree
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looking real Petered out
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and real cool
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and also
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according to a roundup
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of late world news
• from the usual unreliable sources
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real dead
Conclusions
• Total conformity?
Conclusions (cont.)