5 What is Theory?/Why Theory

Given the readings we’re embarking on this week and next in class, two pieces in the New York Times today struck me. One is the obit for Marshall Berman, author of All That Solid Melts into Air: The Experience of Modernity from which we’re reading the introduction,  “Modernity—Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow” (1982). The obituary notes about the book:

He heard song in conflict and argued that the stop-start stumble of modern life was, for all its inexplicability and despair, necessary and promising. Marx, he insisted counterintuitively, might admire the energy and diversity that capitalism has delivered to the United States even if he believed there was a better way. The Bronx, Times Square, all of New York in its many incarnations — from the seedy, bankrupt 1970s to the murderous 1980s to today’s urban boutique — was in his view alive and luminous in its recklessness and resilience.

The other Times review by Ben Brantley of the new play, “Mr. Burns, a Post-Electric Play” is one sense less optimistic (it’s story takes place in a post-apocolyptic scenario) but in another — the form — seems to every bit reflect Berman’s optimism toward the vitality of the avant garde. Notes Brantley about the distinction of this play from what he might describe as postmodern trivia:

The first characters we meet in “Mr. Burns” are clearly on the run from something like a plague, too (radioactivity, to be exact, after the mass failure of nuclear power plants across the country). Gathered around a fire in a woods, these random survivors — like the sequestered Florentines of “The Decameron” — are waiting out a nuclear winter by reimagining a great classic tale of their time. That would be an episode of “The Simpsons,” the “Cape Feare” episode, to be exact, in which young Bart — the son of Homer and Marge — is stalked by the murderous Sideshow Bob.

Let’s pause for a second and note that it might be helpful if you have a passing knowledge of “The Simpsons,” Matt Groening’s long-lived animated series that finds gloriously inventive form and function in the dysfunctional all-American family. You need to know at least that “The Simpsons” is the most inspired American cultural compactor of the past 50 years, which is saying something in an era in which most culture is a matter of recycling.

That “Cape Feare” segment that’s being reconstructed from memory at the beginning of “Mr. Burns”? It is partly a riff on the 1991 Martin Scorsese movie, “Cape Fear,” a remake of a 1962 film that starred Robert Mitchum, whose earlier role in “The Night of the Hunter” is also cited in “The Simpsons” episode under discussion, along with some Gilbert & Sullivan operettas.

So you see, what the characters in “Mr. Burns” are trying to recollect in the play’s first act is itself a recollection of many stories, variously told, that came before. And during the 80-some years covered in “Mr. Burns,” that tale made up of other tales will evolve into other shapes until, at the end, we have come full circle. And what we’re returning to is not that original “Simpsons” episode, but something far older and more primal.

…

That single “Simpsons” episode [Cape Feare] becomes a treasure-laden bridge, both to the past and into the future. And in tracing a story’s hold on the imaginations of different generations, the play is likely to make you think back — way back — to narratives that survive today from millenniums ago. Every age, it seems, has its Homers.

Why do I think this is worth mentioning? Because we’re going to be discussing modernism, post-modernism, and “now” hopefully with more complexity and critical questions. Kick ass for a future that matters!