 Hello, welcome to Global Connections, I'm Patrick Bratton here, and what we're going to talk about today is using films to teach about history and politics, particularly in the university setting. So, I've got a return guest for you guys today, Dean Allison Goff, who's the Dean of the Residential Honors Program at Hawaii Pacific University. Welcome back to Think Tech. Thank you, I'm very happy to be here. Good to have you back. Yeah. One of the things that I'm always struck by, both you and I are movie buffs and we are interested in politics and history. So we always end up talking about the subject, thinking it would be a great idea for a show. So today we thought we'd go out and actually have a show with you guys today. And so we watched a lot of movies and I know you integrate movies when you teach in the classroom and things. So we had a couple of themes that we had thought about talking about and one was sort of this kind of transition and sort of US history, you know, from the Great Depression through World War II into the Cold War and kind of thinking of about three or four sort of, I don't know, paradigmic sort of films that illustrate a lot of themes. So you wanted to start, of course, as we always want to start in the sort of golden age of the Great Depression in Hollywood, right? And one of the things that I find interesting here is that you have this apparent paradox, right? Because when we think about the Great Depression, a lot of us had the stories or grandparents or maybe now our great-great-parents talked to how hard life was. So when you go back and you watch films of this period, they're glorious and they're glamorous and there's Fred Astaire and there's Kerry Grant and there's Carol Lombard and there's all this glamour at a time that we've grown up with these stories about how hard life was. I mean, doesn't that strike you perhaps as odd initially? Well, you know, talking to my grandparents, it doesn't strike me as odd. They were the people who hid their money under the mattress and my father had to persuade them to put them in the savings bank in the 70s because they were so, you know, it had such a bad experience, you know, during the Depression. But it's from my grandfather that I got a love, you know, of classic movies, particularly these screwball comedies, which really I think were fashioned as an antidote, you know, to the Depression. And on the one hand, when you look at these screwball comedies, it looks like there's nothing in there that you can use, you know, in a history class or a politics class to sort of replicate the period because you don't see, you know, the downside of the Depression. They're not really making films about the oaks. They're not really making films about, you know, slums. They're not really making films about people throwing themselves out of buildings on Wall Street. And they're not making films about the people who overwhelmingly were impacted by the Depression, which is, you know, the working and middle class. Instead, most of the characters you see in there, right, are the professional classes, upper classes, et cetera. So you think, well, what does this have to do? What can this tell us, you know, about the 1920s and the 1930s, the era of the Great Depression in particular? And of course, what it can tell you is something about, you know, the mindset of people there. And I think the screwball comedy really does reflect the ability of people to at least mentally rise above the Great Depression, but it also reflects a great deal of, I think, government propaganda that actually was embraced by Hollywood during that period to see them, you know, through the Depression. But at the same time, when you look at these movies very closely, they are very subversive. And this is what interests me, because of course, between the beginning of film and up to the 1950s, you know, films were not protected by the First Amendment. And so they were censored, essentially. And so the movies, particularly of the 30s and 40s, which on the one hand look like, you know, they're trying to buoy the spirits of the population and say everything is normal. And, you know, cheer people up. On the other hand, they're really quite subversive. And they kind of presage, I think, a lot of themes that are going to emerge and developments that are going to emerge in history in the later kind of decades. I think also what's interesting about the movies of the late 30s and the early 40s as well, and the way I like to use these movies in class, is that traditionally as historians and as political scientists, we like to use movies that illustrate great battles and political events, assassination of JFK, or whatever is these great movements. But they think what these movies can tell us more about are things that historians, really since the 16s, have been more interested in or growingly interested in, which is social history, the history of people who traditionally didn't make it into the political record. So I think movies are useful in the 30s and 40s for kind of documenting that side of history. So I know we're going to talk about how these movies influence politics and how they reflect politics. But they also think these are movies that serve both as documentaries of a social history and also kind of artifacts of social history. And I think that's two interesting ways to see movies. I think oftentimes students think of movies that deal with historical topic as a kind of documentary, even if they're fiction. What I like to encourage my students to do is to look at the movies themselves as artifacts, of explaining a particular time in history. So today we're going to talk about movies of the 30s and 40s, whereas I think most of our students want to watch contemporary movies about past events. But I don't always think that that's the best thing for kind of getting them into the zeitgeist, if you want, of a particular era. So I think this is something that historians need to do more and more, actually look to more classic movies as ways of illustrating the past and looking at movies from the 80s onwards. And a very interesting study actually done about student attitudes and what they take away from movies and an historian whose name, I'm sorry, escapes me at the moment, had his students watch dances with walls, which I'm sure most people are familiar with, and the searches, which a lot of people are not familiar with. And he had them watch dances with walls first, and they just lapped it up, lock, stock, and barrel. Everything there was historically accurate, et cetera, et cetera, and this was done in the 90s. And he theorized that one of the things that students like is that movies that are made contemporaneous to them, they understand, because they use the sort of tropes and they use viewpoints and visuals that are very current to them. And this he posited led to their ability or lack of ability to be critical about the historical content of the movie. So he then showed them the searches, which they thought was a terrible movie, because it lacked all the visual glam of modern movies. And of course, it has attitudes in there towards Native Americans and women that were very reflective of the time period in which it was made. So they hated that about the movie. But once they'd watch the searches and then watch the modern movie again, they were likely to be far more critical of dances with walls. So I think this is a very interesting way to use classic movies, even though from a modern perspective they're flawed in their attitudes, particularly towards women and minorities or whatever or so, it seems in order to be critical of more modern movies, which they might tend to think more factually and historically accurate. So that's one of the reasons I'm glad we're talking about classic movies, because I think we can use them in that way as a kind of backdrop to modern movies. So this guy suggests that when you're incorporating movies into teaching history or politics, that you actually try to balance an older film with a modern film and it makes students more critical about analyzing the historical and political content. Because people are always very wary about using films in classes. I mean, some people say it just as a way for people just to sit there to just sit there and put their feet up when they haven't got anything better to do. But actually incorporating films into classes requires a great deal of thought, I think. And I like this guy's idea of using the balance between these two movies. And most of my students, of course, don't know any movies really pre-2000 now. So when you ask them to watch, bringing up baby from 1938, or you ask them to watch The Third Man from, that's 49, right? They're absolutely a skunk at this, but they're very good movies to use, I think, to illustrate certain social and political trends in the past. Well, one thing also kind of a flip side I find, I think oftentimes for professors, because we're older than our students, the generational shifts are not as apparent. So often I'll have colleagues say, well, I'll never show anything really old to the students. I'll just show them something from the 80s. Well, okay, for you, maybe that's a recent movie. But that movie was probably made before most of our students were born. And I find the actual shift for the students, I mean, to get them to watch something like, oh, I don't know, broadcast news from the 80s versus having them watch His Girl Friday. It's not very functionally different for them. It's a historical art event. So whether it's from 1940 or 1980. And I think oftentimes we lose track of that because we remember a movie from, like, Dance with Wolves for most students. I know that is ancient now, yeah. That's why I said the study was in the 90s. It wasn't done now. So I couldn't find a study that was done more recently, but I think that kind of holds, yeah. And the virtue as well of using these older films is film in general speaks to people more than reading a history text, unfortunately. But the way it can speak to them is I think to making them understand, if you get them to critically analyze it, that history or politics is not this kind of wiggish linear move from backwardness to enlightenment. So I mean, I like to use movies like Bringing Up Baby and His Girl Friday, for example, that kind of illustrate, actually, the kind of gender ambiguity in the 30s and in the 40s because there's this notion that the feminism is a 60s, post-60s phenomenon. And then of course it is, and it goes back centuries, couple of centuries before that, but there's a great kind of ambiguity about feminism in these movies. And when you carefully look at them, these movies are really kind of subverting gender roles there. And I think they really reflect the kind of ambivalence that people were feeling about gender roles in the context of the depression and the context of World War II, which demanded from women and from men that they shift their roles and their perceptions of those roles, although there was a great deal of resistance to that. So I know you're familiar with those movies, and they're Howard Hawkes movies. People often accuse them of being a feminism, a feminist, something that you push back against and say, no, I just find women interesting and enthralling. But you can read them in that way. And if you look at both of those movies in Bringing Up Baby, which is Catherine Hepburn and Carrie Grant, and then His Girl Friday, which is, again, Carrie Grant and the fantastic Rosalind Russell. One of my heroes. One of my heroes. Then they really do try to subvert relationships between men and women in very kind of different ways. So in Bringing Up Baby, which is, I think, one of the best scruple comedies of all time, quite frankly. And Catherine Hepburn, I think, just had great comic timing. And with Carrie Grant, the chemistry is fantastic. You have this woman, Catherine Hepburn, who seems to have no relationship with the Depression whatsoever. She's this heiress, she's very rich, she doesn't have a job, she's living off the family fortune. And the comedy revolves around her and the character played by Carrie Grant, David Huxley, I think his name is right, who's this bookish professor who digs up dinosaur bones, et cetera, et cetera. And somewhere in there, there's a leopard involved, which is the baby in the title. And in this movie, she very much is the aggressor. Oh, yes, she chases that character. She chases him, right? It's like Happy Le Pew. Yeah, absolutely, absolutely. And from the get-go, she is the center of that story. One of the opening scenes takes place in a masculinized environment. It's on the golf course, right? There can be no more masculinized environment in the 13s, quite frankly, than the golf course. And she drives this shot down the fairway between David and the fellow who's talking to about business. Again, this is a very masculinized world, and she's right in the center of that. And she remains in the center throughout the rest of the movie. And then she's just this character that brings utter chaos here, right? Which I think is a metaphor for the subversion of these relationships, because as you think about it, how many things does she break during that movie, right? First of all, she breaks his car, right? She takes his car by mistake and dents it and whatever. And she breaks his glasses, right? And then ultimately, at the very end of the movie, she breaks the dinosaur that he's trying to put together. So this is all very metaphorical for the breaking of the traditional relationships between men and women. Now, what does that have to do with the depression? That was a rhetorical question, I'll answer it. But what I think, so I tried to get my students to see this in the context of the depression when between 1930 and 1940, two million more women entered the workforce than had been there before. And that was out of necessity. Most of the jobs to go first were the jobs in heavy industry, which were gendered, right, as male. And the female gendered jobs in clerical work in particular did not witness a contraction during the war. So women as a proportion of the workforce really increased. And oftentimes it was only the woman of the family who could get a job. And the percentage of married women who were working throughout the 1930-1940 period doubled. So there was an enormous shift, right, in the workplace. But it's not only a shift, right, it's a shift in traditional family patterns and gendered patterns. No longer is the guy seen as the breadwinner. In actuality, the woman is out there, often keeping the family together. And there were rules during World War II in America where you can only have one breadwinner in the family. So oftentimes that was the woman who was doing that because she could find work. At the same time, however, organizations like the CCC and other public works programs that were set up under the New Deal, banned women from participating. So the CCC would only allow men, for example. And they really try to kind of perpetuate the idea of man as breadwinner. In reality, this wasn't kind of happening. So there's this tension in the depression between reality and theory. And I think that is nicely illustrated in these movies. And I think there's a kind of proto-feminism going on in the depression and in World War II, that although it seems to get quashed in the 1950s kind of retrenchment and what Betty Friedan would call the feminine mystique is actually just going underground and kind of reemerges in the 1960s. So I like to encourage my students to see these movies in these ways. His Girl Fry is a little bit different, right? Because in this movie, Hildi, yeah? Well, just have a short one. Is a career woman. And we'll come back and talk about that. Yeah, short break. And we'll talk about His Girl Fry. All right, thank you. Have a couple of announcements of other Think Tech programs. Aloha, I'm Carl Campania. I hope you please visit us this summer. It's a wonderful summer. It's actually a cooler summer than we're used to. But I hope that you come back and visit us and watch our show Education Movers, Shakers, and Reformers here on Think Tech Hawaii. It's at noon every Wednesday. See you then. For a very healthy summer, watch Viva Hawaii. We're giving you the best tips and with our best health coach here. So Viva health coach. Viva la comida saludable. Aloha, my name is Mark Shklav. I am the host of Law Across the Sea. Please join me every other Monday to hear lawyers from Hawaii discussing ways to reach across the sea and help people and bring people together. Aloha. You're watching Think Tech Hawaii on ThinkTechHawaii.com, which broadcasts six live talk shows from 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. every weekday, and then streams earlier shows all night long. Great content for Hawaii from Think Tech. Hello, welcome back to Global Connections. I'm talking with Dean Allison Goff about using films to teach history and politics. Before the break, we were talking about some of Howard Hawks' great movies, the screwball comedies in particular, Bringing a Baby and His Girl Friday. And so before the break, you were talking about the aspects of these movies being somewhat subversive within terms of gender and societal roles, where oftentimes people nowadays, we have what I call a sort of presentist hubris, in a sense that, in a sense, I think not to skip media for a second with you, but if you look at a lot of the attention of why a lot of people liked watching a show like Mad Men, in a sense, was that you could show how gender roles or race relations were back in the 60s. And I think a lot of it was for people today to watch that, oh, see how far we've come since those barbaric times, in a sense. And I think maybe what you're drawing on is that actually it's much more complicated than that. I think absolutely. I mean, I love Mad Men too, but I think it was a very simplistic kind of presentation of gender roles in there. And of course, when we talk about gender roles, we always focus on women, right? But we need to focus on the male cohesion in this as well. And we were talking about the evolution of male roles like that of William Powell, in the post-war era, they become a lot more masculine and hard-boiled, where you would expect it to be the other way around if you're talking about a linear, kind of progression to the modern progressive, you know, kind of male. So we have to remember when we're talking about gender relations, it is multi-faceted here. It's not just to do with women. But yes, I think there are a lot more complicated the relationships. And we were going to talk about the His Girl Friday before the break. And one of the central characters in that, Hildi, is a very interesting character. On the surface, the movie looks as if it's a commentary and the kind of binary relationships between men and women. But in the character of Hildi, she simultaneously, you know, rejects the patriarchy, but she wants to be a part of it as well. And she's referred to as a female newspaper man in the movie. So she has this kind of dual identity and double consciousness. And of course, in the end, she doesn't go and live out in Albany with her insurance salesman, you know, husband. Instead, she goes back to her ex-husband. And she also has a career as well. And that looks very feminist on the surface, but of course, all throughout the movie, Carrie Grant's character, her editor, is manipulating her basically into kind of doing this. So this is a very complicated, I think, movie in a very complex commentary on gender relationships. It's not really binary at all. It's not really, you know, black and white. So I like the movie for that reason. You know, I mean, the characters in some way are unbelievable, but I do think they reflect the complexity of people's feelings. And I think that students don't quite appreciate that people actually were people in the past, that complexity did exist politically, but also personally. And this is a good way of getting them to kind of see these multifaceted kind of aspects of relationships, I think. But again, that's a movie that I think reflects the ambiguity of gender roles, the depression. And then of course, World War II brought on when women moved by necessity more and more, not just into the workforce, but into quote, unquote, men's jobs as well. And of course, Hildi is in a man's job, you know, in that movie as a newspaper man. Female newspaper man. Female newspaper man, yeah. Female journalists, of course, during the depression were some of the first ones to be put out of business. So the movie doesn't really touch upon that, but that probably had some sort of resonance, you know, with professional women who were kind of watching that movie, I think, who kind of struggled to get back in, actually, to the business. I think would have been a very interesting commentary for them. Well, one thing you mentioned that we had talked about before, I mean, the one I always find fascinating is this transformation of William Powell, right? So in the 30s, he's in all of these sort of fantastic musicals, these Busby Berkeley musicals, where his character from even a modern day sort of interpretation seems somewhat effeminate. He sings with a high-pitched voice, he's smiley, he's free to dance and all the sorts of things that, you know, modern-day perspective, you know, people always this Liberace-like character that he is. World War II happens, you know, America mobilizes, goes to war, fights the Nazis, fights Imperial Japan, comes back home, and then you have this rise of the sort of film noir genre. And then all of a sudden William Powell goes from, you know, being a well-dressed man with a flower in his lapel, you know, singing to sort of a tough talking private eye is ready to, you know, face down, you know, killers and so on and so forth. I mean, it's like a night and day sort of thing, even though it's only probably about a four-year period in terms of films. I mean, with the rise of sort of this film noir, in a sense, I mean, reflecting, would you say, the America's experience in World War II and coming back to this sort of new Cold War, in a sense? Yeah, I think there's several things going on there. And you can use these movies, both to look at social history and political history as well. On the one hand, you know, the establishment of the tough, you know, pulp fiction, you know, detective, Sam Spade and everything else is a re-establishment, an attempt to re-establish, you know, traditional, you know, kind of gender roles. But on the other hand, there are very strong broads, right? Right, tough talking names. It means we need to tough talking names, right? You want to kill off their husbands in double indemnity or whatever, right? And they often, and that's also an interesting thing that I think leads into the discussion about the Cold War and some movies there. Film noir of the post-war period is very morally ambiguous. And I think that's a reflection, particularly of Cold War politics that is going on. And you can look at that, I think if you look at, you know, Casablanca and you look at The Third Man, which are, you know, Casablanca is, what released Thanksgiving 1942, I think, right? And then The Third Man, 1949, I think that's when it is. And it's interesting, you can already see the evolution of characters there. Of course, you know, Sam Spade character, right? Rick Humphrey Bogot is a central character in Casablanca. And he's a man with some moral ambiguity, right, in that movie. And he's holding out in Casablanca. And he has really allegiance to nobody, apart from himself, he says, and to his employees. And, you know, there's not moral ambiguity there. But of course, by the end of the movie, he's chosen his side. And, you know, he's come out of isolation and he's willing to give up the love of his life and go and help the allies. Of course, that's a metaphor for America, right? In the war ending the isolation and making friends again, you know, with Britain and coming out there. And, you know, one of the most famous lines in the movie, whether or so many, when he says to, you know, Louis, you know, this is gonna be the beginning of a beautiful friendship. I mean, that's the reestablishment, right? Anglo-French rapprochement, right there. And so his character, by the end of Casablanca, of course, is not totally cynical. He's not totally morally ambiguous. But then you look at a film like The Third Man, which is now 49, the war is over, the Cold War has started. And, you know, well, the central character there, even though he doesn't appear till halfway through the film, right, is Harry Lyme. And this is a morally ambiguous man. I mean, he's really a rat. I mean, you know, all the scenes of the sewers are meant to kind of metaphorically kind of convey that. And, you know, the whole setting of The Third Man and the whole way they lit the movie, the fact that they actually went to Vienna and filmed it, you know, there. There was a big fight about that apparently, but they went there. So they, you know, all the rubble you see and everything there is, you know, actually Vienna. I mean, it creates, again, this chaotic, very ambiguous, you know, kind of situation. And in kind of contrast to the optimism, right, of Casablanca that you see at the end, there's very little optimism, right, in this. Everybody's selling each other out. The film uses shadows, a great deal. I mean, that's very emblematic of the way people were already seeing the Cold War. It's full of paranoia. It's full of mistrust. It's full of conflicts between people who were supposedly before allies. And Vienna embodies that, right, with the city being split up into the four zones. And I believe, you know, the director and writer, well, Graham Green, obviously, but the director, you know, went there on a tour beforehand and then kind of sketched out the screenplay after it actually kind of been there. And he talked to everybody in all the sectors about what was going on. So it's, you know, it's moving very much as part of his experience as well as Graham Green's experience as well. I think the thing you talked about, the moral ambiguity. I mean, there's that great speech, of course, that every line has when they're on the first row in Preacher. And he talks about the comparison. What is it, the, if you look at the Northern Italy during the Renaissance, compared to Switzerland. So Switzerland was a democracy and they only gave us the cuckoo clock. But in this other place, they had violence, deception, horrible things, but great art and the birth of Western civilization. So it was all worth it, right? Yeah, exactly, yeah. That's just such a great movie, you know, and I encourage my students to see it, you know, as part, you know, historical, you know, artifact also as a metaphor as well. The way the film is shot, although we didn't want to talk about, you know, camera angles and stuff like that. But the way the first time we see Harry Lyme, he's in the shadows, right? And he gradually kind of comes out to them and there's been all these hints that he's there. I mean, that is Cold War paranoia right there on the screen. So I think this was a very conscious, very consciously made film. And of course, all the people who were involved had been involved in some way, right? In the intelligence services before and during and after the war. So obviously Graham Greene, you know, he was sometimes spy, his sister was an MI6, his best friend was Kim Philby, who actually, his real name was Harold. So we think Harry Lyme kind of came from that. Oh, from one of the Cambridge Five, that's interesting. And then Corder, who was made, who's a Hungarian-British, right? The producer, one of the producers was knighted, you know, by the British monarchy, so Sir Alexander Corder. And it was ostensibly for services to British film. But in reality, many historians think that it was rather in service to the intelligence service because he ran a film company out of Vienna before, during and after the war, which was probably a cover for intelligence and espionage. So these people who made the movie were very deeply embedded, you know, in the Cold War, which of course as historians and political scientists, we would argue, obviously started way before World War II in many ways. So I mean, these people are presaging in many ways what's gonna happen in the 40s and 50s, I think, and in a visual way and in telling stories they've already been part of even before the war started. Nice. I think we could go for another hour, but we've got to draw it to a close. But maybe we can do this again, I think. I think that would be fun. We have a lot more to talk of. I imagine that you do. Sorry. Okay. Thank you very much for joining us on Global Connections. Thank you for Allison for coming. And I look forward to seeing you guys next week.