Tison Pugh

Introduction Disney’s Retroprogressive Medievalisms: Where Yesterday is Tomorrow Today

Disneyland proclaims itself “the happiest place on earth,” and cultural critics would do well to take this assertion seriously. Why else would millions of people visit its parks annually, not to mention the millions more who buy Disney merchandise, watch Disney films, visit Disney websites, and otherwise consume Disney products, if not to partake in some of this happiness, readily available at a price agreed upon by producer and consumer as reasonable? Success breeds suspicion, and many social theorists snipe at Disney’s homogenized presentation of mainstream American (and unabashedly imperialistic) entertainment. Jean Baudrillard posits Disney as merely a simulacrum, as “a perfect model of all the entangled orders of simulation….[I]t is a play of illusions and phantasms,” and in a comparison offensive in its bathos, he likens Disney’s expansive yet efficient parking lots to “veritable concentration camp[s].”1 In his study of the mythic function of utopias, Louis Marin condemns Disneyland as a dystopia: “[Disneyland] alienates the visitor by a distorted and fantasmatic representation of daily life, by a fascinating image of the past and the future, of what is estranged and what is familiar.”2 One might well wonder when Baudrillard and Marin visited Disneyland, as most patrons appear to be enthusiastically enjoying themselves, rather than staving off the exploitative effects of anti-utopic alienation.

Introduction: Filming the “other” Middle Ages

For over a century, filmmakers have struggled with representing societies, both past and present, on the screen. From the outset, with Georges Melies’s Joan of Arc films in the late nineteenth century, the Middle Ages has served as a preferred setting for exploring on the silver screen some of society’s deepest concerns.1 But the marriage of film and history is frequently somewhat inharmonious because, as Vivian Sobchack observes, combining modern cinema with historical narratives confuses the very meaning of history: “In great part, the effects of our new technologies of representation put us at a loss to fix that ‘thing’ we used to think of as History or to create clearly delineated and categorical temporal and spatial frames around what we used to think of as the ‘historical event.’ ”2 Thus, when cinema meets history, the very meaning of “history” appears to crumble under the pressures to translate the truth of the past into the media of the present.

Camping the Killer Child: The Queer Humor of William March’s The Bad Seed on Page, Stage, and Screen

William March’s 1954 novel The Bad Seed, which was adapted into Maxwell Anderson’s 1954 play and Mervyn LeRoy’s 1956 film, features ruthless child psychopath Rhoda Penmark. Hailed in the contemporary media as a masterful exploration of the human psyche’s dark currents, Rhoda has since been appropriated as an icon of queer, camp humor. Indeed, queer humor metamorphoses her into the camp figure of the bitch—no matter the divergence between Rhoda’s youth and this stock figure’s experience. Rhoda thus illustrates the limitations of how cruel girl characters are received in modern culture, in that their psychological complexity can be overwritten by the humorous codes of bitchiness—a marginalization that limits female agency while liberating her queer potential.

Introduction: Jews in Medieval England— A Temporal and Pedagogical Vision

In English history, the dates of 1071, 1144, 1190, 1290, and 1659 relate a narrative of settlement, libel, massacre, expulsion, and return, while also bespeaking resettlement, trauma, exile, and anti-Jewishness. Jews in Medieval England: Teaching Representations of the Other, a multidisciplinary effort, provides instructors with strategies for educating students about a people who were held hostage to myths about their violent nature—particularly in reference to the centuries-old libel of “Christ killers.” In our most optimistic—some might say naive—moments, we teachers of the humanities believe we can change parochial and xenophobic mindsets by introducing and questioning inequality that has prevailed across millennia. This objective illuminates this volume, which offers a variety of pedagogical strategies for addressing the place of Jewish culture in medieval England.