I remember watching Spielberg’s Poltergeist in the late eighties as a child. Movies used to take their time reaching hinter parts of the globe then, in stark contrast to nowadays when streaming content is released on the same day everywhere. I remember being transfixed, peering between the fingers over my eyes, by the agony of the nightmares brought in through the television screen.
It was a B&W TV at the only family in the whole neighborhood who owned a VCR, and as school kids, we were huddled up in the corner of their living room behind the sofa and bamboo wicker chairs. In retrospect, I often wonder about the grownups who let us watch the movie. However, in a weird way, it seems logical to me. In true Indian film watching culture, movies were like pollution, an inescapable social “good” that is collectively consumed. Thankfully, this meant that as a child, I was not subject to curated experiences, as Indian cinema did very little micro-targeting. There were no frozen princesses, and kids bop versions. Instead, superheroes (usually hirsute men) sang to children, danced with damsels, fussed over their moms, donated their last cent, and got into violent fisticuffs with villains, all within a fifteen-minute span on screen.
So, Poltergeist was different. Given my age then, I entirely missed Speilberg’s meta-narrative of suburbia built on graveyards and broken dreams.
As an aside, it was an amazing achievement, that Speilberg made Poltergeist and ET back to back in 1982. ET is the far-seeing telescope mounted on an observatory built on the lands under which the Poltergeist wait. ET is the optimism on our faces, and Poltergeist is the pessimism in our hearts.
For all our differences and relentless dreams forward, America is an introspective nation. As a new nation, America is obsessed with its founding history. We are constantly re-examining and adoring the past, and in turn, distressed by it. “This has never happened in our history”, we say, and then breathlessly “not since 18–”. We constantly seek parallels from the past even as we build new narratives. This internal conflict is all-pervading in our history, and in our daily lives.
Two excellent books revisit the ghosts of our past, to understand our present.
In Jesmyn Ward’s deeply moving and lyrical Sing, Unburied, Sing the ghosts from the past haunt the present and reign the future. In her book, some lives end young and faster, and other lives get older, sooner. Old miseries live on, even as the characters try to escape their current lives. In Jojo, hope gasps like a flickering flame of an exhausted candle. In her short novel, Ms. Ward touches upon several intermingling themes of love and suffering, hope and misgivings, parenting and absences, freedom, and addiction. The book is a commendable selection for Philadelphia’s One Book, One Philadelphia theme for 2019.
The odds are that not many have heard of Pawhuska, OK, a town in Oklahoma with about 3000 residents now. David Grann’s excellent book Killers of the Flower Moon: The Osage Murders and the Birth of the FBI follows the story of the founding of FBI by Edgar Hoover, and the undercover penetration of FBI into the country, following the unexplained murders and disappearances of Osage people (and many well-wishers) in the county. In a true detective fashion, the author discovers that the mystery behind the disappearances is deeper, broader, and more shocking, but also intricately connected with families, business relationships, and the role of local (and federal) government. Osage Indians owned the land on which oil was discovered. During the boom, several conspirators colluded to extract the land out of individuals who owned them through protracted pressure and duplicity.
1. Cities Future and Growth. From 1906 to 1920, Pawhuska boomed to become a big town with nearly 7000 people at its height, only to decline after that oil boom to 3000 now. Which US cities have had such a tremendous downfall in wealth, growth, and prosperity? I wonder.
2. FBI and Operations. In a slightly orthogonal direction, I was fascinated by Edgar Hoover’s obsession with Frederick W. Taylor’s principle of scientific management. FW Taylor, a Philadelphia native, did his experiments and data collection in Philadelphia and is often thought of as the father of modern Industrial Engineering and Operations Research. In 1906, Penn gave him an honorary Ph.D. in recognition of his achievements.