In the latest installment of The Mediapolis Q&A, Stanley Corkin and Bruce Isaacs discuss Boston Mass-Mediated: Urban Space and Culture in the Digital Age.
Bruce Isaacs: I wanted to start by chatting to you a bit about how this book fits into your larger program —with your books on New York, Baltimore, and now Boston. Across these books you read key cities through their media texts to open out questions of the imaginary and the virtual. You do this very clearly with Baltimore and The Wire in Connecting The Wire: Race, Space, and Postindustrial Baltimore and again here with Boston Mass-Mediated. So, I’m interested in the framing of the city in your work. Why is it so important?
Stanley Corkin: You know, I retrospectively realized that I was mapping a very personal arc of geography. I got my Master’s at Emory in Atlanta. At that time, I was trying to figure out what I was going to do as I knew Emory was too small for the scope of my interests. I was in American Studies and then Movie-Made America came out, and I thought that would be the ticket. I went to work with Bob Sklar at NYU as a way to do American studies and cinema studies. The cinema studies program at NYU was a great, truly international program, but people like Bob had both their academic careers and their careers beyond the academy: he was the curator of the New York Film Festival for a long time, wrote mass-market film histories, etc. So, I was figuring out how to navigate an academic career around that context, and since I was interdisciplinary it was hard to kind of exact demands on people’s time. My NYU experience made me really resourceful.
BI: That experience would have rubbed off on you so strongly. Can you briefly unpack that aspect of interdisciplinarity? This book is so interdisciplinary that it would be hard for me to tease out all the disciplines you’re drawing on. Where does that come from?
SC: Well, the way American Studies program was organized at NYU at the time required you take classes in three disciplines. For me those were history, American literature, and film. But mostly I studied in the Cinema Studies program. But I also did not have a traditional academic background, and therefore I was something of an autodidact. I ultimately followed my interests and they kept sprawling. So, when I was doing Cowboys As Cold Warriors, the Westerns book, I became friendly with the late Neil Smith, and he said, “This is a geography book” and I said “Oh, you’re right. It’s a geography book!” I had been reading around social theory and particularly Wallerstein’s world systems theory, and I realized that was the big idea of the book. Film is a spatial medium and geography is a great discipline to employ or adapt to film studies, so that was transitional for me.
BI: That’s such a great sketching of the way you’re approaching film, because this new book is not a conventional media take on Boston — rather, it is deeply steeped in history, geographic locations, regional relationships, and these cultures that emerge. Can you say something about why and how you select the cities you work on? Why New York? Why Baltimore through The Wire? And how did you get to Boston?
SC: One of the reasons I gravitated to film studies is because I was something of a film nerd and interested in cultural history writ large. Film was the most powerful medium in the world until arguably 1960, and subsequently we have film derivatives. What television has become is really a filmic medium. So, if you’re going to the heart of cultural impact, film was where you’d go. Also, as a student of history, I noticed how certain emphases concentrated around given historical periods; for instance, Westerns had kind of always resonated with me as a historical intervention: they are mythic. I am a big fan of Richard Slotkin’s work.
BI: Yeah, that tradition has been so important to me as well. I’ve also done a lot of work on the Spaghetti Western, the concept of going West and capitalism.
SC: They’re Marxist films, so that made sense to me, too.
BI: In Boston Mass-Mediated, you talk about the way that certain films created imaginaries for Boston. For instance, your reading of Good Will Hunting creates a certain way of thinking about Boston, which is not necessarily the Boston that the working-class person might entirely recognize as their existence, and yet you recognize the image of the working class in it. So, I am interested in this idea of social mobility and how cinema has this incredibly profound way of getting us into an idea of the city: the imaginary. Very early on you determine that the city is not just a material place. It can never just be a bunch of landmarks, although that’s very important, and it can’t just be people’s houses and buildings. It’s how it gets reimagined and re-represented. Can you talk a bit about that?
SC: I think that when I did Starring New York I saw that New York is a mythic place. It’s larger than life, and it’s very hard to get a handle on. The films of the seventies localize certain narratives of the city, and those narratives build on each other, so that they’re both of the historical moment and highly intertextual. That became the hook in these books. New York is a good anchor because it is so mythic and has such a storied history in cinema. In The Wire book it is much more circumscribed. Connecting The Wire is about Baltimore, the city in which I have the least experience, and in that book, I found the medium so interesting because what David Simon and his other screenwriters do is create a serious dramatic sociology of a city. There’s a recurring realist aesthetic that’s powerful and a result of the fact of location production.
BI: All of this resonates with the Boston films as well — that is, just how important the location is as opposed to the studio.
SC: In Boston Mass-Mediated, building on the earlier two books, what I realized is that people know places that they’ve never been.
BI: That is such a powerful way of thinking about it. Because in a sense that it’s not only that people know it but that, in fact, we have shared imaginaries. It is also about the importance of America to pop culture, and certainly the way I grew up in the western suburbs of Sydney my closest points of cultural imaginary contact were from the States. It was New York. It was LA. It was hip hop from the West Coast. When I was reading your book, and at about page fifty, I said, I know Stanley is going to mention that scene when the white guy that shows up in the middle with his bike in Do The Right Thing. It’s perfect moment of transformation and tension.
SC: Yes, it’s racial tension.
BI: Can I ask you about that? Obviously, race and ethnicity haunt this book, and class and wealth are a really big parts of the way you’re imagining Boston. I wanted to ask, how distinct are the ethnic regions in Boston?
SC: So, because of the expense of living there, they’ve eroded a bit. I mean, the neighborhood I grew up in is still substantially Jewish. When I grew up it was very modest, but it was well situated geographically so property values subsequently went up and up and up. And the schools are very good. But there’s been a relative ethnic dispersal because of the expense of living in those near suburbs. On the ethnicity question, I have a great anecdote. When I finished grad school, I went overseas and taught for University of Maryland in Japan for the year and when I came back, I had to choose whether to live in New York or Boston. So, I moved back to Boston and taught at Massachusetts College of Art and lived in Watertown. My landlord there was an Italian American and he hated me, and he eventually evicted me when my first wife was seven months pregnant. He ethnically cleansed us from Watertown. So, after we got evicted from Watertown, we moved to Brookline because that was the ethnic home base. I lived about a half a mile from my grandmother, and about a mile-and-a-half from my parents.
BI: So, it was clear that the hatred stemmed from an ethnicity issue?
SC: I would call it an antipathy.
BI: So that’s quite faithfully done in a film like The Departed, these antipathies that exist in the city?
SC: Well, the Italian-Irish thing is a really big deal. One of my good friends, Jonathan Auerbach used to say it’s just the Hong Kong film Infernal Affairs redone by Scorsese, but it wasn’t. The screenwriter had intentionally morphed the structure of the film into the geography of Boston, and for me that was the hook.
BI: I agree, The Departed is done such a disservice by only seeing it in relation to Infernal Affairs and not as an exploration of the city as a site of masculinity, etcetera. You offer a fantastic reading of the film by locating it in the way the screenwriter reconstructs the kernel of an idea in relation to place. There are two things I want to talk about stemming from that reading: the race issue and the busing. When I first saw that opening montage, I didn’t know it was covering the busing crisis.
SC: When I went back to The Departed, I didn’t really have a schematic of the whole project. I knew that I want to do something about mediated Boston, industrial Boston, and I knew one of the hooks was going to be The Friends of Eddie Coyle. When I started, I was looking for big Boston journalistic stories. I had access to the Network Film News archives at Vanderbilt, and the terms of the coverage of the busing crisis were illuminating to me because it’s all about race, class, and ethnicity, and so it became kind of a hook all the way through.
BI: And that becomes a bit of a platform for how the whole city will evolve through Whitey Bulger. Everything follows the busing narrative.
SC: It’s in everything. It was involved in subsequent mayoral races — Ray Flynn, for example. Whitey Bulger and his brother Billy were all intensely involved.
BI: They were anti-bussing and profoundly conservative in terms of what was taking place?
SC: Ray Flynn was a working-class Democrat, and he was a right Populist, which means something different now. That strain existed in urban politics, and it still does, but it’s morphed into something else. Those people would tend to be social conservatives, and they might have become Trumpists. I mean, Ray Flynn would not consider himself a racist, but he was anti-busing.
BI: That’s fascinating. Why was busing so pivotal? And why in your book is the tension around busing so fundamental to the narrative of Boston?
SC: Busing occurs because we’re moving well into the postindustrial disruption. Not much really emerges in the sixties. There’s no state law that requires integration until the seventies, until like ‘72, and ’73, and then busing becomes the match that ignites all of this flammable material. The reason being because people are being dispossessed and therefore, they hold on to their geography, to their stuff and to their places more and more ardently. When I taught at Mass. College of Art in the early eighties it was a mixed group: art kids, but some of them were industrial design kids, and some of them were from very working-class backgrounds; but there were very few Black and brown people in my classes. And I had always taught about race in my classes. In one class, I don’t remember what the subject material was, but somehow, we started talking about integration and this kind of rough little guy said to me, “we don’t ask them to live with us”, and I thought, whoa, that’s a real Boston thing to have happen. The sanctity of these neighborhoods and the way in which they’re policed according to ethnicity, but more importantly, according to race, is real in Boston. In the book, I tell the story from J. Anthony Lukas’s Common Ground when Alva Debnam moves into the white part of Dorchester and gets burnt out. She moves.
BI: What was really fascinating to me is to get a sense of the radical differences in Boston compared to what I see here in Sydney. So, for example, I’m reading your book across the last couple of weeks and there’s a newspaper article in our biggest newspaper, the Sydney Morning Herald that says we apparently are entering a crisis of public school education because parents are increasingly choosing to send their kids to private schools. Public schools tend to be far more multicultural and have a lot of working class and lower middle-class families, whereas private schools are quite expensive here, so I see it as some kind of evolution. Our politicians keep saying we’re a classless society, which is completely farcical, because the minute you have a class that has the economic capacity to send their kids to private school you are, in effect, creating class distinctions. But the difference with Boston and the history you sketch is that it is quite overt. It’s pasted up. It’s people in the street. And even though we’re talking busing, which is decades ago, there’s still a sense of these overt distinctions. In reading your book I was quite taken aback and horrified by what you described through the eighties and nineties, for example, but I worry that in other places we just don’t talk about this stuff, but it’s still there.
SC: It came to conflict, then, and now there’s not that overt conflict. That ship has sailed. In the United States they have these highly privatized public school systems in many cities or the magnet systems because you can’t mandate integration, which is a matter of court decision. And the nature of cities has changed. That’s one of the subtexts of the book or maybe the text of the book: despite this sense of Boston as this kind of mediated place it’s really not that kind of place anymore because the real estate is so expensive that many of the working-class elements have been driven out. Just like if you’re in Central London or Paris, or Central New York, for that matter. These places are so fancy, who can afford to live there? Times Square then and now! That’s one of the things I talk about in the New York book. When I first started going to New York in my teens it looked like the set from Midnight Cowboy and now you can bring your children there on a Saturday night.
BI: When I went to Times Square, I just thought it was a completely digital Disneyland — it had just become a series of panoramic screens.
SC: Right! So that’s a good index of the kind of shift in cities. People who can’t afford to live in cities are pushed to these industrial suburbs.
BI: And that’s the sadness of the story, as I saw it in your book, because there’s a sense in which we don’t have busing, we don’t have the conflict on the streets, yet there is still radical inequality. I think one of the major texts of your book is the fact that what we see is the emergence, and then complete domination, of a kind of digital economic financial force. We use the term neoliberalism to describe what has emerged, not only in class, wealth, ethnicity, and race, but in terms of the way money works in the city. Can you talk about that? Because that’s not a claim you make just about Boston; you’re suggesting that has wider implications for the way we see people live.
SC: It’s the age of mercantilism. There are these cities, these islands of city states that are incredibly well off. You can see it in the elections. They’re incredibly prosperous islands, and they function unto themselves. They bring in their service classes, but those workers don’t — can’t — live there and these cities become fantasy lands for a kind of wealthy clientele. I’m in Miami and this is a corruption capital. New York has this, too. Boston probably does too, but less so. London certainly has it. Paris. The world’s wealthy own apartments in the building I live in, which is part of the constellation of Miami. Many residences for people who are here two days a year. And you go past certain buildings that Trump owned or owns north of here at night, and they’re empty. Many high-end real-estate purchases are for money laundering.
BI: This is creating another kind of inequitable class structure in the cities you’re talking about.
SC: So, in Boston, one of the things that I found interesting, and one of the germs for the book, was this kind of narrative of authenticity of the working class that still exists. But the people who make up that element of the city are largely gone. In South Boston, for example, there was a huge Gillette factory for generations and it just closed down. Property in South Boston is going through the roof. The North End, when I grew up, was an Italian speaking region of the city. It was mostly immigrants and sex workers out on the street corner and now a small studio apartment will cost several thousands of dollars a month.
BI: You know that word: gentrification. You trace really neatly how the material city moves into a transformation through a gentrified kind of capital that comes in, and then through neoliberalism. I see that here. Marrickville where I live has historically been a slightly more left immigrant enclave, but you start to see this unraveling over time as people who take it over have to have more capital.
SC: It squeezes them out.
BI: Exactly, it squeezes them out. Twenty-five years ago, gentrification was a really dirty word and now seems to be the quiet and less impactful version of the neoliberal economy that really concentrates capital in the city, and pushes the working class, and even lower middle class, way out.
SC: One of the things I was interested in was the way in which the aesthetic value of historical urban structures changes. In Boston the South End was really down and dirty when I was growing up. It was rough. The story that is told in Common Ground where these urban homesteaders move into the South End and fix the brownstones, now those brownstones sell for like seven or eight million dollars.
BI: Like in New York too?
SC: Well, in New York they cost $12 million. It’s ridiculous. One of the reasons I brought in Common Ground was because it was the big book about busing. Anthony Lukas gets it. It’s not just schools; it’s really about elaborating domain over certain urban neighborhoods. African Americans have had very restricted access to capital, both social capital and financial capital, through certain devices of governmental fiat and non-governmental fiat. The legacy of historical racism can always be glimpsed.
BI: Which surprised me. There’s a great quote in your book, where Boston is described by a key figure as the most racist city. I had no idea!
SC: Yeah, it was in one of the exposés in The Boston Globe. This really goes back to the dominance of the Protestant upper classes, which leaves everybody else scrambling. Back 150 years since the Irish immigration in the 1840s. This is how the class/ethnic/racial hierarchy, at least in the United States, works. You stand on people who you can push down.
BI: One thing that struck me about your take on Boston is that there is almost no romance about the city through its cinema. A major part of Boston Mass-Mediated is about the abuses of the Catholic church, and that’s chronicled through Spotlight. In this book, the pockets of romance about Boston perhaps come through sports, particularly through baseball.
SC: Well, I started thinking about what I wanted to cover besides news stories, the busing and the priest abuse story. The fact-based films that I write about are interesting in the way that they’re restricted by their source material, but they get into the mythos of place pretty densely. I mean, most of Spotlight is shot in Toronto, and a lot of Good Will Hunting is too; but they choose key locales of Boston and they accentuate their narratives. Once I blocked out the news stories that I thought were everywhere and reflected back on Boston as place, I thought, what else do I do?
BI: Gotta be team sports! If you had missed out on sports the book would be so much poorer for it. Busing, politics, race, and ethnicity, sports, and cinema—those themes and inquiries are not disparate in this picture of Boston. They form a coherent whole.
SC: It tells you how powerful the mythos of place is in the narrative of place. You can track it through these disparate occurrences. I talk in the sports chapters about when a broadcaster is introducing Fenway Park, and it becomes not just about Fenway Park, but about the region that includes Fenway Park. And what does Fenway Park look like? It looks like a historical working-class throwback to when baseball was played in neighborhoods and it wasn’t this international sport and kind of digital projection. So it’s pure nostalgia, right?
BI: Yes!
SC: And you know, the fact that Fenway became the prototype for the new ballparks because somebody understood that in order to continue to market baseball, which is problematic in the contemporary moment because of the pace of the game and competing with other sports, introducing nostalgia or accentuating nostalgia, had to be part of the physical plant. In Houston they built a Fenway-like park. You know, like a brand.
BI: Isn’t baseball the American nostalgia mythos par excellence? I would think you have to understand a bit of baseball if you’re going to study America. Which was such an insight of your book.
SC: Yes, that…and have you ever seen Ray Donovan? So, you know, I loved Ray Donovan, because it has kind of the aura of authenticity, even though it is set in LA. I realized in watching it again it distills the essence of place into an aura.
BI: Yes, and that’s why you conclude your book on Ray Donovan. You use that Benjaminian notion of the aura, because they’re not in Boston but Boston transported to LA…and LA is the place that can remake anything! Stanley, this is a great book for a number of reasons. One is that the narrative you sketch about the city as a virtual space and not just a material space is totally fascinating. But then, what is so rich is the interdisciplinarity because you need those tentacles to make the argument work. As you say, you drop the baseball, and it doesn’t make sense. You drop the films, and it doesn’t make sense. This is a really rich tapestry of Boston. I can’t wait to get back to Boston sometime and experience it now in the wake of your work. It’s been amazing talking, Stanley. Really lovely to meet.
SC: Very much, I really enjoyed the conversation.
