I am my ideal

I had a drama professor back in college who was a bit of a rogue, but an outstanding instructor nonetheless. For some reason presumably tied to departmental politics, he was the person who usually got tasked with teaching the foundation courses in Traditions of Western Drama or whatever the prevailing uni-speak is for "reading a shitload of old plays and discussing why they matter."

These were the mandatory courses that every aspiring thespian or playwright had to suffer through before passing onward and upward to the sexier, hands-on parts of the curriculum, but this professor had a knack for making us care about the plays discussed in class. More importantly, instead of conducting the class as a watered-down English Lit course, he approached the material with an accent on technical aspects over critical theory. (Which is how it ought to be for a theater arts class, but in my experience often not the case.)

"Significance" meant less to him than entertainment value, and when the time came to discuss the dreary naturalism of Strindberg, Ibsen, and the like, he came right out and stated "These are historically important plays. They are important works of literature. You should all be familiar with them. That said, I would rather sit through a community theatre Starlight Express than suffer through a Broadway production of Enemy of the People with an all-star cast."

Hardly a divine revelation, but it's one of those moments that has stuck with me over the years even as other, arguably more important parts of my college education have slipped from conscious memory. The idea that a tenured professor of literature with an impressive resume could step outside the ivory tower and make case for entertainment value in and of itself made me realize that I wasn't just gaming the system and wasting my time at college, humoring the unfortunately high number of insular or clueless instructors that viewed appreciation as a gnostic process, removed from the vulgarity of the masses. (Seriously. I had one professor who was shocked, shocked, to discover that fans of romance novels were not a monolithic block of uneducated bon-bon munchers.)

Or I should have taken it as a clear warning that my lateral thinking processes and poor sense of self-discipline were fundamentally at odds with formal academia. Honestly, if I had to do it all over again, I'd have gone to trade school to be an auto mechanic and kept with the autodidactic route when it came to the the study of humanities.

In any case, the complicated relationship between entertainment and art is something I've addressed quite a few times already on Armagideon Time, usually in reference to the medium of comics or music. Despite recurring assertions to the contrary, quality is a relative concept when it comes to something a personal as "art," and while it is possible to establish a hierarchy of aesthetic value on a macro level, the boundaries tend to blur with closer examination. As always, keeping a sense of perspective is the best course of action, and that's something which is most easily achieved by observing the widest possible vista instead of limiting one's experiences to a single strata, be it lofty peaks of "high art" or the vulgar sumps of disposable entertainment.

Which brings us to AIP's series of Beach Party movies, director William (the real-life Mr. Samantha the Witch) Asher's sybaritic counterpart to Roger Corman's stygian Poe cycle of technicolor exploitation fare -- the Eros and Thanatos of early 1960's drive-in theaters.

Pal Dorian has dedicated this week to the antics of Frankie, Dee Dee and the gang, and his analysis of the series hits pretty much covers all the salient points I could possibly make about their enduring appeal.

The jokes are pure corn, the surfing scenes are almost avant-garde in their rear-projected fakery, the original musical numbers are embarrassingly dire, and the hokey bacchanalia of the privileged white "teenage" characters occurs in a world completely isolated from what was going down in America's inner cities or over in Southeast Asia at the time.

As terrible and cheapjack as the Beach Party films are, though, I can't help enjoying them nonetheless, and no summer vacation would be complete without a Sunday afternoon viewing of at least one the movies. (This year it was Muscle Beach Party and Beach Blanket Bingo.) Chalk it up to nostalgia -- nostalgia for a childhood when the films were staples of weekend afternoon UHF programming, for the lame-but-quaint tropes of vintage sitcom-style humor, and most importantly for the reassuring presence of various guest-stars drawn from the stable of character actors (Paul Lynde, Mickey Rooney, Vincent Price, Peter Lorre, et cetera) familiar to every heavy TV-viewing kid of my generation.

I wouldn't make a case that the films occupy a loftier cinematic position than, say, The Godfather, but I do know what I'd rather sit down to watch on a lazy summer weekend. Coppola's epic may masterfully dissect the nature of the American capitalism, but it does it feature lip-synched performances of either of these musical gems?

Stevie Wonder - Happy Street (from The Complete Motown Singles, Vol. 4, 2006) - A swingin' soul celebration, as featured in Muscle Beach Party (1964).

The Kingsmen - Give Her Lovin' (from The Kingsmen, Vol. 2, 1964) - Ginchy garage rock, as featured in How to Stuff a Wild Bikini (1965).