Author Interview: UVA's Paul A. Cantor on zombies and liberty in popular culture

Professor Paul A. Cantor

Speaking at the Mercatus Center on the Arlington campus of George Mason University last November about the topic, “The Economics of Apocalypse: Flying Saucers, Alien Invasions, and the Walking Dead,” University of Virginia English professor Paul A. Cantor drew upon his research on popular culture to discuss opposing visions of individualism and collectivism in contemporary catastrophe narratives in film and television.

Cantor, a Shakespeare scholar, is author of a recent book, The Invisible Hand in Popular Culture: Liberty vs. Authority in American Film and TV, a follow-up to Gilligan Unbound: Pop Culture in the Age of Globalization, published in 2001.

Cantor is also co-editor, with San Diego State University professor Stephen Cox, of the 2010 volume, Literature and the Economics of Liberty: Spontaneous Order in Culture. He and Cox (who is also editor of Liberty magazine, now an on-line publication) are perhaps the most prominent libertarian thinkers working in the field of English literature today.

After his lecture and a discussion moderated by Reason magazine's Jesse Walker, Cantor explained to me why he was looking into the presence of zombie themes in pop culture today.

“These zombie stories are a very interesting way of exploring questions that Americans are interested in,” he said.

What he has noticed in zombie stories, he explained, is that “almost the first thing that results from the zombie apocalypse is the collapse of the federal government. These stories explore what life would be like in a world that was more like the American western, more like the frontier, in which people are forced to rely on their own resources.”

Sometimes, he said, those situations are “frightening but for many of the characters, particularly in The Walking Dead, the experience is empowering. They develop a sense of self-reliance, they face a a challenge, and they meet it.”

In his book, Cantor traces recurring themes in film and TV since the 1950s, a time when there were just three television channels available to most viewers, compared with the hundreds available through cable and satellite services today.

The proliferation of channels, he said, “has really opened up the creativity in television.”

Citing The Simpsons and The X-Files as pertinent examples, Cantor explained that “a lot of shows almost certainly wouldn't have made it onto television in the era of the three networks. It was the Fox Network, the fourth network, that really opened things up.”

Despite the increase in the number of networks and shows, he said, “there's a lot of continuity. Again, what I'm seeing in these contemporary zombie narratives is in many ways a reconstitution of what westerns were like in the Fifties. What we certainly have now is greater variety and, frankly, greater quality because people are able to take more creative chances.”

Cantor's new book, The Invisible Hand in Popular Culture, he said, “carries on some of the same issues” addressed in Gilligan Unbound.

One section of the more recent work “is devoted to globalization,” the primary theme of Gilligan Unbound, which was published the same week as the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks on New York and Washington.

“This book has given me a chance to see how things have played out in popular culture” over the past decade, Cantor said.

Writing the book gave him an opportunity to ask “how shows like Fringe, V, Invasion, [and] Falling Skies have reacted to developments since 9/11 and [a] world with a threat of terrorism but also the problems created by the war on terrorism.”

He was also able to compare and contrast pop culture during the Cold War and during the post-9/11 era.

“I look at flying saucer movies in the 1950s,” he noted.

In those days, Cantor said, “the invaders are an image of real foreigners. It's Soviet Communism that's showing up in the flying saucers.”

By contrast, he pointed out, “when you look at shows like V, The Event, Invasion, [and] especially Fringe, the people invading us are us. 'We've met the enemy and he is us.' These shows explore a disturbing image of the American government as having moved in totalitarian directions.”

With so many choices of movies and TV shows to watch, Cantor sometimes relies on serendipity to find what he's looking for.

“It's chancy,” he said.

“Sometimes I just like a show, often because I like the characters or the actors in it. Sometimes I force myself to watch a show because it's obvious it's raising the kind of questions I'm interested in. For example, The Walking Dead, I really just like. It's really well-made, well-done.”

On the other hand, he watches Revolution on NBC “even though I don't think it's such a good show because it fits into my thesis and I've got to consider the evidence” as he continues exploration of libertarian and apocalyptic themes in popular culture.

(An earlier version of this interview appeared on Examiner.com.)

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'The Wayward Professor' by Joel J. Gold

I found the typescript for this book review in a long-neglected file box. It was written in 1989 or 1990 but has not been previously published.

“Hail the Wayward Professor!”
A Book Review by Richard Sincere

The Wayward Professor by Joel J. Gold; illustrations by Vivian S. Hixson. Lawrence, Kansas: University Press of Kansas. Publication date: April 1, 1989. 191 pages; $14.95, cloth.

A delightful new book from a most unlikely publisher — the University Press of Kansas — promises to be a good bet for the beach-reading set this summer.

Readers of the Chronicle of Higher Education (there are more of us than you might imagine!) are already familiar with the humorous essays of Joel J. Gold, a fiftysomething professor of English literature at the University of Kansas. Gold, who specializes in eighteenth century works by rakes and rogues, has delivered a rakish and roguish look at academic life and politics, foreign travel, and even the CIA and the IRS.

Gold approaches what might in other circumstances be mundane, even boring, subjects with wry panache — late papers, faculty dinner parties, dealing with insurance adjustors.

Take, for instance, his story about “smuggling” cut-rate liquor from Missouri to Kansas (which was a “dry” state). Gold begins the essay thus: “I would like to tell you about one of my earliest adventures in Kansas when I boldly outwitted the law, smuggled contraband liquor across the state line, and raced down the Kansas Turnpike with the aplomb of Burt Reynolds in Smokey and the Bandit. I would like to tell you that story. Unfortunately, what actually happened will sound more like Don Knotts in The Panicky Professor.”

Not a few of the stories hinge on liquor, its uses and abuses. As an eighteenth- century scholar, Gold had discovered an anecdote about Benjamin Franklin, who claimed to have brought back to life several flies that had been preserved in a bottle of madeira. His curiosity got the better of him, so Gold the humanities professor sought out (some rather wary) biology professors to help him try a little experiment to verify Franklin’s strange claim. The results? Inconclusive.

Then there was the “Naked Lunch" party sponsored by some graduate students to honor visiting author William Burroughs. Under the gaze of guests under the influence of a potent punch (four parts gin to one part creme de menthe) that “carried an overwhelming taste of mothballs,” a living centerpiece lay among the canapes. Periodically, this non-speaking young man would rise, enter the men’s room, and emerge wearing one less piece of clothing than before. By the end of the afternoon, he was fully unclothed. It took more than a few moments for the guests, sensorily deprived by “Essence of Mothballs,” to see the connection: naked centerpiece = Naked Lunch (Burroughs’ most famous novel)!

Gold’s tales of travel abroad are equally compelling and quite amusing. Anyone who has had an extended stay in Europe for business or academic reasons will be able to identify with the plights of Professor Gold and his family. There was the time, driving through Italy, that the family car broke down. As it happened, Mrs. Gold was driving at the time, leading Professor Gold to repeat wearily and haplessly to the nearly uncomprehending Italian mechanic, “Mi sposi condotti.” (Roughly, “Blame my wife — she was driving!”)

This was only after the professor, rather confused, drove five times around Venice looking for the proper bridge to cross into the City of Canals, never realizing that all cars must be parked in Mestre for the passengers to embark, by boat, to Venice itself. By the third or fourth pass, smiling Italians were waving and applauding the little Gold vehicle.

Gold has not had much luck with cars. When he purchased a very nice automobile in Europe, he decided to keep it after his trip was over. He sent it across the Atlantic by ship while he returned by plane. After some time had passed, he began to worry about the car’s safe arrival. His worry was due — the car had been crushed by a load of steel girders that fell loose during the crossing. Try explaining that one to your insurance company!

Other stories relate the different methods of bureaucracy at the British Library and similar French institutions. True glimpses of humanity also are found. At a small provincial museum in England, Gold went searching for some letters by the eighteenth-century politician and satirist John Wilkes (one of the rogues in which he specializes). To his dismay, after the long train journey, he discovered that the entire box of letters consisted of photocopies of originals that were kept at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. He had seen them all, But then, at the bottom of the pile, he found one that was not a photocopy. It was an original! Not only that, it was an original that no one else knew about. It was not listed in any existing index of Wilkes memorabilia. Fleetingly, Professor Gold considered purloining the letter and making himself a rich man. (Such a find could surely bring a small fortune at Sotheby’s.) His honesty got the better of him. He wrote down the letter’s contents and handed it to the librarian, explaining its value and walking away guiltless rather than famous.

It is impossible to convey the true flavor of a book of essays like this. Believe me when I say that you will laugh out loud from the moment you pick up the book. Complementing the jocularity of the text are the amusingly Thurberesque illustrations by Vivian Hixson, whose drawings often accompany Professor Gold’s work in the Chronicle of Higher Education.

In this age of criticism and distress over the state of the academy, it is a real pleasure to come across an academic who can rise above the fray through wit instead of venom, with wisdom instead of sophistry. With his tongue firmly in cheek, The Wayward Professor shows that Joel J. Gold is a credit to his profession. If his students leave college with just a jot of his humor, that should be enough to get them through life on an even keel.


Richard Sincere is a Washington-based free-lance writer and editor.