What the President saw

A staff writer for the Boston Globe, Mark Feeley is also a lecturer in American Studies at Brandeis University. I mention this because evidence has been accumulating these past 20-odd years that American Studies departments, like Cultural Studies, Film Studies and, of course, Media Studies are busily engaged in subverting that central but antiquated notion dear to traditional history departments — ‘because’. Causality is oldhat, it’s risible, and it’s out. The new history is virtual history, or ‘alternate’ history, the kind that did not happen but might have happened, just as novels and movies and genre paintings depict realities which somehow failed to occur. In some cases like Oliver Stone’s Nixon and JFK movies, the excitement for the spectator is searching for vestiges of real history and real ‘becauses’ behind the virtual activity on the screen. Stone makes films in the indicative, but Mark Feeley, who is rather scrupulous and old-fashioned about the truth, resorts to conditionals and even subjunctives as he transports us into the virtual history of a very real and plausible Richard Nixon ‘at’ (or not ‘at’) a number of wonderfully described movies.