[My awesome wife Vaughn Joy’s book Selling Out Santa: Hollywood Christmas Films in the Age of McCarthy has been out for about four months, which means Vaughn has had the chance to share it through a ton of book talks, podcast episodes, writing, and more. So this week I’ll highlight a handful of such occasions, leading up to a special post featuring my own thoughts on this must-read book!]
On one overt and one more subtle connection of another great piece of Vaughn’s writing to her work in Selling Out Santa.
First things first: Vaughn’s November essay for Contingent magazine on all the Frankensteins—Mary Shelley’s, Guillermo del Toro’s, Hollywood and film history’s, our collective cultural consciousness’s, and many more—stands on its own, and deserves to be read as the wonderful and vital piece of cultural studies public scholarship it is. (And a very worthy piece with which Contingent launched their ongoing series on monsters.) Please check it out if you haven’t already (or if you prefer, you can listen to Vaughn read it here!), and then come on back for a couple further thoughts of mine.
Welcome back! I really love every part of Vaughn’s essay, but I have a particular fondness for the brief but potent Finale, and especially for how powerfully she makes the case there for the role and importance of the work of cultural historians. She does the same at greater length, both in her own words and through a choice culminating quote from her book’s muse, the frustratingly forgotten mid-20th century film critic and scholar Dorothy Jones, in the bravura Conclusion of Selling Out Santa. If you want to know more you’ll have to, y’know, but I will add this: I believe one of the main distinctions between public scholarship and more academic scholarship is that the best examples of the former overtly and consistently foreground not just what we’re doing but why we’re doing it and why it matters; and both of these pieces of writing of Vaughn’s make the case for those two “why’s” as well as anything I’ve read.
Dorothy Jones is unquestionably the most inspiring muse for Vaughn’s book and work; but running a close and important second would have to be the filmmaker Frank Capra (see this month-long series on Vaughn’s Review Roulette newsletter for ample proof). Some of the very best writing in Selling Out Santa (a competitive contest indeed) can be found in the concluding Chapter 5, which dives deep into Capra’s career, archives, failures and frustrations, and lasting legacies. And I think it’s no coincidence that some of the very best writing in Vaughn’s Contingent essay can be found in her lyrical tributes to Guillermo del Toro and his film, as when she writes, “He painstakingly stitched together a beautiful new creature indebted to the past but so fully born in the present.” Vaughn isn’t just great at highlighting the work we cultural historians do and why it matters—she is equally adept at doing so with the work that great filmmakers do. These two texts of hers, both published in November, exemplify that skill in distinct but entirely complementary ways.
Next book convo tomorrow,
Ben
PS. If you’ve had a chance to check out the book, and/or have ideas for places or ways Vaughn can talk about it, feel free to reach out!
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