Gary McDonogh. Encyclopedia of Contemporary American Culture

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accepted.

For most of American history adultery was the only acceptable justification for

divorce. In the liberal social climate of the 1970s, the “no-fault” divorce became a critical

innovation, allowing couples to divorce by citing “irreconcilable differences” or an

“irretrievable breakdown of the marriage.” The ease with which many people divorced

caused some to argue that there has been an unprecedented breakdown in American

family

life—a “divorce epidemic”—which has led to harmful effects on the

children

involved and for American society as a whole. Others argue that the freedom to divorce is

necessary because it reduces the stigma associated with ending what would otherwise be

an unhappy or perhaps seriously abusive marriage. One might note that many

conservative Republicans championing traditional values—Ronald

Reagan

. Bob

Dole

and Newt

Gingrich

—have been themselves divorced.

Though divorce may be less stigmatized than in former times, it still creates emotional

and financial distress for those involved, especially for women (who tend to lose more

economically) and offspring. Divorce has been cited as one of the highest causes o

stress

in American life, second only to the

death

of a loved one. As a result, there has

been much debate about what to do—if anything—about this cultural pattern. For

example, in an effort to reduce divorce rates, the Louisiana legislature passed the 1997

Covenant Marriage Act, which permits each couple marrying in Louisiana to limit the

legal grounds of divorce in their case to adultery abandonment, physical or sexual abuse,

felony conviction, or separation of at least two years. Others, notably feminist leaders,

have protested these trends as a regression to an era of stifled choices and oppressive

living arrangements.

Divorce is also commonly presented in

mass media,

both in

television

and movie

narratives, and celebrity lives reported in the press. Economic, social and cultural issues

of divorce, in fact, provide a continuous thread in long-running

soap operas

and movies

from

Adam’s Rib

(1950) through

Kramer vs. Kramer

(1979) to the darkly comedic

War

of the Roses

(1989) and beyond. In

Hollywood,

divorce can be seen as a happy ending—

or a beginning.

reedom

and individuality are central to American culture, and, in some ways, the

rising divorce rate reflects this emphasis on personal liberties. Predictions that rising

divorce rates portend the end of marriage, however, seem greatly exaggerated.

Further reading

Newman, K. (1999)

Falling From Grace,

Berkeley: University of California.

Riley, G. (1991)

Divorce,

New York: Oxford University

NICOLE MARIE KEATING

Encyclopedia of Contemporary American Culture 346

Dixiecrats

Democratic splinter party in the

South

during the 1948 elections. Disgruntled by

President

Truman’s

civil-rights

initiatives and fearing loss of local control, 6,000

Southerners met in Birmingham and nominated Strom

Thurmond

of South Carolina for

president

and Fielding Wright of Mississippi for

vice-president

. Less a visionary party

than one of conservative

backlash,

the ticket captured 1.2 million votes and four states—

Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana and South Carolina. Yet, it was unable to throw

elections in the House of Representatives or stop Truman. This movement foreshadowed

the emergence of a conservative

Republican

South of the 1980s and 1990s.

GARY McDONOGH

Doctorow, E.L. (Edgar Laurence)

b. 1931

Novelist born and residing in

New York

City, known for mixing historical figures and

fiction in novels like

The Book of Daniel

(1960), based on the Rosenberg case,

Ragtime

(1975), an adaptation of an eighteenth-century German historical narrative to the lives o

New Yorkers at the beginning of the twentieth century (made into a

Broadway

musical

in 1998),

Billy Bathgate

(1989), about Dutch Schultz’s mob-dominated Bronx in the

1920s, and

Loon Lake

(1980), portraying American life during the Depression years o

the 1930s. Doctorow has also been vocal politically as an editor-in-chief for

Dial Press

(where he worked with such writers as Norman

Mailer

and James

Baldwin

) and as a

frequent contributor to left-leaning magazines like

The Nation

ROBERT GREGG

documentary

That film,

television

and video can record and transmit “real events” created their initial

popularity. Despite the triumph of

Hollywood

and other narrative media, this realization

also underpins a long history of American documentary production, criticism and

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distribution. Yet, documentary is hardly a simple or unchanging category The “public”

looks for “real” events in

news,

“reality television” and classroom movies, while

documentarians debate more abstract truth in both form and criticism. A documentary is

also a story even if one claims a higher purpose: treating important social issues,

forgotten, exotic or famous people, or great historical moments. Yet, documentarians

manipulate all these while sharing technical and narrative frames and distribution with

other media. Documentaries also have evolved with media technologies and institutional

support.

Among the most important ancestors of American documentary are early ethnographic

filmmakers like Edward S.Curtis, recording Native Americans, and Robert Flaherty

(1884–1951), whose well-known

Nanook of the North

(1922) was complemented by

more “American” films like

Louisiana Story

(1948). Both documentarians relied on

“acted-out” sequences as they recorded “real life.” Margaret Mead and others continued

this ethnographic tradition, aimed primarily at academic markets. Documentarians could

also draw on decades of social photography including Jacob Riis, Walker Evans and

WPA photographers, as well as wartime newsreels and propaganda.

Major changes came by the 1960s with readily portable cameras and synchronized

sound recording. These gave the illusion of “real life” in action (devices now imitated in

fiction through moving cameras and jump cuts). This technology facilitated direct

cinema, which stressed unmediated observation. Here, important documentarians include

the Maysle brothers (Albert 1926–, David, 1932–87), D.A.Pennebaker (1926–) and

Richard Leacock (1921–), while major works include Leacock’s

Primary

(1960), Craig

Golbert’s

An American Family

(1972) and films by Frederick Wiseman (1930–), such as

Titticut Follies

(1967) and

High School

(1968). The intimacy and pervasiveness of the

documentary eye and the use/reading of these films evoked questions about intrusion into

private life: the Loud

family

responded angrily to their depiction on Public Television’s

n American Family

(reprised in interesting ways with the 1999

Public Broad-casting

System

(PBS) serialization of an

American Love Story

), and

Titticut Follies

was barred

from public showing for decades.

Television also changed documentary distribution and audiences. While documentaries

(especially exotic or “nature” films) had occasionally played in theaters, their distribution

more generally was limited to schools,

museums,

or other specialized settings.

Television broadcasted documentaries to a large audience via PBS, including

controversial films, such as Marlon Rigg’s

Tongues Untied

(1989), which graphically

treated gay sexuality across racial lines. Yet, in the 1990s, its independence faced

pressure from government and conservative social lobbies; Ken Burns’

Civil War

(1990)

exemplifies alternative public television documentaries with high production values,

popular audiences, commercial tie-ins and a very safe subject. Commercial and

cable

networks also offer news, news magazines, star documentaries, biography (the title of a

popular Arts & Entertainment channel series) and

MTV

shows like

Real Lives

Commercial documentary however, must sell to audiences and sponsors—hence it tends

to avoid controversy as well as formal complexity. Nonetheless, classic television

Encyclopedia of Contemporary American Culture 348

documentaries, especially via network broadcasting, have been in decline since the mid-

1970s because of shrinking ratings. In the twentieth century news magazines,

talk shows

and “reality” shows replaced earlier, more sober television documentaries. Cheap and fast

to produce, they focus on emotional and sensational subject matters while concealing

fundamental mediations.

With new distribution and materials, documentaries flourished as both a practice and a

theoretical field in the 1980s and 1990s. Film schools teach through documentary

exercises, while disciplines such as

anthropology, history

and sciences drew in

documentaries. Industrial films, news television and political genres played with the form

and implications of truth associated with documentary sobriety while documentary

makers and critics explored reflections on the claims and form of the genre, epitomized

by Bill Nichols, Michael Renov, Trinh T.Min-Ha and others.

Documentaries today incorporate different genres, styles and relations to subjects and

audiences. Bill Nichols, for example, elaborates four modes of documentary

representation—expository observational, interactive, reflexive. The expository mode

teaches through direct address, exemplified in many educational products. Truth is

obviously controlled by the film-maker, with heavy narration and silent subjects.

Observational genres try to observe the subject without interference, seeking

“unmediated” truth. As in direct cinema, filmmakers sought to be “flies on the wall,”

resuming that the subject would become accustomed to the camera. Wiseman, however,

reinterpreted objectivity by claiming his films are his visions, while asserting that what he

saw actually did happen.

Interactive documentaries involve cooperation and questioning, even within the film;

hence they may be linked to film-maker reflexivity as well. Theorist-film-maker Trinh

T.Minh-Ha, for example, questions documentary practices, like syncsound and real-time

(as in long takes), that promote authenticity Hence, in

Surname Viet Given Name Nam

(1989), Trinh took pains to reconstruct interviews that viewers could perceive as staged,

complicating any reading of being Vietnamese in Vietnam and America.

Documentarians choose among these modes, depending on purpose, subject and

audience—high-school films on butterflies or messages of environmental concern tend to

be expository while politicized explorations of identity seek radically reflexive tones.

Another recognition that emerged at the end of the twentieth century was that the

subjects of documentaries have lives outside the film. Even in documentaries on distant

historical subjects, people are connected to the subject by geography and shared national,

ethnic,

gender

class

backgrounds. Subjects in documentaries and filmmakers face

consequences beyond the text. People of power generally control their images and can

challenge unfavorable representations. For social documentaries (and news), subjects

often occupy lower socio-economic positions. While this may record the forgotten and

effect change, it may also categorize victims. Here, grassroots or

community

videography represents an alternative appropriation of truth by groups who affirm their

own truth by their limited and highly contextual documentaries. While less significant in

the market (or in academic criticism), these videos affirm the genre’s flexibility amid

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demands made by claims of truth and power

Further reading

Schechter, S. (1982)

Women and Male Violence,

Boston: South End Press.

Walker, L.E. (1979)

The Battered Woman,

New York: Harper & Row.

EMIKO TAJIMA

Donohue, Phil

talk shows, televisi

Doonesbury

Started by Garry Trudeau, while a Yale undergraduate in the late 1960s, this

comic

strip

gained wide syndication and notoriety in the early 1970s as a vehicle for political satire

which was set in the lives of a group of college students. The

Watergate

scandal

provided fodder for some of the strip’s most outrageous and insightful segments—

handful of which prompted

newspapers

to either relocate the strip from the comics page

to the editorial page or to remove it entirely In 1975, Trudeau won the

Pulitzer Prize

for

political cartooning, thus becoming the first four-panel comic-strip cartoonist to win the

award.

ROBERT ANDERSON

Entries A-Z 351

door-to-door sales

Memory of a pre-

Internet

America, door-to-door sales of brushes (Fuller brush men),

vacuum cleaners, encyclopedias and bibles were all part of the incorporation of rural and

even

suburban

America into national consumption. As envoys of modernity these sales

representatives (generally male) also had dubious reputations: the traveling salesman and

the farmer’s daughter is a standard scenario of American dirty

humor

. Yet their era was

fading by the time of Albert and David Maysles’ documentary

Salesman

(1969). While

females also participated in these areas, they were known for appointment/party sales o

domestic goods and cosmetics—Avon and Tupperware.

ee also:

consumerism

GARY McDONOGH

Douglas, Kirk and Michael

b. 1916 (Kirk)

b. 1944 (Michael)

Father and son

stars

. Kirk (born Issur Danielovitch) broke into movies through

physical egocentric male roles, epitomized in his Oscar nominations as a boxer in

The

Champions

(1949) and as Vincent van Gogh in

Lust for Life

(1956). Awarded a

Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1981, he continued his acting career in the 1990s, while

engaging in public service and authoring novels and the memoir

The Ragman’s Son

(1988). Michael starred as a

television

detective in

Streets of San Francisco

(ABC,

1972–7). On screen, he has come to personify the deep ambiguities and frustrations of the

white

middle-class

male, whether entrepreneur (

Wall Street,

1987, Oscar for Best Actor;

isclosure,

1994), husband (

Fatal Attraction,

1987;

War of the Roses,

1989), worker

(

Falling Down,

1993) or

president

(

The American President,

1995).

GARY McDONOGH

CINDY WONG

Dove, Rita

Encyclopedia of Contemporary American Culture 352

b. 1952

First

African American

poet laureate of the United States, as well as the youngest, in

1993–5. Her published works include

Yellow House and Corner

(1980) and

Mother Love

(1995);

Thomas and Beulah

(1986), which explores the stories of her grandparents, won

the

Pulitzer Prize

. She has also published a novel,

Through the Ivory Gate

(1992). Much

of her work seeks to deal with ordinary life; she is also interested in communicating

poetry to children

GARY McDONOGH

Dow Chemical

Multinational chemical company merging in 1999 with chemical giant Union Carbide for

total worldwide sales of $24 billion. Dow and its affiliates have been tarred with

accusations of environmental damage and US disregard for human life worldwide—

Dow’s association with napalm in the

Vietnam

era made it a popular target for

campus

rotestors. Dow Corning, a corporation created by Dow and Corning Glass in 1943 to

develop silicon polymers, has also been savaged by suits and debates over the health risks

of silicon gel breast implants.

ee also:

deep ecology/Earth First!

GARY McDONOGH

downsizing

A nicer way of saying “lay-offs,” emphasizing corporate/stockholder health and

competition rather than the human cost of lost jobs, even within an expanding economy

Downsizing has been touted as a way of producing leaner and meaner companies with

higher profits; these layoffs since the 1980s have undercut both

community

stability

(with plant closure) and the security of

middle-class

executives and their families.

CINDY WONG

draft

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Although males aged between eighteen and twenty-five are required to register for

ossible conscription in the US, there has been no compulsory military service since

1973. Even before that date, the ideal of a voluntary

army

and exemptions for those with

families or other reasons not to fight had precluded the idea of universal service.

Moreover, conscription has been a fierce battleground for issues of patriotism and

independence, especially in the era of the

Vietnam War

Colonial practices of universal white male military readiness were replaced in the

nineteenth century by a voluntary military although wartime conscription was instituted

by both the North and the

South

in the Civil War. The Selective Service Act of 1917

authorized wartime conscription, but lapsed thereafter. The first peacetime draft, in 1940,

accompanied preparation for the Second World War, but also lapsed afterwards, in 1947.

Reconstituted in 1948 as a response to dwindling interest in the military however, the

Selective Service was extended for

war

and peacetime needs in 1950, 1951, 1955, 1959,

1963 and 1967.

As protest erupted against the Vietnam War, the draft became a special focus o

attention. On the one hand, skillful use of exemptions (especially for college) allowed

middle- and upper-class white males to avoid service: Bill

Clinton

was later accused o

dodging the draft while George

Bush,

Jr. served in the Texas National Guard. Other

opponents of the war favored direct resistance: burning cards, storming induction centers

or leaving the country. The burden of military service fell on poor and minority

inductees, where the lottery ranking birthdates from 1 to 365/6 (for leap year) evoked the

specter of Shirley

Jackson

Inductions ended in 1973 and registration ended a year later. Since 1980, males have

been required to register, but military actions have been conducted by all-volunteer

forces.

GARY McDONOGH

drag shows

Performances based on cross-dressing, elaborated by celebrity imitations, lip-synching

and ironic touches. Both males and females participate (although women’s

representations of the other often underscore the limited ornaments and gestures o

American

masculinity

). Such performances often raise questions about both

gender and

sexuality

. They have become political statements in gay rights settings (e.g. the Gay

Pride

Parade

San Francisco, CA

), but also attract mixed audiences. Indeed, they have

become increasingly mainstream through events like Wig-stock, celebrities like Ru Paul,

erformance pieces by Lily Tomlin and other actors and even crossdressing vignettes by

celebrities like

New York

Mayor Rudy Giuliani or

basketball

star Dennis Rodman.

Movie depictions range from the comic (

T0 Wong Foo, Thanks for Everything,

Julie

Encyclopedia of Contemporary American Culture 354

Newmar, 1995) to documentary explorations of subcultures where

race, class

and

sexuality are questioned

Paris is Burning,

1990).

GARY McDONOGH

CINDY WONG

drama and theater

America’s greatest contribution to world

theater

to date is indisputably the twentieth-

century

musical

. The American musical entertains audiences from London to Tokyo.

Americans who never patronize other live theater inevitably will attend at least one

musical, be it a

Broadway

touring show or their daughter’s high-school play At the

beginning of the twentieth century musical theater was romantic

comedy

complemented

by song and

dance

numbers not necessarily related to the plot. Long on spectacle and

short on substance, such musical comedies as Cole Porter’s

Anything Goes

entertained

audiences across the nation. The first half of the twentieth century saw steady growth in

the sophistication and the popularity of the genre, culminating in the heyday of the

Broadway musical in the 1950s and 1960s. While plays continued to employ lavish

spectacle, song and dance, the storylines (books) were becoming more complex, the

characters more developed and themes tinged with serious social issues. In 1943 Richard

Rogers and Oscar Hammerstein created

Oklahoma

with a fully developed plot and songs

and dances that served to further the story This advent of the integrated musical was

followed by a flurry of blockbuster hits from Rogers and Hammerstein

(Carousel, South

acific, The

ïng and I)

. Lerner and Lowe

(Brigadoon, My Fair Lady),

Leonard

Bernstein

(On the Town, West Side Story)

and Frank Loesser

(Guys and Dolls)

are

members of a long list of artists who contributed to the golden age of American musical

theater. This uniquely American form naturally became a major cultural export, and, by

the 1980s, British and French lyricists and composers (Andrew Lloyd Webber, Alain

Boublil, Claude-Michel Schonberg) had developed their own hybrid forms of musical

theater to be reimported for long runs on Broadway.

By the middle of the twentieth century American mainstream, non-musical drama had

settled into two popular genres. Fourth-wall realism abounded in the form of romantic

comedies and “kitchen sink” dramas (usually set in one room of a

home

and centered

around the personal, often

family,

conflicts of the central characters). These plays often

depicted the American dream gone awry. Tennessee

Williams

wrote about the displaced

aristocracy or pseudo-aristocracy (exemplified by heroines like Blanche Dubois in

Streetcar Named Desire

) of the new

South

. Arthur

Miller,

Death of a Salesman,

rought audiences a painfully honest portrayal of the common person as tragic hero.

Lorraine Hansberry’s 1959 hit,

A Raisin in the Sun,

is an

African American

variation on

this theme. Set in an urban America caught in the growing pains of desegregation and

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