My friend Paul Cantor has died—perhaps I could say he was a mentor, though the word is much debased in our times. I learned very much from him about Shakespeare & about American pop culture; I am more at home both in my work as a film critic & in my studies because of him. I am sure I understand America better because of his gracious & witty conversation. I owe him a debt of gratitude & I hope to have a measure of his great powers as a teacher of his fellow Americans, so I’ve written an obit for my friends at Law & Liberty to say what I know about this great scholar—Carl recently shared it with his own memories testifying to Paul’s friendliness & his wonderful Shakespeare scholarship. We do not do enough to honor those we love after they die; I hope to right this wrong.
But it’s also just a pleasure to listen to Paul & to talk to him—we did seven podcasts together &, of course, I wish we could have done more. These conversations capture even better than his writing the joy he found in pop culture, the innocent way in which he thought about everything stories bring up about the fundamental questions, the modern, American, human dramas we are somehow aware of, but tend to ignore when we get serious. Listen & rejoice, friends, & honor this great critic, take pride in the fact that he was one of us, a patriotic libertarian-conservative!
Our second podcast was on Frankenstein & mythology in the age of modern science!
Then we talked about other modern myths—science fiction, H.G.Wells & the temptations of scientific power!
Then our inquiries turned to modern mythology in America: Tim Burton, Americana, & Paul’s great love of pop culture:
From there we went to TV, Breaking Bad—Paul liked joking around that this is about the “Macbeth of Meth”:
Also, the modern Western, the horror & hope of the state of nature—Walking Dead:
Then there’s the Western as history, modernizing America into an anti-Puritan land, Deadwood!