George Bernard Shaw once quipped that America and England are two cultures separated by a common language. In this innovative attempt to place the movies and theater in the larger context of American and English cultural differences, Michael Gilmore demonstrates that the most interesting way to understand the distinctions between the two cultures is by looking closely at each country's favorite art form. Differences in the Dark is a fresh, wide-ranging look at the meaning of America's fascination with movies and movie stars, and the way the soul of Britain is reflected in its tenacious love affair with the stage. Gilmore shows how the characteristic features of American experience are inscribed in how movies, the quintessentially American idiom, are made and viewed. In the private, solitary nature of film-viewing (in contrast to the more communal, interactive experience of seeing a play), and in American actors' tendency to play themselves, not their characters, from role to role, American movies express a strong sense of individualism and a tendency to escape the limits of time for the freedom of space. An art form built of sophisticated technology and cutting and splicing of time and space, Gilmore argues, resonates deeply in the country of reinvented lives and wide-open spaces. At the same time, the English tradition of class and collective memory is perfectly served by an art form that requires disciplined memorization and the submergence of the individual within a role that, in many cases, existed before the actor was born. Unlike the mechanical products of Hollywood or Disneyland, drama by its very nature cannot be mass-produced. Bringing together such diverse topics as theme parks, realism, and social class, as well as the role of Jewish immigrants in the making of Hollywood (and their virtual exclusion from Great Britain) and the connection between the movies and the African-American community, Differences in the Dark is one of the most original and engaging cross-cultural studies to appear in many years.

Differences in the Dark

Literature & Fiction

Gilmore, Michael

Dramas & Plays

Columbia University Press

Michael Gilmore is astonishingly good at pulling us into the center of what it means to ache with the power and vulnerability of art and love. He can capture the delicacy of lace caught in a button and equally eviscerate a pompous radio personality with Freudian puns of fish and cigars. Visual and visceral, Restless Astronomy slices into the madness coiled within the simultaneously bloated and anorexic American monster. Gilmore's x-ray insight into our historical blindness is at once bracing and heartbreaking. Poets call us to action that both acknowledges and refutes the power of one ego to determine the destiny of others. Yet, we must also act to face our common humanities. Gilmore trusts that the center will hold in the centrifuge of the human soul.

Restless Astronomy: Poems New and Selected

Poetry

Dalton Pub

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Gilmore, Michael. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Books by Gilmore, Michael