“‘Bringing the Beatles Back to Hamburg’: Aspects of National Identity in Wim Wenders’s The American Friend” (2022-2023)
The American Friend is a film I first saw about a month before writing this essay. It struck me as possessing a sort of uncanny, elusive beauty. Unsatisfied with understanding it in such abstract terms, I felt compelled to write about it. By way of Carroll Smith-Rosenberg’s essay “Surrogate Americans: Masculinity, Masquerade, and the Formation of a National Identity,” I began to introduce an analytical framework to my cinematic observations. The form generated by this introduction initially echoed many academic works I encountered both on my own and in class in preparation for the essay. I was resigned to using this beautiful film to make a broader cultural point. As I wrote, however, something unexpected happened. The film, once I synthesized it with Smith-Rosenberg’s historical and cultural analysis, seemed to transcend this synthesis, as though exposure to critical argumentation had strengthened its beauty. This level of nuance in the interaction between two texts was something I had not encountered before, and it taught me a thing or two about the unforeseen potential that material may carry throughout the writing process.
“Smartphones and the New Flesh” (2022-2023)
This essay emerged as a means of understanding a somewhat challenging text. Giorgio Agamben’s “What is an Apparatus?,” introduced to me by professor David Markus, is an essay which, through elaboration on a Foucauldian concept, boldly attempts to answer some fundamental questions regarding the role of the human as subject in the world. In forming a more complete understanding of Agamben’s ideas, I found the use of analogous material with which I was already familiar to be particularly helpful. David Cronenberg’s film Videodrome, a personal favorite, provided a vivid symbolic framework for me to work with, and a particular chapter of Adam Greenfield’s book Radical Technologies formed a bridge between Agamben’s thought and the everyday reality of the smartphone. Accordingly, the process of writing this essay was a lesson in writing not only to produce something, but as an extension and augmentation of thinking.
Nick Mahoney, ‘25, is a rising sophomore from Newton, Massachusetts. He studies music theory and composition at Steinhardt. A composer of concert music, he is focusing his studies on the Western classical tradition, especially early and contemporary music. He maintains a firm belief in the importance of beauty for its own sake. This belief is reflected in his writing, which tends toward analyses and explorations of works in forms other than music. As a lifelong enthusiast of literature and film, Mahoney attempts to present these forms in a manner which reaffirms the persistence of beauty as an immutable presence, even under late capitalism.