THE STRUGGLE BEHIND THE SOUNDTRACK: INSIDE THE DISCORDANT NEW WORLD OF FILM SCORING By Stephan Eicke. McFarland, 2019. 227 pp. $45.00 paper.

Abstract

old lady wed to a ne’er-do-well. All three are portrayed as “responsible for their own impoverishment” (133), i.e., as “undeserving” poor. They appear rarely, for to bring them on screen too much might suggest the comfortable middle-class life enjoyed by the Ricardos and Mertzes was not within everyone’s grasp (as indeed it was not: in 1950, nearly one in three US citizens endured poverty). Furthermore, the show implies that racism is no “barrier to obtaining middle-class status” (134) and makes light of gender inequality, though in real life both contributed heavily to poverty. Decades later, updated but equally false stereotypes of the “undeserving poor” plague the small screen, as Jessica H. Zbeida shows in her analysis of The First 48. In this reality-based crime show, the nice, hard-working, well-educated, middleclass investigators—whose perspective we share through the camera—“use a suspect’s biography and identity to establish his or her delinquency even when a suspect has no criminal record” (254). Viewers are silently prompted to judge suspects based on their physical appearance, which can include hiphop style attire and/or tattoos, and “street” vocabulary. Victims, too, are sometimes linked to ethnic and racial stereotypes which may dim viewers’ sympathy, suggesting the victims’ deaths are more “a consequence of their identity” than “a result of social problems” (253). Zbeida adds, however, that hiphop artists have critiqued First 48 and police departments in three major cities cut their ties with it, suggesting change is in the air. CBS’s hasty dropping of The Briefcase, a reality show that pushed struggling people to judge their own versus others’ “worthiness,” is likewise encouraging. Precisely how Briefcase failed on both narrative and ethical grounds is the topic of Owen Cantrell’s essay. Finally, in his study of urban education in The Wire, season four, Chad William Timm shows how Mr. P learns to honor his students’ “cultural capital” and incorporates it into newly meaningful lessons. This book could serve as a good supplementary text in upper-level US history, sociology, and humanities classes, and its theme is timely enough that one hopes many civicminded adults will read it, too. Highlights not cited above include Lyrica Taylor’s study of inspirations (religious, artistic, and personal) behind Henry Ossawa Tanner’s The Banjo Lesson and The Thankful Poor, and Erin Wuebker’s analysis of New Deal–era posters urging syphilis patients to get treatment—or else fall by the wayside. The book’s flaws are few, though I find it odd that Lenz gives a free pass to photojournalist Jakob Riis, who certainly did much to perpetuate ethnic stereotypes in his 1888 work How the Other Half Lives. I would have welcomed an essay on depictions of poverty in animated cartoons, ranging from Depression-era classics Christmas Comes but Once a Year and Little Match Girl to 1958’s Robin Hood Daffy (“I’ll rob him of his gold and give it to some poor unworthy slob”), for surely these too have an impact on how many Americans, from childhood on, view and interpret poverty.