Modern Popular Culture--A Consuming Passion  ∆RC[in8]

Popular culture, like its name suggests has to be popular, and in today’s world, that means business.  The provision of leisure in our modern industrial society is a commercial activity, which is evidenced by some of the names we use for it: show business, the dream factory, the entertainment industry.  Hollywood is also known as Tinsel Town, the Metropolis of Make Believe, and the Entertainment Capital of the World.  Hollywood is a real place where fantasy rules.  Much of what Hollywood sold at first was not tangible— moviegoers consumed time. However now thanks to modern electronic technology there actually is a product that we can enjoy whenever we want in the privacy of our own homes, or almost anywhere we go, thanks to I-Pods and portable DVD players.  Now we can actually purchase as DVDs and downloads the movies and television shows that were once were ephemeral experiences.  However, as Maltby (1989) points out in Dreams for Sale, “what we are buying is perhaps something different, something we already own,” our own dreams (p. 8).  The notion of Hollywood as the Dream Factory is a cliché, but an apt one:

No one has yet found a more evocative analogy for the experience of cinema-going than that of the dream.  As spectators we sit, spellbound in darkness, sharing a public privacy with our fellow viewers, all of us engaged witnesses in a fantasy that is not under our control, but is nevertheless ours to make of what we will.  The people who run what Italian critic Umberto Eco has called “the heavy industry of dreams” are in the business of selling us desires we already have.  They steal our dreams and then sell them back to us for entertainment. (p. 8)

In keeping with the need to keep consuming, by the 1920s stylistic obsolescence was de rigueur, what Charles Kettering of General Motors called “the organized creation of dissatisfaction.”  Modern popular culture, if invented anywhere, began in the great cities of the United States at the turn of the century: “popular culture needed not only the body heat of the metropolis, and the blood of capitalism, but the oxygen of American democracy to bring it to life” (Maltby, 1989, p. 10, 11).  Tabloid newspapers, movies, and radio would all become forms by which the mass population could talk to itself. 

At the turn of the last century, immigrants flooded to American shores, and swarmed into the cities.  They wanted to construct impressive appearances, and many discarded their old cultures in order to adopt a culture of novelty.  “American popular culture has been so successful above all because it has been able to absorb and assimilate forms and material from anywhere, and yet reproduce them as specifically ‘American’” (Maltby, p. 13). 

According to Maltby (1989), because women were responsible for as much as 85 percent of consumer spending, the consumer was viewed as being female, and “it was because ‘mass culture’ was addressed particularly to women, that it was a matter of anxiety.  The ‘masses’ were ascribed exclusively ‘feminine’ characteristics, being seen as irrational, capricious, passive and conformist” (p. 13). The epitome of this was the flapper of the 1920s.  Women had been excluded from high culture and its institutions, and had only received the right to vote in 1920. Thus, the flapper was the product of mass culture, “dancing her way through the world of modern goods . . . . her clothes, her vehicles, her entire milieu was mass produced,” (Maltby, p. 13) and she enjoyed every minute of it! Being depicted as feminine, "mass culture could be declared trivial and dangerous at the same time."  Then, as now, it has been seen as "symptomatic of, and responsible for, all the social ills of life under capitalism . . ."  Popular culture charts social change and is often held responsible for the changes it reflects.  (p. 13)

Although popular culture does encourage novelty, by making novelty appear desirable, paradoxically, popular culture— to be popular—needs to speak what is common among consumers.  Maltby says that popular culture is “a form of dialog which a society has with itself,” because the producers of popular culture in order to sell their products “must say what they think people most want to hear” (p. 14). 

Movies especially have been seen paradoxically as harmless and dangerous at the same time: much like play, popular culture is not serious, it is seen as trivial, ephemeral.  Maltby (1989) further states that:

unlike Art, entertainment is not “about” anything outside itself, but is self-enclosed.  Play, whether it is called “sport” or “entertainment,” has been made into an area of activity sealed off from our engagements with power, ideology and politics.  It is therefore usually escapist. (p. 14)

Maltby contends that movies provide liberation from the limits of a humdrum existence and that movies present a world of heightened experience, illusion, and romance.  He feels that rather than being seen as escapist, we might rather view movies and various other popular culture creations as “what utopia would feel like, rather than how it would be organized” (p. 14).  Maltby notes that both movies and especially sports are:

the utopian part of our daily existence, the part in which we dream we are at our best.  Science tells us, as individuals, that we need to dream when we sleep, that we suffer if we are not allowed to.  Our culture tells us, every day in myriad ways, that we need to dream, to let our secret, holiday selves escape.  And escapism that is not the escape from or to anywhere, but an escape of our utopian selves, has always been present in the idea of Carnival, where the inhibitions which bind us to conventional roles are loosened . . . if it is the crime of popular culture that it has taken our dreams and packaged them, and sold them back to us, it is also the achievement of popular culture that it has brought us more and more varied dreams than we could otherwise have known. (p. 14)

Popular culture is thus a wonderful vehicle to reflect depth psychologically upon play, since popular culture allows us to participate in public dreams.  Popular culture becomes the in-between space where our private imaginings can be shared:

The world of private imaginings is a shared commodity that everyone can purchase, and it takes place in public spaces like picture palaces, around communal property, such as the images of movie stars . . . . In some senses, popular culture and entertainment involve the escape of those elements of ourselves and our culture that are normally kept under restraint—what Freud termed “the return of the repressed.” (p. 14)

Through popular culture, we play with each other as the psyche plays with and through us.  We will see how popular culture and the psyche play as we examine the individual cultural pieces, Chicago (Marshall, 2002), Disneyland and Mary Poppins, (Stevenson, 1964) in the following chapters. ∆RC[in7]

End of chapter, proceed to Chicago