Culture 3 – Popular culture

(Cultural) products

What do we buy when we buy a cinema ticket or a car?

What else is offered with a product?

Ideas and ideology

• ideology:

• (1) unquestioned, ‘natural’, invisible system of ideas:

(‘false consciousness’)

e.g.: books for boys=books foreveryone

ideology

• (2) a coherent, systematic set of ideasshared by a group

(green, conservative, liberal, nationalist, religious, socialist)

serves as a basis for action

• a belief system through which a particular social group creates the meanings that justify its existence to itself

How do ideologies work?

• Louis Althusser: ideologies address the subject:

• offer a view of the world and our place

• ideological messages do not simply influence us to think about the world in certain ways but are responsible for calling us into being asindividuals and for making us who we are

Cultural products

• They enter the circulation of meanings and representations

Mickey Mouse (born 1927/1928)

• mischievous figure →

• “everyman” figure

Mickey Mouse: added meanings

• symbol of the Disney company (voice suppliedby Walt Disney)

• 1944: D Day code-name, US army mascot

Anti-semitic ideologies:

“Mickey Mouse is the most

atrocious ideal that has ever been

offered to mankind … The healthy

sentiments of every independent

minded young man worthy of

respect must suggest that this ugly

and dirty parasite, this greatest

bacillus host of the animal kingdom

cannot be the ideal animal. We

must not allow Jews to degrade

humanity! Down with Mickey

Mouse! Let everybody wear the

swastika!”

Mickey Mouse = USA

• Orwell: the “Mickey Mouse universe”

• slang: sg of poor quality, sginsignificant

• The Simpsons (Bart Simpson: “I’m the mascot of an evil corporation”)

• South Park, Marilyn Manson

Mickey Mouse in South Park: boss of the Walt Disney corporation

Art Spiegelman: Maus (1991)

• (1) meanings ‘already’ in the texts(intentional or unintentional)

• (2) meanings added in the course of cultural circulation

art: the most useful ideological tool precisely because it seems to be outside the system

Cultural products

The Lion King (1994)

Lion King

• The most ambitious Disney project

• Huge budget

• Product franchising

• New kind of plot

Shakespeare in The Lion King

Mufasa and Simba: Hamlet paraphrase

Timon and Pumbaa: Henry V

political theme

The politics of Lion King

• 1994: end of the Apartheid in South Africa

• Western fears

• the usurper Scar’s regime:

• politically bad – morally evil

Scar with his hyaena army

sickle moon

Voice-casting• 1994 film – ‛racism’

within the animals

• hyaenas: low-castescavengers (WhoopiGoldberg, Cheech Marin, Jim Cummings)

• Mufasa: James Earl Jones

• Simba: Matthew Broderick

• Scar:

• Jeremy Irons

Voicecasting 2019

• Scar: Chiwetel Eijofor

• 1994 film – ‛racism’ within the animals

• 2019 film: almost all-black cast

• (African animals must be played by blackactors?)

The politics of Lion King

• Scar’s revolt and rule: ‘unnatural’ - wasteland

• (King Oedipus – the plague)

• ecology and politics

• (the ‘greenwashing’ of Hollywood)

Circle of Life song • There’s far too much to take in here

More to find than can ever be foundBut the sun rolling highThrough the sapphire skyKeeps great and small on the endless round

It's the Circle of LifeAnd it moves us allThrough despair and hopeThrough faith and love

Till we find our placeOn the path unwindingIn the CircleThe Circle of Life

Ecology

• Mufasa: Everything you see exists together, in a delicate balance. As king, you need to understand that balance, and respect all the creatures – from the crawling ant to the leaping antelope.

• Simba: But, Dad, don't we eat antelope?Mufasa: Yes, Simba, but let me explain. When we die, our bodies become the grass. And the antelopes eat the grass. And so we are all connected in the great Circle of Life.

Politics and ecology

• representing a political system as ‘natural’

• ‘place’ in the ecosystem -- ‘place’ in the socialhierarchy

• political change vs. natural cycle

The politics of Lion King

• rivalling political systems:

• Scar’s evil regime vs. ???

• - democracy??

• - feudalism

• - sg more archaic, tribal

Culture and class

• cultural identity – class identiy

• ‘cultural’ divisions – class divisions

• the ‘élite’

Hippolyt (1999): class, culture and the élite

Hippolyt• Schneider Mátyás with his sniffer car• nouveau riche

• clash of mass culture and ‘high culture’• hybrid figures• high culture = snobbery, hypocrisy (Wagner’s

Lohengrin)• public humiliation of Hippolyt• restitution of order• the young lovers

Popular culture and high culture in Renaissance Man

Popular culture and high culture inRenaissance Man

• stark divide

• Bill: hybrid figure

• selling Hamlet to the DDs (theatre: “TV without the box”)

• Shakespeare: icon of cultural homogeneity(~ Shakespeare in Love)

• DDs ‘elevated’, Shakespeare ‘brought down’

‘Hamlet rap’

adaptation, newculturalproduct

new military marchingchant aboutHamlet

Culture and power

• culture (‘cultural products’): field of conflict

• regulation (control) and resistance

• centralisation, standardisation

vs.

oppositional tendencies

Culture, power and educationCurriculum, Classics, Canon (the ‘three C’s’)

Classics: taxation categories; ‘class’

Canon - religious context (texts with authenticity, authority, and value)

secular context

related to “cannon” and “cane” (Gr. kanē)

regulates what we read and how we read

Culture and power

• power: naked show of force (public execution, military marches)

• OR

• subtle control of minds

Birth of mass culture (19th cent)

• mass literacy• increased leisure time • technologies of

reproduction

• Regulation• prohibition (bear-baiting,

dogfights, bare-fist boxing)

• promotion (public parks, zoos, museums)

• birth of modern sport

What is new about ‘modern’ popular/mass culture?

• (1) demographic boom, growth of cities

• (2) democracy; extension of suffrage; mass literacy

• (3) technologies of production and diffusion

• (4) consumer society (and affluence)

• rise of advertising, department stores

‘mass culture’ vs. ‘popular culture’

“Masses are other people” (Raymond Williams)

• uniformity (‘grey mass’) – physical mass

• violent, ignorant, impressionable rabble

• crowd psychology or mob psychology – Freud, Gustave le Bon

Mass culture as ‘culture industry’

Theodor W. Adorno, 1947

- the logic of industry introduced into culture

- production line, capitalist mass (re)production

- the same product consumed by many (movie → TV)

- (un)importance of the ‘artist’ (James Bond)

- new technologies and media → demand for new products

Adorno, F. R. Leavis, Thomas Mann, José Ortega y Gasset

1. “All mass culture is identical” (Adorno)

‘cliché’ , kaptafa (cobbler’s last)

“mass culture is humiliated repetition… always new books, new programmes, new films, news items, but always the samemeaning”. (Roland Barthes)

uniformity

• sameness: not a flaw but a design consideration

• designed to appeal to many people (different backgrounds)

• - widely shared patterns• - preference for the visual• - simple patterns in content• - rock music: four-beat rhythm • - clichés, commonplaces

2. “mass culture is not coming from the people”

“Mass culture is imposed from above. It is fabricated by technicians hired by businessmen; its audience are passive consumers, their participation limited to the choice between buying and not buying” (Dwight Macdonald)

Orwell’s 1984: novel-writing machines

• But: graffitti, Youtube success stories

• grassroots initiatives→ commodification (eg. hiphop)

3. “mass culture is ephemeral”

momentary pleasure instead of catharsis

BUT:

Dickens, Shakespeare

Conan Doyle, Agatha Christie, Tolkien

classics kept alive by the life-support system of education?

4. “mass culture is escapist” (“packaged dream”)

• kills or atrophies the imagination

• BUT

• “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 that we could otherwise never have known”. (Richard Maltby)

• much pop culture confronts real problems (cli-fi)

5. “mass culture is addictive”

~like drugs

cutting rates in MTV videos: 19.94 shots/minute

~ like pornogaphy (inability to have real relationships)

BUT: Much popular culture confronts serious issues

6. “mass culture cretinises us”- high intensity – losing the ability to pay attention

- identical, passive consumers

- violence on screen blunted, brutalised senses

- (violence porn, suffering porn)

- no empathy

- panem et circenses

• failure to participate in political discussion

conformity → totalitarianism?

“At worst, mass culture threatens not merely to cretinize our taste, but to brutalize our sense while paving the way to totalitarianism”. (Bernard Rosenberg)

mass culture

• profit-making industry + device for keepingpeople quiet

• BUT: cultural field – no sharp divide

• CONSUMERS: we all participate in severalcultures (hybridity)

• personal culture

• bricolage (DIY): consumption as a ‘creative’ act

fans and fandom

• the worst aspects of mass culture (uniform, hysterical, obsessive)

• Yet:

• fandom does not entirely fit consumer culture

• critical communities

• interpretations

• buying habits (fan as anti-consumer)

fandom

fandom

popular culture: closing remarks

• cultural field: subcultures, countercultures; mainstream, élite

• popular culture is not homogeneous

•

• jazz, science fiction, film noir, Hitchcock

• Tolkien

• Tintin comics, Watchmen, Maus

• children’s literature

• humour (Chaplin, Monty Python)

popular culture and kitsch

Baroque church interior

De Brusses: Kittens Playing with Wool

splash-cloth

1947

• ‘socialist realism’

(1952 poster)

kitsch

• ‘kitsch’ – kitschen (to smear dirt on sg)

• art or not art?

• failed/unsuccessful art?

• mass-produced?

• idealising, prettifying

• ‘dishonest’ - a lie (moral rather thanaesthetic category)

• homeliness, reassuring familiarity

• (the opposite of defamiliarisation)

The Fabulous Life of Amélie(Jean-Pierre Jeunet, 2001)

Amélie - postcards