Forget it Jake -- it's Star Wars

Having been born at the tail end of the baby boom, I'm now about a quarter century older than most of my students. This creates certain pedagogical challenges, one of which is that I often don't have a good sense of what cultural and historical allusions and illustrations are going to resonate with or even be comprehensible in a classroom setting.

For example, last semester, I wanted to reference the ending of Chinatown to highlight a couple of points about the legal system, so I asked a class of about 55 students how many of them had seen it. A total of one student raised her hand. She said "do you mean the one in San Francisco?"

Just this week in a seminar on criminal punishment we were discussing punishment as revenge fantasy, and I discovered that none of the dozen or so students had seen either any Dirty Harry films or any portion of Charles Bronson's Death Wish oeuvre.

Now this circumstance could easily degenerate into a Pete Hamill-style Grumpy Old Man lament on how in the innocent 1970s we had quality filmmaking and the only drug was joy, but I'm curious regarding the extent to which both modern media and contemporary demographics have changed expectations regarding inter-generational familiarity with popular culture. When I was an undergrad 30 years ago I would have thought it very strange if professors assumed any kind of familiarity on my part with the American pop culture of 1950. My expectations are bit different, perhaps unrealistically so, for two reasons: Netflicks and the cultural domination of the boomers. For instance, when I discuss the bundle of sticks metaphor for property rights I assume I can put up the cover of Led Zeppelin IV on a slide and it will be familiar to a non-trivial portion of the class (this assumption has proven to be accurate).

On the other hand, you have the Chinatown-Dirty Harry-Death Wish problem. I sort of feel like my students should have seen Chinatown, in the same way they should have read The Great Gatsby. Expecting them to be familiar with Harry Callahan's hand cannon and accompanying witticisms, let alone the repulsive Death Wish series, is another matter (although I do think the Eastwood films are both a reflection of and have influenced some important cultural beliefs about the relationship between law, violence, and justice).

Anyway, at this point I find that the only two film references that I can always count on the vast majority of the class to get are The Wizard of Oz and the first Star Wars trilogy. I'm wonder about the extent to which technology has and will gradually change this circumstance -- that it is or will make pop culture, both in its high art and low schlock manifestations, more reliably intergenerational as pedogogical references or just subjects of general conversation.

Read more...

Don Draper as an unraptured Emma Bovary

As I noted in the comments to this post, it was only a matter of time before I started Mad Men; however, as I've studiously avoided reading about the show for the better part of two years now, I'm not sure my insights into it will be all that insightful. Still, I'll soldier on, with the caveat that I'm about to watch the eighth episode of the most recent season and would rather not have it spoiled. Not, mind you, that I think it could be, as the one of the defining features of the show is the thundering predictability of its characters. That's not as an indictment of Matt Weiner or his writing staff, merely an acknowledgment of the show's central conceit: these are people who want to be left behind when the rest of the world is raptured by history—at least at first.

Don Draper and his fellows at Sterling-Cooper aggressively court their own obsolescence by cultivating an aesthetic that appeals to inhabitants of a disappearing culture. In this respect, focusing the show around the Gatsby in the gray flannel suit is an inspired decision: Draper is a man at a remove both from his own history and those of archetypes that shape his character, and as such is constitutionally belated. He does not believe in free love, like his beatnik paramour Midge Daniels, he merely lacks a convincing moral objection to committing serial adultery. His persona is a fashioned response to a vanishing culture, and it appeals—both for the clients of Sterling-Cooper and viewers of the show—to the perpetually recycled nostalgia for a time in which romantic figures of powerful genius were recognized and compensated accordingly. In the decades previous, as evidenced by an article Earnest Havemann wrote for Life in 1958, it had actually been true that

most advertising agencies were started on the strength of one man's genius and personality. These old giants of the business had an intuitive feel for advertising. Flying strictly by the seat of their pants, they made brilliant guesses as to what would put the public in the mood to buy and planned brilliant campaigns around their hunches. Yesterday's ad man used to take a look at the product, then go off in a corner to dream up his campaign. Today's ad man sends for the research on what consumers are thinking about at the moment and often goes out to size up the consumer himself.

Havemann captures, in miniature, why Peter Campbell's career will inevitably eclipse Draper's: a person can only have hunches about cultures they know intimately, so the value of a Don Draper is inversely proportional to, for example, market penetration into urban black communities. This is not to say that Campbell's attempt to identify the desires of black Americans at the beginning of the Civil Rights Movement makes him any more sympathetic as a character, or to viewers, as his commitment to equality is as instrumental as Draper's is to free love.

Campbell is, in a sense, becoming us, and we revile his behavior to the extent that we recognize our sins in his actions. Draper, however, is becoming art, and as such we hold him as responsible for his actions as we would Emma Bovary. His self-fashioning was not merely based on literary precedent, it was an act of literature, if you will, and much of the appeal of the show is based on watching an inscrutable literary character interact with actual humans. Not literally, of course, but as the show moves forward in time, the endgames of everyone except for Draper become increasingly recognizable to the audience as modern types. We know why the black elevator attendent is reluctant to talk to the white advertising accountant. We know why the career woman is undermining gender expectations by sleeping around. These characters are commendable or revolting according to a familiar cultural logic tempered by a little historical knowledge. We may not know precisely how the story of Peggy Olson ends, for example, but we know what will limit her ability to grow and how struggling against the stunt will deform her, because hers is the thundering predictability of unwed mothers and unfair office politics.

So Peter and Peggy are not left behind because, over the course of two seasons, they learn to love and accept modernity in their hearts. They still seek Draper's approval, but they recognize that he's valuable in a way the world soon stop valuing. When the rapture comes, they know Draper won't be numbered among the chosen. They may not know why—Draper himself seems ignorant—but they know. The key item, in this regard, is the note left by the hitchhikers who dose and rob Draper:

In an act of petty kindness, almost pity, they leave him behind with the means to join them because they know he lacks the will to do so. They may not have personally witnessed his days of the locust in the second season, but like Peter and Peggy, they understand that he will not be following them into the future. Nor, for that matter, will Joan Holloway, whose related status I'll address in a future post should you so desire.

(So long as I'm feeling semi-literary, I should add: if you want to learn why The Dark Knight is actually all about dogs, that's my beat too.)

Read more...

I don't want to be that guy

I.E., the guy who takes pride in not watching television, since

(a) I watch quite a bit of television; and

(b) I think getting academic credit for writing/talking about TV shows would be AWESOME. Indeed I would love to be the Stuart Scott of some Cultural Studies department -- booyah!

But . . . all these end of the decade lists make me wonder: do people actually watch all these shows they're arguing so passionately about? And go to all these movies? And listen to all these albums? (Or are they not called albums any more? I can never get that straight.)

Caveat: I love The Wire. And The Sopranos. Sort of loved Deadwood. But I would have thought the overlap of people who were regular watchers of both Buffy the Vampire Slayer and The Wire and also have strong opinions about OK Computer and That One Film From Denmark About Coffee Shops was relatively modest. Apparently this particular Venn diagram includes 87% of the blogging population.

Now get off of my lawn.

Read more...

There's a bathroom on the right

A few years ago I ran into the concept of a mondegreen, which is usually defined as a mis-heard line in a song. The most commonly cited examples include "there's a bathroom on the right," as a mis-hearing of CCR's "there's a bad moon on the rise" and "s'cuse me while I kiss this guy" rather than Jimi Hendrix's original "s'cuse me while I kiss the sky."

Thanks to the wonders of wikipedia, I've learned that the original definition, formulated by Sylvia Wright, is actually narrower and more interesting: "The point about what I shall hereafter call mondegreens, since no one else has thought up a word for them, is that they are better than the original".

It doesn't seem to me that either of the common examples given above qualify. I humbly submit the following as instances from from my own personal history of mis-hearing song lyrics:

Rod Stewart, Maggie Mae:

I suppose I could collect my books and go back to school
Or steal my daddy's cue and make a living out of playing pool.

The correct lyric is "fool." "Pool" deploys a clever pun, and a much more arresting image of the feckless yet suddenly intriguing father.

[Correction: Jim in comments points out that in fact "pool" is the real lyric, and that my subsequent interpretation is the actual mondogreen, except it wouldn't be one by the original definition. As Emily Litella used to say . . . never mind].

Speaking of which, The Kinks, Father Christmas:

When I was small I believed in Santa
Though I knew there was no dad.

Instead of the canonical "though I knew it was my dad." The mis-hearing adds a level of wistful pathos to the proceedings.

Next up, Neil Young, Helpless:

There is a town in north Ontario
With dream comfort memory to spare

The correct line is "With dream comfort memory despair."

I'm of two minds about this one, as the correct version is more disturbingly surreal, while the mis-hearing has a certain homey charm.

Anyway, I like Wright's original definition much more than the contemporary (mis)understanding of what she had in mind, which is rather ironic as Alanis Morrisette did not observe.

Read more...