The Invisible Hand in Popular Culture: Preface
But then are we in order when we are most out of order.
William Shakespeare, Henry VI, Part Two
This study of popular culture focuses on the most American of all subjects: freedom. America is known as the land of the free, and “liberty” has been its rallying cry throughout its history, from the Revolutionary War and the Founding down to the present day. America was born in a rebellion, and its popular culture has embraced rebelliousness ever since. That explains America’s peculiar fascination with truant children, from Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn to Bart Simpson and Eric Cartman. Many films and television shows have celebrated freedom in its characteristically American manifestations: the freedom to set one’s own goals and go one’s own way, the freedom to associate to solve common problems, the freedom to question authority and revolt against the establishment. But the ideal of freedom has often been challenged in American history, and it has clashed with other American values. In a series of case studies, I analyze the manifold ways in which American films and television shows have grappled with the question of freedom, often exposing its deeply problematic aspects, especially the tension between freedom and political order. The way the issue of freedom keeps coming up in different genres and time periods in American popular culture is testimony to its centrality in the experience of the United States and its great experiment in democratic life.
I put this book together out of essays on popular culture that I wrote over the past ten years. All the previously published chapters have been thoroughly revised and rewritten for this volume, and in some cases substantially expanded. Two of the chapters, the ones on Have Gun-Will Travel and Mars Attacks!, are published here for the first time. To suggest what a rich panorama of artistic achievement American popular culture has to offer, the chapters cover a wide range of subjects. They are split evenly between film and television, and span roughly eight decades of material, from The Black Cat in 1934 to a few television series, South Park, Fringe, and Falling Skies that are still ongoing (as of the 2011-12 season). I deal with several of the most important genres in pop culture. I devote a whole section to the Western, and I take up science fiction, Gothic horror, and film noir. I am interested in the issue of genre crossing, especially the intersection of the Western and science fiction, which I discuss in Chapters Two and Ten (in which I also discuss the fusion of the Gothic and science fiction). I treat the “high end” of popular culture, the work of celebrated directors such as John Ford, Martin Scorsese, and Tim Burton, as well as television writer-producers, such as Chris Carter and David Milch, who are highly regarded by sophisticated critics. But I have not avoided what is generally viewed as the “low end” of popular culture. I include a whole section on Edgar Ulmer, the King of the B-movies, and I have not shied away from discussing flying saucers, invading pod people, freakish superheroes, the Undead, and other mainstays of America’s fertile mythic imagination. I even take up a surpassingly vulgar cartoon, in a chapter that delves into the potty-mouthed wisdom of the fourth graders of South Park.
This book is, then, wide-ranging but not systematic or comprehensive. I am not seeking to provide a historical overview of American popular culture, and do not claim to have exhausted the subjects I discuss. Rather than attempting extensive coverage of whole fields of pop culture, I offer intensive readings of selected works. I am not a film or television historian, or a sociologist; my training is as a literary critic and I concentrate on offering interpretations of the works I discuss. Still, I have chosen significant and representative moments in film and television history, of genuine interest in themselves, but also for what they can tell us more generally about American popular culture. I would be the first to admit that I have been highly selective in what I analyze, given my focus on the subject of freedom. Nevertheless, I hope that this book is enriched and enlivened by the way it jumps back and forth between film and television, different genres, and different time periods. At the same time, at the risk of some repetition, I have worked to keep each chapter self-contained, for readers who wish to concentrate on particular works.
The book is held together by its focus on the issue of freedom, and a number of common threads tie together the chapters. For example, several of the chapters deal with the tension between elites and common people in America. The Have Gun-Will Travel chapter explores the peculiar tendency of Hollywood elites to express their sense of superiority to ordinary Americans by fantasizing cosmopolitan heroes who are necessary to set right the injustices that supposedly occur routinely in small-town America. I argue that Mars Attacks! offers the inverse vision of America: it champions ordinary Americans for their ability to come together to overcome obstacles, while it debunks the elites who falsely claim to have the answers to all problems. The Detour chapter develops the idea that elitist European intellectuals, with their alien perspective on the United States, often misread both the country and its pop culture. Chapter Nine further pursues this notion of cultural elites misreading America—it examines the expert predictions that were made about the future of pop culture after 9/11 and shows how far off the mark they turned out to be.
The contrast that emerges in these chapters between elitist and populist visions of America points to a larger theme of this book—the difference between “top down” and “bottom up” models of order, an idea I outline and explain in the introduction. Reduced to its essentials, the question is: Are Americans better off running their own lives or submitting to the guidance and rule of various kinds of elites and experts? The opening section on the Western broaches the issue in terms of the perennial American debate about freedom versus order. For some of the works I discuss, such as Have Gun, freedom and order seem to be incompatible—order requires the very visible hand of a single hero to impose it on a chaotic and recalcitrant world of individuals pursuing their narrow self-interest (this is a “top down” model of order). In other works, such as Deadwood, something akin to Adam Smith’s invisible hand seems to produce social order. It emerges spontaneously out of the unregulated interaction of individuals, many of whom even appear to be criminals in the eye of the law (this is a “bottom up” model of order with a vengeance). Deadwood suggests that freedom and order are compatible, and that ultimately only freedom can produce genuine social order.
The idea of spontaneous order, made famous by the Austrian economist Friedrich Hayek, is, then, one of the organizing principles of this book. I argue that many works of American pop culture, in upholding freedom as an ideal, present what appears to be disorder as a deeper form of order. The heroes of American popular culture often do not seem to be “orderly” in any conventional sense. They are more inclined to break rules than to obey them. They are frequently mavericks, creative individuals who go against the crowd and chart their own course. But these seemingly “disorderly” characters often create the new orders that a country needs to keep making progress. Because old orders have a tendency to rigidify and block progress, people who make up the rules as they go along can be valuable to society. This is especially true in the economic world, where the dynamic nature of business requires the kind of entrepreneurs who are always breaking existing molds in the process that the economist Joseph Schumpeter calls “creative destruction.”[1] In American pop culture, Scorsese’s The Aviator and Parker and Stone’s South Park are unusual for the way they take the side of entrepreneurs against the government officials who try to regulate them. In these works, government attempts to impose order and rein in economic activity have the effect of blocking progress, while visionary entrepreneurs, trying to improve life for their customers, usher in the order of the future. Both The Aviator and South Park suggest that the American people would be better off being left to their own devices, without government intervention in their lives. These works remind us of something that is often forgotten in discussions of freedom, that economic freedom is one of the most fundamental of all freedoms.
At the heart of the debate I explore in this book is the question: is America great because of its national government or because of its people? Certainly, many films and television shows have celebrated the government of the United States and its leaders, and the grand achievements of the nation-state, the wars it has won and the vast public works it has helped construct (railroads, canals, dams, and so on). In this book, I highlight a countertradition in American popular culture, the disposition to question government authority and to celebrate the people who try to escape, thwart, or battle it to achieve freedom and thus a different kind of greatness. These free spirits may well be just as heroic as famous generals on the battlefield, or accomplish as much for the good of humanity as politicians. Several of the works I discuss, especially Deadwood, Mars Attacks!, and South Park, question the glorification of political leaders in American culture, particularly at the national level. Championing a localism that has always been a strong force in American politics, these works question whether the nation-state is the best form of government and consider the possibility that smaller units of organization might function more effectively, allowing greater freedom to ordinary people to run their lives as they see fit and achieve their own goals.
Thus, one subject I am examining in this book is the libertarian impulse in American popular culture. Libertarianism is a philosophy of freedom, and particularly endorses the free market as the best form of social organization. The use of libertarian to describe a political position is fairly recent; it dates mainly from the mid-twentieth century.[2] But the roots of libertarianism lie in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, in what is often called the classical liberal tradition (given its insistence on limited government, this tradition must be distinguished from modern liberalism, which, by contrast, calls for big government). In analyzing the libertarian aspects of some of the works I discuss, I draw upon classical liberal thinkers such as John Locke, Adam Smith, and Alexis de Tocqueville, and also on inheritors of this tradition in the twentieth century, including the Austrian economists Ludwig von Mises and Friedrich Hayek. In almost all cases, I am not claiming that the films and television shows I discuss were directly influenced by any of these thinkers. I mainly use them to clarify and elucidate issues that I think are genuinely basic to American popular culture. The classical liberal thinkers are perennially relevant to discussing America because, throughout its history, they have profoundly influenced the development of the United States, including its political institutions and economic policies. This impact is epitomized by Locke’s influence on the Founding Fathers. It does not matter whether individual movie directors or television producers have read Locke if he helped shape the America that they deal with in their works. The notions of freedom that circulate in American pop culture inevitably grow out of and remain related to the classical liberal tradition, and thus I feel comfortable drawing on it in my analyses. Still, I want to stress that I am not concerned with a programmatic or doctrinaire libertarian movement in film and television; that is why I refer merely to a libertarian “impulse.” The only work that I discuss in this book that can properly be identified as “libertarian” is, I believe, South Park.
In exploring what is, broadly speaking, a libertarian strain in American popular culture, I am not claiming that it is the only strain, or even the predominant strain—only that it is a significant strain.[3] Accordingly, several of my chapters, particularly those on Have Gun-Will Travel and Detour, deal with anti-libertarian views, television shows or films that suggest that ordinary people, if left to their own devices, will run amok because of their greed, prejudice, and other character defects. In these works, the freedom that many Americans prize is viewed as anarchy, as a chaos of conflicting egoistic impulses that can only tear society apart. The ideal of freedom certainly has not gone unchallenged in American history. Nevertheless, it does have deep roots in American culture, and keeps surfacing in films and television shows, sometimes in unexpected places. For example, one of the most persistent and vital traditions in American pop culture has been a peculiarly anarchic form of comedy, epitomized in the 1930s by the Marx Brothers and W. C. Fields (and even by the Three Stooges, on an admittedly lower level of artistic achievement). With their keen iconoclasm and healthy cynicism about authority, these films challenge silly laws, petty moralism, officious busybodies, social conventions, class distinctions, puritanical restrictions, intellectual pretentions, and other stultifying forces in society. In this book, Mars Attacks! and South Park are my examples of the anarchic power of comedy in American popular culture, with its tendency to smash idols, debunk the establishment, and release the energies of the American people in the name of “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.’’
The anarchic impulse in popular culture is one reason why political elites in America have often—although not always—tried to constitute themselves as cultural elites as well. Elites who want to keep the American people in line fear the explosive energy of their popular culture, its unruliness, its unwillingness to fit into established categories and tamely accept the dictates of authority. Ever since the nineteenth century, elites in America have been condemning various forms of popular culture for not measuring up to the norms of the traditional arts (often arts that originated in Europe). Popular culture has repeatedly been charged with being a force for disorder in society.[4] People who distrust freedom, and want, in particular, to impose order on what they view as the anarchy of free enterprise, tend to look down on popular culture as one more example of what goes wrong when the American people are allowed to have control over their lives. Elitists single out the worst of films and television and say: “Look what happens when people are left to themselves culturally, without the guidance of their betters.” (Well, they rarely came right out and say this, but that is what they are thinking.) Over the years, one of the areas of American life that elites have most persistently wanted the government to regulate has been popular culture, especially film and television in the twentieth century.[5] Elitists who profess to believe in democracy nevertheless have no faith in common people to make sound decisions on their own, even in a matter as simple as choosing the films and televisions shows they watch. How can people be trusted to choose their government if they cannot be trusted to choose their entertainment?
It would be very sad if American popular culture were as uniformly bad as many of its elitist critics claim. It would mean that freedom, which has worked well in many areas of American life, has failed in the realm of culture. That is one reason why I have searched out and focus on moments of sophistication and intelligence in American pop culture, even in some of its more vulgar manifestations. Many have tried to make Americans ashamed of what their pop culture has produced, but there is much that they can be proud of in the history of Hollywood. Films and television shows have been among America’s most distinctive and important contributions to world culture. Contrary to what many critics insist, America’s pop culture is one manifestation of its greatness. This is not to say that all of America’s pop culture is great—far from it. It is to say that, as in other areas, the freedom and democratic spirit of America have provided the conditions that have allowed creative artists to flourish in popular culture. It is no accident that a democratic country has become a world leader in popular culture. The aristocratic heritage of Europe has at times acted as a brake on the development of its popular culture. By contrast, the United States, with the vast economic resources generated by its free enterprise system, has been a pioneer in many of the technological developments that have opened up new creative possibilities in film and television. Even European elites have at times come to appreciate certain aspects of American pop culture. Ever since Europeans became fans of Westerns in the nineteenth century, from James Fenimore Cooper’s novels to Buffalo Bill’s Wild West shows, the American frontier has exerted a peculiar fascination on the European imagination, precisely as a new image of freedom.
In short, freedom has worked well in American popular culture. Like all forms of liberty, it has been a freedom to fail as well as to succeed, and the history of Hollywood is littered with trash. But in most forms of culture the failures vastly outnumber the successes. Today we remember and cherish roughly a hundred Victorian novels and treat this period as a high point of cultural production. We forget the thousands of bad novels from the era, the potboilers and penny dreadfuls that have mercifully slipped down the memory hole of history. There is no simple formula for cultural achievement; genuine art is one of the greatest of human mysteries. Artistic success cannot be predicted or planned for in advance. Cultures seem to function best when they provide widespread opportunities for artistic creation, and therefore a freedom to experiment with different possibilities in the hope of hitting upon a successful form. The mass entertainment system in the United States, for all the mediocrity it has generated, has managed to provide the broad base needed for genuine heights of cultural achievement.[6] Although by no means free of government regulation, the American film and television industries have been among the freest in the world. As a result, with all their shortcomings, they have at their rare best produced a body of work remarkable for its quality and variety.
Thus, American popular culture not only celebrates freedom; it is also itself an example of American freedom at its best and most vibrant. This is, of course, a controversial claim, especially in today’s climate of opinion. The movement known as Cultural Studies and several other forms of contemporary critical analysis treat culture as a realm of unfreedom, dwelling upon the constraints under which would-be creative people necessarily operate. These movements are, broadly speaking, historicist in approach. They view creators in all media as working within ideological horizons defined by the time period in which they live. In recent decades, cultural analysts have become increasingly obsessed with the prejudices and blind spots of artists, especially the way factors of race, class, and gender determine their outlook on the world and the content of their works. These critical tendencies are evident in the analysis of literature and the fine arts, but they are particularly pronounced in the study of pop culture. People laboring in film and television are said to be subject to an unusual array of forces that govern what they can produce, forces supposedly so powerful that many scholars in effect deny that any real creative freedom is possible in pop culture. The fact that films and television shows need to be popular supposedly means that would-be creators in these media become prisoners of the prejudices of the mass audiences they pursue. Needing to flatter their customers, these creators lack the freedom to challenge common opinion.
In the view of many cultural critics, the commercial nature of American pop culture is thus a strike against it. Even when they are not strictly speaking Marxists, they adopt a Marxist position: that American pop culture serves the cause of capitalism, working to make a potentially rebellious population content with their oppressed lot. Ever since the Frankfurt School of culture critique emerged in the 1940s, it has been fashionable to speak disparagingly of a culture industry in the United States and to view Hollywood as a dream factory. Pop culture is equated with mass culture, and criticized for mass producing forms of debased entertainment to numb the American people into submission to their capitalist masters.
This understanding of cultural production, as plausible as it may initially sound, mistakes the average conditions in the entertainment industry for the only conditions.[7] It is certainly true that the majority of people producing films and television shows are not great artists or especially creative. Faced with all sorts of constraints, many of them financial, people working in Hollywood are always tempted to make compromises, to sacrifice whatever artistic integrity they may have begun with, and to work within well-worn formulas that are supposed to deliver mass audiences. But even if most people in Hollywood lack artistic freedom, that does not mean that everyone does. Like all forms of historicism, this kind of culture critique treats a difficulty as if it were an impossibility. No one would deny that, given the demands of the entertainment industry, it is difficult to be genuinely creative in film and television. But one reason we are acutely aware of the widespread absence of creativity in Hollywood is precisely the fact that once in a while someone comes along who breaks the mold and shows what can really be accomplished in film or television. Hollywood’s track record demonstrates that there is nothing inherent in pop culture that simply precludes creative freedom in film and television. As many of the figures I discuss in this book have proven, it is difficult but not impossible to buck the Hollywood system and achieve a high level of artistic success, even in genres that are thought of as the most formulaic (think of what Milch accomplished in Deadwood with the seemingly moribund form of the TV Western). To aesthetic theorists, all the genuine achievements in popular culture have looked impossible—until someone achieved them. That is the difference between culture critics and creative artists. Where the critic sees insurmountable obstacles, the artist sees creative opportunities. Where the critic sees only imprisonment, the artist struggles creatively to find a path to freedom.
The creativity in American pop culture illustrates a general point about freedom. Freedom is not the ability to act without any constraints whatsoever. Given the constraints under which all human beings operate, freedom is the ability to choose how to respond to them. Faced with the Hollywood system, many people choose to compromise with it and work within its limitations, but others resolve to challenge the system, fight for their integrity, and stretch the limits of what can be done in film and television. Human life being as complicated as it is, the choices in Hollywood are never quite this clear-cut and absolute. Most people combine moments of compromise with elements of integrity. The pop culture creators I discuss in this book are generally the ones who have produced some form of interesting work and were willing to struggle against the Hollywood system to do so. I take them seriously as artists and look carefully for what they have to say about important issues. I do not treat them as simply mirroring broader trends in American society or catering to the prejudices of their audiences.[8] There are, in fact, too many ideological disputes within American pop culture for it to be viewed as mechanically reflecting some national consensus. As I show at many points in this book, individual films and television shows are often carrying on a dialogue with each other and disputing very basic issues. Sometimes I make a point about a given film or television show by contrasting its ideological position with that of mainstream pop culture. I am interested precisely in oppositional stances within American pop culture and therefore view many of the figures I discuss as mavericks, deliberately running counter to broader trends in film and television and in American society as a whole.
I cannot prove in advance that my approach is correct and that genuinely creative artists have been at work in film and television. The only proof is this book as a whole, in my detailed analysis of how artistically complex and ideologically sophisticated certain films and television shows can be. Many people have tried to give reasons why film and television are by nature inferior and unsophisticated media. They point to the fact that film and television are generally collaborative enterprises, and do not allow for the individual creative genius that is supposedly responsible for all aesthetic achievement in literature and the fine arts. Or they raise concerns about the haphazardness of creation in the entertainment business, the fact that films and television shows are often produced on the fly and involve a good deal of scrambling to meet deadlines and budgets. How can a television show be a work of art if it was thrown together by a variety of hands and at the last possible moment?
In the introduction, I deal at length with these objections to taking pop culture seriously. On the one hand, it turns out that multiple authorship and haphazard production are more common in literature and the fine arts than is generally supposed. And, on the other hand, the chaotic conditions of production in Hollywood may sometimes result in improving its products in a process of trial and error, involving, among other factors, active feedback from audiences. Lurking behind many critiques of popular culture is the Romantic myth of the creative genius, and the blief that he can produce his masterpieces only in godlike isolation, especially from the debasing effects of the marketplace. In film criticism, this Romantic myth takes the form of the auteur theory, the notion that there are a few great directors, such as Welles, Bergman, Fellini, and Kurosawa, who created their films single-handedly and in opposition to the commercial movie-making system. I deal with the auteur theory in the introduction and in several of the chapters, especially Two, Four, Five, and Eight. I agree with the auteur theory insofar as if maintains that genuine artists can be found working in popular media. As a scholar of Romantic literature and particularly a fan of William Blake, I have always been partial to the idea of the creative genius.
But the more I have studied film and television, the more I have come to realize that we do not need the notion of the solitary genius to authenticate genuine works of art. We are now told by art historians that some of the greatest Rembrandts were not, in fact, painted by Rembrandt, but by some of his very talented students, such as Govert Flinck. Perhaps the most famous example of a “decommissioned” Rembrandt is “The Man with the Golden Helmet” in Berlin. Long regarded as one of Rembrandt’s masterpieces—and hence one of the greatest paintings of all time—the work was re-attributed by the official Rembrandt Research Project in 1985 to a nameless imitator of the Dutch master. Suddenly it seemed to be a lesser work—and experts assumed that it would now fetch a fraction of its former estimated monetary value on the art market. And yet it is still the same painting—and still my favorite “Rembrandt.” This is an example of how what is called the genetic fallacy can distort our view of art. How a work of art comes into being should not affect our judgment of its quality. As Svetlana Alpers has shown, Rembrandt set out to create what we now call “a Rembrandt,” a painting with a certain look.[9] He was evidently able to teach his students how to produce such paintings. He operated a studio, out of which flowed a stream of “Rembrandts,” some entirely by him, some entirely by his students, and some involving collaboration between him and his students. This form of artistic production was by no means unique to Rembrandt. Many of the greatest painters ran studios—Rubens is another notable example—and they left art historians charged with the difficult task of distinguishing the different hands in famous paintings. This is no doubt a fascinating and instructive enterprise, but does it really make a painting a lesser achievement to discover that two artists rather than one had a hand in its creation?
In studying art history, I was struck by the continual use of the word studio, and the connection with Hollywood did not escape me. The auteur theorists contrast the work of a few great directors with the mass production of the Hollywood studio system. And yet we know that some of the greatest paintings in history were products of a studio system. Many of the paintings that hang today in the hallowed halls of museums were originally done on commission, with the “big name” artists scrambling to complete them on time, often enlisting the aid of their students to meet the deadline. One can surely find many differences between the Rembrandt Studio and Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, but there are more similarities than many art historians would like to acknowledge. Cultural critics have developed a kind of reflex antipathy to any form of art that emerges out of commercial conditions. This anti-commercial prejudice is so ingrained that it sometimes produces laughable statements, which betray a complete ignorance of cultural history. A theater director defending her decision not to get involved in filmmaking, said: “[Hollywood films] all seem to be about making money, and I don’t find that terribly interesting. Today in our world, art has to be commercial. That’s a really sad point of view. If Shakespeare had to be commercial, he wouldn’t have written the things he did.”[10] As any passing student of Renaissance drama could have told this director, Shakespeare did write for a commercial theater company and was, in fact, the commercially most successful playwright of his day. He even became a stockholder in the company for which he wrote. Commerce and culture cannot simply be incompatible if the greatest author in any language wrote for a money-making operation.
In several of my chapters, I show that some of the legendary individual geniuses in Hollywood history did, in fact, accept the commercial and collaborative nature of the entertainment business, even the studio system with all its faults. These artists sometimes openly admit that they profited aesthetically from the advice and suggestions of their colleagues and co-workers. In the Have Gun chapter, I demonstrate that the Star Trek universe, which is generally thought to have sprung wholly formed from the lone genius of Gene Roddenberry, in fact developed out of a TV Western he wrote for, but did not create. In the Mars Attacks! chapter, I offer evidence that one of the seemingly purest of contemporary auteurs, Tim Burton, acknowledges that he does not create his films single-handedly; he even expresses gratitude to his financial backers. In the case of my Detour chapter, well after its initial publication, I learned that the film is not the pure invention of its director, Edgar Ulmer, but is based on a published novel and a detailed screenplay, both by Martin Goldsmith. The original French auteur theorists held up Ulmer as an example of a director who managed to place the stamp of his individual genius on all his films (no matter how cheaply or hastily produced). Now some film historians claim that Goldsmith should be regarded as the true auteur of Detour, since he made up the basic story and wrote much of the dialogue. I try to sort out the claims of Ulmer and Goldsmith in the appendix to my Detour chapter, but, once again, I would insist that, as an aesthetic object, the film remains the same, whether one, two, or any number of people created it.
The study of popular culture has suffered greatly from the genetic fallacy. Time and again academics have come up with theories that tell us in advance what films and television shows can and cannot do, supposedly because of the very nature of the media and the conditions that prevail in creating their products. Unfortunately, these theoretical perspectives can blind analysts to what has actually been accomplished in film and television. If you are certain in advance that nothing of artistic value can ever be achieved in these media, you will never make the effort needed to discover if you are wrong. Fortunately, enough great movies were produced in the course of the twentieth century to silence the skeptics about the medium, and a similar recognition of the artistic quality of the best television shows is beginning to spread, even in the academic world. As a sign of the times, Salman Rushdie created a stir in English newspapers when he announced: “I’m in this position where, for the first time in my writing life, I don’t have a novel on the go, but I have a movie and a memoir and a TV series.” It was, indeed, big news when a world-famous novelist decided to work on a science fiction series called The Next People for the Showtime TV network “in the belief that quality TV drama has taken over from film and is comparable to the novel as the best way of widely communicating ideas and stories.”[11]
Ultimately, it is not critics with their theories who determine whether a medium is capable of producing genuine art; that is an issue for real artists to settle, when, as a practical matter, they have to decide whether to work in a given medium or not. What look like the inevitable limits of a medium to academics serve as challenges to artists, who are always searching for new outlets for their creativity, and hence pushing the envelop and breaking through seemingly established boundaries. In an interview, Trey Parker of South Park captured this spirit perfectly: “You can only say ‘you can’t do that’ so many times to Matt [Stone] and me before we’re gonna do it.”[12] Many film theorists in the 1920s argued that cinema is by nature a silent medium. They insisted that talking pictures were not technically feasible, and, even if they were, they would necessarily be inferior to silent movies in what is essentially a visual medium.[13] In 1927, The Jazz Singer proved that talking pictures could be made and succeed big time at the box office. In 1931, Fritz Lang’s M put to rest forever the idea that sound effects could not be an integral part of a film’s artistic impact and a powerful new cinematic resource. As frequently happens in the history of media, the artists proved the critics wrong.
Thus throughout this book, I have tried not to let theoretical presuppositions interfere with my appreciation and understanding of the works I discuss.[14] In the art world, if it looks like a Rembrandt, in some sense it is a Rembrandt.[15] Similarly, in the world of film and television, I am guided by the principle: if it looks like a work of art, it is a work of art, no matter how it came into being. In short, if I find coherence of form and content in a film or a television show, I treat it the way I would any serious work of art. My interpretations generally follow the pattern of what is known as close reading. Despite my theoretical disagreements with the New Criticism (outlined in the introduction), in practical terms I usually focus on how the parts cohere into a whole in the works I discuss. Since the works diverge significantly in terms of artistic quality, I do not expect the same degree of coherence in all the works I treat. Throughout the book I attempt to discriminate between first-rate works (such as Deadwood), worthy I believe to stand comparison with all but the greatest works in other media, and run-of-the-mill Hollywood entertainment (along the lines of Earth vs. the Flying Saucers). Without rehashing centuries of debate in aesthetics, I will simply state that I generally invoke traditional criteria of artistic excellence in my investigations. In discriminating among works, I look for the degree of complexity of plot, character, and theme, and other markers of genuine quality. I do not treat all the works equally. I reserve my detailed analyses for the films and television shows that I believe can stand up to such intense scrutiny. But even mediocre films and television shows may repay serious study, if only to highlight what makes some other works superior.
Despite my attempt to avoid the genetic fallacy, in some cases I have looked into the conditions under which a given film or television show was produced, and have taken those facts into account in my analysis. When possible, I have examined the stated intentions of the people who made the films and television shows, and sometimes factored those details into my interpretations. But basically in this book, I am looking at intentionality, not intentions. I reject “creationism” in aesthetic analysis. Modern biology studies organic form as having a design, without invoking the notion of a designer. That is, we do not need to know a Creator’s intentions to understand the intentionality embodied in a given animal’s form, how its parts fit together to achieve a functional and functioning whole. The theory of evolution tells us that something with intentionality of form can come into being by a random, seemingly undirected, and even messy process that occurs over time. While acknowledging all the differences between aesthetic and biological form, I believe that we can use the evolution of life as a model for the coming into being of much art (though not all)—an issue I discuss in the introduction.[16]
The creation of art may at times be an example of spontaneous order—an achievement that does not have to take place in a single moment of perfectly planned creation. Instead it can involve a process, with the work evolving over time, in a feedback loop that requires a good deal of revision and correction, and a number of different hands may be involved in the process. Thus we should not reject the possibility of genuine art in popular culture simply because its conditions of production do not fit the Romantic model of the artist as solitary creator. As I show in the introduction, at times Romantic poetry itself did not fit this model. The auteur theorists were correct to find intentionality in popular culture and to treat individual films as works of art. Their mistake was to think that intentionality can be the product only of a single consciousness. As in many areas of human life, the working conditions in film and television can sometimes permit different people to collaborate in productive and aesthetically beneficial ways, in effect merging their individual intentions into a larger and more complex artistic intentionality.
Thus in many respects spontaneous order is the unifying idea of this book—popular culture often celebrates its power in American society and is itself an example of that power. In short, I am offering a “bottom up” model of culture--genuine works of art often bubble up out of the most unlikely places, even the seemingly lowest strata of pop culture. For a variety of reasons, the greatest artistic energy can sometimes be found in the commercial media, which continually offer artists new opportunities for original and even groundbreaking work, as well as the potential for substantial and sometimes spectacular financial rewards. The cultural elites who set themselves up as the analysts, evaluators, and custodians of art generally work with a “top down” model of culture that mirrors their own elitism. Championing what they think of as high culture, these elites imagine that aesthetic achievement can result only from elite artists working in splendid isolation, placed well above the hubbub of commercial life. These elitists cannot believe that commerce sometimes can give birth to art, and infuse it with life. Just as the commercial world can be creative in economic terms, it can also be in aesthetic terms. The seeming chaos in film and television production sometimes—not always—results in genuine works of art.
The Hollywood system, with all its commercial demands, is, then, not simply a block to artistic impulses, although it surely is always a threat to them. The artists I discuss, especially Ford, Burton, Scorsese, Carter, and Milch, have had to fight for their creative freedom in Hollywood, sometimes bitterly, but they have achieved it, at least as much as artists in any other media have. If, as the Marxists claim, Hollywood directors are subject to the demands of the American bourgeoisie, Rembrandt was no less dependent on the whims of Dutch burghers for the commissions that kept him in business. Again, freedom is not the absence of all constraints, but the option to struggle against them, and even to make them work in one’s favor.[17] As disheartening as the spectacle of the average level of Hollywood’s output may be, the best that has been created over the years in American film and television is really an edifying sight. It is a tribute to the vitality of popular culture and to what freedom in America—commercial freedom—can produce. If one took, for example, the twenty-five greatest movies produced by Hollywood in the twentieth century, they would, as a group, be comparable in artistic worth to a similar sampling from almost any other moment in cultural history, such as the twenty-five greatest Victorian novels or nineteenth-century Italian operas.[18]
It should not be surprising, then, that American popular culture has often celebrated the freedom that is the ground of its own artistic achievement. The greatest talents in film and television have been mavericks, and they have been attracted to the maverick heroes who have been admired in America from its beginnings in a revolutionary movement. Martin Scorsese is a movie entrepreneur; it is no accident that, in The Aviator, he identifies with Howard Hughes as a business entrepreneur, especially since one of Hughes’s businesses was the motion picture industry. The creative spirits in popular culture value their freedom as artists, precisely because they have had to struggle so hard to achieve it. I have been guided throughout this book by the thought that no idea is more basic to America than freedom, and that popular culture can teach us that freedom is a perpetual challenge, something valuable that we must constantly struggle to maintain in our world.
A Note on Organization
Each part of this book begins with a brief preface that explains how the individual chapters fit together and what the part contributes to the book as a whole. It might, however, be helpful to give a preliminary outline of the book’s structure.
The introduction serves two purposes. First, it offers a methodological justification for the way I analyze individual films and television shows as works of art. It attempts to counter the many arguments that the conditions of production in popular culture prevent any kind of genuine artistic achievement in this realm. Second, the introduction explains the idea of spontaneous order, which is central to this book and recurs in several of the chapters, especially the ones on Deadwood, Mars Attacks!, and South Park.
The first part deals with the most American of all genres, the Western, and the one that has traditionally been devoted to exploring the problematic nature of freedom. Taking up The Searchers, Have Gun-Will Travel, and Deadwood, this part examines and contrasts three very different visions of the relation between freedom and order in the Wild West as imagined in American popular culture.
The second part takes up an improbable trio of subjects: Mars Attacks!, The Aviator, and South Park. But they work together to spotlight the libertarian strain in American pop culture. All three works champion anti-establishment and anti-authority figures, and give a dim view of government intervention in American life. The maverick creators of these works appear to sympathize with the maverick spirit that is basic to the popular conception of the American character.
The third part offers Edgar Ulmer as a case study of the paradoxes and contradictions of American popular culture. For one thing, he was a European, who more or less blundered into the world of Hollywood, and who therefore reveals how foreign influences are actually basic to American pop culture, despite its appearance of insularity. Ulmer could plausibly be offered as a prime example of the way the commercial system of Hollywood trapped and ruined a potential artist, and yet many film historians and theorists take the opposite view—that he was an auteur who triumphed artistically over the studio system. In The Black Cat and Detour, I analyze how Ulmer’s distinctive perspective on America as a European changed over the years, especially in his understanding of freedom and popular culture itself.
The fourth part examines the interaction between popular culture and the larger world around it, focusing on the impact of 9/11 on American films and especially television shows, but dealing with other anxieties of the contemporary globalized world as well. I contrast what was predicted at the time of 9/11 for the future of American pop culture with what actually developed in the following years. The disasters of 9/11 were supposed to produce a new wave of patriotism and reunify pop culture in support of the American government. But in an illustration of the oppositional and contrarian nature of pop culture, many films and television shows have raised serious doubts about government reactions to 9/11, specifically the erosion of civil liberties as a result of the War on Terror. The way pop culture has reacted to 9/11 is one more chapter in the continuing story of how freedom has battled with other values in American history—security, order, stability—and thus this subject rounds out my discussion of the central issue of this book.
A Note on the Notes
Even though this book deals with seemingly non-academic material, such as cartoons and flying saucers, it is a work of scholarship and the chapters are heavily annotated. General readers, or anyone just interested in what I have to say about these films and television shows, should feel free to skip the notes. As a scholar, I need to document my assertions wherever possible, and to acknowledge some of the scholarly controversies that have developed over the subjects I discuss, as well as to anticipate objections to my argument and to point out further lines of enquiry. Anyone outside the academic field of popular culture would be surprised to learn how much scholarship on the subject has already been published, or how much archival material is available for studying individual films and television shows. I myself was amazed (and relieved) that I was easily able to obtain the screenplay of Detour, a film that was all but ignored by critics (and certainly by scholars) when it was released in 1945. My notes, as extensive as they may be, actually represent only a fraction of the research that went into the creation of this book. For those who are interested, I want to give my readers some sense of how serious the study of popular culture has become. At the same time, however, I am always worried that studying pop culture will become deadly serious, and thus lose its peculiar charm--and enjoyment. Accordingly, I have tried to isolate the more scholarly side of my enterprise in the notes, while, as in Gilligan Unbound, having some fun with (and sometimes at the expense of) the films and television shows I discuss in the body of the chapters. I have always believed that the academic study of the entertainment business should remain entertaining itself.
Notes
My epigraph (spoken by the character Jack Cade) is from William Shakespeare, Henry VI, Part Two, IV.ii.189-90 in The Riverside Shakespeare, ed. G. Blakemore Evans (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1974).
[1] See Joseph A. Schumpeter, Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy (New York: Harper, 1975), 81-86.
[2] The person most responsible for popularizing the term libertarian was Murray Rothbard. See especially his book For a New Liberty: The Libertarian Manifesto (New York: Macmillan, 1978).
[3] It is, for example, present in nineteenth-century American fiction, notably in Mark Twain. Many of the characteristics I find in American popular culture are already evident in Twain. In particular, several of the charges made against contemporary pop culture were made against his work during his lifetime—that his books are vulgar, obscene, blasphemous, sloppily written, and not fit to be read by decent people, let alone children. And now those books are regarded as American classics. On the question of what constitutes the greatness of America, Twain has his hero make a telling observation at the beginning of Chapter XXXIII of A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court, where he condemns the foolish disposition of countries like England to honor their worthless political elites at the expense of the private enterprise inventors who actually benefit humanity: “With the spirit of prophecy upon me, I could look into the future and see [England] erect statues and monuments to her unspeakable Georges and other royal and noble clothes-horses, and leave unhonored the creators of this world—after God—Gutenberg, Watt, Arkwright, Whitney, Morse, Stephenson, Bell” (Mark Twain, A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court, [Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 1997], 257). With their celebration of the entrepreneur, these words are very much in the spirit of The Aviator and South Park; this passage appropriately comes at the beginning of a chapter that defends free trade, and, of course, the Yankee ingenuity Twain’s hero embodies is just another name for entrepreneurship. For more on Twain and American pop culture, see Chapter Six, on South Park.
[4] On this subject, see Lawrence W. Levine, Highbrow/Lowbrow: The Emergence of Cultural Hierarchy in America (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1988) and LeRoy Ashby, With Amusement For All: A History of American Popular Culture Since 1830 (Lexington, KY: University Press of Kentucky, 2006).
[5] For a case study of government regulation of television, see my essay “The Road to Cultural Serfdom: America’s First Television Czar,” in Back on the Road to Serfdom: The Resurgence of Statism, ed. Thomas E. Woods, Jr. (Wilmington, DE: ISI, 2010), 171-87, 216-19.
[6] Paul Hindemith once confessed to his fellow composer, Otto Luening, that 80% of his musical compositions were bad. When Luening asked why Hindemith tolerated this failure rate, the creator of masterpieces such as Mathis der Maler replied: “Because without the 80 percent, there would never have been the 20 percent” (quoted in Richard Taruskin, The Danger of Music and Other Anti-Utopian Essays [Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2010], 60). Hindemith is unusually candid in admitting that artistic creation is a hit-or-miss proposition, and that a large number of failures is the precondition for a small number of successes. If anything, Hindemith probably underestimates the proportion of failures to successes in cultural production. The aim of criticism is to separate the wheat from the chaff, but in the process critics often forget that the wheat could not come into being without the chaff. They end up with an elitist vision of high culture as a realm of pure, isolated masterpieces, wholly cut off from and unrelated to any broader cultural context.
[7] I cite examples of this kind of criticism and develop a further critique of the Frankfurt School in Chapter Eight, on Ulmer’s Detour.
[8] Thus, I differ from Frankfurt School theorists when I discuss the presentation of capitalist entrepreneurs in works such as The Aviator and South Park. Instead of analyzing the creators of these works as lackeys of capitalism, compelled by the commercial nature of the media to support commerce, I examine the ways in which their works effectively make a cogent argument for free enterprise. This option is not open to Frankfurt School theorists because they do not believe that a cogent defense of free enterprise is possible. The Frankfurt School theorists do not deal with an obvious objection to their view of American pop culture as pro-capitalist—the fact that capitalists are so often portrayed as villains in films and television shows. I discuss this matter in Chapter Five, on The Aviator, and Chapter Six, on South Park.
[9] See Svetlana Alpers, Rembrandt’s Enterprise: The Studio and the Market (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988), 59-60: “[Rembrandt was] the head of a large studio operation. He certainly had over fifty students and/or assistants during the course of his career. And others were attracted to his style. He engendered, nurtured, and sold the Rembrandt mode to the Dutch public. . . . From our new knowledge of his studio entourage, we can conclude that for most of his life Rembrandt was not a lone genius but the setter of a certain (and, for a while, a fashionable) pictorial style.” For a discussion of the case of “The Man with the Golden Helmet,” see 1-6, 121-22.
[10] Janet McTeer, as quoted in Jane Wollman Rusoff, “Bad Shakespeare is ‘good fun’”, CityTalk, May 25, 2001. See V. F. Perkins, Film on Film: Understanding and Judging Movies (New York: Da Capo, 1993), 161: “The belief that popularity and excellence are incompatible dies hard. It survives in the pejorative undertones of the word ‘commercial’ and in the equation of significance with solemnity and obscurity. It survives in the blanket condemnation . . . of whole genres of popular cinema, from Biblical spectacles to horror movies, from science fiction pictures to Westerns. It survives, particularly, in the notion that the cinema offers two distinct phenomena, one, important, called art, and the other, trivial, known as entertainment. In its crudest form it amounts to the belief that the quality of a film is inversely proportional to the size of its audience.”
[11] Vanessa Thorpe, “Salman Rushdie says TV dramas comparable to novels,” The Observer, June 12, 2011, http://www.guardian.co.uk/2011/jun/12/salman-rushdie-write-tv-drama (consulted June 23, 2011). For more examples of serious novelists writing for television, see Craig Fehrman, “The Channeling of the Novel,” The New York Times, December 16, 2011.
[12] Mickey Rapkin, “They Killed Kenny. . . and Revolutionized Comedy,” GQ, February 2006, 146.
[13] I discuss the attachment of aesthetic theorists to the silent medium in my essay “The Fickle Muse: The Unpredictability of Culture,” in American Culture in Peril, ed. Charles W. Dunn (Lexington, KY: University Press of Kentucky, 2012).
[14] I have also tried not to burden this book with theoretical analysis of the nature of popular culture or arguments against alternative views. For my thoughts on these matters, with responses to specific theorists in the area, see my essays: 1) “The Art in the Popular,” Wilson Quarterly, Vol. 25, No. 1 (Summer 2001): 26-39 (with specific reference to Plato) 2) “Is There Intelligent Life on Television?”, Claremont Review of Books, Fall 2008: 56-59 (with specific reference to Adorno and Horkheimer) 3) “Get with the Program: The Medium Is Not the Message,” Academic Questions 23 (2010): 435-59 (with specific reference to Marshall McLuhan). For more theoretical reflections on the study of popular culture, and the special difficulties involved, see “Notes on Method” in my book Gilligan Unbound: Pop Culture in the Age of Globalization (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2001), xxix-xli.
[15] I am setting aside the issue of deliberate forgery, although even it raises some interesting philosophical questions about art. See, for example, Denis Dutton, The Art Instinct: Beauty, Pleasure, and Human Emotion (New York: Bloomsbury, 2009), 177-88.
[16] For a fuller discussion of the relevance of Darwinian biology to understanding artistic form, see my essay “The Poetics of Spontaneous Order: Austrian Economics and Literary Criticism,” in Literature and the Economics of Liberty: Spontaneous Order in Culture, ed. Paul A. Cantor and Stephen Cox (Auburn, AL: Ludwig von Mises Institute, 2009), 21-62.
[17] One of the most judicious of American auteur theorists, Andrew Sarris, is eloquent on just this point: “The fascination of Hollywood movies lies in their performance under pressure. Actually, no artist is ever completely free, and art does not necessarily thrive as it becomes less constrained” (The American Cinema: Directors and Directions, 1929-1968 [New York: Da Capo, 1996], 31). See also Perkins, Film as Film, 172: “John Huston said: ‘Some of the worst pictures I’ve made, I’ve made since I’ve had complete freedom.’ Creative freedom does not guarantee, nor does industrial production rule out, a good result. In the cinema we are involved with a product, not a system of production. We can reach a judgment without knowing how a film was made.”
[18] The irony, of course, is that the Victorian novel and nineteenth-century Italian opera were the pop culture of their day, and resulted from a largely commercial system of production. Only time has elevated the Victorian novel and nineteenth-century Italian opera to the level of elite culture, and led many critics to forget their commercial roots. As we have seen, Shakespeare also worked in the chief medium of commercial pop culture of his era. It is remarkable how many of the works that are now regarded as artistic masterpieces grew out of what was viewed—and often condemned—as vulgar pop culture in their day. There have been important artistic movements that were elitist even at their origin, such as French neoclassical drama or modernist poetry, painting, and music. One might call this “the hothouse model of culture.” In the alternate model, cultural works grow out of the same soil, only some flourish and come to tower over the others. In the elitist model, true works of art must be developed in isolation from the cultural mainstream, under fundamentally different (chiefly non-commercial) conditions. Whether this elitist model generates works superior in quality to those with popular origins is a very interesting question, which I leave to my readers to ponder.
Related Work
