Creating Culture

How to cultivate the arts when the old rules need not apply.

Nick Gillespie, Jesse Walker, Brian Doherty, Charles Paul Freund, Charles Oliver & Frederick Turner from the December 1997 issue

(Page 6 of 6)

Charles Oliver

There's no doubt much American popular culture traffics in sex or violence. And for as long as there has been popular culture, there have been moralists who decry its effects on society. Fortunately, some researchers have bothered to actually examine such books, music, and movies--and the way audiences use these things. The two books discussed below provide a way of talking about sex and violence in slasher films and porno movies that is very different from the usual screeds against such seemingly unredeemable and undifferentiated "filth."

In Men, Women, and Chainsaws (1992), literature professor Carol J. Clover looks at some of the most disreputable movies there are, the slasher films so enjoyed by teenaged boys. She finds that, far from critics' assertions, these films don't invite the audience to identify with the sadism of the villain. Rather, the audience puts itself psychologically in the position of the suffering victims.

Clover came to that conclusion by literally watching teenagers as they view these films. What she found were not mindless zombies passively absorbing bloody images, but viewers who were aware of the conventions of the genre and who made watching such films ritualistic group activities: They talked to the screen and commented to each other on the action. Clover theorizes that such films offer moviegoers a way to deal with primal fears, especially their fear about the weakness of their own flesh. By identifying with the victims, viewers are engaging in empathy, not objectification. And, she points out, the appeal of these films reaches far beyond adolescent boys. While slasher films have typically been low-budget, independent efforts, Hollywood has tapped into the genre to revitalize its own efforts. Films as different as Thelma and Louise and The Silence of the Lambs have used narrative structures, camera angles, and themes common to the low-budget horror film.

In Hardcore (1989), film theorist Linda Williams tackles pornographic movies and shows that not all sexually explicit films are the same. Over the 80-plus years of the genre's existence, it has undergone a number of changes, responding to new developments in technology, to social and legal acceptance of sexuality, and to the evolving nature of its audience.

The earliest stag films were one- or two-reel affairs, usually nothing more than visual dirty jokes. They were designed to be shown in male gatherings such as lodge meetings or bachelor parties. There's no mistaking them for the feature-length films that came of age in the 1970s and that are still staples of adult pay-
per-view TV channels. These were to be shown in theaters, often to mixed audiences, and they mimicked standard film structures.

Neither stags nor features can compare to the loops shown in peep-show booths or the all-sex videos produced today. Each serves a different audience and each serves a different need. It's this focus on the role of the audience that is the most interesting aspect of Williams's work: She shows that the viewer is far from passive but is in fact an active interpreter of the images, using them not just for sexual arousal but also to deal with his or her own questions about gender politics and sexual identity.

Contributing Editor Charles Oliver writes for Investor's Business Daily.

Brian Doherty

Cultural conservatives and NEA supporters may lament the fact for different reasons, but culture today is defined by a range of options that allows unprecedented room for more and more of anyone's version of the good, the bad, and the ugly. The contemporary scene supports an enormous range of cultural creators and consumers, and even carves roomy niches for commercially marginal products. Here are three books that give historical perspective, insider insight, and forward-looking examples of how our culture machine operates.

Two-Bit Culture: The Paperbacking of America (1984), by Kenneth C. Davis, tells the tale of a technological and marketing innovation--the paperback book--that changed the reading world by bringing both ancient classics and modern trash (and vice versa?) to more people more cheaply than ever before. Davis begins with the original innovator, Pocket Books, which started in 1939 with 10 titles that included Shakespeare's tragedies, an Agatha Christie mystery, Samuel Butler's The Way of All Flesh, and Bambi. "This undertaking," Davis writes, "was another amalgam of that peculiar American genius for combining culture, commerce, and a little technology....[T]he world of books ...would never be the same." Davis shows how cheap production techniques and wide audiences make room for more of everything, and he ought to soothe many a cultural crank's fervid agonies over the coarsening and limitations of modern culture: It's all out there for the choosing. Of course, to some folks, that's exactly the problem.

Virgil Thomson: An Autobiography (1966), is an elegant and witty insider account of how to thrive while purveying arts that don't set the commercial world on fire--in Thomson's case, modern American art music. Thomson relied largely on the time-honored artist's perquisite of patronage from wealthy people; he also received some government funds through the New Deal Works Projects Administration, which fired the free-spirited Thomson when he took an unapproved trip to Paris in search of various artist friends and muses. He later became a well-known music critic for the New York Herald Tribune and even helped create a performance-rights society for composers. Thus this book serves as a thorough, if idiosyncratic, account of how the machine of uncommercial music operates. In the modern cultural cornucopia--even in the midst of the 1930s Depression--"uncommercial" music can survive, when people have the wherewithal to follow their eccentric tastes.

The Factsheet Five Zine Reader (1997), edited by R. Seth Friedman, is an anthology of writings from modern 'zines, that latest example of the irrepressible outpourings of ground-level culture in a society where the means of (re)production are cheap and widespread. Not everything in the book is great writing, by any means. But it's a zesty smorgasbord of what's out there among unedited, un-gatekeepered one-man "publishing companies." And the collection's very existence, published by a Random House subsidiary, vividly illustrates that the dominant culture barons are indeed open to invasions from those who start as outsider barbarians.

REASON Assistant Editor Brian Doherty runs Cherry Smash Records, a small independent record company.