The Formation of Mass CulturePart II: Modernism and the

Middlebrow

Making of the Modern WorldWeek 19

“[A] culture must finally be interpreted in relation to its underlying system of production.”Raymond Williams“Everyday life is defined contradictions: illusion and truth, power and helplessness; the intersection of the sector man controls and the sector he does not control.” Henri Lefebvre

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WINDtlPXmmE

Modernism and Mass Culture• Industrialization,

urbanization, immigration of 19thC fuel 20thC modernism

• Rejection of traditional Victorian culture

• Creation of new select canon• Faith in individual work of art• Fascination with race and

culture: connection with appropriation of 19thC and searches for ‘national’ purity

• Similar historical context; use of technology

• Incorporation of familiar themes of Victorian culture

• Appeal to widest audience

• Mass-produced image (Walter Benjamin)

• Miriam Hansen’s term: “vernacular modernism”

Modernism• Cultural movement of

first half 20thC• avant-garde rejection of

Victorianism• ambivalent attraction to

industry and technology• form over content:

racial implications?• benefits from immigrant

cultures• Walter Benn Michaels:

nativism, modernism

• Paul Strand, Pepper (1932)

Gilbert Seldes and the Lively Arts

• Seven Lively Arts (1924)• Praises new modern

American arts of comic strip, jazz, cinema

• American arts do not imitate style, narratives, themes of European art

• Emphasizes virtuosity and kinetic energy of American arts

Motion Pictures• Working-class origins• Gradual consolidation of small nickelodeon businesses

into studios• Gradual trend toward stars and adaptations of best-selling

literary properties• Connection between popular literature, journalism,

advertising, different appeals to male/female spectatorship• By 1915 and Birth of a Nation, self-consciousness about

cinema as art and historical text• Critics divided; Seldes sees its potential as liveliest art• Attempts to censor westerns, early gangster films, and

boxing matches

The Liveliest Art

A Lively Art or transnational culture industry?

• Silent films appeal across nations through 1928• Chaplin’s popularity in Japan, Russia, US (working-class audiences)• Mary Pickford first woman studio ‘head’: UA (1920)• An evening’s cheap entertainment: anyone could afford a movie• Early emphasis on ‘exoticism’ of stars, expatriate communities in

southern California• But Hollywood also markets ideal ‘white’ modern American woman

(Gloria Swanson), working-class girl (Clara Bow) and average American guy (Gary Cooper)

• Studios unite as major corporations in 1920s: production, distribution, exhibition controlled from the top down (Paramount, MGM, Warner Bros., etc.)

• Work closely with other industries to mass-market films: fashion, advertising, journalism, fiction

• Diversification: all studios have news services and cartoons• Corporate, sales and production offices all over Europe• Ties to government agencies, Department of Defense, consular

agencies • Films censored in US to avoid inciting foreign audiences to revolt

The Other Market

Sergei Eisenstein’s different interpretation of content and form, 1925

Hollywood dominance• Gilbert Seldes and Charlie Chaplin reject dichotomy

between art and mass culture—call themselves “high lowbrows”

• Often bifurcates along European/American lines• Critics like William Allen White call for authentic national

popular culture; reject modernist canons– and also the rest of the world

• Early attempts at workingclass/women’s/integrated culture shift: neo-liberal masculine dominance

• Global dominance of Hollywood: appropriation of other national histories; media manipulation; cultural vampirism and cannibalisation of old films

The New Empire

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8Xjr2hnOHiM

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PYgiAmdFjEI

Masscult and Midcult• Clement Greenberg, “Avant-Garde and Kitsch”

(1939): art versus consumerism• Dwight MacDonald (1960):• Masscult “an instrument of domination,”

mechanistic, without standards, popular—not to be confused with “folk art” and working-class culture

• Midcult will infect true High Culture, and its values “instead of being transitional —‘the price of progress’—may now themselves become a debased, permanent standard.”

Middlebrows• Joan Shelley Rubin (1992) notes that cultural study

focuses on either high or low, but not the median culture Middlebrow writers in 1920s at odds with Lost Generation, high-art moderns

• Longstanding contempt for middlebrows (women writers) by cultural conservative Dwight MacDonald

• Middlebrow culture more powerful than either—heritage of Mathew Arnold (Culture and Anarchy, 1882) and persistence of Victorian values of cultural improvement

• Book-of-the-Month Club, Saturday Review of Literature, Pulitzer Prize, Alexander Wolcott’s radio show, historical films, Clifton Fadiman’s “Great Literature,” BBC Radio 4 lists all 20th-century outcroppings of “middlebrow culture.”

• Contemporary middlebrow tv (Slate): Mad Men, Breaking Bad, Sopranos, The Wire

Is Mass Culture Dangerous?• Chicago exhibitors censor Jesse James films, 1908 and Jack

Johnson fights, 1910• Film’s Production Code Administration (1930, 1934) and other

national censor boards threaten to ban films from theatres unless industry follows prevailing moral ‘codes.’ Pornography goes mainstream in 1970s when old censorship restrictions and ratings are obliterated

• Literature from Hamlet to The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn to Gone with the Wind banned by community educators beginning 1870s

• 1939: Billie Holliday’s record company, Columbia, refused to release recording of Strange Fruit for fear of alienating mainstream racist audiences: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h4ZyuULy9zs

• Radio and TV in US regulated since 1934 by Federal Communications Commission (UK’s equivalent of ITC). TV adopts Hollywood’s old Hays code. Sponsors support network programming and withdrawing support can be its own form of censorship

• Censoring the internet difficult because of free speech claims, transnational flow of information and pseudo-anonymity

Spread of Masscult: Television• 1925 John L. Baird demonstrates his early model for television at Selfridge’s• Broadcast television programmes date from 1928• 1934 Philo Farnsworth’s electrical television• First commercially manufactured TV set: Germany, 1934• 1941: First televised ad aired in US during a baseball game• Television takes over after WWII and goes domestic. 0.5% of U.S.

households have TV set in 1946, rises to 55.7% in 1954, and 90% in 1962. In Britain, 15,000 television households in 1947, 1.4 million in 1952, and 15.1 million in 1968.

• Transcontinental broadcasts, 1951• Broadcasting from 1950s combination of variety shows, Western serials and

soap operas• Unlike individual films, tv often at mercy of group of producers,

shareholders, and ratings• Film profits decline; Hollywood tries to initiate cultural hierarchy of own—tv

new “low”• Playhouse 90, Edward R. Murrow programmes attempt to reach select

cultural audiences• Entertainment blogs give viewers the illusion of textual participation and

productive engagement

The ‘New’ Interconnected Media• Blockbusters (supported by product ads and

multinational corporations) largely pre-sold content and audiences (adaptations of best sellers)

• MTV (Music Television: video ‘narratives’ have ties to films; theme songs; iTunes)

• Video games (b. 1958, with Tennis for Two; 1980 Pac-Man Arcade game;1989 Nintendo Gameboy; biggest markets Japan, UK, US); ties to major blockbusters like The Lord of the Rings trilogy

The Hollywood Blockbuster• b. 1975 with Spielberg’s Jaws• Aimed at global rather than national market; broad audiences, simple action

stories• Violence integral to genre; often adaptation from best-selling novel or comic-

strip • Now with theatre attendance down (US:, UK: Global), Hollywood has made

most of its money in past decade through network contracts, foreign distribution rights and DVD sales

• Even with censorship boards gone, trend has been toward children’s entertainment: between 1989-2003, the average gross of an R-rated film was 7 million (US); G-films make an average of 79 million (US)

• Hollywood challenged in recent years by national cinemas with art market niches and China and India. However, Hollywood still has entrenched mechanisms to maintain its dominance: Bollywood sold 3.6 billion tickets and had total revenues (theater tickets, DVDs, television etc) of $1.3 billion, whereas Hollywood films sold 2.6 billion tickets and generated total revenues (all formats, DVDs, etc) of $51 billion.

Lucas/Spielberg and the Age of Blockbusters

Above: Harrison Ford as Indiana Jones in Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981)

Left: Grauman’s Premiere of Star Wars (1977) and above, Alec Guinness as Obi-wan (mass culture hires high art)

Women, Modernism, and Hollywood

• Classical theory sees women as victims of visual system—looked at, exploited

• But: films cater to women’s specular fantasies (male stars)

• Film industry’s links to women’s literature Melodrama lets women have it both ways

• Female stars: empowerment– women are made not born—de Beauvoir

Postmodernism (1945-)

• Above: Marilyn and Madonna as Marilyn

• Above and below left: Marilyn in 1953 and reproduced by Andy Warhol shortly after her death in 1962 in the first of his assembly-line silkscreens

Men in Grey Flannel Suits: Mass Culture and the Crisis of Masculine

Identity

• Selling corporate culture: Ogilvy’s Hathaway shirt campaign

• Sloan Wilson, The Man in the Grey Flannel Suit (1955): modern man nothing but an empty suit

• Vance Packard, The Hidden Persuaders (1957)

“Weak Faces” and Flannel Suits• North by Northwest (Alfred

Hitchcock, 1959)• Fragility of modern identity and

social status• Consequences of post-war

wealth• Cold War cultures• Part of a wider fascination with

spies, surveillance and the survival of individual in webs of post-national power (James Bond franchise, 1953-)

• Return of our fascination with allegedly conservative post-war era (Mad Men, 2005-)

Reconciling Mass Culture?• High art (defined by Clement Greenberg) now overtaken

by mass culture in academic study; rejection of elitism• Post-structuralist deconstructive criticism breaks down

unified works of art, canons, and grand narratives (or the meta-narrative)

• Middlebrow creed fractures along conflict between creating a great cultural canon and selling it—reconciling desire for both high and low

• But in a postmodern age, are all cultural texts simply a function of the demands and controls of global capitalism? Your illusion of choice in a corporate supermarketplace of culture (Fredric Jameson)

• Can popular culture challenge dominant stereotypes, ideologies, perceptions, imagined histories, or does it simply reflect the prevailing constructed taste?