The Formation of Mass Culture
Part II: Modernism and the
Middlebrow
Making of the Modern World
Week 19: Smyth
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WINDtlPXmmE
“[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
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
• 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 which
supplanted painting,
sculpture, poetry,
performing, architecture,
music, dance
• American arts do not
imitate style, narratives,
themes of European art
• Emphasizes virtuosity
and kinetic energy of
American arts
The Liveliest Art
Black Responses to Birth of a Nation
• Oscar Micheaux,
Within Our Gates
(1920)
• Retells racial drama
in story of white
man’s rape of black
woman
• http://www.youtube.c
om/watch?v=h1E0Nr
cnwAE
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
Mixed messages
Modern Media, 1920-60 (a.k.a. the
Culture Industries)
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Film (beginning of worldwide
Hollywood dominance after WWI;
corporate consolidation of industry)
Radio (a few mavericks start it;
goes corporate in 1920s; ad
sponsors)
Tabloid Journalism (chain papers,
syndicates and Hearst’s ‘yellow’
appeal to the masses
Photojournalism (the rise of Time,
Life and Fortune)
Comics (Krazy Kat national art of
America according to cultural critic
Gilbert Seldes)
Advertising (est. as corporate
industry in 19th C but takes off in
1920s as corporations market to an
increasingly consumer and imagedriven society)
All these major industries are
concerned with mass production
and marketing, constructing the
idea of modernity, and often
reinforcing mainstream white
identities
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=8Xjr2hn
OHiM
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PYgi
AmdFjEI
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
Spread of Masscult: Television
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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
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
The ‘New’ Interconnected
Media
• Blockbusters (supported by product ads
and multinational corporations) largely presold 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
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b. 1975 with Spielberg’s Jaws
Aimed at global rather than national market; broad audiences, simple action
stories; the franchise
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 online 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 postwar 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?