Arthur Asa Berger The Same Old Story 1
As Barthes argued [in Mythologies], the themes of humanities earliest
stories, known as myths, continue to permeate and inform pop culture’s story-telling efforts.
As in the myths of Prometheus, Hercules, and other ancient heroes, Superman’s exploits
revolve around a universal mythic theme—the struggle of Good and Evil. This is what makes
Superman, or any action hero for that matter, so intuitively appealing to modern
audiences….The word “myth” derives from the Greek mythos: “word,” “speech,” “tale of the
gods.” It can be defined as a narrative in which the characters are gods, heroes, and mystical
beings, in which the plot is about the origin of things or about metaphysical events in human
life, and in which the setting is a metaphysical world juxtaposed against the real world. In the
beginning stages of human cultures, myths functioned as genuine “narrative theories” of the
world. That is why all cultures have created them to explain their origins….The use of mythic
themes and elements in media representations has become so widespread that it is hardly
noticed any longer, despite Barthes’ cogent warnings in the late 1950s. Implicit myths about
the struggle for Good, of the need for heroes to lead us forward, and so on and so forth,
constitute the narrative underpinnings of TV programmes, blockbuster movies, advertisements
and commercials, and virtually anything that gets “media air time.” (2002:47-48)
Marcel Danesi, Understanding Media Semiotics
Arthur Asa Berger The Same Old Story 2
Arthur Asa Berger
The Same Old Story
Speculations on Myth and Media
Will the new electronic media lead to the end of reading? Will “old
fashioned” print narratives become obsolete as legions of children and adolescent
abandon comic books, stories and novels to spend all their time watching television
and fiddling with Gameboys and various game-playing mini-supercomputers like the
X-Box and Playstation? These questions might seem reasonable, since there has been
an incredible rise in the popularity of video games, for example. But it is unlikely that
we will abandon other “old” media and replace them with “new” media. Just as
television didn’t destroy radio and radio didn’t destroy newspapers, video games are
unlikely to turn print (and the narratives they carry) and other electronic media into
niche media. One reason the “old” media will continue to flourish, I believe, is
because they are full of narratives that do such a good job of providing us with
modernized and camouflaged versions of ancient myths, of dealing with our need for
living mythically.
Narratives Pervade Our Media and Our Lives
We have to make a distinction between stories, that is narratives, and the
media that make these stories available to people. The fact is that narratives, of one
Arthur Asa Berger The Same Old Story 3
sort or another, pervade the media. For example, in his book The Age of Television,
Martin Esslin estimated, in 1982, that the average male television viewer watched
more than 12 hours of drama per week and the average female watched almost 16
hours of drama per week. The average American, he suggested, “sees the equivalent
of five to six full length stage plays a week.” (1982:7)
That’s because, he explains, television—the most popular medium—is
essentially dramatic. He writes: (1982:7)
One the most obvious level television is a dramatic medium simply because a
large proportion of the material it transmits is in the form of traditional drama
mimetically represented by actors and employing plot, dialogue, character,
gesture, costume—the whole panoply of dramatic means of expression.
If you look at television from the perspective of a dramatic critic, Esslin suggests, you
can gain a better understanding of television’s essence as a dramatic medium (this
applies to the cinema, as well) and various aspects of its social, psychological, and
cultural impact.
We swim, like fish, in a sea of narratives—or, to use Michel de Certeau’s
metaphor, we walk, all day and every day, through a forest of narrativities. As de
Certeau explains in The Practice of Everyday Life: (1984:186)
From morning to night, narrations constantly haunt streets and buildings.
They articulate our existences by teaching us what they must be. They
"cover the event," that is to say, they make our legends (legenda, what is to
be read and said) out of it. Captured by the radio (the voice is the law) as
soon as he awakens, the listener walks all day long through the forest of
narrativities from journalism, advertising, and television narrativities that still
find time, as he is getting ready for bed, to slip a few final messages under
the portals of sleep. Even more than the God told about by the theologians of
earlier days, these stories have a providential and predestining function: they
organize in advance our work, our celebrations, and even our dreams. Social
Arthur Asa Berger The Same Old Story 4
life multiplies the gestures and modes of behavior (im)printed by narrative
models; it ceasely [sic] reproduces and accumulates "copies" of stories. Our
society has become a recited society, in three senses: it is defined by stories
(recits, the fables constituted by our advertising and informational media), by
citations of stories, and by the interminable recitation of stories.
We are, it seems, story-making and story-loving beings and these stories do more than
amuse and entertain us—they teach us about life, they offer models to imitate, and
they can, in some cases, reinforce our battered egos. There is good reason, then, why
narratives are so dear to us.
Narratives, of every genre, pervade our lives—from the conversations we
have with friends to the television dramas and films we watch. It is narratives that
teach us about the Devil and about God and everything in between. It would not be
too far removed to suggest that in addition to being homo ludens we are also homo
narratus—story telling men and women.
I will deal with a number of aspects of narratives here: narratives and fairy
tales, narratives and genres, narratives and myth, the gratifications genres provide,
and narrative genres and myths. I will suggest that, in essence, all stories are
variations on the narratives that we find so intoxicating when we are young—fairy
tales. I will consider the formulaic aspects of genres and also argue that generally
speaking there is a mythic element hidden in our stories of all kinds: in the elite arts,
in popular culture, and in everyday life, because although we think logically, we live
mythically.
Defining Genres
Fairy tales, we must remember, are a kind of story—or in the language of
media criticism, a genre, a French word that means “kind” or “type.” In his essay
“Television Images, Codes and Messages, “ Douglas Kellner discusses genres and
their role in our mass-mediated culture:
Arthur Asa Berger The Same Old Story 5
A genre consists of a coded set of formulas and conventions which indicate a
culturally accepted way or organizing material into distinct patterns. Once
established, genres dictate the basic conditions of cultural production and
reception. For example, crime dramas invariably have a violent crime, a
search for its perpetrators, and often a chase, fight, or bloody elimination of
the criminal, communicating the message “crime does not pay.” The
audience comes to expect these predictable pleasures and a crime drama
“code” develops, enshrined in production and studio texts and practices.
(Televisions, 7, 4, 1974)
These conventions make is easy for audiences to understand what happens in a text
and easier for writers to create these texts, since they can assume certain expectations
on the part of audiences and use formulas, with minor variations, to satisfy these
expectations.
In our everyday lives, we often make our decisions about what kinds of
television shows to watch, films to see, or video games to play, based on how we may
feel or upon certain attractions a genre holds for us. And we decide to watch certain
television programs or go to certain films because, in part, of the pleasures the genre
has for us. For complicated reasons, that I will discuss later, people develop a
fondness for certain kinds of stories. When we are children, fairy tales are very
important for us, because, as Bruno Bettelheim has explained in The Uses of
Enchantment, fairy tales have great therapeutic value for children. When we are older
and more complicated beings, we move on to more complicated kinds of stories, with
different kinds of characters that provide different kinds of gratifications.
Gratifications Genres Provide
Let me offer, here, a chart listing of some of the more important gratifications
genres provide audiences. The “Uses and Gratifications” approach to mass mediated
texts focuses on the social uses audiences make of the texts they see and the
Arthur Asa Berger The Same Old Story 6
psychological gratifications these texts provide, as contrasted with a focus on the
effects of exposure to texts and genres. Some of the earliest research in this area was
described as follows by Katz, Blumler and Gurevich (1979:215):
Herzog (1942) on quiz programs and the gratifications derived from listening
to soap operas; Suchman (1942) on the motives for getting interested in
serious music on radio; Wolfe and Fiske (1949) on the development of
children’s interest in comics…Each of these investigations came up with a
list of functions served either by some specific contents or some medium in
question: to match one’s wits against others, to get information or advice for
daily living, to provide a framework for one’s day, to prepare oneself cultural
for the demands of upward mobility, or to be reassured about the dignity and
usefulness of one’s role.
In my chart I deal with genres rather than with individual texts and suggest the various
uses and gratifications genres provide.
Uses and Gratifications
Genres
To satisfy curiosity and be informed
To be amused
Documentaries, News Shows, Talk
Shows, Quiz Shows
Situation Comedies, Comedy Shows
To identify with the deity and divine
Religious Shows
To reinforce belief in justice
Police Shows, Law Shows
To reinforce belief in romantic love
Romance novels, Soap operas
To participate vicariously in history
Media Events, Sports Shows
To see villains in action
Police Shows, Action-Adventure Shows
To obtain outlets for sexual drives in a
guilt free context
Pornography, Fashion Shows, Soft Core
Commercials, Soap Operas
Arthur Asa Berger The Same Old Story 7
To experience the ugly
Horror shows
To find models to imitate
Talk Shows, Action Shows, Award
Shows, Sports Shows, Commercials
Travel Shows, Art Shows, Culture Shows
(Symphony Concerts, Operas, Ballet)
To experience the beautiful
One of the difficulties of the uses and gratifications approach is that it is very difficult
to quantify the uses people make of genres and tie events in a given text to this or that
gratification. Nevertheless, it is quite obvious that people listened to radio soap
operas (the subject of the study mentioned above by Herta Herzog) and watch soap
operas on television because they provide a number of gratifications to their viewers.
The Fairy Tale as the UR-Genre
I have suggested, in my book Narratives in Popular Culture, Media and
Everyday Life, that we see the fairy tale as an UR-genre. In a typical fairy tale you
might find monsters and other kinds of strange creatures (horror), someone searching
for a missing damsel in distress (detective), someone flying on magic carpets (science
fiction), someone fighting villains or opponents of one sort or another (actionadventure hero), and a hero marrying a princess he has rescued (romance). The basic
genres, can be seen then, as spin-offs emphasizing different aspects of the typical fairy
tale…and, as I shall argue, certain myths.
In the chart that follows I offer suggestions about that formulaic aspects of
some important genres: the kinds of characters we find in them, their plots and their
themes, and so on. Thinking about stories in terms of their formulas, and what
happens in certain genres, helps us understand something about their appeal.
This chart shows some of the basic conventions found in formulaic genres. These
conventions establish what a genre means for people and enable them to understand
the texts without too much expenditure of intellectual effort. Of course some works
in a given genre are more formulaic than others; there is some latitude within
genres for experimentation, but most mass mediated texts tend to be formulaic.
Arthur Asa Berger The Same Old Story 8
I assume that people learn the conventions of various genres as they are exposed to
them.
Genre
Romance
Western
Science-Fiction
Spy
Time
Early 1900s
1800s
Future
Present
Location
Rural England
Outer Space
World
Hero
Lords, Upper
Class Types
Damsel in
Distress
Friends of
Heroine
Lying Seeming
Friend
Heroine Finds
Love
Love Conquers
All
Gorgeous
Dresses
Cars, Horses,
Carriages
Fists
Edge of
Civilization
Cowboy
Space Man
Agent
Schoolmarm
Space Gal
Woman Spy
Town people
Indians
Outlaws
Technicians
Assistant Agents
Aliens
Moles
Restore Law
and Order
Justice and
Progress
Cowboy Hat
Repel Aliens
Find Moles
Save Humanity
Space Gear
Save Free
World
Trench Coat
Horse
Rocket Ship
Sports Car
Six-Gun
Ray Gun
Laser Gun
Pistol with
Silencer
Heroine
Secondary
Villains
Plot
Theme
Costume
Locomotion
Weaponry
Genres also come and go. At one time, in the seventies in the United
States, there were more than thirty westerns being broadcast on television each week,
and numerous western films. In contemporary America, there are few westerns being
made for television or film. This is probably because the conventions of the genre no
longer resonate with Americans and because other genres have evolved that do a
better job of providing the gratifications people are looking for from media. Let me
offer a case study here, on the romance genre. I take my point of departure with
Janice Radway’s excellent book, Reading the Romance
Romance Novels and Their Readers: A Case Study.
Arthur Asa Berger The Same Old Story 9
What, exactly, is a romance and what are its characteristics? How do
romances differ from other narrative texts? To answer this question, Radway offers
what is essentially “a Proppian analysis of the romantic plot.” (1991:120) She asked
some romance readers she knew for a list of their favorite romances and with twenty
of these books in hand, examined them “to determine whether the same sequence of
narrative functions can be found in each of these texts.” She adds a qualifier to her
Proppian analysis: (1991:120)
…a genre is never defined solely by its constitutive set of functions but by
interaction between characters and by their development as individuals. As a
result, I have assumed further that the romantic genre is additionally defined
for the women by a set of characters whose personalities and behaviors can
be “coded” or summarized through the course of the reading process in
specific ways…By pursuing similarities in the behaviors of these characters
and by attempting to understand what those behaviors signify to these
readers, I have sought to avoid summarizing them according to my own
beliefs about and standards for gender behavior.
She summarizes the narrative structure of the typical romance as follows:
Romances start with a heroine being removed from her family and familiar
surroundings; this is an example of Propp’s first function, absentation. Other aspects
of the formula correspond to variations of one sort or another of Propp’s 31 functions,
including recognition, when the heroine’s goodness and beauty are recognized by the
hero, and wedding, when the heroine is (or will soon be) married.
What Radway’s analysis suggests is that the romance novel is a highly
formulaic genre or kind of text, generally involving the theme of changing of male
behavior (and what woman doesn’t want to do that?) from indifference to love, with a
number of formulaic sub-genres that vary on the basic romance formula one way or
another. Taking a formula--a simple set of basic behaviors or Proppian functions-romance writers have been able to write an incredible number of romances. In effect,
Arthur Asa Berger The Same Old Story 10
we can say about these romance novels that they all are “the same old story,” just told
in different ways with slightly different stereotyped characters plugged in at the
relevant points. Actually, we can say the same thing about most texts and genres in
the mass media.
Many genres have sub-genres. For example, the detective genre has three
sub-genres: the classical detective story with a detective who uses his or her brains
(Sherlock Holmes, Hercules Poirot, Miss Marple), the tough guy detective story with
a hero who is smart but also who is good with his fists (Sam Space, Mike Hammer)
and the procedural detective story (CSI). It has been suggested by Will Wright, in
Sixguns and Society: A Structural Study of the Western, that there are four sub-genres
of westerns and many other genres have a goodly number of sub-genres, as well.
At the conclusion of her book, Radway offers some insights about the power
individuals and groups of readers have to resist the power of those who control the
media. She writes: (1991:222)
If we can learn, then, to look at the ways in which various groups
appropriate and use the mass-produced art of our culture, I suspect we may
well begin to understand that although the ideological power of
contemporary cultural forms is enormous, indeed sometimes even
frightening, that power is not yet all-pervasive, totally vigilant, or complete.
Interstices still exist with the social fabric where opposition is carried on by
people who are not satisfied by their place within it or by the restricted
material and emotional rewards that accompany it.
There are, Radway suggests, good reasons to believe that, for one reason or another
(including the fact that people often don’t interpret texts the way those who create
them think they will) people can resist the power of the media. I need only mention
what happened in the countries in eastern Europe dominated by Russia. As soon as
people in these countries discovered that the Red Army would not invade them if they
Arthur Asa Berger The Same Old Story 11
threw out the people who were ruling them, despite forty years of media propaganda,
they did so with hardly a second thought.
The Myth Model
I have suggested, in a number of my writings, that texts of all sorts—in the
elite arts and in popular culture—often have mythic roots. I developed what I
describe as a “myth model” that follows a myth in history, elite culture, popular
culture and everyday life. I got this notion from Mircea Eliade, who explained in The
Sacred and The Profane that many things that people do in contemporary society are
actually camouflaged or modernized versions of ancient myths and legends. As
Eliade writes: (1961:204-205)
The modern man who feels and claims that he is nonreligious still retains a
large stock of camouflaged myths and degenerated rituals…A whole volume
could well be written on the myths of modern man, on the mythologies
camouflaged in the plays that he enjoys, in the books that he reads. The
cinema, that “dream factory,” takes over and employs countless mythological
motifs—the fight between hero and monster, inititatory combats and ordeals,
paradigmatic figures (the maiden, the hero, the paradisal landscape, hell, and
so on). Even reading includes a mythological function, not only because it
replaces the recitation of myths in archaic societies and the oral literature that
still lives in the rural communities of Europe, but particularly because,
through reading, the modern man succeeds in obtaining an “escape from
time” comparable to the “emergence from time” effected by myths.
Eliade defines myth, I should add, as the recitation of a sacred history, “a primordial
event that took place at the beginning of time.” (1961:95).
Arthur Asa Berger The Same Old Story 12
We find a more elaborated definition of myth in Raphael Patai’s Myth and
Modern Man. He describes myth in the following terms ( 1972:2)
Myth…is a traditional religious charter, which operates by validating laws,
customs, rites, institutions and beliefs, or explaining socio-cultural situations
and natural phenomena, and taking the form of stories, believed to be true,
about divine beings and heroes.
He adds that myths play a an important role in shaping social life and that “myth not
only validates or authorizes customs, rites, institutions, beliefs, and so forth, but
frequently is directly responsible for creating them.” (1972:2).
Let me offer, here, my myth model. My argument, based on Eliade’s point
about unrecognized myths permeating our culture and Patai’s notion that myths help
shape culture, suggests that there are camouflaged and unrecognized myths that
inform many texts and other aspects of our culture. People who watch films and
television shows, go to operas and ballet, and do various things as part of their
everyday lives, generally don’t realize the extent to which myth informs all these
activities. The implication is that when we read novels, watch televised dramas and
go to plays and films, we are connecting to ancient myths and thus, through these
entertainments, we live mythically, even if we may not recognize that such is the case.
In the chart below, I take several myths (sacred stories) and run them through
my model.
Myth/Sacred Story
Adam in the Garden of
Eden. Theme of Natural
Innocence
Oedipus Myth. Theme of
son unknowingly killing
father and marrying
mother.
Revolutions
Historical Experience
Puritans come to USA to
escape corrupt European
civilization
Elite Culture
American Adam figure in
American novels. Henry
James’ The American
Sophocles, Oedipus Rex
Shakespeare, Hamlet
Popular Culture
Westerns…restore natural
innocence to Virgin Land.
Jack the Giant Killer
Arthur Asa Berger The Same Old Story 13
Shane.
Everyday Life
Escape from city and
Oedipus period in little
move to suburbs so kids
children
can play on grass (and
with grass).
What this model does is show the hidden sacred or mythic roots of many
different aspects of our lives. Thus, in America, where nature is an important part of
the American imagination—perhaps the most important element in it--manifestations
of the biblical story of Adam and Eve, living in paradise in a state of nature, can be
found in everything from our historical experience—leaving “corrupt” Europe to
establish a new utopian society in the great American wilderness—to our elite
literature, with its American Adam figures in many novels, to our westerns and
science fiction stories and our moving to the suburbs. Our popular culture texts, such
as Westerns, often deal with getting rid of evil doers and villains, of one sort or
another, so that, in theory at least, a more paradisal society can be re-established again
in nature.
In a seminar I taught on popular culture a number of years ago I gave my
students the myth model and the Adamic myth and asked them to play with it. They
provided some of the answers found in my chart. When someone suggested that
moving to the suburbs was probably connected to this myth one of my students, a
woman in her mid thirties with two children, slapped head and said “So that’s why I
moved to the Mill Valley” (a suburb of San Francisco, where I happen to live)!
The Nature Myth and American Identity
In the American imagination, I would argue, we have traditionally seen
ourselves as living in a state of nature, and contrasting that with our motherland and
fatherland Europe, which we identify with civilization and its various discontents. We
can see this in the chart below, which deals with the way we have defined ourselves, in
the best de Saussurean tradition, as un-Europeans in the same way that 7-Up has
Arthur Asa Berger The Same Old Story 14
defined itself as the “un-cola.” I’m not suggesting that this set of oppositions is
correct, only that is the way we have defined ourselves for many years…and perhaps
still do.
America
Europe
Nature
History
Innocence
Guilt
Individualism
Conformity
The Future
The Past
Hope
Memory
Forests
Cathedrals
Cowboy
Cavalier
Willpower
Class Conflict
Equality
Hierarchy (Aristocracy)
Achievement
Ascription
Classless Society
Class-Bound Society
Nature Food, Raw Food
Gourmet Food
Clean Living
Sensuality
Action
Theory
Agrarianism
Industrialism
The Sacred
The Profane
My chart, though it may have little basis in reality, does reflect the way
Americans tended to see themselves as they tried to find an identity and did so by
contrasting themselves with a simplistic and stereotyped image of Europe. The United
States is not a classless society, even though many people living in America tend to
think it is…with, we used to describe as small “pockets” of poverty and a small
number of rich people. We had no hereditary aristocracy so we’ve tended to
Arthur Asa Berger The Same Old Story 15
downplay the extent to which America has (and always had) different classes. In
recent years, however, as the split between the rich and the poor grows greater, more
and more people are becoming aware of the existence of social classes…and of a new
celibritocracy of athletes, movie stars and other kinds of entertainers, some of whom
are worth hundreds of millions of dollars.
Genres and Myths
I believe that, among other things, if you scratch deep enough beneath the
“surface” of a text you can generally find a myth—a kind of intertextuality that may
explain one of the reasons that certain texts resonate with us. Freud made this point in
his famous letter about Oedipus Rex. As he wrote, in his famous letter of October 15,
1897 to Wilhelm Fleiss:
Being entirely honest with oneself is a good exercise. Only one idea
of generally value has occurred to me. I have found love of the mother and
jealousy of the father in my own case too, and now believe it to be a general
phenomena of early childhood, even if it does not always occurs so early as
in children who have been made hysterics…If that is the case, the gripping
power of Oedipus Rex, in spite of all the rational objections to the inexorable
fate that the story presupposes, becomes intelligible, and one can understand
why later fate dramas were such failures. Our feelings rise against any
arbitrary individual fate…but the Greek myth seizes on a compulsion which
everyone recognizes because he has felt traces of it in himself. Every
member of the audience was once a budding Oedipus in fantasy and this
dream-fulfillment played out in reality causes everyone to recoil in horror,
with the full measure of repression which separates his infantile from his
present state.
The idea has passed through my head that the same thing may lie at
the root of Hamlet. I am not thinking of Shakespeare’s conscious intentions,
Arthur Asa Berger The Same Old Story 16
but supposing rather that her was impelled to write it by a real event because
his own unconscious understood that of his hero….
What Freud is suggesting about Sophocles’ Oedipus Rex and Shakespeare’s Hamlet, I
believe, applies—though we don’t realize it--to many aspects of our daily lives, to
texts in elite and popular culture, and, of particular interest, to the genres in which we
find these texts that entertain us. In many cases the myth is modified and defanged—
weakened and camouflaged, lest it show through and, in some cases, be too disturbing
to readers and audiences of mass mediated genres.
I have suggested that not only texts have mythic content but also the genres
in which we find these texts, and it may be that a given genre has an appeal that we do
not recognize, assuming that it is the text and only the text that is important. If Shane
is mythic that may be because the Western genre is mythic, too. In the chart that
follows, I list some of the more important genres that draw upon certain myths—a
highly speculative enterprise, I admit. A given text becomes, then, an intermediary
between a genre and a myth. In some cases, we choose a particular text (film,
television show) because of the genre and in other cases we choose the genre because
of a certain text.
Genre
Myth
Western
Garden of Eden
Science Fiction
Ezekiel’s Vision in Bible
Action Adventure
Hercules, Odysseus
Soap Opera
Sisyphus
Beauty Contests
Narcissus
Space Opera
Icarus
Horror
Lilith, Medea, Minotaur
Love and Romance
Helen of Troy, Pygmalion
Arthur Asa Berger The Same Old Story 17
War and Combat
David and Goliath
It is reasonable to suggest, then, that there are a relatively limited number of
myths, from the Greeks and Romans and the Bible, along with a number of other
cultures and sources, which can be described as “cultural dominants” that have shaped
our consciousness in the West over the millennia. Think, for example, of the impact
that the story of Adam and Even in Paradise (and their eating from the tree of
knowledge and being expelled from The Garden of Eden) has had. My myth model
makes a case for the notion that we may live “modern,” in a logical-rational-scientific
world, or even in a postmodern world where people experience “incredulity toward
metanarratives,” but we act and believe mythically, thanks, to a large degree, to the
narratives and genres in the media that entertain us and, at the same time, connect us
in ways we are only now beginning to realize, to ancient myths.
A Postscript
In the chart that follows, taken from my forthcoming book, tentatively titled
Making Sense of Media: Key Texts in Media Analysis and Cultural Studies
(Blackwell, 2004) I offer my readers an opportunity to write their own romance
novels. My chart on the formulaic aspects of genres, let me point out, was also taken
from this book. All you have to do is take items from any of the four columns at the
first level and mix them with any items from the four columns at the second level
(making whatever minor modifications may be necessary) and keep doing this until
you have exhausted all the levels. Then you just have to write it up as a novel and
send it off to an agent and wait for the money to start rolling in.
Arthur Asa Berger The Same Old Story 18
Write Your Own Romance
Daphne Witherspoon Found Herself Abandoned and Far Away From Home and In
Her Darkest Hour Met
1
2
3
4
Lord Randall
Cuthbert Riding on
his great white steed
Palomar
Slade Slick, a
riverboat gambler
and smoothie, with
greased black hair
and a drooping
mustache. His teeth
were bad, also.
The Reverend Amos
Homer, a prairie
riding minister from
The Church of the
Faithful. He was
very handsome in his
clerical outfit.
Dr. Lance Hobbes, a
neurologist, world
famous mountain
climber, and writer of
important novels and
books on sports and
on psychology.
Who treated her with
scorn, thinking her to
be a wanton woman
from the lower
classes
Who was very kind
to her, but only, she
thought, because he
wanted to have
sexual relations with
her…as with all
women he knew
Who was hostile and
said she seemed to be
an unbeliever who
needed to be saved.
He wanted to convert
her to his faith and
teach her to speak in
tongues.
Who said he noticed
a slight facial tic, a
sign of serious
problems. He
wanted to take her
mountain climbing in
Tibet to help solve
her problems.
Then he noticed that
she had a 38 inch
bust, gorgeous legs,
long blonde hair and
sparkling blue eyes
Then he said he
could find her a nice
place to stay in a
place near Las
Vegas. “The work
isn’t very hard,” he
said. You just lie
around in bed most
of the time.
But she recognized
his evil nature and
told him she didn’t
like Las Vegas, or
Reno, for that matter.
Then he said she
needed special
attention and said she
should meet him at a
certain church at
midnight.
Then he decided she
was too frail to take
mountain climbing,
but he noticed her
great beauty…her 38
inch bust and long
blonde hair and
sparking eyes
But she told him she
wouldn’t do that
because she had lost
her faith in man and
in God, having been
abandoned by a man
she thought she
would marry.
Then she noticed that
he was tall, dark and
strikingly handsome,
and drove a Maserati.
She could tell he
came from noble
stock.
Then he told her she
had stolen his heart,
he apologized for his
callous treatment of
her and declared his
undying love for her.
Then he asked her
whether she had any
sisters or friends who
looked like her and
who were out of
work.
Then he said she
lacked “the gift of
faith” but he could
save her. He added
that his church
allowed many wives
and he proposed to
her.
Then she noticed that
he had a wonderful
sense of humor
besides being clever
and enormously
wealthy.
So she became Lady
Cuthbert, moved to
England to live in a
great mansion. Their
love grew deeper
At this point she told
her to speak with
Rev. Homer Nesbitt,
who could save his
soul. She decided to
But she rejected him
saying she believed
in monogamy. He
decided to get an
MBA and marry a
So she became Mrs.
Hobbes. They
bought a palatial
house in Los Angeles
and he gave her a
So, he got into a
conversation with her
and discovered she
was very smart and
witty. She noticed
that he was very
handsome.
Arthur Asa Berger The Same Old Story 19
with every day.
Hollywood and
become a star and
find true love.
clever executive and
live happily ever
after.
Bibliography
Berger, Arthur Asa. 1992
Popular Culture Genres: Theories and Texts.
Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage
Berger, Arthur Asa
1997
Narratives in Popular Culture, Media and Everyday Life
Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage
Berger, Arthur Asa. 1998.
Media Analysis Techniques (2nd edition).
Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.
Berger, Arthur Asa. 2003
Ads, Fads, & Consumer Culture (2nd Edition)
Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield
Berger, Arthur Asa. 2003
Media & Society
Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield
Eliade, Mircea. 1961
The Sacred and the Profane: The Nature of Religion
Rolls Royce as a
symbol of his
undying love
Arthur Asa Berger The Same Old Story 20
New York: Harper Torchbooks
Danesi, Marcel. 2002
Understanding Media Semiotics
London: Arnold
de Certeau, Michel. 1984
The Practice of Everyday Life
Berkeley: University of California Press
Kellner, Douglas. 1980
“Television Images, Codes and Messages”
Televisions 7 (4) 1974
Patai, Raphael. 1972
Myth and Modern Man
Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall
Radway, Janice. 1991
Reading the Romance: Women, Patriarchy, and Popular Literature
Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press
Wright, Will. 1975
Sixguns and Society: A Structural Study of the Western.
Berkeley, CA: University of California Press
Arthur Asa Berger The Same Old Story 21
Arthur Asa Berger is professor emeritus of Broadcast & Electronic Communication
Arts at San Francisco State University, where he taught from 1965 to 2003. Among
his recent books are Bloom’s Morning: Coffee, Comforters, and the Secret Meaning
of Everyday Life (Westview), Durkheim is Dead: Sherlock Holmes is Introduced to
Sociological Theory (AltaMira Press), and The Agent in the Agency (Hampton).