PART I
cultural studies, identity and politics between modern and postmdern BYE DOUGLAS KELLNER
Media Culture
Media Culture develops methods and analyses of contemporary film, television,
music, and other artifacts to discern their nature and effects. The book argues that
media culture is now the dominant form of culture which socializes us and provides
materials for identity in terms of both social reproduction and change. Through
studies of Reagan and Rambo, horror films and youth films, rap music and African-
American culture, Madonna, fashion, television news and entertainment, MTV,
Beavis and Butt-Head, the Gulf War as cultural text, cyberpunk fiction and
postmodern theory, Kellner provides a series of lively studies that both illuminate
contemporary culture and provide methods of analysis and critique.
Many people today talk about cultural studies, but Kellner actually does it,
carrying through a unique mixture of theoretical analysis and concrete discussions
of some of the most popular and influential forms of contemporary media culture.
Criticizing social context, political struggle, and the system of cultural production,
Kellner develops a multidimensional approach to cultural studies that broadens
the field and opens it to a variety of disciplines. He also provides new approaches
to the vexed question of the effects of culture and offers new perspectives for
cultural studies.
Anyone interested in the nature and effects of contemporary society and culture
should read this book. Kellner argues that we are in a state of transition between
the modern era and a new postmodern era and that media culture offers a privileged
field of study and one that is vital if we are to grasp the full import of the changes
currently shaking us.
Douglas Kellner is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Texas at Austin
and author (with Michael Ryan) of Camera Politica: The politics and ideology of
Hollywood films and (with Steven Best) of Postmodern Theory: Critical
Interrogations. Kellner has also published Herbert Marcuse and the Crisis of
Marxism; Critical Theory, Marxism, and Modernity; Jean Baudrillard: From
Marxism to Postmodernism and Beyond; Television and the Crisis of Democracy;
The Persian Gulf TV War. He has edited Jameson/Marxism/Critique and Baudrillard:
A Critical Reader and co-edited (with Stephen Bronner) Critical Theory and
Society: A Reader.
Media Culture
Cultural studies, identity and politics
between the modern and the
postmodern
Douglas Kellner
London and New York
First published 1995
by Routledge
11 New Fetter Lane, London EC4P 4EE
Simultaneously published in the USA and Canada
by Routledge
29 West 35th Street, New York, NY 10001
Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group
This edition published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2003.
© 1995 Douglas Kellner
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or
reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or
other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying
and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system,
without permission in writing from the publishers.
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Library of Congress Cataloguing in Publication Data
A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress
ISBN 0-203-20580-4 Master e-book ISBN
ISBN 0-203-26667-6 (Adobe eReader Format)
ISBN 0-415-10569-2 (hbk)
ISBN 0-415-10570-6 (pbk)
FOR THE VELVET HAMMER
vii
Contents
INTRODUCTION 1
Media culture and society 2
Cultural studies and social theory 8
Acknowledgements 10
Part I Theory/context/methods
1 THEORY WARS AND CULTURAL STUDIES 15
Theory wars 20
Approaches to cultural studies 27
The Frankfurt School 28
British cultural studies and its legacy 31
A postmodern cultural studies? 43
Notes 49
2 MEDIA CULTURE, POLITICS, AND IDEOLOGY: FROM
REAGAN TO RAMBO 55
Ideology and media culture: critical methods 57
Rambo and Reagan 62
Top Gun: Reaganite wet dream 75
To the Gulf War! 83
Notes 89
3 FOR A CULTURAL STUDIES THAT IS CRITICAL,
MULTICULTURAL, AND MULTIPERSPECTIVAL 93
For a critical multiculturalism 94
Toward a multiperspectival cultural studies 98
Toward a contextual cultural studies 101
Ideology and utopia 108
Hegemony, counterhegemony, and deconstruction 112
Platoon: a diagnostic critique 117
Notes 122
viii Contents
Part II Diagnostic critique and cultural studies
4 SOCIAL ANXIETY, CLASS, AND DISAFFECTED YOUTH 125
Poltergeists, gender, and class in the Age of Reagan and Bush 125
Diagnostic critique: from Poltergeist to Slackers and Beavis and 138
Butt-Head
Notes 152
5 BLACK VOICES FROM SPIKE LEE TO RAP 157
The films of Spike Lee 157
Rap and black radical discourse 174
Resistance, counterhegemony, and everyday life 188
Notes 192
6 READING THE GULF WAR: 198
PRODUCTION/TEXT/RECEPTION
Disinformation and the production of news 199
The media propaganda war 210
Warrior nation 214
Some concluding reflections 223
Notes 226
Part III Media culture/identities/politics
7 TELEVISION, ADVERTISING, AND THE CONSTRUCTION 231
OF POSTMODERN IDENTITIES
Identity in postmodern theory 233
Advertising images 247
Situating the postmodern 255
Notes 260
8 MADONNA, FASHION, AND IMAGE 263
Fashion and identity 264
The Madonna phenomenon 266
Madonna between the modern and the postmodern 285
Notes 292
9 MAPPING THE PRESENT FROM THE FUTURE: FROM 297
BAUDRILLARD TO CYBERPUNK
From Baudrillard to cyberpunk 299
Neuromancer and the Baudrillardian vision 305
Mapping the future; illuminating the present 314
Literature, social theory, and politics 323
Notes 327
CONCLUSION: FROM THE FUTURE BACK TO THE PRESENT 331
Critical media pedagogy 335
Media and cultural activism 336
Contents ix
Media and cultural politics 337
Notes 340
References 342
Index 352
1
Introduction
A media culture has emerged in which images, sounds, and spectacles help produce
the fabric of everyday life, dominating leisure time, shaping political views and
social behavior, and providing the materials out of which people forge their very
identities. Radio, television, film, and the other products of the culture industries
provide the models of what it means to be male or female, successful or a failure,
powerful or powerless. Media culture also provides the materials out of which
many people construct their sense of class, of ethnicity and race, of nationality, of
sexuality, of “us” and “them.” Media culture helps shape the prevalent view of the
world and deepest values: it defines what is considered good or bad, positive or
negative, moral or evil. Media stories and images provide the symbols, myths, and
resources which help constitute a common culture for the majority of individuals
in many parts of the world today. Media culture provides the materials to create
identities whereby individuals insert themselves into contemporary techno-capitalist
socieities and which is producing a new form of global culture.
Media culture consists of systems of radio and the reproduction of sound (albums,
cassettes, CDs, and their instruments of dissemination such as radios, cassette
recorders, and so on); of film and its modes of distribution (theatrical playing,
video-cassette rental, TV showings); of print media ranging from newspapers to
magazines; and to the system of television which stands at the center of media
culture. Media culture is a culture of the image and often deploys sight and sound.
The various media—radio, film, television, music, and print media such as
magazines, newspapers, and comic books—privilege either sight or sound, or mix
the two senses, playing as well on a broad range of emotions, feelings, and ideas.
Media culture is industrial culture, organized on the model of mass production and
is produced for a mass audience according to types (genres), following conventional
formulas, codes, and rules. It is thus a form of commercial culture and its products
are commodities that attempt to attract private profit produced by giant corporations
interested in the accumulation of capital. Media culture aims at a large audience,
thus it must resonate to current themes and concerns, and is highly topical, providing
hieroglyphics of contemporary social life.
But media culture is also a high-tech culture, deploying the most advanced
technologies. It is a vibrant sector of the economy, one of the most profitable
2 Introduction
sectors and one that is attaining global prominence. Media culture is thus a form of
techno-culture that merges culture and technology in new forms and configurations,
producing new types of societies in which media and technology become organizing
principles.
Media culture spectacles demonstrate who has power and who is powerless,
who is allowed to exercise force and violence, and who is not. They dramatize and
legitimate the power of the forces that be and demonstrate to the powerless that if
they fail to conform, they risk incarceration or death. For those immersed from
cradle to grave in a media and consumer society, it is therefore important to learn
how to understand, interpret, and criticize its meanings and messages. In a
contemporary media culture, the dominant media of information and entertainment
are a profound and often misperceived source of cultural pedagogy: they contribute
to educating us how to behave and what to think, feel, believe, fear, and desire—
and what not to. Consequently, the gaining of critical media literacy is an important
resource for individuals and citizens in learning how to cope with this seductive
cultural environment. Learning how to read, criticize, and resist media manipulation
can help individuals empower themselves in relation to dominant media and culture.
It can enhance individual sovereignty vis-à-vis media culture and give individuals
more power over their cultural environment and the necessary literacy to produce
new forms of culture.
MEDIA CULTURE AND SOCIETY
The following studies help provide an understanding of media culture and suggest
ways that it can be understood, used, and appreciated. I want to provide each
reader with resources to learn to study, analyze, interpret, and criticize the texts of
media culture and to appraise their effects. I examine some of the ways that media
culture intersects with political and social struggles and helps shape everyday life,
influencing how people think and behave, how they see themselves and other people,
and how they construct their identities. Accordingly, the following studies will
explore some of the ways that contemporary media culture provides forms of
ideological domination that help to reproduce the current relations of power, while
also providing resources for the construction of identities and for empowerment,
resistance, and struggle. I argue that media culture is a contested terrain across
which key social groups and competing political ideologies struggle for dominance
and that individuals live these struggles through the images, discourses, myths,
and spectacles of media culture.
Culture in the broadest sense is a form of highly participatory activity, in which
people create their societies and identities. Culture shapes individuals, drawing
out and cultivating their potentialities and capacities for speech, action, and
creativity. Media culture is also involved in these processes, yet it is something
new in the human adventure. Individuals spend tremendous amounts of time
listening to the radio, watching television, going to see films, experiencing music,
going shopping, reading magazines and newspapers, and participating in these
Introduction 3
and other forms of media culture. Thus, media culture has come to dominate
everyday life, serving as the ubiquitous background and often the highly seductive
foreground of our attention and activity, which many argue is undermining human
potentiality and creativity.
This book will explore some of the consequences for a society and culture
colonized by media culture. It will probe the nature and effects of the way in
which this form of culture is deeply influencing many aspects of our everyday life.
A major theme of this book concerns how the forms of media culture induce
individuals to identify with dominant social and political ideologies, positions,
and representations. In general, it is not a system of rigid ideological indoctrination
that induces consent to existing capitalist societies, but the pleasures of the media
and consumer culture. Media entertainment is often highly pleasurable and uses
sight, sound, and spectacle to seduce audiences into identifying with certain views,
attitudes, feelings, and positions. Consumer culture offers a dazzling array of goods
and services that induce individuals to participate in a system of commercial
gratification. Media and consumer culture work hand in hand to generate thought
and behavior that conform to existing values, institutions, beliefs, and practices.
Yet, audiences may resist the dominant meanings and messages, create their
own readings and appropriations of mass-produced culture, and use their culture
as resources to empower themselves and to invent their own meanings, identities,
and forms of life. Moreover, media culture itself provides resources which
individuals can appropriate, or reject, in forming their own identities against
dominant models. Media culture thus induces individuals to conform to the
established organization of society, but it also provides resources that can empower
individuals against that society. Exploring these contradictory functions and effects
will be one of the goals of this book.
Media culture is highly complex and so far has resisted any adequate general
theorizations (although there have been many attempts). Most general theories, as
I’ll indicate in this book, appear one-sided and blind to important aspects of media
culture. Most theories of media manipulation and domination that were highly
popular in the 1960s and part of the 1970s assumed that the media were all-powerful
forces of social control and that they imposed a monolithic dominant ideology on
their victims. Reacting against this model, many theories in recent years emphasized
the power of audiences to resist media manipulation, to create their own meanings
and uses, and to empower themselves with materials from their culture. As we
shall see in the following studies, these and other current theories of the media are
also one-sided, limited, and should give way to more comprehensive and
multidimensional critical approaches which theorize the contradictory effects of
media culture.
Theories of the media and culture are, I believe, best developed through specific
studies of concrete phenomena contextualized within the vicissitudes of
contemporary society and history. Thus, to interrogate contemporary media culture
critically involves carrying out studies of how the culture industries produce specific
artifacts that reproduce the social discourses which are embedded in the key conflicts
4 Introduction
and struggles of the day. This involves seeing how popular texts like the Rocky or
Rambo films, rap music or Madonna, TV cop shows, or advertising and media
news and discussion, all articulate specific ideological positions and help reproduce
dominant forms of social power, serving the interests of societal domination, or of
resistance to the dominant forms of culture and society—or have contradictory
effects.
Accordingly, in the studies that follow I attempt to demonstrate how some of
the most popular cultural texts of the day are involved in current political and
cultural struggles. The study of popular and mass-mediated culture has widely
been labelled “cultural studies” and in this book I’ll provide some models of a
media cultural studies that is critical, multicultural, and multiperspectival. A critical
cultural studies conceptualizes society as a terrain of domination and resistance
and engages in a critique of domination and of the ways that media culture engages
in reproducing relationships of domination and oppression. A critical cultural studies
is concerned with advancing the democratic project, conceptualizing both how
media culture can be a tremendous impediment for democratizing society, but can
also be an ally, advancing the cause of freedom and democracy. Media culture can
be an impediment to democracy to the extent that it reproduces reactionary
discourses, promoting racism, sexism, ageism, classism, and other forms of
prejudice. But media culture can also advance the interests of oppressed groups if
it attacks such things as racism or sexism, or at least undermines them with more
positive representations of race and gender.
I am therefore interested in the politics of culture and will develop a specific
model of media cultural studies and engage in the debates concerning how best to
study culture and society in order to fully grasp the production, nature, and effects
of media culture. My approach also employs social theory to properly contextualize,
interpret, and analyze the nature and effects of media culture. It is my conviction
that cultural studies cannot be done without social theory, that we need to understand
the structures and dynamics of a given society to understand and interpret its culture.
I am also assuming that media cultural texts are neither merely vehicles of a
dominant ideology, nor pure and innocent entertainment. Rather they are complex
artifacts that embody social and political discourses whose analysis and
interpretation require methods of reading and critique that articulate their
embeddedness in the political economy, social relations, and the political
environment within which they are produced, circulated, and received.
The following studies take this comprehensive approach to the study of media
culture and use the resources of history, social theory, communications research,
and cultural studies to elucidate some of the meanings and effects of popular cultural
forms. Examples range from films that reproduce or contest conservative ideologies
during the Age of Reagan, to African-American culture from the films of Spike
Lee to rap music, to the images and sounds called Madonna. I also discuss popular
television series, such as Miami Vice, MTV, advertising, the media spectacle known
as “the Gulf War,” the frightening futuristic worlds of cyberpunk fiction, and
Baudrillard’s postmodern theory.
Introduction 5
I assume that society and culture are contested terrains and that cultural artifacts
are produced and have their effects within determinate contexts. It is my conviction
that the analysis of media culture within its matrix of production and reception
helps illuminate its artifacts and their possible effects and uses, as well as the
contours and trends within the broader socio-political context. Since the forms of
culture produced by giant media and entertainment conglomerates are an immediate
and pervasive aspect of contemporary life, and since media culture is both
constituted by and constitutive of larger social and political dynamics, it is an
excellent optic to illuminate the nature of contemporary society, politics, and
everyday life. Indeed, I will argue that understanding popular Hollywood films,
Madonna and MTV (Music Television), rap music and contemporary black films,
and television news and entertainment can help us to understand our contemporary
society. That is, understanding why certain artifacts are popular can illuminate the
social environment in which they arise and are circulated, and can thus provide
insight into what is going on in contemporary societies and cultures.
My focus is on media culture in the United States, but since U.S. culture is
increasingly exported to the entire world, this study should illuminate dominant
forms of globalized consumer and media culture elsewhere as well. U.S. media
culture is invading cultures all over the world, producing new forms of the global
popular. Such phenomena of U.S. media culture as the Rambo and Rocky films,
Madonna and Michael Jackson, MTV and rap, CNN and U.S. TV news footage,
American advertising and commodities, and the forms of American television,
music, film, and other aspects of media culture are popular throughout the world,
thus the studies collected here should be of global and not merely regional interest.
My studies were conceived and begun during a specific historical moment,
that of the triumph of conservatism in the United States and most Western capitalist
democracies. Accordingly, after setting out my concept of the sort of cultural
studies and social theory needed to understand our contemporary media culture
in an opening chapter on the theory and culture wars of recent years, I examine
in Chapter 2 the politics and ideology of Hollywood film in the Age of Reagan
and demonstrate how popular film reproduced the hegemonic conservative
discourses of the era. This study applies and expands the method of reading film
politically developed by Michael Ryan and myself in our 1988 book Camera
Politico and carries out some concrete studies of contemporary Hollywood films,
while delineating a model of a critical and multicultural media cultural studies. I
argue that one needs a cultural studies that criticizes the intersection of class,
gender, sex, race, and other key determinants of culture and identity in order to
more fully conceptualize the ideological dimensions of cultural texts and to
appraise the full range of their effects.
Next, in Chapter 3, I indicate the need to read media culture against its
ideological grain, to ferret out critical and subversive moments, and to analyze
how the ideological projects of media texts often fail. I also explicate a concept
of diagnostic critique that uses media culture to diagnose social trends and
tendencies, reading through the texts to the fantasies, fears, hopes, and desires
6 Introduction
that they articulate. A diagnostic critique also analyzes how media culture
provides the resources for producing identities and advances either reactionary
or progressive politics—or provides ambiguous texts and effects that can be
appropriated in various ways.
In Part II, I carry through some concrete studies of diagnostic critiques that
interrogate dominant representations of class, race, gender, sexuality, youth, and
contemporary politics. In Chapter 4, I illustrate the concept of diagnostic critique
through a reading of the Poltergeist films which I argue articulate middle-class
fears of downward mobility, homelessness, dissolution of the family, and threats
from other classes and races in cinematic form. I then develop readings of the film
Slacker and the MTV series Beavis and Butt-Head to provide a diagnosis of the
plight of disaffected youth in the current moment.
Thus, whereas Chapter 2 showed how Hollywood films transcoded the dominant
political discourses during the era of conservative hegemony from 1980 into the
1990s, Chapter 4 shows how the desires, anxieties, and insecurities of ordinary
people also find expression in media culture, allowing the depiction of crisis
tendencies beneath the ideological facade of a happy, secure consumer society.
Appraising the politics of media culture thus ranges from ideological critique of
the way that popular texts embody dominant political discourses concerning the
major political issues and conflicts of the day to analyzing texts that encode the
politics of everyday life and the anxieties and tensions concerning class, race,
gender, youth, and the dreams and anxieties of ordinary people.
In Chapter 5, I delineate a model of a multiperspectival cultural studies and
illustrate this concept with a detailed study of the films of Spike Lee, which provide
an exemplary instance of the cinematic exploration of key issues of race, gender,
and class in the contemporary moment. Drawing on black feminist and political
criticism of his films, I examine Lee’s work and the contributions and limitations
of his style, texts, and politics. Contrasting Lee’s films with the contemporary rap
music of Public Enemy, Ice-T, Ice Cube, Sister Souljah, and others suggests some
of the range of socially critical cultural texts being produced today and the ways
that radical blacks are pushing beyond the previously established limits of
mainstream culture to articulate their experiences of oppression, rage, and rebellion.
During the Reagan-Bush era, television grew in cultural and political importance,
through the political spectacles and daily photo opportunities produced by the
Reagan Administration and the spectacle of the “Gulf War” which I analyze in
Chapter 6. After Reagan, there followed the Bush regime and his effort during the
“Gulf War” to establish a “New World Order.” In Chapter 2, I indicate how certain
Hollywood films produced images that could be mobilized to produce consent to
the U.S. war against Iraq in the early 1990s. In Chapter 6, I show how the tools of
cultural studies can be utilized to critique the production of “Gulf War,” to provide
a critical reading of the text, and to help explain its effect on the audience and why
the public so massively supported the war.
Over the past decade, media culture has thus been playing an increasingly
important role in political elections, in the daily political battles, and in legitimating
Introduction 7
the political system. Global media events like the Gulf War demonstrated the efficacy
of U.S. weapons systems and the hegemony of U.S. military power, while events
like the spectacular 1994 TV funeral of Richard Nixon demonstrated the power of
the presidency. Nixon’s state funeral also conveyed the myth that anyone could
rise to the presidency as the camera cut frequently during the ceremony to Nixon’s
modest birth house.
Moreover, new forms of television entertainment appeared during the era and
in Chapter 7, I analyze some key moments of television culture in the 1980s,
including Miami Vice and other “new look” TV, often labelled “postmodern.” The
rise of Music Television (MTV) revolutionized the music industry, giving rise to
new multimedia stars like Madonna and Michael Jackson. I also explore some
ways that advertising provides models of gender and identification, as well as
inducements to buy specific products.
Just as image came to play a key role in the politics of the era, so too did it
come to play a central role in the media culture of the period and in everyday
life, in which one’s image, look, and style, became increasingly important in the
constitution of individual identity. Within this context, I provide readings in Part
III of Miami Vice, MTV, advertising, and Madonna in relationship to the claim
that they were exemplary in producing shifts to what has been identified as a
new postmodern culture and new postmodern identities. I attempt to clarify the
faddish discourses of postmodernism, indicating its uses and abuses. Focusing
on the politics of representation in contemporary culture, I analyze the
construction, rhetorical strategies, and effects of some key artifacts of
contemporary media culture, arguing that many texts of our media culture share
both modernist and postmodernist aesthetic strategies and thus are best read as
residing between the modern and postmodern.
This topic leads into reflections on the role of image and fashion in
constructing identity, as well as on the role of popular music, stars, and
promotion in our contemporary culture. I argue in Chapter 8 that Madonna’s
shifts in image and identity articulate transformations in values and politics of
the epoch. I claim that her contradictions capture conflicting aspects of her
cultural moment and that the “Madonna phenomenon” is symptomatic of key
trends of the era, so that interpreting her texts, and Madonna as a text herself,
can illuminate features of the present moment. Yet I argue that Madonna is a
phenomenon of her own production, promotion, and marketing strategies, and
that one needs therefore to focus on the political economy of culture to properly
interpret “the Madonna phenomenon.”
In “Mapping the present from the future: from Baudrillard to cyberpunk”
(Chapter 9), I explore cyberpunk fiction and postmodern theory as artifacts of
media culture which in turn provide fictional-theoretical visions of a society
increasingly dominated by media and information. Focusing on the similarities
between the social analysis of Baudrillard and the novels of William Gibson, I
interpret both as attempts to map our present moment which is constantly slipping
into the future. Through a close reading of Neuromancer, I argue that both
8 Introduction
Baudrillard and Gibson are providing visions of the future which serve to illuminate
the present. This analysis suggests that Baudrillard is best read as dystopic science
fiction, although cyberpunk can also be read as a new form of social theory that
maps the consequences of a rapidly developing information and media society in
the era of techno-capitalism.
In a conclusion, I indicate some remaining tasks for cultural studies and some
of the issues that cultural studies should address in the future. My studies ultimately
propose developing syntheses of social theory, cultural criticism, and media
pedagogy to illuminate our contemporary society, culture, and politics. Combining
philosophy, social theory, cultural critique, and political analysis, I present some
perspectives on society and culture, methods of cultural criticism, and make some
proposals for the reconstruction of cultural studies and critical social theory. Yet
the following texts were not only written for an academic audience. Although they
respond to academic debates over the proper method and terrain of social theory
and cultural criticism, I also address urgent political and cultural issues of the day
and thus attempt to write for a popular audience. I aspire to clearly explain complex
theoretical terms when they emerge in my arguments and to amply illustrate my
key methodological and theoretical positions.
CULTURAL STUDIES AND SOCIAL THEORY
As noted, I believe that cultural studies is best carried out in the context of critical
social theory, and in Chapter 1 and succeeding sections, I indicate how the critical
theory of the Frankfurt School provides useful perspectives on contemporary
society and helpful weapons of critique for cultural studies. But I also indicate
the limitations of the Frankfurt School and how the perspectives on culture and
society of British cultural studies often provide a corrective to the positions of
the Frankfurt School (though I also believe that aspects of the Frankfurt School
approach provide correctives to the limitations of British cultural studies).
Moreover, I engage the contributions of feminism and the multiculturalist projects
which undertake the explorations of gender, sexuality, race, ethnicity, otherness,
and marginality that began proliferating in the 1960s. In addition, I explore the
relevance for cultural studies of the theoretical innovations in the postmodern
theories of Foucault, Baudrillard, Jameson, and others, and attempt to analyze
some of the salient aspects of the present moment, such as the consumer and
media society; new computer, communications, and information technologies;
new forms of fashion and culture; new forms of power and knowledge; and new
modes of subjectivity and identity.
In fact, the present moment is marked by heated debates concerning whether
we are still living in the modern era or have moved into a new postmodern era.
Some of those who argue for the postmodern turn claim that we are living in an
entirely new and original moment that requires new theories and politics. French
theorist Jean Baudrillard is one of the most influential proponents of a radical
break and rupture with the previous forms of society, culture, politics, and theory.
Introduction 9
Throughout the book, I explore the claim that we are living in a new historical era
of “postmodernity” and discuss the relevance of postmodern theory for the study
of society and culture.
I argue that although some postmodern theory illuminates some conspicuous
new features of our culture and society, the claim concerning a new postmodern
rupture in society and history is exaggerated. In several studies, I examine the use
and abuse of postmodern theory and the claims that forms of media culture like
Madonna, Miami Vice, rap, MTV, and various other forms of media culture are
“postmodern.” I also take on those who claim that we need a new postmodern
form of theory and cultural studies to adequately engage our contemporary moment.
I argue that we are now living in a transitional era between the modern and the
postmodern which requires us to draw on both modern and postmodern strategies
and theories, thus resisting claims for a postmodern break in history and the need
for entirely new postmodern theories and cultural studies.
Instead I argue that a combination of the best resources of modern theories,
along with some new postmodern perspectives, provide the most useful tools with
which to do social theory and cultural criticism today. My enterprise intersects
throughout with the project of cultural studies which was developed by the
Birmingham Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies in the U.K. from the early
1960s to the present. This project involved reading culture from the perspective of
the production and reception of cultural texts within concrete historical contexts. I
build on the tradition of British cultural studies, but argue that the project needs to
be rethought and reworked in response to contemporary conditions and challenges.
I argue that while British cultural studies was on the cutting edge of the study of
culture and society for some decades, recent developments in cultural studies, that
have de-centered the earlier focus on class, and a failure throughout its history to
adequately engage the production and political economy of culture, mean that a
different kind of cultural studies is now required. Such a cultural studies, developed
in this book, is itself based on revised, updated, and reconstructed readings of
British cultural studies, of the Frankfurt School, of some positions of postmodern
theory, and of feminism and multicultural theory.
In their best work, proponents of British cultural studies always contextualized
their inquiries within current socio-political struggles and events. Throughout my
own studies, I accordingly attempt to situate the cultural artifacts under inquiry
within the environment in which they were produced and received, and to address
the key political issues articulated in cultural texts. The scope of my studies is
approximately the last decade of media culture from the early 1980s through the
early 1990s. I accordingly situate my studies within the cultural wars between
liberals, conservatives, and radicals, resulting in the conservative hegemony of the
Reagan and Bush Administrations, its constant contestation by liberals and radicals,
and the election of the more liberal Clinton administration in 1992. I show how the
political events of the day, such as the triumph of Reaganism and the Gulf War,
influenced the media culture of the period and how some popular forms of media
culture influenced the social and political ambience of the epoch.
10 Introduction
Throughout, I engage in critical media pedagogy that will enable readers and
citizens to make sense of their culture and society, that will provide tools of criticism
to help individuals to avoid media manipulation and to produce their own identities
and resistance, and that will inspire media activism to produce alternative forms of
culture and social transformation. A critical media pedagogy develops concepts
and analyses that will enable readers to critically dissect the artifacts of contemporary
media and consumer culture, help them to unfold the meanings and effects on
their culture, and thus give individuals power over their cultural environment.
I assume that cultural criticism and media pedagogy require social theory and
that critical social theory in turn should draw upon media and cultural studies and
the methods of cultural criticism to gain key insights into the texture of contemporary
social life. This project thus combines methodological strategies, theories, and
concepts from both modern and postmodern theory in the attempt to provide critical
perspectives on salient cultural and social phenomena of the contemporary era. I
draw upon and elaborate key ideas set out in my other works of the past years and
continue to delineate the trajectories of theory, culture, and politics in the
contemporary era. Inspired by the Frankfurt School project that attempts to provide
theoretical articulations of the present moment, these studies should be read as
examples of cultural critique which provide fragments of a critical theory of society
and, hopefully, some inspiration for a new future politics of liberation.
Moreover, the following studies should be read in conjunction with some of my
earlier works such as Camera Politica (co-authored with Michael Ryan, 1988),
which attempted to chart the vicissitudes of Hollywood film from the mid-1960s
to the mid-1980s and to develop critical methodologies for the interpretation of
cultural texts which would determine how various texts either advanced or inhibited
the aims of progressive political movements. The studies in this volume are also
congruent with my books Television and the Crisis of Democracy (Kellner 1990)
and The Persian Gulf TV War (Kellner 1992) which map some of the ways that the
media have become the terrain for contemporary politics and social struggles. In
these texts, I am interested in how the media either inhibit and impede the project
of the democratization of society or could promote it. These earlier texts attempt
to theorize the role of the media in a democratic society, and I continue this project
in this book. But whereas the preceding two books tended to focus on news and
information, the following studies interrogate a wide range of phenomena of media
culture and analyze how various forms of media culture produce pleasures,
positions, and identities, that either inhibit or advance the aims of producing more
democratic, egalitarian, and truly multicultural societies.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
For helpful comments on many of the texts and discussion of their thematics, I am
grateful to my friend and collaborator Steve Best. Useful comments, insights, and
material were also provided by Robert Antonio, David Armstrong, Ann Cvetkovich,
Jon Epstein, Henry Giroux, Darrell Hamamoto, Kelly Oliver, Danny Postal, Valerie
Introduction 11
Scatamburlo, and editors and readers of the journals where some of these articles
first appeared, though in different forms. I am extremely grateful to Jon and
Margarete Epstein for producing the computer generated illustrations in the book.1
The images of media culture are circulating through new spaces and require new
technologies for their analysis and dissection. I also want to thank Chris Rojek
who was highly supportive of the project and very helpful in focusing the text and
in starting it through the production process. Thanks also to Diane Stafford who
did an excellent job of editing further developments and in putting up with my
constant editing and email. But I am especially indebted to Rhonda Hammer for
providing constant criticism, materials, detailed editing, and ideas which helped
greatly in the development of these studies.
1 Computer images and cover art created by Jon S.Epstein and Margaret J.Epstein
for The Web.
Part 1
Theory/context/methods
15
Chapter 1
Theory wars and cultural studies
We live in a time of dramatic change and upheaval. Since the 1960s, there has been
a series of spectacular changes in culture and society throughout the world. The
1960s was an era of protracted social tumult with new social movements
mushrooming to challenge established forms of society and culture and to produce
new countercultures and alternative forms of everyday life. The 1960s generated
an era of intense “cultural wars” between liberals, conservatives, and radicals to
reconstruct culture and society according to their own agendas, wars that still rage
in the present moment. During the 1970s, worldwide economic recession burst the
bubble of post-World-War-II affluence and talk of a “post-scarcity society” was
replaced by discourses calling for scaling down of expectations, limits to growth,
and the need for reorganization of the economy and state. Such reorganization
took place in most parts of the capitalist world during the 1980s under the rule of
conservative governments which cut back on social welfare programs, while
expanding the military sector and increasing federal deficits, with massive debts
that are still unpaid.
The past five years have also seen the collapse of Soviet communism and the
end of the Cold War. After World War II, capitalist and communist countries began
competing for economic, political, and cultural power. Forces in both blocs
promoted cold and hot wars, resulting in heavy militarization and covert and overt
wars between the surrogates of the superpowers. Monstrous military establishments
on both sides and weapons of total destruction created a tense, fearful epoch, where
demagogues and cynical bureaucrats could frighten populations into accepting
social policies that mainly benefited the greedy and powerful, while postponing
much needed social reform and the creation of a more just and equitable social
order.
The tearing down of the Berlin Wall, the collapse of the Soviet Communist
empire, and the eventual dissolution of the Soviet Union itself seemed to bring this
nightmarish epoch to an end. The result, however, has not been the creation of a
new era of peace and stability. Instead, nationalist and religious wars have exploded,
bringing about a new era of fear and instability, with no political forces able to
offer an attractive way out of the current morass of economic recession, political
instability, and cultural confusion. Within the United States, culture wars have also
16 Theory/context/methods
intensified with rightist assaults on “political correctness” functioning as a weapon
for attacks on progressive forces and ideas.
New technologies have also emerged in the past decade which have changed
the patterns of everyday life and powerfully restructured work and leisure. New
computer technologies have replaced many jobs and created new ones, providing
new forms of accessing information, communicating with other people, and
plugging into the joys of a new computer-mediated public sphere. The new media
and computer technologies, however, are ambiguous and can have contradictory
effects. On one hand, novel media technologies provide more diversity of choice,
more possibility of autonomy over culture, and more openings for the interventions
of alternative culture and ideas. Yet the new computer technologies also provide
new forms of surveillance and control, with electronic eyes and systems in the
workplace providing a contemporary incarnation of Big Brother. The new media
technologies also provide powerful forms of social control through more efficient,
subtly concealed techniques of indoctrination and manipulation. Indeed, their very
existence might sap political energies and keep people safely ensconced within the
confines of their home entertainment centers, far from the madding crowds and
sites of mass political action.
As a historical phenomenon, media culture is relatively recent. While the new
forms of culture industries described by Horkheimer and Adorno (1972) in the
1940s of film, radio, magazines, comics, advertising, and the press began to colonize
leisure and stand at the center of the system of culture and communication in the
United States and other capitalist democracies, it was not until the advent of
television in the post-World War II period that media culture became a dominant
force within culture, socialization, politics, and social life (Kellner 1990a). Since
then, cable and satellite television, video recorders and other multimedia home
entertainment technologies, and more recently home computers have all accelerated
the dissemination and increased the power of media culture.
Media culture in the United States and most capitalist countries is a largely
commercial form of culture, produced for profit, and disseminated in the form of
commodities. The commercialization and commodification of culture has many
important consequences. First of all, production for profit means that the executives
of the culture industries attempt to produce artifacts that will be popular, that will
sell or, in the case of radio and television, that will attract mass audiences. In many
cases, this means production of lowest common denominator artifacts that will not
offend mass audiences and that will attract a maximum of customers. But precisely
the need to sell their artifacts means that the products of the culture industries must
resonate to social experience, must attract large audiences, and must thus offer
attractive products, which may shock, break with conventions, contain social
critique, or articulate current ideas that may be the product of progressive social
movements.
Thus, while media culture largely advances the interests of the class that owns
and controls the large media conglomerates, its products are also involved in social
conflict between competing groups and articulate conflicting positions, sometimes
Theory wars and cultural studies 17
advancing forces of resistance and progress. Consequently, media culture cannot
be simply dismissed as a banal instrument of the dominant ideology but must be
differentially interpreted and contextualized within the matrix of the competing
social discourses and forces which constitute it—as I attempt to do in this book.
Yet, in a certain sense, media culture is the dominant culture today; it has replaced
the forms of high culture as the center of cultural attention and impact for large
numbers of people. Furthermore, visual and oral forms of media culture are
supplanting forms of book culture, requiring new types of media literacy to decode
these new cultural forms. Moreover, media culture has become a dominant force
of socialization, with media images and celebrities replacing families, schools,
and churches as arbiters of taste, value, and thought, producing new models of
identification and resonant images of style, fashion, and behaviour.
With the advent of media culture, individuals are subjected to an unprecedented
flow of sights and sounds into one’s own home, and new virtual worlds of
entertainment, information, sex, and politics are reordering perceptions of space
and time, erasing distinctions between reality and media image, while producing
new modes of experience and subjectivity. These far-reaching political, social, and
cultural changes have been accompanied by a spectacular proliferation of new
theories and methods to help make sense of contemporary culture and society.
Already in the 1950s, social theorists were proclaiming the advent of new
postindustrial societies in which knowledge and information would be the “axial
principle” around which society was organized (Bell 1960, 1973 and 1976). During
the 1970s, arguments began appearing that modernity was over and that we were
now in a new postmodern era (Baudrillard 1976 and Lyotard 1984)—arguments
that generated an explosion of discourses of the postmodern in the 1970s and
1980s (surveyed in Best and Kellner 1991).
Some postmodern theorists argue that contemporary societies with their new
technologies, new forms of culture, and new experiences of the present era constitute
a decisive rupture with modern forms of life.1 For these theorists, the couch potato
channel-surfing through endless waves of TV programs and the computer jockey
jacking into cyberspace and new worlds of information and entertainment constitute
a startling evolutionary development, a decisive novelty in the human adventure.
The media junkies and technofreaks of the present age are seen as the hunters and
gathers of information and entertainment, challenged to survive an “infotainment”
overload and to process a stunning array of images and ideas. Like the mutant
portrayed by David Bowie in The Man Who Fell to Earth, the new postmodern
subjects, so it is claimed, will have to learn to live with and process an immense
fragmentation and proliferation of new images, information, and technologies.
During the same era, political economists began arguing that we are entering a
new “post-Fordist” society in which the regime of accumulation marked by mass
production and consumption, state regulation of the economy, and a homogeneous
mass culture is being replaced by “more flexible” regimes of accumulation (Harvey
1989). These are marked by transnational corporations replacing the nation-state
as arbitrators of production in a new era of global production that erases previous
18 Theory/context/methods
boundaries of space and time. Other social theorists speak of “disorganized
capitalism,” or new forms of organization, and new legitimation crises, risks,
ecological problems, the breakdown of community, growing rifts between rich
and poor, deadly new diseases such as AIDS, and a myriad of other new phenomena
and problems.2
These dramatic changes require new theortical and political responses to interpret
our current social situation and to illuminate our contemporary problems, conflicts,
challenges, and possibilities. In the conjuncture in which we find ourselves, cultural
studies can play an important role in elucidating the significant changes which
have taken place in our culture and society. We are indeed surrounded by new
technologies, new modes of cultural production, and new forms of social and
political life. Moreover, culture is playing an ever more significant role in every
realm of contemporary society, with multifarious functions in arenas from the
economic to the social. In the economy, seductive cultural forms shape consumer
demand, produce needs, and mold a commodity self with consumerist values. In
the political sphere, media images have produced a new sort of sound-bite politics
which places the media at the center of political life. In our social interactions,
mass-produced images guide our presentation of the self in everyday life, our ways
of relating to others, and the creation of our social values and goals. As work
declines in importance, leisure and culture become more and more the focus of
everyday life and the locus of value. Of course, one must work to earn the benefits
of the consumer society (or inherit sufficient wealth), but work is supposedly
declining in importance in an era in which individuals allegedly gain primary
gratification from consuming goods and leisure activities, rather than from their
labor activity.3
Thus, contemporary society and culture is in a state of ferment and change as
competing theories strive to make sense of these new developments. The contested
terrain of theory is accompanied by culture wars between conservatives, liberals,
and progressives, with conservatives attempting to roll back the advances of the
1960s and impose more traditional values and forms of culture. Throughout the
Western world, conservatives have been attempting to gain hegemony by seizing
political power and using it to carry through their economic, political, social, and
cultural agendas. They have been using their political and economic power to carry
through an agenda of cultural transformation, attempting to turn back the clock to
an earlier era of conservative rule.
In the United States, intense culture wars have been raging ever since
movements of the 1960s launched the first direct assaults on conservative values
and institutions. Richard Nixon temporarily established a shaky conservative
hegemony in the early 1970s, but his demise in the Watergate scandal triggered
a new round of culture wars. The conservative counterrevolution became
hegemonic in the U.S. with the election of Ronald Reagan in 1980 and ascent of
the New Right which supported his triumph over the Democrats, liberals, and
those radicals who preserved their 1960s politics and values. The previous
ascendancy of rightists like Margaret Thatcher in the U.K., Brian Mulrooney in
Theory wars and cultural studies 19
Canada, and the Kohl government in Germany spawned a period of conservative
hegemony throughout the Western capitalist world. During this era, conservatives
attacked the welfare state, abortion rights, civil liberties, freedom in the arts, the
liberalization of education, and attempted to impose a rightist and traditionalist
agenda on the public. Yet this offensive of the right never really triumphed in the
realm of culture, and culture itself has been a fiercely contested terrain for the
past decades.4
As we move into the 1990s, conservatives in the United States continue fiercely
to contest the liberals who now hold state power after the election of Bill Clinton
in 1992. When Clinton attempts to push through a partially liberal agenda, his
proposals are fought tooth and nail by conservatives, unlike those of Reagan, who
was able to readily implement his economic agenda (probably because it was
supported by the big media and business, which exert tremendous control over
politicians of both major parties). On the other hand, Clinton has been increasingly
pushing a conservative agenda himself and, in a sense, “Reaganism” retains its
position as “political common sense” and the dominant discourse of the era.
Moreover, both television and radio in the United States continue to be dominated
by conservative voices, with the same old right-wing think tanks and publications
providing the pundits who pontificate on the state of the nation, while new
reactionary brutes like Rush Limbaugh also gain media and cultural power.5
Hollywood films regularly attack women and feminism and celebrate the most
grotesque forms of unrestrained male power and machismo.6 “White male paranoia”
is evident in all cultural milieu from stand-up comics to radio talk shows, and the
conservative cultural offensive rages on unabated.
Similar cultural wars rage throughout Europe. In the U.K., the conservative
hegemony of the Thatcher and Major regimes has been under attack and
conservative power has been eroded, yet the media and culture still evidence strong
conservative trends. In France, the socialist government of Mitterand was decisively
defeated in 1993 by conservative forces, and social democratic governments in
Holland, Denmark, and Sweden have also suffered rare defeats in recent years.
Attempts to unify Europe politically and economically are countered by new
nationalist surges from Scandinavia to Eastern Europe and the pro- and anti-Europe
forces appear evenly divided. In the Arab world, militant fundamentalism is on the
march against secular and Westernized regimes, while in the former communist
world, struggles between national, ethnic, religious, and political forces have
exploded into ugly wars. Misery and oppression continue to grow apace in the
more underdeveloped regions of the world and the wretched of the earth appear
more wretched than ever.
Yet there are also countervailing trends. The progressive social movements of
the 1960s and 1970s are still alive and well and struggles for human rights, the
civil liberties of oppressed people, peace and justice, ecology, and a more humane
organization of society are everywhere visible. Indeed, the very instability, flux,
and uncertainty of the present moment creates openings for more positive futures
and possibilities for the creation of a better world out of current nightmares. On
20 Theory/context/methods
the other hand, the penchant for micropolitics and/or identity politics fragments
the progressive movements and renders many blind to the necessary linkages and
interconnections with others in opposition or in counterhegemonic struggles.
Within this context, it is therefore of vital importance to understand the role of
culture in a wide range of current social struggles, trends, and developments. It is
the conviction of the studies in this book that our current local, national, and global
situations are articulated through the texts of media culture, which is itself a
contested terrain, one which competing social groups attempt to use to promote
their agendas and ideologies, and which itself reproduces conflicting political
discourses, often in a contradictory manner. Not just news and information, but
entertainment and fiction articulate the conflicts, fears, hopes, and dreams of
individuals and groups confronting a turbulent and uncertain world. The concrete
struggles of each society are played out in the texts of media culture, especially in
the commercial media of the culture industries which produce texts that must
resonate with people’s concerns if they are to be popular and profitable. Culture
has never been more important and never before have we had such a need for
serious scrutiny of contemporary culture.
Consequently, to understand what is going on in our society and our everyday
life, we need theoretical perspectives on media culture and social theories that will
help us make sense of the changes and conflicts of the present age. Throughout
this book, I will thus delineate theoretical perspectives that I find useful in grasping
the vicissitudes of contemporary society and culture.7 But the fortunes of theory
are related to the historical matrices which shape and structure them and which
they in turn attempt to illuminate. Therefore, in the following study, I will sketch
the emergence and effects of some contemporary theories which I will make use
of in this work.
THEORY WARS
The past decades of intense cultural, social, and political struggle since the 1960s
also saw the rise of many new theories and approaches to culture and society. It is
as if the tumultuous struggles of the era sought expression and replication in the
realm of theory. The political passions and energies seemed to be sublimated into
the discourse of theory and new theories were appropriated with the intensity that
marked the assimilation and dissemination of radical political ideas and practices
in the 1960s. The proliferation of new theoretical discourses first took the form of
theory fever, in which each new, or newly discovered, theoretical discourse produced
feverish excitement, as if a new theory virus totally took over and possessed its
host. Then the proliferating theory fever took on the form of theory wars between
the competing theoretical discourses, often reducing theory to the domain of fashion.
Theory fever emerged in the 1960s in France with the proliferation of new
discourses emanating from the post-structuralist turn in theory. Rejecting the
totalizing, universalizing, and scientistic theories of structuralism, semiotics,
psychoanalysis, Marxism, and other “master discourses” which produced the theory
22 Theory/context/methods
fevers and wars of an earlier era, the post-structuralist revolution saw the
proliferation of new theories of language, the subject, politics, and culture. Yet,
drawing on the very theories whose more extravagant claims they rejected, the
post-structuralist movement provided new syntheses of Marxism, psychoanalysis,
semiotics, and feminism, exploding in a wealth of theoretical discourses, which
circulated throughout the world.
In the United States, where forms of what Herbert Marcuse called “onedimensional
thought” reigned in the 1950s and early 1960s, Marxism and feminism
were the first forms of theory fever to circulate. Experiences of the Vietnam war in
the 1960s drove many in the New Left and antiwar movement to Marxist theory,
tabooed during the Cold War and driven underground.8 Marxist discourse
proliferated and a stunning variety of neo-Marxist theories from Europe and the
Third World were imported to the United States, producing a wide range of new
radical theories.
Feminism quickly became part of the new theoretical discourses throughout
the world. In the late 1960s, women began to revolt against what they considered
oppressive practices of both contemporary patriarchal societies and their male
comrades in the radical movements. First-wave 1960s feminism discovered classics
like Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex, a rich woman’s history, and the
importance of women’s experience and culture for the radical project.9 Many, often
unhappy, marriages between Marxism and feminism took place, while other
varieties of feminist theory found important tools in psychoanalysis to analyze
women’s oppression and experiences, and to provide for the reconstruction of
more nurturing, feeling, and loving subjects. Thus, as with Marxism, a tremendous
range of feminist theories emerged, which often warred with each other, as well as
with male discourses.
Previously marginalized groups sought their own voices and in the United States
new African-American, Native American, Mexican-American, Asian-American,
and other minority discourses and studies emerged. Gay and lesbian studies
problematized sexuality and provided new perspectives on gender, sexuality, culture,
and society. Theorists whose national origin was frequently colonized countries
generated new subaltern studies, attacking Western colonization, while studies of
the “postcolonial subject” and voices from newly emerged nations produced some
exciting theoretical innovations and greatly expanded the terrain of critical
discourses. Cumulatively, these discourses have contributed to some of the most
exciting social theory and cultural criticism of recent years and in the following
studies I draw on these new oppositional discourses.
Although the tumult of the 1960s passed into the more quiescent 1970s, the
explosion of theories continued and theory wars intensified.10 A new globalization
of theory erupted with the new theoretical discourses being rapidly disseminated
across borders and national cultures. Theorists in the Third World and the United
States appropriated European discourses, and the resulting new critical theories
were circulated in turn throughout Europe. Discourses of race, class, ethnicity,
sexual preference, and nationality challenged theoretical discourses to take account
Theory wars and cultural studies 23
of phenomena previously ignored or underplayed. Wars broke out (and persist)
between those that privileged class and those that privileged such things as race
and gender. Finally, a truce prevailed which agreed that all of these determinants
of social identity and structuring social categories were of fundamental importance
to social life, cultural analysis, and individual subjectivity.
By the 1980s, the new global discourses of theory provided languages for
communication across borders, but they also disseminated the globalization of
theory fever and wars. Theory fevers continued to proliferate and from Berkeley to
Bombay, from Austin to London, new syntheses of Marxism, feminism,
psychoanalysis, post-structuralism, and postmodern theories emerged, while claims
were being made for a new discourse of theory which drew on the new critical
theories, producing ever-spiralling and complexified theoretical discourses and
syntheses. Theory wars intensified between discourses seeking hegemony and
dominance. Each new theory was proclaimed by its advocates as the supertheory,
as the key to culture, society and the subject. Discoveries of thinkers like Roland
Barthes, Jacques Lacan, Michel Foucault, Louis Althusser, Jean Baudrillard, Jean-
François Lyotard, Jacques Derrida, and the other stars of “new French Theory”
were enthusiastically taken up by followers who took each new theory as the finally
discovered oeuvre that would lead the way to theoretical and political salvation.
During the 1980s, various strains of French post-structuralist theory mutated
into postmodern theory (see the genealogy in Best and Kellner 1991 and the
discussion on p. 40). In a sense, postmodern theory exhibits the passions of the
1960s sublimated into theoretical discourse. The break or rupture desired in the
1960s, a break then described in the discourse of revolution, is projected onto
history itself, or more limited domains of society and culture. Yet, the apocalyptic
breaks and ruptures postulated in the 1960s as the goal of political struggle are
now being described in some postmodern theory as breaks occurring as the result
of new technologies, without the effort of revolutionary struggle, thus replicating,
in effect, the old discourses of technological determinism.
Moreover, some of the discourses of the postmodern also bear the marks of
defeat in the aftermath of the 1960s. Postmodern claims concerning the
fragmentation of the subject and doubts concerning the efficacy of political practice
are in part effects of the experience of the fragmentation of the political “movement”
of the era and disintegration of revolutionary politics and subjects. Postmodern
nihilism enunciates the experience of defeat, of disappointment, of despair, over
the failures of the 1960s movements to more radically transform social and cultural
life. Yet there is a more positive version of postmodern theory that translates some
of the progressive tendencies and gains of the 1960s into theoretical discourse and
cultural practice. What Hal Foster (1983) has termed the “postmodernism of
resistance” attempts to develop oppositional theoretical and cultural practices within
the present moment, against the more oppressive features and practices of
contemporary culture and society.
By the 1990s, many of the new theoretical discourses positioned themselves
under the rubric of “multiculturalism.” This way of seeing affirmed otherness and
24 Theory/context/methods
difference, and the importance of attending to marginalized, minority, and
oppositional groups and voices previously excluded from the cultural dialogue.
Multiculturalism elicited new cultural wars as conservatives defended Western
culture, with its canons of great (mostly) European males against the multicultural
offensive. Against multiculturalism, conservatives thus (re)affirmed
monoculturalism leading to a new round of intense theory and culture wars that
are still raging.
As noted, each new product of the theory fever was presented as the solution to
the current dilemmas of theory and politics and extravagant claims for the
revolutionary nature of each theoretical discourse were endlessly recycled. At this
juncture, however, it seems highly questionable to seek a new theoretical Holy
Grail that will yield the secrets of Being, culture, or society. Rather, with Foucault,
it is perhaps better to conceive of theories as instruments, as providing tools in a
toolkit, or, to use an earlier metaphor, as weapons used to attack specific targets.11
“Theories” are, among other things, ways of seeing, optics; they are perspectives
which illuminate specific phenomena and that also have certain blindspots and
limitations which restrict their focus. The term “theory” derives from the Greek
root theoria that privileges seeing, and thus one function of theory is to help
individuals see and interpret phenomena and events. Theories are thus ways of
seeing that provide understanding and modes of interpretation which focus attention
on specific phenomena, linkages, or the social system as a whole.
Post-structuralist theory has made us aware that theories are constructs, products
of specific social discourses, practices, and institutions, and thus do not transcend
their social fields. Traditional theories that claim to provide a foundation of truth,
or universal knowledge transcendent of social conditions, or a metatheory that
provides truth which transcends the interests of particular theories, have been widely
rejected, as have positivist theories which claim that science provides a privileged
mode of truth to which all theory should aspire. Against positivism, it is generally
agreed that there is no such thing as an immaculate perception, that seeing,
interpreting, explaining, and so on are all mediated by theoretical discourses and
embedded in theoretical assumptions.
Thus, on this more modest conception of theory, theories are seen as tools that
help us see, operate, and get around specific social fields, pointing to salient
phenomena, making connections, interpreting and criticizing, and perhaps
explaining and predicting specific states of affairs. Theories provide resources to
talk about common experiences, discourses, practices, institutions, and social
relations. They also point to conflicts and problems and provide resources to discuss
them and to search for solutions.
Theories thus illuminate social realities and help individuals to make sense of
their world. Theories use concepts, images, symbols, arguments, and narratives to
do their work. Contemporary metatheory (i.e. theory about theory) frequently notes
that theories have literary components; they tell stories, utilize rhetoric and symbols,
and like literary texts help make sense of our life.12 Yet theories also have cognitive
components that abstract in theoretical concepts common features of their domain,
Theory wars and cultural studies 25
as when critical social theories analyze the structures of capitalism, patriarchy, or
social class. Social theories provide maps of societal fields that orient individuals
to perceive how their societies are constructed. The categories of social theory
conceptualize the structures, relations, and institutions that provide the terrain for
social and everyday life.
Social theories are thus heuristic devices to interpret and make sense of social
life. They illuminate the context of social action and guide people in their everyday
social interactions. Social theories often provide the big picture that allows
individuals to contextualize their experience within the broader field of social
relations and institutions. Social theories can also illuminate specific events and
artifacts by analyzing their constituents, relations, and effects. Dialectical social
theory makes connections between isolated parts of society, showing, for instance,
how the economy enters into the processes of media culture and structures what
kind of texts are produced in the culture industries. Or it shows how listening to
music is mediated by specific technologies, cultural spaces, and institutions (Berland
in Grossberg, et al. 1992). Dialectics is the art of making connections and relating
parts to each other and to the system as a whole. Thus, a critical theory of society
contains mappings of how society as a whole is organized, delineating its
fundamental structures, institutions, practices, and discourses, and how they fit
together into a social system.
Critical social theory can utilize the concept of articulation to denote how various
societal components are organized into the production of, say, conservative
hegemony, or in the popularity of a Madonna. The concept of articulation was
introduced by British cultural studies and has become central to its practice (see
Hall, 1986b; Grossberg, 1992; and the fast genealogy of the concept in Jameson
1994). Cultural studies delineates how cultural artifacts articulate social ideologies,
values, and representations of gender, race, and class, and how these phenomena
are related to each other. Situating cultural texts in their social context thus involves
tracing the articulations through which societies produce culture and how culture
in turn shapes society through its influence on individuals and groups.
Critical social theories conceptualize the structures of domination and resistance.
They point to forms of oppression and domination contrasted to forces of resistance
that can serve as instruments of change. They illuminate the possibilities of social
transformation and progress, as well as the dangers of intensified social domination.
Critical social theory thus devolves around social practice and can aid in the
construction of better societies by showing what needs to be transformed, what
agencies might carry out the transformation, and what strategies and tactics might
be successful in promoting progressive social change.
Thus, critical social theories are weapons of critique and instruments of practice,
as well as cognitive maps. Critical theory points to aspects of society and culture
that should be challenged and changed, and thus attempts to inform and inspire
political practice. Practice-oriented theory also posits certain goals and values that
are to be realized and sketches ways to transform society to make it better, to
increase human freedom and happiness. They provide vocabularies that help
26 Theory/context/methods
mobilize responses to social problems and issues, and thus aim at intervention in
the public sphere.
As I have noted, the present situation is characterized by a bewildering
multiplicity of competing theoretical paradigms. Different theories can be used
for varying purposes in disparate situations. The usefulness or uselessness of specific
theories depends on the task at hand and whether the theory in question is
appropriate for that task. Theory, as the following studies hope to demonstrate, can
be useful, but it is a grave mistake to believe that there is a supertheory or master
narrative that will provide the interpretive or explanatory keys to all of our
intellectual and political problems. Consequently, instead or arguing for a new
supertheory, or privileging a grand synthesis of previous theories, I will draw upon
a number of critical theories, offering some examples of what I call a
multiperspectival social theory and media cultural studies.13
Contemporary societies require constant mappings and remappings because of
the intensity of change and speed of current social transformations. We are living
through an epoch of intense change, and many of the current theories of society
describe aspects of this change, and are thus relevant in various specific contexts.
No one theory, however, tells the whole story, and all contemporary theories have
their limitations and blind spots, as well as their contributions. Consequently, I
propose combining various contemporary social theories to provide some ways of
illuminating and talking about phenomena and developments within the present
age.14 The mappings of each specific theory provide some novel insights, but usually
are limited in specific ways. Some theories are thus useful for some tasks (i.e.
Marxist ideology as a critique for analyzing class and hegemony), while other
theories are useful for other tasks (i.e. feminism for interrogating gender, or queer
studies for discussing the construction of sexuality and sexual preferences, and so
on). No one theory could possibly address all topics or illuminate all features of
social life. Thus, one must choose which theories one deploys, according to the
specific tasks at hand.
For the purposes of this study, I shall therefore adopt a pragmatic contextualist
approach to theory, using some critical theories for certain specific tasks and others
for different ones. A multiperspectival approach holds that the more theories one
has at one’s disposal, the more tasks one can perform and the more specific objects
and themes one can address. Further, the more perspectives that one brings to bear
on a phenomenon, the better one’s potential grasp or understanding of it could be.
To be sure, a powerful and innovative single perspective (like psychoanalysis or
feminism) might be more useful in illuminating or explaining certain phenomena
than an eclectic combination of multiple perspectives, but combining powerful
approaches like Marxism, feminism, post-structuralism, and other contemporary
theoretical optics might yield more insightful and useful analyses than those
produced by one perspective alone. Moreover, a Marxism informed by feminism
and psychoanalysis is different and more useful than a theory innocent of such
perspectives.
As I attempt to show in this collection, different topics and issues require varying
Theory wars and cultural studies 27
methods and approaches. Indeed, throughout this book I attempt to flesh out my
theoretical position, which is only suggested here, and believe that only through
concrete studies can theories be developed and tested, and their hermeneutical and
critical effectiveness validated. And the political efficacy of a theory can only be
developed and tested through examination of its effects on practice. If a theory
illuminates a phenomenon like MTV and produces altered reception of it (or perhaps
rejection), or inspires the production of oppositional media practices, then the theory
turns out to be valuable both in its theoretical and political effects.
The test of a theory is thus its use, its deployment, and its effects. From this
perspective, theories are seen to be either useful or deficient through their application
and effects. Contextual pragmatist and multiperspectival approaches thus work
together to open up theoretical inquiry to a multiplicity of discourses and methods.
Theories and discourses are more or less useful depending on the issue under
question, the specific application of the theory in the theorist’s hands, and the
goals intended. In the next sections, I shall note which particular theories I and
others engaged in the analysis of the intersection of culture, society, and politics
that is cultural studies have found most useful. Yet I do not intend to provide a
history or genealogy of the trajectories of cultural studies. I will not provide a
summary of works of various traditions of cultural studies, but wish instead to
intervene in contemporary debates, staking out my own positions within the field
of current problematics. Accordingly, in the following discussion, I cite only
positions that I feel are productive for a media cultural studies, or indicate positions
from which I am distancing myself.15
APPROACHES TO CULTURAL STUDIES
The metatheory for and models of social theory and cultural criticism that I am
proposing here have been especially influenced by the Frankfurt School, British
cultural studies, and postmodern/post-structuralist theory. As I indicate below, the
Frankfurt School inaugurated critical studies of mass communication and culture
and developed an early model of cultural studies. There are indeed many traditions
and models of cultural studies, ranging from neo-Marxist models developed by
Lukàcs, Gramsci, Bloch, and the Frankfurt School in the 1930s to feminist and
psychoanalytic cultural studies. In Britain and the United States, there is a long
tradition of cultural studies that preceded the Birmingham school.16 The major
traditions of cultural studies combine—at their best—social theory, cultural analysis,
history, philosophy, and specific political interventions, thus overcoming the
standard academic division of labor by surmounting specialization which bifurcates
the field of study of the media, culture, and communications. Cultural studies thus
operates with a transdisciplinary conception that draws on social theory, economics,
politics, history, communication studies, literary and cultural theory, philosophy,
and other theoretical discourses.
Transdisciplinary approaches to culture and society transgress borders between
various academic disciplines. In particular, they argue that one should not stop at
28 Theory/context/methods
the border of a text, but should see how it fits into systems of textual production,
and how various texts are thus part of systems of genres or types of production and
have an intertextual construction. Rambo is a film, for instance, that fits into the
genre of war films and a specific cycle of return-to-Vietnam films (see the analysis
in Chapter 2). One should not, however, stop at the borders of intertexuality, but
should move from the text to its context, to the culture and society that constitutes
the text and in which it should be read and interpreted. For Rambo also replicates
the right-wing discourses concerning POWs left in Vietnam and the need to
overcome the Vietnam syndrome (i.e. shame concerning the loss of the war and
overcoming the reluctance to again use U.S. military power). Interpreting the
cinematic text of Rambo thus involves the use of film theory, social history, political
analysis and ideology critique, and other modes of cultural criticism, as I will
illustrate in the next chapter.
Transdisciplinary approaches thus involve border crossings across disciplines
from text to context, and thus from texts to culture and society.17 Crossing borders
inevitably pushes one to the boundaries of class, gender, race, sexuality, ethnicity,
and the other characteristics that differentiate individuals from each other and
through which people construct their identities. Thus, most forms of cultural studies,
and most critical social theories, have engaged feminism and the various
multicultural theories, enriching their projects with theoretical and political
substance derived from the new critical and multicultural discourses that have
emerged since the 1960s.
Transdisciplinary cultural studies thus draws on a disparate range of fields to
theorize the complexity and contradictions of the multiple effects of a vast range
of forms of media/culture/communications in our lives and demonstrate how these
artifacts serve as instruments of domination, but also offer resources for resistance
and change. In the following sketch, I first indicate how the Frankfurt School
developed an early approach to media studies still worth attending to, though I
also identify some of its limitations. I next discuss British cultural studies which
currently rivals postmodern theory in popularity and attention as a critical approach
to the study of culture and society, indicating its contributions, but also some of its
restrictions. Then, I discuss the postmodern turn in social and cultural theory and
also explicate some of the attempts to develop a postmodern cultural studies. In
the following discussions, I will focus primarily on aspects of these traditions that
I believe are useful today for cultural studies while noting some limitations that I
think have vitiated certain forms of contemporary cultural studies.
THE FRANKFURT SCHOOL
The Frankfurt School inaugurated critical communications studies in the 1930s
and combined political economy of the media, cultural analysis of texts, and
audience reception studies of the social and ideological effects of mass culture and
communications.18 Its proponents coined the term “culture industries” to signify
the process of the industrialization of mass-produced culture and the commercial
Theory wars and cultural studies 29
imperatives which drove the system. The critical theorists analyzed all massmediated
cultural artifacts within the context of industrial production, in which the
artifacts of the culture industries exhibited the same features as other products of
mass production: commodification, standardization, and massification. The products
of the culture industries had the specific function, however, of providing ideological
legitimation of the existing capitalist societies and of integrating individuals into
the framework of mass culture and society.
Adorno’s analyses of popular music, Lowenthal’s studies of popular literature
and magazines, Herzog’s studies of radio soap operas, and the perspectives and
critiques of mass culture developed in Horkheimer and Adorno’s famous study of
the culture industries (1972) provided many examples of the usefulness of the
Frankfurt School approach. Moreover, in their theories of the culture industries
and critiques of mass culture, they were the first to systematically analyze and
criticize mass-mediated culture and communications within critical social theory.
In particular, they were the first to see the importance of what they called the
“culture industries” in the reproduction of contemporary societies, in which socalled
mass culture and communications stand in the center of leisure activity, are
important agents of socialization, mediators of political reality, and should thus be
seen as major institutions of contemporary societies with a variety of economic,
political, cultural and social effects.19
Yet there are serious flaws in the original program of critical theory which
requires a radical reconstruction of the classical model of the culture industries
(Kellner 1989a). Overcoming the limitations of the classical model would include:
more concrete analysis of the political economy of the media and the processes of
the production of culture; more empirical and historical research into the
construction of media industries and their interaction with other social institutions;
more studies of audience reception and media effects; and the incorporation of
new cultural theories and methods into a reconstructed critical theory of culture
and the media. Cumulatively, such a reconstruction of the classical Frankfurt School
project would update the critical theory of society and its activity of cultural criticism
by incorporating contemporary developments in social and cultural theory into the
enterprise of critical theory.
In addition, the Frankfurt School dichotomy between high culture and low culture
is problematic and should be superseded by a model that takes culture as a spectrum
and applies similar critical methods to all cultural artifacts ranging from opera to
popular music, from modernist literature to soap operas. In particular, the Frankfurt
School model of a monolithic mass culture contrasted with an ideal of “authentic
art,” which limits critical, subversive, and emancipatory moments to certain
privileged artifacts of high culture, is highly problematic. The Frankfurt School
position that all mass culture is ideological and debased, having the effects of
duping a passive mass of consumers, is also objectionable. Instead, one should see
critical and ideological moments in the full range of culture, and not limit critical
moments to high culture and identify all of low culture as ideological. One should
also allow for the possibility that critical and subversive moments could be found
30 Theory/context/methods
in the artifacts of the culture industries, as well as the canonized classics of high
modernist culture that the Frankfurt School seemed to privilege as the site of artistic
opposition and emancipation.20 In addition one should distinguish between the
encoding and decoding of media artifacts, and recognize that an active audience
often produces its own meanings and uses for products of the culture industries.
Yet precisely the critical focus on media culture from the perspectives of
commodification, reification, ideology, and domination provides a framework useful
as a corrective to more populist and uncritical approaches to media culture which
tend to surrender critical standpoints. Although the Frankfurt School approach is
partial and one-sided it does provide tools to criticize the ideological and debased
forms of media culture and the ways that it reinforces ideologies which legitimate
forms of oppression. As I argue in Chapter 2 and throughout the book, ideology
critique is a fundamental constituent of cultural studies and the Frankfurt School is
valuable for inaugurating systematic and sustained critiques of ideology within
the culture industries.
Moreover, on the level of metatheory, the Frankfurt School work preceded the
bifurcation of the field of media studies into specialized subareas with competing
models and methods. This bifurcation is documented in the 1983 Journal of
Communications issue on “Ferment in the field” (Vol. 33, No. 3 [Summer 1983]),
where some of the participants in this discussion on the state of the art of media
communications studies noted a bifurcation of the field between a culturalist
approach that focuses primarily on texts contrasted with more empirical approaches
in the study of mass-mediated communications. The culturalist approach at the
time was largely textual, centered on the analysis and criticism of all forms of
communication as cultural artifacts, using methods primarily derived from the
humanities. The methods of communications research, by contrast, employed more
empirical methodologies, ranging from straight quantitative research, ethnographic
studies of specific cases or domains, to specialized historical research. Topics in
this area included analysis of the political economy of the media, audience reception
and study of media effects, media history, the interaction of media institutions
with other domains of society and the like.
Some contributors to the 1983 JOC symposium suggested a liberal tolerance of
different approaches, or ways in which the various approaches complemented each
other or could be integrated. In overcoming the divide between cultural and
communications studies, I would suggest that the Frankfurt School approach is
valuable because it provides an integral model that transcends contemporary
divisions in the study of media, culture, and communications.21 Their studies
dissected the interconnection of culture and communication in artifacts that
reproduced the existing society, positively presenting social norms and practices,
and legitimating the state capitalist organization of society. The Frankfurt School
carried out analysis within the framework of critical social theory, thus integrating
communication and cultural studies within the context of study of capitalist society
and the ways that communications and culture were produced within this order
and the roles and functions that they assumed. The Frankfurt School also made
Theory wars and cultural studies 31
apparent the inappropriate nature of quantitative methods for qualitative relations
and produced methods to analyze the complex relations between texts, audiences,
and contexts, as well as the relationships between the media industries, state, and
capitalist economies. Thus the study of communication and culture was integrated
within critical social theory and became an important part of a theory of
contemporary society, in which culture and communication were playing ever more
significant roles.22
BRITISH CULTURAL STUDIES AND ITS LEGACY
The Frankfurt School developed their model of the culture industry in the decades
from the 1930s through the 1950s, and then did not develop any significantly new
or innovative approaches to media culture. British cultural studies emerged in the
1960s as a project of approaching culture from critical and multidisciplinary
perspectives which was instituted in England by the Birmingham Centre for
Contemporary Cultural Studies and others.23 British cultural studies situates culture
within a theory of social production and reproduction, specifying the ways that
cultural forms served either to further social domination, or to enable people to
resist and struggle against domination. Society is conceived as a hierarchical and
antagonistic set of social relations characterized by the oppression of subordinate
class, gender, race, ethnic, and national strata. Building on Gramsci’s model of
hegemony and counterhegemony, cultural studies analyze “hegemonic,” or ruling,
social and cultural forms of domination, and seek “counterhegemonic” forces of
resistance and struggle.24
For Gramsci, societies maintained their stability through a combination of force
and hegemony, with some institutions and groups violently exerting power to
maintain social boundaries (i.e. the police, military, vigilante groups, etc.), while
other institutions (like religion, schooling, or the media) serve to induce consent to
the dominant order through establishing the hegemony, or ideological dominance,
of a specific type of social order (i.e. liberal capitalism, fascism, white supremacy,
democratic socialism, communism, or whatever).
Hegemony theory involved both analysis of current systems of domination and
the ways that specific political groups achieved hegemonic power (i.e. Thatcherism
or Reaganism) and the delineation of counterhegemonic forces, groups, and ideas
that could contest and overturn the existing hegemony. British cultural studies was
thus connected with a political project of social transformation in which location
of forms of domination and resistance would aid the process of political struggle.
Richard Johnson, in discussions at a 1990 University of Texas conference on
cultural studies, stressed that a distinction should be made between the postmodern
concept of “difference” and the Birmingham notion of “antagonism,” in which the
first concept often refers to a liberal conception of recognizing and tolerating
differences, while the notion of antagonism refers to structural forces of domination,
in which asymmetrical relations of power exist in sites of conflict. There is indeed
an important difference between mere oppositions and differences (such as up/
32 Theory/context/methods
down, day/night, 0/1) through which linguistic systems are formed and in which
opposing terms are opposite and equal, as opposed to relations of antagonism
(workers/bosses, men/women, whites/blacks) in which the terms of difference are
of unequal power and exist in relations of inequality and antagonism. Within such
relations, oppressed individuals struggle to overcome structures of domination in
a variety of arenas.
The key point here is that it is struggles against domination, against subordination,
which are the ones focused on by a critical cultural studies. Not just any struggle
and resistance, but those against domination, against structural relations of inequality
and oppression are the ones highlighted by the critical cultural studies that I am
concerned to develop.
Cultural studies thus situates culture within a socio-historical context in which
culture promotes domination or resistance, and criticizes forms of culture that foster
subordination. In this way, cultural studies can be distinguished from idealist,
textualist, and extreme discourse theories which only recognize linguistic forms
as constitutive of culture and subjectivity. Cultural studies by contrast is materialist
in that it focuses on the material origins and effects of culture and the ways that
culture is imbricated in process of domination or resistance.
Cultural studies thus requires a social theory that analyzes the system and
structure of domination and forces of resistance. Since capital and economic
relations have played a key role in structuring contemporary societies (often referred
to as “capitalist” or “democratic capitalist” societies), Marxism has played an
important role from the beginning of cultural studies, though there have been fierce
battles concerning which forms of Marxist theory and more recently there have
been sharp rejections of Marxist perspectives (see Bennett 1992 and Fiske 1993).25
Classically, however, cultural studies has seen society as a system of domination
in which institutions like the family, schooling, church, workplace, media, and the
state control individuals and provide structures of domination against which
individuals striving for more freedom and power must struggle.
Cultural studies, therefore, like the critical theory of the Frankfurt School,
develops theoretical models of the relationship between the economy, state, society,
culture, and everyday life, and thus depends on the problematics of contemporary
social theory. Yet cultural studies also draws significantly on theories of culture.
Crucially, cultural studies subverts the high and low culture distinction—like
postmodern theory and unlike the Frankfurt School—and thus valorizes cultural
forms like film, television, and popular music dismissed by previous approaches
to culture which tended to utilize literary theory to analyze cultural forms, or to
focus primarily, or even solely, on the artifacts of high culture.
Yet, as Aronowitz has argued (1993:127ff.), British cultural studies has tended
to ignore high culture, erasing it, with few exceptions, from their field of inquiry.
They might be contrasted in this regard with the Frankfurt School, which celebrated
the oppositional qualities of certain sorts of high culture, especially critical
modernism, and with postmodernism, an aesthetic reaction against high modernism
that mixed features of so-called high and low culture. British cultural studies,
Theory wars and cultural studies 33
however, have generally failed to engage modernism, or other forms of high culture,
and thus overlook the potentials for opposition and subversion, as well as ideology,
in the works which some of its practitioners dismiss as elitist high culture. This is
curious since a group of theorists around the magazine Screen, which was of signal
importance in developing cultural theory in Britain and elsewhere during the 1970s,
celebrated the oppositional quality of modernism against forms of realism and
media culture, thus replicating the Frankfurt split. In retrospect, it seems better to
consider the conservative and oppositional force and effects of all forms of culture.
Though one should also reject the rigid high/low culture split that vitiated the
Frankfurt School and Screen theory, which reserved emancipatory effects solely
for the products of oppositional modernism while dismissing all forms of popular
or mass culture as mere ideology.
A question of terminology
The innovation of British cultural studies, then, was to see the importance of media
culture and how it is involved in processes of domination and resistance. Yet there
is some debate concerning the proper terminology to describe the objects of those
forms of culture that permeate everyday life in the familiar form of such things as
radio or television. Raymond Williams and the members of the Birmingham school
were responsible for the rejection of the term “mass culture,” which they argue,
properly I believe, tends to be elitist, erecting a binary opposition between high
and low, that is contemptuous of “the masses” and its culture. The concept of
“mass culture” is also monolithic and homogeneous, and thus neutralizes cultural
contradictions and dissolves oppositional practices and groups into a neutral concept
of “mass.”
I would also, however, reject the term “popular culture” which John Fiske (1989a
and 1989b) and other contemporary practitioners of cultural studies have
unproblematically adopted (i.e. Grossberg 1989 and 1992). The term “popular”
suggests that media culture arises from the people. The term also covers over the
fact that it is a top-down form of culture which often reduces the audience to a
passive receiver of predigested meanings. As used by Fiske, Grossberg, and others,
“popular culture” collapses the distinction between culture produced by the people,
or “popular classes,” contrasted to mass-produced media culture, thus revelling in
a “cultural populism” (McGuigan 1992) that often uncritically celebrates media
and consumer culture.
Initially, the term “popular” was used by two of the founders of British cultural
studies to refer to a relatively autonomous working-class culture that was “of the
people.”26 The discourse of the “popular” has also long been utilized in Latin
America and elsewhere to describe art produced by and for the people themselves
as an oppositional sphere to mainstream or hegemonic culture, which is often a
colonial culture, imposed from above. Thus, in Latin America and elsewhere,
“popular forces” describe groups struggling against domination and oppression,
while “popular culture” describes culture of, by, and for the people, in which they
34 Theory/context/methods
produce and participate in cultural practices that articulate their experience and
aspirations. Calling mass-mediated commercial products of the culture industries
“popular culture” thus collapses a distinction between two very different sorts of culture.
The concept of “popular culture” also presents a celebratory gloss associated
with the Popular Culture Association, which often engages in uncritical affirmations
of all that is “popular.” Since this term is associated in the U.S. with individuals
and groups that often eschew critical, theoretically informed, and political
approaches to culture, it is risky to use the term “popular culture,” though Fiske
has tried to provide it with an inflection consistent with the left-populist and socially
critical approach of cultural studies. In a 1991 interview, Fiske defines the “popular”
as that which audiences make of and do with the commodities of the culture
industries (see also Fiske 1989a and 1989b). He argues that progressives should
appropriate the term “popular,” wresting it from conservatives and liberals, using
it as part of an arsenal of concepts in a cultural politics of opposition and resistance
(discussion in Austin, September 1990).
Consequently, even the vocabulary of cultural studies is contested, with no
agreement on the basic terms used to describe its field. Indeed, in recent years,
new schools of cultural studies have emerged in Australia, Canada, the United
States and elsewhere, utilizing different methods, concepts, strategies, and
approaches. There is thus a plurality of cultural studies and a series of debates over
its methods, focuses, politics, whether it should or should not be institutionalized,
and so forth.
Moreover, there are problems with some of the basic vocabulary of many
contemporary versions of cultural studies and thus the key concepts are unstable,
constantly being challenged and revised. In view of the contest over terminology,
each intervention in the field of cultural studies needs to lay out and explicate its
critical language, distinguish itself from other discourses, and clarify its own specific
use of the vocabulary. In my view, more debate is needed as to whether using the
term “popular culture” in any form risks blunting the critical edge of cultural studies,
and whether it is thus simply better to avoid ideologically loaded terms like “mass
culture” and “popular culture.” A possible move within cultural studies would
therefore simply be to take culture itself as the field of one’s studies without divisions
into the high and the low, the popular and the elite—though, of course, these
distinctions can be strategically deployed in certain contexts. Thus, I believe that
instead of using ideological labels like “mass” and “popular,” one could simply
talk of culture and communication and develop a “cultural studies” cutting across
the full range of media and culture.
In this book, I am adopting the concept of “media culture” to delineate the
subject matter of my investigations. The term “media culture” has the advantage
of signifying both the nature and form of the artifacts of the culture industries (i.e.
culture) and their mode of production and distribution (i.e. media technologies
and industries). It avoids ideological terms like “mass culture” and “popular culture”
and calls attention to the circuit of production, distribution, and reception through
which media culture is produced, distributed, and consumed. The term breaks down
Theory wars and cultural studies 35
artificial barriers between the fields of cultural, media, and communications studies
and calls attention to the interconnection of culture and communications media in
the constitution of media culture, thus breaking down reified distinctions between
“culture” and “communication.”27
In fact, the distinction between “culture” and “communications” is arbitrary
and rigid, and should be deconstructed. Whether one takes “culture” as the artifacts
of high culture, the ways in which people live their lives, the context of human
behavior, or whatever, it is intimately bound up with communication. All culture,
to become a social artifact, and thus properly “culture,” is both a mediator of and
mediated by communication, and is thus communicational by nature. Yet
“communication,” in turn, is mediated by culture, it is a mode through which culture
is disseminated and rendered actual and effective. There is no communication
without culture and no culture without communication, so drawing a rigid distinction
between them, and claiming that one side is a legitimate object of a disciplinary
study, while the other term is relegated to a different discipline is an excellent
example of the myopia and futility of arbitrary academic divisions of labor.28
In any case, British cultural studies presents an approach that allows us to avoid
cutting up the field of media/culture/communications into high and low, popular
vs. elite, and to see all forms of media culture and communication as worthy of
scrutiny and criticism. It allows approaches to culture and communication that
force us to appraise their politics and to make political discriminations between
different types of artifacts that have different political effects. Like other
multicultural approaches, it brings the study of race, gender, and class into the
forefront of the study of media culture and communication.29 It also adopts a critical
approach that, like that of the Frankfurt School, but without some of its flaws,
interprets culture within society and situates the study of culture within the field of
contemporary social theory and oppositional politics.
The term “media culture” also has the advantage of signifying that our culture
is a media culture, that the media have colonized culture, that they are the primary
vehicle for the distribution and dissemination of culture, that the mass media of
communications have supplanted previous modes of culture like the book or spoken
word, that we live in a world in which media dominate leisure and culture. Media
culture is thus the dominant form and site of culture in contemporary societies.
A question of politics
Media culture is also the site where battles are fought for the control of society.
Feminists and antifeminists, liberals and conservatives, radicals and defenders of
the status quo, struggle for cultural power not only in the medium of news and
information, but also in the domain of entertainment, as I shall demonstrate
throughout this book. The media are intimately connected with power and open
the study of culture to the vicissitudes of politics and the slaughterhouse of history.
They help shape our view of the world, public opinion, values and behavior, and
are thus an important forum of social power and struggle.
36 Theory/context/methods
From the beginning, the work of the Birmingham group was oriented toward
the crucial political problems of their age and milieu and focused intently on the
politics of culture. Some of the first work which defined British cultural studies,
such as Richard Hoggart’s The Uses of Literacy (1958), indicated how individuals
created their identities and lives through their cultural resources. The first half of
Hoggart’s book details how working-class communities in Britain traditionally
created oppositional cultures to the mainstream, and then describes how they were
being eroded by the development of a national culture and processes of cultural
homogenization directed by the state, schooling, and the media. This was also a
theme of such major early influences on British cultural studies as Raymond
Williams (1958 and 1962) and E.P.Thompson (1963).
From the 1960s, British cultural studies began to indicate how media culture
was producing identities and ways of seeing and acting that integrated individuals
into the mainstream culture (Hall and Whannel 1964). The Birmingham group’s
early focus on class and ideology thus derived from their acute sense of the
oppressive and systemic effects of class in British society and the struggles of the
1960s against class inequality and oppression. Studies of subcultures in Britain
sought to search for new agents of social change when it appeared that sectors of
the working class were being integrated into the existing system and conservative
ideologies and parties. Their attempts to reconstruct Marxism were influenced as
well by 1960s struggles and political movements. The turn toward feminism, often
conflicted, was directly influenced by the feminist movement, while the turn toward
race as a significant factor of study was fuelled by the antiracist struggles of the
day. The move in British cultural studies toward focus on education and pedagogy
was related to political concern with the continuing bourgeois hegemony despite
the struggles of the 1960s. The right turn in British politics with Thatcher’s victory
led in the late 1970s to concern with understanding the authoritarian populism of
the new conservative hegemony.
In other words, the focus of British cultural studies at any given moment
was mediated by the struggles in the present political conjuncture and their
major work was thus conceived as political interventions. Their studies of
ideology, domination and resistance, and the politics of culture, directed cultural
studies toward analyzing cultural artifacts, practices, and institutions within
existing networks of power and of showing how culture both provided tools
and forces of domination and resources for resistance and struggle. This political
focus intensified emphasis on the effects of culture and audience use of cultural
artifacts, which provided an extremely productive focus on audiences and
reception, topics that had been neglected in most previous text-based approaches
to culture.30
Yet, especially as it has developed in the United States, many current
configurations of cultural studies are too one-sided, producing new bifurcations of
the field and, in part, occluding the field of communications proper by focusing
too intently on cultural texts and audience reception. In his study of Madonna, for
instance, John Fiske writes:
Theory wars and cultural studies 37
A cultural analysis, then, will reveal both the way the dominant ideology is
structured into the text and into the reading subject, and those textual features
that enable negotiated, resisting, or oppositional readings to be made. Cultural
analysis reaches a satisfactory conclusion when the ethnographic studies of
the historically and socially located meanings that are made are related to
the semiotic analysis of the text.
(Fiske 1989a:98)
This focus on text/audience, however, leaves out many mediations that should
be part of cultural studies, including analyses of how texts are produced within
the context of the political economy and system of production of culture, as well
as how audiences and their subjectivities are produced by a variety of social
institutions, practices, and ideologies. Consequently, in the following studies, I
introduce the term “media cultural studies” to describe the project of analyzing
the complex relations between texts, audiences, media industries, politics, and
the socio-historical context in specific conjunctures. In the studies in this book,
for instance, I focus on some dominant forms of culture within U.S. society
from the early 1980s to the present.
I argue that focusing on texts and audiences to the exclusion of analysis of the
social relations and institutions in which texts are produced and consumed
truncates cultural studies, as does analysis of reception that fails to indicate how
audiences are produced through their social relations and how to some extent
culture itself helps produce audiences and their reception of texts. Indeed, there
is the danger of the fetishism of the audience in the recent emphasis on the
importance of reception and audience construction of meanings. Thus, there has
been a large-scale shift in emphasis from focus on text and the context of its
production to emphasis on the audience and reception, in some cases producing
a new dogmatism whereby the audience, or reader, alone produces meaning.
The texts, society, and system of production and reception disappear in the
solipsistic ecstasy of the textual producer, in which there is no text outside of
reading—resulting in a parody of Derrida’s bon mot that there is nothing outside
of the text.
Furthermore, there has been a fetishism of resistance in some versions of cultural
studies. Within the tradition of cultural studies reception research, there has been a
call to distinguish between dominant, negotiated, and oppositional readings (Hall
1980b: taken up in Fiske’s work). This schema distinguishes between “dominant”
readings, whereby audiences appropriate texts in line with the interests of the
dominant culture and the ideological intentions of a text, as when audiences feel
pleasure in the restoration of male power, law and order, and social stability at the
end of a film like Die Hard, after the hero and representatives of authority eliminate
the terrorists who had taken over a highrise corporate headquarters. An oppositional
reading, by contrast, celebrates the resistance to this reading in audience
appropriation of a text, as when Fiske (1993:3ff.) observes resistance to dominant
readings when, during repeated viewings of a videotape of the film in a shelter for
38 Theory/context/methods
the homeless, the inhabitants cheered the destruction of police and authority figures
in the scenes in which the villains take over the building.
There is a tendency in cultural studies to celebrate resistance per se without
distinguishing between types and forms of resistance (a similar problem resides
with indiscriminate celebration of audience pleasure in certain reception
studies). Thus, resistance to social authority by the homeless evidenced in their
viewing of Die Hard could serve to strengthen brutal masculist behavior and
encourage manifestations of physical violence to solve social problems.
Violence, however, as Sartre, Fanon, and Marcuse, among others, have argued,
can be either emancipatory, directed at forces of oppression, or reactionary,
directed at popular forces struggling against oppression, or arbitrarily exploding
in any direction. Many feminists, in turn, see all violence as forms of brute
masculist behavior and many people involved in peace studies see it as a failed
form of conflict resolution.31
Indeed, the resistance that Fiske valorizes in his Die Hard analysis is not
resistance at all but a very conventional replication of pleasure in violence that
eliminates those who one positions as “bad.” Audiences are taught to get pleasure
out of seeing “bad guys” violently eliminated and Fiske’s homeless men are simply
reacting to the codes and conventions of Holly wood entertainment. To be sure,
they are reacting with pleasure to the violent actions of those coded by the film as
“villains” against those coded as “good guys” or innocent victims, so there is a
reversal of the usual “good” and “bad” conventions, but the audience reaction
valorized by Fiske as “resistance” is simply a visceral response to preconditioned
Hollywood mechanisms that produce pleasure in the violent elimination of those
deemed to be “bad” and deserving to be targets of violence.
In fact, Fiske’s celebration of Die Hard fails to contextualize it within the cycle
of male rampage films analyzed by Susan Jeffords in Hard Bodies (1994). Die
Hard was one of a cycle of compensatory male fantasies that responded to the
emergence of feminism and the conservative male response which refused to share
power with women and that resisted feminist ideas. A series of masculist ideological
extravaganzas starring such ultra-macho men as Sylvestor Stallone, Arnold
Schwarzenegger, and Bruce Willis featured male superheroes as the necessary
solution to society’s problems, thus promoting an ideology of male supremacy. As
the “white male paranoia” and conservative response to feminism intensified, these
masculist fantasies became ever more brutal with films like Die Hard II, Young
Guns II, and the like doubling or even tripling the acts of redemptive male violence
(see Gerbner 1992).
Moreover, unqualified valorization of audience resistance to preferred
meanings as good per se can lead to uncritical populist celebrations of the text
and audience pleasure in its use of cultural artifacts. This approach, taken to an
extreme, would lose its critical perspective and would lead to a populist positive
gloss on audience experience of whatever is being studied. Such studies also
might lose sight of the manipulative and conservative effects of certain types of
media culture, and thus serve the interests of the culture industries as they are
Theory wars and cultural studies 39
presently constituted and those groups who use the culture industries to promote
their own interests and agendas.
Accompanying the fetishism of resistance is the fetishism of struggle. Fiske,
for instance, makes “the popular” a terrain of struggle where audiences resist
domination, struggle to produce their own meanings and pleasures, and evade social
control and manipulation (1989a and 1989b). Political struggle is thus displaced
into “struggle” for meanings and pleasure, while “resistance” is equated with the
evasion of social responsibility, as in Fiske’s examples of youth in video arcades,
hanging out on the beach, surfing, or loitering in malls. Modes of domination are
occluded, and resistance and struggle are depoliticized and rendered harmless,
thus providing an ideology of “popular culture” perfectly congruent with the
interests of the powers that be. Such “resistance” does not really challenge the
existing structures of power, nor does it alter the material conditions or ameliorate
the structures of oppression of those “resisting” by producing meanings and
pleasures in the domain of “popular culture.”
I am also put off by what I take to be a fetishism of audience pleasure in some
current versions of cultural studies. Reacting against a somewhat ascetic attitude
toward certain types of culture in the older radical theory, arguments have been
made that attention should be paid to people’s pleasure in popular film, television,
or other forms of culture, and that this pleasure should be positively appraised and
appropriated. While this was a useful move in many ways, it has led, I fear, to
valorizing certain forms of culture precisely because they are popular and produce
pleasure. Such a sweeping and uncritical approach disdains distinguishing between
types of pleasure and the ways that pleasure can bind individuals to conservative,
sexist or racist positions, as when the Rambo, Die Hard or the Terminator films
mobilize pleasure around extremely masculist and violent behavior.
Pleasure itself is neither natural nor innocent. Pleasure is learned and is thus
intimately bound up with power and knowledge. Since Foucault, it has become a
commonplace that power and knowledge are intimately intertwined and that
pleasure is bound up with both. We learn what to enjoy and what we should avoid.
We learn when to laugh and when to cheer (and laugh tracks on TV sitcoms and
entertainment cue us in case we don’t get it ourselves). A system of power and
privilege thus conditions our pleasures so that we seek certain socially sanctioned
pleasures and avoid others. Some people learn to laugh at racist jokes and others
learn to feel pleasure at the brutal use of violence.
Pleasures are often, therefore, a conditioned response to certain stimuli and
should thus be problematized, along with other forms of experience and behavior,
and interrogated as to whether they contribute to the production of a better life and
society, or help trap us into modes of everyday life that ultimately oppress and
degrade us. Resistance and pleasure cannot therefore be valorized per se as
progressive elements of the appropriation of cultural texts, rather one needs to
describe the specific conditions that give rise to the resistance or pleasure at stake
and their specific effects. If one wishes to maintain a critical perspective, one must
also make difficult normative discriminations as to whether the resistance,
40 Theory/context/methods
oppositional reading, or pleasure in a given experience or artifact is progressive or
reactionary, emancipatory or destructive. Critical practice must seek norms of
critique and make critical discriminations in appraising the nature and effects of
cultural artifacts and practices—a task that I undertake in different contexts in the
following studies.
Earlier cultural studies wanted to balance the ideological and the resistant,
the hegemonic/dominant and the oppositional. This balancing act is evident in
Hall’s articles (1980b and 1981) “Encoding/Decoding” and “Deconstructing the
Popular,” which acknowledge the power of the mass media to shape and enforce
ideological hegemony, the power of the people to resist ideology, and the
contradictory moments and effects of media culture. This form of cultural studies
thus attempts to negotiate the split between manipulation theory, which sees
mass culture and society in general as dominating individuals, and populist
resistance theory which emphasizes the power of individuals to oppose, resist,
and struggle against the dominant culture. Such a dual optic is also evident in the
work of E.P.Thompson (1963) which stresses both workers’ abilities to resist
capitalist domination and forms of cooptation, and Dick Hebdige’s Subculture
(1979) which presents rock music styles and youth culture both as forms of
refusal and as commerical modes of incorporation of subcultural resistance into
the dominant consumer culture.
Thus one should attempt to avoid the one-sided approaches of manipulation
and resistance theory in favor of combining these perspectives in one’s analyses.
In a way, certain tendencies of the Frankfurt School can correct some of the
limitations of cultural studies, just as British cultural studies can help overcome
some of the limitations of the Frankfurt School.32 The Frankfurt School social
theory always situated its objects of analysis within the framework of the
development of contemporary capitalism. While this sometimes led to reduction
of all culture to commodities, ideology, and instruments of ruling class domination,
it also elucidated the origins of all mass-produced cultural artifacts within the
capitalist production and accumulation process, and thus forced attention to the
economic origins and ideological nature of many of the artifacts of media culture.
Likewise, the Frankfurt School emphasis on manipulation called attention to the
power and seductiveness of the artifacts of the cultural industries and the ways that
they could integrate individuals into the established order. The emphasis too on
how the cultural industries produce “something for everyone, so that none can
escape,” suggests how difference and plurality are utilized to integrate individuals
into the existing society.
Difference sells. Capitalism must constantly multiply markets, styles, fads, and
artifacts to keep absorbing consumers into its practices and lifestyles. The mere
valorization of “difference” as a mark of opposition can simply help market new
styles and artifacts if the difference in question and its effects are not adequately
appraised. It can also promote a form of identity politics in which each group
affirms its own specificity and limits politics to the group’s own interests, thus
overlooking common forces of oppression. Such difference or identity politics
Theory wars and cultural studies 41
aids “divide and conquer” strategies which ultimately serve the interests of the
powers that be.33
The Frankfurt School emphasis on cooptation—even of seemingly radical and
subversive impulses—raises the question of the nature and effects of “resistant
readings,” beloved by some cultural theorists. It suggests that even production of
alternative meanings and resistance to “preferred meanings” may serve as effective
ways of absorbing individuals into the established society. Producing meanings
can create pleasures that integrate individuals into consumer practices which above
all profit media industries. This possibility forces those who valorize resistance to
emphasize what sort of resistance, what effects, and what difference does the
resistance make?
The Frankfurt School was excellent at tracing the lines of domination within
media culture, but was less adept at ferreting out moments of resistance and
opposition. Yet it always placed its analysis of media and audience within existing
relations of production and domination, whereas many studies of the audience and
reception often fail to situate the reception of culture in the context of social relations
of power and domination. Furthermore, there remain text-centered approaches
within cultural studies which engage in theoretically informed readings of texts
without considering their production, reception, or anchorage in an institutional
organization of culture that takes varying specific forms in different countries, or
regions, at different times in history—which is to say that textualist approaches
often avoid study of the production and political economy of culture and even the
historical context of culture.
While emphasis on the audience and reception was an excellent correction to
the one-sidedness of purely textual analysis, I believe that in recent years cultural
studies has overemphasized reception and textual analysis, while underemphasizing
the production of culture and its political economy.34 While earlier, the Birmingham
group regularly focused attention on media institutions and practices, and the
relations between media forms and broader social forms and ideologies, this
emphasis has waned in recent years, to the detriment of much current work in
cultural studies, I would argue. For instance, in his classical programmatic article,
“Encoding/Decoding,” Stuart Hall began his analysis by using Marx’s Grundrisse
as a model to trace the articulations of “a continuous circuit,” encompassing—
production—distribution—consumption—production” (1980b:128ff.). He
concretizes this model with focus on how media institutions produce messages,
how they circulate, and how audiences use or decode the messages to produce
meaning. Hall claimed that:
The abstraction of texts from the social practices which produced them and
the institutional sites where they were elaborated was a fetishization…. This
obscured how a particular ordering of culture came to be produced and
sustained: the circumstances and conditions of cultural reproduction which
the operations of the ‘selective tradition’ rendered natural, ‘taken for granted.’
42 Theory/context/methods
But the process of ordering (arrangement, regulation) is always the result of
concrete sets of practices and relations.
(Hall 1980a:27)
Against the erasure of the system of cultural production, distribution, and
reception, Hall called for problematizing culture and “making visible” the
processes through which certain forms of culture became dominant (ibid.).35
Raymond Williams, one of the formative influences on British cultural studies,
called for a “cultural materialism…the analysis of all forms of
signification…within the actual means and conditions of their production”
(1981:64–5), focusing attention on the need to situate cultural analysis within its
socio-economic relations. Moreover, in a 1983 lecture published in 1985/6,
Richard Johnson provided a model of cultural studies, similar to Hall’s earlier
model, based on a model of the circuits of production, textuality, and reception,
parallel to the circuits of capital stressed by Marx, illustrated by a diagram that
stressed the importance of production and distribution. Although Johnson
emphasized the importance of analysis of production in cultural studies and
criticized Screen for abandoning this perspective in favor of more idealist and
textualist approaches (pp. 63ff.), much work in cultural studies has replicated
this neglect. One could indeed argue that most recent cultural studies have tended
to neglect analyses of the circuits of political economy and production in favor
of text- and audience-based analyses.
Furthermore, there is a danger that cultural studies in various parts of the world
might lose the critical and political edge of earlier forms of British cultural studies.
Cultural studies could easily degenerate into a sort of eclectic populism of the sort
evident in some of the work of the Popular Culture Association which is largely
celebratory and uncritical of the textual artifacts that it deals with. Neglecting
political economy, celebrating the audience and the pleasures of the popular,
neglecting social class and ideology, and failing to analyze or criticize the politics
of cultural texts will make cultural studies merely another academic subdivision,
harmless and ultimately of benefit primarily to the culture industries themselves.
Avoiding such a conservative development of cultural studies, I submit, requires a
multiperspectival approach that pays attention to the production of culture, to the
texts themselves, and to their reception by the audience. This requires a variety of
disciplinary and critical perspectives linking cultural studies, ultimately, to critical
social theory and radical democratic politics.
The position that I take on media and culture throughout these studies could
also be denoted a form of cultural materialism, a key term that I intend in two
senses. With Raymond Williams, I see cultural materialism as “the analysis of all
forms of signification…within the actual means and conditions of production”
(Williams 1981:64–5). This dictum suggests that to adequately analyze media
culture we must situate the objects of analysis within the system of production,
and I would add distribution and consumption, within which they are produced
and received. A cultural materialist approach thus stresses the importance of the
Theory wars and cultural studies 43
political economy of culture, of the system that constrains what can and what
cannot be produced, that provides limits and possibilities for cultural production.
Media production is thus intimately imbricated in relations of power and serves
to reproduce the interests of powerful social forces, promoting either domination
or empowering individuals for resistance and struggle. But a cultural materialism
also focuses on the material effects of media culture, insisting that its images,
spectacles, discourses, and signs have material effects on audiences. For a cultural
materialism, media texts seduce, fascinate, move, position, and influence their
audiences. Media culture has its material effects, its effectivity, and it is one of the
goals of cultural studies to analyze how specific texts and types of media culture
affect audiences, what sort of actual effects the artifacts of media culture exercise,
and what sort of potential counterhegemonic effects and possibilities for resistance
and struggle are also found in the works of media culture.
I shall flesh out this approach and provide examples throughout the book. First,
however, I want to engage a recent move within the field of cultural studies.
A POSTMODERN CULTURAL STUDIES?
Arguments have emerged in recent years for a postmodern cultural studies. Some
theorists like Denzin (1991) and Grossberg (1992) aggressively link cultural studies
to the postmodern turn, while many others simply assume that the terrain of cultural
studies is an allegedly postmodern culture and society, without really defining the
terms, noting what is at stake, or making an argument concerning why their method
or subject matter is indeed “postmodern.”36 In fact, the term “postmodern” is perhaps
one of the most abused and confusing terms in the lexicon of contemporary critical
theory. The terms “modern” and “postmodern” are used to cover a bewildering
diversity of cultural artifacts, social phenomena, and theoretical discourses, and
the concept of the postmodern requires constant scrutiny, clarification, and criticism.
During a spring 1993 trip to England, for example, I discovered a newspaper
article in the Guardian titled “The postmodern politician” and found that the topic
was just another boring old conservative with no discernible claims to be
“postmodern.” Upon returning to the United States, I picked up a copy of the
Washington Post Weekly and noted a headline describing the Clinton
administration’s Dee Dee Myers as “the postmodern press secretary” and a reading
of the article suggested that she was allegedly “postmodern” because she arched
her eyebrow and was ironic in her speech. And, Newsweek published an article on
Bill Clinton, “The postmodern president,” without any analysis of what made him
postmodern, in which the term is simply used as a buzzword to catch attention
(January 10, 1994).
But the prize caption is awarded to the New York Times (May 12, 1993) for a
headline: “Forget the bologna on white, here comes the post-modern sandwich.”
Scrutiny of this article indicated that modern sandwiches featured fat chunks of
meat while “post-modern constructions…rely more on roasted or marinated
vegetables than meat and that stylishly recycle leftovers like grilled vegetables,
44 Theory/context/methods
lamb, chicken, or fish” (p. B1). One may laugh at such muddled pop media usages
of the discourse, but things are often not much clearer when we turn to the theoretical
discourses of academic books or presentations. Frequently, academic commentators
simply assume that we are in a postmodern age without any specific analysis.
Often usage of the term “postmodern” points to phenomena that are arguably
modern and the discourse is merely used as a synonym for the contemporary
moment in which we live, or contemporary novelties, without substantive analysis.
My favorite example concerns a sociology professor who in being asked to describe
more clearly what he meant by the term “postmodern” answered that the best
description of “our postmodern society” was found in the passage in “The
Communist Manifesto” in which Marx and Engels describe a state “where all that
is solid melts into air.” Of course, as Marshall Berman has shown (1982), the
“Manifesto” is a virtual hymn to modernity and is a key text of modern theory.
For other examples of undertheorized uses of the term “postmodern” as a
synonym for our contemporary society, one might look at the Introduction to the
anthology of collected papers from a 1990 University of Illinois conference on
cultural studies written by the editors (see Grossberg et al. 1992). There are
references to “our postmodern age” without any argument or clarification
concerning what makes it “postmodern,” what constitutes the break with modernity,
and what are its new features (ibid., 2, 6). Moreover, in a long footnote near the
end of the Introduction, the editors describe the grounding and trajectory of cultural
studies as a response to modernity, modernization, and modernism (ibid., 15–16).37
Yet the editors fail to note the paradox concerning the relevance of cultural studies
in a postmodern era if it is a product of and expression of the modern era (which
much postmodern theory claims is over, thus requiring new approaches to culture
and society, new politics, new modes of thought, etc.). Various authors in the
collection Cultural Studies use the discourse of the postmodern, but usually fail to
provide a sustained discussion and use the term in a variety of conflicting ways. It
is therefore not clear what imprecise and muddled use of the term contributes, and
one suspects that ultimately the discourse of the postmodern has produced more
confusion than clarity, more muddle than illumination.38
Many theorists of the postmodern, or those who systematically deploy the term,
often merely list a set of arbitrary characteristics which are said to be “postmodern,”
illustrated by questionable examples. Many of these lists and examples also cite key
modern characteristics or artifacts as examples of the “postmodern,”39 and thus fail
to adequately theorize the phenomena. Some who argue for a postmodern turn in
cultural studies, like Denzin (1991) arguably overdefine the term, while others
underdefine it. For Denzin, everything that occurs in post-World-War-II U.S. society
is “postmodern” and he provides list after list of its defining features, many of which
could easily be assimilated to lists characterizing modern phenomena.
One of the more interesting attempts to link cultural studies with postmodern
theory is found in Dick Hebdige’s Hiding In the Light (1988). Hebdige wishes “to
explore the genuinely life-enhancing and positive dimensions” opened up by the
various debates of the “post” and to assimilate its insights into a revitalized cultural
Theory wars and cultural studies 45
studies. After a long list of some of the things described as “postmodern,” Hebdige
notes that the very multiplicity of phenomena designated as postmodern suggests
that “we are in the presence of a buzzword.” Yet rather than simply concluding that
the term is meaningless, Hebdige prefers to believe, with Raymond Williams,
that the more complexly and contradictorily nuanced a word is the more
likely it is to have formed the focus for historically significant debates, to
have occupied a semantic ground in which something precious and important
was felt to be embedded. I take, then as my (possibly ingenuous) starting
point, that the degree of semantic complexity and overload surrounding the
term ‘postmodernism’ at the moment signals that a significant number of
people with conflicting interests and opinions feel that there is something
sufficiently important at stake here to be worth struggling and arguing over.
(Williams 1988:182)
After delineating some of the key positions of postmodern theory, Hebdige proposes
the yoking of some new postmodern perspectives to the older neo-Gramscian
program of linking cultural studies to the project of promoting radical social and
cultural change, to advance new solidarities, new struggles, new movements to
promote the cause of progressive social transformation. But, as he points out, this
is a different program, a different version of Marxism, than the older more orthodox
socialist revolutionary programs of, say, an Althusser, which ultimately replicated
old-fashioned Marxist party politics. The neo-Gramscian program by contrast has
no guarantees, no teleologies, no grand narrative of emancipation, no totalizing or
reductive discourses or politics, no privileging of a class or social group, no home
or solid basis from which to struggle, but still holds out the hope that new solidarities,
new forms of struggles, will emerge and sees the need to foster hope, to promote
radicalism, to hold out the possibility of more radical change, to bring the light of
radical critique and politics to the blinding light of the media, to revitalize radical
theory and politics, however modestly and tenuously.
I too am attracted to such neo-Gramscian perspectives and share Hebdige’s
desire to produce new syntheses of cultural studies with other major theoretical
discourses of the present. I am also sympathetic to Hebdige’s sense that “it is only
by grounding our analysis in the study of particular images and objects” that we
can overcome the limitations of the highly theoretical discourses of the past decades
and “the vertigo of postmodernism” (1988: back cover). But in his concluding
appendixes, Hebdige moves back and forth from affirming and distancing himself
from postmodern positions and thus ultimately is unclear how he positions himself
toward the discourse of the postmodern.
In the studies that follow, I shall carefully interrogate various uses of the
discourse of the postmodern to see if the term clarifies or confuses understanding
of the phenomenon under question. Although the discourse of the “postmodern”
often muddles more than it illuminates, it has a certain symptomatic value.
Superficial and sloppy usage of the term points to phenomena or topics that
need to be theorized and thus the term is often a sign that something is under—
46 Theory/context/methods
or poorly theorized. Negatively, the term is often an empty signifier and sign
that more concrete theorization is being avoided and is needed. Such empty
use of the discourse is a sign of lazy theorizing, the avoidance of difficult
thinking and analysis, and the replacing of theoretical analysis with a popular
buzzword. But, positively, it is a sign that something is new and needs to be
comprehended and theorized. Thus, the term “postmodern” is often a
placeholder, or semiotic marker, that indicates that there are new phenomena
that require mapping and theorizing. Use of the term may also be a sign that
something is bothering us, that new confusing phenomena are appearing that
we cannot adequately categorize or get a grip on.
Such under—or poorly theorized discourse reduces the “postmodern” to the
status of a piece of jargon, an often confused attempt to distinguish oneself from
the commitments of modern theory, or to appear hip and cool. Another problem
arises in that more articulated and compelling discourses of the postmodern are
themselves often in conflict with each other (see the discussion of different
versions of postmodern theory in Best and Kellner 1991). Thus, there is no shared,
or agreed upon, discourse of the postmodern, but rather a series of competing
paradigms and discourses. Moreover, new phenomena are constantly emerging
which are claimed to be “postmodern.” Thus, whether one is attending to the
more rarified theoretical discourses of the present, or often laughable
popularizations of the postmodern, such as the “postmodern sandwich” that I
referred to above, the phenomena and discourses of the postmodern are constantly
changing, becoming more complex, requiring new mappings and analyses to
chart their trajectories.40
In order, therefore, for the discourse of the postmodern to have any cognitive
content, certain distinctions need to be made and the family of terms of the
postmodern must be distinguished from the discourses of the modern. In previous
texts, I distinguished between modernity and postmodernity, as two different
historical eras; between modernism and postmodernism, as two different aesthetic
and cultural styles; and between modern and postmodern theory as two different
theoretical discourses (see Kellner 1988; Best and Kellner 1991). Building on these
analyses and historical genealogy, I wish to offer some further conceptual
clarifications to try to illuminate the complex field of discourse of the modern and
postmodern.
To begin, the contemporary discourse of the postmodern first emerged in the
fields of culture and in the present epoch the postmodern fever also began in this
domain. In the 1960s, a “new sensibility” appeared that defined itself against the
abstraction and elitism of modernist art and modern forms of literary criticism.
This new sensibility celebrated emergent cultural practices which were characterized
by, among other things, breaking down the distinction between high and low art,
by incorporating within aesthetic forms a panoply of icons and images of media
culture, and by challenging conventional barriers between artist and spectator. These
new aesthetic forms—such as the paintings of Andy Warhol or the novels of John
Barth and Thomas Pynchon—eventually became known as examples of
Theory wars and cultural studies 47
“postmodernism,” as part of new cultural configurations which rejected features
of classical modernism.
It is within architecture that the term postmodern first gained widespread
currency. Several theorists and architects contrasted new forms of postmodern
architecture that rejected the sterile glass and steel buildings associated with the
high modernist functionalism of Mies van der Rohe and the international style that
championed the same forms everywhere. Building on Robert Venturi’s Learning
from Las Vegas (1972), postmodern architecture appropriated traditional forms,
deployed decoration and color eschewed by high modernist architecture, and
attempted to adapt architecture to local conditions.
Articulating differences between modernism and postmodernism in literature,
cinema, dance, theater, and other arts has proven more difficult, though. The overlaps
and continuities here are more striking, and it is difficult to point to specific features
of postmodern literature and art that have not been anticipated by modernist forms.
Yet while there is not the break or rupture evident in architecture, theorists like
Jameson (1991) and Hutcheon (1989) have described constellations of culture that
exhibit sufficient shared features for the concept of postmodernism within the arts
to have analytic substance, as I shall show in the following studies.41
Postmodernism in the arts, however, was often discussed as an element of a
new “postmodern culture,” “postmodern scene,” or “postmodern condition” and
broader conceptions of a new era of postmodernity, a break with modernity, began
emerging in the 1970s in the theories of Baudrillard, Lyotard, and others.42 In the
1980s, there was a proliferation of discourses on various forms of postmodern
culture and society, with Baudrillard claiming that we have entered a new
postmodern historical era, a “postmodernity.” It also became popular to label a
wide range of thinkers from Foucault to Derrida to Baudrillard as “postmodern,”
as having broken decisively with the assumptions of modern theory, and a variety
of types of postmodern theory emerged. There is indeed no one postmodern theory,
or one definition of postmodernity as a historical epoch, or of postmodernism in
the arts. Instead, these discourses are themselves contested and conflictual with
different theorists imposing their own definitions on these concepts.
Thus, the discourse of the postmodern is a cultural and theoretical construct,
not a thing or state of affairs. That is, there are no phenomena that are intrinsically
“postmodern” which the theorist can then describe. The concepts are generated as
theoretical constructs used to interpret a family of phenomena, artifacts, or practices.
Thus, the discourses of the postmodern produce their objects, whether a historical
epoch of postmodernity, or postmodernism in the arts. Obviously, there are social
and historical phenomena from which theorists derive concepts like postmodernity,
or practices, artifacts, and artists in the field of culture from whom one derives the
term “postmodernism.” Yet which phenomena, practices, artifacts, and so on are
seen as “postmodern” are themselves a function of the theoretical discourse which
denominates some things as “postmodern” and others not.
Consequently, the family of concepts of the postmodern are merely conceptual
constructs meant to perform certain interpretive or explanatory tasks and are not
48 Theory/context/methods
transparent terms that merely reflect established states of affairs.43 Thus, when we
are dealing with the discourse of the postmodern, we are operating on the level of
theory and discourse and need to make clarifications and distinctions on this level
(unless, of course, we are merely using the term as a buzzword, as in the journalistic
and theoretical discourses cited above). As Mike Featherstone reminds us (1991:
1ff.), journalists, cultural entrepreneurs, and theorists invent and circulate discourses
like the postmodern in order to accrue cultural capital, to distinguish themselves,
to promote specific artifacts or practices as being on the cutting-edge, and to circulate
new meanings and ideas. The discourse of the postmodern especially attracts
younger people on the make, or those who wish to distinguish themselves as avantgarde,
although it has also attracted many who wish to revive flagging careers or
libidos with sexy new discourse.
Indeed, the emergence of the postmodern has much to do with battles for cultural
capital in the present age. One way of contesting previous theories, canons, and
models is to declare their obsolescence, or to radically negate their claims to truth,
excellence, utility, or whatever. One accrues cultural capital by distinguishing one’s
work and positions from others, from attaching oneself to popular phenomena,
and by joining new theoretical and cultural movements that enable one to identify
oneself as hip, cool, with it, and up to date. Joining the postmodern carnival can be
fun, allowing one to engage in often promiscuous excursions in which the normal
rules and conventions of the proper are put aside, as one seeks new rules or
conventions or to escape rule and convention altogether.
But it would be a mistake to merely dismiss the discourse of the postmodern
out of hand as a mere fad or ephemeral fashion. For as I write, the discourse has
elicited intense attention and controversy for the past decade (1983–93) and there
is no end in sight. Although many predicted that the phenomenon was over,44 there
continue to be waves of books, articles, conferences, and discussions of the many
modalities of the postmodern. People continue to feel passionately about the
postmodern and the discourse obviously speaks to important changes in our culture
and society and by now has acquired a certain weight. Postmodern theory has
penetrated almost all academic disciplines, producing critiques of modern theory
and alternative postmodern theoretical practices in philosophy, social theory,
politics, economics, anthropology, geography, and just about every academic field.
Groups and individuals marginalized in the society, culture, and university have
taken the term as their own and use it to oppose the established order of things.
Since many of these individuals are younger, one expects that the discourse will
continue to be used for some time to come.
It will be one of the purposes of the following studies to interrogate some
dominant discourses of the postmodern to demonstrate confusion, sloppiness, and
laziness in many symptomatic uses of the discourse. I will interrogate whether the
discourse is useful or not in interpreting specific phenomena in our contemporary
culture. Whether or not a discourse or theory is useful can be determined by whether
it does or does not illuminate specific phenomena, and helps or hinders particular
tasks. One of the aims of these studies is to illuminate and map our contemporary
Theory wars and cultural studies 49
society and culture, so determining the usefulness or uselessness of the discourse
of the postmodern will be one of the tasks of the following studies, especially
those collected in Part II.
Although it is prudent to be skeptical of extreme postmodern claims that would
render obsolescent the assumptions, values, categories, culture, and politics of the
modern era, it must be admitted that significant changes are taking place and that
many of the old modern theories and categories can no longer adequately describe
our contemporary culture, politics, and society. And yet the extreme claims for a
postmodern break and rupture do violence to our sense of enduring continuities
with the past and the fact that many ideas and phenomena which are claimed to be
“postmodern” have their origins or analogues precisely in the modern era.
Consequently, I would suggest that we are living between a now aging modern era
and a new postmodern era that remains to be adequately conceptualized, charted,
and mapped. Historical epochs do not rise and fall in neat patterns or at precise
chronological moments. Change between one era and another is always protracted,
contradictory, and usually painful. The sense of “betweenness,” or transition,
requires that one grasp the continuities with the past as well as the novelties of the
present and future. Living in a borderland between the old and the new creates
tension, insecurity, and even panic, thus producing a troubling and uncertain cultural
and social environment.
The following studies attempt to capture some of the tension in living in a
situation whose contours are not yet apparent and in which intense conflict is
occurring between those conservative forces who wish to maintain the established
social order and those who wish to transform it. These cultural wars are replicated
in what we might call theory wars between those competing voices who wish to
map and guide the construction of the present and future. In the studies that follow,
I intervene in this context and propose the development of cultural studies within
the framework of critical social theory and radical democratic politics. Indeed, I
believe that one cannot do cultural studies without a social theory and that one of
the valuable effects of cultural studies is that it can in turn contribute to developing
a critical social theory and politics for the present age. This is, of course, parallel to
the Frankfurt School claim that a theory of society is needed to illuminate social,
political, and cultural phenomena and development, while intensive research into
the latter areas can in turn contribute to developing critical social theory.
Consequently, I interpret media culture in the context of critical social theory and
in turn use media culture to illuminate social phenomena and conditions. Thus, I
ultimately intend my media cultural studies as an attempt to situate cultural artifacts
within the broader economic, social, and political contexts from which they emerge
and in which they have their effects.
NOTES
1 As I argue below, it is Baudrillard and his followers who posit the most extreme rupture
between modern and postmodern societies. For discussions of his and other postmodern
theories, see Kellner 1989b and 1989c, Best and Kellner 1991, and Kellner 1994a.
50 Theory/context/methods
2 On “post-Fordism,” see Harvey, 1989. On “disorganized capitalism,” see Offe 1985
and Lash and Urry 1987. On the “risk society,” see Beck 1992.
3 This picture of the leisure and consumer society may be ideological. Recent studies
show that the amount of hours devoted to work in the United States is at an all-time
high; see Schorr’s study of The Overworked American (1992). Yet there are also
technological trends that might lead to diminution of the length of the workday. See
Gorz 1982 and 1985 and an article in the New York Times (November 24, 1993:A1)
which indicated that there was a serious movement abroad in Europe to limit work to
four days a week.
4 See Kellner and Ryan 1988 for a study of the contest of representations between the
mid-1960s and mid-1980s in Hollywood film, and Kellner 1990a for a study of the
contested terrain of U.S. television. On the “right turn” in the United States, see Ferguson
and Rogers 1986. On the triumph of Thatcherism in England, see Hall and Jacques
1983 and Hall 1990.
5 See Altermann 1992 and the Newsweek issue of March 29, 1993 on “White male
paranoia” for evidence of the role of conservative think tanks and pundits in shaping
public opinion and the continuing conservative offensive on talk radio, television, and
other cultural domains.
6 Jeffords (1994) argues that U.S. culture and politics manifested trends toward a
“remasculinization of America” after U.S. military defeat in Vietnam, and Faludi (1991)
interprets the new masculist culture as a “backlash” against feminism.
7 Convinced against those who argue “against theory” (i.e. Rorty et al.) that theories are
of use in illuminating our social world, throughout this book I shall reflect on the
nature and function of social theories, for it is not at all agreed upon, or evident, what
social theories are, what they do, and what are their value and limitations. The theoretical
perspectives that I will sketch out are perhaps most influenced by the critical theory of
the Frankfurt School (see Kellner 1989a and Bronner and Kellner 1989) and postmodern
theory (see Kellner 1989b, 1989c, and Best and Kellner 1991), though I also draw
heavily on feminism and multicultural theory, and attempt to develop some new
theoretical perspectives to illuminate our present moment.
8 See Howard and Klare 1972. In Europe, by contrast, Marxism was part of the standard
intellectual discourse, though it tended to be monopolized by the Marxist parties. On
the impact of Marxism on a diverse range of academic fields in the United States, see
Ollman and Vernoff, 1982. For Britain, see Anderson 1980 and Davies forthcoming.
9 On the successive waves of feminism that appeared beginning in the United States
during the 1960s, see the account in Willis 1984; on feminism in the U.S. in the 1990s,
see Faludi 1991 and Brenner 1993. On the unhappy marriage between Marxism and
feminism, see Hartman 1981. For an example of psychoanalytic feminism, see Mitchell
1974. For feminism in Britain, see Barrett 1980.
10 John Fiske curiously ascribes the importation and popularity of European theories in
the United States and elsewhere to a Reaganism that exposed the falsity of the liberal
consensus and the reality of class divisions and inequalities, which supposedly finally
rendered pragmatic Americans susceptible to European theories that stressed conflict,
inequalities, and struggle (1993:40). But, in fact, as my narrative argues, the importation
of European theories began in the 1960s and intensified in the 1970s and 1980s, well
before Reaganism exposed the lies of the liberal consensus.
11 Metaphors are often highly revealing and the shift from conceiving of theories as
“weapons of criticism” to “tools in a toolkit” marks a shift from revolutionary theory to
milder forms of pragmatism and contextualism. Blending these perspectives, I would
argue that theories can be tools or weapons, depending on the context, intentions, and
use—a contextualist theory, no doubt, but with radical intent.
12 See Ricoeur 1970; Simons 1990; and Lepenies 1988.
Theory wars and cultural studies 51
13 The notion of a multiperspectival social theory and cultural studies is sketched out in
Kellner 1991; Best and Kellner 1991; and is elaborated throughout this book.
14 Jameson (1991) and Harvey (1989) combine Marxist theory with postmodern theory to
provide novel perspectives on contemporary society, while other theorists take more
univocal Marxian, Weberian, feminist, or other classical positions on contemporary
society, or develop new theoretical models and perspectives; for an overview of
contemporary perspectives in social theory, see Ritzer 1990.
15 Many studies exist on the history and genealogy of cultural studies; see Hall 1980a;
Johnson 1985/6; Fiske 1986a; O’Connor 1989; Turner 1990; Grossberg 1989; Brantlinger
1990; Agger 1991; During 1993; and Aronowitz 1993. See also the articles in Grossberg
et al. 1992 and During 1993.
16 On earlier traditions of cultural studies in the U.S., see Carey 1989, and Aronowitz
1993 and for Britain, see Davies forthcoming.
17 Raymond Williams was especially important for cultural studies because of his stress
on borders and border crossings. Like the Frankfurt School, he always saw the
interconnection between culture and communication, and their connections with the
society in which they are produced, distributed, and consumed. Williams also saw how
texts embodied the political conflicts and discourses within which they were embedded
and reproduced.
18 On the Frankfurt School theory of the culture industries, see Horkheimer and Adorno
1972; the anthology edited by Rosenberg and White 1957; the reader edited by Bronner
and Kellner 1989; and the discussion of the Frankfurt School approach in Kellner 1989a.
19 I have analyzed some of these effects from a reconstructed critical theory perspective in
analyses of Hollywood film with Michael Ryan (1988), two books on American
television (Kellner 1990a and 1992b), and a series of media cultural studies, some of
which are collected here.
20 There were, to be sure, some exceptions and qualifications to this “classical” model:
Adorno would occasionally note a critical or utopian moment within mass culture and
the possibility of audience reception against the grain; see the examples in Kellner
1989a. But although one can find moments that put in question the more bifurcated
division between high and low culture and the model of mass culture as consisting of
nothing except ideology and modes of manipulation which incorporate individuals into
the existing society and culture, generally, the Frankfurt School model is overly reductive
and monolithic, and thus needs radical reconstruction—which I have attempted to do in
work over the past two decades.
21 The field of communications was initially bifurcated into a division, described by
Lazarsfeld (1941) in an issue edited by the Frankfurt School on mass communications,
between the critical school associated with the Institute for Social Research contrasted
to administrative research, which Lazarsfeld defined as research carried out within the
parameters of established media and social institutions and that would provide material
that was of use to these institutions—research with which Lazarsfeld himself would be
identified. Hence, it was the Frankfurt School that inaugurated critical communications
research and I am suggesting that a return to a reconstructed version of the original
model would be useful for media and cultural studies today.
22 In the 1930s model of critical theory, theory was supposed to be an instrument of
political practice. Yet the formulation of the theory of the culture industries by
Horkheimer and Adorno (1972 [1947]) in the 1940s was part of their turn toward a
more pessimistic phase in which they eschewed concrete politics and generally located
resistance within critical individuals, like themselves, rather than within social groups,
movements, or oppositional practices. Thus, the Frankfurt School ultimately is weak
on the formulation of oppositional practices and counterhegemonic cultural strategies.
23 I have been immersed in the problematic of British cultural studies since 1975, when I
52 Theory/context/methods
was involved in a study group in Austin, Texas and wrote Stuart Hall of the Birmingham
Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies. He responded with a long letter describing
the history of the Centre and sent me a set of their stencilled papers which our group
carefully studied. Over the next years we read all of their studies, journal articles, and
books, and thus the first U.S. cultural studies group emerged in Austin, Texas. See my
review of the earlier stages of the Birmingham project in Theory, Culture, and Society,
Vol. I, No. 1 (1980).
24 Gramsci 1971 and 1992 and Hall 1986a. I further elucidate and illustrate the concept of
hegemony in the following chapters.
25 Many of Stuart Hall’s programmatic pieces discuss the appropriation of Marxism in
British cultural studies, and especially the Marxism of Gramsci and Althusser (see Hall
1980a; 1986a; 1986b; and 1992).
26 See Hoggart 1958 and Williams 1958, and the discussions of the “popular” in Hall
1980a; McGuigan 1992; and Aronowitz 1993.
27 On the need of combining these approaches and overcoming the current division in the
field between the approaches of “cultural studies” and “communication studies,” see
Kellner forthcoming.
28 Although he works in a department of communications, Lawrence Grossberg (1992)
begins his metatheoretical presentation of cultural studies by attacking the concept of
communication and effectively removing it from the conceptual field (ibid., 37ff.),
drawing upon an earlier attempt to deconstruct the concept of communication (Grossberg
1982). I would prefer, however, to dissolve binary oppositions between culture and
communication, to refuse privileging one over the other, and to show how contemporary
media culture and communications are interconnected in the products of the cultural
industries. I would also argue that methods drawn from the humanities to study “culture”
and methods from the social sciences that investigate “communication” are both valuable
for cultural studies. Finally, it is also curious that some departments and disciplines use
the term “communication” to describe the object of their study, while other departments
and individuals use the plural “communications.” There are obviously different types
and levels of communications in our culture, thus the plural has its uses and validity,
though the singular also serves to note that the many varieties are all forms of
communication; consequently, I will use both terms in different contexts to denote
plurality or singularity.
29 The early focus in Birmingham studies was on class and subcultures, but the influence
of feminism forced a focus on gender and sexuality, and the influence of people of
color within the Centre forced focus on race and ethnicity (see the narrative in Hall
1986a and Gilroy 1991). In any case, by the 1980s cultural studies everywhere had a
multicultural agenda, though the earlier focus on class has been displaced in recent
versions, a neglect that I shall attempt to avoid in my studies.
30 Textualism was especially one-sided in North American “new criticism” and other literary
approaches which for some decades in the post-World-War-II conjuncture defined the
dominant approach to cultural artifacts in the United States. The post-structuralist
approaches that developed in France in the 1970s and quickly disseminated throughout
the world were also highly textualist. The British cultural studies focus on audience
and reception, however, was anticipated by the Frankfurt School: Walter Benjamin
focused on the importance of reception studies as early as the 1930s, while Adorno,
Lowenthal, and others in the Frankfurt School carried out reception studies in the same
era. See the discussion in Kellner 1989a: 121ff. Except for some exceptions, however,
the Frankfurt School tended to conceive of the audience as primarily passive, thus the
Birmingham emphasis on the active audience is a genuine advance, though, as I argue
below, there have been some exaggerations on this issue and qualifications to the notion
of the active audience are now needed.
Theory wars and cultural studies 53
31 In fact, Fiske’s other oft-repeated example of resistance by homeless men is their
smuggling in copies of Hustler which they insert within Life magazine (1993:18, 22,
25). Although such behavior does exhibit resistance to middle-class norms, it is highly
questionable from a feminist perspective. The problem is that Fiske has no way to
distinguish progressive from reactionary, emancipatory from destructive, resistance and
celebrates all resistance as positive, thus failing to discriminate and evaluate different
modes and types of resistance. Such a failure could have the effect of depoliticizing this
most important and empowering notion.
32 See Kellner 1989a, Chapters 5–8.
33 I discuss identity politics in more detail below in analysis of the films of Spike Lee
(Chapter 4) and the Madonna phenomenon (Chapter 7).
34 Most North American cultural studies and other varieties of cultural studies which have
been influenced by postmodern theory likewise neglect production and political economy.
I am not sure whether this is the influence of Baudrillard’s pronouncements on “the
end of political economy” (1976), or just laziness and ignorance of the domain of
political economy, or a certain softness in practitioners of cultural studies that are
uncomfortable with the “hard” domains of production and economics.
35 Yet in another article from the same period, Hall (1986 [1980]), rejected the political
economy paradigm as reductionist and abstract (46–7). But note that he is rejecting the
most economistic base/superstructure “logic of capital” model and not the importance
of political economy per se (“This approach, too, has insights which are well worth
following through”). Yet from the late 1970s through the present the dimension of
political economy has receded in importance throughout the field of cultural studies
and I would argue for reinserting its importance—a position that McGuigan (1992)
also takes in a critique of the “cultural populism” of British cultural studies and its
American and other cousins.
36 Stuart Hall once stressed the significance of breaks within a problematic,
where old lines of thought are disrupted, older constellations displaced, and elements,
old and new, are regrouped around a different set of premises and themes. Changes in
a problematic do significantly transform the nature of the questions asked, the forms
in which they are proposed and the manner in which they can be adequately answered.
Such shifts in perspective reflect, not only the results of an internal intellectual labour,
but the manner in which real historical developments and transformations are
appropriated in thought, and provide Thought, not with its guarantee of ‘correctness’
but with its fundamental orientations, its conditions of existence.
(Hall 1986:33)
I would argue that a postmodern turn is such a significant shift, though its significance
hasn’t been fully registered within the tradition of British cultural studies—or at least
many aligning themselves with the earlier tradition simply refer to a new “postmodern”
culture and society without theorizing the significance of the shift, or in the case of
Grossberg (1992), carry out a rather striking post-structuralist and postmodern
transformation of cultural studies without signalling or theorizing the break with the
earlier tradition.
37 I would agree with this latter argument, but the editors offer a highly questionable
explication of these terms, defining modernity, for instance, as “a structure of experience
and identity,” rather than as a socio-historical formation, as an epoch in history, which is
how modernity is defined in classical social theory (see Antonio and Kellner 1994 and
forthcoming). Modernization is defined by the editors in terms of a broad range of
phenomena usually associated with modernity, rather than as a process in which the
forces of modernity impinge on traditional and non-Western societies and cultures,
54 Theory/context/methods
producing a highly complex and contested process of modernization and Westernization.
Modernism is defined as “the whole complex of responses to the changing historical
landscape of the modern,” rather than to the avant-garde artists, such as Baudelaire, and
art movements that articulated certain modern impulses and that revolted against established
forms of culture, attempting to produce innovations in art (and sometimes in life).
38 This tendency to assume that the terrain of cultural studies is “postmodern” culture or
society without defining the term, or providing any arguments, is widespread. The
editors of a 1993 collection of mostly Canadian papers on cultural studies also simply
declare that: “Modernity has passed into postmodernity” (Blundell et al. 1993:8) and
refer to contemporary societies as “postmodern” (ibid., 10). There is no argumentation
and a highly complex and contested term is thus taken as a synonym for contemporary
society. Likewise, Aronowitz (1993) has a chapter on “Cultural studies in postmodern
America” (167ff.), without defining the term or making any argument—indeed, earlier
in his book, he stated that for the purposes of his book, it mattered little whether modernity
was not exhausted or whether “we pronounce the arrival of a postmodern condition
with its renunciation of all universals” (ibid., 14).
39 Almost everyone who uses the term “postmodern” has different definitions, sometimes
engaging in overkill where everything contemporary is “postmodern,” while sometimes
merely offering an arbitrary list of characteristics, many of which are arguably modern.
Others undertheorize the term, privileging one or two characteristics as marks of the
postmodern without establishing a really important or distinctive break from the modern.
40 in recent years, I myself have been trying to chart the vicissitudes of the postmodern
and to appraise the insights and regressions of the discourses; see my book on Baudrillard
(1989b), my edited volume on Jameson (1989c); my book on postmodern theory with
Steve Best (1991); and my Baudrillard reader (1994a).
41 Jameson argued in the first published draft of his theory of postmodernism in the arts
that:
radical breaks between periods do not generally involve complete changes of content
but rather the restructuration of a certain number of elements already given: features
that in an earlier period or system were subordinate now become dominant, and features
that had been dominant again become secondary.
(Jameson 1983:123)
42 Such theories of postmodernity were anticipated by historians such as Toynbee and social
theorists such as C.Wright Mills (see the genealogical discussion in Best and Kellner
1991).
43 This is an obvious point, but one often neglected: most theorists of the postmodern, or
those who use the word without theorizing it, assume that there is something out there
which is called “postmodernism” which is merely waiting to be discovered or described.
Rather, terms of this sort produce their objects, enabling some objects to be labelled
“postmodern” and others not to be so labelled.
44 From the beginning, there were many individuals in every discipline who maintained that
the postmodern turn was a mere fad that could easily be ignored, but the debates roared
on without the participation of those who ignored the phenomenon. Some publishers
have claimed that interest is waning in postmodern controversies, as has a bookstore
owner; see Rosenthal 1992. And yet the game goes on…
55
Chapter 2
Media culture, politics, and ideology
From Reagan to Rambo
In the following studies, I draw on a multiplicity of traditions to keep the project of
cultural studies open, flexible, and critical, refusing to fix any orthodoxies, or to
close off the field in any premature way. The excitement of cultural studies is that
it is a new and open field in the process of making and remaking, and any
interventions should merely attempt to offer some new perspectives or analyses
and not to try to effect any theoretical closures. Indeed, cultural studies is a contested
terrain open to multiple interventions and developments. As noted, some groups
and individuals have been using cultural studies to celebrate the popular and to
legitimate the academic study of “popular culture,” while others use it to criticize
existing inequalities and domination, or to advance specific political and cultural
agendas. Conservative groups in turn attack it as subversive of educational
orthodoxy (see the documentation in Aronowitz 1993) while education reformers
attempt to use it to make contemporary education more relevant and attuned to the
nature and vicissitudes of contemporary culture (Giroux 1994; McLaren et al.
forthcoming).
Most recently, it is to feminist and multiculturalist theories of race, ethnicity,
nationality, subalterneity, and sexual preference that we can turn for specific critiques
of oppression and theories of resistance, and these groups have made important
contributions to cultural studies. Their discourses root their theoretical perspectives
in the struggles of oppressed people and thus politicize theory and critique with
passion and perspectives from existing political struggles and personal experiences.
Such perspectives enlarge the field of cultural studies and political struggle,
expanding, for instance, the concept of ideology critique to include dimensions of
race, gender, sexuality, ethnicity, and other factors, as well as class—relations which
I take up in this and the following chapters. They also infuse cultural studies with
political passion and intensity, breathing new life into its projects.
Building on this work, I argue in this chapter for the need to deploy Marxian
theories of class, feminist concepts of gender, and multiculturalist theories of race,
ethnicity, sexual preference, nationality, and so on in order to articulate the full
range of representations of identities, domination and resistance that one finds
56 Theory/context/methods
structuring the terrain of media culture. The forms of media culture are intensely
political and ideological, and thus those who wish to discern how it embodies
political positions and has political effects should learn to read media culture
politically. This means not only reading media culture in a socio-political and
economic context, but seeing how the internal constituents of its texts either encode
relations of power and domination, serving to advance the interests of dominant
groups at the expense of others, or oppose hegemonic ideologies, institutions, and
practices or contain a contradictory mixture of forms that promote domination and
resistance. Thus, reading media culture politically involves situating it in its historical
conjuncture and analyzing how its generic codes, its positioning of viewers, its
dominant images, its discourses, and its formal-aesthetic elements all embody
certain political and ideological positions and have political effects.
Reading culture politically also involves seeing how media culture artifacts
reproduce the existing social struggles in their images, spectacle, and narrative. In
Camera Politica: The Politics and Ideology of Contemporary Hollywood Film
(1988), Michael Ryan and I indicate how struggles within everyday life and the
broader world of social and political struggles are articulated within popular film,
which in turn are appropriated and have their effects within these contexts. We
indicated how some of the most popular Hollywood films and genres from the
1960s to the late 1980s “transcode” contending social and political discourses and
represent specific political positions within debates over the Vietnam War and the
1960s, gender and the family, class and race, the corporation and the state, U.S.
foreign and domestic policy, and other issues which preoccupied U.S. society over
the past decades.1
For example, some 1960s films presented anti-war discourses and advanced
the positions of the 1960s counterculture (i.e. Vietnam: The Year of the Pig),
while others, like The Green Berets (1967) presented positive representations
of the U.S. intervention in Vietnam and attacked the counterculture. Throughout
the 1970s to the present, media culture in general has been a battleground
between competing social groups with some artifacts advancing liberal or radical
positions and others conservative ones. Likewise, some texts of media culture
advance progressive positions and representations of such things as gender,
sexual preference, race, or ethnicity, while others articulate reactionary forms
of racism or sexism. From this viewpoint, media culture is a contest of
representations that reproduce existing social struggles and transcode the
political discourses of the era.
Furthermore, cultural studies examines the effects of media cultural texts, the
ways that audiences appropriate and use media culture, and the ways that media
images, figures, and discourses function within the culture. In the following pages,
I articulate some theoretical perspectives on media culture, politics, and ideology
which I illustrate with some examples drawn from Hollywood film in the Age of
Reagan and Bush’s New World Order. I also examine some effects of these films
and the ways that they intersected with the political debates and struggles of the
period. In these analyses, I defend the centrality of ideology critique within
Media culture, politics, and ideology 57
cultural studies, yet specify some problems with the classical Marxian conceptions
of ideology and propose some perspectives that will help contemporary criticism
overcome these limitations.
IDEOLOGY AND MEDIA CULTURE: CRITICAL METHODS
Within the Marxian tradition, Marx and Engels characterized ideology as the ideas
of the ruling class which achieved dominance in a specific historical era. The concept
of ideology set out in The German Ideology (in Marx and Engels 1975:59ff.) was
primarily denunciatory and was used to attack ideas which legitimated ruling class
hegemony, which disguised particular interests as general ones, which mystified
or covered over class rule, and which thus served the interests of class domination.
In this view, ideology critique consisted of the analysis and demystification of
ruling class ideas, and the critic of ideology was to ferret out and attack all those
ideas which furthered class domination.2
The classical Marxism of Marx and Engels, the Second International, and the
Third International tended to focus on the primacy of economics and politics and
to refocus attention away from culture and ideology. However, during the 1920s,
Lukács, Korsch, Bloch, and Gramsci emphasized the central importance of culture
and ideology and the Frankfurt School and other versions of Western Marxism
also took up the importance of the critique of ideology as an important component
of the critique of domination.3 British cultural studies too, in its formative period,
made the concept of ideology central to the study of culture and society and one of
their early collection of texts was titled On Ideology.4
Yet there were problems within the Marxian tradition of ideology critique that
needed to be overcome. Some Marxian traditions, including orthodox Leninism,
the Frankfurt School, Althusser, and others, tended to presuppose both a monolithic
concept of ideology and of the ruling class which unambiguously and without
contradiction articulates its class interests in a dominant ideology. This concept
reduces ideology to defense of class interests and is thus predominantly economistic
with ideology referring primarily, and in some cases solely, to those ideas that
legitimate the class rule of the capitalist ruling class. Thus, in this conception,
“ideology” is confined to those sets of ideas which promote the capitalist class’s
economic interests.
In the last two decades, however, this model has been contested by a variety of
critics who have argued that such a concept of ideology is reductionist because it
equates ideology solely with those ideas which serve class, or economic interests,
and thus leaves out such significant phenomena as gender and race and other forms
of ideological domination. Reducing ideology to class interests makes it appear
that the only significant domination going on in society is class, or economic,
domination, whereas many theorists argue that gender, sexuality, and race
oppression are also of fundamental importance and indeed, some would argue, are
entwined in integral ways with class and economic oppression (see Cox 1948;
Rowbotham 1972; Robinson 1978; Said 1978; Barrett 1980; Sargent 1981; Marable
58 Theory/context/methods
1982; Lorde 1984; Kellner and Ryan 1988; Spivak 1988; Eraser 1989; Eisenstein
1979; hooks 1990 and 1992 and Gilroy 1991).
Many critics have correctly proposed that ideology be extended to cover theories,
ideas, texts, and representations that legitimate interests of ruling gender and race,
as well as class powers. From this perspective, doing ideology critique involves
criticizing sexist, heterosexist, and racist ideology as well as bourgeois-capitalist
class ideology. Such ideology critique is multicultural, discerning a range of forms
of oppression of people of different races, ethnicities, gender, and sexual preference
and tracing the ways that ideological cultural forms and discourses perpetuate
oppression. Multicultural ideological critique involves taking seriously struggles
between men and women, feminists and anti-feminists, racists and antiracists, gays
and antigays, and many other conflicts as well, which are seen to be as important
and worthy of attention as class conflicts by Marxian theory.5 It assumes that society
is a great field of struggle and that the heterogeneous struggles are played out on
the screens and texts of media culture and are the proper terrain of a critical media
cultural studies.
With this view, one needs to see the importance of a multitude of struggles
between various groups, including struggles between dominant and subordinate
groups and between class sectors for control of society. In the U.S., this has involved
struggles between liberals and conservatives for hegemonic power and between a
wide range of dominant and subordinate groups. On one level, ideology mobilizes
sentiment, affection, and belief to induce consent to certain dominant core
assumptions about social life (i.e. such as the value of individualism, freedom, the
family, the nation, success, and so on). These core assumptions, the “common
sense” of a society, are deployed by groups, whereby, for example, groups and
forces in struggle tend to deploy discourses of democracy, freedom, and
individualism which they inflect according to their own ideological agendas and
purposes. Sometimes, for example, a concept like empowerment, which began as
a critical concept in the 1960s among progressives (“Power to the People,” the
“empowerment project,” etc.), is appropriated by opposing groups, as when
conservatives during the Reagan/Bush era deployed the rhetoric of empowerment
to support government regulatory agencies and policies to “empower” individuals
against the state (“getting government off our backs”).6
Thus, while there is no one unified and stable dominant ideology, there are core
assumptions that different political groups mobilize and deploy. Indeed,
contemporary democratic capitalist societies have been extremely divided during
the past decades with competing groups and political parties struggling for control
over society. For example, in the United States during the 1950s, moderate
conservatives controlled the economy, society, polity, and culture, establishing a
hegemonic project, overturning the democratic-liberal hegemony which had ruled
since 1932 in the form of FDR’s “New Deal.” In the early 1960s, Kennedy liberals
attempted to forge a liberal consensus and for some years their New Frontier was
a successful hegemonic project until the assassinations of John and Robert Kennedy
(themselves victims of an attempt to re-establish rightist hegemony, if one believes,
Media culture, politics, and ideology 59
as I do, the conspiracy theories). Thereafter, intense struggles between liberals and
conservatives broke out, capped by the victory of Ronald Reagan in 1980, which
established over a decade of conservative hegemony.
Reagan, in turn, redefined “common sense,” producing a political rhetoric that
is still operative during the Clinton era: government must be limited and taxes
reduced; business must be strengthened to create jobs and increase national wealth;
government “red tape” (and thus regulatory policies) must be eliminated; individual
entrepreneurialism is the best road to success and producing a strong society,
therefore government should do everything possible to encourage such business
enterprise; life is tough and only the fittest survive and prosper. Yet on many political,
social, and cultural issues, the conservatives failed to gain hegemony, to redefine
common sense, and thus “culture wars” continue to rage with conservatives
attempting to root out remaining liberal and radical conceptions, practices, and
policies (see Hunter 1991).
Media culture, as well as political discourses, helps establish the hegemony of
specific political groups and projects. Media culture produces representations that
attempt to induce consent to certain political positions, getting members of the
society to see specific ideologies as “the way things are” (i.e. that too much
government is bad, that government deregulation and free markets are good, that
protecting the country requires intense militarization and an aggressive foreign
policy, and so on). Popular cultural texts naturalize these positions and thus help
mobilize consent to hegemonic political positions.7
Criticizing hegemonic ideologies thus requires showing how certain positions
in media cultural texts reproduce existing political ideologies in current political
struggles, as when some films or popular music articulate conservative or liberal
positions, while others articulate radical ones. Moreover, doing ideology critique
involves analyzing images, symbols, myths, and narrative, as well as propositions
and systems of belief (Kellner 1978, 1979, 1982). While some contemporary
theories of ideology explore the complex ways that images, myths, social practices,
and narratives are bound together in the production of ideology (Barthes 1957;
Jameson 1981; and Kellner and Ryan 1988), others restrict ideology to propositions
stated discursively in texts.8 Against this restrictive notion, I would argue that
ideology contains discourses and figures, concepts and images, theoretical positions
and symbolic forms. Such an expansion of the concept of ideology obviously opens
the way to the exploration of how images, figures, narratives, and symbolic forms
constitute part of the ideological representations of gender, sexuality, race, and
class in film and popular culture.
To carry out a multicultural and figurative ideology critique of Rambo, for
instance, it wouldn’t be enough simply to attack its militarist or imperialist ideology,
and the ways that the militarism and imperialism of the film serves imperialist
interests by legitimating intervention in such places as Southeast Asia, the Middle
East, Central America, or wherever. One would also have to criticize the discourses
and figures that construct the text’s gender and racial problematics to carry out a
full ideology critique, showing how representations of women, men, the Vietnamese,
60 Theory/context/methods
the Russians, and so on are a fundamental part of Rambo and that a key element of
the text is remasculinization and re-establishment of white male power after defeat
in Vietnam and assaults on male power by feminist and civil rights movements.
Consequently, reading the ideological text of Rambo requires interrogation of its
images and figures as well as its discourse and language across a range of
problematics while inscribing these problematics within the context of existing
political struggles. Such an analysis, as I will argue below, suggests that the figure
of Rambo represents a specific set of images of male power, American innocence
and strength, and warrior heroism which serve as vehicles of masculist and patriotic
ideologies which were significant during the Reagan era.
Such figural analysis is important because the representations of popular cultural
texts constitute the political image through which individuals view the world and
interpret political processes, events, and personalities. The politics of representation
thus probes the ideological images and figures, as well as discourses, which
transcode dominant and competing political positions in a society. In a massmediated
image culture, it is representations that help constitute an individual’s
view of the world, sense of personal identity and gender, playing out of style and
lifestyle, and socio-political thought and action. Ideology is thus as much a process
of representation, figure, image, and rhetoric as it is of discourse and ideas.
Moreover, it is through the establishment of a set of representations that a hegemonic
political ideology is established, such as New Right conservativism. Representations
thus transcode political discourses and in turn mobilize sentiment, affection,
perception, and assent toward specific political positions, such as the need for
male warriors to protect and redeem society.
Critical theories attempt to contribute to practice and a critical cultural studies
seeks to empower individuals, by giving them tools to criticize dominant cultural
forms, images, narratives, and genres. The studies in this book thus endeavor to
teach how to read, deconstruct, criticize, and use media culture. It has been my
experience in over twenty-five years of teaching that students and others are not
naturally media literate, or critical of their culture, and should be provided with
methods and tools of critique to empower them against the manipulative force of
existing society and culture. On the other hand, many contemporary individuals
have a deep involvement in the artifacts of media culture, are often eager to discuss
their views, often have interesting insights, and should be encouraged to critically
examine and analyze the culture in which they are so deeply immersed.
In line with this pedagogic intent, I am thus interspersing theory with concrete
studies that illustrate my theoretical positions throughout the following pages.
Indeed, I would hope that these studies contribute to the development of a critical
media pedagogy that would empower individuals to discern the messages, values,
and ideologies embedded in media culture texts.9 When individuals learn to perceive
how media culture transmits oppressive representations of class, race, gender,
sexuality, and so on that influence thought and behavior, they are able to develop
critical distance from the works of media culture and thus gain power over their
culture. Such empowerment can help promote a more general questioning of the
Media culture, politics, and ideology 61
organization of society and can help induce individuals to join and participate in
radical political movements struggling for social transformation.
Ideology assumes that “I” am the norm, that everyone is like me, that anything
different or other is not normal. For ideology, however, the “I,” the position from
which ideology speaks, is that of (usually) white male, Western, middle—or upperclass
subject positions, of positions that see other races, classes, groups, and gender
as secondary, derivative, inferior, and subservient. Ideology thus differentiates and
separates groups into dominant/subordinate and superior/inferior, producing
hierarchies and rankings that serve the interests of ruling powers and elites.
Ideology is thus part of a system of domination which serves to further oppression
by legitimating forces and institutions that repress and oppress people. Ideology
itself forms a system of abstractions and distinctions within such domains as gender,
race, and class, so as to construct ideological divisions between men and women,
the “better classes” and “the lower classes,” whites and peoples of color, “us” and
“them,” and so on. Ideology constructs divisions between “proper” and “improper”
behavior, while constructing a hierarchy within each of these domains which justifies
the domination of one gender, race, and class over others by virtue of its alleged
superiority, or the natural order of things. For example, women are said to be by
nature passive, domestic, submissive, and so on, and their proper domain is deemed
to be the private sphere, the home, while the public sphere was reserved for,
allegedly, more active, rational, and domineering men. People of color are often
said to be lazy, irrational, and unintelligent, and thus inferior to the dominant white
race.
Such sexist and racist thinking rests on a series of binary oppositions which a
critical cultural studies attempts to subvert and undermine. The binary oppositions
of ideology are rooted in a system of antagonisms between unequal forces and
serve to legitimate the privilege and domination of the more powerful forces. The
“norm” of ideology is usually white, male, and upper class and serves to denigrate
and dominate non-white people, women, and working-class individuals. Ideology
critique, however, interrogates the categories of whiteness, men, ruling class,
heterosexuality, and other dominant powers and forms that ideology legitimates,
showing the social constructedness and arbitrariness of all social categories and
the binary system of ideology.
Thus feminism and the critique of racism is an integral part of a multicultural
cultural studies. In the ideological operations which produce the likes of sexism,
racism, and classism, we see abstraction at work: ideologies which legitimate the
superiority of men over women, or of capitalism over other social systems, so as to
attempt to justify the privileges of the ruling classes or strata—such patriarchal
capitalist and racist ideologies abstract from the injustices, inequities, and suffering
produced by the system of racist, patriarchal capitalism, such as the glaring inequities
of power and wealth within a supposedly egalitarian society and the sufferings of
subordinate groups and individuals.
Thus, abstraction is fundamentally related to the key features of ideology such
as legitimation, domination, and mystification, and the drawing of boundaries
62 Theory/context/methods
(between allegedly inferior and superior systems, groups, values, and so on) also
plays a fundamental role in this process. Boundary maintenance (between men
and women, capitalists and workers, whites and nonwhites, Americans and the
rest of the world, capitalism and communism, and so on) serves the interests of
social domination, as well as the functions of legitimation and mystification of
social reality. Thus, I am proposing that the “distortion,” “mystification,” “masking,”
and other occluding functions usually associated with ideology are related to a
certain sort of abstraction and to a specific type of ideological boundaries, which
legitimize the domination of ruling social groups.
A cultural studies that is critical and multicultural must therefore carry through
a critique of abstractions, reifications, and ideology which traces reified categories
and boundaries back to their social origins and which criticizes the distortions,
mystifications, and falsifications therein. Thus, one of the functions of dominant
media culture is to maintain boundaries and to legitimate the rule of the hegemonic
class, race, and gender forces. Marxism, feminism, and multicultural theory,
however, pursue a critique of boundaries, focusing on the binary system of
oppositions that structure class, sexist, racist and other ideological discourses. All
of these forms of critical theory are thus weapons of critique in the struggle for a
more humane society and see ideology as providing theoretical underpinnings for
systems of domination.10
Consequently, such variables as race, class, gender, sexual preference, and
ideology are articulated in terms of the organization of the existing society and the
struggles for power in the society. To illustrate such a multicultural approach and
the need for expanding the concept of ideology critique, let us now undertake a
reading of the Rambo films which emphasizes the ways that they transcode a certain
Reaganite ideology and which analyzes the various dimensions and ideological
strategies of the films, including their class, race, gender, and political ideology, as
well as what I call the “Rambo effect.”
At stake is developing a media cultural studies that can analyze, first, how media
culture transcodes the positions within existing political struggles and in turn
provides representations which mobilize consent to specific political positions
through images, spectacle, discourse, narrative, and the other forms of media culture.
And then the actual social effects of the phenomena should be traced. In the
following sections, I undertake this inquiry through a close reading of media texts
and analysis of their possible range of effects. Then I work through a study of the
Rambo effect in order to provide some examples of the nature, functions, and
effectivity of media culture within contemporary society.11
RAMBO AND REAGAN
The first Rambo film, First Blood (1982), presented the Vietnam veteran as a victim
and merged an uneasy set of images that ascribed responsibility for his victimization
to societal forces and that showed them driving him to violence. In the plot, Special.
Forces veteran John Rambo (Sylvester Stallone) is searching for a member of his
64 Theory/context/methods
unit, who he discovers died of Agent Orange contamination, thus situating the
Vietnam veterans as victims of their government. Unable to hitch a hide, Rambo
walks into the small town of Hope, and is arrested by the sheriff who complains
that he needs a haircut and bath. Mistreated by the sheriff and his deputies, Rambo
escapes and wages war against the local and national guard law enforcement
agencies, being positioned as a victim of oppressive authority and power. At the
end, he surrenders to his former Special Forces commander Col. Trautman (Richard
Crenna) and breaks down, crying that although he was a hero in Vietnam, he cannot
even hold a job and is a figure of contempt and hatred, thus blaming all of society
for making him an outcast.
In the second Rambo film (1985), Rambo is transformed into a superhuman
warrior who rescues U.S. POW’s still being held in Vietnam, thus transcoding the
paranoia of contemporary conservativism concerning missing POW’s in Vietnam.12
The film is but one of a whole series of return-to-Vietnam films that began with the
surprising success of Uncommon Valor in 1983 and continued with the three Chuck
Norris Missing in Action films of 1984–6. All follow the same formula of
representing the return-to-Vietnam of a team of former veterans, or a superhuman,
superhero veteran like Rambo, to rescue a group of American soldiers “missing in
action” who are still imprisoned by the Vietnamese and their evil Soviet allies.
In general, media culture forms a system of culture organized according to
various industries, types, genres, subgenres, and genre cycles. It follows the model
of industrial production and is divided into genres with their own rules, conventions,
and formulas. Film for instance, is divided into genres like the horror film, war
film, musical, comedies, and so on, with their own distinctive conventions, forms,
themes, and the like. Popular genres tap into concerns of the present and give rise
to genre cycles attempting to emulate the success of popular artifacts.
The film Rambo synthesizes the “return-to-Vietnam” c ycle with another c ycle
that shows returning veterans transforming themselves from wounded and confused
misfits to super warriors (i.e. Rolling Thunder, Firefox, First Blood). All of these
cinematic attempts to overcome the “Vietnam syndrome” show the U.S. and the
American warrior hero victorious this time and thus exhibit a symptom of inability
to accept defeat. They also provide symbolic compensation for loss, shame, and
guilt by depicting the U.S. as “good” and this time victorious, while its communist
enemies are represented as the incarnation of “evil” who this time receive a welldeserved
defeat. In these cinematic fantasies, it is always the “enemy” that performs
vicious and evil acts, while the Americans are virtuous and heroic. Cumulatively,
the return-to-Vietnam films therefore exhibit a defensive and compensatory response
to military defeat in Vietnam and, I would argue, an inability to learn the lessons of
the limitations of U.S. power and the complex mixture of “good” and “evil” involved
in almost all historical undertakings.
On the other hand, Rambo and the other Stallone-Norris meathead-hero films
can be read as expressions of white male paranoia which present males as victims
of foreign enemies, other races, the government, and society at large. The returnto-
Vietnam films also exhibit an attempt at remasculinization, in which highly
Media culture, politics, and ideology 65
masculist male behavior is celebrated, as a response to feminism and other attacks
on male power. In The Remasculinization of America, Susan Jeffords (1989) argues
that Vietnam was a terrible blow to masculine pride, for which American males
experienced great guilt and shame. A vast amount of Vietnam films and literature
deal with this problem, she claims, attempting to heal the wounds and to reconstruct
a damaged male psyche.
Yet the films can also be read diagnostically as symptoms of the victimization
of the working class. Both the Stallone and Norris figures are resentful, inarticulate,
brutal, and thus indicative of the way many American working-class youths are
educationally deprived and offered the military, or activities like sports that channel
violence into socially acceptable behaviour, as the only way of affirming themselves.
Rambo’s neurotic resentment is less his own fault than that of those who run the
social system in such a way that it denies his class access to the institutions of
articulate thought and mental health. Denied self-esteem through creative work,
they seek surrogate worth in metaphoric substitutes like sports (Rocky) and war
(Rambo). It is symptomatic that Stallone plays both Rocky and Rambo during a
time when economic recession was driving the Rockys of the world to join the
military where they became Rambos for Reagan’s interventionist foreign policies.
The Rocky-Rambo syndrome, however, puts on display the raw masculism which
is at the bottom of conservative socialization and ideology. The only way that the
Rockys and Rambos can gain recognition and self-affirmation is through violent
and aggressive self-display. And Rambo’s pathetic demand for love at the end of
the first two Rambo films is an indication that the society is not providing adequate
structures of mutual and communal support to provide healthy interpersonal
relationships and ego ideals for men in the culture. Unfortunately, the Stallone
character intensifies this pathology precisely in its celebration of violent masculism
and militarist self-assertion.
Reading Rambo politically
What is perhaps most curious, however, is how Rambo appropriates countercultural
motifs for the right. On one level, the film is about the triumph of the individual
over the system, continuing the dominant trope of individualism in American
ideology, but giving the concept a particularly rightist and masculist twist after the
1960s appropriated individualism as social revolt and non-conformity. Moreover,
Rambo has long hair, a headband, eats only natural foods (whereas the bureaucrat
Murdock swills Coke), is close to nature, and is hostile toward bureaucracy, the
state, and technology—precisely the position of many 1960s counterculturalists.
This is an excellent example of how conservative ideologies are able to incorporate
figures and fashion which neutralize and even reverse their original connotations
as oppositional style and behavior. The film also incorporates radical anti-state
discourses and images, for Rambo’s real enemy is the “governmental machine,
with its massive technology, unlimited regulations, and venal political motivations.
Rambo is the anti-bureaucratic non-conformist opposed to the state, the new
66 Theory/context/methods
individualist activist” (Berman 1984:145). Thus Rambo is a supply-side hero, a
figure of individual entrepreneurialism, who shows how Reaganite ideology is
able to assimilate earlier countercultural figures, much as fascism was able to provide
a “cultural synthesis” of nationalist, primitivist, socialist, and racialist ideologies
(Bloch 1991 [1935]).
This analysis suggests that Reaganism should be seen as revolutionary
conservativism with a strong component of radical conservative populism,
individualism and activism, and that this fits in with Star Wars, Indiana Jones,
Superman, Conan, and other films and television series which utilize individualist
heroes who are anti-state and who are a repository of conservative values. And, as
Berman (1984) points out, this constitutes a major shift in the strategies of the
culture industries which celebrated conformity and a beneficent state in the 1950s
and which has shifted to valorization of nonconformity and individualistic heroism
in the Reaganite age of entrepreneurial glory.
Yet the identification of Rambo with natural man against machine technology
is problematized in that Rambo is also identified with technology, and specifically
murderous military technology. Rambo’s bow and arrow shoots missiles that
explode with nuclear impact, thus merging nature and technology. Rambo’s knife,
a risible phallic symbol of aggressive masculinity, is also high-tech, enabling him
to cut through barbed wire and to suture his wounds with a needle and thread
conveniently stored in its butt. The knife also directs him with a compass, and, of
course, provides him with a powerful weapon with which he can quickly and
efficiently dispatch his adversaries. Moreover, Rambo is associated too with the
power of helicopters, explosives, and other weapons, thus merging technology
and nature in images of a pure “fighting machine.”
Consequently, the images enact an implosion between body and technology,
with the body itself, the figure of Rambo, being represented as a superweapon. “I
am war,” he says at one place and the cinematic images show him effortlessly
gliding through nature, overcoming all adversity, and triumphing over his enemies.
The spectacle of the film thus sutures the cultural opposition between nature and
technology, via the lavishly displayed high-tech effects which overpower the
spectator with sights, sounds, and the pleasures of the action/adventure genre. Thus,
the technology appears to be a force of nature, just as Rambo appears to be war
itself, rather than war, technology, and Rambo being perceived as socially
constructed artifacts which are hardly “natural”.
The film machine also mobilizes images and displays of gender and race to
do its ideological work. In regard to gender, one might note that Rambo
instantiates a masculist image which defines masculinity in terms of the male
warrior with the features of great strength, effective use of force, and military
heroism as the highest expression of life. Symptomatically, the women
characters in the film are either whores, or, in the case of a Vietnamese contra,
a handmaiden to Rambo’s exploits who functions primarily as a seductive and
destructive force. Her main actions are to seduce Vietnamese guards—a figure
also central to the image of woman in The Green Berets—and to become a
Media culture, politics, and ideology 67
woman warrior, a female version of Rambo, who helps Rambo fight the bad
guys. Significantly, the only (brief and chaste) moment of eroticism in the film
comes when Rambo and his woman agent kiss after great warrior feats, and
seconds after the kiss (of death) the woman is herself shot and killed. This
renunciation of women and sexuality highlights the theme that the male warrior
must go it alone and must thus renounce erotic pleasure. This theme obviously
fits into the militarist and masculist theme of the film, as well as the genre of
ascetic male heroes who must rise above sexual temptation in order to become
maximally effective saviors or warriors.13
The representations and thematics of race also contribute fundamentally to the
militarist theme. The Vietnamese and Russians are presented as alien Others, as
the embodiment of Evil, in a typically Hollywood scenario that presents the Other,
the Enemy, “Them,” as the embodiment of evil, and “Us,” the good guys, as the
incarnation of virtue, heroism, goodness, innocence, and so on. Rambo appropriates
stereotypes of the evil Japanese and Germans from World War II movies in its
representations of the Vietnamese and the Russians, thus continuing a manichean
Hollywood tradition with past icons of evil standing in for—from the Right’s point
of view—contemporary villains. The Vietnamese are portrayed as duplicitous
bandits, ineffectual dupes of the evil Soviets, and cannon fodder for Rambo’s
exploits, while the Soviets are presented as sadistic torturers and inhuman,
mechanistic bureaucrats.
And yet reflections on the representations of gender and race in the film make
clear that these phenomena are socially constructed, are artificial constructs that
are produced in such things as films and media culture. The stereotypes of race
and gender in Rambo are so exaggerated, so crude, that they point to the artificial
and socially constructed nature of all ideals of masculinity, femininity, race,
ethnicity, and other subject positions. These representations are presented in
cinematic terms which celebrate the white male power of Rambo against women
and other races. Thus, to fully explicate filmic ideology and the ways that film
advances specific political positions, one must also attend to cinematic form and
narrative structure, to the ways that the cinema apparatus transcodes social
discourses and reproduces ideological effects.
Film ideology is transmitted through images, figures, scenes, generic codes,
and the narrative as a whole. Camera positioning and lighting help frame Sylvester
Stallone as a mythic hero in Rambo; an abundance of lower camera angles present
Rambo as a mythic warrior, and frequent close-ups present him as a larger-thanlife
human being. Focus on his glistening biceps, his sculptured body, and powerful
physique presents him as a male sexual icon, as a figure of virility, which promotes
both female admiration for male strength and perhaps homo-erotic fascination
with the male warrior. Slow-motion travelling shots code Rambo as a force of
nature, effortlessly gliding through the jungle, while triumphant music codes his
accomplishments as superheroic. His regeneration into superhero are presented in
shots where he magically leaps out of the water, purified and potent, poised to
avenge and triumph.14
68 Theory/context/methods
The action shots focus on his body as the instrument of mythic heroism, while
the cutting creates an impression of dynamism that infuses Rambo with energy
and superhuman power and vitality, just as slow-motion shots and lengthy takes
which center on Rambo for long stretches of action tend to deify the character.
When, by contrast, Rambo is tortured by villainous communists, the images are
framed in the iconography of crucifixion shots with strong lighting on his head
producing halo effects, as in medieval paintings, and the redder-than-red blood
producing a hyperrealization, if I may borrow a Baudrillardian term (1983a), of
heroic suffering. Close-ups on the communist villains focus on their sneering and
sadistic pleasure in torturing Rambo, while the battle scenes depict the communists
predominantly in long shots as insignificant and incompetent pawns in Rambo’s
redemptive heroism. And in one incredible scene, Rambo snaps off the head of the
snake, evoking the myth of Adam and Eden, in which Adam cannot tame the serpent
and must leave the Garden of Eden, whereby Rambo conquers it, demonstrating
his power to rule the jungle.
William Warner (1992) has pointed out that the torture and suffering of Rambo,
highlighted by the cinematography, enacts a sado-masochistic position whereby
the spectator experiences the pain as just punishment for the guilt of the loss of
masculinity and U.S. imperial power in Vietnam. Then, through a magical reversal,
the subject attains the pleasures of the sadistic position by participating in Rambo’s
mastery and power over his adversaries. Such a scenario thus provides a psychic
resolution to the trauma of loss in Vietnam and empowers spectators who are
experiencing loss of power in the present hard times.
Jeffords (1994) reads the torture scenes in the Rambo films as demonstrating
that the national body can recover from wounds and reconstitute itself as dominant,
as powerful, as in control. The Rambo body also provides the norm of the powerful
body that can protect us from harm and against which soft and weak bodies can be
differentiated and seen as lacking. She argues that the inept sheriff and his deputies
and the National Guard in the first Rambo represent the soft bodies that make the
U.S. prey to foreign and domestic subversion. The Stallone, Norris, Schwarzenegger
and other “Hard Bodies”, by contrast, present the ideal man needed to preserve the
existing society from its enemies and from internal decay and feminization.
In the case of Rambo, not only does the scenario of the film enact this redemptive
drama of shame, humiliation, torture, and resurrection via an empowered subject,
but the film spectacle enables the spectator to participate in the exciting experiences
of Rambo effortlessly traversing the space of the jungle, blending in with nature.
Spectators are invited to thrill in Rambo’s destruction of his enemies, to experience
redemptive violence, to triumphantly return with Rambo in a high-tech helicopter.
Thus, the cinematic apparatus of spectacle contributes to the empowering
experience. As with video games, the spectator is invited to achieve a position of
mastery, to destroy enemies and to triumph over evil.
As Warner suggests (1992:684–5), the spectacle of Rambo helps explain its
appeal with young and international audiences.15 Powerless spectators enjoy the
thrill of identification with “natural” and technological power and magically
Media culture, politics, and ideology 69
overcome all adversity. The Hollywood special effects produce a spectacle whereby
the audience is able to experience the power of decisively defeating evil. The
spectacle thus empowers audiences, providing a momentary sense of mastery and
power, compensating for the decline of power in everyday life. In addition, media
spectacles hide the ideological content, whereby fast editing, dazzling high-tech
images, and narrative excitement overwhelm the viewer’s critical faculties, thus
subliminally conveying the ideologies through images and spectacle.
Furthermore, the “happy ending” closure situates the film as a return to the
conservative Hollywood adventure tradition, and the victory over the evil
communists codes Rambo as a mythic redemption of U.S. defeat in Vietnam
by heroic action—a trope reproduced in the films of Stallone, Chuck Norris,
and countless others, as well as in pulp novels and television shows. Such
mythic redemption was carried out politically during the era in the actions of
Ronald Reagan, Oliver North, and other “cowboys,” who supported violence
to resolve political conflict (Jewett and Lawrence 1988:248f.). Not by accident
did both the Hollywood heroes and the Hollywood president and his cronies
act outside the law to carry out “heroic” actions constrained by the legal and
political order.
Consequently, although the U.S. was denied victory in Vietnam, it has
attempted to achieve it in media culture. This phenomenon shows some of the
political functions of media culture which include providing compensations for
irredeemable loss while offering reassurances that all is well in the American
body politic—reassurance denied in less conservative films such as Oliver Stone’s
Salvador, Platoon, Wall Street, Talk Radio, Born on the Fourth of July, Heaven
and Earth, and Natural Born Killers, which provide an instructive countercycle
to the Stallone Rocky/Rambo cycles and which also testify to the conflictual
nature of cinematic ideology in the contemporary period. For the Stone films
demonstrate the pain of defeat and depict powerful institutions and social forces
overshadowing individual ability to control the course of events. The conservative
films, by contrast, celebrate the triumph of the will over adversity and their effects
reveal the ludicrousness of claiming that the artifacts of media culture neither
have powerful effects nor promote interests of domination. Instead, as the
following study of the Rambo effect suggests, they are potent forces within
contemporary culture that have a variety of discernible effects.
The Rambo effect
Rambo was one of the most popular films of its era. It opened at a record-breaking
2,074 theaters and had the third-largest opening gross in movie history—$32, 548,
262 in its first six days (New York Times, May 30, 1985). Rambo quickly became
the number one film in box office receipts:
In its first 23 days of release, Rambo, which cost $27 million to produce, has
grossed a phenomenal $75.8 million at the box office. Only two films in
70 Theory/context/methods
history, Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom and Return of the Jedi, have
had more successful launches.
(Time, June 24, 1985)
By the end of the summer, it had grossed over $150 million in the U.S. alone to
become one of the most popular films of the day (Business Week, August 26, 1985).
Moreover, it spawned a whole culture of “Rambomania” which:
is spreading faster than the fire storms set by the hero’s explosive warheads.
Hollywood megahits of summers past have flooded the market with such
whimsical souvenirs as furry Gremlins and cuddly E.T.s. This year stores
are stocking up with war paraphernalia: a $150 replica of Rambo’s hightech
bow and arrow, Rambo knives and an assortment of toy guns, including
a semiautomatic job that squirts a stream of water 10 ft. Youngsters will soon
be able to pop Rambo vitamins, and New Yorkers can send a Rambogram, in
which a Stallone look-alike will deliver a birthday message or carry out a
tough assignment like asking the boss for a raise. The U.S. Army has started
hanging Rambo posters outside its recruitment offices, hoping to lure
enlistees. Rambo fever is even spreading overseas. The film has already
broken box-office records in Beirut and the Philippines, and 25 companies
have signed contracts to distribute Rambo merchandise, even in countries
where the film has not yet opened.
(Time, June 24, 1985)
Liberal critics described their horror over seeing the film with Rambomanaics
who cheered the human killing machine’s every exploit.16 The film was quickly
taken up by discussions and talk shows:
Even a panel of political journalists on ‘This Week with David Brinkley’ last
Sunday on ABC-TV pushed aside the President’s tax plan, the SALT II
negotiations and other heavyweight matters to talk about what the popularity
of Sylvester Stallone’s new action movie says about our national state of
mind.
(Chicago Tribune, June 12, 1985)
The pundits concluded that its “message” was: “We should have won in Vietnam.
We did win in Grenada. And now…on to Nicaragua!” (ibid.).
Columnist Ellen Goodman feared that Rambo’s rescue of US POWs held in Vietnam
would increase calls for military attempts to rescue hostages in Lebanon and elsewhere
(Chicago Tribune, June 27, 1985) and soon after Ronald Reagan himself said:
“Boy, after seeing Rambo last night, I know what to do next time.” Reagan’s
remark came as he was preparing to address the nation on the freeing of 39
American hostages in Beirut. They were among 153 passengers on a TWA
(Trans World Airlines) flight hijacked on June 14 as it headed for Rome
from Athens.
(Reuters Ltd., June 30, 1985)17
Media culture, politics, and ideology 71
Psychologists began describing war mania in young children,18 and posters of the
film, images of Rambo, and references to him appeared everywhere. Indeed, the
term “Rambo” soon became a synonym for tough, macho, patriotic, and Reagan
himself used the term “Ramboing” to describe an aggressive response to
provocation. The film was endlessly discussed as expressing the signs of the times:
Rambo has touched a raw nerve in America, a feeling that we should, in the
words of Ronald Reagan, stand tall again. Ten years ago, after the collapse
of Saigon and the anguish of the Watergate scandal, Rambo would have
been laughed out of the movie theaters. The mood then was virulently antiwar,
but today that’s all changed.
(People, July 8, 1985)
On the other hand, Vietnam veterans protested against the film all over the country,
claiming that it provided distorted representations of both Vietnamese and American
vets, while promoting violence, and they picketed theaters that ran the film. But
Rambo had become a major figure in popular and commercial culture “heating up
the poster, button and bumper sticker market.” By mid-summer,
more than 600,000 Rambo posters have been sold…There are 11 kinds of
‘Rambo’ buttons, with sales so far of 300,000. Next, bumper stickers. Among
them: ‘Need an Army? Hire Rambo’; ‘Rambo—America’s Newest Weapon’;
‘Beware—This Vehicle Protected by Rambo’.
(Chicago Tribune, July 11, 1985)
A novel based on the film sold over 800,000 copies (Reuters North European
Service, July 31, 1985).
T-shirts from Rambo, First Blood, Part II, have topped the 1.5 million mark
(250,000 shirts). During the first five weeks of release, these shirts have
outsold the previous record holder, the ever present M*A*S*H shirts…Not
only are millions viewing the film, but large numbers of viewers have decided
to publicly identify and display themselves with an image of Rambo.
(Business Wire, July 18, 1985)
A large number of Rambo toys, weapons, clothes, and other consumer items also
saturated the market, and the next year a Rambo cartoon show opened. The film
also inspired bizarre actions throughout the United States. A Rambo look-alike
messenger, dressed in army fatigues and carrying a fake gun to deliver a
Rambogram, led a policeman to shoot himself in the foot in pursuit of the messenger
(Proprietary to the United Press International, August 19, 1985). And:
Residents of a posh suburban Rochester neighborhood Thursday blamed a
recent vandalism spree on “Rambo’s Raiders,” a group of adolescents
emulating Sylvester Stallone’s freedom-fighter movie character. Screens have
been slashed, bushes and shrubs cut down and garden hoses turned on and
aimed inside homes during the past few weeks in the Monroe County town
72 Theory/context/methods
of Penfield. Sheriffs deputies said a group of teens who masquerade as Rambo
in the quiet neighborhood may be responsible. Deputies this past weekend
arrested two Stallone clones, who were dressed in camouflage fatigues, cutoff
shirts and wore paint on their faces. “We understand that they wear army
fatigues and carry knives,” said JoAnne Cortese, whose home was vandalized.
“It’s almost like Rambo’s Raiders. They feel that if Rambo can do it, they
can do it.”
(Proprietary to the United Press International, August 15, 1985)
Other reports surfaced of crimes, including murders, that were allegedly inspired
by Rambo. The Los Angeles Times reported a murderer had used a knife like
Rambo’s and that the suspect was believed to have been inspired by the film (August
16, 1985).
A judge decried the glorification of Sylvester Stallone’s Rambo film character
in deciding the case against a 15–year-old boy accused of setting junglestyle
booby traps in a park. Washington County Circuit Judge Jon B.Lund
held Andrew S.Bene, Beaverton, accountable Tuesday on one count of
recklessly endangering others but absolved him of three related weapons or
assault charges.
(Proprietary to the United Press International, September 18, 1985)
And: “Police Monday charged a man with robbing a tavern and three customers
while dressed as the movie character Rambo” (Proprietary to the United Press
International, October 7, 1985). Most bizarrely:
A man who played a “Rambo” role for hero-worshipping teenagers was
behind bars Saturday, accused of “brainwashing the kids” with commando
warfare tactics and conspiring with one child to kill his parents. Wilmer
Leonard McClinton Jr., 32, was held in the Mobile County Jail without bond
on charges of selling firearms to minors, conspiracy to commit murder,
criminal possession of explosives and contributing to delinquency of
minors…. Lee said raids Friday on McClinton’s home in Satsuma and former
residence in Mobile produced knives, gunpowder and exploding arrows.
Police said he used weapons and live ammunition to teach commando tactics
to boys aged 11 to 15. “He took some of the kids to see the movie Rambo 10
times,” said Juvenile Unit Sgt. James Huey.
(Proprietary to the United Press International, November 9, 1985)
The release of Rambo on video cassette multiplied the Rambo effect with many
people purchasing or renting the film. The cassette sold 425,000 units the first day
that it went on the market, breaking previous records (PR Newswire, January 14,
1986). Stories continued to circulate concerning the Rambo effect: “A teenager
who defense attorneys said was under the delusion that he was John Rambo, a
fictional Vietnam War veteran played by Sylvester Stallone, has been convicted of
stabbing his mother’s best friend” (United Press International, May 22, 1986). A
Media culture, politics, and ideology 73
young man “told police he played ‘Rambo’ with his 15–year-old neighbor the
night the boy was killed… [He] was charged with the multiple stabbing death” of
the boy (United Press International, April 15, 1986). And: “A teenager authorities
said shot himself in front of two friends after watching two violent films starring
actor Sylvester Stallone was in critical condition” (United Press International,
May 5, 1986). Rambo had firmly established itself within US folklore and the
Rambo effect continued to circulate violence and reaction.
I earlier suggested how the spectacle of Rambo attracted international audiences
and acclaim and indeed the Rambo effect circulated through the world. Reuters
reported that in war-torn El Salvador, the film
has broken box office records…where 20,000 people saw it on the day it
opened…fights broke out among people lining up for tickets and [there were]
several minor injuries after patrons stampeded to get in. Several officers and
soldiers in the Salvadoran army have taken to wearing the same bandannastyle
head-gear as the beefy, bare-breasted Rambo.
(August 2, 1985)
The film also broke “box office records in South Africa, Hong Kong, Taiwan,
Venezuela and elsewhere. It has even broken box office records in Israel and
Lebanon” (Reuters North European Service, July 31, 1985)
There were efforts to ban the film in Britain,19 but they failed and the film was
also a great success throughout Europe.20 “Rambo” thus became a figure of the
global popular who mobilized identification around the figure.21 Rambo also became
embroiled in world politics and the contradictions of the Cold War. An official
Soviet publication attacked the film and concluded:
Rambo is not the only film of its kind. Similar Hollywood creations have
been playing in American theaters for several years now. And many observers
are forced to admit that this film serves another purpose—to influence public
opinion in favor of military adventures, particularly in regard to Nicaragua.
Even Stallone admitted in an interview that his film is ‘a right-wing fantasy.’
It would be more accurate to say that Rambo is a film that sows hostility and
hatred. Its widespread popularity in America is lamentable.
(The Current Digest of the Soviet Press, August 14, 1985)
But Rambo received a favorable review in the Peking Evening News: “This is a
serious film with healthy content, profound social significance and a high degree
of artistic material. An outstanding work in recent American cinema” (The
Washington Post, August 8, 1985). And China’s showing of the first Rambo film
broke attendance records and produced “a Rambo craze” in China (Proprietary to
the United Press International, September 25, 1985).
Yet, “Rambo” also became a figure of contempt and a negative discourse, as well
as a positive one, emerged. A “Rambo” was coded negatively as someone who was
excessively masculist, out of control, and potentially dangerous and violent. Feminists
used the term to mock excessive male macho behavior and political liberals deployed
74 Theory/context/methods
it to attack the excesses of the conservative political establishment. The term became
increasingly negative in political discourse, showing how such popular figures are
themselves contested, part of a socially and politically constructed political discourse.
Indeed, “Rambo” is a polysemic cultural construct which can be appropriated by
opposing sides in political debate and struggle.
And so “Rambo” became a contested figure in U.S. cultural and political
iconography and discourse. On one hand, there were Rambo bars (in Houston),
Rambo fashion, Rambo weapons, and iconic images of Rambo on posters and
other commercial paraphenelia. A U.S. mercenary recruited to aid the Nicaraguan
contras was shown in a TV interview with a massive poster of Rambo behind him
and the figure Rambo was assimilated to the aggressive conservative attempts at
remasculinization and the re-assertion of U.S. military power during the epoch.
Yet there were frequent attacks on Ramboism in the press and Warner counted
twenty articles that equated Rambo with Oliver North in the Iran/Contra affair,
references that were mostly negative (Warner 1992:686), signifying male aggression
out of control and out of the bounds of democratic propriety.
The popularity of the film Rambo and the Stallone, Chuck Morris, and other
“action-adventure” vehicles suggests that the Hollywood President and large
segments of the country had assimilated a manichean worldview from Hollywood
movies whereby “the enemy” is so evil and “we” are so good that only violence
can eliminate threats to our well-being. Thus, Reagan’s most “popular” acts were
his invasion of Grenada and bombing of Libya—precisely the sort of “action”
celebrated in Rambo, Top Gun, Iron Eagle, and the other militarist epics of the
Reagan era. Hollywood films therefore provided iconography which helped
mobilize support for conservative and militarist political agendas. The images of
helicopters landing in Grenada and Panama carried the same positive and exciting
charge as images of military action in the Hollywood militarist films.
Consequently Hollywood films of the 1980s provided the iconography for the
positive reception of images of “real” (i.e. as brought to you by television) aggressive
military action. The presenting of “enemies” as absolutely evil and necessary to
eliminate codes such U.S. military aggression as “good.” Military heroes replicate
the heroism in the Hollywood military spectacles and are infused with the same
popular adulation as the Rambos of the film world. Moreover, Rambo and the
return-to-Vietnam films thus articulate conservative imperialist/militarist fantasies
which in turn transcode Reaganite anti-communist and pro-militarist discourses.
Indeed, Reagan constantly employed Ramboesque solutions to the political
challenges of the day, fighting secret wars all over the world and engaging in overt
military actions, suggesting that the Hollywood President really believed that
violence was the best way to solve conflicts.22 Not by accident were Oliver North
and other members of Reagan’s secret government referred to as “Rambos” when
they engaged in their illegal and criminal covert operations.
And so Hollywood film in the Age of Reagan enacted rites of mythical redemption
in narratives which attempted to manage social anxieties, to soothe and alleviate the
sense of shame associated with defeat in Vietnam, and to smooth away the rough edges
Media culture, politics, and ideology 75
of history (i.e. U.S. atrocities in Vietnam as depicted in Platoon and other antiwar
films). In their mythical scenarios, Americans incarnate goodness and innocence, while
communists represent pure evil—precisely the fantasy of Ronald Reagan in his predetente
incarnation and precisely the mindset of the classical Hollywood cinema which
Reagan embodied. This Hollywood/Reaganite mindset was hegemonic politically and
culturally during Reagan’s reign and requires analysis of the contemporary political
context of Hollywood film to fully capture its ideological effects.
TOP GUN: REAGANITE WET DREAM
The Reagan era was one of aggressive military intervention in the Third World,
with an invasion of Grenada, the U.S.-directed and financed Contra war against
Nicaragua, the bombing of Libya, and many other secret wars and covert actions
around the globe. Hollywood film nurtured this militarist mindset and thus provided
cultural representations that mobilized support for such aggressive policy. Reagan’s
policies were continued by George Bush, who undertook an even more large-scale
aggressive military action against Iraq. As an example of a media cultural studies
that situates film in its socio-political context, I will next undertake readings of a
series of Reaganite fantasies that legitimated the aggressive militarist policies of
the Reagan and Bush Administrations and that provide a pool of cultural
representations which could be mobilized to generate support for Bush’s war against
Iraq—an event that I interrogate in Chapter 5 below.
Top Gun (1986) was one of a series of films during the 1980s that encoded the
Reaganite ethos of militarism, advocating a strong military while celebrating
conservative and military values. Like Rambo and the other return-to-Vietnam
films, Iron Eagle, Red Dawn, and other Reaganite fantasies, Top Gun celebrates
individualistic heroism, military valor, and conservative American values. Like
these other films, it operates in a binary universe where there is a struggle between
good and evil in which the enemy is absolutely evil and Americans represent the
embodiment of “goodness.” Coming at the tail end of the Cold War with the Soviet
Union, Top Gun is not as fiercely anti-communist as some of the films just
mentioned, but its “enemy” seems to be Soviet communists, though the foreign
Other to the good Americans is indeterminate enough to encompass Soviet allies
like Libya or Iraq (i.e. the “enemy” flies MIGs, a Soviet plane, but is not identified
as Russian, though the MIG fighter pilots have red stars on their helmets; yet,
since this was the epoch in which Reagan bombed Libya, to the delight of his
conservative brethren, the film’s enemy could be read as Arab nations using Soviet
MIGs and no specific anti-Soviet ideology is articulated in the film).
In many ways, Top Gun thoroughly embodies the social attitudes of Reaganism.
Appearing in 1986, before the Iran/Contra crisis, the 1987 stock market crash, and
exposés of the Savings and Loan scandals, Top Gun represents the ascendancy of a
triumphant Reaganism at its last moment of supremacy before its fall from uncontested
hegemony (obviously Reaganism had its comeback with the triumph of George Bush,
Son of Teflon—but that’s another story told in Kellner 1990a). The film was the
76 Theory/context/methods
most popular box office draw of the year, suggesting that it tuned into the social
ethos of the epoch, and puts on display the central values of Reaganite conservativism.
Top Gun is primarily about competition and winning—women, military honor,
sports, and social success. It unabashedly celebrates the value of being top gun,
the elite, the best, the winner. The story features the exploits of Pete Mitchell,
code-named Maverick, and winningly played by Tom Cruise in one of his string of
Reaganite fantasies (Risky Business, All the Right Moves, Cocktail, and so on).
Cruise’s Maverick embodies the Reaganite/Yuppie values of winning at all costs,
of putting competition at the center of life, and going all out to win in every domain
of social existence from dating, to sports, to career.
The film opens with titles indicating that in 1969 the Navy Air Core set up a
school to train elite aerial fighters, and in a later training session, it is announced
that the U.S. needs to maintain its ratio of expert aerial fighter pilots in the
contemporary world. The message is that even in a high-tech, computerized
society, individual initiative and skill are crucial, indeed essential, to military
survival. At one point, Maverick valorizes individual intuitive ability rather than
cognitive abilities: “You don’t have time to think up there. If you think, you’re
dead.” The same anti-intellectual ethos pervaded the Star Wars films and
inadvertently put on display the anti-intellectualism and thoughtlessness that
was an essential part of Reaganism, promoted daily by President Feel-Good and
by the commercial media which shared his values and anti-intellectualism (i.e.
advertising, for instance, works by addressing and manipulating fears and
fantasies, and not by utilizing rational discourse; Reaganism and media culture
work, I suggest, in a similar fashion).
The opening title sequence through its montage of sound and images establishes
the ethos of the film. As the titles cross the screen, eerie music provides a background
to images of silhouettes slowly moving through a misty early morning dawn. The
images of men are coupled with pictures of airplanes and the music shifts to more
upbeat rhythms and the sounds of airplane motors and staccato radio messages
produce a rich sound collage. A V-sign is flashed and a plane takes off from an
aircraft carrier “somewhere in the Indian Ocean.” The modernist image construction
and collage of image and sound codes the fighter pilots with a mystical aura, drawing
on the cultural codes of Triumph of the Will, which opened with a picture of an
airplane magically moving through clouds to the accompaniment of martial music
in a fusion of images of nature, technology, and clouds. Top Gun opens with a
similar fusion and the project of the film will be to fuse high-tech imagery, mythical
heroism, and masculinity into a figure of the “top gun” who succeeds in every
walk of life and who will produce a proper role model for Reaganite youth.
The music track cuts to a rock background and two fighter planes and their
crews take off for their daily mission. The fighter pilots and their planes have
mythical names (Ghostrider, Merlin, Cougar, Maverick, and so on) and the image
construction utilizes off-center framing, quick cutting, and high-tech sound montage
to fuse the fighter pilots with awesome power and glory. Enemy MIGs suddenly
appear and after ritualistic dogfighting, one of the fighter pilots, Cougar, loses
Media culture, politics, and ideology 77
control and Maverick must risk his life to escort his dazed comrade back to the
destroyer where the planes are based. Cougar decides to quit and loses his status as
“top gun” fighter, ineligible to go to the elite training school. Instead Maverick and
his co-pilot Goose get their chances to prove themselves and enter the competition
for the best of the best. In the Reaganite universe, only the elite succeed and the
faint-hearted must fall by the wayside, deprived of the success and honor reserved
for the top guns and top dogs in the deadly competition for wealth and power in
which only the winners succeed and everyone else is a loser.
The clouds, fog, shiny planes, high-tech control centers, and handsome and
heroic young pilots in the opening sequence code the naval aviators as modern
heros, as quasimythical embodiments of the mystery and power of modern
technology. Here high-tech image construction with the best cameras, editing
equipment, and personnel invest the figures with aestheticized glory and the
dazzling fight scenes and gee-whiz sound effects likewise encode the flight and
fighting scenes with the awe and power of aestheticized technology. As with
fascism as a political movement (see Benjamin 1969), military films like Top
Gun aestheticize war and thus provide soft-core propaganda for the military.
Indeed, the credits at the end provide “special thanks” to the pilots of the U.S.
Navy F–16 aircraft and credit a large number of military officials and pilots who
participated in the film, thus certifying its credentials as official, U.S. government
approved propaganda.
One wonders how many pilots and soldiers who joined the military and fought
in the Panama invasion, the Gulf War, and other military escapades of the era were
influenced by such cinematic propaganda. Hollywood film, like the Hollywood
President, are not innocent entertainment, but lethal weapons in the service of
dominant socio-economic forces. Top Gun’s ideological project is to invest desire
in the figure of heroic fighter pilots and high-tech war which it does with attractive
star figures, cinematic high-tech wizardry and special effects, rock music and the
sounds of speed and power, and, of course, the sophisticated planes and military
gadgets. As noted, the images and spectacles of high-tech entertainment are semiotic
vehicles that subliminally transmit ideological effects. During an initial Top Gun
training session, one pilot whispers to another, when watching a video of a hightech
explosion/kill, “this gives me a hard-on.” Indeed, this is the project of the film
itself which turns on the spectator to the thrill of technological death, fusing Eros
and Thanatos, libidinal energy and destruction, in images of technowar,23 thus
helping to produce the psychological disposition to thrill to images of technodeath
in events like the Persian Gulf War against Iraq.
The scene cuts to Miramar, California, home of “Fightertown U.S.A,” where
the “top gun” school is found. Here, Maverick begins his competition with
“Iceman,” who is viewed as the top fighter pilot, the one to beat. Iceman and his
partner “Slider” are your perfect all-American fraternity boy jocks, who reek with
self-confidence, privilege, and the conviction that they are the best and deserve
whatever they get. Maverick and Goose, by contrast, are more marginal characters
and vaguely working class; they are the underdogs who will fiercely compete to
78 Theory/context/methods
become top dogs, celebrating the values and lifestyle of the dominant elites by
their single-minded pursuit of the same values and goals.
It is soon clear that success with women is part of what it means to be “top
gun.” After their initial orientation session, the pilots go into a local bar, filled with
attractive women coming on to the largely military male clientele. As the spectator
voyeuristically enters the bar, one sees representations of female flesh and flashing
smiles, projecting images of erotic paradise for the technowarriors of the Top Gun
school. Media culture produces images that mobilize audience desire into certain
modes of thought, behavior, and role models that serve the interest of maintaining
and reproducing the status quo. Showing the pilots with beautiful women helps to
invest the images of the military with erotic energy and turns on female spectators
as well to equate sexual excitement with the military and uniforms, thus helping to
supply the actual would-be warriors with the sexual prizes that serve as part of the
stimulant for military service and heroism. In addition, women are objectified as
sexual commodities, valued for good looks and readiness to serve and gratify men.
The message of the bar scene for women is that military men are exciting partners,
thus positioning women to admire men in uniform. The message for males is that
if you join the military, wear the uniform, and exhibit the marks of rank and honor,
you’ll score with the women, that, in short, military guys get the girls. As he enters
the bar, Maverick quickly spots an attractive woman and makes his moves, singing
to her, clowning, and coming on to her. She rejects him for an older man, but he
follows her into the women’s room where he continues his pursuit; competition
and entrepreneurship demand innovation and courage to score the big bucks, glory,
and girls promised by the conservative ideology of the era.
The next day as he enters his flight class, Maverick sees that the woman is
his flight instructor and he cowers down beneath his dark glasses. The woman,
Charlie (Kelly McGillis), is the perfect Reaganite female: competitive, out for
promotion, and proper in her behavior. She incarnates a conservative
appropriation of feminism in which women compete as equals with men while
retaining their “femininity.” “Charlie” has a man’s name, but thoroughly
feminine looks, sensibility, and behavior. She also represents the new woman
in the military, and during a period in which the volunteer army depended on
women recruits, her image of a successful and attractive military woman
provides free recruitment advertisements for the volunteer army; many women
probably found themselves in the deserts of Saudi Arabia during 1990, awaiting
a violent war, as a result of appropriating positive images of women in military
life promoted by films like Top Gun.
Top Gun also replicates conservative Hollywood cinematic and ideological codes.
It utilizes the conventions of romance to validate Maverick as the prototype of the
successful male. In subtle ways, the film also reinscribes the domination of women
by men and the conventions of male-dominated romance. At first, Maverick finds
himself subordinate to Charlie: she is his teacher, who has a Ph.D. in astrophysics,
and is a figure of the new woman authority figure who is a threat to male power
and domination. As their relationship evolves, it is she who initiates the romantic
Media culture, politics, and ideology 79
connection after his initial overtures. As the moment of their sexual involvement
approaches, she states: “This is going to be complicated.” By the end of the film,
however, Charlie is rendered subordinate to Maverick. As he returns to the Top
Gun flight school, a hero and now an instructor, the audience sees Charlie bestow
upon Maverick an adoring glance; their eyes meet and this time it is Maverick who
says, “This is going to be complicated,” establishing himself as the initiator and
the master of the relation. This narrative ploy not only utilizes the traditional
Hollywood trope of the happy ending to mobilize audience pleasure in Maverick’s
total triumph, but also invests pleasure in his mastery of the strong woman.
The film provides as well positive images of family, father-son male bonding,
and the continuity of generations—familiar conservative themes during an era in
which such values had been strongly contested in the 1960s and 1970s. Maverick
is the son of Duke Mitchell, a fighter pilot who had died under mysterious
circumstances. In a key scene, Maverick visits Viper (Tom Skerritt) who tells him
of his father’s heroism and that his military record was stained because he, Viper,
and others had strayed across the border to pursue the enemy (presumably in Laos
or Cambodia) and thus had broken rules. Maverick talks of his family to Viper—
presented himself as a good family man—and Viper comes to assume a surrogate
father role to Maverick.
The images of Maverick’s partner Goose also reinforce the family ideology.
In one cafe scene, soon before Goose’s death, Goose, his wife, and his children
enjoy themselves with Maverick and Charlie. Goose plays the piano and sings
“Great Balls of Fire,” with the whole group energetically joining in. The singing
of popular rock ‘n’ roll songs, and the ever-present rock soundtrack background,
also invest the characters with positive energy, for their association with rock
music associates them with the cultural signs of pleasure and sociality, aspects
which are fused with images of family in this scene. The cafe scene ends with
Goose’s wife saying to him, “Goose, you great stud; take me to bed or lose me
forever.” For the top guns, therefore, marriage, good times, and intense sexuality
come together in one convenient package and that package is marriage and family:
the ultimate destination of Maverick and Charlie, with Charlie repeating the “take
to me bed” phrase to Maverick soon after as they kiss on a moonlit night beside
the bay as the scene cuts to black.
As in all good fantasies, the hero is tested and this happens when Maverick and
Goose are engaged in a training exercise and their plane spins out of control; they
are forced to evacuate and Goose is killed. Maverick feels guilty and resigns from
the top gun school, though his father figure Viper talks him into returning to
graduate. At the graduation ceremonies, there is a call for the top candidates to go
immediately to a crisis assignment: Iceman, his partner Merlin, and Maverick are
selected. The scene cuts to the “Indian Ocean, 24 hours later,” where a
communications ship is missing and must be rescued; MIGs are all around the
area and there is a fear that the enemy will reach the ship first. Iceman and a
partner and Maverick and the Iceman’s former partner Merlin are sent out on
patrol and encounter the enemy MIGs. Maverick saves Iceman and manages to
80 Theory/context/methods
knock out a series of MIGs, thus becoming the hero of his military peer group.
These final battle scenes celebrate the vital role of the military and military heroism:
the Top Gun shows that he has “all the right moves” and in “risky business” with
the enemy he triumphs, blowing away MIG after MIG to the delight of the audience
(I still recall with horror that Saturday afternoon when I saw the film with a
thoroughly enraptured audience which roared with every kill).
I am aware that this reading of the manipulative effects of an ideology machine
like Top Gun goes against the current emphasis on the active audience,
constructing their own (oppositional) meanings from cultural texts. But some
blockbuster films like Top Gun are carefully constructed ideological machines
that celebrate and reproduce hegemonic political positions and attitudes. Top
Gun positions the audience in ways to induce spectators to identify or sympathize
with its politics; while many of us may resist these positions and may not buy
into their ideologies, we must actively resist the text itself. Sure, spectators can
produce any number of “oppositional” or “aberrant” readings, but we should
also distinguish between texts that invite or facilitate oppositional readings and
those that resist them, and we should recognize that some films succeed in pulling
audiences into their ideological projects while others fail. Moreover, cultural
studies should promote critical media literacy to help audiences resist ideological
manipulation and this requires understanding of the ideological operations and
effects of films like Rambo and Top Gun.
Like Rambo, Top Gun was one of the most popular films of its time, grossing
over $130 million by the end of 1986, becoming the year’s top-grossing film (Time,
November 24, 1986). Like Rambo, it provided role models for identification and
helped promote conservativism and militarism. Time reported that: “Its glorified
portrayal of Navy life spurred theater owners in such cities as Los Angeles and
Detroit to ask the Navy to set up recruiting exhibits outside cinemas where Top
Gun was playing to sign up the young moviegoers intoxicated by the Hollywood
fantasy” (November 24, 1986). It was later reported that the film made high school
students dream of military life and contributed to a big jump in applications to
military academies. Many students mentioned the film in their applications and a
West Point captain agreed: “It doesn’t hurt to have neat movies like Top Gun… I
think everyone enjoyed the spill-off from that” (The Washington Post, January 19,
1987). A retired admiral noted that Tom Cruise and Top Gun “did a lot” for the
Naval Academy. “They’re still standing in line to become Naval aviators” (The
Washington Post, June 24, 1987). The movie continued to be popular and Tom
Cruise was named by students in grades eight through twelve as the person they
most admired, according to a poll by the World Almanac and Book of Facts (United
Press International, February 4, 1988). The film eventually took in over $350
million in box office receipts, had high video cassette rentals and sales, and entered
U.S. folklore, with many Gulf War pilots and commentators referring to the film to
describe U.S. military aviation exploits in the war against Iraq.
Such is the “genius” of Top Gun that it provides a relatively seamless narrative
with few, if any, socially critical moments, polysemic meanings, discordant voices,
Media culture, politics, and ideology 81
or critical, marginal elements. The film rigorously privileges the position of
Maverick, with whom the audience is invited to identify, and affirms without
question his values and goals. Tom Cruise, of course, infuses his character with a
winning smile and he is invested with romantic charm and attractiveness as he
pursues and wins the flight instructor Charlie. Images of him playing volleyball,
or undressing in the locker room or bedroom, present his body as hard, wellsculptured,
and athletic, precisely the dominant figure of male virility and
attractiveness.
Top Gun draws on cultural imagery from the last several decades to encode its
hero with glory and positivity, and works to decenter and marginalize all oppositional
readings. For instance, Maverick wears a black jacket and drives a motor-cycle,
the image of 1950s rebellion; his name replays a popular television hero who was
something of an oppositional, non-conformist—but safe—figure on 1950s TV (i.e.
the cowboy gamblers Bart and Brett Maverick, resurrected in a 1994 film). With
the Tom Cruise Maverick figure, however, these symbols of rebellion become icons
of male fashion and virility. The soundtrack plays 1950s and 1960s rock music,
which the characters sing at key junctures in the film. Here too symbols of nonconformity
and individuality become symbols of group identity and cohesiveness.
In fact, Maverick’s “individuality” is thoroughly consistent with military group
cohesiveness and is even functional for military purposes.
Thus, Top Gun utilizes dominant cultural imagery of the past decades to present
a cultural synthesis of the present as the embodiment of everything that was best in
the past: all oppositional meanings to potent cultural symbols are shorn away and
they serve to celebrate the conservative present as the best of all possible worlds.
Consequently, while the films of Robert Altman deconstruct Hollywood genres,
American mythologies, and dominant ideologies in order to produce a complex
text that problematizes our relation to dominant cultural forms, Top Gun exploits
the images, symbols, and forms of the past to privilege conservative ideological
positions in the present.
Top Gun’s take on race is nowhere near the virulent racism that infected Rambo,
Iron Eagle, and many other political films of the era. The “enemy” is faceless and
though it is dangerous and must be destroyed, it is indeterminate and unnamed.
Indeed, only one significant scene involves race in the whole film and it is a mark
of the subtle racism practiced by conservative politicians and filmmakers when
they couldn’t get away with more blatant racism. After his partner Goose’s death,
a guilt-ridden Maverick finds it impossible to fly at his usual heroic level and when
his new black partner chides him for failing to adequately perform during a flight
exercise, Maverick grabs the black and rather nastily tells him: “I’ll fire when I’m
ready to fire. Have you got that?” This singular eruption of violence, the only time
that Maverick loses his cool, functions to put an uppity and too-ambitious black in
his place and puts on display white fears of blacks taking their positions or
outperforming them.
Previously, the black pilot was a silent figure, frequently on the edges of the
frames picturing the top guns. As a faceless figure depicted as part of the military
82 Theory/context/methods
team, he appears as an icon of the integrated military, which provides equal
opportunity for whites and blacks and that provides blacks the possibility of
advancement. Only in this one scene is the black given narrative prominence and
here, he is coded negatively. Indeed, there is no reason why Maverick should have
to remonstrate with a black partner, a white would have done just as well, except
that the ideology machine Top Gun wants to exploit lingering hostilities toward
people of color to gratuitously drive the audience to pity and sympathize with the
temporarily limp hero.
Even more revealing, the black fighter pilot is the only main Top Gun trainee
whose name is never mentioned or highlighted: his code name “Sundown” is faintly
visible on the bottom of his helmet as he flies with Maverick, but his helmet is
suddenly blank when he confronts Maverick on the ground, as if he has no personal
identity and is merely a figure of the uppity black. Thus, while all the white pilots
have their code names prominently displayed, the black is without significant
identity. This omission (perhaps inadvertently) points to the inferior position of
blacks who manage to become integrated into the white power structure and points
to the complicity of popular Hollywood cinema in keeping blacks and people of
color in a subordinate position. In fact, the codename “Sundown” connotes an
absence of light, equating it with the color “black” that is negatively valorized in
racist iconography. Indeed, Top Gun presents a primarily white elite, without the
ethnicity that characterized the classical Hollywood war film or many contemporary
war films (i.e. The Boys in Company C, Platoon, and Heartbreak Ridge).
Thus, through image and narrative construction, the Reaganism of the 1980s is
ideologically infused with Tom Cruise’s winning smile and military heroism is celebrated
as the way to gain social acceptance and prestige. The military adventures of the Reagan
and Bush regimes require willing accomplices and films like Top Gun help with
recruitment and the production of proper attitudes. The society also needs highly
competitive young people to spur the economy to new entrepreneurial heights and the
film’s celebration of competition and winning as the supreme value helps promote
proper(ly capitalistic) social values, while perpetuating the myth of the American dream.
Furthermore, it provides appropriate gender models too. Not surprisingly, Charlie
appears back at the Top Gun school where the triumphant Maverick asked to be assigned
after his heroic feats. They are obviously coupled at the end, so the narrative machine
of the film satisfies all desire for closure: the hero wins his glory, gets the girl, and
satisfies all of his goals. The traditional Hollywood happy ending thus serves to validate
dominant sociopolitical values—as it always did. Conservative film form and
conservative political values march together toward the American utopia that it was
Reagan’s political genius to sell to a public ideologically nurtured on Hollywood
fantasies. Reaganite political discourse and Hollywood film thus provide complementary
visions of a very specific ideological fantasy.
Thus, Top Gun’s conservativism is seamless and total: the film perfectly
reproduces the conservative discourses of the period on winning and individual
competition, the military, gender and heterosexual coupling, the family, patriotism,
and race. The year’s number one film thus allows analysis of the dominant ideology
Media culture, politics, and ideology 83
of the period which it serves to reproduce and strengthen. One of a series of popular
conservative films, it anticipated the bombing of Libya and the Gulf War, while
replicating the heroic fantasies of military success exposed in the Iran/Contra
scandal: the revenge of the real which punctuated the military fantasies of the
Hollywood White House. “It’ll make a good movie someday,” Reagan wistfully
informed Oliver North when he was forced to dismiss him as the Iran/Contra scandal
was exposed, and unless Tom Cruise continues his trek to the left (i.e. Born on the
Fourth of July, A Few Good Men) perhaps Cruise himself will star in Ollie North,
Top Gun, a potential cinematic replay of “Hollywood Politics, The Movie.”
TO THE GULF WAR!
Top Gun, however, is only one of a series of conservative military films of the era
(see Kellner and Ryan 1988; Britton 1986). Together, these films prepared the country
for the Gulf War by celebrating the virtues of high-tech weaponry and military
heroism, creating an Arab enemy to replace the Soviet nemesis, and promoting the
specific foreign policy agendas of Reagan and Bush. Thus, just as late 1970s
Hollywood films prepared the country for the conservative hegemony of the 1980s
and early 1990s, so too did films of the Reagan and Bush era produce attitudes that
would support the conservative and militarist policies of the hegemonic Republicans.
Iron Eagle I (1985) and II (1988) presciently anticipated the turn from a
communist enemy to Arab nemesis. Together, the two Iron Eagle films portray the
move toward detente with the Soviet Union and the production of a new superenemy
which eventually found its incarnation in Saddam Hussein and Iraq, uncannily
anticipated in Iron Eagle I and II. The Iron Eagle films contributed to the anti-
Arab sentiments of the day by presenting negative images of Arab “terrorists” and
regimes. The first Iron Eagle film was aided by the Israeli government which
provided F–16s, Phantoms, pilots to fly the planes, and Israeli military advisors.
The film was funded by a rich Texan who “had never invested in films before” and
wanted “to make non-exploitation action films with pro-American sentiments”,
(Los Angeles Times, July 31, 1985). The film got poor reviews, but did well at the
box office, leading to two sequels that also promoted anti-Arab politics. It is not by
accident that Hollywood films follow the trajectory of U.S. foreign policy: films
are highly capital-intensive and the producers of the culture industries closely follow
political and social trends. They are especially sensitive to winds of change, so
when detente with the Soviet Union appears as an important political development,
Hollywood shifts its focus accordingly (leading to a box office problem for Sylvester
Stallone’s Rambo III which picked the Soviets as enemies in his Afghan epic at the
very moment of detente). Yet Hollywood adventure films must have an Enemy, an
evil “Foreign Other,” and both Hollywood and Reagan and Bush turned to Arab
“villains” for the political demonization necessary for the narratives of Hollywood
film and U.S. politics at the moment when the Soviet Union was turning to Big
Macs, pornography, crime, and capitalism.
The first Iron Eagle is more of a teen fantasy film than a full-blown military
84 Theory/context/methods
propaganda film à la Top Gun or an exercise in conservative ideological
masturbation à la Rambo. The film opens with a high-tech air war between MIGs
and U.S. fighter planes with a U.S. pilot shot down. An unnamed Arab country
claims that the U.S. planes violated their air space, recalling the dogfighting between
U.S. and Libyan fighter planes when Libya claimed air space for itself which the
U.S. argued went beyond that allowed by international law. But in this version of
the incident, the U.S. government covers over the capture and trial of the U.S.
pilot, allowing him to languish in an Arab prison.
The son of the pilot is a would-be fighter pilot himself, deeply disappointed that
he did not get admitted into the Air Force Academy because he failed a high school
course during the time that he spent in Air Force flight simulators. The boy, Doug
McMasters, his teenage friends, and a black retired pilot Chappy Sinclair (Lou
Gossett, Jr.) conspire to save him. They use their airbase connections to get
intelligence on the prison where the father is being held, steal two Air Force planes,
and the son and Chappy undertake the father’s rescue. In an incredibly hokey and
implausible scenario, they do just that, knocking out half of the Arab army in the
process.
Iron Eagle is extremely racist, portraying Arabs as subhuman sadists and villains.
The Arab leader, who looks a lot like Saddam Hussein, is vicious and dictatorial.
Arabs torture the captured U.S. pilot and sentence him to death arbitrarily and
without any due process. In the final duel scene, the Arab leader himself
commandeers a plane to fight the Americans after they liberate the captured pilot
and the audience is positioned to cheer when the young teenager blows the Arab
leader away. This scene replicates a disturbing trope, dominant in Hollywood
adventure films from Star Wars to the present, in which audience pleasure is
mobilized by images of total destruction. Such an audience is being preconditioned
to crave the total obliteration of enemy countries like Iraq and such scenes thus
produce pleasure in mass destruction—pleasure that would be mobilized by the
computer videos of high-tech bombing in the Gulf War.
Iron Eagle II (1988) is more serious and more politically interesting. It enacts
detente with the Soviet Union and the turn toward the Arab enemy. While the
villain in Iron Eagle I looked like Saddam Hussein, the Arab enemy is obviously
Iraq in the sequel. The plot involves a joint U.S./Soviet project to knock out an
Arab secret nuclear bomb installation, fictively replaying the Israeli bombing of
the Iraqi nuclear installation of 1981. Indeed, the film’s credits end by giving “special
thanks” to “the Ministry of Defense in the State of Israel” and thanks the Israeli
Defence Forces and the Israeli Air Force. The film is an Israel-Canada co-production
and if Top Gun can be legitimately seen as U.S. military propaganda, Iron Eagle II
can be seen as Israeli propaganda.
The dramatic tension in the film is built around the conflicts between the U.S.
and Soviet fighters, their surmounting of their former hostilities, and their pulling
together to defeat the common enemy (a fantasy that Bush and his war team realized,
with some success, in the war against Iraq). The successful conclusion is delayed
by the machinations of a paranoid U.S. general who still hates and distrusts the
Media culture, politics, and ideology 85
Russians and who does everything possible to sabotage the mission (he attempted
to ensure that the mission would fail initially by picking the worst possible misfits
for the U.S. team). This general represents the lingering obstacle to detente and his
defeat and humiliation represents the need for new military thinking, new enemies,
and new strategies in the post-Cold-War world.
Not surprisingly, the Iron Eagle team triumphs, totally obliterating the Arab
(read: Iraqi) nuclear installation, ending the threat of a sneak nuclear attack or
nuclear blackmail. While the white and black Americans and Russians learn to
work and cooperate together, they turn their hostility on villainous Arabs who are
blown away with the body counts that Hollywood used to reserve for commies. In
Iron Eagle II, however, the Arab enemies are voiceless and for the most part faceless,
thus dehumanizing Arabs as ciphers who threaten, but are less than human.
Once again, Hollywood follows the trajectory of U.S. foreign policy, uncannily
anticipating the war against Iraq. Indeed, in his Thanksgiving 1990 trip to visit the
U.S. troops in Saudi Arabia, Bush expressed his concerns that Iraq had a nuclear
capability that might be operative within a year as a justification for U.S. military
action. This line was repeated by his administration officials over the next two
days, but was dropped when every informed official indicated that it would be at
least five to ten years before Iraq could obtain a credible nuclear facility (see Kellner
1992b, Chapter 2).
Other anti-Arab films of the Reagan/Bush era include The Delta Force (1986)
which uses the format of the disaster film to vilify Arabs in a fictional account of a
Palestinian hijacking of a passenger jet: the “terrorists” are thoroughly villainous
and the film uses comic-book exaggeration to sketch out pictures of “good” Jews,
Israelis, and Americans, menaced by the “evil” Palestinians. Death Before Dishonor
(1987) portrays Arab terrorism against Israelis and then against the U.S. embassy
and U.S. Marines in a fictional country of Jemel, thus linking the U.S. and Israel as
common allies against Arab terrorism. Steal the Sky (1988) also positively portrays
Israel, idealizing an Israeli attempt to steal a Soviet MIG from Iraq in the mid-
1960s.
An ideologically bizarre fantasy film, The Retaliator (1986), also known as
Programmed to Kill, portrays vicious Arabs who kill young tourists and then kidnap
and torture American youths. A woman Arab sympathizer (Sandra Berdhahl) is captured
by the U.S. forces and transformed into a robot, sent back to assassinate the Arab
terrorist leader, her former lover. She does this, but then turns on the U.S. forces,
obliterating several villainous Americans in a bizarre mixture of anti-Arab and anti-
U.S. intelligence agency narrative. Such an ideologically contradictory scenario
articulates populist fears both of evil foreign Others and of evil perpetuated by one’s
own government in a primarily paranoic imaginary that sees evil everywhere. It also
displays fears of women getting out of control, in the image of the killer woman robot,
who systematically murders terrorists and U.S. government agents alike.24
Navy Seals (1990) celebrates the high-tech commando forces which, according
to one report, played a key role in the Gulf War (see Newsweek “Secret Warriors,”
June 17, 1991). Once again Arabs are dehumanized as fanatic terrorists, possessing
86 Theory/context/methods
deadly Stinger missiles which threaten innocent civilians. The SEAL team (named
for their operations on SEa, Air, and Land) embody all the virtues of courage and
efficiency and obliterate literally hundreds of Arabs, previewing the slaughter of
the Iraqis by the high-tech military in the Gulf War. Like Rambo, Navy Seals and
other anti-Arab films such as Iron Eagle, The Delta Force and Death Before
Dishonor portray prolonged and detailed scenes of torture, to present Arabs as
savage criminals and to position the audience against such villains.25
All of these films dehistorize actual historical conflicts and present struggles
between Arabs and the West as a battle between civilization and barbarism in an
indeterminate and mythical space. Prince (1993) documents how the anti-Arab
thrillers “avoid locating the story in clear geographic terms” (ibid. 245). This
indeterminacy functions to generally stigmatize Arabs and to provide villain
scenarios that can be mobilized in any number of political interventions against,
say, Iraq, Iran, Syria, Libya, or whoever. As Prince concludes:
The vague geographical and political specifications accruing to the national
and cultural conflicts dramatized in these films operates to render them in
strongly ideological terms, in which the enemy occupies no terrain specifiable
on a map’s coordinates but is rather a hazy, nebulous, threatening Other, a
projection of political and cultural anxieties that are stripped of their historical
basis and are assigned to regions of the world in generalized, superficial and
essentially mythological terms.
(ibid.: 246)
These representations of Arabs in the contemporary Hollywood cinema are
extremely racist and are disturbingly similar to perceptions of Jews in fascist films.
In a variety of 1970s political thrillers, Arabs are portrayed as fanatic “terrorists”
who coldly murder innocent victims (Black Sunday, Nighthawks) and lack human
feeling. In corporate conspiracy films of the 1970s and 1980s, they are presented,
or are alluded to, as greedy capitalists (Rollover, Network, The Formula, Wrong is
Right, etc.). Thus, Arabs are serving as new villain stereotypes in Hollywood films
and by the 1980s were the privileged target of Hollywood manicheanism (see
Shaheen 1984).
Such stereotypes obviously dehumanize Arabs, presenting them as violent
and villainous. In general, the anti-Arab films of the past years combine racist
and chauvinist ideologies that present Arabs as the incarnation of evil and
Americans as the embodiment of good. This vision replays what Edward Said
(1978) described as “Orientalism” which establishes the virtues of the West by
means of delineation of differences between the “civilized” West and the
“savage” Orient which was portrayed as irrational, barbaric, underdeveloped,
and inferior to the rational, refined, and humane West. In Navy Seals, the film
opens with cuts between a terrorist attack on a U.S. Navy helicopter and a
wedding scene in which a black member of the group is getting married. The
images set the scene for contrast between representations of the civilized and
personalized Americans and the savage and depersonalized Arabs. The black
Media culture, politics, and ideology 87
SEAL is killed and a long funeral underscores the value of life in the West, in
contrast to the seeming disdain for life in the Middle East. The scenes also
transfer racism from blacks to Arabs, presenting the black in positive terms
against the viciously represented Arabs.
Arabs were thus the villain of choice for Hollywood adventure films and the
conservative U.S. administrations. Hollywood orientalism helped produce negative
images of Arabs that Bush could mobilize in demonizing the Iraqis in the Persian
Gulf War. In these same adventure film scenarios, women tended to be decentered
and a pornographic erotics of violence replaced sexual eroticism, much as the cool
killers of the Persian Gulf War were shown pornography films before going out on
their “turkey shoots” against the literally defenseless Iraqis, showering their bombs
on military and civilian targets in spasms of ejaculatory violence lit up by flashing
infra-red photos of anti-aircraft fire exploding in orgasmic splendor. This erotics
of violence, visible daily in the Gulf War, was anticipated in the video games and
war films of the preceding years and has helped produce a pornographic military
culture that may produce even more monstrous films and foreign policy adventures
in the years to come.
And yet critical examination of these pro-war and anti-Arab films exposes
their simplicity arid puerile childishness. Iron Eagle, for instance, is constantly
deconstructing its conservative ideology. When the teenage son learns that his
father is being held prisoner in the Middle East, his black teenage friend tells
him not to worry, because “President Peanut” is out and the new President,
“Ronald Raygun,” will take decisive action and rescue his father. Well, the
government does nothing, requiring the teen heroes to carry out the rescue mission
themselves (the real Reagan would, of course, realize the fantasy of attacking
Arab enemies in his Libya bombing of 1986). Thus the film inadvertently conveys
the message that the current conservative government is incompetent and uncaring
(approximately the truth in this case). Moreover, this rightist fantasy constantly
portrays the military as a bunch of bunglers, who are constantly being manipulated
by the teenagers who are able to steal crucial intelligence and two fighter planes
for their mission.
Iron Eagle’s scenario is so hyperbolic, so ridiculous, that it reveals itself as
sheer nonsense, as a totally implausible teen fantasy picture that allows teenagers
to be heroes, to identify with characters that carry out heroic actions that complacent
adults are unable to do. This specific fantasy structure, though, limits its identity
positions to teenagers and perhaps black men silly enough to identify with Cappy.
No self-respecting adult, however, could identify with the fantasy or accept its
narrative terms as plausible. Iron Eagle thus presents itself as an extremely limited
teen fantasy, of limited ideological use.
Other anti-Arab films also deconstruct their own opposition between the
“savage” Middle East and the “civilized” West. While the West supposedly values
life and the Middle East devalues it, the films indulge in the slaughter of countless
Arabs. One is supposed to cheer such slaughter as a cleansing of irredeemable evil,
but the brutality and repetitiveness of the high-tech massacres indicate that the true
88 Theory/context/methods
savages are those in the West who make such simplistic barbaric films, which
prepare the way for real life high-tech massacres, as the genocidal U.S. war against
Iraq.
Read diagnostically, even right-wing films can be seen to expose their
contradictions and to undercut the ideologies that they affirm. One could do a
deconstructive reading of the rightist fantasy Red Dawn, that features a Soviet-led
invasion of the U.S., which shows the ludicrousness of right-wing anti-communist
fears and obsessions (see Kellner 1991). Such ideological fantasies may be of
sufficient complexity, or riven by internal conflicts, to produce oppositional
readings against the grain, while more modernist films like Nashville, Blade
Runner, Do the Right Thing or Zelig may require multivalent readings to do justice
to their complexity.
A film like Top Gun, by contrast, is an ideology machine that mobilizes desire
into certain ideological positions and utilizes narrative to privilege some positions
(i.e. success, winning, romance), while negatively presenting other positions (i.e.
quitting, losing, not being a team player, etc.). The narrative attempts to position
the audience to identify with certain characters and then produces obstacles to
their attaining the goal that the audience is positioned to want them to obtain (i.e.
getting the girl, becoming top gun). When the narrative allows the audience desire
to be satisfied by producing the romantic couple and military heroism at the end,
the audience is positioned to experience these victories as good and to identify
with the values and behavior celebrated.
Yet some qualifications should be made. The audience may resist the attempt
at manipulation and the text may fail to obtain its ideological ends. A film like
Top Gun is successful, however, as attested to by its box office reception and
positive reception by audiences. Some films may be more conflicted and
contradictory than a successful ideology machine like Top Gun. Indeed, many
Hollywood films are neither “conservative” nor “liberal” because they want to
play it both ways, to gain the maximum possible audience by offending nobody.
Predominantly conservative texts may contain liberal features or
deconstructively undermine their own conservativism, and liberal films during
the 1970s were constantly reproducing conservative discourses (see the
discussion of corporate and political conspiracy films and the Jane Fonda films
in Kellner and Ryan 1988). In any case, the artifacts of media culture should be
read in their specific social contexts to decipher their meanings and messages
and to appraise their effects. I amplify this notion of a diagnostic and contextual
cultural studies in the following chapter, where I will also more fully elucidate
and develop some of the theoretical categories introduced here as well as my
conception of cultural studies.
Media culture, politics, and ideology 89
NOTES
1 The process of “transcoding” describes how social discourses are translated into media
texts, as when Easy Rider transcodes 1960s countercultural discourses of freedom,
individualism, and community in cinematic images and scenes, when, for instance, the
bikers drive through nature with the soundtrack playing “Born to be Wild,” or “Wasn’t
Born to Follow.” See the explication and use of the term in Kellner and Ryan 1988.
2 John Thompson (1984, 1990) examines classical and recent theories of ideology and
finds that many of them sever the link between ideology and domination, and therefore
rob ideology of the critical edge that it had in Marx and other neo-Marxists. I would
therefore agree with Thompson on the need to link the concept of ideology with theories
of hegemony and domination, and thus to delimit its application to ideas and positions
which serve functions of legitimation, mystification, and class domination that assure
the domination of the ruling class, gender, and race over other classes and groups within
society, rather than equating all ideas or political positions with ideology (see Kellner
1978 for an earlier presentation of this position).
3 Attempts within cultural studies to downplay the importance of ideology critique, such
as Fiske (1993), play into the hands of an establishment that has for decades attempted
to abolish the concept of ideology as too political and politicizing. The “end of ideology”
debate within the social sciences and apolitical approaches to literature, philosophy,
and the other humanities have all attempted to banish the concept of ideology. Given
the centrality of the concept of ideology to earlier traditions of cultural studies, it is
ironic that some of those identifying with cultural studies are now trying to put aside
one of its central and defining concepts.
4 The collection was first published as part of the series of Working Papers on Cultural
Studies 10 (1977) and then republished.
5 Camera Politico (Kellner and Ryan 1988) took seriously this full range of struggles
and attempted to demonstrate how the current struggles of U.S. society and politics
were articulated in popular film. We also stressed the need to see that conflicts between
liberals and conservatives for the control over society are highly important, as are the
class conflicts that were the focus of the earlier moment of Marxian ideology critique.
6 In the New York Times (November 27, 1993: A1), there is a story concerning the
emergence of a new conservative cable TV network that is called “National
Empowerment Television.” The conservatives organizing this project prefer the term
“populist” to that of “conservative,” thus attempting to coopt another term once (and
still) deployed by the Left and progressives.
7 For more detailed discussions of ideology as hegemony, see Kellner 1978, 1979, 1990a,
and 1992b. My studies here build on this earlier work where I explicate these concepts
in more detail.
8 Thompson (1984) examines a large number of contemporary theories of ideology which
want to fundamentally define ideology in terms of language and a discourse theory.
Against this position I wish to include image, symbol, myth, and narrative in the
repertoire of ideological instruments, and thus combine discourse theory with mythsymbol
criticism and narrative analysis in order to note the ways that images, scenes,
and narratives attempt to convey ideology. A more recent move in cultural studies,
influenced by some off-the-cuff remarks by Foucault and arguments of Deleuze and
Guattari, would reject the concept of ideology altogether on the grounds that it is
reductive, economistic, and of less importance than the apparatus of domination and
control—which is then concluded to be the proper target of radical critique; Fiske
(1993) takes up this argument. Although it is surely valuable to analyze such institutions
and practices that reproduce social domination, simply throwing out the concept of
ideology critique is theoretically disabling. Moreover, ideology is involved in the
reproduction and functioning of precisely these institutions, discourses, and practices
90 Theory/context/methods
that Foucault and others wish to analyze. Instead of throwing the concept out, what is
needed is reconstruction of the concept of ideology and expansion of ideology critique
that traces its functions and effects in social life.
9 For recent works in critical pedagogy that stress the need for critical media literacy, see
Giroux 1992 and 1994, and McLaren et al. forthcoming.
10 John Fiske (1993) develops a peculiar critique of what he calls “ideology” theory that
he argues covers over the fact that it is “power” that actually oppresses people and not
ideology. In fact, as Gramsci, the Frankfurt School, British cultural studies, and others
have argued for decades, it is a combination of overt power (i.e. forces of violence and
oppression) and ideology that maintains the existing social order and that serves interests
of domination and oppression. Indeed, ideology arguably has power effects and to
exclude culture/ideology from power, or to too sharply distinguish between the two,
seems perverse from the Foucaultian perspectives that Fiske is pursuing in his latest
work. In any case, by attempting to exclude ideology critique from cultural studies,
Fiske weakens the project, depriving it of a crucial weapon of critique. Furthermore, by
uncritically adopting a “post-structuralist” position on power (which rejects structural
perspectives), Fiske covers over the fact that there are obdurate and oppressive structures
that oppress women, people of color, and other oppressed groups and that ideology
covers over, idealizes, or naturalizes these structures. Thus, while post-structuralist
perspectives on power, such as Foucault’s, can contribute to a more sophisticated social
theory and cultural studies, simply throwing out structural analysis and ideology critique
undermines the project of cultural studies which should draw on structuralist and poststructuralist
theory, ideology critique and analysis of the institutions and practices of
power and domination.
11 In some major recent examples of cultural studies published in the United States, one notes a
dearth of close reading of actual media culture in Brantlinger 1990; Grossberg 1992; Aronowitz
1993; and Fiske 1993. There is almost no sustained reading of popular music in Grossberg
1992, despite the fact that the book purports to be about rock music; likewise Aronowitz’s Roll
Over Beethoven (1993) fails to concretely engage media texts in favor of discussion of theory
and some of the theoretical and political debates around cultural studies. Although Fiske
discusses the Elvis phenomenon (1993), he does not engage Elvis’s music, nor does he really
discuss the texts of media culture in any sustained fashion, or provide any close readings.
Whereas decentering of textual analysis might be a useful corrective to cultural studies that in
some forms were excessively textualist, I believe that it is useful to utilize textual analysis as an
important part of cultural studies, and thus in the following chapters, there will be many close
readings of cultural texts. I also attempt to illuminate the effectivity of media culture, whereas
Fiske seems to think that media culture has no effects, that it is people’s appropriation or use
of media culture that is of crucial importance for cultural studies. I believe by contrast that
analyzing the texts of media culture is useful in discerning their effects, though I admit that the
audience is something of a sphinx and that it is impossible to ascertain precisely what effects
the various domains and artifacts of media culture actually have on their audience. Moreover,
general theories of media effects are probably empty and problematic, though one can trace
the effects of some artifacts like Rambo, Slacker, Beavis and Butt-Head, rap, media
representations of Gulf War, Madonna, and other key phenomena as I do in the following
studies, in which I provide some new perspectives on the vexed question of media effects and
a new research program to detect effects of media culture figures, texts, and spectacles.
12 As late as 1992 or 1993, a disinformation campaign took place alleging that a KGB file
contained documents indicating that Vietnam had indeed purposely held U.S. POWs
hostage after the war, a myth perpetuated for decades by Ross Perot, other paranoids on
the right, and those who wanted to block normalization of relations with Vietnam as
revenge for U.S. military defeat in the region. For exposure of the 1992 disinformation
campaign, see Bruce Franklin’s article in The Nation (May 10, 1993:616).
Media culture, politics, and ideology 91
13 Jeffords notes that Missing in Action (1984) also shows the hero renouncing women
and sexuality, inscribing the hero in the fascist scenario of sexual purity, subliminally
identifying his efficacy with asceticism (1989:132f.). Such representations point to
parallels in Theweleit’s analysis of male fascist warriors in Nazi Germany (1987).
14 Jeffords (1989:130ff.) notes that there are four scenes where Rambo emerges from
water to accomplish heroic action, thus enacting mythic purification rites, primal images
also present in the slow-motion climax of Missing in Action, when Chuck Norris emerges
from water, machine-gun blasting, to destroy his enemies.
15 “The Rambo films ‘work’ for American teenagers and children who have little or no
knowledge or interest in its Reaganist statement. Rambo’s spectacular action seems,
too, to have worked in tandem with its heroic masculinity in making it extraordinary
popular from Iceland to Yugoslavia to Lebanon” (Warner 1992:684–5).
16 “Rambo is the biggest crowd-participation movie in a long while. Audiences really
scream when Mr Stallone’s John Rambo is tortured. They cheer and cheer when he
embarks on his revenge” (New York Times, May 30, 1985). And: “in the Loop’s United
Artists theater I witnessed a cheering of human carnage that would have embarrassed
the Romans” (Chicago Tribune, June 12, 1985). As the summer progressed, enthusiastic
audience response seemed even to increase: “In movie theaters, young enthusiasts jump
to their feet chanting ‘U.S.A., U.S.A.’ as Johnny Rambo blasts another batch of the
enemy to the world beyond” (Reuters Ltd., July 27, 1985). Liberal critics, by contrast,
counted the acts of violence and attacked the film.
17 In another sound-test warm-up for a radio address, Reagan had said: ‘“My fellow Americans,
I am pleased to tell you I have just signed legislation which outlaws Russia forever. The
bombing begins in five minutes.’ The White House insisted that the quote was a joke and
off-the-record. But press accounts of the comment infuriated Moscow, frightened Europeans
and gave Democrats some unexpected political ammunition” (Reuters Ltd., June 30, 1985).
18 One psychologist noted:
In my psychiatric practice, I see more and more evidence among children of playing
war. And I see more and more of it tied to television and the movies. I had a 15–yearold
kid from Downstate Illinois in my office last week who’d seen ‘Rambo’ nine days
in a row. He’d tried to sign up with the military, wearing a headband and an American
flag like the character in the movie, and he was crushed when they wouldn’t take him.
Chicago Tribune, June 16, 1985)
19 As it turned out, the film was not banned, but predictions of the film generating violence
materialized:
A gang of youths fought with police inside a movie theater which was showing Rambo,
police said today. About 50 youngsters forced their way into a theater in Gloucester,
western England, through a fire exit. Fighting broke out when 22 police officers were
called in to restore order, a spokesman said. Seven people were being detained, he
added.
(Reuters Ltd., September 1, 1985)
20 Rambo
is proving as successful in France as it was last summer in the United States, breaking
opening day records in Paris…. Rambo opened to 342,082 admissions in France on
340 screens, another opening day record for the territory. A spokesman for Tri-Star
Pictures said Rambo was also breaking records in other countries where it has opened.
Proprietary to the United Press International (November 8, 1985)
21 Most curiously:
92 Theory/context/methods
Pirated videos of Rambo circulating in the Middle East carry French and Arabic
subtitles with a different storyline. Set in the Philippines in 1943, the subtitled version
has Rambo returning, after escaping two years earlier, to rescue World-War-II POWs
still held by the Japanese. All dates are changed accordingly, despite action scenes
with rocket-firing helicopters and other high-tech weaponry. As a U.S. Soldier tells
Rambo on the English soundtrack ‘you made a hell of a reputation for yourself in
‘Nam’, the subtitles read: ‘You made quite a name for yourself in Guadacanal’ (scene
of a major pacific battle of World War Two). ‘It’s obviously been done for political
reasons,’ said a diplomat who viewed the pirated tape, noting that the subtitles delete
all references to Vietnam and the Soviet Union. The manager of one of Cyprus’ largest
illegal video houses speculated the film had been ‘sanitized’ for distribution in Middle
East countries like Syria which maintain close ties with the Soviet Union and might
otherwise be offended by Rambo.
(Reuters North European Service, August 26, 1985)
22 I sometimes give a very short lecture on the mind of Ronald Reagan, in which I point to
the ways that he assimilated the generic codes and worldview of the Hollywood western,
war film, melodrama, and other genres, that dichotomized the universe into the forces
of good vs. evil, which presented “us” as “good” and “them” as “evil,” and which thus
repressed any negative and aggressive inclinations in one’s own country and psyche.
23 On the concept of “technowar,” see Gibson’s (1986) description of high-tech systems
of warfare in Vietnam; I draw on this concept in Chapter 5.
24 Some of Steven Seagal’s films also villainize American officials who are shown to be
duplicitous and criminal, operating outside the rule of law and engaging in criminal
activities. In Above the Law (1988), U.S. government officials are shown involved in
the sale of drugs and involved in terrorism, while Under Siege (1992) shows renegade
military and intelligence figures leading an effort to take over a U.S. nuclear submarine,
while the government officials themselves are shown as duplicitous and amoral. Such
films transcode radical critique of U.S. foreign policy and the U.S. government and
serve as counterpoles to the conservative films. Both, however, operate with the same
comic-book manicheanism.
25 Not Without My Daughter (1990) presents Iranians and the Iranian revolution in totally
negative terms, featuring the story of an American woman who married an Iranian. Her
husband turns into a monster during a trip back to Iran in 1984 and the wife undertakes
the difficult task of escape from her husband to flee the country with her daughter.
93
Chapter 3
For a cultural studies that is critical,
multicultural, and multiperspectival
The artifacts of media culture are thus not innocent entertainment, but are thoroughly
ideological artifacts bound up with political rhetoric, struggles, agendas, and
policies. Given their political significance and effects, it is important to learn to
read media culture politically in order to decode its ideological messages and effects.
As I have argued so far, reading media culture politically requires expanding
ideological criticism to include the intersection of gender, sexuality, race, and class,
and to see that ideology is presented in the forms of images, figures, generic codes,
myth, and the technical apparatus of film, television, music, and other media forms,
as well as in ideas or theoretical positions.
Yet cultural texts are not intrinsically “conservative” or “liberal.” Rather, many
texts try to go both ways to maximize their audiences, while others advance specific
ideological positions, but they are often undercut by other aspects of the text. The
texts of media culture incorporate a variety of discourses, ideological positions,
narrative strategies, image construction, and effects (i.e., cinematic, televisual,
musical, and so on) which rarely coalesce into a pure and coherent ideological
position. They attempt to provide something for everyone to attract as large an
audience as possible and thus often incorporate a wide range of ideological positions.
Still, as I have argued, certain media cultural texts advance specific ideological
positions which can be ascertained by relating the texts to the political discourses
and debates of their era, to other artifacts concerned with similar themes, and to
ideological motifs in the culture that are active in a given text.
In this chapter, I will explicate my concept of cultural studies, the need for a
contextual cultural studies, and the notion of diagnostic critique. I will first explicate
my conception of a critical multiculturalism as a basis for cultural studies and then
discuss my conception of a multiperspectival cultural studies. After explicating
my conception of a contextual cultural studies, I indicate why it is important to
utilize a dual optic that ferrets out both ideological and utopian moments from
media culture. I also indicate how deconstruction and post-structuralist concepts
can be deployed in cultural studies and explicate my conception of a diagnostic
critique, which I illustrate with a reading of Oliver Stone’s 1986 film Platoon.
94 Theory/context/methods
FOR A CRITICAL MULTICULTURALISM
I aim at developing a cultural studies that is critical in that it probes forms of
oppression and domination and articulates normative perspectives from which to
criticize these forms. To develop a critical standpoint requires one to articulate the
social constitution of the concepts of gender, class, race, ethnicity, and sexuality,
and the ways that representations of these phenomena produce identities in
contemporary societies, as well as how alternative representations produce new
and different identities. Maintaining a critical standpoint also requires interpreting
culture and society in terms of relations of power, domination, and resistance, as
well as articulating the various forms of oppression in a given society via
multicultural perspectives. Moreover, critical social theory and media cultural
studies involves developing normative standpoints from which one can critically
engage cultural texts. This requires spelling out specific values and validating them
in concrete contexts.
Critical perspectives toward culture and society have long attacked domination
and oppression while positively valorizing resistance and struggle which attempt
to overturn these forces. This is true of British cultural studies, the Frankfurt School,
feminism, certain forms of post-structuralism, and critical multiculturalism. Thus,
values of resistance, empowerment, democracy, and freedom are adopted as positive
norms, used to criticize forms of oppression and domination. Yet such values are
adopted as conventions, as normative standards through which one can criticize
specific examples of domination, oppression, and the ideologies that further such
conditions, rather than as absolute moral principles. A broad range of contemporary
theory thus renounces foundationalism, seeing concepts and norms as social
conventions adopted to serve specific purposes.
A critical cultural studies adopts norms and values with which it criticizes texts,
artifacts, and conditions that promote oppression and domination. It positively
valorizes phenomena that promote human freedom, democracy, individuality, and
other values that the project adopts, defends, and valorizes in concrete studies and
situations. Yet a critical media cultural studies also intends to relate its theories to
practice, to develop an oppositional politics aimed at producing a progressive turn
in contemporary culture and society through contributing to development of a
counterhegemony to the conservative hegemony of the past years. A critical
perspective sees culture as inherently political and as, in many cases, promoting
specific political positions and as aiding forces of domination or resistance. Such
a perspective perceives existing culture and society as a contested terrain, and
chooses to ally itself with the forms of resistance and counterhegemony against
the forces of domination. Grounding its politics in existing struggles and social
forces, it places social theory and cultural studies in the service of socio-cultural
criticism and political change.
Furthermore, a critical cultural studies must relentlessly examine its own
methods, positions, assumptions, and interventions, constantly putting them in
question and revising and developing them. Critical social and cultural theories
cultural studies 95
are thus open, flexible, non-dogmatic, and without guarantees. Recognizing that
contemporary society and culture is a contested terrain, critical theories engage
opposing theories and are not afraid to appropriate material from them and to
reject aspects of their own theories shown to be problematic, or to question its own
assumptions or values if they are shown to be questionable.
Both the Frankfurt School and the Birmingham group were constantly
renegotiating their positions in relation to new historical conditions and theoretical
developments, and this self-reflexivity and flexibility is an epistemological
strength that other versions of cultural studies and social theory should emulate.
The Birmingham group was constantly appropriating new perspectives, such as
feminism and multiculturalist theories of race and nationality, as a result of
criticisms of their previous positions. There was also constant reflection and
debate over the methods and goals of cultural studies. This reflexivity and
flexibility was also characteristic of certain stages of development of the Frankfurt
School, though some of its positions hardened into an orthodoxy, resistant to
new theoretical developments and unable to deal with new social conditions (see
Kellner 1989a). There is always the danger that a powerful theory and method
can degenerate and harden into an orthodoxy and only vigilant critique, openness,
flexibility, and a commitment to revision and development can prevent such
rigidity and dogmatism.
Maintaining a critical perspective also involves developing a critical theory of
society to ground one’s cultural analysis and critique. Critical social theory carries
out a critique of existing systems of domination and points to forces of resistance
and possibilities for radical social transformation. It reads media culture texts in
the context of how they relate to structures of domination and forces of resistance
and which ideological positions they advance within the context of current debates
and social struggles. Thus, a critical cultural studies is not merely interested in
providing clever readings of cultural texts, but is also interested in advancing a
critique of structures and practices of domination and advancing forces of resistance
struggling for a more democratic and egalitarian society.
A critical social theory and cultural studies that attacks oppression and strives
for social equality is necessarily multicultural and seeks to attend to differences,
cultural diversity, and otherness. I am using the term “multicultural” here as a
general concept for those diverse interventions in cultural studies that insist on the
importance of scrutinizing representations of class, gender, sexuality, ethnicity,
subalterneity, and other phenomena often displaced or ignored in previous
approaches to culture. A critical multicultural approach, in my conceptualization,
involves analysis of relationships of domination and oppression, the way stereotyping
works, resistance on the part of stigmatized groups to dominant
representations, and the struggle of these groups to represent themselves, to counter
dominant and distorting representations, and to produce more positive ones.
“Multicultural” here thus functions as a general rubric for all those attempts to
resist the stereotyping, distortions, and stigmatizing by the dominant culture. A
critical multiculturalism also works to open cultural studies to analysis of the
96 Theory/context/methods
relations of force and domination in society and the ways that these are covered
over and/or legitimated in dominant ideological representations.1
A critical multicultural perspective takes seriously the conjunction of class,
race, ethnicity, gender, sexual preference, and other determinants of identity as
important constituents of culture which should be carefully scrutinized and analyzed
in order to detect sexism, racism, classism, homophobia, and other tendencies that
promote domination and oppression. Multiculturalism recognizes that there are
many cultural constituents of identity and a critical cultural studies indicates how
culture provides material and resources for identities and how cultural artifacts are
appropriated and used to produce individual identities in everyday life.
The multicultural project also validates the positive contributions to culture and
society of diverse races, genders and sexual identities, ethnicities, and social classes
and groups. It is often noted that the most exciting work in recent years2 comes
from feminist theory and those multiculturalists analyzing race, gender, nationality,
and alternative sexualities. These new cultural theories gain inspiration from new
social movements and have forced a sea change in how we look at and respond to
texts. The canons of white male European culture have been challenged and a
wide range of new voices and individuals have been encountered. In addition, the
perspectives of oppressed groups present critical insights into mainstream culture,
allowing us to see oppressive elements that we might overlook from our more
privileged perspectives.
A critical cultural studies is allied with an insurgent multiculturalism (Giroux
1993) which supports the struggles of oppressed groups against domination and
subordination, siding with those in struggle against inequality, injustice, and
oppression. An insurgent multiculturalism (or cultural studies) does not just register
differences (though this activity can be important), but analyzes relations of
inequality and oppression that generates struggles. Moreover, it also positively
valorizes representations that help promote the struggle of the oppressed against
domination, while attacking representations that legitimate, naturalize, or cover
over domination. An insurgent multiculturalism is thus part of the “pedogogy of
the oppressed” (Freire 1972) which helps the oppressed see their oppression, name
their oppressors, and articulate the goals and practices of liberation.
Thus whereas Fiske and others valorize resistance and struggle per se, an
insurgent cultural studies only positively interprets struggle and resistance against
oppression, against structural inequality, grounding its analyses in antagonisms
between structural inequalities and oppression. An insurgent cultural studies enters
into dialogue with members of oppressed groups in struggle and expands cultural
studies to include voices usually excluded in more academic forms of cultural
studies, thus striving for a more inclusive and political project.
The theories of interpretation, approaches to culture and society, and political
interventions of a wide range of oppressed and multicultural groups have thus
produced new perspectives and tools of criticism. Such groups have used cultural
studies as a way of challenging canons and orthodoxies, legitimating the texts and
voices of subordinate groups, and politicizing culture and education. Yet
cultural studies 97
multiculturalism as a movement and ideology (in a broader sense than I am using the
term) can easily be coopted by corporate forces that promote the term as a new front
for melting-pot liberalism that helps individuals work and get along together through
the promotion of toleration and acceptance of difference. Multiculturalism can also
lead to in-group separatism and the various forms of identity politics, through which
individuals identify with single-interest groups and construct their identities through
identification with specific groups and categories and exclusion of others. Such singleinterest
politics fragment or block development of progressive blocs and alliances,
and thus weaken the possibility of progressive social transformation.
Against such attempts to coopt the discourse of multiculturalism, or to use it as
a badge of separatism that promotes special interests, I am using the term to
encompass attempts to resist exclusion of specific issues and perspectives from the
terrain of cultural studies. Indeed, multiculturalism, as I am using the term, demands
openness to the discourses of all oppressed or subordinate groups and the need to
perceive the importance of engaging a broader range of types of representation in
order to produce fuller and more critical readings of texts. But a critical
multiculturalism does not entail affirming that there are nothing but differences;
rather it points out that there are common forces of oppression, common strategies
of exclusion, stereotyping, and stigmatizing of oppressed groups, and thus common
enemies and targets of attacks. It thus stresses commonalties as well as differences
and insists on the articulation of how representations of such things as race, gender,
and class are intertwined and function as vehicles for ideologies of domination
which naturalize, legitimate, or mask social inequalities, injustice, and oppression.
Critical multiculturalism also sees differences in terms of contradictions between
unequal forces, theorizing oppositions between the more powerful and subordinate
groups in terms of relationships of domination which creates the possibility of
resistance against all forms of oppression. It also articulates common goals in
struggle whereby dominant representations, or other forms of social oppression,
are resisted and struggled against. A critical multiculturalism thus allies itself with
the struggles for emancipation and for the creation of a more free, just, and
egalitarian social order.
A multiculturalist focus on the diversity of forms of oppression and resistance
is connected to development of a multiperspectival social theory and cultural studies
that draws on the wide range of work done in the field in recent years. A
multiperspectival cultural studies attempts to avoid one-sidedness, orthodoxy, and
cultural separatism by stressing the need to adopt a wide range of perspectives to
understand and interpret cultural phenomena. As I have been arguing, gender, race,
class, and other key cultural constructs are interconnected and reproduced in cultural
forms and representations. To get a fuller picture of cultural texts and social
phenomena, one must therefore grasp a wide range of constituent elements of
cultural texts and practices. To do this properly, one needs to draw on a spectrum
of critical methods, as some are better to grasp class, others to conceptualize gender
and sexuality, and yet others to articulate race, myth and symbol, subliminal and
latent dimensions of culture, and so on.
98 Theory/context/methods
TOWARD A MULTIPERSPECTIVAL CULTURAL STUDIES
A cultural studies that is critical and multicultural should therefore also be
“multiperspectival.” This is a cumbersome and unattractive term, but remains
the best concept that I have found to describe the sort of cultural studies that I am
trying to develop. I shall elucidate this concept with some theoretical and practical
analyses in this and in following chapters. Simply put, a multiperspectival cultural
studies draws on a wide range of textual and critical strategies to interpret, criticize,
and deconstruct the artifact under scrutiny. The concept draws on Nietzsche’s
perspectivism which holds that all interpretation is necessarily mediated by one’s
perspectives and is thus inevitably laden with presuppositions, values, biases,
and limitations. To avoid one-sidedness and partial vision one should learn “how
to employ a variety of perspectives and interpretations in the service of
knowledge” (Nietzsche 1969:119). For Nietzsche: “There is only a perspective
seeing, only a perspective ‘knowing’; and the more affects we allow to speak
about one thing, the more complete will our ‘concept’ of this thing, our
‘objectivity,’ be” (ibid.). Expanding this call for multiperspectival interpretation
in later aphorisms collected in The Will to Power (1968), Nietzsche argues: “every
elevation of man brings with it the overcoming of narrower interpretations; that
every strengthening and increase of power opens up new perspectives and means
believing in new horizons” (1968:330).
Applying these notions to cultural interpretation, one could argue that the
more interpretive perspectives one can bring to a cultural artifact, the more
comprehensive and stronger one’s reading may be. I have been arguing that to
capture the full political and ideological dimensions of the texts of media
culture, one needs to view them from the perspectives of gender, race, and
class. I am now suggesting that combining Marxist, feminist, structuralist, poststructuralist,
psychoanalytic, and other critical perspectives will provide fuller,
more complete, and potentially stronger readings. Combining, for instance,
ideology critique and genre criticism with semiotic analysis allows one to
discern how the generic forms of media culture, or their semiotic codes, are
permeated with ideology. The conflict/resolution code of most television
entertainment, for example, provides an ideological notion that all problems
can be resolved within the existing society by following conventional behavior
and norms. Advertising often deploys a similar model, showing a problem and
that the product advertised provides the solution.
A perspective, in this analysis, is an optic, a way of seeing, and critical methods
can be interpreted as approaches that enable one to see characteristic features of
cultural artifacts. Each critical method focuses on specific features of an object
from a distinctive perspective: the perspective spotlights, or illuminates, some
features of a text while ignoring others. The more perspectives one focuses on a
text to do ideological analysis and critique—genre, seniological, structural, formal,
feminist, psychoanalytic, and so on—the better one can grasp the full range of a
text’s ideological dimensions and ramifications. It therefore follows that a
cultural studies 99
multiperspectival approach will provide an arsenal of weapons of critique, a full
range of perspectives to dissect, interpret, and critique cultural artifacts.
Some qualifications to this position should be made, however. Obviously, a
single reading—Marxist, feminist, psychoanalytic, or whatever—may yield more
brilliant insights for the study of some phenomena than combining various
perspectival readings; more is not necessarily better. However, a variety of critical
perspectives utilized in a proficient and revelatory fashion provides the potential
for stronger (i.e. more many-sided, illuminating, and critical) readings. Secondly,
a multiperspectival approach may not be particularly illuminating unless it
adequately situates its text in its historical context. A text is constituted by its
internal relations and its relations to its socio-historical situation and the more
relations articulated in a critical reading, the better grasp of a text one may have.
A multiperspectival method must necessarily be historical and should read its
texts in terms of its socio-historical context and may also choose to read history
in the light of the text.
Certain methodological strategies are, of course, incompatible and a
multiperspectival approach must choose between competing perspectives in terms
of what specific task is at hand and what specific goals one has. For some purposes,
it may be useful to engage in a focused feminist reading, while for other purposes
one might carry through multivalent readings, getting at a text from a variety of
perspectives. A multiperspectival position, however, that is not a mere liberal
eclecticism, or merely a hotchpotch of different points of view, should allow its
various perspectives to inform and modify each other. For instance, a Marxism
that is informed by feminism will be different from a one-dimensional Marxism
innocent of feminism (and vice-versa). A Marxist-feminist position that is
informed by post-structuralism will be different from a dogmatic Marxist-feminist
perspective that reduces a film solely to class and gender problematics. For
poststructuralism champions a multiplicity of perspectives, focuses attention on
features ignored by some Marxist or feminist perspectives, and undermines naive
beliefs that one specific interpretation is certain and true. Yet a poststructuralist
perspective like deconstruction can itself become predictable and one-sided if it
does not utilize other perspectives such as Marxism and feminism (see Ryan
1982 and Spivak 1988).
Each critical method has its own strengths and limitations, its insights and
blindspots. Marxian ideology critiques have traditionally been strong on class
and historical contextualization and weak on formal analysis, as well as gender
and race; feminism excels in gender analysis but sometimes ignores class, race,
and other determinants; structuralism is useful for narrative analysis but tends to
be overly formal; and psychoanalysis calls for depth hermeneutics and the
articulation of unconscious contents and meaning, but sometimes ignores
sociological determination of texts and individuals. Thus, the more of these critical
methods one has at one’s disposal, the better chance one has of producing reflexive
and many-sided critical readings.
Of course, a reading of a text is only a reading from a critic’s specific position,
100 Theory/context/methods
no matter how multiperspectival. Any critic’s specific reading is only their own
reading and may or may not be the reading preferred by audiences (which
themselves will be significantly different according to class, race, gender, region,
ethnicity, sexual preferences, ideologies, and so on). There is thus a split between
textual encoding and audience decoding and always the possibility of a multiplicity
of readings and effects of specific texts (Hall 1980b). One way to discover how
audiences read texts is to engage in ethnographic surveys (see the Appendix to
Kellner and Ryan 1988), but even then one is not sure how texts affect audiences
and shape their beliefs and behavior. Thus, one needs to study which images, figures,
and discourses of media culture become dominant and trace their effects through a
variety of circuits, as I do in this book.
Although all texts are polysemic and subject to multivalent readings depending
on the perspectives of the reader, I am not advocating an “anything goes” liberal
pluralism. All of the critical methods that I have mentioned are deployed by a
critical cultural studies to interpret the text and its effects within the existing system
of domination and oppression and use critical social theory to contextualize the
artifact and the reading in relation to existing social struggles. The critical cultural
studies that I am delineating takes the side of progressive forces struggling against
domination and attacks structures, practices, and ideologies of domination and
oppression. Thus, the various methods and perspectives used are deployed within
a critical social theory that attacks a system of domination and that struggles for a
more democratic and egalitarian social order.
A multiperspectival approach thus multiplies both theoretical perspectives and
the perspectives from which cultural phenomena are viewed and interpreted. Within
the history of cultural studies, the project has been driven to appropriate new
weapons in its theoretical arsenal, as new movements produce new theories and
discourses. Cultural studies is now genuinely international and multicultural, and
this has greatly expanded the perspectives from which we can view and appraise
dominant, marginal, and oppositional cultures. And, as noted in Chapter 1, the
struggles and turbulence of the past decades have also generated a proliferation of
theories and methods which we can deploy as instruments and weapons in
developing more multiperspectival visions and methods. Each theory and
perspective is to some degree a product of a social struggle and can be adopted as
a weapon of critique in the struggle for a better society. It is the project of critical
cultural studies to adopt such weapons and to employ them in specific projects and
domains.
Consequently, I am deploying cultural studies and critical social theory both to
analyze hegemonic forces of domination and counterhegemonic forces of resistance.
There are always controlling forces and blocks in society that form a hegemonic
project, as well as forces struggling against this hegemony. During the conservative
hegemony of Reagan and Bush, for example, conservative forces dominated the
economy, polity, society, and culture, but there were always forces in struggle
against this hegemony, ranging from liberals fighting for political power to black
single mothers struggling for welfare rights. The forces of domination find
cultural studies 101
articulation in media cultural texts, as do forces of resistance and the voices of
individuals oppressed by the existing social system.
For example, films like Rambo and Top Gun mobilized desire into subject
positions congruent with the Reaganite military build-up and interventionist foreign
policy, while male hero films mobilized desire and fantasy into a remasculinized
male subject that was part of a backlash against feminism (see Faludi 1991 and
Jeffords 1994). Yet films like Casualties of War and A Few Good Men mobilized
its audiences against the sort of military heroism celebrated in the conservative
films and positively valorized individuals with a conscience who would stand up
to the pressures from conservative authority to “do the right thing.” These liberal
individuals with a conscience were also more sensitive than the hard-bodied heros
of the Stallone-Norris-Willis-Schwarzenegger conservative films. In the cultural
wars between liberals and conservatives of the period, media culture thus intervened
on different sides, producing opposing identities, models of masculinity, and gender
politics for its audiences.
A critical cultural studies thus demonstrates how cultural texts produce social
identities and subject-positions and contrasts opposing positions. It analyzes media
messages and effects, and attempts to show how certain figures, models, and
discourses undermine the values and ethos of a pluralistic, egalitarian, democratic,
and multicultural society, whereas other figures and models may promote the
creation of a more egalitarian and democratic society. A cultural studies that is
critical and multicultural thus intervenes in the cultural wars of the period and uses
its analyses of media culture to promote social change toward a more democratic
society, fighting forms of media culture that promote oppression while linking
more progressive media culture with political movements struggling for freedom
and democracy.
TOWARD A CONTEXTUAL CULTURAL STUDIES
The critical, multicultural, and multiperspectival conception of cultural studies
that I am sketching draws on Antonio Gramsci’s theory of hegemony (1971) which
presents culture, society, and politics as terrains of contestation between various
groups and class blocs (see Boggs 1984 and Kellner 1990a). From this perspective,
cultural critique should specify which contests are going on, between which groups,
and which positions, with the cultural analyst intervening on what is perceived as
the more progressive side. Expanding on Gramsci, a variety of individuals have
attempted to develop a more differentiated concept of ideology which pays more
attention to emergent, residual, and hegemonic ideologies within contemporary
neo-capitalist (or state socialist) societies (see Williams 1977; Kellner 1978 and
1979; Hall 1987). This expansion of the concept of ideology anchors ideology
critique more securely in concrete and historically specific socio-political analysis
and thus grounds ideology critique in the context within which political conflict
actually occurs.
Thus, I see media culture as a contested terrain reproducing on the cultural
102 Theory/context/methods
level the fundamental conflicts within society rather than as an instrument of
domination. Examination of Hollywood film from 1967 to the present (Kellner
and Ryan 1988), for example, reveals that U.S. society and culture were torn apart
by a series of debates over the heritage of the 1960s, over gender and sexuality,
over war, militarism, and interventionism, and over a great variety of other issues.
On one hand, Rambo, Red Dawn, Missing in Action, Invasion U.S.A, Top Gun, and
the like represent aggressively right-wing positions on war, militarism, and
communism that served as soft- and hard-core propaganda for Reaganism and a
distinctly right-wing interventionist and militarist agenda.
On the other hand, Missing, Under Fire, Salvador, Latino, and other left or
liberal films sharply contested the rightist vision of Central America and U.S.
interventionism in that area by representing the U.S. and ruling bourgeois cliques
as “bad guys” in generic scenarios that are primarily sympathetic to rebels and
those struggling against U.S. imperialism. Against Rambo and other return-to-
Vietnam films, Platoon, Full Metal Jacket, and Casualties of War subvert the rightwing
version of Vietnam, as films like M.A.S.H., Catch–22, Soldier Blue, and others
previously attacked right-wing versions of militarism and U.S. foreign policy in
earlier debates over Vietnam. And in the domain of sexual politics, antifeminist
films like Ordinary People, Kramer versus Kramer, An Officer and A Gentleman,
Fatal Attraction, Basic Instinct, The Hand That Rocks the Cradle, Shiver, The Temp,
and Body of Evidence can be contrasted with more feminist films like Girlfriends,
Desperately Seeking Susan, Working Girls, and Desert Hearts, which present
women struggling for independence and equality. The latter films advance various
feminist positions, while the former are part of the backlash against feminism
analyzed by Faludi (1991). U.S. society has been deeply divided in the realm of
sexual politics and various artifacts of media culture take opposing positions in the
culture wars of the present age and thus should be analyzed in terms of their positions
and effects within existing social struggles.
It should be noted, however, that mainstream Hollywood is severely limited in
the extent to which it will advance socially critical and radical positions. Hollywood
film is a commercial enterprise and it does not wish to offend mainstream audiences
with radical perceptions and thus attempts to contain its representations of class,
gender, race, and society within established boundaries. Radicals are thus usually
excluded from Hollywood film, or are forced to compromise their positions within
accepted limits. Moreover, the generic codes and conventions of Hollywood film
tend to limit its discourses and effects. The conventionality of focused stories with
individual characters, the use of close-ups and shot-reverse shots, that cut from
one character to another, the use of recognizable and popular stars, and other
elements of conventional Hollywood film tend, for example, to limit Hollywood
films to the parameters of individualism, thus precluding positive portrayals of
political groups or collectivities struggling for change. Thus, it is the independent
film movement to which one must look for the most progressive political
interventions within the terrain of American film culture (Kellner and Ryan 1988).
In any case, films and other forms of media culture should be analyzed as
cultural studies 103
ideological texts contextually and relationally, seeing some texts as more progressive
radical or liberal responses to rightist artifacts and ideological positions, rather
than, say, just dismissing all media culture as reactionary and merely ideological,
as certain monolithic theories of the “dominant ideology,” such as the classical
critical theory of Horkheimer and Adorno (1972), many Althusserians, some
feminists, and others, are wont to do. A contextualist cultural studies reads cultural
texts in terms of actual struggles within contemporary culture and society, situating
ideological analysis within existing socio-political debates and conflicts rather than
just in relation to some supposedly monolithic dominant ideology, or some model
of mass culture that is simply equated with ideological manipulation or domination
per se.
One way to delineate the ideologies of media culture is to read the artifact
relationally, situating films, for example, within their genres or cycles, as well as
within their historical, socio-political, and economic context. Reading films
contextually involves seeing how they relate to other films within the set, and how
the genres transcode ideological positions. This would involve reading Rambo in
terms of the return-to-Vietnam cycle which can be situated within the whole genre
of Vietnam films and debates over the U.S. intervention in Vietnam and its aftermath.
It would involve reading Top Gun in the context of the series of films dealing with
military life in the period (i.e. An Officer and a Gentleman, Iron Eagle, Heartbreak
Ridge, and so on), in which some of the films treat military life in a celebratory
fashion, while others present more critical visions.
While Top Gun and Iron Eagle, for example, present a utopia of military life,
more realist war films like Platoon, Full Metal Jacket, or Casualties of War show
the actual consequences of military life when actual war breaks out. Likewise,
while Heartbreak Ridge has a generally positive view of military life, with some
criticism of elite officers, it shows the dangers and anxieties involved in even a
minor military excursion like the Grenada invasion, though ultimately it transcodes
Reaganite triumphalism, presenting the Grenada invasion as a U.S. victory. Taps,
Lords of Discipline, Brainstorm, War Games, The Dogs of War, Blue Thunder, A
Few Good Men, and others present a more critical vision of the U.S. military,
while Up the Academy, Tank, Deal of the Century, Spies Like Us and the other
satirical films present more critical visions of the U.S. military and of the national
security state.
By relating specific films to other generic examples and to the range of current
debates which the genres address, right-wing films can be read, for instance, as
responses to actual threats to conservative hegemony, and thus as testimonies to
current social conflicts and contradictions. Or liberal films can be read as
contestations of conservative hegemony, rather than just as wimpish variations of
the same dominant ideology. From this contextualist perspective, ideology critique
thus involves doing ideological analysis within the context of social theory and
social history. Reading films politically, therefore, can provide insight not only
into the ways that film reproduces existing social struggles within contemporary
U.S. society, but can also provide insight into the social and political dynamics of
104 Theory/context/methods
the era. Even highly ideological films like Rambo point to social conflicts and to
forces that threaten conservative hegemony, such as the liberal antiwar, antimilitary
position which Rambo so violently opposes. Thus, ideology can be analyzed in
terms of the forces and tensions to which it responds while projects of ideological
domination can be conceptualized in terms of reactionary resistance to popular
struggles against traditional conservative or liberal values and institutions.
Thus, rather than just conceptualizing ideology as a force of domination in the
hands of an all-powerful ruling class, ideology can be analyzed contextually and
relationally as a response to resistance and as a sign of threats to the hegemony of
dominant group, sex, and race powers. Consequently, 1960s films can be read as a
resistance to the social conformity and conventional cinema of the earlier era,
while Dirty Harry can be interpreted as a response to the radicalism of the 1960s
and the recent triumphs of liberalism within criminal law. Sexist and reactionary
films like Straw Dogs or The Exorcist can be read as responses to feminism and the
resistance of women to male domination. Blaxploitation films like Shaft or Superfly
can be read as signs of resistance to black subservience to whites and as a reaction
against black stereotypes in Hollywood films. And the racism of films like Rocky
can be read as articulations of white working-class fears of blacks and as testimonies
to increased cultural and political power of blacks in U.S. society, while the relative
absence of dramatic Hollywood narrative films about blacks in the Reagan era can
be interpreted as the resistance of conservatives to black demands for racial equality
and increased power. Or, Top Gun, Rambo, and the return-to-Vietnam films can be
read as responses to U.S. defeat in Vietnam, to challenges to imperialism, and to
those who would curtail the military and limit U.S. military power.
Drawing on studies of the relationships between social ideologies and movements
and their environments by sociologist Robert Wuthnow (1989), I want to utilize
the categories of social horizon, discursive field, and figural action to describe
some of the ways that cultural texts transcode and articulate social images,
discourses, and conditions and in turn operate within their social field. The term
“social horizon” refers to the actual experiences, practices, and features of the
social field of media cultural texts which help structure the universe of both the
media culture and its reception. The social horizon of the 1960s, which provided
the backdrop of films like Easy Rider or Woodstock, was the emergence of the
counterculture with its own style of dress, behavior, music, language, and culture—
a counterculture that defined itself against mainstream “establishment” culture
during a period of intense social turmoil and contestation. The “sixties” thus provides
the social horizon of films of the period which in turn are transcoded, or articulated,
within specific discursive fields.
The discursive field of Easy Rider and Woodstock was sixties’ countercultural
music, language, lifestyle, and practices which attempted to innovate cultural
production and to produce alternative forms of life, ways of living. The content of
the social horizon was articulated into specific discursive fields in films like Easy
Rider which utilized a rock music soundtrack, eccentrically cut images of bikers
riding through nature, and deployed figure/ground images that framed the bikers
cultural studies 105
against the desert, mountains, sky, and sun to transcode sixties’ ideologies of
freedom, individualism, harmony with nature, emancipation through technology,
and so on. Woodstock used triple-screen division, cutting between stage and
audience, tight close-ups interwoven with long shots, and so on to cinematically
transcode the tight connection between rock concert audiences and the musicians
during the period. The film Woodstock thus transcoded the sixties’ discourses of
community, love, freely expressed sexuality, individualism, and revolt through the
discursive field of its cinematic images and discourses.
Thus, media culture articulates a complex set of mediations. It transcodes 1960s
discourses like the counterculture, or feminism, as well as competing mainstream
liberal or conservative discourses. Some texts of media culture that projects positive
images of women transcodes feminist discourses (i.e. Girlfriends, Desert Hearts,
Working Girls, etc.), while the antiwomen images and discourses that have returned
with a vengeance in the 1990s (i.e. Basic Instinct, Falling Down, The Hand That
Rocks the Cradle, and so on) articulate the antifeminist discourses and backlash
against feminism described by Faludi (1991) and others. The competing array of
social discourses at a given moment is thus articulated in media culture which
draw upon and in turn circulate competing social discourses of the moment, thus
intervening within social struggles and conflicts.
Media culture also articulates social experiences, figures, events, and practices,
as well as discourses. Fashion style, contemporary looks and artifacts, and other
signs of the contemporary, all suture or weave the audiences into the cinematic
texts. Indeed, for media culture to work for its audiences it has to resonate to social
experience, to “fit in” with the social horizon of audiences, and so popular media
culture taps into existing fears, hopes, fantasies, and other concerns of the day.
The figural action in films like Easy Rider involved celebatory presentation of
the figures of the bikers who incarnated the countercultural ethos and ideology of
freedom and individualism of the period. The figure of the fighting machine Rambo
by contrast embodies the militarist and masculist discourses of the 1980s, though
as noted, he also incorporated countercultural images of individualism and the
natural to articulate the militarist/masculist ideology of the era. The figural action
of Woodstock involved the rock musicians as godlike cultural heroes, the promoters
as benevolent facilitators of counterculture, and the audience as hip participants in
countercultural community and rebellion. These cinematic innovations also formally
enact the cultural revolution that the film depicts in its celebration of the Woodstock
festival and counterculture. Just as the actual counterculture attempted a revolution
of everyday life and to produce new forms of culture, so too did contemporary
filmmakers attempt to produce new cinematic forms, bringing an innovative
modernist impulse into Hollywood film, challenging and subverting its conventions
and producing new forms of cinematic language.
The films, rock music, and counterculture of the 1960s in turn had their own
figural and discursive effects, disseminating countercultural images and ideologies
as audiences appropriated the images, style, fashion, and attitudes into their own
lives. In particular, films like Easy Rider and Woodstock not only strengthened the
106 Theory/context/methods
countercultural convictions of its audiences, but incorporated new recruits into the
counterculture by promoting its style, fashion, and rebellious alternative culture.
On the other hand, reducing 1960s activism and rebellion to cultural style made it
easy to incorporate and coopt the counterculture within mainstream U.S. culture
and the images of Easy Rider and Woodstock facilitated this process of cooptation
and exploitation which eventually led to the death of the counterculture as a
genuinely oppositional culture.
In the last chapter, I indicated some of the discursive and figural effects of
Rambo and the ways that the figure and film were embedded in a struggle over its
meaning, providing semantic and imagistic resources that could be articulated in
diverse ways. In recent years, there has been a trend to study the effects of media
culture through audience ethnography, studying either fan behavior or the ways
that audiences, such as homeless men watching Die Hard (Fiske 1993), use the
artifacts of media culture. While these studies often provide valuable, if limited,
insight into the effects of media culture, I would suggest that there are other ways
to study its effectivity. One can study the reception of media culture by analyzing
its reviews, criticism, and the ways that the texts become embedded in popular
discourses and generate a multiplicity of diverse effects. This mode of reception
studies was advanced by Walter Benjamin in the 1920s and 1930s and has been
taken up by literary theorists like Jauss who have developed literary reception
studies to delineate how literature has been received by various publics.
New computer data-bases, like Dialog and Lexis/Nexis, make it possible to do
a new type of reception studies, such as I am doing in this book. One can type in
code words like “Rambo” and “Reagan” to see some of the ways that the figure of
Rambo was articulated within popular political discourses. The result was literally
hundreds of references which I drew upon in the previous chapter in my study of
“the Rambo effect,” and I did similar data-base searches concerning all the major
films that I am analyzing, as well as the Gulf War, rap music and hip hop culture,
Beavis and Butt-Head, Miami Vice, MTV, cigarette advertising, Madonna, and
cyberpunk fiction. One finds literally thousands of references which enable one to
trace the effects of texts that enter into media culture through a wide range of
social discourses that articulate a variety of diverse effects.
On the other hand, although figures like Rambo and Madonna can generate
powerful direct effects, it is rare that single films, popular songs, television programs,
and so on directly influence their audiences. Yet some examples of the global
popular attain the status of directly influencing thought and behavior by producing
models of gender, style, or action. Such powerful images are emulated throughout
the world and often directly affect their audiences. Yet, on the whole, it is the
cumulative effects of 1960s films and music that articulate countercultural ideologies
which serve to promote certain movements and which affect the ways that people
see, talk, and behave. Or it is the cumulative effects of racist images of Arabs in
Hollywood movies and television news and entertainment that makes it possible to
mobilize anti-Arab discourses in political events like the Gulf War. And so while
the very figure of a Rambo may have a massive range of effects, some of which I
cultural studies 107
documented, it is the cumulative impact of all of the anti-Arab images of film and
television that negatively constituted images of Arabs, rather than a single film or
artifact alone.
Critical cultural studies is concerned with analyzing certain resonant images
(Kellner 1990a) which is one of the keys to ferreting out media effects. Certain
images resonate to our experiences and stick in the mind, moving us to later thought
and action. Sometimes pop figures like a Rambo, a Madonna, a Beavis and Butt-
Head become highly resonant, mobilizing thought and behavior, so that one wants to
be a Madonna, imitating her style of dress and image moves; one wants to be a
Rambo, imitating his macho behavior; one emulates Beavis and Butt-Head, replicating
their laughs, their ways of speaking, and perhaps even their asocial behavior.
In the 1950s, resonant images of non-conformist rebels and bikers (Marion
Brando, Elvis Presley, James Dean, or beatnik writers like Jack Kerouac) became
highly influential, modelling style, thought, and behavior; in the 1960s, countercultural
figures became resonant images. Occasionally, a resonant image might be
detached in effect and memory from its narrative structure and while the textual
message may be “crime does not pay,” or “adultery brings unhappiness,” it is the
memory of the criminal or the adultery that remains in one’s mind, that influences
thought and behavior. This was possibly true of 1930s crime dramas in which the
energy and power of a Cagney or Bogart might have been what stuck in one’s
mind, producing rebellious or criminal behavior, rather than their getting caught
or murdered. Likewise Mario van Peeble’s New Jack City (1991) might attempt to
convey an antidrug message and develop a narrative in which crime is punished
and does not pay, yet perhaps the images of the drug dealers leading the high life
are what resonates and what influences later behavior.
Likewise, paleosymbolic scenes (Kellner 1979) may be vehicles of powerful
media effects, as scenes of communal fun in films like Easy Rider or Woodstock
might promote the ideologies and lifestyle of the counterculture with their images
of nude swimming, easy sex, getting high, and participating in social ritual. The
preface “paleo” signifies a sort of “before symbolism” or “underneath symbolism.”
Paleosymbols are tied to particular scenes that are charged with drama and emotion.
For example, Freud found that certain scenic images, such as a child being beaten
for masturbation, or discovering his parents having sex, have a profound impact
on subsequent behavior. The images of these scenes remain as paleosymbols which
control behavior, for instance, producing guilt accompanying masturbation, or
infusing sex with great fascination and attraction, or fear and repulsion.
Paleosymbols are not subject to conscious scrutiny or control; they are often
repressed, closed off from reflection, and can produce compulsive behavior. Thus
Freud believed that scenic understanding was necessary to master scenic images,
and, in turn, this mastery could help in understanding what the scenic images
signified and how they influenced behavior.
Paleosymbolic scenes may deeply influence one’s perceptions of members of
opposite genders, races, and classes, and may shape gender behavior and style.
Media representations of blacks as violent and threatening may produce negative
108 Theory/context/methods
images of members of this race. Such images are often presented in gripping and
dramatic scenes and the images are thus likely to stay in the viewer’s mind. Likewise,
images of violence as the way to solve problems and exert power may create strong
paleosymbolic residues that shape violent attitudes and behavior. Or the
paleosymbolic scenes of Rambo may stick in one’s mind, leading one to engage in
body-building, arms training, and perhaps violent action, as with the examples
noted in my discussion of the Rambo effect.
Likewise, paleosymbolic images of predatory and violent women, such as the
vampire-like predators of Fatal Attraction and Basic Instinct which I will discuss
below, or the monstrous women of horror films, might produce fear of women. Or
pornography or scenes that degrade, brutalize or mutilate women may produce
violence against women. Media culture provides powerful images and scenes for
identification that may directly infuence behavior, providing models of action,
fashion, and style.
In appraising the effects of media culture, one must avoid the extreme of either
romanticizing the audiences of media culture, or of reducing them to a homogeneous
mass incapable of critical thought or action. One needs to grasp the contradiction
that the media do manipulate people and yet people also manipulate and use the
media. British cultural studies tries to capture this contradiction in the distinction
between encoding and decoding, whereby the texts of media culture may be encoded
as the most crass, ideological and banal artifacts and yet audiences can produce
their own meanings and pleasures out of this material. Yet it is a mistake to go too
far toward the active audience, as Fiske and others have done, and to exaggerate
the power of audiences against media culture. The media are tremendously powerful
forces and underestimating their power does not benefit critical projects of social
transformation.
In any case, the effects of media culture are highly complex and mediated, and
require study of the origin and production of media culture texts, their distribution
and reception by audiences, and the ways that individuals use cultural texts to
produce meaning, discourses, and identities. Such effects can best be discerned by
concrete studies of how popular cultural artifacts like the Rambo films, rap music,
or Beavis and Butt-Head circulate and gain effectivity within media culture and
everyday life. I will thus continue to engage in such concrete studies later in this
and the following chapters, but first want to introduce some more theoretical material
concerning some of the ways that one can learn to read media culture critically and
thus increase one’s media literacy.
IDEOLOGY AND UTOPIA
Because of the closeness of popular media texts to their social conditions, they
provide privileged access to the social realities of their era and can thus be read to
gain insight into what is actually going on in a particular society at a given moment.
Consequently, the ideologies of media culture should be analyzed within the context
of social struggle and political debate rather than simply as purveyors of false
cultural studies 109
consciousness whose falsity is exposed and denounced by ideology critique.
Although demystification is part of ideology critique, simply exposing mystification
and domination isn’t enough; we need to look behind the ideological surface to
see the social and historical forces and struggles which generate ideological
discourses and to examine the cinematic apparatus and strategies which make
ideologies attractive.
Furthermore, on this model, ideology criticism is not solely denunciatory and
should seek socially critical and oppositional moments within all ideological texts—
including conservative ones. As feminists and others have argued, one should learn
to read texts “against the grain,” yielding progressive insights even from reactionary
texts. One can also attend to the possibility of using more liberal or progressive
moments or aspects of a film against less progressive moments as when Jameson
(1979, 1990) extracts the socially critical elements from films like Dog Day
Afternoon or Jaws, which are contrasted with more conservative positions and
used to criticize aspects of the existing society.
Furthermore, radical cultural criticism should seek out those utopian moments,
those projections of a better world, that are found in a wide range of texts (Bloch
1986). Extending this argument, one could claim that since ideology contains
rhetorical constructs that attempt to persuade and to convince, they must have a
relatively resonant and attractive core and thus often contain emancipatory promises
or moments. Specification of utopian moments within the most seemingly
ideological artifacts was the project of Ernst Bloch whose great work The Principle
of Hope was translated into English in 1986 (see Kellner 1994b). Bloch provides a
systematic examination of the ways that daydreams, popular culture, great literature,
political and social utopias, philosophy and religion—often dismissed tout court
as ideology by some Marxist ideological critique—contain emancipatory moments
which project visions of a better life that put in question the organization and
structure of life under capitalism (or state socialism).
Throughout his life, Bloch argued that Marxism was vitiated by a one-sided,
inadequate, and merely negative approach to ideology. For Bloch, ideology is
“Janus-faced,” two-sided: it contains errors, mystifications, and techniques of
manipulation and domination, but it also contains a utopian residue or surplus that
can be used for social critique and to advance political emancipation. Bloch believed
that even ideological artifacts contain expressions of desire and articulations of
needs that socialist theory and politics should heed to in order to provide programs
and discourses which appeal to the deep-seated desires for a better life within
everyone. Ideologies thus provide clues to possibilities for future development
and contain a “surplus” or “excess” that is not exhausted in mystification or
legitimation. And ideologies may contain normative ideals whereby the existing
society can be criticized, as well as models of an alternative society.
Drawing on Bloch, Jameson has suggested that mass cultural texts often have
utopian moments and proposes that radical cultural criticism should analyze both
the social hopes and fantasies in the film, as well as the ideological ways in which
fantasies are presented, conflicts are resolved, and potentially disruptive hopes
110 Theory/context/methods
and anxieties are managed (Jameson 1979, 1981, 1990). In his reading of Jaws,
for instance, the shark stands in for a variety of fears (uncontrolled organic nature
threatening the artificial society, big business corrupting and endangering
community, disruptive sexuality threatening the disintegration of the family and
traditional values, and so on) which the film tries to contain through the reassuring
defeat of evil by representatives of the current class structure. Yet the film also
contains utopian images of family, male bonding, and adventure, as well as socially
critical visions of capitalism which articulate fears that unrestrained big business
would inexorably destroy the environment and community.
In Jameson’s view, mass culture thus articulates social conflicts, contemporary
fears and utopian hopes, and attempts at ideological containment and reassurance.
Consequently, cultural criticism requires a “double hermeneutic” that attends to
ideology and utopia. For Jameson:
works of mass culture cannot be ideological without at one and the same time
being implicitly or explicitly utopian as well: they cannot manipulate unless they
offer some genuine shred of content as a fantasy bribe to the public about to be so
manipulated. Even the ‘false consciousness’ of so monstrous a phenomenon of
Nazism was nourished by collective fantasies of a utopian type, in ‘socialist’ as
well as in nationalist guises. Our proposition about the drawing power of the works
of mass culture has implied that such works cannot manage anxieties about the
social order unless they have first revived them and given them some rudimentary
expression; we will now suggest that anxiety and hope are two faces of the same
collective consciousness, so that the works of mass culture, even if their function
lies in the legitimation of the existing order—or some worse one—cannot do their
job without deflecting in the latter’s service the deepest and most fundamental
hopes and fantasies of the collectivity, to which they can therefore, no matter in
how distorted a fashion, be found to have given voice.
(Jameson 1979:144)
Top Gun is, of course, a conservative utopia that uses the military as a scene
for utopian images of community, romance, male heroism, and self-affirmation.
Films like Jaws, by contrast, might use utopian images to provide a critique of
the loss of community, and its destruction by commercial interests. Popular
texts may thus also contain social criticism in their ideological scenarios and
one of the tasks of radical cultural criticism is to specify utopian, critical,
subversive, or oppositional meanings, even within the texts of media culture
(see Kellner 1979). For these artifacts may contain implicit and even explicit
critiques of capitalism, sexism, or racism, or visions of freedom and happiness
which can provide critical perspectives on the unhappiness and unfreedom in
the existing society. The Deer Hunter, for instance, though an arguably
reactionary text (Kellner and Ryan 1988), contains utopian images of
community, working-class and ethnic solidarity, and personal friendship which
provides critical perspectives on the fragmentation, alienation, and loss of
community in everyday life under contemporary capitalism.
cultural studies 111
The utopian images of getting high and horsing around in the drug hootch in
Platoon provide visions of racial harmony and individual and social happiness
which offer a critical perspective on the harrowing war. scenes and which code
war as a disgusting and destructive human activity. The images of racial solidarity
and transcendence in the dance numbers of Zoot Suit provide a utopian and critical
contrast to the oppression of people of color found in the scenes of everyday and
prison life in the film. And the transformation of life in the musical numbers of
Pennies From Heaven provide critical perspectives on the degradation of everyday
life due to the constraints of an unjust and irrational economic system which informs
the realist sections of the film.
In addition, Hollywood films, even conservative ones, put on display hopes and
fears that contest dominant hegemonic and hierarchal relations of power (Ryan
1989:111ff.). Ideological texts thus put on display both the significant dreams and
nightmares of a culture and the ways that the culture is attempting to channel them
to maintain its present relations of power and domination. Top Gun, for example,
exhibits the need for individual achievement, recognition, community, and love. It
presents the (dubious) argument that these needs can be satisfied by military life.
Other films show that the present society cannot satisfy existing needs, or assuage
existing fears, as when Thelma and Louise (1991) suggests that women must take
radical action to maintain their autonomy in existing patriarchal society. And a
documentary like Roger and Me (1990) shows the destruction of working-class
communities as multinational corporations close down their plants.
From this perspective, a critical cultural studies should not only critique dominant
ideologies, but should also specify any utopian, oppositional, subversive, and,
emancipatory moments within ideological constructs which are then turned against
existing forms of domination. This procedure draws on the sort of immanent critique
practiced by the Frankfurt School in the 1930s, when they turned earlier forms of
democratic bourgeois ideology against current, more reactionary, forms in fascist
society. An immanent critique of contemporary society thus turns its own values
against current social forms and practices that deny or contradict widely recognized
values such as freedom or individualism (see Kellner 1984, 1989a). Thus, while
bourgeois ideologies of freedom, individualism, and rights are to some extent
ideologies which mask class rule and domination, they also contain critical and
emancipatory moments which can be used to criticize the suppression or curtailment
of rights and freedom under capitalist society. The practice of what the Frankfurt
School called “immanent critique” thus turns ideology against ideology, using
more rational and progressive ideologies against more repressive and reactionary
ones (i.e. turning liberalism against fascism or New Right conservativism). The
Frankfurt School critical theorists, however, never engaged in such an immanent
critique of media culture and I am proposing here that such a project could be of
use to cultural studies today, replacing earlier denunciatory models.
Consequently, sharp distinctions between ideology and science or theory, or
ideology and utopia, should be deconstructed.3 Ideology has to have some cognitive
and utopian features in order to appeal to individuals. If ideology were nothing
112 Theory/context/methods
more than lies and mystification, it would have no hold on an individual’s experience
of life, and if it had no attractive features it would not appeal to people. Thus
ideological texts often have some cognitive content and utopian moments that
cultural studies should examine and discuss. But ideology critique is also interested
in how ideology tricks individuals into accepting contemporary social conditions
and ways of life. Ideology presents historically constructed conditions as natural,
as common sense and the way things are, as if it were natural for Rambo to slaughter
hundreds of individuals and then to turn on the state and its computers.
Ideology also presents the specific interests of groups as universal, as in
everyone’s interests, as if it was in everyone’s interests to intervene in foreign
countries and to kill communist or Arab “enemies.” Ideology transforms negative
conditions and forces into positive ones, as if it were good that the U.S. employs
mercenaries and undercover agents to carry out its dirty work. Ideology thus
represents the world upside down, with culture and the historically contingent
appearing as nature and the eternal; with particular class interests appearing as
universal; with highly political images, myths, and stories appearing as apolitical.
Ideology is thus a rhetoric that attempts to seduce individuals into identifying
with the dominant system of values, beliefs, and behavior. Ideology replicates
their actual conditions of existence, but in a mystified form in which people fail to
recognize the negative, historically constructed and thus modifiable nature of their
societies. Yet the work of ideology is very complex and it is to 1970s French theories
that we turn for new perspectives on culture and ideology that can be of use to
cultural studies.
HEGEMONY, COUNTERHEGEMONY, AND DECONSTRUCTION
Developments of new ways of reading and criticizing texts by so-called New French
Theory also has some important implications for the project of cultural studies.
Various French post-structuralists have contested the somewhat simplistic Marxian
belief that ideology resides in and constitutes the center of texts, and that ideology
critique simply involves refutation and demolition of the central ideological
proposition of the text. Against this procedure, theorists like Roland Barthes, Pierre
Macheray, Jacques Derrida, and other post-structuralists propose new ways of
reading texts and engaging in ideology critique. Texts, in the post-structuralist
view, should be read as the expression of a multiplicity of voices rather than as the
enunciation of one single ideological voice which is then to be specified and
attacked. Texts thus require multivalent readings, and a set of critical or textual
strategies that will unfold their contradictions, contestatory marginal elements,
and structured silences. These strategies include analyzing how, for example, the
margins of texts might be as significant as the center in conveying ideological
positions, or how the margins of a text might deconstruct ideological positions
affirmed in the text by contradicting or undercutting them, or how what is left
unsaid is as important as what is actually said.
Such a strategy involves paying attention to the margins, to seemingly
cultural studies 113
insignificant elements of a text, as well as to the specific ideological positions
affirmed. An Unmarried Woman, for example, presents the ideology of liberal
feminism whereby Erika (Jill Clayburgh) is able to develop herself more fully
both in terms of relations and career after her husband leaves her for a younger
woman. At the end of the film, she prances merrily down a Manhattan street with
a giant painting just given to her by her lover (Alan Bates), whose offer to go with
him immediately to New Hampshire she rejected so that she could also pursue a
career. As Erika crosses the street, three black and Latino working women stop to
look at her and the frame freezes on their faces, undercutting the film’s ideological
affirmation of liberal feminism by showing that most women cannot afford the
luxury, or have the privilege, of making choices available to upper-class women
like Erika.
Thelma and Louise, by contrast, exhibits a more radical feminism in its critique
of male brutality, forcing the female protagonists to violence and a life of crime.
Yet the ending could be read as undercuting an affirmation of sisterhood and the
triumph of women by showing the protagonists driving off a cliff, as if attempts at
women’s liberation and solidarity were impossible. Yet the ending could also be
read as an affirmation of their solidarity and an indication that women cannot
achieve liberation in the existing society of male violence and power, and must
radically transform the society and culture before real liberation is possible.
Obviously, films do not have one simple message and can give rise to a multiplicity
of readings, depending on what aspects of a film the critic chooses to focus on and
the complexity of the text itself.
Marginal elements in films might be important in other ways as well. In the
opening title sequence of Beverly Hills Cop we get rather realistic pictures of the
black Detroit ghetto—precisely the world that the ideological project of the film
attempts to erase, as the action shifts to the upper-class world of Beverly Hills.
Although Cruising is arguably a homophobic attack on gay male life, it shows the
sexual ambivalence of the male cop (played by Al Pacino) and, indirectly, the
excitement of the gay scene in some of the cinematic representations. Some
cinematic texts are, as Robin Wood argues, inherently incoherent and contradictory
(Wood 1986). In these cases, ideology critique would put on display the central
ideological contradictions, or would attempt to show how what appears to be the
central ideological position or argument is itself put into question and undermined
by contradictory or marginal elements within the text. This procedure would thus
show how ideologies may come into contradiction with themselves or fail, and
thus demonstrates the cracks and fissures, vulnerabilities and weak points, and
gaps within hegemonic ideology itself.
One should also pay attention to what is left out of ideological texts, for it is
often the exclusions and silences that reveal the ideological project of the text. For
instance, The Deer Hunter and the return-to-Vietnam films leave out U.S. atrocities
against the Vietnamese (portrayed in films like Platoon and Casualties of War) and
present U.S. soldiers as innocent victims of evil Vietnamese and communists.
Ideological presentations of women in contemporary society in Hollywood films
114 Theory/context/methods
often leave out the ways that women are bonding together to fight male oppression,
not only via friendship, à la Thelma and Louise, but also by means of group
organization and associations. Hegemony thus works by exclusion and
marginalization, as much as by affirming specific ideological positions.
Such methods of ideology critique therefore encourage the critic to be as much
interested in how ideology fails as in how it succeeds, in how ideological texts are
sites of tensions and dissonance even when they seem most harmonious and
ideologically successful. Although the first Dirty Harry film, for example, is
obviously a right-wing call to law and order, it displays a conflict between liberal
and conservative views of law enforcement and while it attempts to privilege the
conservative version, it depicts a society so ridden with crime, corruption, and
hopeless inertia that a critical reading could demonstrate that both liberal and
conservative solutions to crime are inadequate and that only radical social
restructuring can address the problems that the film presents. Inadvertently, perhaps,
the conclusion of the first Dirty Harry film, where Harry throws his badge away,
points to a society so corrupt that even the right-wing solution to crime must
inevitably fail. The conservative individualist hero walks away alone into (pure)
nature in the film, but conservative economic interests are themselves destroying
the nature yearned for by its fantasists, thus showing the classical conservative
solution to be increasingly untenable in the modern world.
Deconstructive criticism thus shows how ideological projects fail, or undercut
their own messages and intentions. Media culture texts are complex and require
multivalent readings. Yet they are not so polysemic that they can mean anything
and audiences are positioned to accept certain positions via the deployment of the
apparatus of the cinema, television, or whatever form. Although audiences can
resist “dominant” readings, it is not certain that they always resist these meanings
and there is little evidence for the belief that audiences always read texts against
the dominant culture, as Fiske comes close to claiming. Indeed, the studies in this
book undermine his claim that: “there can be no popular dominant culture, for
popular culture is formed always in reaction to, and never as part of, the forces of
domination” (Fiske 1989a: 43). As our studies of Rambo, Top Gun, and other
militarist, sexist, and racist films suggest, media culture sometimes legitimates
forces of domination and induces audiences to gain pleasure in assent to ideological
positions, sometimes fails to do so, and sometimes provides pleasure in opposition
to dominant ideologies and institutions.4 Ethnographic interviews with audiences
concerning their interpretations of media culture and attempts to analyze media
effects must deal with the fact that many messages of media culture are subliminal
and perhaps not consciously perceived. A diagnostic critique thus assumes a depth
dimension to media culture and uses methods of myth and symbol interpretation
to ferret out hidden, latent, and subliminal meanings.
Applying psychoanalytical methods to reading Top Gun, for instance, suggests
that the film is about phallic power and the threats to masculist values in the 1960s
and 1970s and their reassertion during the 1980s. Being “top gun” obviously means
being top stud as well as top fighter pilot and the two competencies are related
cultural studies 115
throughout the film. When Maverick is triumphant in his military exploits he gets
the girl and when he fails she leaves him; when he triumphs at the end, she is there
to validate his victory. Top Gun is full of phallic symbols and power, images of
male potency, from the first images of the phallic airplanes to the closing battle
scenes. Thus, the psychoanalytic perspective strengthens the feminist one and not
by accident have many feminists adopted psychoanalytic perspectives.
Read diagnostically, Top Gun articulates fears that male power is being threatened
by women in the current society and enacts its re-privileging. A number of films of
the 1980s and 1990s also present phallic women as a threat to male power and
familial domesticity. Part of what Susan Faludi diagnosed as backlash in the media
(1991), films like Fatal Attraction and Basic Instinct portray strong, single,
independent successful women in an extremely negative light. Fatal Attraction’s
(1986) villainess, a single and successful editor named Alex played by Glenn Close,
seduces a married male, Dan Gallagher (played by Michael Douglas), and then
proceeds to obsessively pursue him, seeking to destroy his marriage and to possess
him for herself.
Faludi points out how the film was initially intended to be a sympathetic portrayal
of the dilemmas of a single independent woman and how the original version
makes her a tragic victim of her situation, showing her committing suicide alone
in a bathtub. But the film revises that ending, having the wife shoot the single
woman, who the film positions the audience to hate, with its contrasts of the happy
family life and the evil threats to it represented by Alex. One key scene shows her
voyeuristically watching a happy family scene in which Dan gives his daughter a
rabbit, while his wife looks on with affection. Alex is shown outside looking in
during a scene that dramatizes precisely what this single career woman is missing
and she vomits as she realizes all that she lacks.
The other side of Fatal Attraction is that it provides a morality tale for men,
warning that if they stray from matrimonial monogamy—even once—it could wreak
disaster and destroy what is presented as most important in life. The Hand That
Rocks the Cradle (1992) contains similar problematics in favor of the traditional
family and traditional women’s roles at the expense of single women. In its
melodramatic plot, a happily married woman, Claire Bartel (played by Annabella
Sciorra), reports that her gynecologist sexually molested her; other women report
the same and he commits suicide, causing his wife Peyton (played by Rebecca De
Mornay) to have a miscarriage. In a hyperbolic revenge plot, Peyton enters the
Bartel home as a nannie to their two children and proceeds to attempt to destroy
the wife, thereby wreaking revenge for her husband’s death.
And so once again men are warned that if they stray from matrimonial fidelity
disaster will ensue and women are shown descending into madness and violence
without a man to take care of them and enable them to realize their feminine nature.
In one scene, Peyton is caught breast-feeding the Bartel’s new-born baby by a
black handyman, who she gets fired with false accusations that he sexually molested
the young daughter. The image of the woman with child represents the norm for
women which is denied Peyton, who is subsequently driven to psychotic extremities
116 Theory/context/methods
to try to fulfill this role. And in both films it is the wife who, in fighting for her
family, kills the evil threat to their familial happiness.
Fatal Attraction and The Hand that Rocks the Cradle contrast bad and good
women, with traditional women represented as good and the sort of independent
professional woman celebrated by certain versions of feminism, or single women
per se, depicted as lacking and driven to vile and destructive behavior. Basic Instinct,
by contrast, simply vilifies women as such in its story of a successful woman
writer (played by Sharon Stone) whose family, lovers, and enemies are shown as
mysteriously murdered. The striking thing about this film is the extent to which it
vilifies all of its women characters. Its convoluted plot makes it ambiguous as to
whether the woman writer, or a woman police psychologist obsessed with the
writer, are really guilty of the crimes. Two other major women characters, the
writer’s lesbian lover and an older woman, are also revealed to be mass murderers
who killed their families, thus representing women per se as evil and vicious—
traditional sexist stereotypes.
Basic Instinct also vilifies lesbians as perverted and predatory, and portrays
women as wanting to assume male phallic power and control. Indeed, the film can
be read as an alarmist allegory concerning what women would do if they were to
assume phallic power. Both the writer of Basic Instinct and Alex of Fatal Attraction
can indeed be read as derisive vehicles of phallic power run amok with knives and
ice-picks, used as murder weapons of choice, serving as crudely Freudian symbols
of the violent phallus.
A diagnostic critique, such as I will illustrate and develop in the following studies,
uses history to read texts and texts to read history. Such a dual optic allows insight
into the multiple relations between texts and contexts, between media culture and
history. My diagnostic critique of contemporary media culture will suggest that
ideological hegemony in U.S. society today is complex, contested, and constantly
being put into question. Hegemony is negotiated and renegotiated, and is vulnerable
to attack and subversion. In recent years, for instance, the New Right political
hegemony of the Reagan years passed over to a more centrist conservatism of the
Bush regime that in turn became increasingly militarist in the wake of the Panama
invasion and Persian Gulf War. Yet, despite the seeming popularity of the Gulf
War, Bush’s hegemony turned out to be vulnerable, shaky, and subject to overthrow
and reversal—as indeed happened in the 1992 Presidential election.
Reading media culture diagnostically thus presents insights into the current
political situation, into the strengths and vulnerabilities of the contending political
forces, and into the hopes and fears of the population. From this perspective, the
texts of media culture provide important insights into the psychological, sociopolitical,
and ideological make-up of a specific society at a given point in history.
Reading media culture diagnostically also allows one to detect what ideological
solutions to various problems are being offered, and thus to anticipate certain trends,
to gain insights into social problems and conflicts, and to appraise the dominant
ideologies and emergent oppositional forces. Consequently, diagnostic political
critique enables one to perceive the limitations of mainstream conservative and
cultural studies 117
liberal political ideologies, as well as helping to decipher their continuing appeal.
It enables one to grasp the utopian yearnings in a given society and challenges
progressives to develop cultural representations, political alternatives, and practices
and movements which address these predispositions.
Such diagnostic reading thus helps with the formulation of progressive political
practices which speak to salient hopes, fears, and desires, and the construction of
social alternatives that are grounded in existing psychological, social, and cultural
matrixes. Consequently, diagnostic film critique does not merely offer another
clever method of reading films but provides weapons of critique for those interested
in producing a better society.
PLATOON: A DIAGNOSTIC CRITIQUE
Almost two decades after the fall of Saigon to communist forces, Vietnam continues
to be a hotly contested topic in American culture and politics. As J.William Gibson
(1986) indicates in his book The Perfect War: Technowar in Vietnam, liberals from
the beginning presented Vietnam as a series of “tragic mistakes,” while conservatives
blamed defeat on the politicians and excessive “restraint” in the use of military
force. In the aftermath of Vietnam, liberals and leftists claimed that the debacle
demonstrated the limits of U.S. military power, the impossibility of policing the
world and stopping liberation movements everywhere. For conservatives, on the
contrary, the “Vietnam syndrome” represented a f ailure of will, liberal co wardice
and defeatism, which should be overcome with renewed military build-up and
intervention. With Ronald Reagan’s Presidential victories in 1980 and 1984, the
rightist version became official policy, and Reagan’s problems with the Iran/Contra
scandals can arguably be traced to the right’s inability to accept the limits of U.S.
power and its obsessive drive to stop communism, to defeat the Foreign Other, to
reassert U.S. military might all over the world.
The battle between left and right over Vietnam, war, and militarism has taken
place within Hollywood film and U.S. popular culture as well as within the political
arena. Although John Wayne’s ultra right-wing fantasy The Green Berets (1968)
was the only actual fictional film which dealt with U.S. involvement in Vietnam
during the years of American intervention, many films like M.A.S.H., Catch-22,
Soldier Blue and others could be read as attacks on U.S. involvement in Vietnam,
and as ripostes to right-wing versions of militarism and U.S. foreign policy within
the context of the debates over Vietnam in the late 1960s and early 1970s.5 After
the U.S. pulled out of Vietnam and the communist forces won, the Hollywood
debate on Vietnam finally emerged front and center. Left-liberal films like Coming
Home, Who’ll Stop the Rain (both 1978), Cutter’s Way (1981), and Born on the
Fourth of July (1989) sympathetically presented vets as victims of a misguided
war, while Go Tell the Spartans and The Boys From Company C (both 1978), and
Hamburger Hill (1987) presented combat f ilms located in Vietnam that criticized
U.S. involvement, and that therefore raised questions about imperialist intervention
in the Third World.
118 Theory/context/methods
The two major 1970s films in Hollywood’s debate over Vietnam, however, The
Deerhunter (1978) and Apocalypse Now (1979), both used a “heart of darkness”
scenario to present racist visions of “innocent” Americans thrown into violent
warfare in the “mysterious” and “savage” East. Both films presented mythical
visions of male heroism that tried to salvage some redeeming virtues from U.S.
defeat in Vietnam, and both dishonestly evaded the causes, history, and actual
trajectory of the Vietnam war (i.e. both were more about “manhood” and “heroism”
than Vietnam itself).
During the Reagan era, such ideological extravaganzas as Rambo, Red Dawn,
Missing in Action, Top Gun, the TV mini-series Amerika, and other artifacts of
media culture represented aggressively right-wing positions on war, militarism,
communism, and so on. These films and others like An Officer and a Gentleman,
Star Wars, Indiana Jones, ad nauseam served as soft and hard core propaganda for
Reaganism and a distinctly right-wing interventionist and militarist agenda. In this
context, Platoon can be seen as a left-liberal intervention in the Hollywood debate
over Vietnam.
Oliver Stone’s Platoon is arguably the most realistic and critical Vietnam combat
film yet to appear.6 The story—based on Stone’s experiences in Nam during 1967–
8—deals with the experiences in Vietnam of a young army volunteer Chris Taylor
(Charlie Sheen), who is obviously Stone’s alter ego. The young soldier emerges
out of darkness from the bowels of a military transport vehicle into dusty, goldyellow
(and highly filtered) light and the sound of helicopters in a dramatic
introduction to Vietnam, presented as an exotic Otherness. He and his fellow soldiers
see corpses in body bags, and are immediately transported to the jungle for combat
duty, thus thrusting the viewer into the reality of combat without any preparation
or background.
Chris himself has ob viously landed in Vietnam without any real knowledge of
what is going on there and what he is getting himself into. On the initial hike, the
heat, the insects, the foreign jungle terrain, and the fear cause him to throw up, and
a sympathetic officer agrees to carry some of the excessive baggage which he has
brought with him. Chris tries to explain his motivations and experiences in voiceover
narrations which summarize his letters to his grandparents, though he is soon
overwhelmed by his experience, which can no longer be expressed in conventional
terms, and halts this activity.
As soon as Chris and his platoon reach his camp “somewhere near the Cambodian
border,” he is assigned night patrol, and soon thereafter Chris and the audience are
initiated into the rituals of search-and-destroy patrol duty, night watches, and fire
fights in which deadly explosives suddenly flash, maim, and kill. The key combat
episodes—which shed most critical light on U.S. involvement in Vietnam—include
the torching of Vietnamese villages, and an all-out “enemy” assault which traps
the American forces who are cut off from supply and support forces. The village
scene provides a powerful depiction of U.S. atrocities. The U.S. troops enter a
village suspected of harboring Viet Cong, and brutalize women, children and animals
in the process, after which they torch the village. In a key narrative device, the
cultural studies 119
“humane” Sgt. Elias (Willem Dafoe) prevents the more brutal Sgt. Barnes (Tom
Berenger) from killing a young girl after he had already killed a woman and other
villagers. Chris, who had begun participating in the atrocities, looks on intently
and shortly thereafter breaks up the rape of a village teenager by other soldiers.
The scene recalls My Lai and other U.S. war crimes, and thus both realistically
points to the brutalizing effects of the Vietnam War while disallowing the traditional
war film conventions that depict “our boys” as good, and the “enemy” as evil.
Likewise, the concluding massacre scene shows the victimization of U.S. soldiers
who are used as bait to attract an enemy assault which would allow the U.S. army
to use its superior fire power and conventional weapons and strategies that were
precluded by the conditions of jungle warfare. The U.S. captain eventually orders
an air attack on the region which indiscriminately destroys U.S. and Vietnamese
troops.
The social horizon of Platoon was obviously the Vietnam War itself, the
experiences of the U.S. soldiers, and the tumultous debate over the war in the U.S.
The discursive field of the film was the anti-war discourses that questioned U.S.
motives and actions in the Vietnam War, undercutting rationales that legitimated
the U.S. intervention. The war is put in question by Chris’s narrative questioning
of the war, the violent deaths of the U.S. soldiers in the platoon, and the brutal
actions against the Vietnamese. The figural action privileged in the film involved
the activity of the soldiers in battle, on patrol, and in camp. The dominant figures,
however, as I argue below, constituted a clash between “good” and “bad” soldiers
which defocused attention on the irrationality of the U.S. intervention and presented
the action as a symbolic morality tale playing out opposing images of soldiers and
manhood.
Most of the movie deals with the fear, the uncertainty, and the brutalization
undergone by young Americans thrown into the jungles of Nam. Although there is
some focus on the drug culture which provided a break and an escape from combat,
there is very little of the clichéd conversation, obligatory love or personal emphasis,
or celebrations of male heroism and bonding that is typical of the Hollywood war
films. Platoon has an hallucinatory intensity about it, and it powerfully recreates
the experience of being at war in a completely hostile and alien environment. Oliver
Stone’s focus in the film is on the experience of combat, and the film brilliantly
recreates the environment and atmosphere within which U.S. troops fought in
Vietnam. The film also makes clear from the beginning that it is for the most part
poor white working-class people and people of color who are drafted and sent to
Vietnam, and that the war certainly does not serve their own interests in any way
whatsoever. Indeed, Platoon deglamorizes warfare by showing how it brutalizes
young men and inevitably brings out the worst in their natures.
On the other hand, Platoon neither presents the Vietnamese as autonomous
subjects with their own point of view and reasons for fighting, nor does it illuminate
U.S. involvement in Vietnam and the imperialist nature of the intervention. Like
most other Hollywood Vietnam war films, Platoon focuses almost exclusively on
the U.S. troops and their experiences, and presents the Vietnamese as objects of
120 Theory/context/methods
either fear (in the combat scenes) or pity (in the atrocity scenes). Indeed, in many
ways Platoon shares the conventions and masculist ideologies of a tradition of
Hollywood war films. The plot development is structured as Chris Taylor’s initiation
into both knowledge and “manhood,” and masculinity is defined (as in the most
reactionary Hollywood traditions) as the ability to commit violence. For Chris is
clearly transformed from a naive “greenie” into an experienced and effective killing
machine who comes charging out of a foxhole in the final battle scene to kill
dozens of Vietnamese in a way that would have made Audie Murphy and John
Wayne proud.
The central symbolic trope of the film which contrasts the “evil” soldier Sgt.
Barnes to the “good” Sgt. Elias is equally problematical. From the beginning,
Barnes is a hard-assed disciplinarian and brutally effective leader who showers
Chris with obscenities and tells him to get his sorry ass moving when he is about to
collapse on his first march. Elias, by contrast, takes some of the books and excess
gear from his pack and offers to transport it himself. As the story unfolds, one
group of soldiers identify around Barnes, whereas others associate with Elias,
delineating what Stone saw as a fundamental division in the Vietnam army between
hard-core militarist regulars (boozing rednecks) and more humane countercultural
types (blacks, Hispanics, and the hippie drug culture).7 Stone and the film perceive
one group as the good guys and the other as the bad guys—reproducing the
manichean vision which runs throughout the Hollywood war film.
This moralistic division allows Stone to celebrate Elias (and ultimately Chris)
as the “good” soldier, while negating Barnes and his cohorts as bad soldiers. Elias
is thus presented as more “humane” and “moral” than Barnes, but he also calls
Vietnamese “dinks” and seems to get pleasure from killing scores of “enemies”
and going on dangerous missions. Stone allows him almost superhuman heroics
and a redemptive death scene where he stumbles in slow motion as he is shot
repeatedly by the Vietnamese after Barnes had attempted to assassinate him, and
dies with his arms reaching up to heaven.
Consequently, because of the intense focus on combat and moral conflict,
there is really no political analysis of U.S. involvement in Vietnam, nor does the
film deal on an y level with the question of “wh y were we in Vietnam?” Stone’s
vision is really no different than the earlier critical Vietnam films Go Tell the
Spartans and The Boys in Company C (both 1978). Like Spartans, Platoon shows
the U.S. blundering into a military adventure with no clear objectives and with
no sense of the terrain and situation. Like both Spartans and Boys, Platoon draws
a firm boundary between “good” and “bad” wars, and “good” and “bad” soldiers,
rather than carrying out a more penetrating critique of war, militarism, and U.S.
foreign policy.
Consequently, political issues are displaced by moral issues centering on the
moral struggle between Barnes, who represents brutal efficiency, and Elias, who
represents idealistic humanity trying to preserve respect for human life in difficult
circumstances. At the end of the film, the young narrator Chris refers in a voiceover
to Barnes as “our Captain Ahab,” and of “Barnes and Elias fighting for
cultural studies 121
possession of my soul.” In a rather masculist concluding gesture, Chris kills Barnes,
thus symbolically purging his soul of the evil and brutality which he was confronted
with in Nam.
Thus, Platoon’s symbolism overpowers its realism, but despite its failings, there
are some quite powerful critical visions of U.S. involvement in Vietnam in the film.
The brutality of the U.S. platoon in the Vietnamese village is as stomach-churning a
presentation of U.S. atrocities in Vietnam as Hollywood is likely to produce, and
such powerful scenes subvert the ideological manicheanism of the traditional
Hollywood war film that sees U.S. soldiers as “good” and the “enemy” as “evil.”
The final combat scene illustrated how some platoons served as bait to attract the
Vietnamese into open fire, and the slaughter of both the U.S. and Vietnamese forces
provide powerful indictments of the futility and brutality of the war.
In its political context, Platoon’s critical vision of U.S. intervention countered
the rightist discourse on Vietnam of Rambo, Reagan, and others who refused to
see that the Vietnam War was fundamentally and morally wrong. Moreover, its
graphic demonstrations of the horrors of war mobilized subject positions against
fantasies of military heroism promoted in the comic-book militarism of films like
Rambo, Top Gun, and other militarist extravaganzas. In this context, Platoon’s
Academy Awards and its critical and commercial success helped turn Hollywood
away from the Reaganite entertainment and mindless militarism that was dominant
in Hollywood during the Reagan years.
Thus, some media culture promoted prowar feelings, while other artifacts
promoted antiwar positions. A diagnostic critique reads films politically in order
to analyze the opposing political struggles and positions and their relative strengths
and weaknesses. It attempts to discern how media culture mobilizes desire,
sentiment, affect, belief, and vision into various subject positions, and how these
support one political position or another. A diagnostic critique thus indicates how
the texts of media culture help to produce political identities and criticizes those
identities and effects which are counter to democracy and that support the forces
of domination and oppression.
Politics, however, pervades everyday life, as well as the great political battles
that dominate media news and information. A diagnostic critique thus also probes
the politics of everyday life and its struggles around issues like race, gender, and
class. From this perspective, media cultural texts articulate the fears and hopes, the
dreams and nightmares, of a culture and thus are a source of novel and important
socio-psychological insights, displaying what audiences are feeling and thinking
at a given moment. This explains why psychoanalysis continues to be of importance
for cultural studies. Against the notion of the depthlessness and surface of
contemporary cultural texts claimed by postmodern theory, I would argue that
many cultural texts today continue to be bearers of meaning and to require depthhermeneutical
models to ferret out their meanings and the range of their possible
effects. The studies in the following chapters will pursue these topics, showing
how cultural studies can contribute to presenting diagnostic insight into the struggles
of everyday life, as well as the major political and media events of the era.
122 Theory/context/methods
NOTES
1 I am thus appropriating the term multiculturalism for my agenda of cultural studies and
am not intervening in the debates over multiculturalism in education in which, as Giroux
(1992), McLaren (1993) and Scatamburlo (forthcoming) argue, there are a diverse range
of corporate/conservative, left-liberal, and more critical multicultural projects. I am
associating these cultural studies with what Giroux, McLaren, and Scatamburlo describe
as critical multiculturalism.
2 For some of my earlier work in developing multiperspectival theory, see Kellner 1991
and 1992a, and Best and Kellner 1991.
3 Althusser wants to contrast science to ideology, as its radical other, whereas Mannheim,
Bloch, Ricoeur, and others oppose ideology to utopia. I would suggest that one should
not make such tight distinctions, that ideology and science, as well as ideology and
utopia, are interconnected. Yet I see the concept of culture as wider than ideology, and
believe that one can, on an analytical level, counterpoise various discourses to ideology.
One can also contrast ideological discourses and criticize one ideology from the
standpoint of another, as when one attacks fascism from the standpoint of liberal
humanism. Theories that might be ideological, in the sense of legitimizing a dominant
social order, in one context, can be critical and subversive in another, as when Marxism
provided conservative social functions in legitimizing the former Soviet Union, while
presenting radical critical perspectives on actually existing capitalist societies. Thus,
all discourse and critique is contextual, using norms in specific contexts, rather than
positing absolute standards of critique.
4 See the appendix to Camera Politica that discusses interviews with audiences concerning
the political messages and effects of popular films. The survey displays a range of
reactions to and readings of the politics of popular films (Kellner and Ryan 1988),
many that follow the ideological encoding of the films while others resist it, or offer
their own readings.
5 On Hollywood’s presentation of Vietnam, see Britton 1986; Wood 1986; and Kellner
and Ryan 1988.
6 Most reviews highlighted Platoon’s, alleged realism and praised its honesty,
verisimilitude, and so on (the film poster and advertisements for the film were full of
such comments). Likewise, reflections on the film by veterans and political commentators
tended to stress its realism and accurate representations of the war and the experience
of fighting; see, for example, the pieces in the New York Times by correspondent David
Halberstam and Marines veteran David Trainor (March 15, 1987). I shall dissent from
this position here and generally perceive realism as a set of conventions which construct
a picture of the world rather than as a way of imitating the world or providing access to
the real.
7 Oliver Stone sets forth his dualistic and dichotomizing vision in an article in American
Film where he writes that Platoon “mirrored the very civil war that I’d witnessed in all
the units I was in—on the one hand, the lifers, the juicers and the moron white element
(part Southern, part rural) against, on the other, the hippie, dope-smoking, black, and
progressive white element…Right versus Left” (Oliver Stone “One from the Heart,”
American Film (January-February 1987):19). This article and the extended interview
in Film Comment (February 1987):11–20, 60, presents Stone as the left wing of the
Hollywood boy’s club, and although Stone’s films have their limitations, taken
cumulatively, such films as Salvador, Born on the Fourth of July, Talk Radio, JFK and
Heaven and Earth present something of a left-progressive intonation within the voice
of U.S. media culture.
Part II
Diagnostic critique and
cultural studies
125
Chapter 4
Social anxiety, class, and disaffected
youth
In the previous chapters, I delineated aspects of my method and model of cultural
studies and in the rest of the book will apply it to concrete studies, to doing cultural
studies. In the previous chapter, I introduced the concept of diagnostic critique
which uses history and social theory to analyze cultural texts and uses cultural
texts in turn to illuminate historical trends, conflicts, possibilities, and anxieties.1
My conceptions of a contextual cultural studies and the notion of diagnostic critique
will be illustrated in this chapter, first, by study of some horror and fantasy films
that articulate the social anxieties of working- and middle-class people in an era of
economic insecurity in the United States and elsewhere. In Chapter 2, I interrogated
how Hollywood films transcoded the political discourses of the era, while the studies
in this chapter will probe the anxieties of ordinary people in the terrain of everyday
life during the same period. Cultural studies can thus use its methods to probe
events, discourses, and social trends on both the macro and micro level, engaging
both the defining political trends and events of the era, as well as the texture and
travails of everyday life.
I will argue that the Poltergeist and other horror films articulate fears of
downward mobility in the contemporary era and provide allegories concerning
social anxiety over losing one’s job, home, and family. Next, I interrogate the
situation of contemporary youth through analysis of the film Slacker and the
MTV-series Beavis and Butt-Head. Throughout this chapter, I will suggest that
media culture provides social allegories which articulate class and social group
fears, yearnings, and hopes.2 Decoding these social allegories thus provides a
diagnostic critique with insight into the situation of individuals within various
social classes and groups, like youth. Thus, fantasy and entertainment may be
the vehicle of deadly serious diagnoses of the contemporary era which cultural
studies should analyze and interpret.
POLTERGEISTS, GENDER, AND CLASS IN THE AGE OF REAGAN
AND BUSH
During the past two decades, the horror-occult genre was one of the most popular
and successful Hollywood genres.3 Horror films have traditionally dealt with
126 Diagnostic critique and cultural studies
universal and primal fears (i.e. fears of dying, aging, bodily decay, violence,
sexuality, etc.). However, the most interesting contemporary horror films (The
Exorcist, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, Carrie, Alien, The Shining, and so on)
have presented, often in symbolic-allegorical form, both universal fears and the
deepest anxieties and hostilities of contemporary U.S. society. A subtext of these
films is the confusion and fright of the population in the face of economic crisis,
accelerating social and cultural change, a near epidemic of cancer, industrial
diseases, and AIDS, political instability, and fear of nuclear annihilation. The wide
range and popularity of post-1970s Hollywood horror films suggests that something
is profoundly wrong with U.S. society and a probing of these films may help reveal
something about the source of contemporary fears.
The 1980s was also the era of Reagan and Bush and in this study, I wish to
relate the social anxieties of the era to the conservative hegemony and will argue
that these phenomena are interconnected. The 1980s was an unprecedented era of
class warfare with massive redistribution of wealth from working and middleclass
sectors to the rich and an era of high fear of unemployment, downward
mobility, and crisis for the working classes.4 While the 1970s saw a wave of popular
films dealing with the working class (Kellner and Ryan 1988), it was rarely featured
in 1980s Hollywood films which focused more on middle- and upper-class families
and individuals. Yet the working class was often presented as threatening others to
middle-class life and, as I attempt to demonstrate below, was often negatively
stigmatized in genres like the horror film.
The broad panorama of popular horror films attests to a resurgence of the
occult in contemporary society which suggests that individuals are no longer in
control of everyday life. When individuals perceive that they do not have control
over their lives and that they are dominated by powerful forces outside themselves,
people are attracted to occultism. Consequently, during eras of socio-economic
crisis when individuals have difficulty coping with social reality, the occult
becomes an efficacious ideological mode which helps explain unpleasant
circumstances or incomprehensible events with the aid of religious or supernatural
mythologies.
In the crisis of German society after World War I, for instance, there was a
proliferation of horror films and the first great wave of American horror films
appeared in the midst of the 1930’s depression. After the explosion of the atomic
bomb and with the heating up of the Cold War and arms race in the 1950s, another
wave of occult horror films appeared, featuring visions of mutant animals and
humans, or apocalyptic holocausts. Over the years, media culture has accumulated
a rich treasure house of occultist lore to draw upon, and in the 1970s and 1980s
Americans turned to occultism for experiences and ideas which helped them cope
with economic crisis, political turmoil and cultural malaise. In this resurgence of
the occult, repressed fears and irrational forces sought symbolic expression which
often served as vehicles for reactionary ideologies in contemporary film (i.e. The
Exorcist trilogy, The Omen trilogy, and a variety of monster films, demonic
possession films, and other occult thrillers).
Anxiety,class,disaffected youth 127
Whereas conservative horror films provide fantasies of reassurance that existing
authorities and institutions can eliminate evil, many contemporary horror films do
not provide reassurance that historically specific or universal evils can be suppressed
and contained. Instead, they reveal a society in crisis, where destructive forces are
rampant and conventional authorities and values are incapable of defeating and
eliminating the evils afoot. Consequently, these films often do not legitimate
contemporary American institutions and values but show horrific violence and
social disintegration to be ubiquitous and powerful forces in the contemporary
social order. This is true to some extent of films that rely on religious institutions to
defeat “evil” (i.e. The Exorcist and to a greater extent the more nihilistic films of
George Romero, Tobe Hooper, Wes Craven, Larry Cohen, and others that show
contemporary institutions and ways of life to be the source of horror).5
In the following discussion, I shall disclose how the Poltergeist series negotiates
middle-class fears and insecurities concerning race, gender, and class in the
contemporary era. I’ll interpret these films allegorically as articulating deep-rooted
fears that are often explored in genres like the horror film rather than realist films,
where they might be too painful to confront and explore. Horror films are a
reactionary genre to the extent that they blame occult forces for societal
disintegration and a life out of control, thus deflecting attention from the real sources
of social suffering. Yet they also offer the possibility of radical critique by presenting
suffering and oppression as caused by institutions that need to be reconstructed.
1970s horror films, for example, saw monsters being produced by families, and
thus could be taken as socially critical, cinematically articulating the critiques of
the family in 1960s political movements. Films like The Texas Chain Saw Massacre,
Motel Hell, and so on presented the family as monstrous, as the source of monsters,
thus replicating feminist critiques of the patriarchal family. But films like Poltergeist
show good families being attacked by monsters, and thus serve as ideological
defenses of the middle-class family, which transcode cinematically the conservative
pro-family discourses of the 1980s. Yet, read diagnostically, even conservative
horror films reveal contemporary anxieties concerning the family, downward
mobility, and homelessness in an uncertain economy and deteriorating social order.
In the following diagnostic reading, I accordingly discuss the Poltergeist films as
indicators of social anxiety and disintegration in contemporary U.S. society.
Poltergeist and social anxiety
Among the wave of 1980s occult-horror films, Poltergeist (1982), directed by Tobe
Hooper and co-authored and produced by Steven Spielberg,6 is especially interesting
because it articulates the underlying anxieties of the new middle class in the Age
of Reagan. Poltergeist, along with Spielberg’s E.T., The Extra-Terrestrial (1982),
explores with sympathy and even affection the environment and lifestyle of the
new affluent, suburban middle class and presents symbolic projections of its
insecurities and fears. While E.T. presents an optimistic and charming allegory of
suburban middle-class life, Poltergeist presents its shadow-side and nightmares in
128 Diagnostic critique and cultural studies
a story where the Other, the Alien, is not a friendly extra-terrestrial who comes
from outside the society to help it, but threateningly emerges from within the socioeconomic
system and social subconscious to terrorize the ordinary middle-class
people who are the subject of the film. Thus, whereas E.T. is Spielberg’s childlike
fantasy of hope, Poltergeist is a symbolic probing of universal and specifically
American fears that takes the form of an allegorical nightmare, the decoding of
which should tell us something about everyday life during the Reagan era.
Poltergeist features the adventures with the occult of the Freeling family which
discovers that its house is built on top of a Native American graveyard whose
spirits seek revenge against the intruding family. In another plot twist, evil spirits
attempt to seduce the clairvoyant five-year-old daughter, Carol Anne into the spirit
world. Her parents try to rescue her and are forced to turn to parapsychologists and
a diminutive woman medium for help.
The family unit in Poltergeist contains a father, Steve Freeling (Craig T.Nelson),
his wife Diane (Jobeth Williams), a teenage daughter Dana (Dominique Dunne),
a young boy Robbie (Oliver Robins) and little Carol Anne (Heather O’Rourke),
who is the first to make contact with the poltergeists. The Freelings live in one of
the first houses built in Phase One of a housing project called Cuesta Vista. The
father is a successful real estate agent who has sold 42 percent of the housing
units in the area—which his boss tells him represents over seventy million dollars
worth of property. As a reward for his heroic efforts, he has all the commodities
desired by the new affluent middle class. Depiction of this class and its fears of
losing their home, family, and property is a central focus of the Poltergeist films.
The name “Freeling” evokes the dominant ideology of freedom and from this
perspective a “freeling” is a free being, a member of a class and society free
from basic worries and cares, free to celebrate and live the American middleclass
dream. “The Star-Spangled Banner,” referring to the “land of the free,”
plays in an opening segment and refrains later in the film, which presents iconic
images of American flags throughout! Yet Poltergeist deals with the threats to
freedom and loss of sovereignty in contemporary middle-class life, and the alltoo-
real prospects of downward mobility in an American dream gone sour and
become a nightmare.
The film opens with display of the new icons and objects of upper-middle-class
status and provides a charming look at the new affluent consumer environment
with its split-level houses, omnipresent multichannelled TV, electronic gadgets,
bountiful toys for the kids, dope and sex for the parents, and a treasure house of
commodities for every conceivable purpose. The opening images show the father
asleep on his couch in front of his television. To the tune of the national anthem,
we see configurations of television dots forming the scene of marines putting up
the flag on a hill of Iwo Jima, evoking America’s heroic past. But the present is
troubled. The camera pans from room to room in the affluent house showing the
family members asleep. The TV goes off and static fills the screen. Carol Anne, the
youngest member of the household, gets up, goes downstairs, and stands in front
of the TV talking to the strange lights dancing about in the static. The entire family
Anxiety,class,disaffected youth 129
comes down and looks at her in amazement. Throughout the film, the TV static
will signal bizarre happenings and menace.
After the opening scene, Poltergeist presents some comic tableaux of suburban
life. A heavy-set man drives down the street on a bicycle carrying a case of beer
precariously balanced on the handlebars. Some playful kids aim their electronically
directed toys at him and he falls off the bike. The beer cans spill and explode and
he desperately carries the remaining, and still exploding, cans into the house where
a group of middle-aged and middle-class men are watching a football game on TV.
The pleasures of communal TV football in suburbia are soon disrupted: the next
door neighbor’s television set is plugged into the same remote control frequency
and the kids next door have switched the channel to Mr Rogers to the dismay of
the football fans. The husband runs out to negotiate a peaceful settlement with the
neighbor who insists on the rights of his children, and the two fathers blast their
remote control devices at each other’s TVs, switching the channel from the football
game to Mr Rogers to the alternating consternation and joy of the football audience
and the kid show audience.
The opening scenes depict images of technology getting out of control that will
permeate the Poltergeist films. Technology out of control serves as a trope for
fears of loss of sovereignty and power over one’s immediate environment. In
particular, there was fear of television taking over leisure activity and young people’s
minds during the 1980s and Poltergeist articulates this fear in a parable whereby
young Carol Anne is sucked into a television set that is the portal to the “other
world” of spirits. The young girl talks to the “TV people” in the opening sequence
in which her hands lightly rest upon the static-filled TV screen at the end of the
day’s broadcasting. As the film proceeds, the television will play a major part in
the plot.
The scenes of the Freeling’s television and the family’s and then neighbor’s
interaction with it also ironically depict the dialectic between public and private
space in the contemporary suburban environment. Suburban Americans share the
public space of television, mass communications, and consumer culture, yet for
the most part participate in the shared culture in the private space of their own
home. The community portrayed is a leisure community bound together by the
objects of play and entertainment: toys, television, sports, beer and other common
commodities. This community is a fragile one: without the TV, for instance, the
weekend football watching community dissolves. Most suburbanites do not know
their neighbors, unless they share leisure activities in common. The “remote control
television” scene shows how shared suburban space overlaps and produces conflicts,
as well as how weak, or non-existent, “neighborliness” is in the suburbs. It also
depicts a new communications environment and technology which individuals do
not yet understand and do not fully control.
Crucially, we watch the family withdraw from their suburban community and
turn in on themselves when the poltergeist crisis unfolds. Their neighbors are of
little help and only appear when the poltergeists destroy the Freeling’s house and
threaten the neighborhood. In fact, Poltergeist projects a view that the most organic,
130 Diagnostic critique and cultural studies
solid and viable social unit and institution in suburban life is the middle-class
nuclear family. Spielberg and his co-workers present very positive and affectionate
scenes of middle-class family life without the satirical or ironic distance of many
contemporary filmmakers (Altman, de Palma, Woody Allen, and other liberal and
radical critics of the family).
After introducing the Freeling family, in another key scene, the kids are tucked
away in bed and Steve and Diane are alone in their bedroom. The wife holds a
marijuana cigarette and talks and giggles about past memories, taking us back
from the 1980s to the 1960s. The scene suggests that the flower children are grown
up, married, and heads of families. The husband, however, is engrossed in a
biography about Ronald Reagan: The President, The Man. The husband eventually
drops the book and starts fooling around with his wife. He plays wild animal,
whispers in her ear and Diane sighs, “Oh, I just love it when you talk dirty!” The
scene cuts to the children in their bedroom: they are awake in fear during a
thunderstorm. In addition to the thunder and lightning, a gothic tree casts weird
shadows throughout the room, a clown grinningly menaces (an iconic image from
Tobe Hooper’s previous film The Funhouse, which will periodically reappear as a
sign of menace), and the poltergeists begin knocking things around.
The next night during an even more powerful thunderstorm, branches of a giant
tree take the young son Robbie out of the bedroom window and his parents
desperately retrieve him from the forces of raging nature. At this point, Carol Anne
disappears, the family enters a state of panic, and the film enters the realm of
occultist allegory. Poltergeist presents allegorical spectacles of a family holding
together in the face of adverse experiences that threaten to pull it apart. The scenes
of separation throughout the movie express fear of impending disintegration of the
family and fear of separation from the haven of the family. As the poltergeists
become more destructive, Carol Anne is spirited away to a nether world, the teenage
daughter spends more and more time with her friends, and the young boy and his
dog are sent away to his grandparents. The father too is pulled away by the demands
of his job, but eventually he chooses the family over his job (i.e. he finally quits his
job and moves away with his family). There are frequent affirmations of love and
strong portrayals of family bonds. The mother, especially, is the moral and physical
center of the family and shows herself ready to risk her life for her children, while
retaining courage in the face of adversity.
Moreover, unlike typical horror films where individuals frequently blunder into
disaster, in Poltergeist the individuals act rationally, cooperatively, and courageously.
The father goes to Stanford and summons a group of parapsychologists who come
to investigate the phenomena and they in turn call in a diminutive woman spiritualist,
Tangina (Zelda Rubinstein), who tells the family how to deal with the poltergeists
and how to get their daughter back. With the spiritualist’s guidance, the mother
enters the spirit world to retrieve her daughter—revealing the depth of her love
and concern for her child. Significantly, it is the women who play the key role in
rescuing Carol Anne—reinforcing traditional images of women as protectors and
nurturers of children.
Anxiety,class,disaffected youth 131
In addition to representing fears of the family being torn apart, Poltergeist deals
with anxieties about losing one’s home, or watching it fall apart. The American
dream has traditionally focused on buying and owning one’s own home and in an
era of accelerating unemployment, a weak economy, and diminishing discretionary
income, fear of losing one’s home, or not being able to maintain it, accelerated
during the 1980s. Stephen King, author of such popular books as Carrie, The
Shining, The Stand, and so on—which themselves are a fertile source of symbolic
allegories about contemporary American anxieties—writes of The Amityville
Horror, a gothic, occult precursor to Poltergeist:
the picture’s subtext is one of economic unease…. Little by little, it is ruining
the Lutz family financially. The movie might as well have been subtitled
‘The Horror of the Shrinking Bank Account’…. The Amityville Horror,
beneath its ghost-story exterior, is really a financial demolition derby.7
Poltergeist too shows a house gradually but inexorably falling apart. Rooms become
uninhabitable, machines and technology either do not work or operate out of the
family’s control, commodities and toys fall apart. Finally, the house literally
collapses and the family must flee. This allegory of the home under siege is part of
the reason that the film was so effective in manipulating its audience: viewers can
identify with this very average middle-class family in a house that constantly gives
them troubles and is eventually taken away from them. This is a contemporary
horror story for current and would-be home owners, many of whom lost their
homes during the Age of Reagan and Bush.
The social horizon of Poltergeist is thus the loss of homes and breaking up of
families during an era of economic insecurity and social fragmentation which saw
many people losing their homes, a divorce-rate of over 50 per cent, and middleand
upper-class people falling into lower-class strata. The discursive field of the
film is both pro-family discourses and the articulation of social anxieties concerning
home and family. The threats to middle-class security are, however, projected onto
the figures of poltergeists which allegorically serve as vehicles of the socioeconomic
forces that were pulling families apart and causing many to lose their
homes and fall into downward mobility.
As it turns out, the source of the poltergeist disturbance is the result of a decision
of the land developing company, for which the father works, to build their project
on top of a graveyard after removing the headstones, but without removing the
corpses. In zombie scenes reminiscent of the horror classic Night of the Living
Dead, the dead arise from the earth and terrorize the neighborhood. The film thus
plays on fears that land developers will destroy the environment and upset delicate
ecological balance—another contemporary worry that is the site of current struggles
to limit growth and suburban development.
Yet the poltergeists also represent fear of racial otherness, and the films can be
read as fear of racial invasion and destruction of suburban middle-class utopia.
The monsters in Poltergeist appear as dark-skinned monstrosities, an otherness to
white middle-class “normality.” Fears of racial others are linked to fears of working132
Diagnostic critique and cultural studies
class others in Poltergeist. Some workers appear early in the plot to toil on a family
swimming pool, itself a symbol of middle-class affluence. The workers are slightly
dark-skinned ethnic types, and appear somewhat uncouth and vaguely threatening.
Two male workers leer at the teenage daughter who responds with obscene gestures
to the mother’s amusement. Soon after, one worker opens the window to drink the
mother’s coffee and snack on some food laying on the drainboard. The mother catches
him and good-humoredly chastises the vaguely threatening worker who she calls
“Bluto” (an odd name, perhaps after the menacing working-class character in Popeye);
a name appropriated by the John Belushi character in Animal House as well.
Horror films thus mobilize fear of the other and draw lines between normality
and abnormality, good and evil. Goodness resides in middle-class familial normality
and Otherness resides in the working-class and racial Others like Native Americans
in the Poltergeist films. From this perspective, the threatening monsters stand in
allegorically for race and class forces threatening middle-class stability. Such
cinematic representations transcode the conservative, yet anxious, pro-family
discourses of the era in their celebration of the family and negative stigmatizing of
otherness.
Another major subtext of the film is fear of television. Carol Anne first comes
under the spell of the poltergeists through the TV set and then disappears—indeed,
how many American children have disappeared into the TV set! The poltergeists
and the disembodied voice of the little girl after she is spirited away communicates
through the TV set just as so many Americans receive their communication from
the outside world through TV. As noted, television static is an iconic image of
disturbance throughout the film, and the television is on constantly. During the
scenes in which the parapsychologists attempt to analyze the situation, state-ofthe-
art video cameras and recorders are placed throughout the house. The
poltergeists are actually recorded and played back on a video-recorder
demonstrating the mechanical reproducibility of everything in media society and
the possibility of instant replay.
The images of video surveillance may also articulate fears that Big Brother is
watching, that new technologies will invade privacy, that a new technological
panopticon is on the way.8 We see here, symbolically portrayed, the power of
television to captivate audiences, spy on people, and become an organizing center
of leisure. The fear that television might eventually totally replace cinema is certainly
one of Hollywood’s greatest fears and perhaps a concern of Spielberg and his
collaborators. In the final scene, when the family has left their ill-fated house and
checks into the Holiday Inn, we see them taking out the TV set and putting it on
the balcony. The audience laughs and claps and the filmmakers grin and everyone
goes home, and sooner or later, probably sooner, turns on the TV.9
The Holiday Inn site at the end reveals the underlying theme of security vs.
insecurity in the film. What could be more secure than the Holiday Inn, that icon
of middle-class sameness where one knows in advance that one will receive the
same room and furnishings anywhere in America? Poltergeist points to intense
middle-class insecurities in the Age of Reagan with growing fears of unemployment,
Anxiety,class,disaffected youth 133
losing one’s home, and losing control over one’s life and possessions. It contains
a panorama of fears of growing powerlessness in the face of corporate power and
greed, an economy out of control and rapid cultural change. It reproduces the fears
of the disintegration of the family exploited by Reagan and the New Right, as well
as fears of television and losing control over one’s children. It reveals the Age of
Reagan to be an era of fear and trembling for both the middle and the working
classes faced with intensifying threats to their livelihood and well-being.10
Poltergeist also lightly plays on fears of teenage sexuality in the scene near the
end when the teenage daughter appears with a large hickey on her neck, which
reflects back on a scene preceding it, when she responds to the news that her
family is going to spend the night at a Holiday Inn with a knowing remark: “Oh, I
remember that place,” and her mother looks on with amused tolerance.11 Earlier,
in the marijuana/bedroom scene, the mother recalls being examined for hickeys
and bruises by her father. Thus, in opposition to the attack on teen sexuality by
sectors of the New Right, Poltergeist seems to project a liberal view of easy sexual
tolerance and acceptance.12
Poltergeist confronts primal fears of bodily disintegration and death as well as
fears specific to the present era. All horror films play on anxieties over rapid change
in which life goes out of control and either multiplies or mutates at a rapid pace, or
disintegrates and falls apart with frightening speed and intensity. Horror films
present horrifying images of life gone berserk and manipulate fears that we have
of disease, bodily disintegration, and death. One striking sequence in Poltergeist
allegorically confronts a contemporary version of the universal fear of bodily
mutation: fear of cancer in an age where one out of four people will fall prey to this
dread disease, and one out of five will die from it. Many contemporary horror
films play on this fear by showing bodies rapidly mutating, decaying and changing
abnormally. The prevalence of images of rapid bodily mutation in recent horror
films symbolically portrays, I believe, representations of cancer at work in speeded
up motion like those Walt Disney nature films that used to show the growth of
plants and animals with time-lapse photography. If this intuition is correct, then
deep-rooted fear of cancer and bodily disintegration accounts for part of the
fascination and horror with which the audience watches bodies bizarrely mutate
during horror films. Poltergeist, for instance, shows a young Stanford scientist go
to the kitchen and take a steak out of the refrigerator. We see the piece of meat
undergo cancerlike metastasis, spewing out bizarre growths and organs before our
eyes. The frightened scientist goes into the bathroom and washes his face, then
looks into the mirror only to see his face mutate into rotting flesh. Although this
hallucination disappears, he leaves the house and does not return.
Likewise, the most spectacular scenes of the dead returning to life in Poltergeist
confront us with disintegrating flesh that literally embody fears of death and
disintegration. We also see the mother grey prematurely after her trip to the spirit
world—another symbolic presentation of fear of rapid aging. Finally, the film plays
on hopes for afterlife and fears that it may be hellish—one of the sources of power
of fundamentalist religion—by depicting an afterlife and showing that it is populated
134 Diagnostic critique and cultural studies
by monsters who torment those who are not the elect and do not make it to the realm
of spiritual salvation which the film holds out as a blissful reward for the saved.
Poltergeist thus presents a panorama of symbolic images of contemporary
American nightmares. It achieves its power by drawing on real fears which it
presents in symbolic form that allows people to experience their subconscious
anxieties in the safe medium of film in an ideology machine that smoothes over
and tranquilizes their fears by showing the family pulling through. Poltergeist
presents the landscape of contemporary consciousness more powerfully than the
fairy tale E.T., revealing the contours of American consciousness in the Age of
Reagan to be fearful, consumer and family oriented, and ready to believe and do
anything in order to survive.
Although Poltergeist hints that corporate capitalism is rapacious, destroying
the earth, exploiting people, and even threatening human survival, the real source
of contemporary anxieties is displaced onto the occult. Hence, while Poltergeist
and other recent horror films contain allegories about contemporary anxieties, the
audience is directed by the film toward spectacles of occult horror rather than the
horror show of contemporary life in the United States. The irrationalist-occultist
metaphysics in films like E.T. and Poltergeist therefore weaken the social insights
present in the films and strengthen the rampant irrationalism in U.S. society manifest
in religious revivalism, cults, new age spiritualism, and so on.
In fact, several of Spielberg’s major films are permeated with the fuzzy-minded
occultism that T.W.Adorno shrewdly characterized as “the metaphysics of dopes”
(1974:24). Although Spielberg and company’s excursions into the supernatural
allow individuals to experiences anxieties in a symbolic form that they might not
be able to face in a more realist narrative form, his 1980s films tend to project real
fears onto threats by evil spirits, and focus hope on deliverance by some beneficent
extra-terrestrials (Close Encounters, E.T.), or superheroes like Indiana Jones in
Raiders of the Lost Ark. Spielberg’s ideology machines all too often summon his
audience to escapist fantasies, conservative affirmation of middle-class values,
traditional mythic heroes, and the forms of traditional popular culture. Unlike the
more critical Hollywood filmmakers who dissect dominant myths and question
dominant values (i.e. Altman, Scorsese, Allen, and so on), Spielberg is a storyteller
and mythmaker who affirms both the opposing poles of middle-class values and
lifestyles as well as a transcendent occultism.
The turn to the occult in post-Exorcist (1973) Hollywood film represents an
ideological crisis in American society by presenting a society in crisis whose
institutions are under attack by a variety of forces. Some of the most popular horroroccult
films (The Exorcist, The Omen, Carrie, The Amityville Horror, The Shining,
and so on) portray a disintegrating society incapable of dealing with the evils
presented in the films. If there is any salvation, or a solution to the problems depicted,
in most of these and other Hollywood “blockbuster” films, it appears
transcendentally in the form of aliens or extra-terrestrials, the church or the spirit
world, or superheroes from other worlds or other times like Superman, Batman,
Conan, or Indiana Jones. The appeal to the past, or to the transcendental, for heroes,
Anxiety,class,disaffected youth 135
values and legitimation does not, however, effectively legitimate the institutions of
the existing society, and points to a legitimation crisis in contemporary American
society (Habermas 1975).
Poltergeist, it is true, does attempt to positively portray the family and middleclass
lifestyles, but there are ideological contradictions in Spielberg’ s work between
attempts to celebrate existing middle-class institutions and values in contrast with
the search for salvation from extra-terrestrials, or spiritualism. There are also hints in
his films that existing institutions and values lack vitality. In Close Encounters, the
husband abandons his family to pursue his fantasy of making contact with the aliens
in the U.F.O.’s; in E.T., the absence of the father (separated from the mother and in
Mexico with a new girlfriend) can be seen as a psychological reason for the boy to
turn for friendship and love to the extra-terrestrial; and while in Poltergeist, we have
a particularly strong portrait of the family as a viable institution, the rest of the dominant
institutions, and especially the corporation, are presented in a critical light.
Thus, although an ideology of the family emerges from Poltergeist, the film
does not provide ideological legitimation of the American political economy. In
this light, the turn to the occult and transcendent-spiritual values in recent Hollywood
films discloses a failure of the culture industries to provide effective ideological
legitimation for contemporary American capitalism. Nonetheless, whatever one
thinks of Spielberg’s occultism, or his affirmation of middle-class values, his work
is valuable for shedding light on contemporary U.S. society and revealing the fears,
hopes, and fantasies of the new affluent, suburban middle class. In Steven Spielberg,
the new middle class has found its storyteller and ideologue. His fantasies are
permeated with ideologies that should be probed, decoded and criticized by those
interested in understanding U.S. society and culture in the contemporary era.
Poltergeist II and the crisis of patriarchy
The original Poltergeist is brilliantly produced, combining Tobe Hooper’s taste for
the macabre and striking images with Spielberg’s cinematic talents. The fluid camera
is constantly moving throughout the film, producing striking images and
juxtapositions; the lighting creates some stunning effects of the supernatural; editing
is fast-paced, and the film is gripping throughout. Brian Gibson’s Poltergeist II:
The Other Side (1986), by contrast, is cinematically mediocre and its contrived
“plot” travels further into the occult and supernatural. Yet the film’s silly occultism
provides an allegory of middle-class fears and I interrogate it from this perspective.
Carol Clover (1992) points out how women are privileged in the first Poltergeist
film. The daughter and mother are presented as possessing more intuitive and
clairvoyant powers, the chief parapsychologist is a woman, as is the medium,
presenting women as the more powerful figures. The father is shown to be helpless,
and is usually depicted looking on from the sidelines, while the women control the
discourse and events (only the women, for instance, participate in a long discussion
of death and the afterlife). Clover fails to analyze, however, how the film articulates
a crisis of patriarchy brought about by the strong women who threaten the power
136 Diagnostic critique and cultural studies
of the father, providing a need for him to reaffirm his power and overcome the
crisis of patriarchy in the second Poltergeist film. Her intent focus on the important
role of gender in the contemporary horror film also occludes the importance of
the role of class and race, just as her argument that the horror film often privileges
women over men covers over the importance of the resurrection of male power
in Poltergeist II.13
Indeed, whereas the father was rather marginal in the first Poltergeist,
he is central to the second one. The film opens a year later, with the father
out of work and the family living with his wife’s mother. The father indicates
how much he misses his job and how he wishes that they could return to
their home. He complains about the failure of the insurance company to
reimburse them for the loss of their house, articulating contemporary
anxieties concerning bureaucratic institutions and corporations. He also
jokes about his “downward mobility,” yet he is portrayed as being
completely ineffectual and pathetic, unable to better himself. Hence, the
family is forced to live in the mother-in-law’s house and the father seems
to be unable to do anything to get the insurance company to reimburse
them for the loss of their house, nor is he able to get back his old job. Thus,
the family represents a thoroughgoing crisis of patriarchy and articulates
male fears of losing house, job, and self-respect in a declining economy
and disintegrating social order.
In the narrative of the film, the Freeling family is once again threatened by
the loss of their daughter, this time through the intervention of a mysterious
preacher named Kane, played by Mien Beck, who was at the time dying of cancer
and projected a gaunt, haunting, ghastly figure.14 Kane is represented as an evil
demon who is trying to abduct Carol Anne into the spirit world, and he is
representative of an uneducated and malevolent working-class figure, a cross
between the shyster preacher played by Robert Mitchum in Night of the Hunter
and the southern thug who threatens the middle class in standard Hollywood
horror and crime dramas.
In the occult plot, Kane is a cult religious leader who led a group of
fundamentalist fanatics to California during the last century. They dwelled in a
cavern, underneath the current Freeling house, believing that the world was
coming to an end. The members of the religious sect, however, had a collective
change of mind and attempt to climb out of the cave when the predicted end of
the world passed, but they were trapped as Kane had sealed the entrance with a
stone. The sect was rumored to have been killed by Native Americans, but, in the
occult plot, their spirits continue to reside fitfully in the cave beneath the graveyard
over which the Freeling’s house was built, unable to go to “the other side.” The
spirits are attracted to Carol Anne, who they see as good and innocent, and able
to lead them “into the light,” to take them to “the other side.” By comparison,
the evil Kane—presented as a devil figure—seems to want to spirit Carol Anne
into the poltergeist world in order to use his power over her to regain control
over his “flock.” From this perspective, Kane represents the irrational,
Anxiety,class,disaffected youth 137
authoritarian working-class patriarchy that Steve Freeling must overcome to be
a good middle-class father and husband.
Read allegorically, the poltergeist disturbances are thus overdetermined, focusing
on spirits of the dead angry over the desecration of the burial site in the first
Poltergeist, and on poor whites in the second. The images of the poor white religious
sect members, trapped in the cave, represent the fears of the middle-class, anxious
that downward mobility might push them into a similar forlorn state. The flashback
images of the poor whites thus subliminally warn the audience that they too could
fall into this condition. Cumulatively, the images of the spirits of poor whites and
the dead haunting the white middle class transcode its fears and anxieties in an era
of economic and social insecurity of invasion by other races and classes.
Poltergeist II thus continues the probing of contemporary fears concerning race,
class, gender, and sexuality, even more starkly and extravagantly than the first
Poltergeist. The film was released in 1986, during a Reagan recession in which
fear of unemployment, of losing one’s home, and of loss of control over one’s life
was growing. Once again, technology is shown out of control, with an early scene
showing a vacuum cleaner refusing to behave, and throughout the film, the father’s
car is breaking down, perhaps articulating fears of loss or failure of one’s
automobile, a special token of prestige and power for the middle class. Now the
family is threatened both by the spirits of the poor whites wanting out of their
spirit dimension and the spirits over whose graveyard the house was built. Together,
the Poltergeist films thus allegorically represent fears that monsters from lower
classes and other races will destroy middle-class suburban utopia.
Once again, the poltergeists come to haunt the family and once again it is the
women that are in touch with the spirit world. The film introduces the grandmother
(played by Geraldine Fitzgerald), whose house the Freelings are living in, who
also possesses occult power and communicates throughout the film from “the other
side” with Carol Anne after her death. But this time the father too must deal with
the spirits and prove himself “man” enough to lead the family. At one point, the
preacher Kane shows up, and rants at Steve:
“Who do your wife and family turn to with their problems? They turn to him
[Taylor], now don’t they? They don’t trust you any more, and what you fear
is that you’re not man enough to hold this family together! Now, let me in.
Let me in!”
The father is aided by Taylor, a Native American (Will Sampson) who appears as
a “magic helper” (a traditional fairy tale motif) and who lectures him on his
responsibilities and need to take charge. In one scene, the father goes off to a
“sweat lodge” ceremony with the Native American, a scene of male bonding where
the father presumably retrieves some of his lost patriarchal power. He is given a
feather, which he proudly displays as a totem of his lost and hopefully to be regained
patriarchal power.15
Yet the father is still lacking power and resolve and in one key scene he turns to
the spirits of alcohol, getting drunk on a bottle of tequila, the type with the worm
138 Diagnostic critique and cultural studies
in the bottle. In the occult plot shift, Kane inserts himself into the worm, to use the
weak father to spirit away his daughter. The father swallows the worm and becomes
demonically “possessed.” The possession takes the form of a violent desire to
have sex with his wife, whom he attempts to rape when she declines. In a violent
struggle with the monster, the worm comes out of the father’s mouth, now in the
form of a giant snake, who—after a grotesque birthing metamorphosis—assumes
the form of Kane! The figure of the worm/snake/monster/Kane symbolizes dangers
of out-of-control working class sexuality and equates Kane with monstrous and
threatening power.16
The father, however, eventually redeems himself and once again takes control
of his family. The family bonds together to return to Cuesta Verde, the scene of
their destroyed home. They go together in the cave under their house where Kane
and his followers are trapped. The evil spirits seize Carol Anne and her mother, but
with the help of the Native American, Taylor, the father and the son go to “the
other side” to retrieve the mother and daughter. The father thus proves that he is
worthy of re-assuming patriarchal power and restores the family to unity. After
escaping the cave, the family is shown once again in their old neighborhood,
presumably to resume their happy and affluent suburban life.
The father has thus reconstituted his identity as leader of the family and reestablished
a male authority in touch with the irrational, traditional, and heroic to
become a proper middle-class patriarch. Likewise, the family is reconstituted as a
positive and integral unit, overcoming threats and challenges to its integrity. Unlike
the horror films of an earlier era that showed the family producing monstrosities
and horror, the family in the Poltergeist films survives threats from the monsters
who are outside “others” and threats to middle-class normality. Such films thus
present ideological defenses and celebrations of the middle-class nuclear family.17
DIAGNOSTIC CRITIQUE: FROM POLTERGEIST TO SLACKERS
AND BEAVIS AND BUTT-HEAD
In my reading of the Poltergeist films, the poltergeists represent threatening class
and racial others who menace middle-class normality and the films articulate
contemporary fears of the middle-class family in an uncertain economy and
disintegrating social order. The two films show middle-class life as out of control
and threatened with dissolution. Yet the re-establishment of patriarchal order brings
the family back together. The most poignant images of Poltergeist II show the
family framed together in single shots, bonding collectively as a united familial
unit. Both of these films show families being torn apart and coming back together,
a cinematic fantasy in an era in which real families were torn apart by a disintegrating
economy and social order. Indeed, losing one’s house and job and being threatened
by crime and downward mobility were and still are all-too-real fears in the
contemporary United States, so perhaps audiences could symbolically confront
such fears only in genres like the horror film, rather than realist drama. Indeed,
who would want to watch a drama of a family losing job, home, and then being
Anxiety,class,disaffected youth 139
torn apart, an event which has become all too familiar during the past decade of
permanent economic crisis.
From another perspective, the Poltergeist films, like conservative films such
as The Big Chill, represent the end of the 1960s. In the first Poltergeist, the
mother and father smoke dope and make love in one scene; the 1960s generation
has grown up, married, and now live affluent lifestyles in the suburbs. In
Poltergeist II, the wife tells the husband that “You were never a hippie,” that the
husband just assumed hip attitudes to impress another girl. A significant scene
revolves around the mother cutting roses in the garden and remembering planting
the roses with her mother when she was a girl—a poignant image of the continuity
of the generations which some 1960s radicals wanted to rupture. In the Poltergeist
films, the 1960s are now dead and buried: relentless traditionalism and celebration
of the family have returned with a vengeance and Hollywood is only too happy
to return to conservative institutions like the middle-class family which it has
traditionally celebrated.
Yet all is not happy in the home of the brave and the land of the free and to
discover articulations of contemporary class dynamics in the Hollywood cinema,
one must deal with genres like the horror and fantasy film to fully experience the
vicissitudes of class in the contemporary era and the deep anxieties around class
downward mobility, perhaps the American nightmare. Horror and fantasy can deal
with thematics too painful and disturbing to be confronted in social realist genres.
But while horror and fantasy can be deployed to criticize existing institutions, they
can also deflect attention from the real sources of contemporary suffering onto
occult figures. This is the ideological function of the Poltergeist films which are
conservative celebrations of middle-class normality that, read diagnostically, can
reveal the threats to the family which it is the purpose of the film to patch over. The
project of the Poltergeist films is thus ultimately to suture the spectator into desire
for typical middle-class life after allowing experience of threats to it to be played
out. The films are thus symptomatic of the right turn in U.S. culture after 1960s
radical critique and political movements put in question institutions such as the
family and patriarchy.
The Slacker effect
And so where does this situation leave the younger generation? For insight into
the plight of contemporary youth, one can look to Richard Linklater’s Slacker
(1990) and Dazed and Confused (1993) and to the 1993–4 MTV phenomenon
Beavis and Butt-Head. Slacker is probably the quintessential cinematic dissection
of the plight of the twenty-something post–1960s generation of disaffected youth,
bombarded with media culture and alienated from the conservative hegemony of
“straight” middle-class society. The youth of Slacker all live on the margins of
society and pursue off-beat lifestyles, refusing to play the game of academic
success, career, marriage, and family espoused by the mainstream, and celebrated
in the Poltergeist films.
140 Diagnostic critique and cultural studies
The film pursues a day in the life of Austin, Texas youth during the late 1980s.
The narrative opens with director Rick Linklater arriving in Austin on a bus. He
embarks at the bus station and gets into a taxi where he proceeds to recount the
“weird” dream he has just had and philosophizes concerning the possibility of
alternative universes and lives, consisting of choices not made, which he had just
read in a book. The film then pursues an aleatory itinerary in which one character
accidentally encounters another and the narrative proceeds to trek each new
character, leaving the previous ones behind. The result is a vision of youth leading
aimless, disconnected lives, wandering from one scene and situation to another
without specific goals, or purpose.
Yet the young slackers are in a totally media-saturated society in which the
products of media culture provide the basis of their conversations, fantasies, and
lives. A political conspiracy buff tells of government conspiracies and cover-ups
from the space program, referencing World Weekly New; another speculates on
Live Elvis; an agitated young woman tries to sell Madonna’s pap smear, complete
with black pubic hair; another slacker recounts statistics indicating the lack of a
genuine mandate for Bush in the 1988 presidential election, which it turns out,
come from the Dallas Morning News; a young black sells “Free Mandela” T-shirts
and pamphlets, while doing a political rap derived from media cliches; a video
artist/activist has a room full of TV sets and videotapes, trying to capture everything
on tape; the local music scene is a major sources of interest and entertainment, as
are movies and television; two slackers philosophize about the cartoons Scooby
Doo and the Smurfs in a cafe; and many of the characters spout fragments of pop
philosophy derived from media culture.18
The slackers, however, appropriate media culture for their own ends, turning
articles from conservative media sources into material for radical social and political
critique, while using media technology for their own purposes (as does obviously
director Linklater and his team). The slackers are not passive products of media
effects, but active participants in a media culture who use media to produce meaning,
pleasure, and identity in their lives. The ubiquitous T-shirts often have logos or
images derived from media culture, and TV and music are constant backgrounds
for the cinematic events of the film.
Thus, the media form the very fabric of the slackers’ lives and allow diagnostic
critique to discern that for many segments of youth today media culture is their
culture. Previous studies of media effects were too restricted in their
(pseudo)scientific research methods and thus failed to see how media culture
circulates images, artifacts, information, and identities which are appropriated by
audiences which use the media culture to create their pleasures and identities.
Researchers concluded too quickly that media culture had no discernible and
measurable effects because their experimental situations were too artificial and
their methods inappropriate to tap into the texture of everyday life to see how
people actually use the media to produce meanings, pleasures, and identities.
Slacker thus allows a diagnostic critique of how media culture saturates
contemporary youth culture and provides the materials from which young people
Anxiety,class,disaffected youth 141
produce meanings, identities, and bondings. In a sense the film presents a
“postmodern” vision of the plight of contemporary youth.19 The youth are lost in
the moment and seemingly live completely fragmented and disconnected lives,
going from one activity to another through largely accidental mediations. No one
seems to have any long term plans or projects, and all seem to only live for the
moment, drifting through life as if in a dream with no dreamer.
Yet as the characters in the film wander from one scene to another, and as some
characters leave the frame, while others enter, one gets a sense of something of a
Slacker community in which the Slackers are connected to each other, even if
temporarily or minimally. Yet the community consists of nomadic wanderings,
accidental connections, unstructured comings and goings, and a vision of life as
consisting of disconnected moments of euphoric intensity, punctuated with periods
of banality and meaninglessness.
The style of Slacker thus utilizes the postmodern strategy of fragmenting and
disconnecting narrative unity, presenting a series of slices of barely connected
lives, meandering through the surface of things, without any depth or deeper
meaning. A young man picks up a young woman outside of a music club, takes her
home, and we see her get out of bed and leave the next morning, while the roommate
watches TV in the same room, without any dialogue shown passing between the
characters.
The film thus explores surfaces and while there are moments of great humor
and intense conversation, there is no character development, plot development and
resolution, or the production of deep meanings that link sequences, or tie the
narrative strands together. Moreover, Linklater pastiches modernist movies, as where
he draws on Luis Buñuel’s modernist film The Milky Way (1969) as the principle
of narrative (dis)organization of the film (I define modernism in more detail in
Chapter 5). Buñuel’s film presented the voyage of religious pilgrims on their way
to Spain in a timeless space and placeless time, in which the main characters
encounter one eccentric figure after another, who soon disappear as another strange
person enters the narrative sequence. Slacker also presents a world of accidental
connections and absurdist juxtapositions, though while Buñuel’s film had some
main characters who remained in the narrative, and utilized allegorical probing of
Christian myths, Slacker has no main characters, with each slacker disappearing
after her/his few moments of narrative focus, and the film eschews allegory or
symbolic meaning.
Slacker’s concluding sequence plays with Godard’s One Plus One, substituting
for Godard’s black revolutionaries proclaiming revolution a “Post-modern Paul
Revere” (as described in the titles) riding in a car with loudspeakers, describing a
government weapons program. And while the end of Godard’s film shows his
camera apparatus on the beach, scooping up his then wife Anne Wiazemsky and
raising her to the sky in a fade-out, in a delirious romantic image of transcendence
through love and cinema, Slacker shows a group of all-night party animals driving
up to Mount Bonnell, the highest point of Austin, with a movie camera which they
throw off the cliff. The camera pans to the cover of Paul Goodman’s book Growing
142 Diagnostic critique and cultural studies
up Absurd before spiralling images of the camera swirling down the cliff cut to
black in a nihilistic conclusion that nothing really matters in a totally absurd world,
neither love, nor cinema, nor creativity, nor transcendence of any sort.
Yet in another sense, Slacker represents a modernist auteur with a distinctive
vision and style which adds up to a sharp, insightful view of the plight of
contemporary youth, alienated from the American dream and traditional American
values, floating on the media surfaces of contemporary life with their attention
focused and shaped by media culture. The film was financed on a very low budget
and shares the innovative ethos of the independent film. In an early scene in an
Austin coffee house, a student picks up a copy of Hal Foster’s collection of essays
on postmodern culture, The Anti-Aesthetic (1983), and a copy of Marshall Berman’s
book on modernity and modernist culture, All That is Solid Melts Into Air (1982),
is visible on a table. The two books articulate opposing contemporary aesthetic
evaluations (i.e. modernism vs. postmodernism). I would argue that Linklater
combines modernist and postmodernist aesthetic strategies and that the film is
thus between the modern and the postmodern.20
Moreover, Slacker’s vision of multiple possibilities of life, with a wide range of
individuals producing their own meanings, might have emancipatory effects. The
characters are not conforming or submitting to an over-arching structure of
domination, and while they all get opinions and images from the media, they process
them in their own individual and idiosyncratic ways. Such a vision especially
appealed to young audiences and Slacker was felt deeply, producing distinctive
“Slacker effects” (see my earlier study of the Rambo effect). The film became a
cult favorite throughout the country and indeed the world. During the past few
years wherever I go to lecture, someone, upon learning that I live in Austin, mentions
Slacker and how much they love the film. Moreover, in 1993, city officials in
Austin were worried about the large number of homeless youth on the streets and
margins of the city, many of whom had seen Slacker and came to Austin in search
of like-minded cohorts and to pursue the “Slacker” lifestyle, now identified with
Austin.
Thus, Slacker articulated experiences of disaffection of youth from contemporary
U.S. society and produced a new concept to describe contemporary youth,
mythologizing the lifestyles of slackers in Austin, Texas. It obviously tapped into
deep feelings of contemporary youth, striking a highly responsive chord in its
audiences who used the film to articulate their own experiences and feelings. The
success of the film also won Linklater a $6 million Hollywood contract to make
another youth film, Dazed and Confused (1993), which traced a day in the life of
Austin highschool students on graduation day of 1976. Linklater’s “Hollywood”
film presents graduating seniors who also lack any guiding purposes or goals and
who are alienated from their parent’s “straight” middle-class world.
Thus, Linklater’s films present a diagnosis of the situation of youth in an absurd
society in which traditional norms and values no longer have any hold on many of
the young. They present the opportunity for a diagnosis of the situation of
contemporary youth in the U.S.A and suggest that large numbers of young people
Anxiety,class,disaffected youth 143
are disconnected and alienated from the mainstream culture celebrated by network
television and conservative Hollywood film. The cult TV show of 1993–4, Beavis
and Butt-Head also presents the opportunity for a diagnostic critique of the plight
of the current generation of youth in a situation of downward mobility.
Beavis and Butt-Head: no future for postmodern youth
Animated cartoon characters Beavis and Butt-Head sit in a shabby house much of
the day, watching television, especially music videos, which they criticize in terms
of whether the videos are “cool” or “suck.” When they leave the house to go to
school, to work in a fast food joint, or to seek adventure, they often engage in
destructive and even criminal behavior. Developed for MTV by animated cartoonist
Mike Judge, the series spoofs precisely the sort of music videos played by the
music television channel.21 Beavis and Butt-Head quickly became a cult favorite,
loved by youth, yet elicited spirited controversy when some young fans of the
show imitated typical Beavis and Butt-Head activity, burning down houses, and
torturing and killing animals.22
The series provides a critical vision of the current generation of youth raised
primarily on media culture. This generation was possibly conceived in the sights
and sounds of media culture, weaned on it, and socialized by the glass teat of
television used as pacifier, baby sitter, and educator by a generation of parents for
whom media culture, especially television, was a natural background and
constitutive part of everyday life. The show depicts the dissolution of a rational
subject and perhaps the end of the Enlightenment in today’s media culture. Beavis
and Butt-Head react viscerally to the videos, snickering at the images, finding
representations of violence and sex “cool,” while anything complex which requires
interpretation “sucks.” Bereft of any cultivated taste, judgment, or rationality, and
without ethical or political values, the characters react in a literally mindless fashion
and appear to lack almost all cognitive and communicative skills.
The intense alienation of Beavis and Butt-Head, their love for heavy metal
culture and media images of sex and violence, and their violent cartoon activity
soon elicited heated controversy, producing a “Beavis and Butt-Head” effect that
has elicited literally thousands of articles and heated debates, even leading to U.S.
Senate condemnations of the show for promoting mindless violence and stupid
behavior.23 From the beginning, there was intense media focus on the show and
strongly opposed opinions of it. In a cover story on the show, Rolling Stone declared
them “The Voice of a New Generation” (August 19, 1993) and Newsweek also put
them on its cover, both praising them and damning them by concluding: “The
downward spiral of the living white male surely ends here: in a little pimple named
Butt-head whose idea of an idea is, ‘Hey, Beavis, let’s go over to Stuart’s house
and light one in his cat’s butt”’ (October 11, 1993). “Stupid, lazy, cruel; without
ambitions, without values, without futures” are other terms used in the media to
describe the characters and the series (The Dallas Morning News, August 29, 1993)
and there have been countless calls to ban the show.
Anxiety,class,disaffected youth 145
Indeed, a lottery prize winner in California began a crusade against the series,
after hearing about a cat that was killed when kids put a firecracker in its mouth,
imitating Beavis and Butt-Head’s violence against animals and a suggestion in
one episode that they stick a firecracker in a neighbor boy’s cat (The Hollywood
Reporter, July 16, 1993). Librarians in Westchester, New York ranked Beavis and
Butt-Head high “on a list of movies and television shows that they think negatively
influence youngsters’ reading habits,” because of their attacks on books and frequent
remarks that books, or even words, “suck” (The New York Times, July 11, 1993).
Prison officials in Oklahoma banned the show, schools in South Dakota banned
clothing and other items bearing their likeness (Times Newspapers Limited, October
11, 1993), and a group of Missouri fourth graders started a petition drive to get the
program off the air (Radio TV Reports, October 25, 1993).
Yet the series continued to be highly popular into 1994, and it has spawned a
best-selling album of heavy metal rock, a popular book, countless consumer items,
and movie contracts in the works. Time magazine critic, Kurt Anderson, praised
the series as “the bravest show ever run on national television” (The New York
Times, July 11, 1993) and there is no question but that it has pushed the boundaries
of the permissible on mainstream television to new extremes (some critics would
say to new lows).
In a certain sense, Beavis and Butt-Head is “postmodern” in that it is purely a
product of media culture, with its characters, style, and content almost solely
derivative from previous TV shows. The two characters Beavis and Butt-Head are
a spin-off of Wayne and Garth in Wayne ‘s World, a popular Saturday Nite Live
feature, spun off into popular movies. They also resemble the SCTV characters
Bob and Doug McKenzie, who sit around on a couch and make lewd and crude
remarks while they watch TV and drink beer. Beavis and Butt-Head also take the
asocial behavior of cartoon character Bart Simpson to a more intense extreme.
Their comments on the music videos replicate the popular Comedy Central
Channel’s series Mystery Science Theater 3000, which features two cartoon stick
figures making irreverent comments on god-awful old Hollywood movies and
network television shows. And, of course, the music videos are a direct replication
of MTV’s basic fare.
Beavis and Butt-Head is interesting for a diagnostic critique because the main
characters get all of their ideas and images concerning life from the media and
their entire view of history and the world is entirely derived from media culture.
When they see a costumed rapper wearing an eighteenth-century-style white wig
on a music video, Butt-Head remarks: “He’s dressed up like that dude on the
dollar.” The 1960s is the time of hippies, Woodstock and rock ‘n’ roll for them;
Vietnam is ancient history, collapsed into other American wars. Even the 1950s is
nothing but a series of mangled media cliches: on Nelson, the twins of 1950s teen
idol Ricky Nelson, Butt-Head remarks that: “These chicks look like guys.” Beavis
responds: “I heard that these chicks’ grandpa was Ozzy Osbourne.” And Butt-
Head rejoins: “No way. They’re Elvis’s kids.”
The figures of history are collapsed for Beavis and Butt-Head into media culture
146 Diagnostic critique and cultural studies
and provide material for salacious jokes, which require detailed knowledge of
media culture:
Butt-Head: What happened when Napoleon went to Mount Olive?
Beavis: I don’t know. What?
Butt-Head: Pop-Eye got pissed.
Moreover, Beavis and Butt-Head seem to have no family, living alone in a shabby
house, getting enculturated solely by television and media culture. There are some
references to their mothers and in one episode there is a suggestion that Butt-Head
is not even certain who his father is, thus the series presents a world without fathers.24
School is totally alienating for the two, as is work in a fast-food restaurant. Adult
figures who they encounter are largely white conservative males, or liberal yuppies,
with whom they come into often violent conflict and whose property or goods
they inevitably destroy.
There is a fantasy wish-fulfillment aspect to Beavis and Butt-Head that perhaps
helps account for its popularity: kids often wish that they had no parents and that
they could just sit and watch music videos and go out and do whatever they wanted
to (sometimes we all feel this way). Kids are also naturally disrespectful of authority
and love to see defiance of social forces that they find oppressive. Indeed, Beavis
and Butt-Head’s much maligned, discussed, and imitated laughter (“Heh, heh,
heh” and “Huh, huh”) may signify that in their space they rule, that Beavis and
Butt-Head are sovereign, that they control the television and can do any damn
thing that they want. Notably, they get in trouble in school and other sites of authority
with their laugh, but at home they can laugh and snicker to the max.
And so the series has a utopian dimension: the utopia of no parental authority
and unlimited freedom to do whatever they want when they want to. “Dude, we’re
there” is a favorite phrase they use when they decide to see or do something—and
they never have to ask their (absent) parents’ permission. On the other hand, they
represent the consequences of totally unsocialized adolescent behavior driven by
aggressive instincts.25 Indeed, their “utopia” is highly solipsistic and narcissistic
with no community, no consensual norms or morality to bind them, and no concern
for other people. The vision of the teenagers alone in their house watching TV and
then wreaking havoc on their neighborhood presents a vision of a society of broken
families, disintegrating communities, and anomic individuals, without values or
goals.
Beavis and Butt-Head are thus left alone with TV and become couch-potato
critics, especially of their beloved music videos. In a sense, they are the first media
critics to become cult heros of media culture, though there are contradictions in
their media criticism. Many of the videos that they attack are stupid and pretentious,
and in general it is good to cultivate a critical attitude toward culture forms and to
promote cultural criticism—an attitude that can indeed be applied to much of what
appears on Beavis and Butt-Head. Such critique distances its audience from music
video culture and calls for making critical judgments on its products. Yet Beavis
and Butt-Head’s own judgements are highly questionable, praising images of
Anxiety,class,disaffected youth 147
violence, fire, naked women, and heavy metal noise, while declaring that “college
music,” words, and any complexity in the videos “suck.”
Thus, on one level, the series provides sharp social satire and critique of the
culture and society. The episodes constantly make fun of television, especially
music videos, and other forms of media culture. They criticize conservative authority
figures and wishy-washy liberals. They satirize authoritarian institutions like the
workplace, schools, and military recruitment centers and provide critical
commentary on many features of contemporary life. Yet, the series undercuts some
of its social critique by reproducing the worst sexist, violent, and narcissistic
elements of contemporary life, which are made amusing and even likeable in the
figures of Beavis and Butt-Head.
Consequently, Beavis and Butt-Head is surprisingly complex and requires a
diagnostic critique to analyze its contradictory text and effects. There is no denying,
however, that the Beavis and Butt-Head effect is one of the most significant media
phenomena of recent years.26 Like Linklater, Judge has obviously tapped into a
highly responsive chord and created a media sensation with the characters of Beavis
and Butt-Head serving as powerfully resonant images. In 1993, while lecturing on
cultural studies, wherever I would go audiences would ask me what I thought of
Beavis and Butt-Head and so I eventually began to watch it and to incorporate
remarks on the series into my lectures.27 If I was critical or disparaging, young
members of the audience would attack me and after a lecture at the University of
Kansas, a young man came up, incredulous that I would dare to criticize the series,
certain that Mike Judge was a great genius who understood exactly how it was for
contemporary youth, with no prospects for a job or career, and little prospect for
even marriage and family and a meaningful life. In this situation, I was told, what
else can young people do except watch MTV and occasionally go out and destroy
something?
In a sense, the series thus enacts youth and class revenge against older, middleclass
and conservative adults, who appear as oppressive authority figures. Their
neighbor Tom Anderson—depicted as a conservative World War II and Korean
war veteran—is a special butt of their escapades and they cut down trees in his
yard with a chain saw, which, of course, causes the tree to demolish his house,
assorted fences, power lines, and cars. They put his dog in a laundro-mat washing
machine to clean it; they steal his credit card to buy animals at the mall; they lob
mud baseballs into his yard, one of which hits his barbecque; and otherwise torment
him. Beavis and Butt-Head also blow up an Army recruiting station with a grenade,
as the officer attempts to recruit them; they steal the cart of a wealthy man, Billy
Bob, who has a heart attack when he sees them riding off in his vehicle; and they
love to put worms, rats, and other animals in the fast food that they are shown
giving to obnoxious white male customers in the burger joint where they work.
Beavis and Butt-Head also love to trash the house of their “friend” Stewart
whose yuppie parents indulgently pamper their son and his playmates. Stewart’s
permissive liberal parents are shown to be silly and ineffectual, as when his father
complains that Stewart violated his parents’ trust when he let Beavis and Butt148
Diagnostic critique and cultural studies
Head in the house after they caused an explosion which blew the wall out. The
mother gushes about how cute they are and offers them lemonade—in fact, few
women authority figures are depicted.
The dynamic duo also torment and make fun of their liberal hippie teacher, Mr
Van Driessen, who tries to teach them to be politically correct. They destroy his
irreplaceable eight-track music collection when he offers to let them clean his
house to learn the value of work and money. When he takes them camping to get in
touch with their feelings and nature, they fight and torment animals. In fact, they
rebel against all their teachers and authority figures and are thus presented in
opposition to everyone, ranging from conservative males, to liberal yuppies, to
hippie radicals.
Moreover, the series presents the revenge of youth and those who are terminally
downwardly mobile against more privileged classes and individuals. Like the punk
generation before them, Beavis and Butt-Head have no future. Thus, while their
behavior is undeniably juvenile, offensive, sexist, and politically incorrect, it allows
diagnosis of underclass and downwardly mobile youth who have nothing to do,
but to destroy things and engage in asocial behavior.
From this perspective, Beavis and Butt-Head is an example of media culture as
popular revenge:28 Beavis and Butt-Head avenge youth and the downwardly mobile
against those oppressive authority figures who they confront daily. Most of the
conservative men have vaguely Texan, or Southwestern, accents, so perhaps the
male authority figures represent oppressive males experienced by Judge in his
own youth in San Diego, New Mexico and Texas. Moreover, Beavis and Butt-
Head’s violence is that of a violent society in which the media present endless
images of the sort of violent activities that the two characters regularly engage in.
The series thus points to the existence of a large teenage underclass with no future
which is undereducated and potentially violent. The young underclass Beavis and
Butt-Heads of the society have nothing to look forward to in life save a job at the
local 7–Eleven, waiting to get held up at gunpoint. Consequently, the series is a
social hieroglyphic which allows us to decode the attitudes, behavior, and situation
of large segments of youth in contemporary U.S. society.
For a diagnostic critique, then, it is wrong to simply excuse the antics of Beavis
and Butt-Head as typical behavior of the young. Likewise, it is not enough simply
to condemn them as pathological.29 Rather the series reveals how violent society is
becoming and the dead-end futures of downwardly mobile youth from broken
homes who are undereducated and have no real job possibilities or future. Indeed,
the heavy metal culture in which Beavis and Butt-Head immerse themselves is a
way for those caught up in deadend lives to blot everything out, to escape in a
world of pure noise and aggression, and in turn to express their own aggression
and frustrations through heavy metal “head-banging.” Thus, when Beavis and Butt-
Head play the “air guitar,” imitating heavy metal playing during the music videos,
they are signalling both their aggression and the hopelessness of their situation.
Beavis and Butt-Head’s narcissism and sociopathic behavior is a symptom of a
society that is not providing adequate nurture or support to its citizens. It is indeed
Anxiety,class,disaffected youth 149
curious that many of the most popular media culture figures could easily be clinically
diagnosed and analyzed as narcissistic: Rush Limbaugh, Andrew Dice Clay, Howard
Stern, and other popular media figures are examples of empty, insecure, and hostile
individuals who resort to extreme behavior and assertions to call attention to
themselves. In turn, they tap into audience aggression and frustrations and become
popular precisely because of their ability to articulate inchoate social anger. Indeed,
compared to a Rush Limbaugh, Beavis and Butt-Head are relatively modest and
restrained in their narcissism.
Beavis and Butt-Head, Rush Limbaugh, and other figures of contemporary U.S.
media culture also think they know things, but are know-nothings in the good old
tradition of American anti-intellectualism. These figures are basically buffoons,
sometimes entertaining and often offensive, who in the classical syndrome of
narcissism are empty, insecure, and aggressive. They masquerade their emptiness
and insecurity in verbal bravado and aggressiveness and attention-seeking action.
They also display classic symptoms of fear of women, who they continually objectify,
and engage in puerile and infantile sexual jokes and gesture. Beavis and Butt-Head
are classic teenagers whose hormones are out of control and who cannot control
them, and their elders like Howard Stern and Andrew Dice Clay exhibit similar
symptoms. These figures of popular entertainment are all white boys, incapable of
taking the position of the other, of empathizing with the other, or of respecting
differences. They are all extremely homophobic, though Beavis and Butt-Head are
obviously repressing homosexual proclivities signalled in all the “butt” jokes, “suck”
references, and Butt-Head’s injunction: “Hey, Beavis pull my finger.”
In a sense, Beavis and Butt-Head is an example of what has been called “loser
television,” surely a new phenomenon in television history. Previous television
series tended to depict wealthy, or secure middle-class, individuals and families,
often with highly glamorous lives. It was believed that advertisers preferred affluent
environments to sell their products and so the working class and underclass were
excluded from network television for decades. Indeed, during the Reaganite 1980s,
programs like Dallas, Dynasty, and Life Styles of the Rich and Famous celebrated
wealth and affluence. This dream has been punctured by the reality of everyday
life in a downsliding economy, and so a large television audience is attracted to
programs that articulate their own frustration and anger in experiencing downward
mobility and a sense of no future. Hence, the popularity of new “loser television,”
including The Simpsons, Roseanne, and Beavis and Butt-Head.
Thus, the MTV show Beavis and Butt-Head allows a diagnostic critique of the
plight of contemporary youth in disintegrating families, with little education, and
with no job possibilities. Beavis and Butt-Head’s destructiveness can be seen in
part as an expression of their hopelessness and alienation and shows the dead-end
prospects for many working-class and middle-class youths. Moreover, the series
also replicates the sort of violence that is so widespread in the media from heavy
metal rock videos to TV entertainment and news. Thus, the characters’ violence
simply mirrors growing youth violence in a disintegrating society and allows the
possibility of a diagnostic critique of the social situation of contemporary youth.
150 Diagnostic critique and cultural studies
Yet the show is highly violent and has already had spectacular violence effects.
In the Liquid Television animated short that preceded the series, Judge shows Beavis
and Butt-Head playing “frog baseball,” splattering frogs and bashing each other
with baseball bats (an image immortalized on one of many Beavis and Butt-Head
t-shirts). In other shows, they use lighters to start fires, blow up a neighbor’s house
by sniffing gas from the stove and then lighting it, and engage in multifarious
other acts of mayhem and violence. A Los Angeles area school teacher discovered
that about 90 percent of her class watched the show and invited a local fire
department official to speak to her class
after several students wrote about playing with fire and explosives in their
autobiographical sketches. Some examples: “A major ‘Beavis and Butt-Head’
fan, Jarrod Metchikoff, 12, used to ‘line them (firecrackers) up in a tube and
shoot them in the sewer pipe’ until his mother found out. Brett Heimstra, 12,
said he set off firecrackers in manholes and sewers until his mother discovered
them and he ‘heard some stuff about how it’s dangerous.’ Elizabeth Hastings,
12, said she knows a boy who lights firecrackers in portable toilets.
(Los Angeles Times, October 16, 1993).
The fire official told the students “about a 10–year-old Orange County boy who
lost use of his hand after an explosion caused by WD–40 and a cigarette lighter”
(ibid.). After the initial reports of cruelty to animals and fans of the show starting
fires (see note 22), many more such reports came in. The fire chief in Sidney,
Ohio, “blamed MTV’s cartoon for a house fire started by three girls” (The Plain
Dealer, October 14, 1993). Further: “Austin, Texas, investigators say three fires
started by kids may have some connection to the show” (U.S.A Today, October 15,
1993). And Houston teenage fans of the show were blamed for setting fires near
the Galleria mall (Radio TV Reports, October 25, 1993).
Intense criticism of the show’s violence—and Congressional threats to regulate
TV violence—led MTV to move back its playtime to later in the evening and there
was a promise not to replay the more violent episodes, or to show Beavis and Butt-
Head starting fires, or Beavis shouting “Fire! Fire!” but the series had already
become part of a national mythology and its popularity continued apace.30 Indeed,
media culture is drawn to violence and taboo-breaking action to draw audiences in
an ever-more competitive field. Thus, the program’s excesses are directly related
to a competitive situation in which commercial media are driven to show ever
more violent and extreme behavior in the intense pressures for high profits—a
trend that many believe will accelerate as the number of TV channels grows and
competition becomes fiercer.
And so we see how media culture taps into its audience’s concerns and in turn
becomes part of a circuit of culture, with distinctive effects. Media cultural texts
articulate social experiences, transcoding them into the medium of forms like
television, film, or popular music. The texts are then appropriated by audiences,
which use certain resonant texts and images to articulate their own sense of style,
look, and identity. Media culture provides resources to make meanings, pleasure,
Anxiety,class,disaffected youth 151
and identity, but also shape and form specific identities and circulate material whose
appropriateness may insert audiences into specific positions (i.e. macho Rambo,
sexy Madonna, disaffected Slackers, violent Beavis and Butt-Head, and so on).
The Beavis and Butt-Head effects were particularly striking. Not only did the
show promote acts of violence and copious discussion of media effects, but the
characters became models for youth behavior, with young people imitating various
of their tics and behavior patterns. Of course, the series generated a large consumer
market of “Beavis and Butt-Head” products, which in turn proliferated its images
and effects. For example: “Mask-maker Ed Edmunds of Distortions Unlimited
says he’s sold 40,000 Beavis and Butt-Head masks, his top sellers for this Halloween
season.” (U.S.A. Today, October 26, 1993). In 1994, Beavis and Butt-Head combs,
calendars, and even day-planners were on the market.
The show also strongly influenced musical tastes and sales, providing a boon
for heavy metal rock. Studies showed that sales jumped of every video played on
the show, including ones Beavis and Butt-Head panned.31 The Beavis and Butt-
Head effect even became part of political contestation:
It was only be a matter of time before “Beavis Clinton” and “Butt-Head
Gore” T-shirts began appearing on the streets of Washington. The hapless,
ugly, dumb cartoon characters have been altered to look like the leaders of
the free world, thanks to local political entrepreneurs and T-shirt creators
Kathleen Patten, Beth Loudy and Chris Tremblay. On the shirts, Beavis is
sporting a Fleetwood Mac T-shirt and is seen asking Butt-Head, “Eh, do you
think we’ll get re-elected?” To which the veep, wearing the Greenpeace whale
logo, says: “Huh…nope”.
(Washington Times, October 26, 1993)32
Previous studies of media effects seem blind to the sort of complex effects of
media culture texts of the sort I have discussed in analyses of the Rambo effect, the
Slacker effect, and the Beavis and Butt-Head effect. In each case, figures and
material were taken from these texts and were used to produce meaning, identities,
discourse, and behavior. The media provide symbolic environments in which people
live and strongly influence their thought, behavior, and style. When a media
sensation like Beavis and Butt-Head appears, it becomes part of that environment,
and in turn becomes a new resource for pleasures, identities, and contestation.
Thus, it is totally idiotic to claim that media culture has no discernible effects,
as in the dominant paradigm from the 1940s, which lasted several decades.33 Yet it
is equally blind to blithely claim that audiences simply produce their own meanings
from texts and that the text’s do not have their own effectivity. As my discussions
have shown, media culture has very powerful effects, though its meanings are
mediated by audiences and even a figure like Rambo can be a contested terrain in
which different groups inflect its meanings in different ways.
The Slacker and Beavis and Butt-Head effects that I have just discussed
crystallize the experiences and feelings of alienation and hopelessness produced
by a disintegrating society and shape these experiences into identification with
152 Diagnostic critique and cultural studies
slackers, rockers, heavy metal and nihilistic violence of the sort engaged in by
Beavis and Butt-Head. Popular media texts tap into and articulate feelings and
experiences of their audiences and in turn circulate material effects that shape
thought and behavior. The texts of media culture thus have very powerful and
distinctive effects and should thus be carefully scrutinized and subject to diagnostic
critique—a project that I will continue in the following chapters.
NOTES
1 This dual optic of reading history through texts and using history and theory to read
texts was that of T.W.Adorno and Walter Benjamin; see the discussion in Kellner 1989a
and the development of diagnostic critique in Kellner and Ryan 1988.
2 I should acknowledge the influence of Fredrick Jameson. For his use of allegory, which
I draw upon here, see Jameson 1979, 1981, 1990 and 1991 and on Jameson see my
study in Kellner 1989c.
3 Variety claimed that in 1980 horror and sci-fi films would generate more than one-third
of all box-office rentals and predicted that by 1981, the figures would reach 50 percent.
See “Horror Sci-Fi Pix Earn 37 percent of Rentals-Big Rise During 10–Year Period”
(January 3, 1981). Cinefantastique (Vol. 9, Nos. 3–4 (1980): 72) reported in a decade
re-cap that half of the top ten money making films of all time are horror and science
fiction films. The popularity of the horror film has continued to the present.
4 As Ferguson and Rogers argue:
The combination of social-spending cuts, other budget initiatives, and the massively
regressive tax bill produced a huge upward distribution of American income. Over
the 1983–1985 period the policies reduced the incomes of households making less
than $20,000 a year by $20 billion, while increasing the incomes of households making
more than $80,000 by $35 billion. For those at the very bottom of the income pyramid,
making under $10,000 per year, the policies produced an average loss of $1,100 over
1983–85. For those at the top making more than $200,000, the average gain was
$60,000. By the end of Reagan’s first term, U.S. income distribution was more unequal
than at any time since 1947, the year the Census Bureau first began collecting data on
the subject. In 1983, the top 40% of the population received a larger share of income
than at any time since 1947.
(Ferguson and Rogers 1986:130)
5 On “subversive” and “critical” moments in these and other contemporary filmmakers’
works, see the studies in Britton, Lippe, Williams, and Wood 1979; Kellner and Ryan
1988.
6 Poltergeist is credited as a Tobe Hooper film and Hooper is credited as director, while
Spielberg is credited as producer, source of the story, and one of the writers. There have
been many discussions concerning alleged tensions between Hooper and Spielberg
during the filming, as well as debate over whose film it really is—as if a collective
enterprise “belonged” to one person or another. In fact, the film itself is an amalgam of
the cinematic styles and concerns of Hooper and Spielberg. This film exhibits Hooper’s
flair for the suspenseful, odd and horrific, and Spielberg’s affection for the middle
class, fuzzy minded occultism, and technical skill.
7 Stephen King, “Why We Crave Horror Movies,” Playboy (January 1981): 237.
8 In Discipline and Punish, French theorist Michel Foucault (1979) analyzed the apparatus
of surveillance developed in the early nineteenth century by Jeremy Bentham, which
he called a “panopticon,” describing an architectural structure whereby prisoners,
students, workers, or others could be constantly surveyed. New technologies present
Anxiety,class,disaffected youth 153
the possibilities that new high-tech surveillance could create a frightening panopticon
society, a la Orwell’s 1984.
9 Fear of television has been an obsession of Spielberg’s in his recent films. Early in
Poltergeist, the children are told not to play so roughly and Carol Anne is directed to
watch TV: she flicks it on and a violent Western is playing! In E.T., when the alien
watches television for the first time, he communicates his thoughts and feelings to the
young boy at school (they have apparently achieved a “mind-meld,” to use Star Trek
lingo, sharing each other’s minds). When E.T. watches a violent scene on TV, the boy
is then violent at school; E.T. watches John Wayne kiss Maureen O’Hara and the boy
kisses a little girl at school. The fear that children will imitate what they see on TV is
widespread in U.S. society today, and is symbolically portrayed in Poltergeist and E.T..—
the concern has emerged in contemporary discussions of media violence and the impact
of shows like Beavis and Butt-Head on the young. Not accidently, when the little boy in
E.T. succeeds in his ploy to stay home from school to be with his new companion, the
mother warns: “And no TV!”
10 Of course, the industrial working class, more than the middle classes, faced economic
disaster during the de-industrialization of America, but this situation, as I suggest later,
was probably too really horrible for Hollywood to deal with, thus working-class and
middle-class fears were projected into horror films dealing with predominantly middleclass
families.
11 In cinematic folklore surrounding the film, the young actress playing the teenage daughter
died a violent death (she was murdered by a jealous boyfriend), giving rise to rumors of
supernatural complicity—rumors which multiplied when Heather O’Rourke who played
Carol Anne also died some years later.
12 The stalker films presented a more concerted attack on teen sexuality, invariably killing
the young teens after a sexual encounter; the stalker films contain a curious mixture of
modern sexual titillation and traditional punishment of “immoral” sexual behavior;
they also contain a mixture of pro- and anti-woman aspects, as when they target young
women for punishment, but show some strong women fighting back as survivors.
13 Clover (1992) fails to see that The Exorcist and many contemporary horror films are
anti-feminism and anti-independent and strong women, preferring to see the genre as
strongly pro-women; in fact, like most genres, it has its reactionary and progressive
wings, as I shall show in this discussion.
14 Beck, of course, was the founder of the avant-garde Living Theater and was himself a
life-long radical.
15 Clover presents the Native American Taylor as representative of a more feminine nature
which the father must get in touch with (1992:94), but she misses the significance of
the crisis of patriarchy that Steve must overcome and the motif of resurrection of male
power; she also fails to read the retreat to the sweat lodge as male bonding that resurrects
male power. Rather than representing the feminine per se, Taylor represents a more
traditionalist supernatural wisdom against “normal” science and reason, so the message
is ultimately that Steve must become more masculine and more wise to reassume the
phallic power under threat.
16 Clover (1992:106f.) sees the birthing segment as a positive expression of the
transgression/mixing of gender identities and generally valorizes the frequent birthing
images in the contemporary horror film as evidence of the positive and strong role of
women in the genre. But these images of monstrous births—which run through horror
films like the Alien series, The Thing, and many others—can be seen as extremely
negative images of biological processes and thus as anti-women, as projecting negative
images of birth as monstrous and women as bearers of monstrosities.
17 I am leaving Poltergeist III (1988) out of my discussion, since it does not deal with the
Freeling family, showing instead Carol Anne visiting relatives in Chicago and the return
154 Diagnostic critique and cultural studies
of Kane to try to abduct her again. The film is so bad that it could be taken as symptomatic
of the decline of the horror genre in the contemporary era, though part of the problem
with the vague and unresolved plot might be due to Heather O’Rourke’s death, who was
then unavailable to shoot scenes necessary for coherence and resolution. O’Rourke’s
death, following upon that of Dominique Dunne, the young woman who played her teenage
sister in Poltergeist I, fuelled occultist folklore concerning the revenge of evil spirits, a
focus that should have been levelled at the nature of a violent society with inadequate
medical care (Dunne was killed by a jealous boyfriend, and O’Rourke’s family sued for
medical malpractice, claiming that her daughter’s ailment was misdiagnosed and that she
was therefore given medical advice and treatment that led to her death at 13).
18 On the other hand, unlike Beavis and Butt-Head, which I discuss below, the slackers
also read books, referencing Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky, de Sade, and various other writers
and poets, though the differences between books, TV, and movies seem to be levelled,
with the various characters reducing everything to sound bites and clichés.
19 The conception of “postmodernism” that I am using here is that of Jameson (1991) who
focuses on flat, one-dimensional experiences or images, disconnected and fragmented,
but punctuated by moments of euphoric intensity. This concept describes both the form of
the film Slacker and the texture of its characters’ experiences and lifestyle.
20 Coincidentally, I was teaching a course on modernity/postmodernity the semester of the film’s
shooting, was using the two books in the coffee house in my course, and several of my students
were in the film. Thus, aesthetic debates concerning modernism and postmodernism were in
the air during the period, and Linklater, who I have known for years, obviously picked up on
these ideas, blending them in an innovative fashion in his film.
21 Beavis and Butt-Head was based on an animated short by Mike Judge, in which the two
characters play “frog baseball,” shown at the Sick and Twisted Animation festival and
taken up by MTV’s animated series Liquid Television. The series itself premiered in
March 1993, but because there were only four episodes, the show went on hiatus,
returning May 17 after Judge and his team of creative assistants put together thirty-two
new episodes (The San Francisco Chronicle, June 29, 1993). The series tripled MTV’s
ratings and MTV ordered 130 more episodes for 1994 (The New York Times, October
17, 1993).
22 An October 9, 1993, story in the Dayton Daily News reported that a five-year-old boy
in Dayton, Ohio, ignited his bedclothes with a cigarette lighter after watching the
pyromaniac antics of Beavis and Butt-Head, according to his mother. The boy’ s younger
sister, aged 2, died in the ensuing blaze. The mother said her 5–year-old son had become
“obsessed” with Beavis and Butt-Head and imitated the characters’ destructive behavior.
I provide more examples of the Beavis and Butt-Head effect throughout this section.
23 An October 23, 1993, Senate Hearings on TV violence focused media attention on the
show, though U.S. Sen. Ernest Hollings (D-SC) botched references to it, saying: “We’ve
got this—what is it—Buffcoat and Beaver or Beaver and something else…. I haven’t
seen it; I don’t watch it; it was at 7 o’clock—Buffcoat—and they put it on now at 10:30,
I think” (The Hartford Courant, October 26, 1993). Such ignorance of media culture is
often found in some of its harshest critics.
24 Their family genealogy in a book on the series puts a question mark in the place of both
of their fathers (Johnson and Marcil 1993). So far, their mothers have not been shown,
though there are some references to them. It is also unclear exactly whose house they
live in, or are shown watching TV in, and whether they do or do not live together. One
episode suggests that they are in Butt-Head’s house and that his mother is (is always)
out with her boyfriend, but other episodes show two beds together in what appears to be
their highly messy bedroom and as of early 1994, their parents have never been shown.
25 Psychoanalysts like to identity Beavis and Butt-Head with the Freudian Id, with
uncontrolled aggression and sexual impulses that they cannot understand or control
Anxiety,class,disaffected youth 155
(they were often shown masturbating, or talking about it, and Beavis uncontrollably
“moons” attractive female singers while watching music videos). There is also a barely
repressed homo-erotic element to their relationship, expressed in the endless “butt”
jokes and references, their constant use of “sucks,” and other verbal and visual behavior
(“Hey Beavis, pull my finger!”).
26 Margot Emery was taking a midterm examination in a mass communications theory
course for master’s degree candidates at the University of Tennessee at Knoxville
when she found, on the last page, a question about…Beavis and Butt-Head. Novelist
Gloria Naylor, Hartford Stage Company artistic director Mark Lamos and other
distinguished panelists were discussing stereotypes in art, especially the depiction of
Jews in ‘The Merchant of Venice,’ when unexpectedly the talk swung around to…
Beavis and Butt-Head. Fred Rogers of ‘Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood’ was being
honored for his work by the Pittsburgh Presbytery and wound up discoursing upon…
Beavis and Butt-Head. Thomas Grasso, a prisoner whose main problem these days i
s deciding whether he’d rather have the state of Oklahoma execute him or the state of
New York imprison him for a very long time, recently wrote a poem comparing Gov.
Mario Cuomo and a New York corrections official to…Beavis and Butt-Head. In f
act, it has become so rare to read 10 pages of a magazine, to browse one section of a
newspaper or to endure 30 minutes of television or radio talk without bumping into
some knowing reference to the animated MTV dullards.
(The Hartford Courant, October 26, 1993)
27 Via MTV marathons of the series in summer 1993, January 1994, and Steve Best’s
collection, I was able to see almost every episode of the series. I also did extensive
Nexis data-base searches for mainstream media references to and debates over the
series and through the Fall of 1993 and into 1994, there were literally hundreds of
references to the series. There also appeared a best-selling album of the heavy metal
that Beavis and Butt-Head celebrate, a best-selling book, and movie deals in the works.
Consequently, one can also easily speak of the Beavis and Butt-Head effect.
28 On this concept and a wealth of examples, see Kellner 1978.
29 After a Washington, D.C. psychologist said that Beavis and Butt-Head’s humor sounded
like the antics of normal youth, she frantically called back the reporter after seeing that
night’s episode, leading her to comment on voice mail: “I totally condemn this program.
I do not see any shred of normal adolescent behavior here. It’s one of the most sadistic,
pathological programs I’ve ever seen. I would not recommend it to anyone of any age”
(The Washington Times, October 17, 1993). The same story noted that an advocate of
People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals stated: “Psychiatrists will tell you that
almost every major serial killer has animal abuse in their background. Beavis and Butt-
Head not only torture animals, but they are preoccupied with fire, and those are two of
the three predictors of adult criminal behavior.”
30 MTV’s parent company Viacom was engaged at the time in a much-publicized battle to
merge with Paramount and the conglomerate obviously did not want too much bad
publicity. Thus, MTV had to walk the line between preserving its most profitable and
popular product and avoiding excessive media criticism. The result was compromises
that softened the edge of Beavis and Butt-Head, while attempting to preserve the show’s
popularity. As of spring 1994, the MTV strategy has worked with the show continuing
to be highly popular with controversy diminishing.
31 The group White Zombie’s album La Sexorcisto: Devil Music Vol. 1, for example,
wasn’t selling enough to make the nation’s Top 100 charts, averaging only about
2,000 copies a week. But the group’s video has been a fixture on “Beavis and Butt-
Head” since the summer, and the exposure—along with the bratty teens’ words of
praise—have propelled the album into the national Top 30. Estimated sales now:
156 Diagnostic critique and cultural studies
more than 500,000 copies…. Rick Krim, MTV’s vice president of talent and artists
relations, explains the response to the “Beavis and Butt-Head” exposure. ‘We had
liked the ‘Thunder’ video and supported it with play on the various specialty shows,’
he says. “That never really sparked significant album sales, the ‘Beavis and Butt-
Head’ exposure sure did. The sales response was pretty immediate…Almost everything
that gets played on the show gets some sort of sales bump from it”
(Billboard, September 4, 1993).
32 Such an anti-Clinton move could backfire as younger voters might interpret the
association to suggest that Clinton and Gore are “cool” are thus come to support them.
33 I am speaking of Lazarsfeld’ s “two step flow” model which claimed that media culture
had no direct effects, that its effects were modest and minimal, and mediated by “opinion
leaders” who had the more important effects on consumer and political behavior, social
attitudes, and the like (see Katz and Lazarsfeld 1955 and the critical discussion of its
effects in Gitlin 1978).
157
Chapter 5
Black voices from Spike Lee to rap
In this chapter, I will use rap music and the films of Spike Lee to provide a diagnostic
critique of the situation of African-Americans in the United States today.1 Black
rap artists and filmmakers have used media culture to articulate their visions of
contemporary U.S. society and have used media culture to resist the culture of
racial oppression in the United States and to articulate their own forms of resistance
and oppositional identities. I will accordingly probe the aesthetic strategies and
politics of some recent productions by black popular artists to delineate the resources
for social critique and political action found in their work.
Indeed, media culture reproduces existing social struggles and discourses,
articulating the fears and sufferings of ordinary people, while providing material
to produce identities and make sense of the world. When members of oppressed
groups gain access to media culture, their representations often articulate alternative
visions of society and give voice to more radical perceptions. Yet a diagnostic
critique is also interested in the limitations of these works in order to advance the
interests of the oppressed in future struggles.2
Despite the continued oppression of blacks and people of color and growing
violence against African-Americans, black culture has produced extremely
important works in the last decades in the fields of literature, film, music, theater,
and a full range of arts.3 Cultural expression has always been a way of resisting
oppression and articulating experiences of resistance and struggle. Gospel, blues,
jazz, rock, and other forms of music have traditionally articulated African-American
struggle and resistance. Black literature has also been a rich source of original
voices, articulating the vicissitudes of the African-American experience and their
culture of resistance. During the past decade, new African-American voices have
appeared in the realms of film, hip-hop culture, and rap music, and these black
incursions into media culture will be the focus of this chapter.
THE FILMS OF SPIKE LEE
During the 1980s, Hollywood joined Ronald Reagan and his administration in
neglecting black issues and concerns. Few serious films during the decade featured
blacks who were mostly stereotypically portrayed in comedies, often with black
158 Diagnostic critique and cultural studies
comics like Richard Pryor or Eddie Murphy playing against a white buddy (Guerrero
1993b:113ff). Within this context, Spike Lee’s films constitute a significant
intervention within the system of Hollywood film. Addressing issues of race, gender,
and class from a resolutely black perspective, Lee’s films provide insights into
these explosive problematics missing from mainstream white cinema. Starting with
low-budget independent pictures like Joe’s Bed-Stuy Barbershop: We Cut Heads
(a 1983 student film) and She’s Gotta Have It (1986), Lee moved to Hollywood
financing of his films starting with School Daze (1988), a focus on black college
life that spoofed the college film genre and the musical. His next film, Do the
Right Thing (1989), was immediately recognized as an important cinematic
statement concerning the situation of blacks in contemporary U.S. society and the
films that followed (Mo’ Better Blues, Jungle Fever, Malcolm X, and Crooklyn)
won Lee recognition as one of the most important cineastes at work in the United
States today.
Moreover, the success of Lee’s films helped open the door to financing a wide
range of other films by young blacks in the 1990s. The profits made by Lee’s films
produced on a low budget showed that there was an audience for black films dealing
with contemporary realities. Estimates suggest that from 25–30 percent of the U.S.
film audience are black Americans (overrepresenting their 13 percent of the
population), and Hollywood calculated that there was a significant audience for
black-oriented films (Guerrero 1993b).4 Moreover, the profits that Spike Lee made
on his early films, produced on a low budget, procured continued financing of his
own films and opened the door for a renaissance of films by, usually young male,
African-Americans during the 1990s.5
In the following study, I examine Spike Lee’s aesthetics, conception of morality,
and politics, arguing that his aesthetic strategies draw on Brechtian modernism
and that his films are morality tales that convey ethical images and messages to
their audiences. I also discuss Lee’s politics, focusing on the figure of Malcolm X
in Lee’s work and his sometimes contradictory identity politics, in which politics
is subordinate to creating one’s identity and identity is defined primarily in terms
of cultural style. I argue that despite their limitations, Lee’s films push key buttons
of race, gender, sexuality, class, and black politics, thus providing a compelling
cinematic exploration of the situation of blacks in contemporary U.S. society and
the limited political options which they have at their disposal in the current
organization of society. I begin with a reading of Do the Right Thing (hereafter
DRT), turn to Malcolm X (hereafter X), and conclude with more general comments
on Lee’s gender politics, his identity politics, and his aesthetic strategies.6 I then
go on to probe the voices of black ghetto radicalism in the arena of rap music and
examine some of the controversies concerning it, concluding with some reflections
on oppositional culture and counterhegemony.
Do the Right Thing as a Brechtian morality tale
DRT (1989) takes place in a Brooklyn ghetto on the hottest day of the year. Mookie,
Black voices 159
a young black man (played by Spike Lee), gets up and goes to work at Sal’s Pizzeria
on a Saturday morning. Various neighborhood characters appear as Lee paints a
tableau of the interactions between blacks and Italians, and the Hispanic and Korean
residents of the Brooklyn ghetto of “Bed Stuy.” Conflicts between the blacks and
Italians erupt and when a black youth is killed by the police, the crowd destroys
the pizzeria.
Lee set out to make a film about black urban experience from a black perspective
and his film transcodes the discourses, style, and conventions of African-American
culture, with an emphasis on black nationalism that affirms the specificity of black
experience and its cultural differences from mainstream white culture. Lee presents
black ways of speaking, walking, dressing, and acting, drawing on black slang,
music, images, and style. His films are richly textured ethnographies of urban
blacks negotiating the allures of the consumer and media society, and the dangers
of racism and an oppressive urban environment. The result is a body of work that
represents uniquely black perspectives, voices, styles, and politics.
Yet Lee also draws on the techniques of modernism and produces original
innovative films that articulate his own individual vision and aesthetic style. In
particular, like the German theater artist Bertolt Brecht, Spike Lee produces a cinema
that dramatizes the necessity of making moral and political choices.7 Both Brecht
and Lee produce a sort of “epic drama” which paints a wide tableau of typical
social characters, shows examples of social and asocial behavior, and conveys
didactic messages to the audience. Both Brecht and Lee utilize music, comedy,
drama, vignettes of typical behavior, and figures who present the messages desired
by the author. Both present didactic learning plays, which strive to teach people to
discover and then do “the right thing,” while criticizing improper and antisocial
behavior. Brecht’s theater (as well as his film Kuhle Wampe and his radio plays)
depict character types in situations that force one to observe the consequences of
typical behavior. Lee, I would argue, does the same thing in DRT (and most of his
other films), depicting typical work, familial, and street scenes and behavior. In
particular, the three street-corner philosophers, who offer comic commentary
throughout, are very Brechtian, as is the radio DJ, Mister Señor Love Daddy, who
tells the audience not only to do the right thing throughout the movie (“and that’s
the truth, Ruth”), but he repeatedly specifies “the right thing,” insisting that the
ghetto population: “Wake Up!,” “Love one another,” and “Chill!”
DRT posits the question of political and social morality for its audience in the
contemporary era: what is “the right thing” politically and morally for oppressed
groups like urban blacks? The film is arguably modernist in that the question of
the political “right thing” is left open in the film. By “modernist,” I refer, first, to
aesthetic strategies of producing texts that are open and poly vocal; that disseminate
a wealth of meanings without a central univocal meaning or message; and that
require an active reader to produce the meanings.8 Second, I take modernism to be
an aesthetic tendency dedicated to the production of unique works of art that bear
the vision and stylistic imprint of their creator. Third, the type of modernism
associated with what Peter Bürger (1984) calls the “historical avant garde” attempts
160 Diagnostic critique and cultural studies
to produce serious works that change individuals’ perceptions and lives and strive
to promote social transformation. Movements like futurism, expressionism, Dada,
and surrealism meet these criteria, as do the works of Brecht and Lee, though I
ultimately argue that Lee’s films contain a unique mixture of American popular
cultural forms and modernism, inflected through Lee’s African-American
experience.9
Thus, I am claiming that in a formal sense the works of Spike Lee are in accord
with these modernist criteria and that his aesthetic strategies are especially close to
those of Brecht. Lee’s texts tend to be open, to elicit divergent readings, and to
generate a wealth of often divergent responses. He is, in this sense, an “auteur”
whose films project a distinctive style and vision which cumulatively exhibit a
coherent body of work with distinctive features and effects. His work is highly
serious and strives for specific transformative moral and political effects. Yet there
are also ambiguities in Lee’s work. While the disk jockey, Mister Señor Love
Daddy, serves as a voice of social morality (Sittlichkeit, how to treat others) in
DRT, it is an open question what, if any, political position Lee is affirming. Does
he agree with the politics of Malcolm X or Martin Luther King? Is he advocating
reform or revolution, integration or black nationalism, or a synthesis of the two?
Throughout the film, Public Enemy’s powerful rap song “Fight the Power”
resonates, but it is not clear from the film how one is supposed to fight the power,
or what political strategies should be employed to carry out the struggle. Indeed,
one could read Do the Right Thing as a postmodern evacuation of viable political
options for blacks and people of color in the present age.10 That is, one can read the
film as demonstrating that, politically, there is no “right thing” to do in the situation
of hopeless ghetto poverty, virulent racism, and the lack of viable political options
and movements. In this postmodern reading, the film projects a bleak, nihilistic
view of the future, marked by hopelessness and the collapse of modern black politics.
In this context, political reformism and Martin Luther King’s nonviolence appear
questionable as viable instruments of change. But it is not clear that violence is an
attractive option and one could even read the film as questioning social violence,
demonstrating that it ultimately hurts the people in the neighborhoods in which it
explodes. (One could read the events in Los Angeles, which Lee’s film uncannily
anticipates, in a similar light).
On this postmodern reading, it is not clear what the power is that one is supposed
to fight, what instruments one is supposed to use, and what one’s goals are supposed
to be. This nihilistic postmodern reading suggests that modern politics as a whole
is bankrupt,11 that neither reform or revolution can work, that blacks in the U.S. are
condemned to hopeless poverty and the subordinate position of an oppressed
underclass without the faintest possibility of improving their situation by any means
whatsoever. Yet one could also read DRT as a modernist film that forces the viewer
to compare the different politics of Malcolm X and Martin Luther King and to
decide for his or her self what the “right thing” is for blacks in the contemporary
era. In the following analysis, I’ll interrogate whether Do the Right Thing is a
modernist or postmodernist film in both its style and politics, and whether Lee
Black voices 161
privileges Malcolm X or Martin Luther King in the film. But first I want to
interrogate the cultural politics of DRT.
Cultural politics in Do The Right Thing
The characters in DRT are portraits of distinctive neighborhood African-, Hispanic-
, Italian-, Anglo-, and Korean-American individuals and Lee depicts typical modes
of their behavior and their conflicts with one another. Race for Lee is presented in
DRT in terms of cultural identity and image, especially cultural style. As Denzin
points out (1991:125, 130ff.), the characters wear T-shirts that identify their cultural
politics and style. Mookie, the black worker in Sal’s pizzeria, wears a Jackie
Robinson baseball jersey, symbolizing the position of a black who breaks the
colorline in the white man’s world (as Lee himself has done). While working,
Mookie also wears a shirt with his name on it and the logo of “Sal’s Pizzeria,”
signifying his position between the two worlds. Radio Raheem, whose radio blasts
out “Fight the Power” which provokes the confrontation with Sal, wears a T-shirt
proclaiming “Bed-Stuy or Die.” This message identifies him as a figure who asserts
black solidarity and rebellion to preserve the community.
Lee also deploys color-coding symbolism in the wearing of T-shirts, with Pino,
Sal’s racist son, wearing white, while Vito, his son who gets along with blacks,
wears a black T-shirt. Sal’s clothes code him as the boss/worker who drives up to
his pizzeria in a Cadillac, but he dons an apron to make the pizzas, presenting him
as a petit-bourgeois small businessman. Other shirts identify the wearer with white
or black cultural heroes. A young white man who has just purchased a ghetto
apartment wears a Larry Bird Boston Celtics’ jersey, while a young black man
wears the L.A.Lakers’ jersey of Magic Johnson. The Hispanics wear sleeveless
colored T-shirts, while the older black men wear sleeveless white T-shirts,
conventional single-colored shirts, or go topless. Most of the young women wear
tube tops, though Mookie’s sister Jade sports designer clothes.
Clothes and fashion accoutrements depict the various characters’ styles and
identity. Buggin’ Out, an angry young black youth, wears a yellow African kente
shirt with a gold chain around his neck and a gold tooth. He also wears Nike Air
Jordan shoes (that Lee does commercials for), and explodes with anger when the
Celtic fan accidentally soils them. Radio Raheem wears the same type of shoes
himself and his ghetto-blaster and rap music establishes his cultural identity (he
only plays Public Enemy). He also displays a set of gold brass knuckle rings,
engraved with “love” and “hate”: supposedly the two sides of the sometimes gentle
and sometimes violent Raheem.12 Mookie too sports a gold tooth and earring,
marking him as a participant in black urban cultural conventions.13 The three black
street-corner philosophers, discoursing on the current situation of blacks, are
casually dressed, while the alcoholic Da Mayor (Ossie Davis) wears old and dirty
clothes, coding him as an example of failed black manhood. Mother Sister (Ruby
Dee) dresses conventionally and represents traditional matriarchal black values,
disapproving of Da Mayor and “shiftless” young blacks.
162 Diagnostic critique and cultural studies
In fact, DRT influenced fashion trends itself: “the summer of 1989 saw millions
of young people wearing Mookie-style surfer baggies over lycra bike shorts”
(Patterson 1992:125). Indeed, Spike Lee himself opened a fashion store in Brooklyn,
designing his own T-shirts and clothes, and he produced and acted in commercials
for Nike Air Jordan shoes. He thus depicts a society in which cultural identity is
produced through style and consumption and himself contributes to this trend
through his films and commercial activity.14
The ways that mass cultural images pervade style and fashion suggest that
cultural identity is constituted in part by iconic images of ethnic cultural heros,
which are badges of identity and forces of division between the races. Sal has
pictures of famous Italian-Americans (his “Hall of Fame”) on the wall of his pizzeria,
and Buggin’ Out’s demand to put pictures of blacks on the wall and Sal’s vehement
refusal to do so precipitates the attempted boycott and the subsequent violence. A
stuttering and perhaps mentally retarded young Black, Smiley, is selling pictures
of Malcolm and Martin,15 who appear as icons of black politics, and references to
Jessie Jackson and Al Sharpton appear in graffiti, constituting black political leaders
as cultural heroes, along with sports and music stars.
These scenes suggest how media culture provides the material for identity and
how different subcultures appropriate different images to provide identities. Identity
is thus formed on a terrain of struggle in which individuals choose their own cultural
meanings and style in a differential system that always involves the affirmation of
some tokens of identity and rejection of other ones. Social institutions individuate
people with social security numbers, voting registration, consumer lists, data-bases,
police and academic records, and so on, but producing one’s individual identity
means refusing to be defined by these determinations and choosing other forms of
identity. More and more, it is the case that media culture provides resources that
are appropriated by audiences to make meanings, to create identities, as when
teenage girls use Madonna as a model, or blacks emulate African-American cultural
heroes, or aspiring Yuppies look to professionals on TV shows like LA Law for
patterns of identity.
Identity is thus mediated by mass-produced images in the contemporary media
society, while image and cultural style is becoming ever more central to the
construction of individual identities—as I am indicating in this discussion and will
take up again in the following chapters. Media culture provides a powerful source
of new identities, replacing nationalism, religion, the family, and education as
sources of identity. As Benedict Anderson argued (1983), nationalism provided a
powerful imaginary community and identities, and the forms of media culture
provide surrogates for both individuals and groups who are able to participate in
imaginary communities through cultural style and consumption and who can
produce individual and group identities through the appropriation of media cultural
images.
Media culture also provides modern morality tales that demonstrate right and
wrong behavior, that show what to do and what not to do, that indicate what is or
is not “the right thing.” Media culture is thus an important new force of socialization
Black voices 163
and it is one of the merits of DRT to put this process of the creation of identity
through image and cultural style on display in a fashion which shows as well how
different identities are produced in opposition to each other and represent a terrain
in which social conflicts are played out.
DRT shows how cultural identity is also articulated through music and expressive
styles. The black DJ and Radio Raheem play exclusively black music, while the
Puerto Rican street teens play Spanish-inflected music. A scene where Radio
Raheem and the Puerto Ricans duel each other with loud playing radios signifies
the cultural clash and divisions in the ghetto community. In addition, Sal provokes
Radio Raheem by ordering him to “turn that jungle music off. We ain’t in Africa,”
while Buggin’ Out replies: “Why it gotta be about jungle music and Africa?”
Thus, different cultures use popular music to establish their cultural identities
and different styles of music divide the community. But it is the racial epithets that
most pungently articulate the contemporary social conflicts and tensions. At a key
juncture in the film, in modernist and Brechtian fashion, Lee interrupts his narrative
and has the characters look into the camera and spit out vicious racial slurs, with
Mookie attacking the Italians (“Dago, Wop, guinea, garlic breath, pizza slingin’,
spaghetti bender,” etc.). Pino, the racist son, replies to the camera, assaulting blacks:
“Gold chain wearin’ fried chicken and biscuit eatin’ monkey, ape, baboon, fast
runnin’, high jumpin’, spear chuckin’, basket ball dunkin’ titso spade, take your
fuckin’ pizza and go back to Africa.”
A Puerto Rican attacks Koreans in similar racial terms and the Korean grocer
attacks Jews. This scene, thoroughly Brechtian, brilliantly shows the racial
differences encoded in language, but tends to equate all modes of racism as logically
equivalent, whereas one could argue that the institutional racism against blacks is
far more virulent than the variegated cultural racisms articulated and that Lee never
really catches the reality of racism as part of a system of oppression.16 From this
perspective, the existing society especially oppresses people of color: it is, then,
not just the case that there is racism, and racial hatred, among all the races and
ethnicities, but there is an unequal distribution of power and wealth in contemporary
U.S. society, in which blacks and people of color tend to suffer disproportionately
from systemic racial and class oppression. Put otherwise, Lee does not understand
that capitalism is a system of oppression, which especially exploits and oppresses
its underclass, particularly people of color.
Lee, however, presents racism in personal and individualist terms as hostility
between different members of different groups, thus failing to illuminate the causes
and structures of racism. Moreover, the film effectively denigrates political action,
caricaturing collective action and the tactic of the economic boycott which served
the civil rights movement so well. As Guerrero puts it:
by constructing Buggin Out and Radio Raheem as supercilious and
unreasonable characters, advocating the most effective social action
instrument of the civil rights movement, the economic boycott, and then
having the possibility of social action dismissed by the neighborhood youth
164 Diagnostic critique and cultural studies
for the temporary pleasures of a good slice of pizza, the film trivializes any
understanding of contemporary black political struggle, as well as the recent
history of social movements in this country. This dismissal of collective action
is further accented by contrasting Buggin Out and Raheem with the character
of Mookie, the film’s calculating middle-man, positioned between Sal and
the community. For it is through Mookie’s aloof, individualist perspective
that much of the film is rendered.
(Guerrero 1993b:149)
In addition, Lee is constantly celebrating consumerism, the center of much of the
film’s focus and affective investments, rather than depicting how consumerism
has come to centrally organize ghetto existence. Much affective investment is placed
on the eating of pizza, ice cream, ice cones, drinking beer, and displaying consumer
items. As I noted, there is a strong emphasis on the construction of identity through
clothes and style and no one questions consumerist practices.
Yet Lee does incisively show how clothes, music, language, and style separate
the various ethnic groupings in his vision of a divided ghetto community. Such a
situation is ripe to explode into violence and DRT presciently anticipated the L.A.
uprisings that erupted in May 1992, after a white jury acquitted the policemen
who were videotaped viciously beating Rodney King. DRT is thus properly read
as a cautionary tale warning what might—and did—happen if relations between
the races continue to worsen.
Thus, DRT has its insights, as well as its limitations, and a diagnostic critique
can read the film as articulating some of the conditions that produce violence in
the ghettoes. The film is particularly strong in depicting the ghetto explosion that
erupts after Radio Raheem is killed by white policemen when he and Sal start
fighting. Lee has his own character Mookie throw a garbage can through the window
of Sal’s Pizzeria and violence breaks out that destroys the establishment. A close
viewing of Mookie’s action suggests that it was a conscious, deliberate act and
that Lee was presenting it as “the right thing.” The camera zooms in on Mookie
deliberating about what to do after the police have accidentally choked Radio
Raheem to death in a fight that began when Sal smashed his beloved radio. Lee
then pans a long and slow shot of Mookie methodically walking away to pick up a
garbage can and then returning to throw it through the window of the pizzeria,
starting the riot that ends in its destruction. It is clear that he is doing it because of
rage over Radio Raheem’s death and that Lee is depicting the act as a conscious,
deliberate act on Mookie’s part.17
On this reading, Lee is privileging human life over property and is suggesting
that violence against property is a legitimate act of retaliation. One could also
argue that Mookie is directing the mob’s violence against the pizzeria and away
from Sal and his sons, thus ultimately protecting them against the mob’s wrath.18 It
is, of course, debatable whether the act of violence was “the right thing,” though it
is a rejection of King’s philosophy of non-violence. Yet it is not clear that this act
produces anything positive for Mookie or the black community; one could indeed
Black voices 165
argue the opposite.19 Smiley puts the picture of Malcolm X and Martin Luther
King standing side by side on the wall, thus fulfilling Raheem’s desire to have
black images in the pizzeria. But they are shown burning in the wall, raising the
question of whether this can be read as a sign of the futility of black politics in the
present age, allegorically enacting the fading away of the relevance of Malcolm
and Martin in the current moment.
In any case, the (white conservative) critique that DRT was “bad” because it
was likely to produce violence and increase race hatred is misplaced. Rather, Lee’s
film reveals the living conditions and the racial tensions and conflicts that are
likely to produce racial and other forms of urban violence. That is, DRT explores
the social environment that produces violence and urban explosions. In interviews
after the film, Lee protested that he was only depicting existing urban situations
and not offering solutions, and this position seems wholly reasonable.
Yet one could still criticize Lee for deconstructing modern politics as futile or
irrelevant, thus giving voice to a postmodern nihilism.20 However, certain aspects of
the film counter this reading of DRT as an expression of a bleak, postmodern pessimism
which would affirm the obsolescence of a modern black politics of the sort typified by
Malcolm X and Martin Luther King. Lee himself later claimed that he is affirming a
politics that would embrace aspects of both King and Malcolm X, that would use both
men’s philosophies and strategies for social change in different contexts. He calls
attention to the still picture put on the wall of the Pizzeria as it burns:
Malcolm X and Dr King are shaking hands and smiling. So when I put those
two quotes there, it was not a question of either/or, not for me, anyway, just
a choice of tactics. I think they were men who chose different paths trying to
reach the same destination against a common opponent.
(Lee and Wiley 1992:5)
Thus, the seemingly opposing quotes of King and Malcolm X that close DRT
both, on this view, articulate valid positions and it would thus be a question of
context and tactics concerning which view was most appropriate. Yet the scenario
of the film itself seems to privilege Malcolm X, who would eventually be the topic
of Lee’s major film epic to date. Indeed, the vision of DRT is in some ways consistent
with Malcolm X’s black nationalist teachings and thus does affirm certain modern
political positions. One of the street-corner philosophers expresses wonder and
chagrin that the Korean grocer can turn a boarded-up building into a successful
business, while blacks cannot. Surely this is a nod toward Malcolm X’s views on
black self-sufficiency and economic independence, and certainly Spike Lee has
enacted this philosophy as successfully as anyone in the black community. It is
clear that Mookie is going to get nowhere working in Sal’s Pizzeria and the other
home-boys in the movie are also rapidly going nowhere. “Time to wake up, brothers,
and get your shit together,” is an arguable message of the film.
Likewise, Malcolm X put a heavy emphasis on black manhood, standing up to
the white power structure, fighting back, and acting decisively to maintain one’s
self-respect. In that sense, Mookie’s violent action instantiated certain of Malcolm’s
166 Diagnostic critique and cultural studies
teachings, though one could raise the question whether this was in fact “the
right thing.” One could also raise some questions concerning whether
Malcolm X did or advocated the “right thing” politically at various phases of
his life and what his legacy is for us today. I will interrogate X from these
perspectives, arguing that the film, like DRT, is ultimately a morality tale
and that Lee’s politics slide into a black identity politics that can neither be
pinned down to specific modern positions (i.e. Martin or Malcolm), nor to
postmodern nihilism.
Malcolm X as a morality tale
From the perspective of my reading of DRT, one could argue that X can be read
as a morality tale interrogating what is the “right thing” for blacks in
contemporary U.S. society in both the individual and the political sense. In
this reading, it is the figure of Malcolm X that is the center of the film and the
key transitions involve his transforming himself from criminal to dedicated
black nationalist working for the Nation of Islam, and then transforming himself
again into a more secular internationalist. The key, then, is Malcolm X as moral
ideal, as a model of a black transforming and making something of himself,
becoming self-sovereign, rather than any specific political position or message
that Malcolm X taught.
Although Lee strongly affirms Malcolm X’s politics, he is not, I believe, an
uncritical sycophant and hagiographer, and puts in question some of Malcolm X’s
views, while forcing the audience to decide whether the actions of Malcolm or
other characters in his films are indeed “the right thing.” I thus see X and DRT as
political morality plays and believe that Spike Lee was perfectly justified to tell
black and other children to skip school to see the film X. Not only does one learn
a great deal about one of the most important figures of our time, but one is forced
to reflect upon what is the “right thing” for individual and political morality. Yet I
would argue that Lee’s film on Malcolm X focuses more on Malcolm as a role
model for blacks, making it a morality tale for contemporary individuals. The life
of Malcolm X is certainly exemplary as an example of a figure able to undergo
profound self-transformation and to forge his own individual identity under difficult
circumstances (the delineation of such righteous models is also congruent with
Brechtian strategy).
The first part of Malcolm X, arguably, shows what the wrong thing is for blacks
today, that is, to engage in a life of crime, drugs, and shallow materialism.21 Yet
Lee invests so much time and energy to this phase of Malcolm’s life that it makes
the one-time criminal Malcolm Little almost attractive and certainly sympathetic.
Malcolm X himself in his autobiography presents Malcolm Little as a very bad
dude and negative figure (Haley and X 1965), though it does not seem that this
image emerges from Lee’s film. Denzel Washington creates an engaging character
and Lee’s use of comedy and melodrama invests the Malcolm Little character with
positive energies. So although he is caught in criminal activity and goes to jail, the
Black voices 167
film puts a positive spin on his early life, full of high times with white women,
drugs, exciting high jinks, and good buddies.22
Lee uses the strategy of epic realist historical tableaux in this sequence, heavily
seasoned with comedy, satire, and music. As always, music is extremely important
in Lee’s films and X can be seen and heard as a history of black music over the
decades and how it was an integral part of the texture of everyday life. Once again,
parallels with Brecht are obvious, as Brecht used music to capture the ethos and
style of an age and as a way of making, or highlighting, certain didactic points.
Moreover, it is clear that Lee is presenting certain forms of black behavior, such as
“conking” hair, as bad and the early sequences contain the obvious moral that a
life of crime leads to jail. The message concerning black men involving themselves
with white women is less clear, though Lee tends to present interracial relationships
negatively in X and other films such as Jungle Fever.23
The prison sequence shows Malcolm Little refusing to submit to the humiliations
of prison life and then being broken by solitary confinement. But he is also shown
coming to accept black Muslim teaching and bettering himself through study. It is
one of Lee’s pervasive messages that education is the way to “uplift the race” (one
of the mottos of School Daze and the title of the book on that film), and certainly
Malcolm X embodies a positive model of this philosophy, as he is shown learning
to study and to gain knowledge. Indeed, Malcolm X emerges from prison a totally
changed man and an exemplar of an individual who undertakes to transform himself
successfully.
So far, the aesthetic strategies of X can be read as a Brechtian epic drama, as a
Brechtian morality tale which embodies specific lessons for blacks and others
through showing tableaux of social and asocial behavior which contrasts positive
and negative values and behavior. Lee deploys a variety of genres and styles, and
mixes in music, comedy, and dramatic flashbacks into key episodes of Malcolm
X’s early life (the mixing of genres is also Brechtian). The last third of the film
continues this strategy, though it is too dense and compressed to present adequately
Malcolm X’s teaching and the complexity of his later positions. The key episode is
the shift from Malcolm X’s adherence to the teachings of Elijah Muhammad and
the Nation of Islam to his radical activist social philosophy. Yet there was, arguably,
too much of the religious and dubious racial teachings of the Nation of Islam and
not enough of Malcolm X’s late social philosophy, which many believe is his most
valuable radical legacy.24
In Lee’s defense, he does spend much energy trying to make clear the reasons
for Malcolm X’s break with the Nation of Islam and shows that Malcolm underwent
a very significant transition to a radically new position, thus again making the
point concerning the importance of radical self-transformation. Lee also dealt with
the complexity of Malcolm X’s assassination and the strong possibility that both
the Nation of Islam and U.S. government agencies were involved in his murder—
as opposed to just pinning it on the Nation of Islam. He also strongly emphasized
that the “mature” Malcolm saw that all colors were equal in his experiences in
Mecca. In fact, I am bracketing the question of historical accuracy in my discussion
168 Diagnostic critique and cultural studies
(upon which much of the critique of the film has focused, both from Lee’s friends
and enemies) and am focusing instead on the issue of aesthetic strategy and the
politics of the film.25
In any case, Lee’s film on Malcolm X raises questions concerning his own
politics—a topic I take up in the next section.
Lee’s cultural politics
In this study, I have focused on Lee’s cultural politics and use of Brechtian aesthetic
strategies. Yet there are some major differences between Brecht and Lee. Brecht
was a convinced communist with very specific political values and a fairly specific
Marxist political agenda (though there is some debate about this; see Kellner 1981).
Lee, by contrast, does not seem to have as focused a political agenda. His politics
appear more vague and indeterminate than those of Brecht, thus perhaps coding
Lee as somewhere between a high modernist position that refuses any determinate
political position; a more pragmatic contextualist politics, that draws on disparate
sources for specific political interventions in concrete political situations; and an
identity politics, in which politics is defined primarily through the production of
cultural identity.
The social horizon of Lee’s films is the oppression of African-Americans in a
highly racist society and their resistance to oppression through production of
distinctive cultural styles and identities. Lee’s films transcode the discourses of
black pride and affirmation, and present figures of strong blacks resisting racism
and struggling to create their own identities. On the whole, Lee privileges cultural
politics over the struggles of political movements and actions. His films focus on
the specificity of African-American oppression and resistance, and present a
distinctive African-American cultural style and identity as key constituents of a
politics of identity that focuses on the affirmation of black pride and the positivity
of black culture. Such cultural politics are valuable for providing awareness of the
distinct forms of oppression suffered by specific groups and for making the
production of an independent cultural style and identity an important part of the
struggle against oppression. But cultural politics deflects attention from pressing
political and economic issues and may well produce a separatist consciousness
that undermines a politics of alliance that would mobilize distinct groups against
oppressive forces, practices, and institutions.
Hence, I wish to qualify my presentation of Lee as a Brechtian for I do not think
that Malcolm X plays the role that Marx played in Brecht’s work, nor, for that
matter, does the black radical tradition as a whole play such an important role in
Lee’s work as the Marxian tradition played in Brecht’s work. Lee’s politics are,
for the most part, culturalist, focusing on black identity and moral decisions
concerning race, gender, and personal identity. This was evident in DRT where
Lee interrogated the visible badges of cultural politics and presented the conflicts
of the community in primarily cultural terms. Lee excels in presenting small group
dynamics and has not been successful in articulating the larger structures—and
Black voices 169
structural context of black oppression—which impact on communities, social
groups, and individual lives. Thus, he does not really articulate the dynamics of
class and racial oppression in contemporary U.S. society.
This leads to related questions about representations of gender, race, and class
in Spike Lee’s films. DRT focuses more on gender and race than class, seeing the
antagonism between the Italians and blacks more as a racial conflict than a class
conflict. While the small businessman Sal can be seen as a representative of the
class system that oppresses blacks, he is, like the Korean grocer, really part of the
ethnic working class himself, even though he owns a small business. Lee claims
that he intended to deal with the black working class in DRT, writing: “In this
script I want to show the Black working class. Contrary to popular belief, we
work. No welfare rolls here, pal, just hardworking people trying to make a decent
living” (Lee and Jones 1989:30).
This passage, written before he actually made the film, is curious because the
only blacks shown working are the DJ, Mookie, and a black cop. Mookie’s sister
is said to work, but it isn’t clear if any of the other blacks are working or not. And
although the neighborhood depicted is one that is inhabited by what could be called
the black underclass, there is no exploration of their oppressive living and working
conditions in the film. All of the characters define their identity in terms of fashion,
consumption, and cultural style. Only the old drunk, Da Mayor, dresses slovenly,
while all of the other characters seem to be full-scale participants in the consumer
society (much of the film, in fact, concerns consumption of pizza, ice cream, ice
cones, beer, and other drinks, food, and various consumer goods, for which everyone
always seems to have the money).
Consequently, as I noted earlier, Lee tends to celebrate consumption and to
define cultural identity in terms of style and consumption patterns. Moreover, he
fails to address the reality and dynamics of class oppression. In fact, Lee does not
really explore black underclass exploitation and misery in his films. Reflecting his
own middle-class perspective, most of Lee’s characters are middle-class and
upwardly mobile blacks. The protagonists of She’s Gotta Have It are middle-class
and although some of the students in School Daze are represented as of different
classes and status groups, they are at least upwardly mobile. The one scene in a
fastfood chicken restaurant, in which the students confront working-class blacks,
suggests hostility and difference between these sectors of contemporary African-
Americans, but the differences are not adequately explored in Lee’s films. Mo’
Better Blues (1990) and Jungle Fever (1991) focus on black professionals and
while the latter has powerful images of a crack house and degradation through
drug addiction, neither explores the reality of black underclass oppression.
Thus, even though all of the characters of DRT are ghetto-dwellers, the
phenomenon of class and class oppression is not really explored, nor is it in his
other films, including X. The ghetto blacks in the beginning of X are shown getting
zoot suits, hair-conked, and dancing in dazzling ballrooms where they can pick up
white women. In one scene, where Malcolm is working on a train and fantasizes
about pushing food into the face of an obnoxious customer, it is more race than
170 Diagnostic critique and cultural studies
class hatred that is shown. Lee shows Malcolm getting into a life of crime in the
next scene, where he encounters a Harlem crime lord, who takes him on, suggesting
that it is race hatred, rather than class oppression, which pushes blacks into crime.
And nowhere does Lee adequately explore the world of class difference and
exploitation.
The Malcolm who converts to Islam takes on resolutely middle-class values
and the black underclass almost disappears from the film once he leaves prison
and becomes a major political figure. Thus, Lee fails to depict class oppression
and projects his own black middle-class values into the characters in all of his
films. Amiri Baraka claims that Lee “is the quintessential buppie, almost the spirit
of the young, upwardly mobile, Black, petit bourgeois professional” (Baraka
1993:146) and argues that these values permeate his films.
Yet gender, like race, is a major focus of all of Lee’s films, although he has been
sharply criticized by black feminists for his treatment of the topic, bell hooks, for
example, criticizes Lee’s conventional construction of masculinity and his stereotypical,
usually negative, images of women (hooks 1990:173ff.). His male characters
often define themselves through acts of violence and typically engage in extreme
macho/masculist behavior. The women are generally more passive and powerless,
though, occasionally, as with Mookie’s sister Jade and his Puerto Rican wife Tina,
they verbally assault the male characters. Indeed, these examples show Lee’s
proclivity toward utilizing images of stereotypical female “bitchiness,” although
Jade, played by his sister Joie Lee, is a strongly sympathetic character.
As Michelle Wallace notes, Lee privileges conventional heterosexual
relationships and negatively stigmatizes oral sex, which Wallace argues demeans
gays, as well as negatively portraying “the rest of the vast range of illicit sexual
practices and psychosocial developments beyond the pale of compulsory
heterosexuality, in which such perverse passions as interracial sex and drug addiction
are included” (Wallace 1992:129). In fact, I think that part of the underlying problem
with Lee’s gender politics are his proclivities to use Brechtian “typical” characters
to depict “typical” scenes. The “typical,” however, is a close breath away from the
stereo-typical, archetypical, conventional, representative, average, and so on, and
lends itself to caricature and distortion. Lee’s characters thus often embody gender
or racial stereotypes. He is only a “realist” in Brecht’s sense of trying to depict
“real” situations, but he does not engage the realities of underclass life or of gender
oppression to any great extent. Indeed, like Brecht, he uses comedy, aesthetic
interruption, satire, farce, and other devices to confront the problems of race, gender,
and sexuality. These are hot issues of the present, and much of the interest in Lee’s
work resides in his pushing of these buttons. Yet one could question whether Lee
interrogates gender and sexuality any more seriously or successfully than he
interrogates class.
As noted, in all of his films, Lee depicts certain characteristic types of gender
behavior and interaction between the sexes, but often does so in stereotyped ways.
He also puts a heavy stress on skin color, dividing blacks in School Daze according
to the color of their skin. In Jungle Fever too, there are constant contrasts between
Black voices 171
light- and dark-skinned blacks, and the wives of the two main black characters are
extremely light-skinned. Both Fever and X fetishize the white skin of women,
showing them to be both an intense object of black male desire and a route to black
male downfall. One of the jazz musician’s girlfriends in Mo’ Better Blues is lightskinned,
while the other is dark black. Most of the sex scenes in Lee’s films are
shot at night and the lighting exaggerates skin color differences, highlighting the
almost obsessive focus with skin color in Lee’s films.
Yet as hooks (1990), Wallace (1992), Guererro (1993b), Reid (forthcoming b),
and others have argued, Lee seems to rule out the possibility of healthy romantic
relationships between people of different color—a quasi-segregationist position
that a more progressive multi-culturalist vision would reject. There are also stereotypical
doublings of women between “good” and “bad” in Lee’s films, especially
evident in X, where Malcolm’s girlfriend Laura goes from good to bad. Laura is
first depicted as Malcolm’s good girlfriend, contrasted to the white woman Sophia.
Laura, however, becomes a junkie and a whore, and thus the good/bad opposition
with Laura is reversed. Eventually, Malcolm’s wife Betty appears as the ultimate
good woman, against whom all previous and other women appear as “bad.” Yet
this replicates the stereotypical “madonna” and “whore” opposition which has
dominated a certain type of classical Hollywood cinema. A possible exception to
these stereotypes in X are the Muslim sisters who are seduced and made pregnant
by Elijah Mohammed, but they too are ultimately presented as victims, as helpless
objects of male desire and as breeding machines to perpetuate male patriarchy.
Moreover, in all of Lee’s films women are relegated to the sphere of private life,
while men are active in public life. This is most striking in X, where Malcolm X’s
wife is primarily depicted as a dutiful spouse, raising his children and standing
passively beside him. Thus, there are few positive images of women in Lee’s films,
or of egalitarian relationships between men and women.26 Malcolm is shown as a
harsh patriarch who seems to want a wife primarily for breeding. Flipper in Jungle
Fever abandons his black wife for a white woman and then this relationship is shown
to fail. Nola Darling in She’s Gotta Have It plays off three black men against each
other and the resulting tension harms all her relationships. The jazz musician has two
girlfriends in Mo’ Better Blues and, once again, this situation is shown as untenable;
the main character marries the more conventional woman, has a family, and gives up
his jazz career. Thus, one rarely sees in Lee’s films strong, independent women,
egalitarian relationships, or men who treat women with genuine respect and care.
In part, Lee’s sexual politics fall prey to the stereotypes of the classical
Hollywood cinema and do not transcend this level. But they also reflect the male
chauvinism in the black and other minority communities and the intensity of conflict
between male and female—explosive tensions also articulated in rap music. But
his cinema does not explore the causes of these tensions, or propose any solutions.
Likewise, he ultimately fails to address the causes or propose solutions to the
political oppression of blacks.
For the most part, Lee privileges morality over politics in his films which are
best viewed as morality tales rather than political learning plays in Brecht’s sense.27
172 Diagnostic critique and cultural studies
Although his early musical School Daze thematizes class to some degree, on the
whole Lee’s films deal more with race and gender than class (which is, of course,
a major focus of Brecht’s Marxian aesthetic).
Before making my final criticisms, however, I want to stress the progressiveness
and excellence of Lee’s films in relation to other products of the Hollywood cinema.
His films are far and away superior to most other Hollywood films and it is good
that Lee is able to use media culture to articulate African-American perspectives
which are then disseminated through his films and his energetic promotion of them.
Both aesthetically and politically his works are so far superior to most Hollywood
films that it seems unfair to criticize him. Yet it is through critique and self-critique
that cultural and political progress are made, and Lee has been criticized from
within the black community for not taking more specific political positions, for
being politically vague and indeterminate, and for replacing nitty-gritty issues
politics with cultural politics.28
Thus, Lee tends to reduce politics to cultural identity and slogans. School Daze
ends with the message “Wake Up!” proclaimed by the black activist hero of the
movie and Do the Right Thing begins and ends with the DJ Mister Señor Love
Daddy proclaiming this. Fine, wake up. But to what, and what does one do when
one is awake? Such concrete politics seem beyond the purview of Lee’s vision and
suggest the limitations of his politics.
Moreover, he seems to be primarily concerned with the situation and
oppression of blacks and does not explore the oppression of other groups. This
could be excused on the grounds that it is useful to have someone undertaking
this effort, yet there are limitations, as I have been noting, concerning Lee’s
exploration of black oppression, which tends to ignore how a system of
exploitation oppresses blacks and other people of color and oppressed groups.
Indeed, Lee’s color fetishism aids a divide and conquer perspective which, in
essence, blinds the colonized and prevents solidarity among the oppressed. As
Cornell West puts it:
As long as we simply hide various particularisms…there cannot be a radical
democratic project. So there must be strategies and tactics that cut across
identity politics, cut across region, and gender, race, and class. Class is still
around even though it’s been unable to constitute an identity that has the
saliency and potency of the other identities. And we must attempt to think
about how we create and sustain organizations that acknowledge this. Because
we’re in the bind we’re in partly because we’ve been unable to generate the
transgendered, transracial, transsexual orientation of social motion, social
momentum, social movement. And if we can’t do that, then there will be
many, many more David Dukes by the end of the twentieth century, even
while we engage in our chatter about identity.
(West 1992a:23)
Thus, identity politics helps keep oppressed peoples apart and tends to reduce
politics to the search for a cultural identity and style. Lee never portrays political
Black voices 173
movements in any serious fashion. He fetishizes leaders, which, as Adolph Reed
puts it:
also reflects an idea of politics that is antidemocratic and quietistic. Great
Leaders don’t make movements. Insofar as they aren’t just the work of clever
publicists, they are in most important respects holograms created by
movements. Understanding politics as a story of Great Leaders produces
nostalgia and celebration, not mobilization and action.
(Reed 1993:19)
Although there is a conflict in Lee’s work between his affirmation of Malcolm X’s
modern politics and evocation of a postmodern political pessimism, it seems to me
that the central problem with Lee’s politics is that he ultimately comes down on
the side of a culturalist identity politics, which subordinates politics in general to
the creation of personal identity. Identity for Lee is primarily black identity and he
constantly operates with a binary opposition between black and white, and “us”
and “them.” Lee’s identity politics, moreover, are primarily culturalist, in which
identity is defined by “image” and cultural style. This was clearly the case in DRT,
where every character’s politics were defined in terms of cultural style. None of
the various characters were involved in any political organization, movement, or
struggle, and Buggin’ Out’s boycott of Sal’s Pizzeria is a pathetic caricature of the
real struggles by people of color for rights and survival.
Concrete issues of black politics in DRT were reduced to graffiti on walls where
one read slogans like “Tawana Told the Truth,” “Dump Koch,” or “Jesse,” referring
to Jesse Jackson’s 1988 run for the Presidency. Yet here too black politics are
sublimated into slogans and images, and Lee’s culturalist identity politics never
really rise beyond this level. As bell hooks notes, Lee never explores alliance politics
and fails to realize that:
Combatting racism and other forms of domination will require that black
people develop solidarity with folks unlike ourselves who share similar
political commitments. Racism…is not erased when we control the production
of goods and services in various black communities, or infuse our art with
an Afrocentric perspective. Nostalgia for expressions of black style are less
and less accessible to black folks who no longer live in predominantly black
communities.
(hooks 1990:183–4)29
hooks also argues (1993) that Malcolm X becomes reduced to an image in Lee’s
presentation, both, I would add, in DRT and X. Spike Lee thus ultimately falls
victim to a consumerist image culture, in which value, worth, and identity are
defined in terms of images and cultural style, in which one’s image determines
who one is and how one will be received. Film, to be sure, is at its best a feast of
images, but critical film interrogates these images, deconstructs those that serve
the interests of domination, and develops alternative images, narratives, and aesthetic
strategies. Lee, however, does not rise above the repertoire of dominant images
174 Diagnostic critique and cultural studies
already established and reproduces many questionable images of men, women,
blacks, and other races. Although his films show that cinema can address issues of
key political importance and generate interesting discussions that may have
progressive political effects, so far, his films, whatever their merits, are limited,
specifically in their identity politics.
Yet his films do attack at least some of the many forms of sex, race, gender, and
class oppression. While they might not ultimately provide models of a “counterhegemonic
cinema” as bell hooks and other black radicals desire, they provide
some engaging and provocative cinematic interventions that are far superior to the
crass genre spectacles of the Hollywood cinema.
RAP AND BLACK RADICAL DISCOURSE
African-Americans have traditionally used music and musical idiom as a privileged
form of resistance to oppression. Gospel emerged as response to the oppression of
slavery, while the blues articulated a response to institutional racism, and so both
articulated suffering produced by oppression and resistance to it. Ragtime and jazz
drew on African-American experiences, seeking a musical idiom to articulate suffering
and joy, collective agony and individual expression, domination and resistance. As
African-Americans moved from the South to northern industrial cities, they created
new forms of music to express their experiences, producing, among other forms,
rhythm and blues. Such African-American music and culture was often limited to
black enclaves and was primarily disseminated through live performance.
During the 1950s, R. & B. mutated into rock and roll music and black artists
like Fats Domino, Chuck Berry, Little Richard, and others entered into mainstream
culture. White artists, however, like Pat Boone, quickly began covering and
exploiting the African-American songs, though genuine rock culture
contemptuously dismissed such “poaching” and most rock fans preferred the black
musical artists who entered the mainstream of American culture. It was especially
significant that black music made use of media culture to disseminate its meanings,
music, and voices. The 1950s was an era of proliferation of radio stations and new
recording technologies made available cheap recordings for the booming hi-fi/
stereo industry. Tape recorders, car radios, and eventually cassettes helped make
music an even more central part of media culture and it was probably professional
sports and rock music that did as much as anything to promote civil liberties for
blacks, to show whites that blacks were cool, to demonstrate that they were human
beings who deserved the full range of civil liberties available.
Much of the black rhythm and blues that migrated into rock and roll was an
urban, ghetto product, and African-American culture quickly assimilated music
into the texture of urban life. Radios, stereos, walkman radio/cassettes, and ghettoblasters
transmitted the sounds of black culture throughout country, city, and suburb.
New musical developments were quickly assimilated into African-American musical
idiom. Reggae music provided both new sounds and a new politicization of music.
Black rappers in the 1970s, like Gil Scott-Heron and Grandmaster Flash, developed
176 Diagnostic critique and cultural studies
new forms of political music, articulating the experiences of oppression and struggle
in the black urban environments.30
In the 1970s and 1980s, black urban hip hop culture developed new forms of
music, dancing, and singing, appropriate to African-American experience and
culture31—urban graffiti, break-dancing, black radio, club scenes with D.J.’s who
practiced sampling (i.e. taking popular songs and overlaying them with rapping
and electronic sounds), scratching (i.e. moving the needle rapidly over the disk),
and punch-phrasing (i.e. deftly shifting from one turn-table to another). Rap thus
started as a performance art, in club scenes, or rap parties, but the explosion of rap
CD’s and music videos made rap and hip hop culture highly visible, producing
new forms of identities and experiences. Popularized in films like Beat Street,
Breakin’ and Wild Style, and played more frequently on BET (Black Entertainment
Television) and MTV, rap became increasingly visible and popular—and
controversial—as the decade moved on.
RAP is a form of talking or rapping music with the R signifying rhyme and
rhythm and the P poetry—and in some cases politics. In the following discussion
of this highly controversial form, I want to argue that rap itself is best seen as a
cultural forum for urban blacks to articulate their experiences, concerns, and politics.
As a cultural forum, rap itself is a contested terrain between different types of rap
with competing voices, politics, and styles. It is thus a mistake to generalize
concerning rap as the differences between different rappers are extremely significant.
Thus, as we shall see, whereas some rap glorifies a gangster lifestyle, drugs, and
misogynist attitudes, other rap artists contest these problematical interventions,
using rap to articulate quite different values and politics.
Although there were rap artists in the 1970s, it was in the 1980s that it became
visible and massively popular. The 1980s was a period of decline in living conditions
and expectations for blacks under conservative administrations who shifted wealth
from the poor to the rich, cut back on welfare programs, and neglected the concerns
of blacks and the poor. During this period, the standard of living and job possibilities
for African-Americans declined and living conditions in the inner-city ghettos
deteriorated with growing crime, drug use, teen pregnancies, AIDS and sexually
transmitted diseases, gangs, and urban violence.
Rap music articulated the experiences and conditions of black Americans living
in violent ghetto conditions and became a powerful vehicle for political expression,
articulating the rage of African-Americans facing growing oppression and declining
opportunities for advancement, in which bare survival became an important issue.
The music struck a responsive chord and rap songs and albums went to the top of
the charts, leading record companies to produce more and more rap albums. During
the 1980s and 1990s, new rap artists like N.W.A. (Niggers With Attitude), Public
Enemy, Ice-T, Ice Cube, Sister Souljah, Queen Latifah, and 2 Live Crew won
notoriety and fame for their increasingly radical, shocking, and sometimes
outrageous rap music.
Rap confronts its listeners with a collage of urban sounds, combining sampling
from radio, television, popular records, and other familiar sounds, ratched up to a
Black voices 177
high decibel level punctuated by the discourse of distinctive, aggressive voices.
Voice is very important with distinct lyrics, articulating experiences and often
messages. Rap is a mode of talking, not singing, and utilizes often complex, though
unorthodox, rhyming schemes. Rap is usually delivered in a fast, staccato style
and the often complex patterns of rhyme and rhythm can create tensions between
the spontaneity of the performance and the fixity of the lyrics. Rap songs are often
long and sometimes convoluted, continuing an African-American tradition of long
and complex stories with individual variations and the solo riffs of rag-time, jazz,
and the blues. The rapper is often like a minister in the black church, with a message
for the audience, which the rapper conveys in distinctive ways, and like the chorus
in the black church, rappers often have choral background.
Rap music usually utilizes an electronically produced sound track and the music
often has a very rapid beat; Chuck D of Public Enemy noted that his group
accelerated the beats per minute in typical rock productions, thus upping the speed.
But rap is also dance music and the rappers often call on the audience to dance, to
shake and move their arms, sometimes to raise a clenched fist or express defiance,
or to in some ways participate in the musical performance. Queen Latifah frequently
commands her audiences to “dance for me,” and Ice-T explains that the rapper
“won’t be happy till the dancers are wet” with sweat, “out of control,” and
“possessed” by the beat and music (cited in Shusterman 1991:628).
The affectivity of rap, the pleasures it produces and somatic effects, are thus
related to the conjunction of the voice, music, spectacle, performance, and
participation. Of course, some of these elements are not present in listening to
records of rap music, though some of the somatic effects are present in the sound
alone. Videos of rap concerts, ho wever, or music videos of the alb ums or specif ic
songs, help replicate some of the affective pleasures and live performances and in
some cases multiply the visual pleasures by quick cuts and edits, and quite striking
images. Ice-T’s video version of “Original Gangster,” for instance, is a visual tour
de force with brilliant cinematography and many of Public Enemy’s music videos,
available in video rental stores but rarely shown on TV, also effectively combine
visual montage with the music, generating a complex wealth of cognitive, visual,
and somatic effects.
Rap also depends on technological virtuosity, with the DJ, who manipulates the
electronic sounds, an important part of the rap crew. Rap therefore combines
African-American oral traditions with highly sophisticated technological modes
of reproduction. Moreover, rap sounds are often transgressive sounds, breaking
the rules of propriety and acceptable discourse. They are often disorderly sounds,
with the noise of police cars, helicopters, bullets, glass breaking, and urban uprisings
in the soundtrack. Rap sounds are especially disturbing when played on loud
“ghetto-blasters” in public spaces, announcing that the enemy is within, that the
society is divided and facing explosive conflicts.
There are also frequent references to current events, such as the 1992 Rodney
King shootings and the L.A. uprising, mentioned on many rap albums, which often
use a collage of sounds of the ghetto, electronically bolstered. Rap develops a
178 Diagnostic critique and cultural studies
lexicon of distinctive language, political references, and iconic sounds, mixing
them together and often repeating discourse or sound on other albums, as when
Ice T’s song “Mind Over Matter” reprises Public Enemy’s use of the phrase. There
is thus a common social, political, and cultural context to rap music which is highly
intertextual (there are also attacks on other rap or black musical artists who abandon
rap, or compromise, as I note below).
Rap music is, however, centered on the rapping, sometimes by a single rapper,
often overlaid by choruses or repartee with others, and sometimes by entire groups
who take the mike one after the other. One of the first things that one notices when
listening to contemporary rap is how it is a form of articulating identity and selfassertion
in an environment increasingly hostile to African-Americans. The rap
artists frequently call attention to themselves and use their music to affirm their
own identity. This may border on narcissism and a materialism that brags of its
record sales and material possessions, but is also a mode of self-assertion in an
environment hostile to any form of African-American self-expression. The rap
artists are saying: Hey, we’re here! Listen to us and hear what we are telling you!
The frequently collective nature of rap groups, on one hand, decenters
individualism for group identity, but often affirms both the individual and group
identity, as individual rappers call attention to themselves as distinct voices, but
then re-submerge themselves into groups. Like graffiti artists, who took on
nicknames, rap artists often utilize a pseudonym, like Chuck D or Snoop Doggie
Dogg, to signify either the anonymity of black voices, or the need to take on another
persona to express their concerns. The name serves as a mask in the tradition of
African culture and signifies, on some occasions, that the rapper is speaking for
the group, or community, as well as themselves.
Rap thus gives expression to very specific voices who have been left out of
mainstream culture and the rap artists are concerned to tell you who they are, to let
you know where they are coming from and what they have on their mind. Public
Enemy’s music constantly refrains the group’s name in the background of the
songs, and their group name itself is an expression of their outsider status and
rebellion against mainstream culture. It plays on the sense that black youth are
perceived as a “public enemy” in the society at large. Their name also signifies
that they are emerging into the public sphere, into mainstream culture, as an enemy,
as an outsider, as a disruptive force. They also frequently affirm themselves as
“Public Enemy Number One,” calling attention to themselves as a threat and danger
to the mainstream.
Ice-T and Ice Cube adopt the “ice” metaphor, signifying their absolute coolness
and hardness. Ice-T constantly evokes his own name, sometimes embellished with
the refrain, “Ice, mother-fucking T,” describing himself as the “original gangster.”
Ice Cube describes himself as “America’s Most Wanted” and choruses taunt “Fuck
you Ice Cube” as he raps his radical lyrics. Queen Latifah is a Queen, she-royalty,
and African royalty at that, so show a little respect brothers! Sister Souljah
appropriates the term “soul sister,” given an African inflection with “Souljah,”
which also positions her as a “sister soldier,” a militant in the cause of black
Black voices 179
radicalism, and choruses on her songs chant her name as she belts out her aggressive
lyrics.
The Sister Souljah effect: during the 1992 Presidential election, candidate Bill
Clinton, in an opportunistic and effective gesture, attacked the violence of rap
lyrics, in the presence of Jesse Jackson and other blacks, singling out for censure
Sister Souljah. The rap singer got her fifteen minutes of media fame and Clinton
got a lot of publicity as a candidate not afraid to speak out on crime and violence,
and to put blacks in their place—an opportunistic appeal to so-called “Reagan
Democrats,” telling them, in effect, that he was no panderer to special interests
like blacks. For a diagnostic critique, however, it showed that Clinton was precisely
an opportunistic panderer to conservative white interests and fears.
Clinton’s rating got a quick bump and he went on to win the presidential election.
Earlier, President George Bush attacked rap artist Ice-T for his song “Cop Killer.”
Bush followed the police and right-wing groups in making highly publicized attacks
on rap music, thus both presidential candidates chose to attack rap. Meanwhile,
rap became more aggressive and more controversial, articulating the correct
perception by blacks that they were going to continue to be left out of the action,
that the new Democratic Party administration would be no more sympathetic to
their concerns than the Republican administrations of Bush and Reagan. The result
was an increase in violence and provocation in rap music and continual violence
in the increasingly explosive ghettos.
Indeed, the use of obscenity, terms like “nigger,” and other shock techniques
used by rappers are both a mode of self-expression and articulative of the actual
language and violence of urban ghetto culture. Use of the term “nigger” to describe
themselves and their group is an attempt to take a term of racist insult and to
transform it into a badge of racial pride. Use of the terms “bitches” and “ho’s,”
used to describe women in a derogatory fashion, replicate the sexism in the black
community and the high level of tension in relations between the sexes. By 1993,
male rappers were vociferously attacked by women in their community and
elsewhere for use of such sexist terminology. Queen Latifah, for instance, in her
1993/4 hit music video and song “U.N.I.T.Y.” calls for unity and derisively says:
“Who you calling a bitch?!” A chorus tells the black woman audience, “You ain’t
a bitch and a ‘ho’” and: “You gotta let ‘em know.” The video portrays street
harassment of women and shows how to “dis” such foul behavior.
Indeed, 2 Live Crew and some other rap groups are consistently derogatory
toward women, portraying them as good only for sex and otherwise as useless,
nagging, dumb “bitches.”32 This sexism has caused quite a stir in the black
community and has promoted much discussion that probably helps clarify relations
between the sexes. Thus, for a diagnostic critique, the sexist songs themselves are
an index of the deep hostility between the sexes and the need for restructuring
relations between men and women.33 This is not to excuse the sexism of the lyrics,
but to combine critique with diagnosis, attempting to discern what such attitudes
tell us about contemporary social realities and what needs to be done to address
the problem.34
Minggu, 21 Februari 2010
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