Monday, May 22, 2006

Pop Culture Meaning   [Stanley Kurtz]

Here are some more quick thoughts on trying to make sense of movies, TV shows and such.  First, with literally millions of viewers, any generalization is going to have scads of exceptions.  I’m sure there are some very liberal folks who loved the Narnia books when they were kids and who enjoyed the movie as adults.  But I don’t think “it’s just a movie” or “it’s just a TV show” is enough to explain the content of popular culture.  There are an infinite number of ways to write a good story, and what strikes people in 1950 as a great read isn’t the same as what works in 2006.

When I was growing up, the main image of Catholicism in popular culture came from re-runs of Bing Crosby movies.  Maybe folks know of some big, popular films from the fifties that questioned the divinity of Christ and featured conservative Catholics as bad guys, but offhand I can’t think of any.  That strikes me as a likely index of a significant cultural change.

The whole Murphy Brown dispute went badly for Quayle when pundits made fun of him for not realizing that it was “only a television show.”  Things turned around when folks decided that Dan Quayle was right.  Historians frequently point to movies and television shows as signs of the times and important culture shaping events in and of themselves.  It’s sometimes easier to see this in retrospect.  South Pacific helped call racial prejudice into question after WWII.  The Da Vinci Code seems to me to encapsulate a certain skepticism about religion mixed with an attraction to new age movements, typical of the present.  This is true, even if huge numbers of people saw South Pacific or The Da Vinci Code without directly thinking or caring much about the politics.  Many do care about these things, and what’s out there culturally can shape us in subtle ways, regardless.

05/22 03:18 PMShare