BASIC INTRODUCTION TO KEY CONCEPTS:
FILM AND CULTURE, SPRING 2001, UWEC

Professor Bob Nowlan
 
 

1.    What is "Society."

• The totality of relations among all people living at a particular place and time as well as the sum total of the institutions they have designed to facilitate and govern their relations with each other.

 
• Our society equals all of us plus all the social structures that organize our interactions with each other, such as family, school, church, government and the law, ownership and property, labor and leisure, etc.

• Everything that human beings have created other than what nature itself has provided in order to give meaning, purpose, and value to our life in society.

 
• Culture includes material culture, all of the material things we as human beings have created and make use of in the course of our lives, all that we can tangibly perceive, as well as spiritual culture, all of the intangible things we have created and make use of in the course of our lives, such as customs, habits, rituals, beliefs, ideals, and values.

• Every society has its own culture, its own precise organization of material and spiritual phenomena that distinguishes it from the cultures of other societies.

 
• For instance, we have what is called American culture and other societies have what are called, for instance, French culture, Russian culture, Algerian culture, British culture, etc. Also, American culture today is different than what was American culture in the 1890s or 1950s or 1710s.

• Within a larger society, smaller social groups tend to have their own distinct subcultures.

 
• These subcultures reflect the particular social position, historical experience, interests, needs, desires, and way of looking at and dealing with life common to a group of people sharing a common social identity, such as African-American culture, Southwestern culture, Hmong culture, gay culture, working class culture, punk culture, hip hop culture, etc.

• Of course, there are subcultures within subcultures, and all of these overlap with and influence each other quite extensively.

 
• The same is true of relations between subcultures and the dominant, or mainstream, culture: these overlap with and influence each other quite extensively as well.

 
• Just think of, for instance, how the dominant culture tends to take up expressions of rebellion originating in various subcultures and make them mainstream, after a period of time, especially by turning these into commodities.

 
• To take another example, when I was your age attending college, a male wearing an earring, even just one, was usually indicating either that he was gay, or a gypsy, or a sailor; obviously, a lot has changed since that point in time.

 
• In any event, subcultures arise from sharing any one or more of the following social positions in common (among many others): class, job, race, ethnicity, gender, sexuality, nationality, regionality, age, generationality, religious conviction, political affiliation, educational attainment, leisure interest or hobby, etc.

• Film is a part of a larger society, and, as such, the ways film are produced, distributed, and exhibited, as well as what they represent, how, and why are always in part products, or reflections, of this larger culture, and, most likely, of particular subcultures within the larger culture as well.

• For example, The Manchurian Candidate is obviously a product of America of the late 1950s and early 1960s, especially of the impact and influence of McCarthyism and the Cold War. This film reflects military, government, media, and family subcultures of the time.

• At the same time, film also exerts its own impact and influence as well; the ways in which people relate to films and to what films represent in turn effects what, and how, people will think, feel, believe, act, and interact in the rest of their lives.

 
• Films therefore are productive as well as products of culture; in other words, they respond to as well as reflect culture. As we have talked about before, film takes ideas and images from the world in which we live and then turns these into stories which aren't simply identical with the world outside of film.

 
• To take The Manchurian Candidate, once again, the film doesn't just show us what McCarthyism and the Cold War were like by opening a literal window onto these phenomena, but rather tells us a story about McCarthyism and the Cold War, offering a commentary on them: the film argues that McCarthyism was dangerously demagogic and actually highly anti-patriotic, despite Senator McCarthy's attempt to wrap himself in the flag as a superpatriot, and the film argues that the best way to wage the Cold War against the Soviet Union and the People's Republic of China is to maintain our democratic freedoms and civil liberties rather than to become the mirror image of the USSR and the PRC, i.e., dictatorial and oppressive.

• Popular culture is not just culture which is popular with large numbers of people, but rather culture which these people themselves have created.

 
• In American society over the course of the past fifty to sixty or more years, popular culture has increasingly become mass culture, in other words culture which is mass produced for mass consumption and, for the most part, not created by we the people ourselves, or at least not according to our design and direction.

 
• Hollywood, for instance, manufactures films for us; we only indirectly influence what kinds of films we get to see in commercial exhibition by choosing to "buy" some of these more than others.

 
• What's more, this may be a quite small degree of influence as we by and large can only choose among a relatively limited array of choices that Hollywood studios make available to us, and all of these choices generally conform to fairly familiar patterns and standard formulas.

• According to some of its harshest critics, such as the members of the Frankfurt School whom you read about in Robert Kolker's Film, Form, and Culture, the culture industry dominates and subjugates us, encouraging us, for the most part, to consent and conform, not to question, challenge, or rebel.

 
• In fact, it does this most insidiously by taking over our thinking for us, and by therefore promoting the stupidification of the American general public.

 
• I think all of us know how easy it is to support this kind of argument, even if we don't fully agree with it, when we consider the highly lame and very simplistic ways that many popular films and television shows encourage us to make sense of what they represent to us.

 
• Just to take one example, consider the way television stations such as MTV tend to represent what most, if not all, traditional-age undergraduate college students spend most of your time thinking and doing. It seems almost superfluous for MTV to run its "spring break" marathon shows as it seems like people your age are already spending most of your time and energy doing the same thing MTV suggests you will be doing on spring break.

• In contrast with the Frankfurt School, and their followers, however, other culture critics propose that the culture industry is itself contradictory, and that it doesn't act like a monolithically oppressive, and stupidifying, force; that not all productions from the culture industry are equally trivial or share the same conservative outlook.

 
• According to this kind of position, what's more, many if not most people don't simply accept everything that the culture industry creates for us at face value. In other words, we negotiate meaning with movies, tv shows, musical recordings, and so on; we interpret and evaluate these texts in ways that are often quite different than what was intended, and we make them mean things in our lives that their producers could not have imagined.

• What's more, sometimes even big budget, commercial films, tv shows, and musical recordings encourage us to think about what they represent, and at times, to do so critically. Most of the films I have chosen for us to watch this semester are examples of films that at least aim to do this. From our discussion last Thursday, it seems that many of you agree Twelve Monkeys is this kind of Hollywood film.

• In addition to those culture critics who approach mass culture as contradictory, rather than entirely negative, there are those such as Walter Benjamin, who you have read about in Robert Kolker's Film, Form, and Culture, who see positive possibilities in the development of mass culture.

 
• According to Benjamin, mass culture allows large numbers of people to gain access to cultural products, and therefore enhances the potential expansion of democracy versus the confinement of cultural products, and cultural production, to a relatively elite few.

 
• Once products of culture can be mass produced, such as we see in the case of film, recorded music, radio, television, the internet, etc., the cult of the original suffers a severe blow -- the original loses its aura as something absolutely unique and sacred.

• Today, for instance, in order to listen to music or to watch a dramatic play people don't necessarily need always to attend a live performance; we can listen to cds, radio, and music on-line or which we have downloaded, and we can watch videos, dvds, and films on cable and network television. Also, we can hang posters of famous works of art or look at these in books which we can buy quite easily at bookstores, or on-line.

• As Benjamin sees it, this greater access to reproductions of works of art enables a much wider number of people to learn about art and to think about and pursue the practice of making their own art.

 
• For example, think about how many young people in the United States (and elsewhere) have been encouraged to form their own rock bands, ever since the 1950s, as a result of their access to recordings of rock music on the radio, on television, and in the form of cds, tapes, and vinyl records and albums.

• In sum, I think one of the most important things to take away from this brief introduction to cultural theory and criticism, is to think about how we relate to the larger culture, and the smaller subcultures, within which we participate, as well as how the films we watch encourage us to relate to this culture and these subcultures.

 
• We can use this as a criteria to judge a film's politics: Does the film encourage us to relate to culture passively, as a dazzling, mysterious spectacle, something that takes place by and large outside of our influence and control? Or does the film encourage us to relate to culture actively, by providing us an opportunity for critical reflection about this culture, and, perhaps even by providing us a means for collective action, and a spark, or a stimulus to do so, to act together, in the interest of social transformation?

• Finally, Robert Kolker's Film, Form, and Culture raises two other points in what you've read of chapter three so far that I'd like to touch on: intertextuality and postmodern style.

 
• Intertextuality refers to the ways in which all texts are always built out of and draw upon prior and other texts. In examining a film's intertextuality, therefore, we should try to look at the other and prior texts that influenced the film and that the film takes up and makes into something new, even if it the film is mostly just the same and only a little bit different from what has been done before.

 
• For example, when we discussed The Matrix, we discussed a number of ways in which this film is an example of intertextuality: it draws upon texts of Christian, Buddhist, and Hindu religions, Alice in Wonderland, and the films Metropolis and Dark City, among many other sources.

 
• Turning to "postmodern style," this refers to a text which not only foregrounds its own intertextuality, but also tends to represent the world it shows us as one that is vast, complex, contradictory, fragmented, fluid, and open-ended. This is a world, moreover, that is dominated by information overload and by electronic media technology. A postmodern text, such as a postmodern film, also typically takes the form of a maze, a puzzle, or another kind of intricate and elaborate game. Twelve Monkeys is exemplary of "postmodern style."

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