Culture, politics, popular culture

22 October 2015

The Lion King (1994)

Shakespeare

in The Lion King

Mufasa and Simba:

Hamlet paraphrase

Timon and Pumbaa:

Henry V

‘added meanings’ in The Lion King

• 1994: end of the Apartheid in SA

• (Western worries) →ambiguous ‘politics’

• Scar’s regime: politically evil and unnatural

• (wasteland)

Scar with his hyaena army

Lion king: sickle moon

Circle of Life song • Here’s far too much to take in here

More to find than can ever be foundBut the sun rolling highThrough the sapphire skyKeeps great and small on the endless round

It's the Circle of LifeAnd it moves us allThrough despair and hopeThrough faith and love

Till we find our placeOn the path unwindingIn the CircleThe Circle of Life

Ecology• Mufasa: Everything you see exists

together, in a delicate balance. As king, you need to understand that balance, and respect all the creatures -- from the crawling ant to the leaping antelope.

• Simba: But, Dad, don't we eat antelope?• Mufasa: Yes, Simba, but let me explain.

When we die, our bodies become the grass. And the antelopes eat the grass. And so we are all connected in the great Circle of Life.

Ideologies in The Lion King

• Politics presented as nature

• Alternative to fascism/communism: not democracy but feudalism

• Change is bad -- natural cycle is good

• Voices of the hyaenas: Whoopi Goldberg, Madge Sinclair, Cheech Marin

• (but Mufasa: James Earl Jones)

hyaenas

Culture and class

• Cultural identity – class identiy

• (are we defined by our wages, class positions or cultural habits?)

• ‘cultural’ divisions – class divisions

• the ‘élite’

• Hyppolit (1999)

• Difficulty of talking about class

Hippolyt (1999): class, culture and the élite

Hippolyt

• Schneider Mátyás with his sniffer car • nouveau riche • Hyppolit and the garden gnomes

• The clash of mass culture and ‘high culture’

• hypocrisy • Public humiliation of Hippolyt

Renaissance Man

Popular culture and high culture in Renaissance Man

Shakespeare as the symbol of a happy, utopian cultural unity: Hamlet rap

• (~Shakespeare in Love)

Hamlet rap

Culture and power

• Culture (in a narrow sense of ‘cultural products’): field of conflict, battlefield of ideas

• Regulation (control) and resistance • Centralisation, standardisation

vs.

oppositional tendencies

Importance of mass culture

Birth of mass culture (19th cent)

• Demographic boom, • Urbanisation • mass literacy, • technologies of reproduction• popular fiction, music hall, magazines • Regulation: prohibition and encouragement • Bear-baiting, dogfights, boxing • Public parks, zoos, botanical gardens • Libraries, museums • Codification of sports (rugby), birth of modern

sport

Victorian pastimes

Mass culture or popular culture?(or consumer culture?)

• Mass society -- consumer society

Mass society

• (1) capitalism, urbanization (appearance of crowds)

• (2) Society ‘ruled’ by the masses (democracy, universal suffrage)

• ‘The controllers and manipulators go in fear of the Mass Man, the monstrous creation of their own fantasies’ (Stuart Hall)

Democracy and mass society

• Winston Churchill

• “Democracy is the worst form of government, except for all the others.”

• “The best argument against democracy is a five-minute conversation with the average voter.”

Mass society

• mass production

• technologies

• printing press (popularity of the novel)

• Mass literacy

• photography, motion pictures, radio, telecommunications, computer

Mass culture or popular culture?

MASS: ‘Masses are other people’ (Raymond Williams)

• Violent, ignorant, impressionable rabble• Physical mass (sameness, uniformity, the ‘grey

mass’)

POPULUS

coming from the people

Liked by the people

(the problem of folklore)

Mass culture as ‘culture industry’

• Theodor W. Adorno, F. R. Leavis, Thomas Mann, José Ortega y Gasset

• designed for mass consumption

• the simultaneous consumption of the same artwork by audiences often divided by great distances (movie → TV)

• Vaudeville (music hall) was a popular art, but it was not a mass art

Culture industry

1. „culture industry” (Adorno, 1947)

The logic of industry introduced into art

Production line, capitalist mass (re)production

(and consumption), technological aspect

Importance of the ‘artist’ (e.g. James Bond novels)

Mass culture as culture industry

• Mass culture: the technologies and networks themselves seem to produce the works themselves

• Video games

• Eg cable tv, home entertainment industry

• the expectation that new media technologies will require a large amount of product to transmit

2. Uniformity, sameness

‘cliché’

„All mass culture is identical” (Adorno)

The bastard form of mass culture is humiliated

repetition… always new books, new programmes,

new films, news items, but always the same meaning. (Roland Barthes)

sameness

• not a flaw but a design consideration. • Mass art is designed so that it is accessible to a large

number of people (differing cultural backgrounds) • widely shared and recognisable patterns, looking for the

smallest common denominator. • preference for the image as opposed to language • content: „Action/adventure scenarios are so serviceable

for the purposes of mass art because physical competition between the starkly defined forces of good and evil is easier for almost anyone to track than are complex psychological dramas, which may require background cultural information that the common viewer is apt to lack”

• Rock music: four-beat rhythm

sameness

• Trivialising important things until they are reduced to the level of the commonplace

• („I love you” every morning)

• lowest common denominator

Sameness – globalisation of mass culture

• technologies of mass production and distribution • a global mass culture: co-existing, as a second

culture, with local, traditional cultures • eroding the first culture in certain Third World

countries? • difficult to find people anywhere in the world

today who have not had some exposure to mass art

sameness

Identical consumers? Brainwashing?

BUT: why don’t all popular cd’s and and films sell equally well?

Why isn’t every Hollywood blockbuster a hit?

• Popular culture is diverse

• Success unpredictable

3. Not coming from the people

CONSUMER CULTURE

Identity determined not by labour and social status but by consumption habits

Consumers: not participants in social discussion but passive receivers

Not coming from the people

“Mass culture is imposed from above. It is fabricated by technicians hired by businessmen; its audience are passive consumers, their participation limited to the choice between buying and not buying” (Dwight Macdonald)

1984: novel-writing machines

• But: graffitti, Youtube success stories

4. Popular culture: ephemeral; passing value

Pleasure instead of catharsis?

• BUT:

Dickens, Shakespeare

Conan Doyle, Agatha Christie, Tolkien

There are different kinds of art experience

Some classics kept alive by the iron lung of education

5. Escapist („packaged dream”)

• still: “If it is the crime of popular culture that it has taken our dreams and packaged them and sold them back to us, it is also the achievement of popular culture that it has brought us more and more varied dreams that we could otherwise never have known” (Richard Maltby)

• politically engaged and responsible popular art (urban music, feminist thrillers, Scandinavian crime etc)

6. Addictive

like drugs

(cutting rates in MTV videos average 19.94 shots per minute)

like pornogaphy

(porn addict: inability to have real relationships)

7. Cretinization

Identical, passive, unthinking consumers

Conformity – totalitarianism

“At worst, mass culture threatens not merely to cretinize our taste, but to brutalize our sense while paving the way to totalitarianism” (Bernard Rosenberg)

Closing remarks• panem et circenses

• Pop culture: profit-making industry +

a device for keeping people quiet

• BUT:

• (1) The cultural field is not black and white

• (2) neither CONSUMERS nor (3) PRODUCTS make homogeneous categories

• 3. pop culture is not homogeneous

• 4. need to look at individual products

cultural field

• underground cultures,

• countercultures;

• what is mainstream/elite?

• multitude of subcultures

the consumer of popular culture

• we all participate in several cultures

• personal culture Bricolage (DIY)

e.g. fandom – does not entirely fit consumer culture

(fans create critical communities, interpretations)

fandom

fandom

• jazz

• SF

• film noir and Hitchcock

• Tolkien and fantasy

• Tintin comics

• Watchmen

• children’s lit

• humour: Chaplin, Monty Python

Popular culture vs Kitsch

Baroque church interior

De Brusses: Kittens Playing with Wool

sampler

Michael Jackson atrwork

Kitsch?

1947

• „socialist realism”

(1952 poster)

Hubert

Lanzinger:

The Standard Bearer

kitsch

• Idealising, prettifying

• ‘dishonest’

• Homeliness, reassuring familiarity

The Fabulous Life of Amélie(Jean-Pierre Jeunet, 2001)

Amélie

Amélie - postcards