Monthly Archives: September 2011

Frye and Popular Culture Update

I was negligent in adding links to my earlier “Frye and Popular Culture” post. Here is a much-expanded set of links to posts dealing with Frye on popular culture

Previous posts on Frye and rock ‘n’ roll herehere, and here.

Casting our net a little wider on the issue of popular culture: posts on Charlie Chaplin herehere, and here; on silent movies here; a list of every movie Frye alludes to seeing here; on the New Yorker here and here; on television here; on popular art forms herehereherehereherehere, hereherehereherehere, here; on popular music here; on John Lennon here; on the Beatles here; on Bob Dylan here and here; on the ’60s youth movement here; on Andy Warhol here and here; Frye’s comments on a number of movies here.

This is by no means a comprehensive collection. This is just the stuff we’ve pulled together so far.

Frye and Popular Culture

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h4vs2drW_Hc

Hole, “Olympia.” Why it’s Hole, why the song is “Olympia,” and why this version of it is amateur hand-held video of a 1993 performance, is clarified below.

Last Saturday night I put up a brief post to note the passing of R.E.M and the twentieth anniversary of the release of Nirvana’s Nevermind. The next day I posted some observations by Amanda Marcotte on Nirvana and Third Wave feminism, and added a comment to expand a little on the rise of the riot grrrl phenomenon which, like Nirvana, had the same improbable hometown of Olympia, Washington. Tomorrow night I’m putting up more video featuring riot grrrl bands, partly because the movement is so closely associated with the emergence of the Third Wave, but also because the music and the culture around it are interesting on their own.

Whenever I post anything having to do with popular culture, especially if it is music that may be unknown to or disliked by many people, I do the same gut check: is this Frye-relevant?  In this instance I’d say, as I say every time, yes it is, even though it is obviously not for all tastes. This time, however, I thought I’d sketch out my reasons for thinking so.

Frye once observed that soap operas never rise to the condition of fully realized romance because the endless narrative of serial adventures cannot reach a dialectical crisis of identity. It’s tempting to take this sort of comment as licence to dismiss popular culture generally. But Frye himself does not do this. He in fact says that there is no real distinction between high and low culture, and that any imposed distinction is about bias rather than anything intrinsic to the art itself. I have three main reasons to suggest why works of popular culture, whatever their appeal to taste, ought to be of interest to Frye critics.

The first is the assumption of imaginative value. Even the aesthetics of mass produced and distributed cultural phenomenon — particularly music, movies, television — have their own implicit value that can be tapped by critical engagement. The more consistently we are imaginatively engaged, the greater our potential for creative imaginative response. Mass produced culture has the advantage of ensuring mass circulation but introduces the danger of mass conformity. It has, however, also always been a cause for resistance and “counter-cultural” reactions. As long as this continues to happen, it is more likely to provide enough variation to prevent a debilitating decline into cliché and the kinds of reflexive response that undermine a liberated imaginative response.

Second, in much if not most of our popular culture (especially in that element with resistant counter-cultural origins) the dialectic of identity is strongly manifested in the prevailing archetypes of concern. Our only recently developed youth culture has a notably stubborn streak of resistance (which corporate interests, contrary to the conventional wisdom, do not entirely erase, but also search out at street level as the resistance reinvents itself). The lyrics of popular songs can easily be seen to be some expression, however occasionally naïve or fleeting, of discontent driven by something more like what Frye calls primary concerns: “making a living, making love, and struggling to stay free and alive,” as he puts it in Words with Power. This dialectic of identity those primary concerns represent is not much different from other “higher” forms of imaginative expression; the concerns are universal and their expression is recognizable in recurring archetypes.

Finally, there is what Frye refers to as the local and decentralizing aspect of culture. The universal is best perceived through the particular, which is why, as he once put it, William Faulkner could set his novels in a fictional county in Mississippi and still win a Nobel Prize for literature. The principle is in no way restricted to white American males; it is in the nature of the imaginative dimension of literature and all of the other arts. This fact ought to be more readily appreciable today when there is increasing evidence of the potential for a globalized popular culture, in which just about any aspect of any culture can be transferred and enjoyed anywhere else. It is typically picked up by another small, localized community and eventually transposed into the wider culture. Not surprisingly, the trend is most conspicuously present in music, which always has a massive international appeal, and therefore lends itself to innovation and synthesis. Thirty years ago a designation for “world music” came into wide use, and the increasingly hybridized nature of the music that falls under this heading has only become more obvious. It is almost a certainty these days that just about wherever there are discontented youth challenging local authority, there will be rap and hip hop: this is as true of large parts of the Muslim world, for instance, as it is of Israel.

Local culture therefore has a decentralizing effect on the more widely shared culture, and there is observable movement between the two. This makes it easier to understand why there is a cultish aspect to any counter-culture, especially among young people: these cultish communities are decentralized in the sense that they make a deliberate point of being as far away from accepted standards as they can manage, and they are local in the sense of exhibiting a sensibility and outlook assumed not to be widely shared, even if the community is international and held together by the ability to communicate through electronic media. But today’s cult always has the potential to be part of tomorrow’s culture.

Riot grrrl, for example, to end with the subject of tomorrow’s post, began in about 1990 in Olympia, Washington, which, again, was also the home of Nirvana, and quite remote from any source of the North American musical mainstream. The members of the Olympia music scene made their own music for their own enjoyment, and in a remarkably short period of time Nirvana’s local brand of grunge (an amalgam primarily of heavy metal and punk rock) became an international phenomenon. Meanwhile, the riot grrrl movement introduced a renewed expression of feminist attitudes into the alternative music scene, and that in turn allowed it to catch on just about anywhere it went. Like punk, with its anti-corporate orientation, the music is stripped down, the outlook is crankily dismissive of the status quo, and the lyrics are often profane; but the expectation tends to be hopeful, in the sense that there is anticipation, as there is throughout all of the arts, that things really could change for the better by confronting the world as it is with some sense of the way it ought to be. The fact that the perspective also tends to be ironic is, of course, not a problem because our universally shared concerns are, as Frye points out, what makes irony ironic.

Relative simplicity does not exclude a work of popular art from being imaginatively relevant or from having transferable value. It can render the dialectic of identity as reliably as any “serious” work of art, although, admittedly, with less range and nuance. But what the consumer of art does with any particular work of art is a matter of choice and discretion, and there the potential remains limitless. One of the most pleasantly surprising things about the punk movement when it first began to appear in the mid-1970s is that its indignation is typically motivated by passionately advocated concern. Because that concern is ironically expressed, it can yield a lot of wit and even unexpected tenderness. A much loved but long defunct riot grrrl band from Olympia, Bikini Kill, has a song called “I Like Fucking.” The title and the content are provocative, and, like most punk, there is a conventional épater la bourgeoisie involved. But the more localized context is, once again, what would soon become known as the Third Wave, including an energetic push back against male privilege, as well as a declaration of freedom and gender identity that is more fluid, self-confident, and defiantly sex-positive. However offensive some might find the presentation, the expectation is always reassuring if reassurance is what we are expecting to find. Approached on its own terms, this kind of music has its own authority, an authority that, like the best in all art, invites and does not compel.

I’ll hedge my bets a little by acknowledging that a lack of “range and nuance” in popular culture may be an issue worth considering in much more depth than I have here, and for some people it may be a deal breaker. I also do not address Frye’s critical but prescient observations about the youth culture of the 1960s because I think the culture has much deeper roots now. Because I teach, I am fortunate enough to be continually surprised by the sophistication of students, despite the needless compromises that have been introduced into their formal education through cutbacks and chronic under-funding. Their worldview is remarkably liberal, and it has certainly not been encouraged by the diminished opportunities we have provided them compared to their baby boomer parents. They seem to pick it up where they can, and the most obvious place to look is the culture a significant number of them seem to feel is not simply there for them to consume, but to engage to the extent their own concerns will carry them. In a society currently under seige by a plutocratic class which appears to be set upon stripping away wealth from whatever source it can find, our popular culture is a means to keep alive the determination to prevent the powers that be from being the powers that will prevail.

Previous posts on Frye and rock ‘n’ roll here, here, and here.

Casting our net a little wider on the issue of popular culture, posts on Charlie Chaplin here, here, and here; on silent movies here; a list of every movie Frye alludes to seeing here; on the New Yorker here and here; on television here; on popular art forms herehere, herehere, here, here, here, here, here, here, and here; on popular music here; on John Lennon here; on the Beatles here; on Bob Dylan here and here; on the ’60 youth movement here; on Andy Warhol here and here; Frye’s comments on a number of movies here.

This is by no means a comprehensive collection. This is just the stuff we’ve pulled together so far.

Quote of the Day 2: Keystone XL

Martin Lukacs of the Guardian notes that the Ottawa protest may signal wider public protest:

The Canadian action heralds a new spirit of defiance in the broader climate change movement. It follows on two weeks of sit-ins at the White House in Washington last month where more than 1,200 people were arrested over Keystone XL – the TransCanada pipeline that would carry the dirty Alberta oil to Texas refineries. The Washington protesters successfully introduced millions of Americans to their No 1 source for oil imports, putting an ecological-disaster zone the size of Florida on the map; now, their Canadian counterparts showed they were neither silent nor passive on the issue. These are signs that the environmentalist community – professionalised and tame for too long – may have discovered a much-needed impetus for civil disobedience.

(Photo: Sean Kilpatrick, Canadian Press)

Quote of the Day: Occupy Wall Street

John Cassidy at the New Yorker notes that police violence against the protesters has only increased their numbers:

If the cops had kept their cool, the occupation, which is meant to last several months, might well have declined over time to a hard core of a few dozen. Now the protesters’ numbers are growing, presenting a dilemma for [Police Commissioner Raymond Kelly] and his billionaire boss Mayor Bloomberg. Should they leave the kids alone or present them with another publicity coup by attempting to break up their encampment?

Bob Denham’s “Essays on Northrop Frye”

We are very pleased to announce that we will very shortly be posting a new collection of twenty-two essays on Northrop Frye by Bob Denham, which he has very generously decided to publish with us. These essays will examine a number of prevailing themes and influences in Frye’s work, including the more esoteric dimension of his interests. Nine of these essays will examine his relation to a number of other influential thinkers, including Aristotle, Giordano Bruno, Kierkegaard, Mallarmé, and Lewis Carroll. I think we can confidently promise that these will be available in our library for you to read in paginated, searchable, and downloadable PDF by Monday.

Quote of the Day: “A good first step is making people aware of the battle lines”

Matt Taibbi notes the almost complete lack of media coverage of the Occupy Wall Street protest:

There is a huge number of Americans who simply don’t realize that they’ve been victimized by Wall Street –  that they’ve paid inflated commodity prices due to irresponsible speculation and manipulation, seen their home values depressed thanks to corruption in the mortgage markets, subsidized banker bonuses with their tax dollars and/or been forced to pay usurious interest rates for consumer credit, among other things.

I would imagine the end game of any movement against Wall Street corruption is going to involve some very elaborate organization. There are going to have to be consumer and investor boycotts, shareholder revolts, criminal prosecutions, new laws passed, and other moves. But a good first step is making people aware of the battle lines.

The Politics of Fear

The Conservatives’ Omnibus Crime Bill is working its way through the House. The tax-payer funded Government of Canada television ad above, one of many like it that ran in the weeks before the election was called, is now airing again. The intention clearly is to tenderize the public and put it in the mood for “reform.”

As is typically the case with the Conservatives, it’s about fear. They take a worst-case scenario and make it appear to be the widespread norm. This is a recognizable part of what seems to be a cynical and ongoing propaganda campaign. If anyone can find statistics regarding any significant incidence of middle-class children under the age of ten using “juicy” as depicted in this ad, I’d be grateful.

The Conservatives apparently want to change our attitude toward government on all fronts, and the message is clear: government can’t afford to provide the services we want and need, but it can “protect” us from bogies and bumps in the night. It can’t find the money for expanded health care, but there’s more than enough to build prisons.

Like conservatives in the U.S., Canada’s Conservative Party disdains government as a provider of public service, and has taken hold of the instruments of government in order to undermine it. It is obvious at this point that they do so on behalf of their real constituency, the rich and corporations, who are the only beneficiaries of government policy to any significant extent. The fact that income inequality in Canada is now increasing at a faster rate than the U.S. verifies as much.

Quote of the Day: “Women who — like Vulcans and Mothra — do not exist in real life”

The red-band trailer for Bridesmaids

Mindy Kaling, who writes for and plays Kelly Kapoor on The Office, in this week’s New Yorker lays out her love of romantic comedies by way of “the female archetypes”:

I like watching people fall in love onscreen so much that I can suspend my disbelief in the contrived situations that occur only in the heightened world of romantic comedies. I have come to enjoy the moment when the male lead, say, slips and falls right on top of the expensive wedding cake. I actually feel robbed when the female lead’s dress doesn’t get torn open at a baseball game while the JumboTron camera is on her. I regard romantic comedies as a subgenre of sci-fi, in which the world operates according to different rules than my regular human world. For me, there is no difference between Ripley from “Alien” and any Katherine Heigl character. They are equally implausible. They’re all participating in a similar level of fakey razzle-dazzle, and I enjoy every second of it.

It makes sense, then, that in the romantic-comedy world there are many specimens of women who—like Vulcans or Mothra—do not exist in real life.

The types Kaling goes on to describe in detail are:

The Klutz” (“The hundred-per-cent-perfect-looking female is perfect in every way except that she constantly bonks her head on things”)

The Ethereal Weirdo” (also known as the Manic Pixie Dream Girl: “She is essential to the male fantasy that even if a guy is boring he deserves a woman who will find him fascinating and perk up his dreary life by forcing him to go skinny-dipping in a stranger’s pool.”).

The Woman Who Is Obsessed with Her Career and Is No Fun at All” (“Often, a script calls for this uptight career woman to ‘relearn’ how to seduce a man, and she has to do all sorts of crazy degrading crap, like eat a hot dog in a sexy way or something.”).

The Forty-two-Year-Old Mother of the Thirty-Year-Old Male Lead” (“If you think about the backstory of a typical mother character in a romantic comedy, you realize this: when “Mom” was an adolescent, the very week she started to menstruate she was impregnated with a baby who would grow up to be the movie’s likable brown-haired leading man.”).

The Sassy Best Friend” (“You know that really hilarious and horny best friend who is always asking about your relationship and has nothing really going on in her own life? She always wants to meet you in coffee shops or wants to go to Bloomingdale’s to sample perfumes? She runs a chic dildo store in the West Village? Nope? O.K., that’s this person.”).

The Skinny Woman Who Is Beautiful and Toned but Also Gluttonous and Disgusting” (“If you look closely, you can see this woman’s ribs through the dress she’s wearing—that’s how skinny she is, this cheesecake-loving cow.”).

The Woman Who Works in an Art Gallery” (“The Gallery Worker character is the rare female movie archetype that has a male counterpart. Whenever you meet a handsome, charming, successful man in a romantic comedy, the heroine’s friend always says the same thing: ‘He’s really successful. He’s”—say it with me—“an architect!’”).

Read the entire thing here.