Understanding Popular Culture: Part Two

For my second week of reading Understanding Popular Culture, I found myself inundated with theory after theory in the final two–thirds of John Fiske’s text. Since the first three chapters of this work were more contemporary in tone at the time of Fiske’s writing, I was surprised by the historical mood of Chapter 4: “Offensive Bodies and Carnival Pleasures.” While charting the evolution of sports and recreation in England – and the public reaction to them – Fiske adopts a tone akin to Foucault in The History of Torture, as he provides both a historical overview of his subject matter and an application of theory. Utilizing the work of historians Robert Malcolmson, Gareth Stedman-Jones, and Hugh Cunningham, Fiske argues how British sports such as football and cricket were able to be appropriated by the English middle-class and made respectable (65).

When it comes to wrestling, thankfully – and this is where Fiske’s discussion becomes timely for me – strategies of class-control are ineffectual. Fiske writes, “Wrestling…is quite a different matter – here the middle-class ethos has failed to control the professional sport to the extent that it becomes doubtful if the bourgeois word sport is even remotely appropriate. In wrestling, probably more than in any other ‘sport,’ the disorderly popular pleasures are given free and public expression” (65). As the author then discusses the resisting “grotesque” bodies of wrestlers, with an application of Bakhtin thrown in to aid his argument, he states, “The grotesque is properly part of the vernacular of the oppressed” (72). This comment, which articulates why wrestling fans loves their disproportionately-musculatured heroes, instead of traditional square-jawed paragons of masculinity, led me, in a linear-way, to wonder why fans of the fictitious living dead choose to dress up like their decaying heroes and take zombie strolls. On the one hand, this carnivalesque public expression of zombie fandom is undeniably egalitarian – as the issues of sex, race, or bodily appearance becomes transformed and obviated by makeup showing varying degrees of physical decrepitude. Thus, the grotesque simulation of death becomes the resisting and destabilizing force against traditional notions of bodily health and beauty. The majority of these zombie strollers, on the other hand, are predominately middle-class, judging from the locations – towns and malls – where they stage the spectacle of their “walks.” Nonetheless, in an age of economic uncertainty, such expressions of resistance mimic anxieties concerning a post-apocalyptic scenario where all social institutions – perhaps all normal definitions of existence itself – have evolved into a distorted, deathly mockery of middle-class life.

In Chapter 6, “Popular Texts,” Fiske likewise lends me a finer understanding of how television opens itself up to the rigor of critical interpretation once reserved for a novel: “The reader of a novel is often told in great detail of the interior feelings and motivations of a character: The viewer of television has to infer all of these from a raised eyebrow, a downturn of the corner of a mouth, or the inflection of the voice as it speaks the cliché. By ‘showing’ rather than ‘telling,’ by sketching rather than drawing completely, popular texts open themselves up to a variety of social relevances” (98). Last week, I mentioned that I am currently working on a paper articulating Steven Moffat’s development of the character of River Song and fan reaction to her evolving characterization. Moffat is adept at conveying the depth of emotional feeling taking place between the Doctor and River, but the fans still feel a sense of ownership toward the characters, particularly River, as they closely watch and, hence, rewrite, or appropriate Moffat’s text when it lets them down and goes in a direction beyond their set of expectations. With Fiske’s above comment in mind, then, I can better approach fan interpretations of River in zines and user-generated tribute videos on YouTube.

In the future, for my theoretical dissertation, which I hinted at in my last blog, I potentially wish to explore anime fandom. Like my comments concerning zombie strollers, this is relatively new critical territory for me, but, if I simply posited myself as a Doctor Who or Star Wars theorist, how ultimately effective would I be as a scholar and teacher? Going outside my traditional objects of studies – and embracing more feminized fandoms such as anime – will thereby help me to achieve a wider, gendered overview of science-fiction, fantasy, and horror fandoms. Since anime is an animated form – or cartoon – it can visually transcend the limitations of reality. This thought leads me back to Fiske, who, in Chapter 6’s “Popular Discrimination,” discusses Bob Hodges and David Tripp’s studies on modalities, in that television news is a “high” (or more real) modality for children whereas “cartoons… are of low modalilty [as] they work on the conditional mood, and say, ‘The world would be like this if…’”  (123). When I thus behold the elegant and romanticized cartoon visuals of the anime series Chobits, the beautiful and action-oriented imagery of InuYasha, and the eclectic, kinesthetically shifting anime styles for FLCL, I understand why Japanese and American children, teens, and adult fans of these narratives love escaping to worlds where the infinite possibilities of if are constantly in play. 

Fiske’s concluding chapter, “Politics,” works well in telling me that the term mass culture is a misnomer as “such a process, if it existed…would be anticultural and unpopular; it would be the antithesis of culture understood as the production and circulation of meanings and pleasures, and of the popular as an intransigent, oppositional, and scandalous set of forces” (141). This tension between the forces of production and the consumers who purchase or reject brands and goods should indeed be celebrated. Oppositional binaries, as Fiske reminds us in his conclusion to Understanding Popular Culture, are also the chaotic sort of energy that should channel scholarship: “New knowledge is not an evolutionary improvement on what precedes it; rather, new knowledges enter adversarial relationships with older, more established ones, challenging their position in the power play of understandings, and in such confrontations new insights can be provoked” (153). With Fiske’s inspiration truth now in hand, I can more confidently forge ahead in my evolution as a fan cultures scholar!