Pop Goes the Culture

It may be the ultimate instance of American mixed feelings. Our popular culture? Spiffy, spectacular: Billie Holiday songs, Krazy Kat, Preston Sturges movies, Ernie Kovacs, the Four Tops, The Mary Tyler Moore Show, Bob Dylan, E.T., even blue jeans, Whoppers and soda pop. But ask again, on a dull, gray, Spenglerian day, and the view is altogether different. Alarming, appalling, totally awesome. The critic Dwight Macdonald called pop culture a spreading ooze back in the 1950s, when Sylvester Stallone was still just a boy. Today America's righteous pop thug is huge, ubiquitous, swaggering from one medium into the next and the next: he is a movie warrior, he is a TV cartoon character, he is a plastic doll, he is a music-video creature and now, in candy racks all over America, he is chewing gum--Rambo black flak, jagged, black raspberry bits packed in foil pouches and meant to resemble shrapnel.

The U.S. has a knack for concocting and consuming entertainments that are quick, vivid, exuberant. Razzmatazz is a plentiful U.S. natural resource, like oil but with no OPEC competitors. Americans are pop-culture vultures, profligate in the money and time they devote to making themselves giggle and choke up on cue, ooh and aah en masse. Why is it that Americans make slick movies and snappy songs and every kind of TV show so relentlessly, so effectively, so -- well, well?

What is it about the works of Howard Hawks (The Big Sleep, Bringing Up Baby), Chuck Jones (Bugs Bunny cartoons), Phil Spector (The Ronettes, The Righteous Brothers) and Aaron Spelling (The Love Boat, Dynasty) that make them unmistakably American artifacts? To a good part of the rest of the world, the U.S. is nothing but its global pop gush. Not the Bill of Rights, not Mary Cassatt, not George Balanchine but Madonna, The A-Team and Sidney Sheldon. The respectable pieties are correct: sure, America is the land of freedom and the land of opportunity. But it is perhaps more lovably the land of great tap dancing and terrific special effects, the land of oomph.

No wonder. The nation and the proto-pop media were invented more or less simultaneously only two centuries ago. Newspapers and novels made sense. "Those who cry out now that the work of a Mickey Spillane or The Adventures of Superman travesty the novel," Critic Leslie Fiedler noted in 1955, "forget that the novel was long accused of travestying literature." Pamela and Tom Jones were, in a sense, the Magnum, P.I. and The Young and the Restless of their day. By 18th century standards, the new American flag must have seemed gaudy and flamboyant -- patriotic pop; and the national anthem composed in its honor celebrated naval war as a kind of giddy pageant.