 Introduction: Art and Escapism
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Gone With The Wind
In 1939, a nationwide publicity campaign ballyhooded the search for the ideal Scarlett O'Hara to play opposite Clark Gable.
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The image of the Americans as the "people of plenty" is with us still, as allıning in a slum in Manila or Buenos Aires as ever it was in a Romanian village.
What the history of our popular culture tells above all is how many of om fantasies have been sold to the rest of the world by Americans; how much people all over the world have all been influenced, in the details of their daily lives, by the United States; how, if the rest of the world has not been colonized by the United States in the 20th century, it has all, certainly, been Coca-Colonized:
"If the United States abolished its diplomatic and consular services, kept its ships in harbor and its tourists at home, and retired from the worlds' markets, its citizens, its problems, its towns and countryside, its roads, motor cars, counting houses and saloons would still be familiar in the uttermost corners of the world... The film is to America what the flag was once to Britain.
By its means Uncle Sam may hope some day, if he is not checked in time, to Americanize the world." What the New York Morning Post said of the movies in 1923 has become only more true since, as the instruments of Americanization have become more and more effective
In the 1960s media theorist Marshall McLuhan proclaimed that electronic communications had turned the world into a "Global Village", in which "our central nervous system is technologically extended to involve us in the whole of mankind and to incorporate the whole of mankind in us".
McLuhan argued that the electronic media were more "organic" than mechanical forms such as print; thus the new media could become quite literally, "the extensions of Man." His writings enjoyed an enormous vogue at the time of their publication, and he contributed a collection of slogans by which the media would be discussed and categorized - "the medium is the message"; "Culture is our Business", "hot" media, such as film or radio, that concentrated attention on a single sense, against "coId" media like television that he elaimed required more participation on the part of the consumer.
But McLuhan' s theories were only another version of the popular excitement which has accompanied every new development in communications' technology in this century. In McLuhan's media fantasy, "We are certainly coming within conceivable range of a world automatically controlled to apoint where we could say, 'We can program twenty more hours of TV in South Africa next week to cool down the tribal temperature raised by radio last week'." What was missing from this monstrous scenario was any suggestion about who might be doing the controlling. McLuhan's mythology ignored the historical forces that actually shaped the world's media institutions.
American popular culture has formed so many of our contemporary images of "civilization" in part because the United States has been the great economic power of the century, and in part because the characteristic forms of each new medium of popular eulture have first been fixed in America, and then copied elsewhere. If popular culture in its modem form was invented in any one place, it was at the turn of the century in the great cities of the United States, and above all in New York.Any distinction between art and entertainment is far from precise, because entertainment lacks a firm definition. It is usually defined through negatives: that which fails to be art or socially significant is entertainment. We may not know what entertainment or popular culture is, but we know it when we see it. Its connotations are triviality, ephemerality, and an absence of seriousness.
Unlike Art, entertairunent is not "about" anything outside itself, but is self-enclosed. Play, whether it is called "sport" or "entertainment", has been made into an area of activity sealed off from our engagements with power, ideology and politics. It is therefore usually escapism.
Mark O'Dea, a leading New York advertising executive, wrote that the key to successful advertising copy was the ability to "release people from the Iimitations of their own lives". Helen Woodward suggested that fashion had a sirnilar role. But it was from the movies, above all, that writers and critics came to see the consumer audience as trapped in a humdrum existence, secretly desiring the illusion of romance.
Like such other fictional forms as radio soap opera or pulp fiction magazines, "the world of entertainment" the movies presented was one of heightened experience, in which the complexity of their audience' s daily lives was replaced by an intensity of focus on particular dramatic events. In their films Clark Gable, Gary Cooper or Bette Davis seldom endured the minor irritants of ordinary life. Life in the movies was not so much simpler than elsewhere as less cluttered. Most moviegoers recognized Hollywood' s perfectible world, where problems were cured by a dose of romantic love at the end of the plot, as escapist, but it might be better described as utopian, an attempt to project, as one critic has suggested, "what utopia would feel !ike rather than how it would be organized" .
Escapism is far too simple a description of the complex relationship between our mundane realities and the heightened realms of experience made available to us by Hollywood or television. A stenographer in the 1930s going to a screwball comedy set in the art deco world of the very rich might seem to be indulging in an "escape" from her drab daily life. But what is she doing, the next week, when she goes to her local department store and buys a copy of the dress wom by the star in that same movie?
Escapism usually suggests to us that we must be escaping from somewhere where we ought to be, the daily world of work and responsibility, and escaping to somewhere make-believe, a Shangri-La, a utopian fantasy-Iand over the rainbow. But that does not explain why the stenographer buys the dress. Sportswriter Hugh Mcllvaney came closer to the mark when he wrote, "Sport has no validity, no worth whatsoever, if it is not govemed by utopian ethics, by a code of morality infinitely superior to anything !ikely to be found in everyday life".
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First Oscar for a black performer
Hattie McDaniel became the first black performer to win an Oscar, for her role as Vivien Leigh's "Mammy".
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But sport is part of everyday life; !ike the movies and the songs about perfect love and the party dresses we wear for special occasions, sport is the utopian part of our daily existence, the part in which we dream we are at our besİ. Science tells us, as individuals, that we need to dream when we sleep, that we suffer if we are not allowed to. Our culture tells us, every day in myriad ways, that we need to dream, to let our secret, holiday selves escape.
And escapism that is not an escape from or to anywhere, but an escape of our utopian selves, has always been present in the idea of Camival, where the inhibitions which bind us to conventional roles are loosened. It is our Camival selves that we take on holiday, and the holiday resort - from Atlantic City to Blackpool to Pattaya - has always been a place of loosened inhibitions. 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 cultıne that it has brought us more and more varied dreams than we could otherwise ever have known.
The interplay between our public and private worlds which popular cultıne invokes by the moment suggests that the artifacts of popular cultıne should be seen as a form of public fantasy. Frank Sinatra crooned ''I'll be seeing you" to a million "you' s" and his sentiment was put to personal use by each viewer. The world of private imaginings is a shared commodity that everyone can purchase, and it takes place in public spaces !ike picture palaces, around communal property, such as the images of movie stars. Marilyn Monroe, for example, served as the public fantasy of American sexuality in the 1950s and early 1960s. In some senses, popular culture and entertainment involve the escape of those elements of ourselves and our culture that are normally kept under restraint - what Freud termed "the return of the repressed".
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Introduction
