Global Mission. - Gilligan Unbound Pop Culture in the Age of Globalization - book review

Gilligan Unbound
Pop Culture in the Age of Globalization
Paul A. Cantor
Rowman and Littlefield, $27.95, 255 pp.

Like so many other intellectual confections whipped up in the last two decades, a study of television culture might appear frivolous and tasteless in a time of war. As it turns out, far from being another exercise in exotic pedantry, Paul Cantor's new book is timely, readable, and provocative.

A professor of English at the University of Virginia and the author of scholarly books on Shakespeare, Romanticism, and literary theory, Cantor is a frequent contributor to the Weekly Standard, American Enterprise, Reason, and other conservative publications.

Cantor's unmistakable fondness for his material indicates the evolution of the American right's relationship to mass culture. Unlike the paleo-cons who reject mass culture as a sinkhole of sin and democracy, a new, Reaganaut breed of conservatives revels in its pleasures and meanings. The American right increasingly caters to the ascendancy of what the Standard's senior editor David Brooks has dubbed "the Bobo," who fuses capitalist avarice and bohemian style. Cantor even avows his reliance on the "cultural studies" often considered by the left and the right as the cost-free radicalism of baby-boom academics. His debt to that genre is apparent in his choice of subject matter, his easy and enthusiastic familiarity with popular TV programs, and his assumption that sitcoms, cartoons, and science fictions "offer us a window into ideological developments in America." This open sensibility outshines the cliches about "the sixties" or "the nineties" that fly fast and tedious in this book.

Focusing on four television shows that together span four decades, Cantor traces a conflicted metamorphosis of American national identity. In the first (and weakest) chapter, Cantor reads the popular sixties sitcom "Gilligan's Island" as a study in "the Americanization of the globe." The program's "fearless crew" is a microcosm of the confident and genial democracy once central to the American imagination. Incorrigibly inept to the undiscerning eye, Gilligan emerges in Cantor's reading as a hybrid of Rousseau's natural man and Tocqueville's democratic citizen, whose amiable conformism and lack of distinction constitute his claim to superiority. Despite the presence of martial skill (the Skipper), wealth (the Howells), knowledge (the Professor), and beauty (Ginger), it's still Gilligan's island. The Pacific locale and the castaways' unfazed resilience convey, Cantor believes, cold war America's "sense of its global mission as the chief representative of democracy." Cantor mars this ingenious ideological reading with an implicit equation of democracy and mediocrity that both echoes Tocqueville's overrated canards about "leveling" and ratifies the self-conceit of the boboisie.

Cantor's remarks on "Star Trek" capture the imperiousness and ambivalence of the Americanizing enterprise. Where the Americanization of the globe is a humane and comic process among the castaways, it assumes an arrogant, bellicose, and ultimately tragic form among the crew of the Enterprise. Drawing on Francis Fukuyama's proclamations of "the end of history," Cantor interprets the starship's intergalactic mission as a macrocosm of democratic imperialism and secularism. Although the famed Captain Kirk prohibited interference in the affairs of other planetary civilizations, he routinely violated this rule in order to put misguided or miscreant beings onto what he called "the normal course of social evolution": unimpeded scientific and technological progress, the rule of benevolent experts, and the advance of representative institutions--the imagined and eventually star-crossed trajectory of the New Frontier and the Great Society.

While Cantor argues that the TV show implied only a muted and sporadic ambivalence about imperial ventures, the Star Trek films exhibited a growing unease at the prospect of Federation/U.S. domination. In Cantor's melancholy gloss on Fukuyama, Star Trek's "end of history" is the "homogenization of the galaxy," an erasure of genuine diversity, the loss of heroism, the containment of culture in a "vast museum, or rather supermarket." Cantor might also have discerned a basic contradiction of Wilsonian internationalism: the coexistence of "self-determination" and the commitment to liberal democracy as the "normal"--and presumably enforceable--course of human history.

If the "normal course" for Homer Simpson is the doughnut run to the Kwik-E-Mart, the store's ownership by an Indian immigrant named Apu exemplifies what Cantor calls the "globalization of America." Rather than rehearse the overworked account of "The Simpsons" as a satire, Cantor emphasizes its unlikely celebration of family life, its serious attention to religion, and its multicultural, polyglot texture. Cantor is especially insightful on how "The Simpsons" affirms the nuclear family in Homer's hapless devotion, Lisa's nest-bred resistance to corporate villainy in the city of Springfield, and opposition to therapeutic intrusion by bureaucrats and counselors.