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Carnival Culture: the Trashing of Taste in America

Commonweal, Oct 9, 1992 by Michael O. Garvey

If you blindfolded yourself and threw a brick into a crowd of typical North American college students (as you really should sometime), you'd be more likely to injure a Nintendo enthusiast than a devoted reader of Paul Claudel. Nowhere in Carnival Culture, an absorbing study of the triumph of the barbarians, is this specific experiment recommended, but its predictable outcome is the sort of thing the reader is invited to lament.

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Which - let's face it - makes for a lot of fun, especially for us suburban white trash types who thought Terminator 2 was garbage but had to admit that the opening scene was great, and who can't afford cable TV but don't mind watching it from a bar stool every once in a while. Members of the cultural elite denounced by Vice-President Dan Quayle will find in Carnival Culture a thriller of social criticism, and in James B. Twitchell a writer almost as entertaining as Stephen King (who, the reader will learn, is one of three authors who wrote ten of the thirteen novels selling 1 million or more copies during the last decade. The other two are Danielle Steele and Tom Clancy. The book is loaded with wonderfully depressing information like that).

For an academic, a professor of English at the University of Florida, Twitchell writes vividly and well, and when he occasionally uses a word like "hebephrenic" to describe something like a McDonald's commercial, you figure that he just can't help himself. Exhaustive research of pop culture is impossible because the thing is, like a septic tank, continually replenished. Still, it's difficult to believe that anyone, academic or otherwise, has studied our collective daydream as thoroughly.

An enjoyable, if disorienting, feature of the book is Twitchell's "taxonomy of taste" with people, ideas, and specific works presented in descending order through the categories of High Culture, Popular Culture, and Low Culture (which overlaps with Popular Culture). The marriage of Donald and Ivana Trump is the meridian bisecting popular culture, with Mrs. Trump at the bottom of the top and Mr. Trump at the top of the bottom. But at the tiptop is "abstract expressionism" (outranking Blake's Prophetic Books and "some French philosopher you've never heard of") and at the very bottom is "truck/tractor pulls" (presumably more despicable than Geraldo Rivera, Phil Donahue, and the happy face). That "deconstruction" ranks anywhere at all in the taxonomy is pretty silly, but to rank it above "King Lear," let alone The Super Bowl, is outrageous. But Twitchell is, after all, an academic. Best of all, he's an academic writing about show business, promising to examine "how the organizations of production and transmission evolved into their current conglomerated forms and what this portends for the future." That's right. We're talking morbid delectation in every medium you can think of.

"We call whatever is vulgar, junk," he writes. "We also use this term to describe the most potent narcotic (heroin) and its users (junkies), a particularly potent and annoying kind of marketing (junk mail - now junk phone calls), a favorite diet of empty calories (junk food), and even a method of risky financing (junk bonds). The current (since the 1960s) use of the word |junk' demonstrates how ambivalent we have become." If Twitchell is ambivalent about junk, he's certainly an expert on the arcana of the rapacious market which so ingeniously turns out the paperback books, movies, and TV networks. In one paragraph, for instance, the reader learns that the Disney Company charges $20,000 to place a brand product in the background of one of its movies; that for $40,000 the product will be mentioned in the script; that for $60,000 it will be consumed on screen; that Philip Morris paid $350,000 to have James Bond smoke Lark cigarettes in License to Kill; and that the movie Days of Thunder included more than seventy such "product placements," most notably one for the sugar substitute Sweet |n Low which involved Tom Cruise's tongue and Nicole Kidman's thigh. And did you know that cable television bills are paid more promptly by most people than their utility bills? And that Mel Brooks retorted "Bullshit! " to the suggestion that he was vulgar?

Twitchell is as alarmed as you'd expect an academic to be about the onslaught on America's leisured and literate masses, and he wonders about the relationship between democracy and schlock, but his chief indictment of the vulgarians seems merely to be that they are so...well, so vulgar. Which they are, of course, but considerably more than that needs to be said.

The annoying thing about your average culture critic, as Walker Percy suggested in these very pages thirty-three years ago, is what he or she won't talk about. The critic will deliver all sorts of dreadful news about how the culture is going to hell but not a suggestion about where it was before beginning the descent. In the name of what, you wonder, is this indictment being made? The critic will never say much more than some vague thing or other about some books and music and pictures everyone used to admire, or at least respect. My hunch is that this shyness, this boorish fear of absolutes, is precisely the reason that most critics of Twitchell's stature can't do much more than catalogue the collapse. You can sit around all day making lists of encroaching crap, and this is fun as far as it goes, but finally not very satisfying.

Carnival Culture: the Trashing of Taste in America

Commonweal, Oct 9, 1992 by Michael O. Garvey

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