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January 22, 2008, 06:41 AM ET
No More Pop Classics
I teach a sophomore survey of American literature, and last week I encountered something I didn’t expect. Walt Whitman was the day’s reading, and when I mentioned that from the beginning Whitman garnered enthusiastic fans, people like the older doctor in the film Doc Hollywood (who recites “Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking” over dinner), I looked out to see a crowd of blank stares.
“The movie, right, with Michael J. Fox,” I added.
No nods. It was a big hit in 1991, and it shows up on WTBS and other stations now and then. But when I asked the 75 students if they had viewed it, or even heard of it, only six raised their hands. If asked about it 10 years earlier, probably everybody in the room would say yes and think silently of how stupid the question was. It was a standard for 20-year-olds back then, but has already sunk into oblivion.
So I pushed the point and asked about another film, the most popular one from my own undergraduate days: The Road Warrior. It came out in 1981 and was a world-wide sensation, and every guy I knew in college saw it and loved it. It made Mel Gibson a star and still appears on television every few months. But The Road Warrior got only one hand in the class.
Has the half-life of pop culture hits for college kids shortened to only a few years? In my undergraduate time, pop-culture stuff could linger for decades. Classmates at UCLA watched Leave It to Beaver, listened to Neil Young, and read Kurt Vonnegut. Things didn’t disappear so quickly. But now, maybe because of the accelerated consumption of culture wrought by the digital revolution, pop-culture memory seems to diminish by the year.
The change alters the old antagonism of high culture vs. pop/mass culture, which assumed a stability in the latter that doesn’t exist anymore. Instead of distinguishing cultural productions in terms of excellence, seriousness, genius, complexity, or the other criteria that divide mass from high, we have a new contrast, one that puts pop/mass artifacts on the same side of high artifacts. It is: enduring culture vs. transient culture. And the former is getting smaller all the time.
Photo from www.dvdtown.com
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