Much Ado About 'Friends': What Pop Culture Offers Literature

By RICHARD KELLER SIMON

Identical twins enter the university. Literatura is a bright, hard-working student who loves stories and majors in English. Vulgara is just as bright and hard working,

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and also loves stories, but gets her fill of them from movies and television programs, forms that Literatura detests. Vulgara majors in business. My challenge is to teach both of them.

Literatura lives in Culture House, reading happily. Vulgara rooms in Aaron Spelling Hall, writing marketing plans for her seminar in product placement. In her spare time, she stares, entranced, at television shows -- when she isn't scurrying over to the multiplex to be passively entertained in wider, louder dimensions.

What will become of them? Literatura eventually will turn her academic skills and love of literature into a position as a temporary, part-time, adjunct lecturer in English. Vulgara will turn her business skills and love of commercial entertainment into a position as senior vice president for programming at a major communications conglomerate.

The English department will fawn over Vulgara, hoping for a large donation for a new building, while denying Literatura a secure, full-time job. Such are the realities of modern university life. But Literatura is the one doing the heavy lifting, the one scrutinizing and absorbing the timeless tales of the ages. Right?

In a course on the great books of the classical world, Literatura reads in the Iliad about the fury of Achilles on and off the battlefield. Vulgara watches Rambo: First Blood Part II and sees a contemporary variation on the same story. Literatura reads Aeschylus' Oresteia trilogy while Vulgara watches Francis Ford Coppola's Godfather trilogy; Euripides' Hippolytus while Vulgara watches Jerry Springer; Aristophanes' The Clouds while Vulgara watches Rodney Dangerfield in Back to School; Plato's Symposium, a dialogue on sex and love, while Vulgara pores over her boyfriend's copy of Playboy.

The rival forms of storytelling are put before Literatura and Vulgara quite differently, the one as literature that demands careful study, the other as entertainment that exists solely for our pleasure. But that distinction has more to do with context than with any inherent quality of the stories. In dismissing Stallone's translation and abridgment of the Iliad as beneath the versions we find in literary anthologies, we lose sight of popular culture as a potentially powerful teaching tool.

A literature course that took popular culture seriously might inspire Vulgara to change her major. Perhaps such a background would make her look twice, when she becomes an entertainment executive, at that proposed biopic about Caravaggio instead of the treatment for a new game show. At the very least, it might compel her to earmark her donation to the university for an endowed chair to be filled by her sister.

We have very mixed feelings about Vulgara, of course. Popular forms of storytelling were excluded from university English programs from the departments' beginnings, at the end of the 19th century, until the 1950's, for much the same reason that plaster casts of Greek sculpture were excluded from museums. Art and literature were supposed to be the best that had been thought and said in culture.

But in the decade following the end of World War II, a number of critics -- Leo Spitzer, Leslie A. Fiedler, Marshall McLuhan, and Northrop Frye among them -- started treating popular-story forms as literature, or at least as comparable to literature. Still, it was not until the late 1960's that courses in popular culture began to appear on a regular basis in English departments. By the early 1970's, many American universities offered courses in detective fiction, science fiction, and pop culture more generally, although few of those courses counted toward a concentration in literature.

Major acceptance of popular culture by English departments came during the 1970's, first by semioticians inspired by Roland Barthes (the translation of Mythologies into English was the crucial event), then by Marxists following Fredric Jameson, and finally by cultural theorists following Raymond Williams. By the early 1980's, popular culture was in the academic mainstream for the first time. PMLA, the journal of the Modern Language Association, published an article on The Joy of Cooking, and presses began to publish a great many superb academic books on popular culture.

Opponents of the trend quickly emerged. Political traditionalists, from Allan Bloom to all of President Reagan's humanities appointees, led the first sustained attack on popular culture in the curriculum in the 1980's, arguing that the 60's had destroyed academic life and trivialized the university. They were followed by a number of distinguished (and senior) academic traditionalists, such as Neil Postman in Amusing Ourselves to Death, Alvin Kernan in The Death of Literature, and Harold Bloom in The Western Canon. They described a frightening, emerging new age of illiteracy brought on by the rise of popular culture.

Throughout the 1990's, along with a group of dedicated followers (James Twitchell, Barry Sanders, Sven Birkerts), these academics pleaded for a return to the standards of the past, although they despaired that they might be too late, and that the victory of the forces of evil, as described by Alexander Pope in The Dunciad, was already at hand. Students no longer arrived at Yale with a love of reading, Harold Bloom lamented. English departments had discarded the classics for a study of Mormon theme parks.

Now the future of literary studies is up for grabs. In his 1998 The Rise and Fall of English, Robert Scholes expressed the fear that English departments were about to go the way of classics departments, shrinking into insignificance, unless they learned how to change. The answer, I would argue, is hidden in plain sight: on TV and at the movies.

What our students love, and what we know how to teach, after all, are almost the same. And while this may outrage some literary purists, the future of English departments depends on our ability to link the two kinds of stories.

The popular television sitcom Friends, for example, is a contemporary variation on Shakespeare's melodramatic comedy Much Ado About Nothing. Never mind that the settings are different (Renaissance Italy, contemporary Manhattan), or that one is written in poetry and the other in the language of everyday life. The core characters, plots, and themes are almost the same.

One reason for the parallels is that all comedies share certain qualities, especially those written on the pattern established by Roman New Comedy. Young lovers get together over the objections of their parents or their community, usually by clever trickery, and at the end there is a wedding or weddings, when everybody and everything is reconciled. Many sitcoms and movies are just as dependent on this Plautine form as are the great dramatic comedies of the past, although in those meant for family audiences, young children trick their parents to garner more-age-appropriate rewards. (The twins in The Parent Trap, for instance, have as their goal getting their estranged parents back together.)

But Friends shares much more with Shakespeare than the tradition of New Comedy. It is Much Ado adapted to current economic and cultural conditions, and to the demands of the half-hour sitcom.

In Friends, as in Much Ado, a small group of unmarried young men and women flirt with each other, play a series of tricks on each other, and fall in and out of love. Some characters are apprehensive and fearful about marriage and commitment, others more enthusiastic, but all are torn between the conflicting obligations of love and friendship.

Weddings end in disaster (Rachel's and Ross's, to name only ... five). A man (Chandler) keeps women at a distance with his compulsive joking. Men and women (Ross and Rachel, Chandler and Monica) become romantically involved only when they learn by accident or unplanned confession how much each loves the other. A woman (Rachel) who has been badly hurt by the man she loves (Ross) requires that he suffer in abject humiliation before she will accept him again. A young couple are torn apart by jealousy (Ross, Rachel, and the infamous "break" in their dating). A woman who is quiet and conventional (Rachel, in the show's first season) slowly begins to gain confidence and, with it, her voice.

Ross loves Rachel in the first few seasons of the sitcom just as Claudio loves Hero in Shakespeare's comedy. The men are painfully shy, unsure of themselves because of their limited experience with love and sexuality, and more than a little awkward. The women are young, beautiful, and gradually getting to understand and accept their qualities beyond that beauty.

In both cases, the characters are contrasted with their opposites. In Shakespeare, Claudio's comrades are the sexually active and witty Benedick, and Don Pedro, a man expert at wooing women and eager to help his friends. In Friends, Ross's pals are the sexually active, goofy Joey, who is usually successful with women, and the witty Chandler, who seldom is. Among Much Ado's women, Hero is complemented by the outspoken, independent Beatrice. In Friends, Rachel has the outspoken, offbeat Phoebe and the independent Monica.

Four friends in Shakespeare become six on prime time, but the dynamics among them are similar. Chandler is the sitcom's version of Benedick -- the witty, sarcastic bachelor who keeps himself from getting attached to women by obsessing over their faults. Benedick finally meets his match in the strong and clever Beatrice, who trades jibes with him and ultimately marries him, just as Chandler finally finds Monica. And through it all, Phoebe wanders like a typical Shakespearean fool, making off-the-wall comments and singing wacky songs that contain more than their share of truth.

In my classes, I grant equal time to Much Ado and Friends, even though it means I will have that much less time to devote to some other literary masterpiece. My students love Friends. When I show brief excerpts, their faces light up. Many of them talk about the major characters as if they were close personal friends. They remember the names of minor characters who have appeared in no more than one or two episodes.

The students are more apprehensive about Shakespeare, concerned as they are about the language they must master, the characters to keep straight, and the exam looming on the horizon. What they most want to talk about and understand is the television program, while what I want to talk about and have them understand is Shakespeare. We meet in the middle.

I'm not tricking my students. Friends isn't simply an entree into Shakespeare. Shakespeare is also an entree into Friends. Shakespeare is the best way for them to fully appreciate something that enchants them and is an important part of their lives.

"The students who come to us now exist in the most manipulative culture human beings have ever experienced," Robert Scholes wrote in his 1985 book, Textual Power: Literary Theory and the Teaching of English. "They are bombarded with signs, with rhetoric, from their daily awakenings until their troubled sleep, especially with signs transmitted by the audio-visual media. And, for a variety of reasons, they are relatively deprived of experience in the thoughtful reading and writing of verbal texts. They are also sadly deficient in certain kinds of historical knowledge that might give them some perspective on the manipulations that they currently encounter."

This statement, which I reproduce for my students and ask that they place in some spot that they will look at every day -- like a bathroom mirror or the front of their television set -- is my critical starting point. I tell them that I have a skill to teach them that will be essential to their well-being for the rest of their lives -- literary criticism -- for with it they will be able to understand the stories they love as well as the stories their parents and their professors worry so much about. And then I lecture on Shakespeare, but only after they know that there will be a paper to write on Friends, or a group discussion of the show.

After dissecting both works, I ask my students the toughest question I know: Who gets the better story, the Elizabethan who attended a production at the Globe 400 years ago, or someone who watches the American sitcom on a regular basis? Are we being cheated today?

My students are divided on the issue: Some are clearly disappointed in Friends, say they can watch TV no more, and feel distressed at the loss of language in the past 400 years. Others are enchanted by Friends and say they have recruited others to watch it as well, so impressed are they by the ways in which Shakespeare can be adapted to the demands of contemporary American television. But in either case, I've won a victory: I have shown them that literary criticism is not simply a skill that allows them to get good grades in English courses, and that the great tradition of literature is alive and well, and worth knowing.

The next week, I walk into the lecture hall and turn on the Jerry Springer Show. Many of my students confide that they are appalled at what they see, until I point out that Springer's audience is filled with college-age people. Well, yes, they admit, it is kind of transfixing. What kind of story is Springer telling us? I ask. Our reading for the week is Euripides, and after I lecture on the structure of Greek tragedy, and explain the ways in which Euripides reworks the form, I ask them about Springer and how he reworks the form.

What has happened to tragedy? The answers come haltingly. In greatly abbreviated form, Springer's guests are tragic characters, his audience is the chorus, and Springer himself is the chorus leader. In 10 action-packed minutes of physical and emotional mayhem, as guests rip each other's clothing, punch, curse, and scream, and as the audience goads them on, Springer has replicated the pattern of betrayal, discovery, and violence that we have found in Euripides. It comes without any elaboration, development, or closure -- without everything, in fact, except the moment of dramatic climax. There are so many such moments in an hour of Springer that we get something that Euripides' audiences never dreamed of: all anguish all the time. This isn't Athens in the fifth century B.C., after all, and we shouldn't expect that narrative tragedy would endure without change.

Isolating Springer in a course on popular culture, or the Greek tragedy in a course on the great books, is a terrible pedagogic and intellectual mistake. By bringing the two stories together, and treating them as comparable forms, I can more effectively teach both. I hope Scholes would approve.

Friends and Much Ado. Springer and Euripides. There are endless examples, if you look hard enough and with an open mind. Seinfeld (and wouldn't Kramer be excited about this!) is a contemporary variation on George Etherege's Restoration comedy The Man of Mode, and Cheers (as Diane Chambers might point out) a variation on Richard Brinsley Sheridan's The School for Scandal.

Other forms of popular culture are similarly related to the great tradition. Cosmopolitan reworks the character types, plots, and themes of great 19th-century courtship novels, like Jane Austen's Sense and Sensibility and Gustave Flaubert's Madame Bovary. Although the cover of the April 2000 issue of Cosmo announces "How to Touch a Naked Man" -- not exactly one of Austen's primary concerns -- the essays inside speak directly to the problems faced by the novelist's heroines. "Six Romantic Fantasies That Could Ruin Your Relationship." "Guy Spy: Is your puppy-eyed lover lying through his teeth?" And "Cosmo Quiz: Are You Too Self-Centered?" Marianne Dashwood, one of the heroines of Sense and Sensibility, really could have used the April issue.

Because the entertainments that Americans love, and the great books that their professors know how to teach, are often similar in this fashion, popular culture can be the salvation rather than the nemesis of traditional humanities disciplines, particularly English. We need more, not less, of such materials in our classrooms, and not isolated from the rest of the curriculum in courses set aside for them -- as is typically the case -- but carefully integrated into core requirements.

If Literatura and Vulgara would only take my course, they might learn a lot from each other. Vulgara would feel less alienated from the past, and Literatura would feel like the fabulous commodity she is, instead of a marginally employed relic in the making.

Richard Keller Simon is a professor of English and the chairman of humanities at California Polytechnic State University at San Luis Obispo. He is the author of Trash Culture: Popular Culture and the Great Tradition (University of California Press, 1999).

American Culture, American Tastes: Social Change and the 20th Century, by Michael Kammen (Alfred A. Knopf, 1999). An ambitious intellectual history of the debates over mass culture in the 20th century.

The Cowboy and the Dandy: Crossing Over From Romanticism to Rock and Roll, by Perry Meisel (Oxford University Press, 1999). An elegantly written analysis of British Romantic poetry and American rock 'n' roll.

The Designated Mourner. by Wallace Shawn (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1996). A play about the death of high culture and highbrows.

The Eloquence of the Vulgar: Language, Cinema, and the Politics of Culture, by Colin MacCabe (British Film Institute, 1999). The author argues "that there can be no sense of a teaching of literature which is not a branch of media studies."

Popular Culture and High Culture: An Analysis and Evaluation of Taste, by Herbert J. Gans (Basic Books, 1999). A thoughtful revision of the classic 1974 text includes a discussion of how lines between high and low culture have blurred.

The Rise of the Image, the Fall of the Word, by Mitchell Stephens (Oxford, 1998). The author contends that the rise of the image will "help us escape the artistic, political and philosophic doldrums" of the fallen word.

Seinfeld and Philosophy: A Book About Everything and Nothing, edited by William Irwin (Open Court, 2000). Philosophers demonstrate how Seinfeld elucidates concepts from Socrates to Kierkegaard to Wittgenstein.

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