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About the Author
Mark Bauerlein is professor of English at Emory University. His books include Literary Criticism: An Autopsy (1997) and Negrophobia: A Race Riot in Atlanta, 1906 (2001). His articles have appeared in The Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, The Weekly Standard, TLS, Yale Review, Partisan Review, Reason Magazine, and many other national periodicals. Topics he will cover include the ideological climate of the campus, knowledge and skill levels of U.S. students, and technology in the classroom.
About Brainstorm
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Recent Posts
The Lunsfords on Student Writing | Comment [24]
Student Bibliophobes | Comment [34]
The Attack on Theory | Comment [33]
A Statement About Diversity Research | Comment [25]
Unity Over Diversity | Comment [30]
Featured Articles By the Author
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
Posted at 05:41:40 AM on January 22, 2008 | All postings by Mark BauerleinComments
Commenting is closed for this article.
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Well, given that “Doc Hollywood” came out when these students were about 2, you can’t really fault them for not knowing the film.
— SB · Jan 22, 07:11 AM · #
Let’s see- how much of this is simply a result of the accumulation of pop culture “stuff?” In 1970, there was the detritus of perhaps 15 years of TV, for example- now it is 50 years (even allowing for the limited circulation these days of black and white) So there is simply a lot more in the mix- it is to be expected that for any individual piece, it will slide in importance fairly rapidly (The Big Three networks of yesteryear versus today, etc). Once it is no longer the current rage, it takes a place in an ever larger pot of “past influences.” As that pot increases in size, the chance of any particular item being rediscovered by a large proportion of the new cohort diminishes accordingly.
— Another John · Jan 22, 07:19 AM · #
The real problem is fragmentation. In the 70s and 80s late night was Carson (and SNL), but today there are nine different late-night shows, each with a different set of fans. A lot of people would say that the best-recognized movie of 1994 is The Shawshank Redemption, although probably I’ve heard more students quote Pulp Fiction, even though the top-grossing movie (and Best Picture winner) was Forrest Gump. You just don’t know what you can count on your students to know, outside of maybe the last 12 months’ worth.
— sibyl · Jan 22, 09:47 AM · #
Your point is well made but the conclusion is wrong. If for “enduring culture” pop culture of the past is meant, no wonder enduring culture is getting smaller! The fact is Shakespeare is probably more enduring than Neil Young while Young lasts longer than whatever is going on with the kids today. But this is not a sign of the times: it’s just a sign of quality.
— A middle-aged teacher · Jan 22, 10:40 AM · #
Isn’t there a larger point being hinted at here? Don’t we see not just the recent past of pop culture disappearing, but along with it the memory of entire sensibilities, whole schools of thought. Pop culture is an expression of a culture’s dialog with itself, and through art and films it is a way of arriving at some forms of understanding.
It might be no great loss that Doc Hollywood gets lost in the old media bin, but when you also find that these students are unfamiliar with a book such as “1984” or entire eras of ground-breaking writers, musicians, artists and well something much more important than media artifacts are lost, our sense of ourselves is diminished.
— ScottM · Jan 22, 05:02 PM · #
Legend has it that Clement Clarke Moore once bitterly declared: “I’ll always be remembered for that damn poem.” In his lifetime, he had seen his own scholarship fall into obsolescence and obscurity while “The Night Before Christmas,” a poem he wrote on a whim for his children, became increasingly elevated as an American cultural treasure. Academics have always been cranky about the fact that “culture” (i.e. social memory) refuses to follow their roadmap. Hence, more students can identify Scott Joplin than have heard of Arnold Schoenberg despite great scholarly effort to the contrary. The “transient culture verses enduring culture” contest is nothing new. Culture has always been a game of endurance; and in this respect a sleek catchy tune has a great advantage over more ponderous works of intellectual labor.
The problem with Bauerlein’s thesis is that two questions are being confused. One is: what aspects of our culture are my students already familiar with? (for purposes of examples and comparisons). The other is: what cultural productions are worthy of teaching? In other words what do they know already? And what do they need to learn? When put this way it becomes clear that Doc Hollywood is an unlikely choice for either.
I too have been caught off guard when attempting to meet students on the supposedly common ground of popular culture. Generational problems aside, it turns out that mass culture knowledge is often a social minefield for students. I found that, though Star Trek’s “prime directive” is a perfect example of the logic of anthropological functionalism; bringing it up in class caused students to stare nervously at their desks —afraid to be taken for a “trekkie.” I once played a music video from the eighties in class and had to mediate a volatile discussion when the hard-core punks squared off against the Emos. There is nothing “safe” about popular culture. But it is a good way to start a lively discussion about how music creates social identities.
I figure they come to us to learn stuff they can’t learn on TV. So we have to take our best shot at it and teach about what has proven to be enduring, and of course what aspects of culture we think should continue to endure. But we shouldn’t take ourselves too seriously or we’ll be disappointed like Clement Clarke Moore. We can’t drive culture (and that’s a good thing!). It seems like the best we can do is to introduce students to books, music, art, and ideas that we think will broaden their horizons. One class at a time…
— DrJohn · Jan 22, 07:48 PM · #
I’m forty-four years old, and I’ve never heard of Doc Hollywood. My partner, who has seen it, tells me that it was neither a big hit nor any good. And even if a movie was very popular at the time, that doesn’t make it a pop classic. I know that my students have heard of and probably seen the Back to the Future movies (speaking of films starrring Michael J. Fox), or Ferris Bueller’s day off, or Ghostbusters (I had a student write a poem about the latter) or, to mention something even older, Star Wars. Those can indeed be considered pop classics, whatever one thinks of their quality as films.
Your piece says more about your disappointment that your students don’t share your particular tastes and memories than about pop culture in general.
— Reginald Shepherd · Jan 22, 07:52 PM · #
Today’s increasingly diverse student body demands clarity of communication. When bringing up a US cultural phenomenon, one should ask students for parallels. In the examples sited, one could explain the movie and ask “what is today’s Doc Hollywood”? I’m sure there are examples of such for every generation. If not, then one needs to use another pedagogical method.
— John · Jan 23, 05:49 AM · #
There’s a huge difference between popular culture and its artifacts and the texts used to produce a quiescent mainstream American population. To draw on the medium of film, Rocky Horror Picture Show would be an artifact of the former, while Bauerlein is thinking of the latter with Doc Hollywood.
— Jesse · Jan 23, 06:07 AM · #
A short stop at the marketing departments of any major consumer or entertainment products corporation would explain the decreasing half life of pop culture stuff. If I am selling something to you, and I cannot sell it to you twice, I will try to sell something else to you. In the effort to convince you that something nearly identical to what I just sold to you is really different, I do my damnedest to make what you just bought out of date, out of style, no longer “in”, and the like. I sell against my own prior products—in my effort to increase sales, revenues, CEO livestyles, and other accoutrements brought up short by early deaths. It is no accident that pop culture has decreasing half life—tens of thousands of companies are working quite seriously all day every day to make it so. They are succeeding. It is no accident.
This kind of rumination, however, does make one wonder—what would my life be like off of this train? What if I bought nothing much new for ten or more years? Would I die? Is it possible? Would my capabilities collapse? This is an interesting rumination.
— Richard Tabor Greene · Jan 23, 08:31 AM · #
I hate to say this, but I’m a pop culture scholar, and I haven’t heard of “Doc Hollywood” either. Perhaps that film has just been lost to the mists of media history.
On the other hand, vestiges of “The Road Warrior” still abound – though it’s usually considered by it’s common name, “Mad Max.” Your students might not have seen the 1981 Mel Gibson film, but I’m quite sure they’d be familiar with the music video for Tupac Shakur and Dr. Dre’s popular song, “California Love,” which was directly influenced by Mad Max. Popular culture’s endurance can most readily be found in the way that it transforms and reappears in other sectors of pop culture – from old movies into new music, old photos into new digital videos, even old songs revamped into new cult hits, such as the 1950’s song “Conquest,” recently redone and released by the White Stripes both in digital formats and on good old vinyl. Pop culture is always in the process of recycling and regeneration, and has been globally for centuries.
— KAD · Jan 23, 10:15 AM · #
The author raises good questions. Though somethings in popular culture seem to endure. I overheard a student conversation recently in which two 20-year-olds were comparing the Beatles and the Stones. Yet again, maybe it was an assignment for a class on late 20th century contemporary music.
— AMD · Jan 23, 11:01 AM · #
Our best gauge of what our students know can be determined from shows like The Simpsons & South Park. Obviously, Doc Hollywood is not an important reference point for anyone (I didn’t even remember seeing it until this discussion teased it out of the part of my brain where bad movies lurk).
— Lion-O · Jan 24, 09:30 AM · #
Considering the fact that the multi-Oscar-winning “The Silence of the Lambs” was also released in 1991, it’s really not very surprising that “Doc Hollywood” has been largely forgotten. I’d be very surprised if those same students had no familiarity with “Lambs”. While you clearly found “Doc” entertaining, its ability to endure in the popular consciousness has as much to do with what other material was produced in the same era as with its intrinsic quality (and as someone who I believe is MUCH more familiar with Hollywood films than the average person – I’d argue that “Doc” was pretty poor fare to begin with.)
This is not to dismiss your argument entirely – but I think you’re making a bit much of the rather common observation that there is no accounting for taste. I happen to think John Waters’ films are generally hilarious and often quite brilliant in their satire, but my ability to quote lines verbatim from many of his (even rather obscure) pictures isn’t shared by the vast majority of my gay peers of the same age cohort. I can’t say I consider this a tragic state of affairs, although I would argue it illustrates rather eloquently my refined and twisted sense of humor.
— Mark Koenig · Jan 26, 10:52 PM · #