Movie Theater as a Popular

¶ … Movie Theater as a Popular Culture Activity

Going to the cinema has always been a part of my life. As a child, I would go with my family to see films on the weekends, and as I grew older, I would go with my friends almost every Friday or Saturday night. Seeing the latest films was a popular culture experience. It had a very important meaning in my life: it allowed me to bond socially with my peers. We could talk about actors and actresses, directors and writers. There were independent filmmakers who introduced new narrative styles into movies and we could follow their evolution over the years. Going to the movie theater was also a way to understand life and myself in relation to the world around me. Some films, I learned, had more artistic merit than others. Some were labors of love for directors like Terrence Malick and Paul Thomas Anderson. Others were "guilty pleasures," like the Expendables. Understanding the difference between a film that was meant to entertain and enlighten and a film that was meant merely to entertain through spectacle helped me see that while going to the cinema was a pop cultural event, it could sometimes translate into a high culture exercise.

Richard Hamilton defined pop art as being mass-produced for a mass-audience, transient, expendable, low cost, youthful, witty, sexually gimmicky, glamorous, and big business (Johnson 723). If this is pop art, pop culture could be called a culture or society that embraces pop art. Certainly the cinema may be understood as a house of pop art, and going to the cinema as participation in popular culture.

Forces such as family, peers, and media have, of course, influenced my desire to go to the movie theater. My reasons for attending, however, are not always the same as those with whom I go. My friends may desire to see a movie simply to pass time. But I derive an aesthetic pleasure out of attending, even if it is a silly action film. I look for scenes or shots of artistic merit. I listen to the film score. I observe the direction and ponder how it might have been done in other ways. Considerations like this may elevate the experience from one of popular culture to one of high culture because my orientation is toward high culture in the first place. I perceive from such a vantage point. On the other hand, for people like my friends or my family, going to the movies is little more than a way to pass the time with popular entertainment. They rarely attempt to see the popular culture experience from the perspective of high culture.

And yet even such a reflection does not do justice to the idea of going to the theater as a participation in popular culture (that can also be one in high culture). Stephanie Meyer's Twilight books and films, for example, have been hugely successful (a fact most obviously seen in the film adaptations -- all of which have turned the series into a billion dollar film franchise). Women and men alike flock to see the films. But what are the cultural values that are reinforced or challenged in the work? Are there any at all? Or is Twilight just the latest example of schlock entertainment?

Stephen King is no fan of Twilight. The difference between such films as Twilight and Harry Potter, he notes, is that J.K. Rowling knows how to write -- and Stephanie Meyer does not. But that is not the only difference: King observes that while Harry Potter teaches values about growing up and learning to deal with reality and having to struggle with our own good and evil natures, Twilight, he argues, is simply about sex: "Harry Potter is about confronting fears, finding inner strength and doing what is right in the face of adversity. Twilight is about how important it is to have a boyfriend" (Serper).

Yet, perhaps having a boyfriend is something of cultural value in our day and age. Perhaps the gender codes that the Feminist movement of the 70s tried to establish have grown too cold for young girls and romantically-inclined women. Perhaps there is something deeper to Twilight than anyone is willing to admit. So, then, we must ask ourselves: What are these films about? Is there not something revealing even about the reflections seen in popular culture? Cannot pop culture, therefore, be considered part of high culture? Must it be discarded simply because it is popular? I don't think that it must. And yet there is something distinctly different about the Tree of Life that Twilight simply does not have. One might call it vision or purpose. Perhaps this is the difference between high culture and popular culture. Needless to say, however, at a cinema one may often choose either/or.

Still, Umberto Eco states that "according to traditional standards in aesthetics, Casablanca is not a work of art, if such an expression still has meaning" (Eco 197). This is an interesting observation by Eco for a number of reasons. First, it points out that one of the most celebrated movies of all time is not what traditionalists or high culture purists would classify as part of high culture: it is a pop culture phenomenon. Secondly, however, Eco qualifies his statement with the curious phrase "if such an expression still has meaning." It is indicative of the radical transformation in the way art and culture are now analyzed both by amateurs and scholars, low and high cultures, that Eco should have to add this qualifier. Why might going to the movie theater to see a film by Antonioni be considered participation in high culture? What distinguishes a work by him or Malick from a standard Hollywood studio production? Again, we arrive at the same question. If popular culture scholars are compelled to give such a definition, it may be because "high culture" descended into the ranks of popular culture through the works of such artists as Richard Hamilton, Jaspar Johns, and Andy Warhol.