In her 2005 book Female Chauvinist Pigs, the feminist culture critic Ariel Levy attempts to understand the sudden (and to her, distressing) popularity of what she calls “raunch culture.” Everywhere she looked at the turn of the millennium, she saw softcore pornography: women taking lessons in pole- and lap-dancing; teenage pop stars semi-clothed and gyrating; hit movies like the 2000 remake of Charlie’s Angels that seemed to exist mostly for male sexual gratification. And what really annoyed her about raunch culture was the way that so many feminists were celebrating it:
People I knew (female people) liked going to strip clubs (female strippers). It was sexy and fun, they explained; it was liberating and rebellious. My best friend from college, who used to go to Take Back the Night Marches on campus, had become captivated by porn stars. She would point them out to me in music videos and watch their (topless) interviews on Howard Stern. As for me, I wasn’t going to strip clubs or buying Hustler T-shirts, but I was starting to show signs of impact all the same. It had only been a few years since I’d graduated from Wesleyan University, a place where you could pretty much get expelled for saying “girl” instead of “woman,” but somewhere along the line I’d started saying “chick.” And, like most chicks I knew, I’d taken to wearing thongs. (2-3)
Two decades on, raunch culture has so dominated American popular culture that the phenomena Levy complains about seem almost traditional. We live in a culture that sent the Cardi B song “WAP” (if you somehow don’t know what the acronym stands for, please don’t look it up) to the top of the charts in eight countries; a culture in which the average child has been exposed to hardcore pornography before they turn thirteen; a culture in which national, supposedly conservative, politicians sidle up to porn stars and traffic underage girls.
Of course, nothing comes from nowhere, and Ross Benes’s new book 1999: The Year Low Culture Conquered America and Kickstarted Our Bizarre Times, attempts to sketch the history of twenty-first-century mass culture. As the title suggests, Benes sees a lot of the seeds of modern low culture in that pivotal year of 1999, the year Britney Spears released her first album and Limp Bizkit’s Significant Other debuted at number one; the year that South Park: Bigger, Longer, and Uncut crossed boundaries that even basic cable wouldn’t have allowed; the year that WWF Smackdown premiered. But of course, as Benes himself acknowledges, the history of low culture goes back substantially further—for example, The Jerry Springer Show (the subject of his first chapter) crested early in the year and quickly began to recede), and Beanie Babies (the subject of his second) were largely finished as a cultural phenomenon by that year. Even so, 1999 feels like a watershed year for American culture.
Where Benes is at his best is in giving the material history of low culture, the political and social and financial circumstances that allowed for its rise. It’s fascinating how many of these artifacts arose from one form of governmental deregulation or another. Trashy talk shows and reality television were made possible by the collapse of antitrust legislation, allowing media companies to become media conglomerates. Once they’d spent billions of dollars acquiring their competitors, they needed to be able to make entertainment products on the cheap: enter Jerry Springer and Survivor, which cost a fraction of the amount required for a scripted series of any quality.
Or take professional wrestling. When it conquered the world in the late ‘90s, it did so in part because of a concreted effort by Vince McMahon and company “to get around state athletic commission regulations and taxes” (81). To do so, McMahon announced that wrestling was scripted and not a sport that needed to be regulated (and pay fees) like boxing. Or, needless to say, pornography, which has always been bombarded by lawsuits and attempts to regulate it—regulations which have gradually disappeared, despite the best efforts of previous generations of conservative lawmakers.
Where I found the book frustrating was Benes’s general lack of an ethical vision as far as culture is concerned. My saying this would no doubt open me up to Benes’s favorite accusation: moral guardianship. “Connecticut Democratic senator Joe Lieberman got off from lecturing Americans about their entertainment choices” (163), he says. Elsewhere, speaking about the Pokémon craze, he quotes a mother in a Newsweek article who “gave her best Helen Lovejoy [a Simpsons character given to moral panic] impression, pleading for someone to please think of the children, and compared Pokémon cards to hard drugs” (69-70). His contempt for anyone making ethical judgments about low culture runs throughout the book, and gets very tedious after a few dozen pages.
But he is not particularly consistent. Just two paragraphs after calling that Newsweek mother “Helen Lovejoy,” he approvingly cites South Park’s Trey Parker making a very similar case: “[Pokémon] was appealing to kids because it gave them a task [ . . . ] Even the theme song and everything was, ‘Get em all! Get em all! Pokémon!’ And you just worked kids up into a tizzy. ‘I gotta get em all!’” (70). True, Parker doesn’t explicitly compare Pokémon to crack cocaine, but why does Benes not accuse him of being Helen Lovejoy? Is it because Parker’s ethical judgment is positive? Is it because South Park is itself an example of the vulgar low culture that he loves? (Because, as becomes increasingly clear as the book progresses, he does love the culture he discusses.)
Likewise, at one point he criticizes former education secretary William Bennett for “host[ing] press conferences to gin up moral outrage with self-serious statements” (22) about The Jerry Springer Show. A scant three pages later, Benes is ginning up his own moral outrage, against Oprah Winfrey, often seen as a morally and socially conscious alternative to other daytime talk-show hosts:
However, Oprah pushed ridiculous concepts that may have proved more harmful than anything Jerry Springer broadcasted. She made Dr. Oz the most famous doctor in America even though fewer than half of Oz’s recommendations are backed by medical evidence. She made Dr. Phil a famous enough psychologist that he could license his image to sell fraudulent weight-loss supplements, which spawned legal settlements over their false advertising. She encouraged viewers to adopt New Age philosophies that don’t align with reality. She presented the most unscrupulous actors in the satanic panic as authentic whistleblowers and victims, without pushback. She gave credence to figureheads who promote the discredited claim that vaccines cause autism. She promoted the fairy tale that if you want something to happen, all you have to do is wish for it to come true. (25)
All of these things are true, and all of them are bad. But it’s strange for Benes to complain about the sanctimony of the critics of low culture and then engage in some fairly serious sanctimony of his own. As things stand, contemporary cultural critics could use some more sanctimony—at least for matters outside partisan politics, which seems to have a monopoly on sanctimony these days.
The very premise of the book, however, is that the low culture of the late ‘90s created, or helped to create, the world we live in now, and Benes is perfectly willing to criticize contemporary politics. To his credit here, he is not a partisan hack. His analysis of kayfabe in journalism and politics includes references to conservatives and liberals alike: Jake Tapper, Gavin Newsom, Ron DeSantis, the ACLU, The Young Turks, and Megyn Kelly. Elsewhere, he praises Antonin Scalia for his granting of free-speech protections to video games.
Benes might be horrified to learn that he agrees with Andrew Breitbart’s famous proverb that “Politics is downstream of culture,” but I don’t know how else to take his major argument here. If the political situation we find ourselves in—which Benes limns with insight—really is a product of the late ‘90s culture industry, that culture is responsible for quite a bit of human suffering and dysfunction, and we owe it to ourselves to criticize it, however much Benes enjoyed watching Jerry Springer as a nine-year-old. If it’s reasonable to criticize contemporary politics, why would it be hysterical moral guardianship to criticize the culture that created it?
In this sense, 1999 reminds me of an interview with the comedian and actor Patton Oswalt that I heard a decade ago. He’d just published a memoir, Silver Screen Fiend, about his love for movies and the positive effect that they can have on the viewer’s soul. The interviewer asked him if they could also have a negative effect, and he replied that they could not. (Unfortunately, the audio from this interview is no longer available, so Oswalt’s response may be more nuanced than I remember.) But anything non-divine that has the capacity to do good must also have the capacity for doing bad, and, as I see it, Oswalt and Benes both fail to take popular culture seriously enough.
In fact, Benes’s periodic defenses of low culture are conducted on seriously shaky ground. What people who criticized the advertising campaign that Pokémon used to generate childhood obsessions don’t understand, he says, is that “playing with pocket monsters was a social activity” (71). He himself played Grand Theft Auto III for a solid 24 hours on his sixth-grade Christmas Day, but don’t worry: “When I played GTA, I did more critical thinking than when I read books, listened to music, or watched documentaries” (162). Never mind that “critical thinking” is a completely meaningless phrase; Benes never bothers to explain how solving puzzles like “park[ing] a Cheetah (read: Ferrari) near the spot where I planned to murder gang members” (162) corresponds to any useful or soul-creating activity outside of the game. As Joshua Gibbs puts it,
From time to time, I hear students argue that video games help with problem solving or critical thinking, which sounds vaguely scientific. When I was a kid, we told adults that video games “improved hand-eye coordination.” We didn’t have any idea what it meant, but it also sounded scientific. Americans are never ones to pass-up some vaguely scientific sounding claim which supports their desire to do something they already like to do. There will always be some huckster out there telling you that “such and such is actually good for you.”
Helen Lovejoy type that I am, it concerns me that Benes marinated in some truly heinous culture when he was barely in double digits. A self-described “hick” (117), he tells us that at age ten he was listening to Limp Bizkit and the horrorcore rappers Insane Clown Posse, making dry-ice bombs, and looking at rotten.com, which he later describes as “vile, featuring decapitations, mutilated dead bodies, and bizarre sex acts” (153). But even this description, given the content of the rest of the book, is a value-neutral account, not a condemnation.
And then there’s his defense of consumerism, represented by the Beanie Babies bubble and the Pokémon craze:
Capitalism may lead to the creation of rather silly and useless commodities, but it also encourages people to indulge in their fantasies. Guardian editor Joe Stone received an “inordinate amount of joy from hoarding pop merch.” He had “no regrets” about covering his adult bedroom with wallpaper featuring the Spice Girls, who “taught” him “how to be a consumer.” Although consumption is materialistic, it’s often joyous. (71)
It never fails—whenever Benes defends low culture, he does so in the exact terms that he ought to be using to criticize it. Joe Stone is not someone to be admired, at least not for his interior design. He should be pitied, and I’ll admit that my own feelings don’t even rise to pity.
Benes’s defense of all low culture is ultimately that it’s what the people want. “Nearly every consumer product has a trade magazine dedicated to it because open markets are built on giving people the freedom to lose control over their lives by obsessing over the most niche, useless, and perverse products imaginable. Thank God for that freedom” (75). It’s almost impossible to imagine that he’s being serious here—except that he clearly is: “Marketers might sway them, but by and large, entertainment sucks a large portion of many people’s budgets because they find it rewarding, at least in the short term. For all its faults, materialism keeps dopamine rolling, which can be a gratifying aspect of living in a capitalistic society” (75). He admits that taken too far, consumerism leads to addiction “and potentially, the horrors of Brave New World” (75), but there’s no suggestion in his work that maybe we should stop consumerism before it gets to that point. Just part of freedom, I guess!
As I read 1999, I found myself thinking a lot about a much better writer, Dwight Macdonald, whose long 1960 essay “Masscult and Midcult” remains the best key to understanding American popular culture. Actually, Macdonald doesn’t use the phrase “popular culture,” because he doesn’t think that most of what goes out over the airwaves rises to the level of culture. Thus he prefers the term Masscult. A work of genuine culture—either high culture or folk culture—comes from a human being and speaks to its audience as human beings. Not so Masscult, which “offers its customers neither an emotional catharsis nor an aesthetic experience, for these demand effort. The production line grinds out a uniform product whose humble aim is not even entertainment, for this too implies life and hence effort, but merely distraction” (5). Masscult—which, according to Macdonald, represented nearly the whole of popular culture in the mid-‘60s—is made by nobody for nobody.
Needless to say, most of Macdonald’s examples will not be familiar to modern readers, because the disposability of masscult means that it rarely lasts beyond the decade that produced it. But Macdonald is such a sharp and funny writer that “Masscult and Midcult” is a blast to read. (In contrast to 1999, which is written in the bland style beloved of advertisers and doesn’t have a single sentence I will remember, or want to, after I finish writing this essay.) Perry Mason’s creator, Erle Stanley Gardner, Macdonald tells us, “is marketing a standard product, like Kleenex, that precisely because it is not related to any individual needs on the part of either the producer or the consumer appeals to the widest possible audience” (6). Life magazine features a photo spread of a roller-skating horse and nine color pages of Renoir paintings, which we might be tempted to think of as an attempt to educate the masses, but “the final impression is that both Renoir and the horse were talented” (12). The almost entirely forgotten song “I Love You Truly” was so popular at weddings “because its wallowing, yearning tremolos and glissandos make it clear to the most unmusical listener that something very tender indeed is going on. It does his feeling for him” (27). So, we might say, does Limp Bizkit; it’s only that the emotion has changed from sentimentality to rage.
The problem is that when we allow masscult to feel for us, we surrender to the atomizing forces of the mass society that produces it. “Masscult comes from above,” Macdonald writes. “It is fabricated by technicians hired by businessmen. They try this and try that and if something clicks at the box office, they try to cash in with similar products, like consumer-researchers with a new cereal, or like a Pavlovian biologist who has hit on a reflex he thinks can be conditioned” (13). To hone our taste on masscult is to turn ourselves into cogs in the great machine of society—to become the nobodys that this trash was made for.
I love Dwight Macdonald, and I especially love this essay, but in my case, the gravity of Masscult and its highfalutin cousin, Midcult (which “has the essential qualities of Masscult—the formula, the built-in reaction, the lack of any standard except popularity—but it decently covers them with a cultural figleaf” [35]), has proven too powerful for me to escape. I love popular culture, from the radio dramas and comedies of the 1940s to rock music to, God help me, comic-book movies. I believe that my taste in Masscult is substantially better than what Benes and Levy describe in their books, but I know that’s a dodge, because any difference in Masscult will only be a difference in degree, not kind.
To understand why, we should recall Benes’s favorite defense of low culture: that it gives the people what they want. He’s right, of course. Macdonald knew it back in the ‘60s:
Whenever a Lord of Masscult is reproached for the low quality of his products, he automatically ripostes, “But that’s what the public wants, what can I do?” A simple and conclusive defense, at first glance. But a second look reveals that (1) to the extent the public “wants” it, the public has been conditioned to some extent by his products, and (2) his efforts have taken this direction because (a) he himself also “wants it”—never underestimate the ignorance and vulgarity of publishers, movie producers, network executives and other architects of Masscult—and (b) the technology of producing mass “entertainment” [ . . . ] imposes a simplistic, repetitious pattern so that it is easier to say the public wants this than to say the truth, which is that the public gets this and so wants it. (10)
This is the logic of the culture market: give the people what they want, but always remember that what they will most easily accept will generally be the lowest common denominator. Thus the forces that produced Cardi B and the Insane Clown Posse are the same forces that produced Otis Redding and Paul Simon; the forces that produced Vince McMahon are the same ones that produced Jack Benny. Low culture, as Benes calls it, was the inevitable conclusion of market-logic, especially once it was stripped of all moral guardrails.
Likewise, the slide from culture to politics was also inevitable, for reasons that Macdonald identifies. Masscult is the product of mass society, which, “like a crowd, is inchoate and uncreative. Its atoms cohere not according to individual liking or traditions or even interests but in a purely mechanical way.” Ultimately, the morality of mass society “sinks to the level of the most primitive members [ . . . ] and its taste to that of the least sensitive and the most ignorant” (9). Once we accept market-logic, everything becomes the lowest common denominator, politics no less than culture. It’s no accident that, of the seven presidents of my lifetime, two of them (Reagan and Trump) came directly from the entertainment industry, while two others (Clinton and Obama) conducted themselves like celebrities all the way to and from the White House. Mass society is self-replicating. Life imitates Masscult. Reality imitates simulacrum.
Because I’m as much a captive of Masscult as anyone else, I don’t think I’m the right person to offer a solution to the reduction of our society to its lowest common denominator. But I at least know that the solution is not to celebrate the dumbest and most vulgar aspects of Masscult, as Ross Benes does in 1999, nor is it to stave off any moral objection to them by references to vague terms like “freedom,” “joy,” and “critical thinking.” Maybe the best hope I can offer that our culture will escape the race to the bottom we’ve been running for the last century is something Francesco Petrarch says in his essay “The Ascent of Mount Ventoux”:
Much that is doubtful and evil still clings to me, but what I once loved, that I hove no longer. And yet what am I saying? I still love it, but with shame, but with heaviness of heart. Now, at last, I have confessed the truth. So it is. I love, but love what I would not love, what I would that I might hate. Though loath to do so, though constrained, though sad and sorrowing, still I do love, and I feel in my miserable self the truth of the well known words, “'I will hate if I can; if not, I will love against my will.”'’
In other words, I think the best hope for those of us who love Masscult might be to feel ashamed about it—and to admire people who have better taste than we do.
Image Via: RawPixel
