A History of Popular Culture

More of Everything, Faster and Brighter

Raymond F. Betts, Lyz Bly

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9781136160264
• Edition: 2
• Topic: Historia
• Subtopic: Historia moderna

This lively and informative survey provides a thematic global history of popular culture focusing on the period since the end of the Second World War.

A History of Popular Culture explores the rapid diffusion and 'hybridization' of popular culture as the result of three conditions of the world since the end of World War Two: instantaneous communications, widespread consumption in a market-based economy and the visualization of reality. Betts considers the dominance of American entertainment media and habits of consumption, assessing adaptation and negative reactions to this influence.

The author surveys a wide range of topics, including:

• the emergence and conditions of modern popular culture
• the effects of global conflict
• the phenomenon and effects of urbanization
• the changing demography of the political arena and the work place
• the development of contemporary music culture
• film, television and visual experience
• the growth of sport as a commercial enterprise.

Now updated, by Lyz Bly, to include major developments such as blogs and social networks, YouTube.com, and enhanced technologies such as the iPhone, iPod, and iPad as well as the way in which the internet has reshaped the ways we consume media. The book provides an engaging introduction to this pervasive and ever-changing subject.

1 Popular culture in the early twentieth-century world

“Produce! Produce! Were it but the pitifullest infinitesimal fraction of a product, produce it in God’s name!” implored the Scottish political philosopher Thomas Carlyle in 1834. And so the century did through the development of an industrial system that made the factory the center of production, steam the motivating force and iron the construction material of the new age. Railroad lines criss-crossed the countries of Europe and by 1869 bound together the United States. The Brooklyn Bridge spanned outward, and the Eiffel Tower rose skyward in testimony to this constructive age that shortened distances, crowded cities and facilitated comfort in domestic life to a degree hitherto unknown. Canned food and cotton clothing, cakes of soap and bars of chocolate candy were obvious signs that an economy of scarcity (think of a fairy tale like “Hansel and Gretel”) was being replaced by an economy of abundance, with the department store, appearing first at mid-century in Paris, offering particular testimony.

All this activity was celebrated as progress, especially in the world’s fairs, those nineteenth-century showcases of ever-increasing and ever-innovative products. For all that, no previous technological changes were so tightly clustered together as the industrial advancements that appeared in the first dozen years of the twentieth century. They initially defined the dimensions of contemporary popular culture and also provided the instruments that would form it. In this brief period, inventions and technical improvements moved the industrial base from steam and iron to gasoline and electricity. The bulkiness of the first phase of industrial development, so evident in the steam train, a powerful but inefficient instrument, was succeeded by swifter and less spatially restricted means of communication.

In 1901, the first Mercedes appeared, a well-built and highly maneuverable automobile soon to become an enduring brand name. It was a vehicle that helped convert the automobile from a novelty to a new form of individual transportation. A few years later, in 1908, Henry Ford introduced his Model-T, the world’s best-selling car for nearly a half century until the Volkswagen Beetle came along. Heard but not seen in that year of the first Mercedes was the first transatlantic wireless (radio) message, the contribution of the Italian scientist Guglielmo Marconi. Seen but not heard in that year were the photographs produced by the Eastman Kodak Company’s Brownie camera, the first camera mass-produced for personal use.

Now add to the list of technological changes two other items: a new invention and the popularization of an earlier one. In 1903 the Wright brothers left the ground briefly in their airplane. In 1909 the Frenchman Louis Blériot crossed the English Channel in his, suggesting that the machine could traverse long distances while avoiding down-to-earth obstacles. In 1910, the Gaumont Palace opened in Paris, a 5,000-seat movie theater, the first of its kind and the model for a new form of ticketed entertainment: the movies or cinema. Pictures projected on a screen were the contribution of the French Lumière brothers who introduced the technique in 1895.

All these developments increased the pace, the visual range and the forms of modern popular culture. They were cinematic and kinetic, the terms Jean Baudrillard used to describe the late twentieth-century American scene. They were not, however, dominantly American. What understandably gave the sparkle and dazzle to America at the turn of the century was electricity or, more accurately stated, its practical application. Some of the basic electrical terms, ohms, amperes and voltage, were derived from the last names of European scientists investigating the properties of electricity, after Benjamin Franklin, flying a kite in a thunderstorm, got the shock of his life.

In the United States and in the year 1879, Thomas Alva Edison had successfully concluded his search for a durable filament that would burn long and bright so that electricity might serve widely as a new means of illumination. Yet the really dazzling announcement of the electric age came in that busy year, 1901. The Pan-American International Exposition in Buffalo, New York had its several hundred thousand incandescent lights, the most impressive light show of the time, illuminated by a new generator placed at the base of Niagara Falls. The wires running the twenty miles between the Exposition site and the Falls were the first of what is everywhere called a national grid, a network of wires reaching hundreds of miles and assuring that electricity would be the silent servant of the vast majority of people. The Exposition itself recognized the potential of electric light in its Electric Tower, nearly 400 feet high. One commentator declared that the structure “shines like diamonds.” What the creators of the exposition had succeeded in doing was to make electric light an integral part of architectural design. The buildings were bathed in light, not spotlighted, previously the dominant form of night illumination.

Jean Baudrillard follows a long tradition in calling the United States he visited in 1986 “dynamic.” What stood out brightly in the night sky of Buffalo a century ago was the work of heavily humming dynamos. Artificial light changed night from threatening darkness to attractive brightness. It became the signature of American – and then of all – contemporary popular culture. The Japanese architect Toyo Ito wrote that, after twilight, Tokyo becomes a “jungle of lights,” in distinct opposition to its daytime appearance (Ito 1997: 32). Las Vegas presents a similar contrast, a desert town that blooms in neon colors at night. Everywhere the daytime city invites, everywhere the nighttime city beckons. Contemporary popular culture bathes in the nightly spectacular.

Unlike mercy, which Shakespeare’s Portia said falls gently as the rain from heaven, electricity now zooms through space and strongly charges popular culture. It is no exaggeration to say that all contemporary popular culture depends on electrically powered developments and practices. Entertainment, travel, telecommunications – the major popular culture industries – are all energized electrically.

Wheels and reels start rolling

In 1911, Henry Ford opened a car assembly plant in Manchester, England, where he produced his famous Model-T. Charlie Chaplin, born in London in 1889, migrated to the United States and first appeared in tramp garb in a 1914 Mack Sennett film titled Mabel’s Strange Predicament. A decade later the Model-T was the most widely distributed automobile, and Charlie Chaplin was the most widely recognized film actor. Car and star were major elements in the internationalization of popular culture. Each commodity was widely appreciated. In much of the world, the noisy Ford and the silent Chaplin required no knowledge of a different language, customs or habits to assure much pleasure.

The name Ford was less identified with the man and Detroit than with new personal convenience and a novel method of production. Aldous Huxley satirized the assembly line in his dystopian novel Brave New World (1932) where Ford was worshiped as a deity ruling over a new religion: a system of earthly organization in which efficiency was the goal and manufactured happiness the implied mood. Huxley’s acid criticism was not mentioned when in 1999 the Ford Motor Car Company received the “Car of the Century Award” for its Model-T. The organizer of the event, Dick Holzhhaus of the Netherlands, declared: “It was Henry Ford’s vision to give people unprecedented mobility that changed the lives of millions throughout the world.” Introduced in 1908, the Model-T accounted for 56 percent of global automobile production by 1927.

Chaplin had a similar global effect: he became the modern Everyman, making film comedy into skillful pantomime and graceful acrobatics. This was predominantly a visual experience in the days before the “talkies” were introduced. Even in his 1936 film Modern Times, a parody of Ford’s industrial process, sound was primarily limited to music, the dialogue maintained as subtitles. Chaplin strongly helped to internationalize movies through his gestures and identification with the “little man” caught up in a world marked by economic and political uncertainty, with the dehumanizing influence of World War One and the industrial system.

The dream factory

Movies were an industrial art, produced for both entertainment and profit. Chaplin was living proof of the fact: he was the first star to receive a $1 million contract, that in 1918. Because movie production was an expensive undertaking, it quickly became the work of large companies, and the film became a new variant of the industrial corporation. Some have said that the movie industry, like the Ford Motor Company, was organized vertically: all activity from script writing, to casting, to filming and editing placed under single control. Equally significant was the further control imposed through what has been called the “studio system.” By the 1930s five major companies had gained an oligopolistic control of the industry. Not only did they produce the films, but also they controlled distribution through the movie houses they owned. Paramount Pictures, for instance, owned 1,000 movie theaters.

A new palace of pleasure, unlike any seen before, the movie theater became the centerpiece of popular culture, far exceeding its only rival at the time, the seasonally restricted amusement park. Movie theater architecture was a new hybrid. Its once garish and now celebrated marquee – the dazzlingly lit front overhang – was more tantalizing for most who frequented the movies than that of the opera house and hotel. Its neon lights and incandescent bulbs were used to spell out the names of the features. Its façade was kitsch on the grand scale, imaginative pastiches of Arabian or Venetian palaces, Egyptian or Chinese temples. Lobbies were equally grand, as indeed was the theater itself. Some, like the theater of Radio City, New York, were done in the Art Deco manner with sleek lines and indirect lighting, impressive in itself, but enhanced – again, as was Radio City – by its stage presentations, particularly the long line of long-legged girls tap-dancing in unison as the Rockettes.

To add a further sense of drama to the movie theater scene, Sid Grauman, showman and entrepreneur who built several of the finest movie theaters of the time, introduced the idea of the première. As the name suggests, this was the first showing of a new film, attended by Hollywood’s celebrities and carried on radio, in newspapers and newsreels as a major “event,” a sterling example of the new phenomenon, the celebration as newsworthy. Even the Nazi propaganda film Triumph of the Will had such a première in Berlin in 1935. In attendance were, among others, Adolf Hitler and his propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels.

From the red carpet frequently rolled out for this occasion to the same rollout for an awards ceremony required little imaginative leap. The industry’s newly established Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences held its first awards night on May 16, 1929 at a hotel banquet, when award-winners received recognition for what were voted to be the best pictures and acting of the previous year. In the following year, the ceremony was carried on local radio. But it was not until 1944 that the Oscar Awards ceremony was made a network theatrical “event” – hosted by Grauman at his Chinese Theater in Hollywood – and broadcast overseas to America’s military, then fighting in World War Two.

In 1940, as a result of news leakage, the announcement of awards gained new suspense: the names were sealed in envelopes, to be opened during the ceremony. Hardware had by then been made the essential part of the event. In 1934 the Oscar made its appearance. A 24-carat gold-plated, bronze trophy in the form of a medieval knight, the statuette was presented to actors and actresses of “merit.” An annual blend of pomp, kitsch and fashion show, the Academy Awards were a twentieth-century spectacular, joined by other such film ceremonies elsewhere after World War Two.

Certainly there were many films and actors to choose from each year. With the introduction of double-feature shows in the 1930s and the growing popularity of newsreels and cartoons, production was maintained at a fast clip. And stars were distributed as were cars, through extensive advertising and publicity. Not surprisingly, many stars were photographed standing by the splendid cars they owned, testimony to new wealth and to the new mobility of the age. Their homes, spread out on well-manicured lawns, soon created a new geographical exercise for the sightseer, that of following the readily available maps of the homes of the stars. The emergence of movie magazines and fan clubs also added to Hollywood’s growing reputation as Tinsel Town.

Even though movie production was an international activity in the interwar period, with European countries developing national production companies and creating films of great merit, Hollywood dominated. The magnetic attraction of the studios was so strong (money, facilities, national and international markets) that film directors and actors from abroad gathered in the Los Angeles suburb. Greta Garbo and Ingrid Bergman from Sweden, Hedy Lamarr and Paul Henreid from Austria, Cary Grant and Laurence Olivier from England, Charles Boyer from France and Marlene Dietrich from Germany – to name a few – settled in. Alfred Hitchcock, thoroughly English, was only the most famous of a series of European directors who made films there. And the popularity of the sub-genre of American-made British Empire films, of which Gunga Din (1939) eventually became the classic, led to the establishment of a British colony of actors there. Only one other film center rivaled Hollywood in scale of production and distribution: the Indian. Primarily settled in Bombay (now known as Mumbai), the name “Bollywood” was attached to this major film-manufacturing site.

Since the early work of D. W. Griffith (director of the Jim Crow-era racist epic Birth of a Nation [1915]), who introduced the moving camera trolley and the fade-out, Hollywood was acclaimed for its innovative techniques and practices. The feature film (a major production running about 90 minutes), genres (cowboy, South Sea romance, gangster-urban – forerunners of today’s action films – and film noir which used lighting and effective use of the black-and-white medium to create a brooding or sinister atmosphere) defined Hollywood’s stock-in-trade.

For sheer dramatic achievement, great credit must go to Walt Disney who turned crude animated cartoons into doubly fabled productions – the consummate skill of the animators and the use of animals as characters. No other Hollywood star approached and then exceeded the international reputation of Charlie Chaplin except Mickey Mouse. Making his screen debut in Steamboat Willie (1928), Mickey took on his definitive form by 1930. He became a feature actor in Disney’s Fantasia (1940). Popular with all ages and in many places, Mickey even – unwittingly – made an appearance in Nazi Germany. He served as the “mascot” of a German fighter pilot, who had the mouse’s likeness painted on the fuselage of his plane.

The automobile and the film, the one running on wheels and gasoline, the other on reels and electricity, were the most significant early twentieth-century technological advancements in the internationalization of popular culture. Film reels and car wheels epitomized speed and rhythm, as the film moved at 24 frames a second and the car engine turned at something like 3,000 revolutions per minute. Such speed created new allusions and illusions about reality. Both devices emerged from the industrial environment. Just as Henry Ford perfected mass production, Hollywood created a “dream factory.”

The open road

The automobile promised a new freedom, or so Henry Ford said, the freedom of the road. The movie promised escape too, from the confines, the cares and the cacophony of the modern industrial city. Together, they created a new vision of things, of speed, of pleasure, of fun on-the-go. This relationship was particularly established in the romantic films of the 1930s where the convertible, ragtop down, served as the perfect intimate setting in which the debonair hero could engage in love-talk with the heroine, as her long hair was sensually caressed by the breezes stirred up by the powerful car rolling along the uncluttered road.

More often than not, the car stood still in the film studio with the countryside rolling by on projected background film, while breezes were generated by fans and wind machines. The car did indeed roll along the road in other films of other moods, the generic gangster film, most obviously, but also in The Grapes of Wrath (1940) in which a makeshift old truck conveys the hardship of the Depression days. Today, it is impossible to think of an action film that does not have a major car wreck or explosion in order to assure brilliant destruction.

As some of these connections might suggest, the automobile was not only utilitarian but also admirable. It became an industrial art form, its shapely contours engendered by the attraction for men (the vast majority of owners and drivers) of its fine curves and appealing lines. Thus viewed as a new graven image to be worshiped, the automobile invited pilgrimage to the annual automobile shows, notably in the United States and Europe. Perhaps the most famous was the Salon de automobile in Paris, an international event that continues to this day. These shows might also be considered new forms of theater featuring bright and sparkling models, with chrome for decoration, the automobile itself often placed on a revolving pedestal. As at the beauty contests that entered the popular culture scene at the same time (the first Miss America contest was held at Atlantic City in 1929), the automobile received the ardent male gaze.

The Romantic poet John Keats rhapsodized that “a thing of beauty is a joy forever.” Not so in this modern world, where the physical beauty that aroused joy was the quality of youthfulness, while the automobile was manufactured on the principle of newness. To assure the appearance of change, cars were manufactured according to what was called “creative obsolescence,” hence the idea of “model years” and the annual automobile show, where the shape of fenders, the size and location of headlights and the grill, of course, were all regularly redesigned and realigned to suggest further change toward better, more powerful and more graceful movement ahead. Remember that among the adjectives Richard Hamilton listed when he defined “pop art” was transitory. Popular culture, like all industrial activity in the twentieth century, sought and praised the new. Someone coined the term “neophilia” to express this sentiment.

The automobile also became an instrument of social change, notably in the United States. A driver’s license was a young person’s rite of passage, a “jalopy” was often his means – and occasionally hers – of detachment from family dependency. The closed sedan, an interwar innovation, gave the woman a comforting independence as well, some historians have asserted, as she drove herself to her own activities and also drove to accommodate those of her children. Youthful sex was enacted in the car, thus replacing the barn with an easily moved venue offering greater seclusion and intimacy. On the sober side of things, the traffic light, invented in 192...