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A L S O_.T O D A Y
My so-called Zeitgeist: Discuss what's meant by the word "mainstream" in Table Talk's Media area
R E C E N T L Y
Truth in advertising Wall Street Journal personals work! A battle for the soul of America Magazine racks Of Fallowships, Flynt, Republican phone sex and demon goddesses of love BROWSE THE
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REVOLT OF THE ELITISTS | PAGE 1, 2, 3
Whereas Gabler offers a detailed, heavily documented and detached theory of contemporary media, New Yorker essayist George W.S. Trow has written a deeply personal and idiosyncratic narrative of the changes in popular culture and Culture culture over the past 50 years. "My Pilgrim's Progress: Media Studies, 1950-1997" is sort of a biography both of Trow and of post-World War II America. Trow writes that our political-cultural "aesthetics" have shifted, from those of FDR and Eisenhower, of newspapers and universally shared assumptions and the industrial economy, to the fast-paced television vocabulary of today, which he critiqued earlier in "Within the Context of No Context." And these shifts, Trow says, were intertwined with changes in American demography that meant, for instance, the demise of the Brownstone New York elite -- from which the Trow family came -- that was inseparably tied to the Roosevelts. Trow's story is thus both personal and societal, accessible and rambling, engaging and occasionally maddening; he free-associatively sets disparate phenomena and events side by side -- John O'Hara, the QVC shopping channel, the Henry Wallace presidential campaign -- and leaves the reader to flesh out the details and complete the connections. Here's a representative snippet that captures "Pilgrim's" voice and digressive approach: "[Franklin Roosevelt] has to tell Stalin what's going on as to the invasion of Europe, and he's telling Stalin -- perhaps he's told Stalin in person, my memory is so bad -- and we're talking about Casablanca here -- I'll check it later -- or I won't -- but Roosevelt is telling Stalin that ..." Through this impressionistic ramble, Trow aims to tell us "how 1950 got to be 1997." In Trow's 1950 the political and cultural worlds were run by titans like Dwight David Eisenhower, George Bernard Shaw and William Randolph Hearst -- pre-broadcasting-era men with 19th century minds and three-word names. George W.S. Trow (a man with four words in his name) contends that the difference between their world and ours is captured in the difference between our current icons and his childhood idol, Eisenhower. Trow sees Ike as the last American leader who simultaneously had compelling authority in every venue of American power: military, economic, political and cultural. In other words, Eisenhower represents the last moment before the deluge of cultural fragmentation that followed the 1950s. Eisenhower "had his mind formed within the atmosphere that gave rise, also, to the oratory of William Jennings Bryan. Bryan was 'Gilligan's Island' for Ike ... Nowadays, children have their first mind formed within the atmosphere of the Candice Bergen Sprint advertisements." So Trow's narrative is one of decline. And a story of decline told by someone who presumes to represent, or at least channel, the predecline culture, is necessarily haughty: What you don't know, George Trow effectively says, could fill this book. "You don't remember 1955; I do," Trow announces five pages in. Then, casually, "You probably don't know what the Black Nobility used to be in Rome." The next page, he volunteers, "I thought you might like to know how I read a newspaper. I read it differently than you do." This easy condescension -- as well as Trow's casual sourcing and his puzzling free-association -- should be infuriating. That it is not is, I suppose, thanks to his fluid style and his birthright. Reading Trow is like listening to a garrulous faded aristocrat: With every word he reminds you of the gulf between you and him, between his age and yours, and you know in your democratic soul that you should question his right to do it -- and yet you feel grateful. You also feel -- and this is not a comment on Trow but on his evocation of these deceased earlier cultures -- you also feel pity. If his book doesn't sound like a typical work of media criticism, it's probably because the media was inseparable from private life for Trow, who grew up in a New York newspaper family, steeped in the culture of journalism and the social codes embedded in it. Truth is, George Trow really does read a newspaper differently from you and me. In a tour de force section early in the book, he dissects a series of February 1950 New York Times, showing how a stretch of disparate news reports and ads demonstrate the fears and sensibility of the 1950s reader. Trow's essential critical approach is close reading of newspapers, TV shows, movies, cultural events and images -- what he calls "mainstream cultural artifacts" -- to take a core sample of the culture's consciousness. Like Gabler, he understands that they are an inseparable part of a cultural octopus: To understand the New York Herald Tribune is to understand a Bonwit Teller ad is to understand a coal miner's strike is to understand "The Seven-Year Itch." And today, without the coherent, unifying culture he identifies in these archival newspapers, Trow writes, "Everyone is busy trying to achieve the stability and prosperity, the dominance of the 1950s, absent all the information available in the New York Times of February 1, 1950." But Trow doesn't acknowledge the links between this supposed 20th century decline and the rise of small-d democracy: greater literacy, greater general affluence, greater access to technology. He wearies of modern culture's frenzy: "a kind of unreal, speeded-up violence ... one minute you're watching Frasier and the next minute you're watching some hyperactive car chase." Well, is it so terrible to have a hundred alternatives, however low-rent, to the Porteresque bon mots of millionaire psychiatrists drinking poire William in a penthouse? Trow, like Gabler, seems to believe that modern media inherently keep audiences ignorant. He denounces TV's lack of historical perspective, its "context of no context," while Gabler says "entertainment" (most electronic and much print media) "pulls us into ourselves to deny us perspective." That's simply wrong. The kind of all-encompassing information Trow eulogizes is available in spades; it just takes desire, filtering and an entirely different and broader kind of reading from parsing a single authoritative Truman-era daily. And yes, it takes speed. If it's harder to take it all in, well, tough. It's because our media, for their many faults, are far more comprehensive and representative than in the heyday of All the News That's Fit to Print. Trow spends far more time describing the American culture of the 1950s than in pinning down what exactly he finds lacking in its contemporary counterpart and how he thinks it devolved, except for some jabs at Quentin Tarantino, MTV and -- but of course -- Reagan. Perhaps Trow feels he covered that well enough in "Within the Context." Perhaps -- more worrisomely -- he believes people of quality and intelligence more or less agree on what's wrong with the media and culture today. And Trow occasionally comes across, like the Edwardians and 1950s elites whose own waning he describes, as a bit clumsy with the new cultural lingo of his time: "the ultimate of (fashion copywriting) has always been Revlon, which was 'For lips and fingertips,' you know, gangsta rap, in a way." Word up! For all that, Trow's book is an engaging holistic snapshot of the culture of the middle of the century. And more significant, it may be the single best explanation, in its own circuitous way, for that glimpse of unrest that night at the Newseum, and for why critiques like Neal Gabler's have such resonance. Even the weaknesses of "My Pilgrim's Progress" -- its self-indulgence, its vagueness -- capture that sense of overwhelmedness, of drowning in the welter of popular culture, of feeling baffled and insulted and excluded by its language. And more: the combination of enraged progressivism and affronted cultural conservatism. The dire, frustrated pleas -- "America will die by its own hand unless it puts the tabloid mind away." The mourning of a way of life. "My Pilgrim's Progress" ends as a eulogy, with Trow's visits to the museumized houses of Roosevelt and Eisenhower. We can and will argue about whether we're going to hell or the grave or the museum or the loony bin via the current American culture -- I emphatically don't think we are -- but some people are being left behind in the last one. The ferment in the auditoriums and in the Talk of the Town is something more than topical anger at Barbara Walters or Tina Brown or Lucianne Goldberg. It is a cultural clique's death throes. George W.S. Trow seems to feel it and those educated New Yorkers at the Newseum certainly did, fuming in their seats, clenching their Citarella bags, raging, raging against the flipping of the remote.
James Poniewozik's media column appears every Tuesday. - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - LIFE THE MOVIE: HOW ENTERTAINMENT CONQUERED REALITY MY PILGRIM'S PROGRESS: MEDIA STUDIES, 1950-1997 |
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