By Victor Greto
Elvis matters.So do Star Trek, Nike and Marlon Brando’s angst-ridden motorcyclist in The Wild One.
But maybe not for the reasons you first thought.
Ever wonder why, say, you thought Brando was cool, thought of Elvis when you thought about race, or created a world in your head based on Gene Roddenberry’s brainchild?
Taken for granted or sneered at by academics for much of the 20th century, popular culture has patiently stitched itself into what has become the crazy-quilt of academic study.
As popular culture studies become some of the most trend-setting classes in higher education throughout South Florida and across the country, you can finally think deeply (and mostly without guilt) about why you do, after all, put that fake microphone to your mouth, leer at yourself in the mirror and mouth Blue Suede Shoes.
And there’s nothing frivolous about it.
“We live in a society increasingly defined by leisure and consumption and by various forms of mass media,” says Robin Bachin, an assistant professor of history at the University of Miami, “and these impact all elements of society, from the economy to political to social relations. So understanding popular culture provides a lens into understanding American society more broadly.”
Bachin teaches a course on popular culture in American history and the history of sport.
“These things that have become so natural in our existence,” she says, “they have a historical framework, and to better understand our society, it’s best to understand the forms from which popular culture emerges.”
Still, if you’re wondering if it’s just a coincidence that the popularity of studying Madonna or Elvis in college came when Baby Boomers became professors, you can stop wondering.
“There is some sort of corollary between Boomers and the popularity of popular culture studies,” says Steven Alford, a liberal arts professor at Nova Southeastern University.
But it’s not self-indulgence, the academics say. This is serious stuff.
Alford, whose specialty is 19th century British literature, says it makes perfect sense for him to apply his literary critical skills to motorcycle movies.
Sure, he rides one, and maybe he digs the smell of leather, but still …
“Popular culture claims to recognize the inherent textuality of all things,” Alford says, trading in for a moment his leather jacket for a tweed one with patches on the elbows. “And we understand things through the lens of language. If that’s the case, then the literary tools of analysis can be used to understand things that are normally understood to be trivial.”
For example, in a paper he recently wrote, Alford traced the myth of the outlaw biker to Life magazine’s misleading report of a violent get-together of motorcyclists in Hollister, Calif., on the Fourth of July weekend, 1947.
That report eventually led to the 1954 film starring Brando, which etched into the American mind the idea of the leather-clad, outlaw biker.
The bikers, Alford says, were actually returning Word War II veterans, members of that recently vaunted “greatest generation,” but who were definitely not middle class.
“They belonged to various clubs because they didn’t assimilate well back into suburbia,” he says. “They were lower-class, undereducated men who probably didn’t have the best psychological framework coming back from the war.
“The result,” he says, “was the demonization of a certain class of people in the interest of selling magazines.”
Understanding the role and complexities of class and race in American life has a lot to do with popular culture study. It is also interdisciplinary.
Gil Rodman, who teaches in the communication department at the University of South Florida in Tampa, and who has written Elvis After Elvis: The Posthumous Career of a Living Legend, says there’s more to studying popular culture than just indulging curiosity.
Popular culture has become the stage where American political and social battles are played out.
“We come to have a certain understanding of what it means to be black or white or upper class or lower class in part because of media images,” he says, “and they are rarely neutral images.”
Rodman’s book details the iconic meaning of Elvis after his death in 1977. He says Elvis is used as an example of both racial assimilation (bringing white and black music together), and as an example of racist appropriation (white man who stole an African-American art).
“Elvis is still being invoked to explain racial politics,” Rodman says, and it shows no sign of stopping.
A good example, he says, is the use of Public Enemy’s song Fight the Power in Spike Lee’s 1989 movie Do the Right Thing.
In part, the song cries, “Elvis was a hero to most/ But he never meant [expletive] to me you see/ Straight up racist that sucker was … “
In the song, Rodman says, “Elvis becomes a figure to reference the history of white appropriation of black culture.
“For better or worse, what matters is that popular culture matters more in our daily lives than `high’ culture.”
Without denying the importance of traditional “high art,” Rodman says, “I would argue that one of the things the university should do is try to make sense of contemporary life and culture. Part of that requires us to engage it in active ways and understand it on its own terms.”
It’s not just professors who are looking at deeper issues through the prism of popular culture.
Chanelle Rose says she was first attracted to Bachin’s popular culture class at the University of Miami because of the course description.
“It said it would look at issues dealing with class, race and gender, and how all these things were represented through American popular culture,” says Rose, 25.
This sounded perfect to Rose, a second-year doctoral student of U.S. history, because her specific interests within American history include African-American history and class and gender studies.
In one class Bachin presented a Nike advertisement featuring Tiger Woods. Though the discussion was complex and lasted for more than an hour, Rose says some of things they discovered were “that Nike was trying to not only target an African-American audience, but also how Nike had broken class and race barriers, how it’s become an international phenomenon. You can be in the poorest parts of the world and you will know Nike.”
Since she’s taken the class, Rose characterizes herself as “more aware and observant” of the culture around her, from understanding better the commercialization of hip-hop culture to the omnipresence of television.
Popular culture may also be used to highlight aspects of other, ostensibly dryer disciplines.
Paul Joseph, a law professor at NSU, says he uses popular culture partly to teach aspects of the law, and has co-edited a book, Prime Time Law: Fictional Television as Legal Narrative.
“You can get a gauge on what people think about the legal system when you see serious drama,” Joseph says.
There was a time when lawyers were portrayed as positive, Perry Mason in the late 1950s and The Defenders in the early 1960s. Now, however, portrayals of lawyers in both Law & Order and in The Practice are much more problematic.
Why has the change taken place?
“It’s a reflection of Watergate and Vietnam,” he says, “a loosening of faith in authority, that has left us profoundly skeptical of everything. It plays out in the assumption that everyone’s got an angle.”
Joseph says he uses a 1989 episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation to teach his students a different way of looking at individual rights.
“One of the big changes for first-year law students,” Joseph says, “is learning to deal with the inherent uncertainties of legal argument and the legal system. It can be traumatizing.”
Using Star Trek was helpful in that regard. The episode, “The Measure of a Man,” written by a former attorney, dealt with the legal issue of the individual rights of Commander Data, an android, and whether he had human rights or was simply property.
Elaine Papas, 39, who recently received her law degree from NSU, says the class helped her become aware of popular attitudes toward her profession.
“It made me more aware that part of my responsibility in providing the best representation to a client,” she says, “is to be aware that a person may not be clear about the role an attorney plays and may not understand that judgments are not always brought down as quickly as they are on TV.”
As Bachin shows her students, however, popular culture studies do not have to confine themselves to entertainment.
Modern corporations can be valuably studied, too.
“Think about Disney or Nike,” she says, “two of the largest and easily recognized corporations that are global in scope: investigating them we learn about labor relations, ideas that companies try to sell in advertising, about how Americans define themselves, and values that structure American culture.”
Education doesn’t get any more pertinent than that.