Transcript O`Brien - The Homepage of Dr. David Lavery

ENGL 6310/7310
Popular Culture
Studies
Fall 2011
PH 300
M 240-540
Dr. David Lavery
10/24/11
Popular Culture Studies
Popular Culture Studies
Popular Culture Studies
With satisfaction the young audience watched the frontiers of
nudity and language dissolve. Europe led the way, with contingents
of erotically dissatisfied Swedish students and Danish housewives.
Film by film the desiccated old laws dropped nil. The empty space
remaining was called freedom. The ground was being cleared for the
New Eden, a voyeurist paradise in which there was nothing that
could not be looked at. In strikingly different ways Roger Vadim and
Federico Fellini began to sketch in the details of the new covenant,
and a small army of film students, old-time exploitation experts, and
consortiums of Western European businessmen followed their lead.
The eye was to be fed. Desire was in the cameraman's seat. An age
of optical luxury opened. The lens prepared to move into what had
been curtailed by the fade-outs of the first half century of movies,
like conquistadors in silk paisley shirts embarking for an
undiscovered continent. (75)
Popular Culture Studies
But how much farther back might you not trace that prehistory of
projection, could you but find a surviving practitioner to initiate
you? Was there a subculture of projectionists carefully guarding its
technical secrets? Where were the lost slide shows of the Tibetans
and the Olmecs? What had become of the medieval movies, the
Graeco-Roman movies, the ancient Egyptian movies, or of the
mystifying play of flame and shadow cast against cave walls to
induce Cro-Magnon wonderment? Was that the sin for which
Atlantis had been destroyed, not nuclear weapons after all, but the
premature invention of Technicolor and Cinemascope. (107)
Popular Culture Studies
So FILM HISTORY charted the evolution of tiny mutations, as if
everybody set out to make exactly the same movie—like monks
copying out the writings of Origen and Athanasius—and failed
in revealing ways. The failed imitation then became someone
else's original. (141)
Popular Culture Studies
AND WILL THIS empire indeed go on forever? Won't the electricity
run out, won't the raw materials have to be rationed, won't such
practices fall victim to the impending war against pollutants?
Won't there be religions of iconoclasts springing up around the
globe dedicated to erasing offending images and dismantling the
image-making machines, simply in order to make a new start?
Wouldn't there be, after the glut of pictures, a deep craving for
desertification?
It was peculiar to imagine people three thousand years hence
watching Intolerance or Bringing Up Baby or Rebel Without a
Cause. By then their criteria would of course have changed
drastically. Just as you, watching a thirties movie, already paid less
attention to story and jokes than to stray effects of lighting and
brief glimpses of period furniture and costume. Those future
movie buffs might be fascinated by earlier phases of evolution:
vanished nuances of bone structure or nerve reflex, archaic vocal
patterns evidently associated with amusement or terror. They
would perhaps watch the wonderful comedians as if studying an
amoeba under glass.
Popular Culture Studies
You CAN ALMOST remember what memory was. But the
recollection already has a secondhand quality about it. It's a
rumor, a fable about a world in which there was a past. People
stored images and words in their brains. They couldn't look at
them; couldn't look them up or play them back; their heads
were their hardware. They kept people alive in their brains,
made a place for them in a complex landscaped garden called
In the Beginning or Formerly or In Ancient Times. By
memorizing the lanes and turnings of it—what was planted in
what row, where the fountain was, how the seasons altered
it—they kept track of everything that had ever existed. (216)
Popular Culture Studies
Was it for this you stayed awake until the end of the
night, the end of the decade, to bid a long goodbye to
the Century of the Eyeball? Flip through the trading
cards one more time before the bell rings. Goodbye
Hindenburg disaster, goodbye Stan and Ollie, goodbye
storm troopers of Berlin, goodbye Ingrid Bergman
clutching the key to the wine cellar, goodbye
bobbysoxers of 1947, goodbye Mr. Magoo, goodbye
Goodbye Again, goodbye Zapruder footage, goodbye
Warren Oates and Jean Seberg, goodbye compilations
of compilations of images. (222)
Popular Culture Studies
You stepped into a bath of light. To write with light was to
write on water. Pellucid, each movie showed layers upon
layers of other movies underneath it. None existed alone. As
in a hall of mirrors they reflected one another endlessly, in a
dizzying crossfire of ricocheting forms. A few of the more
striking flickers might be singled out and preserved beyond
their natural span. Most would fade only to be replaced by
others. Your life span was a passage through a palimpsest of
water writing, like the waterfall in Johnny Guitar through
which the outlaws walked to get to their secret hideout.
You knew the pleasure of being perpetually erased by water,
of beginning perpetually to look again as if for the first time at
the flicker of movement, the beginning of the new episode.
You will never know how things might have been in a different
empire. (223-24)
Popular Culture Studies
Or maybe they would simply lose interest. Having evolved out of a
world where the little living pictures were everywhere, perhaps
the most exciting thing they could witness would be the screen
going blank. The hum of the soundtrack cutting out would
announce a healing influx of voluntary silence.
And then what would they do, as they began learning again how
to live in a world without movies? What would it then become
possible for them to see?
What a world that would be. What stories could be told of it.
What a movie it would make. (224-25)
Popular Culture Studies
It was for the construction of those micro-bubbles that
human intelligence and science had evolved, that
savants and engineers and whimsical caricaturists had
put together the separate pieces of the great invention.
In a roundabout, absurdly elaborated fashion —
requiring special-effects laboratories, wagonloads of
art directors and prop men, years of systematic
alchemical research—the brain had set about creating
an image of itself, with a view toward projecting it into
every corner of This Island Earth. Dutiful technicians
and creative workers carried out their small pieces of
the design, like the laborers on the pyramids. It was as
if the technology of movies had from the beginning
been built at the behest of an inconceivable Overmind
working through human agents. Like the alien
intelligence that oversaw the recreation in giant vats of
its home planet's environment (piece by piece, through
the hypnotically controlled labor of uncomprehending
British villagers) in Enemy from Space. The World-Soul
wanted to watch home-movies. (213-14)
Popular Culture Studies