Why Culture Matters

Tikkun Magazine, January/February 2007

REVIEW

By Charlie Bertsch

Pretend We're Dead: Capitalist Monsters in American Pop Culture, by Annalee Newitz. Duke University Press, 2006.

Academic Scholar-ship on popular culture starts by confronting a paradox. In trying to take seriously books, films, and records that weren't intended to be taken that seriously—at least from an intellectual standpoint—scholars risk having their own work trivialized. Nobody who writes about Shakespeare, Hitler's rise to power, or the matriarchal structure of a small South American tribe has to justify their research topic to their colleagues. But if you want to write about the role of Shakespeare on the Star Trek: Next Generation holodeck, Darth Sidious's rise to power in the Star Wars series, or the gender politics of Xena: Warrior Princess, you are bound to encounter befuddlement, if not outright mockery. This is why those in the academy who study popular culture tend to protest the importance of their work a little too vociferously, and also why some of the people who do it best end up pursuing other career opportunities.

Annalee Newitz, who writes a popular syndicated column on technology and contributes regularly to magazines like Wired, falls into the latter category. As she explains in the acknowledgements to Pretend We're Dead, the book began as a dissertation project. That it ended somewhere else was clearly a boon for her prose. After beginning the book with a brief discussion of the film The Sixth Sense, in which she describes the dead, whom the young character Cole sees as, "spirits who cannot rest until they get some kind of closure on their lives," she turns to the Blair Witch Project:

    Of course, some ghosts could give a crap about closure. Certainly
  this is the case with the bloodthirsty sprits who haunt the remote
  Maryland woods in Blair Witch. When a bunch of art students decide to
  slum it around the countryside to get footage for a sarcasm-laced film
  they're making about the legend of these spirits, they discover what
  documentary filmmakers have known for almost a century: the natives
  don't appreciate their condescending attitude.

This is writing that, like those pissed-off Maryland ghosts, hits its point with the force of a hammer. But that doesn't make the point any less sophisticated than it would have looked buried in a half-page sentence full of abstract terminology.

Although Pretend We're Dead is clearly the product of someone who has thought long and hard about her topic, it is also refreshingly free of the secondary and tertiary references that make most university press books of this kind a tough read. If Newitz mentions something, she does so because it matters for her argument, not because she is trying to pay her scholarly dues. Her discussion of Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer's Dialectic of Enlightenment provides an excellent example. After compactly summarizing their critique of the culture industry, she deftly traces its influence on the work of less subtle thinkers, citing the "media effects" studies that began in the 1960s:

    One might compare this historical transformation to the way a
  bastardized version of Freudian psychoanalysis reached a broad
  audience through pop psychology and Hitch-cockian cinema. Certainly
  Adorno and Horkheimer never became household names like Freud did, but
  their ideas have held sway over subsequent generations of media
  producers and critics.

What makes the many passages like this one in Pretend We're Dead so helpful is that Newitz is just as interested in "bastardized" versions of ideas as she is in the original source. Her entire argument about the ways in which the effects of capitalism are manifested in horror films—"contained, figured, talked around, repressed"—hinges on this idea of bastardization. It doesn't matter whether a film like Logan's Run provides a coherent critique of the culture industry. The important thing is to recognize its affinities with both Adorno and Horkheimer's actual argument and its "watered-down" offspring in media effects studies. Logan's Run, she writes, "is actually about audiences zombified by computers rather than movies. I would argue that the omnipresent, authoritarian computers in Logan's Run are precisely the kind of mass culture victims Adorno and Horkheimer feared." That's a strong claim, to be sure, but one that illuminates both the film and the critique that animates it more clearly than writing that is less sure of its own strength. Like the work of Slovenian theorist Slavoj Zizek, which it sometime resembles, Pretend We're Dead is a book that conveys rich insights about our society through inventive examination of specific films. And it's fun to read as well, whether you could give a crap about horror movies or not.

Charlie Bertsch is Tikkun's music editor. He teaches at the University of Arizona.

Source Citation

Bertsch, Charlie. 2007. Why Culture Matters [Review of the book Pretend We're Dead: Capitalist monsters in American Pop Culture] Tikkun 22(1): 72.