Roll Over Adorno: Critical Theory, Popular Culture, Audiovisual Media

Introduction: Critical Theory, Popular Culture, Audiovisual Media

1 Introduction Critical Theory, Popular Culture, Audiovisual Media Why is kitsch a so much more profitable export than Rembrandt? —Clement Greenberg, “Avant-Garde and Kitsch” In Masscult (and in its bastard, Midcult), everything becomes a commodity, to be mined for $$$$. —Dwight Macdonald, “Masscult and Midcult” I n “A Theory of Mass Culture,” Dwight Macdonald commences his famous salvo against what for him is sometimes mistakenly called “popular culture” by insisting that its “distinctive mark is that it is solely and directly an article for mass consumption, like chewing gum.”1 Though this sort of complaint is familiar enough, it’s hard to imagine a more patronizing attitude toward popular culture, as if its products were somehow beneath contempt. Still, in retrospect, what’s striking about Macdonald’s essay is the decidedly stark binaries that structure its argument: “A statistically significant part of the population . . . is chronically confronted with a choice between going to the movies or a concert, between reading Tolstoy or a detective story, between looking at old masters or a TV show.”2 The argument of “A Theory of Mass Culture” is based, it is clear, on the logic of mutual exclusion. Indeed, so deeply engrained are the cultural protocols of the day (and Macdonald’s are not so much exceptional as exemplary) that it never occurs to the author that it’s possible to both enjoy and be instructed by both a nineteenth-century Russian novel and a contemporary detective story. Moreover, despite the loaded rhetorical valences associated with the final opposition (Tolstoy “good,” detective fiction “bad”), the differences between these cultural objects or practices are not as self-evident as they may seem—even, it’s important to note, at the time that Macdonald was composing his essay (an earlier version of which was published in Politics in 1944 as “A Theory of Popular Culture”).3 In this political and historical context, consider a passage from Raymond Chandler’s Farewell, My Lovely (1940): They had Rembrandt on the calendar that year, a rather smeary self-portrait due to imperfectly registered color plate. It showed him holding a smeared palette with a dirty thumb and wearing a tam-o’-shanter which wasn’t any too clean either. His other hand held a brush poised in the air, as if he might be going to do a little work after a while, if somebody made a down payment.4 Anybody who is even remotely familiar with Chandler’s work will not be surprised by his invocation of one of the capital Old Masters as a way to ironically comment on his own iconic creation, the private-eye Philip Marlowe (whose surname itself recollects Conrad as well as Shakespeare ’s great contemporary and adversary, Christopher Marlowe). To be fair, when in the very first paragraph of “A Theory of Mass Culture” Macdonald claims that detective fiction is one of the “new media” which the “serious artist” rarely comes into contact with, he is specifically thinking of sensational authors such as Dashiell Hammett and Mickey Spillane or, to employ his own shorthand, not “DupinHolmes ” but Spade-Hammer. The irony is not only that Marlowe is the “vanishing mediator” in the series “Spade-Hammer,” but that very few people who are conversant with detective fiction, as Macdonald appears to be, would compare Hammett to Spillane, whereas many would compare Hammett to Chandler. If it’s surprising that Macdonald never mentions Chandler in his brief survey of detective fiction, subtitled “Sherlock Holmes to Mike Hammer,” it’s even more surprising that the author, who was also a practicing film critic, omits any discussion of film noir. Now, one might argue that noir as a popular film genre predates Macdonald, who is writing in, roughly speaking, the mid-1940s and 1950s, though The Maltese Falcon (directed by the literary-minded John Huston from a novel by Hammett) appeared in 1941 and the genre coalesces, by common consensus , in 1944. The key to this particular mystery lies, I think, in the term itself: film noir. The passing critique of Gide (who, according to Macdonald, “was foolish enough to admire Hammett”5 ) indicates as much. In other words, film noir would have been suspect because it was invented by the French, first by Frank, Chartier, et al. in the early 1940s and later, more definitively by Raymond Borde and Étienne Chaumeton 2 ROLL OVER ADORNO in A Panorama of American Film Noir (1955...