Largest Audience

Schmitt !Largest Audience Dale Schmitt East Tennessee State University Largest Audience Paul R. Gorman. Left Intellectuals and Popular Culture in Twentieth-CenturyAmerica. University of North Carolina Press, 1996. (Cloth $39.95, paperback. $15.95) Most of us are familiar with the claims that motion pictures are produced with "nothing but the dollar in sight" and that they are full of"the realism ofbloodshed, crime, and brutality." What might surprise us is that this observation was delivered by a movie industry critic in 1908. Paul Gorman acknowledges that the condemnation of popular entertainment has been a constant in modern American history . His focus, however, is not to rework that chestnut, but rather to deal with what he considers one ofthis century's most fascinating paradoxes. Why did vigorous popular culture criticism come from leftist intellectuals and liberals, those persons we would have expected to be in tune with the common people and optimistic about the future of a democratic society? Gorman explores this subject in Left Intellectuals and Popular Culture by first establishing the historical context. Beginning with the attacks of conservatives at the close of the nineteenth century, he follows the criticism through the progressives, the cultural radicals of the 1920's, the professional social scientists of the interwar period, the communists and leftists of the 1940's and 1950's, and concludes with an in-depth study ofDwight McDonald's theories. Within each of these categories, Gorman delineates new threads ofcriticism and locates sources by relying heavily on the published work ofthe critics themselves, especially articles appearing in various elite journals and reviews. Because ofhis approach, Gorman's book is much more an exercise in intellectual history than a study ofpopular culture. He is particularly effective showing how views ofmass entertainmentsuch as the efforts to regulate dance halls—fit into the larger context of the progressive movement. Often, however, this sort offocus is lacking and Gorman is forced to deal with individual critics without clearly showing their connections to a larger intellectual society. His contention, for instance, that Dwight McDonald was the logical culmination ofearlier leftist critics is not altogether convincing. According to Gorman, the one underlying theme that connected all these critics was their firm beliefin the passive acceptance of"mass entertainment" by the public. Whether it is the progressive view ofa public victimized by a greedy entertainment industry, the communist view ofan unenlightened proletariat, or the sociological beliefin the destruction offolk community by urban mass society, all assumed that the public consumed entertainment but did not produce or influence it. Gorman believes that this situation changed in 1960's when some intellectuals "stopped criticizing and started explaining" popular culture. He also contends, rather convincingly, that criticism ofpopular culture "was shaped more by the social concerns ofintellectuals than by their observations ofentertainments ." Mass entertainment became the scapegoat that intellectuals loaded with all their personal uneasiness about the dramatic and often frightening events going on around them. In particular, Gorman argues that this approach allowed them to maintain their connection with the "people" by assuming an elitist and paternalistic role in culture. It became their duty to save society from exploitation, to lead ordinary people to higher cultural forms, or to transform folk culture into true art. Early on Gorman makes an important distinction. Popular culture, he avers, attracts the largest audiences while mass culture is created specifically for transmission through the mass media. While these are useful definitions, they are meaningful in art and literature where intellectuals at least could make a clear distinction between what was popular and what was "good." In media—such as motion pictures and radio—the differences become much less clear. The movies were particularly threatening—according to the critics—because powerful visual images were easily absorbed by a passive audience and hence likely to provoke unthinking imitation of action. Other than some discussion of communist criticism of Soviet films and an occasional reference to Charlie Chaplin, little is mentioned about motion pictures. Since, during the time period covered, movies were both the most popular and the most "mass" form of entertainment , it would have been enlightening to hear criticisms of the industry. It is intriguing, for instance, to learn that Dwight McDonald...