Progressive Politics and American Dreams

Lary May. The Big Tomorrow: Hollywood and the Politics of the American Way. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000. xv + 348 pp. Illustrations, appendices, notes, film index, and subject index. $30.00.

Given the prevailing winds of contemporary scholarship, it was only a matter of time before a book like The Big Tomorrow, Lary May's fascinating yet flawed account of the movie industry during the heyday of the studio system, appeared on the horizon. For nearly thirty years scholars from a variety of disciplines have steadily undermined the dismissive view of popular culture that has dominated the academy and elite and middle-class opinion since the late nineteenth century. This campaign has been quite successful, inspiring academics to look anew at historical artifacts previous generations had scorned. Through journalism and middlebrow criticism, it has also contributed to important changes in the culture at large, encouraging much of the educated public to reject genteel canons of taste that have long been central to the worldview of the well-to-do. May's book marks the culmination of these trends, a final offensive that seeks nothing less than a complete rout of the enemy.

To appreciate May's audacity, one must see his work alongside that of other scholars in the field. Revisionist studies of popular culture have emerged from several disciplines, and the best work has been unabashedly interdisciplinary, borrowing methods and assumptions from cultural anthropology, sociology, literary criticism, and social history. On the whole, this new scholarship has focused on three areas of inquiry.

The first is the production of popular culture, a field dominated by sociologists that has revealed the widely disparate imperatives that influence producers of popular culture. The findings of these scholars have compelled us to reject the notion that the popular culture industries are monolithic institutions in which individual agency is sacrificed at the altar of the bottom line. Ironically, over the past century, devotion to the bottom line has often led producers into new terrain, inducing them to make ribald motion picture comedies, finance hard-hitting television documentaries, and distribute scabrous gangster rap. The second area of inquiry, inspired by work in anthropology and especially literary criticism, is the study of popular culture texts--everything from tabloid newspapers and Wild West shows to Hollywood movies, swing music, and television sitcoms. Work in this field has led us to revise the conventional wisdom about the content and ideological functions of popular culture. Rather than seeing it as a modern-day opiate of the masses that encourages escapism or promotes values conducive to capitalist cultural hegemony, scholars now stress the complexities and ambiguities of popular culture texts, which make it possible for some of them to serve counter-hegemonic ends. This conclusion has been affirmed by studies of popular culture audiences, the third and perhaps most important line of inquiry that has fueled the revisionist assault of the past two decades. The conventional view, espoused by Arnoldian conservatives as well as Frankfurt School-inspired leftists, held that popular culture rendered audiences passive and malleable. Fed a steady diet of movies, music, and television programs, individual consumers were transformed into dupes who eagerly embraced whatever messages producers chose to impart to them. Studies of audiences, however, have fatally undermined the conventional view, revealing consumers to be active, knowing, and resistant, capable of using popular culture for their own purposes. ¹

Historians have been particularly attracted to the new work on audiences, and some of the best social history of the past two decades--from Roy Rosenzweig's account of working-class leisure in turn-of-the-century Worcester, Massachusetts, to Pete Daniel's recent book on the emergence of interracial subcultures in the postwar South--acknowledges the importance of popular culture in helping specific groups and communities forge collective identities and pursue political aims. But the other lines of inquiry have their devotees as well, especially among cultural historians and scholars working in American studies...