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Introduction Popular Culture and Spontaneous Order, or, How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Tube A film may have its own unity, with its relationships coherent and its balance precise. But that the ultimate unity can be entirely foreseen is a dubious proposition: the distance between conception and delivery is so great, and the path between them so tortuous and unpredictable. . . . A film . . . cannot be made in the mind and then transferred to celluloid precisely as conceived. One of the prime requirements for a film-maker is flexibility to improvise, and to adjust his conceptions to the ideas and abilities of his co-workers, to the pressures of circumstance, and the concrete nature of the objects photographed. —V. F. Perkins, Film as Film In studying popular culture, especially when working on my book Gilligan Unbound, I quickly ran into hermeneutical difficulties. I wanted to discuss television shows as works of art, to demonstrate how they present a meaningful view of the world in a skillful and sometimes even masterful manner. I was interested in how a sequence of television shows expressed changes in the way Americans perceived their place in the world and, more specifically, the way their attitudes toward globalization evolved. This project involved making statements such as: “The Simpsons portrays the national government negatively and celebrates a turn to the local and the global” or “The X-Files suggests that modern technology is at war with the power of the state.” In short, like many of my colleagues, I surreptitiously imputed intentionality to something inanimate and truly unconscious—a television series. One could claim that in such circumstances saying “The Simpsons” is simply shorthand for saying “the team that created The Simpsons,” but I suspect that something more is at work here, an attempt to evade the difficult questions about intentionality and artistic purpose that analyzing a television show raises. 1 2 The Invisible Hand in Popular Culture “Sailing to Byzantium” versus The X-Files Our basic model of aesthetic intentionality in literature is the lyric poem. When William Butler Yeats sat down to write “Sailing to Byzantium,” we like to think that he was free to shape the poem any way he chose. Thus, we want to say that the resulting poem was wholly the product of Yeats’s intentions and his alone, and that means that every word in the poem is aesthetically meaningful.1 One can therefore legitimately worry over the most minor details in a poem like “Sailing to Byzantium” and make something of the fact that Yeats chose to use one particular word rather than another. But is this kind of close reading appropriate for television shows, since they are not produced the way lyric poems are? No television show is created by a single author. Scripts are typically the product of a team of writers, and even the list of people officially credited with writing a given script does not include all those who had a hand in it. Writing for television resembles committee work rather than what we normally think of as artistic activity. Scripts generally involve compromises and may end up embodying different conceptions of the work in question, sometimes even contradictory ones. Moreover, a script is only the rough blueprint for a television show. In the process of actually shooting the show, the director, and sometimes even cast members, modify the script, perhaps because it has led to problems in production or simply because on the spur of the moment they think that they can improve it. Even after it has been shot, a show has not taken its final form. Network executives, censors, and potential sponsors may well demand further changes before it can be aired. The result of the complicated production process of a television show is that the work that finally reaches the screen will never correspond exactly to the idea of the person who first conceived it and will often be quite remote from the initial conception. It thus becomes problematic to speak of intentionality in the case of television shows because it is difficult to identify whose intentions one is talking about. Moreover, given the nature of the television industry, an element of contingency is inevitably introduced into the final product. As an interpreter one might, for example, try to make something of the darkening of the light in a particular scene and claim that it was intended to achieve a darkening of mood. But if one asked the producer about this...

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