View masters - the debate over effects of pop culture such as TV

Reason, Feb, 1996 by Nick Gillespie

The audience's power over media's message

Sad but true story: When I was in the fourth grade, some well-meaning teachers arranged a special viewing of the movie Charly, which had been released a few years earlier. Based on the novella Flowers for Algernon, the film tells the story of a mildly retarded man named Charly Gordon who, through an experimental surgical procedure, becomes a prodigious intellect. The beneficial effects, however, turn out to be temporary and Charly eventually reverts back to his original level of intelligence - tragically conscious of the enfeebling of his own mind. It's a good story, well told and well acted (Cliff Robertson won an Academy Award for the title role).

Although my teachers had no reason to believe we were a particularly mean-spirited crew to begin with, they figured, I assume, that the movie would inculcate a sense of sympathy so that we would be more sensitive to mentally impaired individuals. We walked away from the theater having learned quite a different lesson, though.

During the film, whenever Charly's co-workers (who are a mean-spirited crew) make a mistake, they inevitably quip, "I pulled a Charly Gordon." The day after we saw the movie, a student knocked over a display in the back of a classroom and, as the teacher began to upbraid him, he turned his palms outward and shrugged. "I pulled a Charly Gordon," he explained as the class erupted into laughter. By the end of the day, the phrase had become a ubiquitous defense for any and all manner of goof-up, mistake, or academic error. And for weeks after, kids - boys and girls, teachers' pets and class cut-ups - hurled the epithet Charly Gordon as an all-purpose invective. Every time the teachers heard the phrase, you could see them grit their teeth and shake their heads - they had no one to blame but themselves.

Besides the self-evident truth that children like to disappoint their elders, there's a larger point to this story, one that bears on the recent and seemingly endless attempts to police popular culture: The audience has a mind of its own. Individuals sitting in a theater, or watching television, or listening to a CD don't always see and hear things the way they're "supposed" to.

Consider TV, for instance. "People talk at it, through it, and around it," observes Constance Penley, a professor of film and women's studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara, who has extensively studied "fan" communities. The one thing they don't do is merely absorb it, notes Penley, one of a growing number of scholars who stress the audience's role in constructing meaning and value in popular culture. Such media analysts say that consumers of popular culture are not that different from consumers of, say, food and clothing - that is, they are engaged, knowledgeable, discriminating, and self-interested.

That would be news to most participants in the public debate over depictions of sex and violence in movies, TV, and music. Liberals and conservatives are as tight as Beavis and Butt-head in agreeing that consumers of popular culture - the very people who make it popular - are little more than tools of the trade. Joe Sixpack and Sally Baglunch - you and I - aren't characters in this script. Just like TV sets or radios, we are dumb receivers that simply transmit whatever is broadcast to us. We do not look at movie screens; we are movie screens, and Hollywood merely projects morality - good, bad, or indifferent - onto us.

"We have reached the point where our popular culture threatens to undermine our character as a nation," Bob Dole thundered last summer in denouncing "nightmares of depravity" and calling for movies that promote "family values." "Bob Dole is a dope," responded actor-director Rob Reiner, a self-described liberal activist. Fair enough, but it apparently takes one to know one: "Hollywood should not be making exploitive violent and exploitive sex films. I think we have a responsibility [to viewers] not to poison their souls," continued Reiner, who rose to prominence playing the role of Meathead on All in the Family.

Token antagonism, then, belies fundamental agreement: Pop culture can undermine (or, implicitly, ennoble) our character; movies can poison (or save) our souls. There is no sense that the ticket-buying public might have a say in the matter, that we might be responsible for our own damnation. Indeed, one of the most striking characteristics of the continuing public discussion regarding popular culture is the eerie sense of solidarity between feuding politicians and players. Scratch the surface and everyone from Bill Clinton to Charlton Heston, Newt Gingrich to Chevy Chase, Janet Reno to Sally Field, agrees: Movies, music, and TV should be the moral equivalent of a high colonic, Sunday school every damn day of the week.

This isn't to suggest that popular culture has no effect on how we think, feel, or act, that we exist somehow forever and apart from what we watch and listen to. But the interplay between pop and its audience is far more complicated than most of its critics acknowledge. It's not just that people such as Bob Dole, who admitted that he hadn't even seen the movies he criticized, and William Bennett, who has most recently lambasted daytime talk shows, don't have a solid working knowledge of popular culture. Even more important, they don't understand the experience of interacting with pop culture, of how individuals react, respond, and revise what they see and hear.