Critique Of Popular Culture example essay topic

In our time, we use the term 'popular'. It means that basically known by amount of people. Immediate products are the product of the popular culture that we have and we are in without realizing. Unlike popular culture, there is a high culture, which is defined, social, educated and thoughtful. The product of popular culture is not thoughtful and original. It is not individual expression and so on.

Popular culture has commercial function. Originality is risky because it has to be understood easily to be sold to the mass. There is no worry about if popular culture should give message to people or not. It doesn't care this it just entertains people. Hollywood cinema, pop music, fictions, sit-coms and many others can be counted as product of popular culture.

Matrix is one of the popular culture's products. To sum up in the film, Keanu Reeves plays Tom Anderson, a computer programmer by day, and a computer hacker by night (his nickname is Neo). Towards the opening of the film, Neo is contacted by a strange woman named Trinity (Carrie-Anne Moss). He enters in the adventure to discover The Matrix.

It is about conflict between reality and virtual, imaginary. If we turn back the popular culture, today, cultural production is more widespread. Many people are engaged by cultural texts. Culture starts to belong everybody.

Emergence of new forms of culture and new means of distribution lead a popular culture criticism. There are two different critiques. The first one is conservative critique of popular culture and the other is leftist / liberal critique. For conservatives, there is a natural order in society and the order is good. Elite is monopoly over culture. Popular culture diminishes elite's priority.

So there is a critique of popular culture. The loss of control over masses is their argument. Elites are not the leaders anymore in terms of art. By those things there is a loss of tradition. Popular culture may violate the traditional ways. Conservatives think that there is a natural order in society, which is good and in the film we see this order is broken. Q. D Leavis claims that popular art and high art are both art but she asks the reason of presence of art.

She thinks that art helps us find our way through the world understand our lives. However in Matrix, we are like the male protagonist because we don't know (audience) what matrix is and we don't know what is true or not and what is going to happen. Q. D Leavis thinks that popular culture can't be art. It cannot do what art is supposed to do. She is a critique of popular culture because it is being consumed instead art. When Matrix was shown in 1999, there was very much advertising and promoting of it.

As if it was very original and different. Actually it has good effects and also in Hollywood market, it was a kind of initial film in terms of effects and technology. However it got consumed and its popularity finished. No it is not because the second Matrix is coming soon to remind itself with almost same plot and pattern with previous one. Q. D Leavis talks about difference between fiction and the serious books. Fiction which is kind of 'clear entertainment', includes setting which is not real.

It is not art book it is read by lowbrow public. On the other hand she calls elites / high culture as a minority. Minorities read literature, serious novels and art book. Those books mention about real things. They show people the real to help their lives. She says: " The best that the novel can do, it may suggested, is not to offer a refuge from actual life but to help the reader to deal less inadequately with it; the novel can deepen, extend and refine experience by allowing the reader to live at the expense of an unusually intelligent and sensitive mind, by giving him access to finer code than his own".

(Leavis, 38) She means that novels are not be from far from actual life and should help reader to understand life. She also means this in terms of art. Popular products give us temporary pleasures continuously. Popular narrative doesn't give us real. It only gives us illusionary. There is nothing for life.

It confuses us also. Matrix narrative seems to have totally different narrative because it is fantastic film. You are looking for the reality with protagonist, Neo in simulation environment. You can't understand which one is real. People are fighting and going to real environment by computer. Then you see that it is not the real place.

It is obscure. There are just codes and symbols. Everything makes audience confuse but audience satisfy only when they identify themselves with Neo. The narrative of Matrix doesn't help us to make a social atmosphere. Furthermore, the other critique of popular culture is leftist / liberal. Adorno is one of them He claims that popular culture is not artistic production.

Popular culture is designed for use not for enlightenment. It is not art. It is a commodity. It is an ideology. Popular culture passes the social ideology dominant culture.

Unlike Leavis, leftists think that people actually don't want that but that's all they have to choose. I conceive that this can be related with Althusser's " Ideology and Ideological Apparatuses"; he talks about 'the base-superstructure' model the base refers to economical state. Superstructure refers to all other most of relations such as education, religion and family etc. He claims that ideology is taught us by these states like the system, life and society etc.

In terms of ideological film analysis, Hollywood cinema is a part of ideological apparatus because American culture educates all of us individually by cinema. Therefore it is easy to reach people to teach the system by films. In addition, Adorno talks about mass culture in relation to the "human". One of the reason that, mass culture is not art, the art is human. According to him, art is wholly human product. Mass culture is only industrial production.

The other reason that, mass culture is not art because it doesn't leave any room for human response. Those aspects get us to the question of "standardization". According to Adorno, standardization is not what you have, when you have art. But the whole points of mass culture become standardized. While Leavis is talking about serious novel and fictions, Adorno talks about popular music and serious music. Although Matrix seems to be original and interesting movie, actually it is not it is standardized; it has similar patterns with some other genres.

For example, simply, the strategy of fight is same with Kung-Fu movies, or the metro scene, while Neo is face to face with spy, as if they do duel like in western genres. All things are in the other side; the story is a kind of contemporary "Alice in Wonderland". Instead of eating mushrooms, he is getting red pill, before this on pc it is written, "follow the white rabbit" so where is the originality. Or the scene that he is connected to the computer and his life functions stops and Trinity can't endure this and kisses him and says he can't die because she loves him.

And suddenly he comes back. It is based on the fairy tale like Sleeping Beauty or Princess with seven dwarfs etc. Even after this film, a lot of the product of popular culture is produced similar with it in terms of narrative and techniques. Adorno says in the article of "On Popular Music": .".. In the introduction of the first movement of Beethoven's Seventh Symphony the second theme (in C-major) gets its true meaning only from the context. Only through the whole does it acquire its particular lyrical and expressive quality- tat is a whole built up of its very contrast with the cantus firm us like character of first theme.

Taken in isolation the second theme would be disrobed to insignificance. Nothing corresponding to this can happen in popular music. It wouldn't affect the musical sense if any detail were take out of the context... ". (Adorno, 60). Thus, popular music has many patterns, which are similar with each other, when you get some details out from it, nothing changes but it is opposite for serious music.

It is standardization. For example in Matrix, when we get the scene of kissing or one or two fighting scene out from the movie, what would it be change? Nothing, because it consists of repetition and familiar patterns which are used in other product.

Bibliography

Ashley, Bob (1997) Reading popular Narrative Source book, London: Leicester University Press.