I am going to get to that reading: also typical of his idealization of non marketizable culture in the essay is his attribution of pure opposition to the commodity in working class British music, third world literature and women’s literature everything but US working class culture that had been fully commodified as rock and roll by a growing music industry. There is something so wrong here but so fascinating. Jaws is the allegorical triumph of technocracy and the PMC but he wasn’t reading Ehrenreich!
RIP Fredric Jameson - or maybe not? The struggle continues ... ?
Inspired by today's post I looked up Jameson's 1979 article, which you kindly shared with us, "Reification and Utopia in Mass Culture". And I skimmed it (🤯).
And was fascinated by the material discussing the film Jaws. He mentions in passing that among the many reviews of the film, that it was reviewed by Pravda - this was a time that there was "still an alternative", even if it wasn't perfect 😂 - and later that year the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan. (I wonder what the situation there would have been like if the Soviet Union hadn't left.)
In the article, a particular engagement with popular culture caught my eye. In a review of Jaws, Jameson highlights the revealing differences between the movie Jaws and the book Jaws. Here is an excerpt:
"Yet the
most dramatic surprise the novel holds in store for viewers of the film will evidently be the discovery that in the book Hooper dies, a virtual suicide and a sacrifice to his somber and
romantic fascination with death in the person of the shark. Now while it is unclear to me
how the American reading public can have responded to the rather alien and exotic
resonance of this element of the fantasy - the *aristocratic obsession with death* would seem
to be a more European motif -- the social overtones of the novel's resolution - the triumph
of the islander and the yankee over the decadent playboy challenger - are surely
unmistakable, as is the systematic elimination and suppression of all such class overtones
from the film itself."
Class conflict is thus suppressed in the realization of the film version of the book. Especially interesting to me is Jameson's comment on "the aristocratic obsession with death" 💀. And it is interesting in part because every year my wife and I (my wife is a high school art teacher) go to see the latest collection of high school students artworks in the local art gallery. There are typically at least a hundred works. And every year I count between 25 and 40% of the artworks deal in some way with death, expressed typically with lots of skulls.
We are in Canada and don't have the same American spirit. Nevertheless I'm pretty sure that decades or generations ago that teenage nihilism would not have been so common. My wife's poor students (literally so) have little class consciousness even while they have a vague class awareness. The school works hard of course to ensure awareness of non class difference. It is heartbreaking what is revealed by so many of the artistic productions of these kids.
I'm really looking forward to learning more about Fredric Jameson.
I am going to get to that reading: also typical of his idealization of non marketizable culture in the essay is his attribution of pure opposition to the commodity in working class British music, third world literature and women’s literature everything but US working class culture that had been fully commodified as rock and roll by a growing music industry. There is something so wrong here but so fascinating. Jaws is the allegorical triumph of technocracy and the PMC but he wasn’t reading Ehrenreich!
RIP Fredric Jameson - or maybe not? The struggle continues ... ?
Inspired by today's post I looked up Jameson's 1979 article, which you kindly shared with us, "Reification and Utopia in Mass Culture". And I skimmed it (🤯).
And was fascinated by the material discussing the film Jaws. He mentions in passing that among the many reviews of the film, that it was reviewed by Pravda - this was a time that there was "still an alternative", even if it wasn't perfect 😂 - and later that year the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan. (I wonder what the situation there would have been like if the Soviet Union hadn't left.)
In the article, a particular engagement with popular culture caught my eye. In a review of Jaws, Jameson highlights the revealing differences between the movie Jaws and the book Jaws. Here is an excerpt:
"Yet the most dramatic surprise the novel holds in store for viewers of the film will evidently be the discovery that in the book Hooper dies, a virtual suicide and a sacrifice to his somber and romantic fascination with death in the person of the shark. Now while it is unclear to me how the American reading public can have responded to the rather alien and exotic resonance of this element of the fantasy - the *aristocratic obsession with death* would seem to be a more European motif -- the social overtones of the novel's resolution - the triumph of the islander and the yankee over the decadent playboy challenger - are surely unmistakable, as is the systematic elimination and suppression of all such class overtones from the film itself."
Class conflict is thus suppressed in the realization of the film version of the book. Especially interesting to me is Jameson's comment on "the aristocratic obsession with death" 💀. And it is interesting in part because every year my wife and I (my wife is a high school art teacher) go to see the latest collection of high school students artworks in the local art gallery. There are typically at least a hundred works. And every year I count between 25 and 40% of the artworks deal in some way with death, expressed typically with lots of skulls.
We are in Canada and don't have the same American spirit. Nevertheless I'm pretty sure that decades or generations ago that teenage nihilism would not have been so common. My wife's poor students (literally so) have little class consciousness even while they have a vague class awareness. The school works hard of course to ensure awareness of non class difference. It is heartbreaking what is revealed by so many of the artistic productions of these kids.
I'm really looking forward to learning more about Fredric Jameson.