Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, March 17, 1991 TAG: 9103190385
SECTION: EDITORIAL PAGE: B-3 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: By MARSHALL FISHWICK
DATELINE: LENGTH: Long
The Japanese have given these popular products a name - omizu shobai - the water business. Water ebbs and flows and can never be held in your hands. Having invested $12 billion in American entertainment companies since 1987, Japan seems to like our water.
Just what is this "popular culture"? The two words, taken singly or jointly, stretch like rubber bands. There are 21 dictionary "definitions" of the verb "pop" - to say nothing of the noun, adjective, abbreviations and link words (popcorn, popeyed, popgun, etc.). This much is clear: "pop" is an unflinching look at the real world; a fascination with our mechanized modernized electrified environment; a mirror held up to life, full of motion and madness. It is where and what we are.
Popular culture describes events and products that appeal to and express the tastes of the majority; the Roman vox populi - voice of the people. That voice is not easy to understand, measure, please or influence. No one knows just what makes a TV series, movie or play a hit, or a book a best seller, at home or abroad. Perception comes after the fact.
For popularity, there is no precise definition. Like the air, it's just there. Take a deep breath. Soon it will be gone with the wind.
Popular culture deals with "time out" and "time off." It centers around entertainment, leisure, loafing . . . watching sports and sitcoms; selecting a soap, soap opera or video; going to a movie, rock concert, political rally or theme park; playing cards, Nintendo or dress-up. Enjoying life.
It draws from ancient and elite insights. Batman's feats stretch back to Beowulf; Madonna tempts us as Circe once tempted the Argonauts. Film gets many of its best plots from the stage, and jazz echoes primordial rhythms. Musical comedies have one ear tuned to the opera, comic-strip artists adapt early cave paintings and medieval illuminations.
Today's global culture tends to be more visual than verbal. The mind is not so much a debating society as a picture gallery. Television is more than a medium - it's a culture. Films are reel illusion. We see the great globe itself as did our astronauts from the moon.
Young people don't want to die for communism, capitalism or any other ism. They want to be tuned in - and all over the world, that tune tends to be American. The world alters as we walk on it. Old boundaries disappear in the Age of Satellites. The most valid description of our planet is "international." Nothing is too old, too new or too obscure to attract us. All history is part of the usable past; all the world's a stage and TV cameras cover it. Walls between nations and disciplines, like the Berlin Wall, crumble. Style supersedes ideology. People in socialist countries line up for hours to buy Levis or a Big Mac. Coca-Cola earns more money in Japan than it does in the United States.
What is being born, before our very eyes, is a one-world op-tech civilization.
Think how this will affect China, with its billion people; or 190 million Indonesians, half under the age of 20. See what it has already done to Japan, where 750 McDonald's are crowded day and night, turning out "Teriyake McBurgers." Visit the Tokyo Disneyland, if you're lucky enough to get a reservation. Less than eight years old, this shrine to Mickey and Minnie recently welcomed its 100 millionth visitor.
Or fly halfway round the world and watch them build new highways and commuter-train lines to the French Disneyland. It will open in 1992 at a 5,000-acre park just east of Paris. The $4 billion investment will create 35,000 new jobs, and who can guess how much revenue? One thing we do know is what those visitors will see: daily gunfights at the Hotel Cheyenne and a skating rink (modeled on the one at Rockefeller Center) called Hotel New York.
Much of the world (especially the French) may not approve of our cuisine or foreign policy. But who can resist Mickey, Madonna, Ronald McDonald or Star Wars? Who can deny our uninhibited sense of fun, our ability to make magic?
"American movies are the only ones that are really international," admits Japan's Keiji Matsushima. "Americans know how to entertain people. French, British and Japanese filmmakers are too intoxicated with themselves."
The worldwide success of Pepsi and Coke have become legendary. Why do people buy not only Coke - but Coke sweaters, shoes and handbags? "They're buying the good things in life," suggests Coke's CEO, Roberto Goizueta. "We say it's the American way, but not really. It's everybody's way."
Figures confirm it. Since 1985 Hollywood's overseas revenue has doubled. America's music business makes 70 percent of its income abroad. Almost everybody everywhere watches "Dallas" and Cosby. The most popular film of all time in Israel and Sweden is "Pretty Woman." Pretty good.
Popular culture is and will always be controversial and subversive. Often it is brash, childish, faddish. American society remains, in theory and in fact, a wilderness shared. Our world is pluralistic, revolutionary, abrasive. It will seek and find new means of expression, in which media not only expresses but compresses. Popular culture has perfected the sound bite, which does in seconds what once took hours or days.
Yet "sound bite" is only our name for the quip, epigram, retort. The Greeks were masters of it. So were Ovid, Rochefoucauld, Pascal, Pope, Shaw and, in living memory, Churchill and Kennedy. But whereas they had relatively few readers or listeners, we have millions of simultaneous viewers. This huge power is not yet understood, let alone mastered. Electrified, computerized, televised, tantalized - what lies ahead as we end a millennium? No one can say. But we must meet all change and challenges with open hearts and open minds. That, ultimately, is our power and our glory.
by CNB