Dogs And Cats Living Together! Mass Hysteria!

By Isaac Butler

 

Tom Loughlin thinks the sky is falling.  He also apparently thinks that the protests in Wisconsin have already failed, even though polls show that a majority of Americans oppose Scott Walker's attempt to Union Bust Wisconsin now and several Republican governors are trying to shelve their attempts at union busting in light of the protests, including most prominently Mitch Daniels in Indiana.

But that's not what gets me about Tom's post.  It's his contention that unlike India (?) we have no culture in America because everything's too corporate and because our theatre has lost touch with "the average people of this country" (unlike Shakespeare and Moliere).

There's a lot that... weird about this. First off, Shakepseare's company was the Early Modern equivalent of a for profit corporation, so it's odd that his work is part of the antidote to the corporate mindset. Also, Moliere was the kind of man of the people who was godfather to two of the children of the reigning French monarch. which is how it happened that major rules of the day were bent for him, allowing his corpse to be buried in consecrated ground despite his earlier excommunication. Also, I'm unclear as to what an "average person" is or what's meant by that. 

But, whatever... posts that heavily quote Network aren't generally going to have a lot of nuance (although I love that movie!).  The real problem is the contention that America has "no culture to speak of in this country, and we have never bothered to create one."

 This idea strikes me as, well, deeply wrong. We may not have created one culture in America, but that doesn't bother me very much. After all, they don't have one culture in India either. It's not all Saag Paneer and Bollywood, ya know? What we have is a vibrant variety of different cultures sharing space and influencing each other along with a mass media cultural output sector that is... you know... the dominant creator and distributor of culture in the world.

To give just a couple of examples... I know that Tom cares greatly about local cultures creating work for the people in those areas, and it's an idea I support.  Now that I've moved to Minneapolis, one thing that I have noticed here is that there's an entire poetic and literary tradition dedicated to the concerns of the midwest, to working class people and farmers and every day life.Very little of this manifests itself in theatre, but it does manifest itself all over the place in literature (which, last time I checked, is part of culture) some put out by nonprofit publishing houses (as many of the major non-profit publishers are based in the midwest) some by for profit publishing houses.  The midwest literary culture is one of many micro cultures that contributes overall to this big umbrella we call American Culture.

Similarly, urban African American culture has been one of the dominant cultural forces in the world for the better part of a century.  This is rather remarkable when you consider how few people in the world are actually African Americans living in american cities. Ditto ze Jews, who amongst other things basically gave us 20th Century American Theater, helping to invent the musical, writing many of the major plays of the last century, and bringing method acting to the states. 

It troubles me that theatre isn't more a part of our mass culture. And it troubles me that so much of the culture is mediated by large corporations. In that, Tom and I have similar worries.  But the idea that we've already lost, that the world is over, that we make nothing good or meaningful as a culture anymore (and furthermore, maybe we never did) is just hooey.  That we also don't have an agreed upon monoculture in this country is to me our great strength. 

Lastly, I'll just point out that the film Network (one of my favorites) which Tom quotes regularly throughout the post and serves as a kind of rallying cry for his apocalyptic pessimism was distributed by MGM in partnership with its parent company United Artists, which was itself owned by the Transamerica Corporation, an insurance holding company. 

Comments

[Son Ray]

Just a quick personal response to 'theatre has lost touch with "the average people of this country"...'

My wife and I went to some theater recently. It was produced by a local company that felt it was important to say in their program that the group had been founded in reaction to "the deliberately and off-putting avant-garde and weird for weird's sake nature" of the work that they'd found in the city. They went on to say that they were committed to doing work that "the average person can enjoy."

My wife's first reaction was, I feel so average.

[Adam]

Thank you for this Mr. Butler. That post from Tom struck me as all types of wrong but I couldn't express why.

[I can't give my name]

Isaac,
I get what you're saying about the specifics of Tom's post, and I agree, but overall, I think Tom's message (even thought it's not that well articulated), hits on something we all agree with: too much corporate, not enough state and federal.
I, like tom, am also horrified that Rocco Landesman is chairman of the NEA. I've worked on the producing side of commercial theatre. I've been the bitch to Rocco's cronies. If you don't quite know the mentality of the circle of commercial Broadway producers Landesman comes from, let me tell you: When I interned at _____, one of Landesman's co-producers offices (a place partially run by ____ brother of ____ at ___, a major Broadway producer), the musicians' union, Local 802 went on strike. The argument was over a term regarding number of musicians per theatre--the number of musicians required is determined by the size of the theatre, not the show. Now, obviously, I can see a producer's side: Why should we have to pay for musicians we're not going to use? But, the contract had a term for negotiating the number of musicians (who each, by the way, only make around $1300 per week) in special circumstances. Plenty of shows met these circumstances. Nevertheless, the producers wanted to do away with the musician number requirement. So, they asked me, an intern they paid $200 a 40-hour week, to hand out, for $10/hour, anti-union fliers at the picket lines. I was the only intern who refused.
Landesman comes from the circle of producers who say they prefer commercial over non-profit because "it's more honest." It's not more honest if you ever looked through their files, as I did--I can't tell you what I found--at least not on a blog. This is the same circle from which one producer said on the down-low, "We were once the kings of Off-Broadway, now we're the princes of mindless entertainment." These are the folks who put their money into finding who has the money for a $100-ticket, and then once they've found them, marketing, marketing, marketing. If the focus group of upper middle class people from Westchester, Connecticut, and Long Island doesn't like the show, well, then forget artistic integrity, we'll change it.
So, Tom has a real point. Yes, a lot of the specifics and the references to "Network" are not quite fleshed out and kind of silly, but the main idea is extremely important. Let's not attack him for not being the greatest writer of persuasive essays.