The post-World War II period in the West is interesting for a number of reasons. One of the changes that was evident in this era was a change in intellectual and academic attention to and response to “popular" culture.
One of the key texts in this changing attitude toward popular culture was Mass Culture: The Popular Arts in America edited by Bernard Rosenberg and David Manning White and published by probably the leading social science publisher of the immediate post-war era, The Free Press. Mass Culture brought together a host of intellectuals and academics interested in popular culture from varying sides of the political, ideological, and cultural spectrum. Some, both on the left and the intellectual as opposed to the populist right, decried and condemned popular culture—films, television, comic books, mass fiction, radio, advertising, and comic books—for its socialisation for mass conformity function and its lowest common denominator content. Others found much to praise in popular culture. Still others found mass culture or masscult a double edged sword, both praising it and damning it alternatively for a variety of reasons.
By the time Mass Culture was published the popular culture revolution was in full swing. Many pop culture critics had already been singing the praises of European cinema from auteurs like Ingmar Bergman and Vittorio de Sica. Soon intellectual film critics associated with the French film journal Cahiers du Cinema and Postiff, the British film journal Movie, and critics like Andrew Sarris and Peter Bogdanovich, waxed poetically about those pantheon auteurs in Hollywood like Alfred Hitchcock, Orson Welles, John Ford, and Howard Hawks who, they argued, had produced personalised art within the belly of the corporate beast, the commercialised and standardised Hollywood studio system.
This increasing intellectual interest in cinema eventually stimulated an increasing interest in film as a critical study and as a practical vocation even within the staid academy where talk of popular culture often cooled the cockles of the high art academic heart. By the 1970s there were even programmes in film at elite American research universities like the University of Iowa, the University of Wisconsin, Indiana University, USC, and UCLA and universities, elite and not, such as Queen’s, York, McGill, and Simon Fraser in Canada. Not surprisingly, the critical study of film as a historical and sociological phenomenon came late to many older elite institutions with strong boundary markers between high culture and popular culture like Toronto, Cambridge, and Oxford.
The revolution or revivification of a host of theoretical approaches such as Marxism, Semiology, Semiotics, Psychoanalysis and a sensitivity to the realities of economic, political, and cultural inequalities like gender and ethnicity (including race) in the post-World War II era and particularly from the mid-1960s on, had an impact on theoretical and methodological approaches to critical film studies in the academy as many of the younger generation and even some of the older turned away from an auteurism they saw as inherently romantic and anti-contextual in the economic, political, cultural, demographic, and geographic sense exchanging it for one or more of the elements above in sometimes shifting syncretistic or hybridic configurations, a movement reflected in Bill Nichols’s two volume edited collection Movies and Methods published by the University of California Press. From an emic point of view many in academic film studies believed that the study of film as a historical, social, and cultural phenomenon had come of theoretical and methodological age and, and in the process, had reached the level of theoretical and methodological sophistication sociology and cultural and social anthropology had and perhaps had even surpassed those disciplines in their level of theoretical and methodological sophistication.
By the 1980s and 1990s another pop culture form was trying to emulate the trajectory of film studies in academe and fighting for recognition from the guardians of higher education, television. Scholars such as Horace Newcomb, Thomas Schatz, John Fiske, John Tulloch, Robert Allen, Robert Thompson, David Marc, Christopher Anderson, Douglas Gomery, Jane Feuer, and others, including the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies at the University of Birmingham, were trying to bring respectability to the critical studies of television in the same way that Gomery, Schatz, Brian Henderson, James Naremore, Andrew Tudor, Peter Wollen, Dudley Andrew, Umberto Eco,Jill Mulvay, David Bordwell, Rick Altman, and others had brought a certain if somewhat tenuous level of respectability to film in the academy.
The study of television has had a more ambiguous and tenuous place in the academy in English, Communication, and Media Studies departments and faculties even than film studies. As with film—there has always been a fanboy and fangirl component to academic critical film studies—the development of interest in television was stimulated by television programmes themselves and particularly cult television series like Star Trek. Critical writers like David Gerrold published a book on the episode he wrote for Star Trek, "The Trouble with Tribbles", in 1974. Horace Newcomb edited the first edition of his critical reader on television, Television: The Critical View in 1976. Jane Feuer and her colleagues published their seminal collection of essays on MTM, Mary Tyler Moore Enterprises, which produced television hits, both popular and critical, like The Mary Tyler Moore Show, Rhoda, Lou Grant, Hill Street Blues, and St. Elsewhere in 1985. The personnel of Mary Tyler Moore Enterprises, by the way, would not only link American television of the 1970s and 1980s to the past, 1960s shows like the highly praised The Dick van Dyke Show and That Girl, but also to the future. Many critically praised shows of the 1990s, like NYPD Blue, Cheers, and The Simpsons were created by alumni of MTM. By 1987 television studies had, with the publication of the first edition of Richard Allen’s edited collection Channels of Discourse, a book in which the smorgasbord of contemporary critical approaches to literature and film had been recapitulated and replicated in television studies, reached, at least from an emic point of view, adulthood. This did not mean, however, that television studies was seen by most in the academy as an adult worthy of inclusion in the humanities or social sciences curriculum.
The 1990s saw an explosion of writings in television studies mostly thanks to a cult show on the WB netlet, Buffy the Vampire Slayer. As I write no show, not even its nearest rival Star Trek, has stimulated the amount of academic attention as has Buffy. One of the first and the first essay on Buffy I read was that of noted cultural and social anthropologist David Graeber, “Rebel Without a God”, published in In These Times in 1998 within a year of when Buffy debuted on the late WB in 1997. More articles and books, now numbering in the several hundreds, academic conferences, and even an online journal on Buffy and Whedon Studies—Joss Whedon created Buffy— Slayage, followed—and can be found at listed at Whedonology: An Academic Whedon Studies Bibliography at the Association for Buffy Studies+, and shows little signs of abating.
In the world of publishing McFarland and Tauris, both independent academic publishers not associated with universities, have led the academic charge in Buffy and Whedon Studies and TV Studies in general. University presses, like Syracuse and Duke, have played a much less prominent role in Buffy Studies suggesting the tenuous position of Buffy and Whedon Studies in the contemporary academy and the attitudes that exist toward the study of television in the academy.
Over the years I have read many of the McFarland and Tauris Whedon Studies books. The latest on my now read list is Jess Battis’s Blood Relations: Chosen Families in Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Angel (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2005). Battis, now at the University of Regina, argues, to use an analogy from cultural anthropology, that chosen families, families of choice, is the key symbol or the key theme, the symbol or theme which all other symbols or themes in the Buffyverse, in the television shows Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Angel (and which are also central in Whedon’s short lived television series Firefly), revolve. According to Battis Buffy herself in Buffy, and Cordelia and Fred, in Angel, function as the chosen matriarchs of the Scooby Gang or Slayerettes and Angel Investigations or the Fang Gang respectively. The chosen father of Buffy is Giles. The chosen fathers of Angel are Angel himself and Wesley. The children of the Buffy chosen family include Willow and Xander and, if of less duration, Cordelia, Willow’s one time significant other, Oz, Xander’s one time significant other, Anya, Tara, Willow’s significant other until her death, and Dawn, Buffy’s made by the monks sister. The adult children of Angel include Gunn, Lorne, and Angel’s blood son Connor, none of whom Battis explores in the detail in which he explores Willow and Xander. Battis finds much to praise in his homiletics about the key symbol of chosen families in both shows, chosen families that reflect, Battis argues, the changing family dynamics of post-World War II America and Canada and which offer a loving and communitarian alternative to the West’s dominant nuclear families, particularly for outsiders, and finds much to condemn in his polemics about the chosen family key theme of the show, namely the absence of non-White ethnics and much in the way of class diversity in the characters of the show.
Though focused at least ostensibly on the symbol or theme of chosen families in the Buffyverse and limitedly in the Whedon verse, Battis’s book jumps around to other issues, including reflexive ruminations on postgraduate life in the staid and conventional university of today. I was left with the feeling that without such padding the book, like so many books in film studies and television studies, would probably have made a better journal article than a monograph.
Beyond this structural issue I had a number of issues with Blood Relations, a book that is in someways Buffy meets sociology, but selective sociology. Like so many of those who engage in crystal ball textualism Battis, while briefly exploring quantitative data on Canadian and US families and far to limited in its utilisation of primary documentary material (mostly interviews of Whedon)—Battis’s analysis is grounded in the sola textura method, an exploration of the text alone, a kind of academic fundamentalist approach to texts. Whether one can discern everything one always wanted to know about a given text, including its economic, political, cultural, demographic, and geographical contexts, is an open question, an open question in which I would answer that it is not possible to do that with any confidence given its lack of evidentiary checks and balances. This, in turn, means that one can compellingly argue that academic textual analysis is actually a form of situated reader response that tells us as much if not more about the reader, including his or her ideological persuasions, than the text itself.
Battis, like so many social and cultural constructionists—who got there before Foucault, by the way, as did social and cultural anthropologists like Franz Boas and Margaret Mead—does not grasp Buffy’s and Angel’s theodicy. Real evil exists in the Buffyverse along with shades of grey. And this is why the Scoobies and the Fang Gang fight not for god, not for country, not for any ethnic group, not for any particular gender, but for humanity. And at the end of Buffy that fight becomes much more democratic than it was under the gaze of the patriarchal and paternalist Watcher’s Council.
Battis does the now time warn cystal ball textualist representational song and dance. He calls for greater ethnic, gender, and class representation in ostensibly middle class texts like Buffy which is well and good but it ignores the “realites” of American television. British and even Canadian television, all of which seem to be more representational in these areas than US TV. The problem I have with these clarion calls is how far do we go in asking for representatonal representation in television shows? How about identity groups like the Amish, Christian fundamentalists, and Southern Baptists? Should they be represented in proportion to their populations on American TV? If so, how? An Amish remake of All in the Family perhaps?
Battis misses some things. For example, Battis comments in a footnote that he has no idea what happened to Willow’s and Tara’s kitten, Miss Kitty Fantastico. Actually, Dawn explains what happened to Miss Kitty in the very last episode of Buffy. Speaking of Dawn, the introduction of Dawn into season five of Buffy adds a blood family dimension to a show emphasising chosen families making it more complicated it in the process, since Dawn, though she may be the key created by the monks to protect her from the hellgod Glory who wants to use her to go home, is literally blood kin to Buffy.
Finally, while Battis makes a compelling case for the importance of chosen families in the work of Joss Whedon and in Buffy and Angel in particular—there are also chosen families of sorts in The Dick van Dyke Show, That Girl, and The Mary Tyler Moore Show—it is not the key symbol that gives meaning to all the secondary symbols that circulate around it in the Buffyverse. The key symbol in Buffy, I would argue, is not chosen families but growing up, an existentialist portrayal of growing up with all its attendant joys and—this is a Whedon show after all—horrors and terrors. It is growing up that gives chosen families meaning in Buffy along with the increasing complexity of evil in the show, the problems associated with addictions, the problems associated with parental issues, and the decision to fight the good fight even if it is likely never to end the conflict once and for all. There is still a hellmouth in Cleveland after all.
A historical note. It is, at my age, quite interesting to read a lot of crystal ball textualism that has been produced since its rise to hegemony after the 1970s. In a lot of what I have read and perused it sometimes seems that the successive young turks associated with crystal ball textualism are constantly reinventing the wheel and seem to have a limited knowledge of the history of social and cultural theory. For example, they often seem unaware that social and cultural constructionism has been around since Wilhelm Dilthey and Max Weber and that some of what Foucault asserts has parallels in earlier social and cultural constructionist literature. They far too often seem unaware of earlier attempts to meld social and cultural analysis with psychoanalysis. Cultural anthropologists, for instance, melded the study of culture, national character, and psychoanalysis back in the 1930s by looking at a host of “texts” including media texts. Cultural anthropologists have also been engaged in something else Battis muses on, whether some identity groups can really understand and grasp other identity groups. Cultural Anthropologists, for example, were reflecting on whether men can, when doing fieldwork, grasp women and whether some ethnics can grasp the “realities” of other ethnics since at least the 1970s, an era which also saw the increasing prominence of reflexive anthropology and reflexive ethnographers such as the authors of essays in Dell Hymes’s edited collection Reinventing Anthropology, James Clifford, Michael Fischer, and George Marcus. Of course, social and cultural anthropologists learned long ago that informants weren’t always generous with the truth, something that led to ethnographers to reflect on the practise of fieldwork and what one learned during fieldwork. As for the notion that humans perform, ethnographer Erving Goffman focused on human performativity practises long before those in English Studies faculties did as did Shakespeare.
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