I actually watched Peter Weir's latest effort, "Master and Commander" last night; that is an event in myself, as I only normally lurk in cinemas to watch Lord of the Rings movies.

I don't get this passage:
"I'm uneasy with our national cinema. The Australian film industry is often too localized and provincal (eg., Strictly Ballroom and Priscilla) and it is too keen and willing to play a dumb uncultured Australia vis-a-vis the cosmopolitan UK or the US. I'm deeply disturbed by this aspect of our film culture and its failure to engage with our mediascape."

I thought you was all for our film industry, as it was the only way it could 'tell our national story'.

I think our film industry is okay. I enjoyed movies like "The Dish" and "The Castle", precisely because they were unashamedly Australian, and not worried about the opinions of others.

Scott,
look at this

I enjoyed Truman a hell of a lot, though the ending has never convinced me. Truman, the character, is evidently meant to be the media phenomenon of the age and seems to be almost the only thing on TV for people to watch. The audience have invested an awful lot of their time, attention and emotions in Truman... so why are they so enthusiastic about his breaking out of the show at the end? What else is there for them to watch now that Truman has rather ungratefully removed himself from the show and spurned all that attention and emotion? Really, the film should've ended in confusion and anger, not this show of joy...

Gary. I looked at it. Mark Freeman at least seems to recognise the dilemma. Do you want a very small, provincial film industry, or do you want something that has a voice in the international market?

It doesn't matter to me, of course, but it is a dilemma that film buffs like James would have to give thought to.

Gary, long comment ahead!

sometimes you seem to be a great defender of the ordinary, the everyday (and especially the local) - but then every so often I am puzzled by these rants against the cultural forms many "ordinary" people make part of their everyday lives - Hollywood cinema, for example. This seems to me to be contradictory.

I'm wondering if you could explain exactly what the "lowest" in the cliche "lowest common denominator" refers to? What is the value hierarchy at work that you find wanting? What worries me as that this kind of statement resonates powerfully with Frankfurt school rhetoric against "mass culture" - from which position it is only a short glance sidewise to actually ranting against "the masses" themselves. John Carey's "The Intellectuals and the Masses" is a great cultural history of this kind of thing.

secondly, I totally get the idea of organic or authentic expressions of Australian culture (however impossible it is to define Australian-ness, but we'll leave that for another day) as against Hollywood style, but where exactly does the anger you express come from? I'd really love it if you'd unpack some of these things a bit more for me.

"sideways", of course, not "sidewise" - which is a cool, if non-existent word.

That's not a long comment. You've never met Jack Strochhi I take it.

Jean,

My roots are in the Frankfurt School's Dialectic of Enlightenment. I lost my baby philosophical teeth on that book.It is a powerful text that cannot be ignored.

Most of the cultural studies rejection of that text has been based on its elitism, a valorisation of mass culture, and avoiding the philosophical core: the relationship of culture to the historical process of enlightenment.

A core thesis of the book, that the mass cultural forms are produced by the culture industry, is right; as is their claim that some of the content of these forms is junk; as is their connection of culture to the process of enlightenment.

The lowest in the "lowest common dominator" refers to the lies in the advertisment form that breaks up programs; plus the 10th rerun of a violent action movie in which American hero save the world again with everything being blown up around him.

I don't accept that this is in the tradition of high culture intellectuals rubbishing the masses:

----I did say that The Truman Show indicated critical reflection by Hollywood on its own practices and those of the media.

----Making aesthetic judgments about a cultural product of the culture industry is different from both the aesthetic experience of the audience and their taste.

Re Australian culture.There is such a thing and it needs to be defended in a globalized world. That does not mean accepting the Herder tradition of the 1890s of a unified whole. We can talk about unity-in-diversity as opposed to a collection of fragments or diferences.

"Making aesthetic judgments about a cultural product of the culture industry is different from both the aesthetic experience of the audience and their taste." I think we'll have to agree to disagree on that one. This is the thing cultural studies cannot forgive Adorno for, despite some very real sympathies between the two camps (Douglas Kellner in particular sees no problem with a remarriage!).

My question about the "lowest common denominator" stems from the fact that such a term is absolutely loaded with cultural baggage - the metaphor of the vertical plane is such an immensely powerful one, and is very frequently used to refer to human beings as much as texts.

These commonsense expressions are interesting to me precisely because they are so naturalised. I don't think you've really answered my question about it yet - ads are "lowest" because...? Formulaic action adventure films are "lowest" because...? Please don't get me wrong, I'm not championing these cultural forms on the basis of their value, I'm just interesting in getting you to pin down what value systems (ethical? political? aesthetic?) are at work, and why you think they are important. If you want to, that is...

Jean,
I do not really understand the ongoing animus between Adonro and cultural studies. Both come out of romantic the culture and society tradition---the English version a la Raymond Williams for cultural studies.

You cannot forgive Adorno????? Note the religious language.

We can talk about the production of a cultural product, its form and content, and the reception of that product by the audience.

Adorno was weak on the reception bit, and he conflated reception with form and content. Understandable, since he was a modernist who placed all the emphasis on form as sedimented content.

Hence we have passive audience sucking up trash without even knowing it was junk. Is that what you mean? Is that the source of the animus?

If so, you can rework this by building in critical reception of junk forms (advertising)and discerning judgements of Hollywood films. The key is Bildung---or the historical process of becoming educated.

I haven't read Kellner for a long time. As I cannot recall what he wrote I cannot comment on his remarriage.

The vertical plane bit.

Spatially, we have mediascape within which we live and, as subjects we are shaped by its meanings. Its space plus the old hermeneutical circle.

That mediascape has a history--it can be recovered by excauvation of its layers. Those layers of meaning of our visual culture are historically vertical, as they lie on top of, and overlap, with one another. I'm not sure that understanding is a commonsense one.

We can evaluate these histical meanings in terms of our cultural traditions---in this case it is the enlightenment one.

We then make judgments about their truth content re our mutilated and instrumentalised world; how much they express our suffering in that world; and how much they facilitate or foster our striving for a better and more flourishing life.

Culture is a part of that value system of our Enlighenment tradition that is our cultural heritae from Europe. So you can evaluate cuiltural products in terms of how much they enlighten us or deceive us.

What has been naturalised is the disconnection between culture and enlightenment.That European tradition is broken backed in Australia---dismissed as elitist by a market populism that is all the rage.

Gary, thanks for a well thought-out response. Good stuff.

"Hence we have passive audience sucking up trash without even knowing it was junk. Is that what you mean? Is that the source of the animus? " That's exactly it, of course. And more seriously, the conflation of mass *production* or *distribution* with the idea of an undiferrentiated mass of human beings who are, as you say, the passive receptacles of this "mass culture". The unpacking of this easy, and nonsensical, conflation was, I would argue, early British cultural studies' (Hoggart, Williams, Hall) biggest priority and its biggest success.

It doesn't matter to me so much whether this idea is present in a canonised theorist's work or not, because most people aren't going to go and read Adorno. What worries me is the extent to which the idea has become all-pervasive, and really has become less about defending the people from propaganda, and more about demonstrating how clever, cultured, and enlighted the person who doesn't get duped by mass culture is. The fact is that a lot of Adorno's work has filtered "down" (heh) to mainstream culture, not as some kind of resistance to tyranny rhetoric, but merely as a way of differentiating those with enlightened tastes from those without them.

Kellner wrote a piece outlining what he feels are the "missed articulations" between cultural studies and cultural marxism - http://www.gseis.ucla.edu/faculty/kellner/papers/cultmarx.htm. I agree with most of it.

I like your description of the "layers" of the mediascape. The problem of course with the enlightenment project is with accommodating different kinds of knowledges, and different systems of value...that's where cultural studies puts most of its energy now I think, rather than celebrating mass culture (and British cultural studies, as against the US version, is not really known for doing this in the first place.)

In fact, populism in cultural studies is under serious threat from both "inside" and "outside".

I may go back into my shell and finish my damn thesis now. Thanks for a great discussion though!

Excellent stuff- a great response to a great film.