Jews, Mobility, and Sex: Popular Entertainment between Budapest, Vienna, and New York around 1900

Reviewed by: The Fun Factory: The Keystone Film Company and the Emergence of Mass Culture, and: Universal Women: Filmmaking and Institutional Change in Early Hollywood Paul Monticone (bio) Rob King . The Fun Factory: The Keystone Film Company and the Emergence of Mass Culture. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2009. 376 pp. $26.95 (paper), $60.00 (cloth). Mark Garrett Cooper . Universal Women: Filmmaking and Institutional Change in Early Hollywood. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2010. 264 pp. $27.00 (paper). Two recent studio histories provide valuable contributions to our understanding of the emergence of studio-era Hollywood and revivify a genre of film history still—long after the so-called historical turn—too thick with annotated filmographies, biographical chronicles, and narrow industrial histories. The significance of the 1910s to the shape that popular cinema would take has long been known, and among the decade's most significant innovations were the emergence of the feature-length film, the studio system's hierarchical division of labor, the star system, the acceptance of cinema as a legitimate cultural form, and the victory of southern California over other production centers. At first glance, the subjects of Rob King's The Fun Factory: The Keystone Film Company and the Emergence of Mass Culture (University of California Press, 2009) and of Mark Garrett Cooper's Universal Women: Filmmaking and Institutional Change in Early Hollywood (University of Illinois Press, 2010) would appear to reside outside the industry's mainstream. But in accounting for practices seemingly out of step with much of the industry, both books advance our understanding of how that mainstream formed. By the midteens, mainstream cinema had largely abandoned the working-class and immigrant audiences of the nickelodeon era and had excluded women of the nickelodeon era and had excluded women from positions of authority. However, as these two books establish, at Keystone and Universal such configurations did exist—at least for a time. Both books share a similar structure: six chapters in two sections, the first accounting for the presence of unrefined, working-class cultural forms and female directors, and the second charting how these studios came into alignment with the rest of the industry. In neither case is this latter process construed as a simple surrender to an exogenous dominant, and this is the principal virtue shared by both volumes. For King, the transformation of [End Page 61] Keystone's brand of slapstick from a popular entertainment to mass culture required complex hybridizations of cultural forms, and, for Cooper, the fortunes of female filmmakers were determined by complex institutional practices, such as the geography of the workplace, management hierarchies, and the function genre would perform in feature production. The tight focus shared by the two works—each treats one studio and covers about half a decade—permits the authors to demonstrate how two particular features of mainstream cinema were instituted at two particular studios. King's The Fun Factory argues that Keystone should not be recalled nostalgically for its pratfalls and bathing beauties but, rather, should be understood as instrumental to the early twentieth century's most significant cultural shift, from a "hierarchical cultural order that reinforced social divisions to a commercially driven 'mass' culture that tended to obscure those divisions" (8). Keystone, at first, exploited those divisions, as King demonstrates in his first chapters. Shortly after its founding in 1912, Mack Sennett's Keystone found a niche as a working-class reply to the uplift movement's genteel pretensions (like those of Sennett's former employer, Biograph). Moral melodramas were countered with slapstick spectacles that often dismissed narrative development and frequently burlesqued the conventions of Griffith's last-minute rescues. The second chapter traces how, at Keystone, humor initially centered on ethnic stereotypes of Germans, Irish, and Jews (all staples of nineteenth-century popular entertainments), but these images were supplanted by classed figures, such as Chaplin's paradigmatic tramp, as immigrant and native-born workers began to forge a common, working-class identity. Pushing ethnic humor to the margins also helped expand Keystone's audience into the middle class. Paradoxically, at the moment when Keystone most clearly foregrounded class as comedic content, it also began to modify the working class's popular...

The early twentieth century in Spain saw a series of initiatives designed to reform the institutions of the theatre (and musical theatre in particular), prompted by the desire to regenerate politics and society following defeat in the Spanish-American War. This desire for regeneration had an unintended effect: while regeneration was supposed to make Spanish institutions more responsive to the populace, theatre shifted away from its traditional position in Spanish popular culture and became an elite institution; this in turn made room for new forms of popular culture such as cinema, cabaret and sporting events to flourish. Government-mandated reforms tended to alienate popular audiences by not taking their demands into account. Formalized copyright control only protected elite, conservatory-trained theatrical composers and not artists working in popular entertainment. Ironically, these reforms – designed to save Spanish theatre from a decline into frivolity and meaninglessness – ended up marginalizing the theatre and legitimizing popular entertainment.

Reviewed by: Popular Culture and Entertainment Media in Adult Education Pauline Reynolds Elizabeth J. Tisdell, Patricia M. Thompson (Eds.). Popular Culture and Entertainment Media in Adult Education. New Directions for Adult and Continuing Education, No. 115. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 2007. 96 pp. Paper: $29.00, ISBN: 0-4702-4870-X Popular Culture and Entertainment Media in Adult Education attempts to remedy the sparse attention that popular culture has received formally in the discipline of adult education despite the apparently wide pedagogical use of aspects of popular culture in classrooms. This book provides a variety of approaches for the formal and informal consideration of the impact of popular culture on learning and literacy, and as an effective part of educators’ arsenal of critical techniques for use in their classes. Using examples from films, television, cartoons, hip-hop, and culture jamming, this book highlights the effectiveness of utilizing popular culture as a source for the critical exploration of self and society. It illustrates this purpose through examples that focus on diverse populations and different approaches, thus demonstrating the influence and impact of popular culture on learning both in and out of the classroom. In the opening chapter, E. J. Tisdell introduces readers to relevant theoretical perspectives of popular culture and critical media literacy. The book’s theoretical perspective is predicated on assumptions that popular culture is a site of dominant and alternative messages, that viewers can critically pull apart these messages, and that doing so is meaningful. In the following chapter, Guy builds on these ideas, specifically discussing popular culture as pedagogy. This chapter outlines the pervasiveness of cultural products in our lives and provides examples of structured class activities designed to help students analyze the messages embedded in popular culture, particularly those concerning race, class, and gender. [End Page 150] Chapters 3,4, and 5 draw more directly on the formal application of entertainment media in class situations using very different examples. Chapter 3 shares the perspectives of an instructor and student from a class focused on the role of entertainment media in learning. Fascinatingly, hip-hop is the compelling source of popular culture in Chapter 4. Mary Stone Hanley takes the reader on a journey from her own introduction to hip-hop, her attempts to learn more about it, and finally her use of it as an innovative way of engaging her students in critical, creative explorations of self and society. She claims that as a pedagogical tool hip-hop can “model dialogic instruction” (p. 36), instill “creative agency” (p. 36), and help students develop their critical skills. Her examples include ways she engages students both as observers and creators of hip-hop in her research and class practice. Chapter 5 draws on two instructors’ experiences teaching a humanities class structured around an analysis of The Simpsons. Their motivation lies in seeing the cartoon as a form of social critique, one which can be analyzed and used to reinforce learning in ways which that students find interesting and entertaining as well as insightful. They discuss several ways in which they incorporate the program in the classroom. The next three chapters describe popular culture as informal sources of learning and literacy. Chapter 6 specifically focuses on the influence of popular culture in building literacy, where literacy is more broadly conceived of and defined as “social practice[s]” (p. 57), allowing people to more successfully navigate their world. The cult British television series The Avengers is the subject of Chapter 7. This absorbing contribution outlines Robin Redon Wright’s research in this area, describing the series, its context, the reactions toward it, and its impact the show had on viewers. She illustrates how the portrayal of one character, Dr. Catherine Gale, had a lasting impact on some women, transforming their options, choices, and behaviors. Chapter 8 introduces readers to the phenomenon of “culture jamming,” a type of activism that resists consumerism and can be interpreted as a form of public pedagogy. Jamming involves activities such as reclaiming billboards, shopping-intervention, and performance as ways to highlight the impact consumerism has on our environment and ways of thinking and being. Sandlin advocates the educative power of culture jamming as a tool for...

During the second half of the 20th century, the Caribbean island of Barbados emerged as a key player in the creation and nurturing of Caribbean popular music. And, yet, despite its vital role in the popularization of tuk music, the rise of spouge, and the Barbadian contribution to and transformation of other Carribean music traditions, there is still relatively little sustained critical literature that discusses the various strands of the island’s music culture. Curwen Best’s The Popular Music and Entertainment Culture of Barbados provides this long overdue survey of the development of Barbadian popular music and entertainment culture by focusing on pivotal phenomena, artists and movements in the evolution of Barbadian popular music and culture. Best concentrates, in particular, on transformations since 1980 and 2000 respectively, each of which marked the ushering in of new opportunities and challenges to the creation and dissemination of Barbadian popular music. His study considers the telling roles played by the expanding influence of western popular culture, the Internet, post-dancehall and post-soca aesthetics, cyberculture, digital culture, and the subterranean lure of traditional culture. Readers will find especially compelling Best’s analyses of selected artists, musical genres, and phenomena, such as Gabby, Rihanna, Jackie Opel, Alison Hinds, Rupee, Red Plastic Bag, Lil’ Rick, spouge, tuk, ringbang, gospel, dub/dancehall, calypso, soca, folk, alternative, hip hop, Crop Over, Jazz Festival, National Independence Festival of Creative Arts, BajanTube, party politics and entertainment, popular bands, music technology, the Internet and new frontiers of cultural expression. This book will be of significant interest to scholars, students and all those curious about Caribbean popular culture, the popular music of Barbados, and the impact of emerging technologies on cultural development in a small island state.

During the second half of the 20th century, the Caribbean island of Barbados emerged as a key player in the creation and nurturing of Caribbean popular music. And, yet, despite its vital role in the popularization of tuk music, the rise of spouge, and the Barbadian contribution to and transformation of other Carribean music traditions, there is still relatively little sustained critical literature that discusses the various strands of the island’s music culture. Curwen Best’s The Popular Music and Entertainment Culture of Barbados provides this long overdue survey of the development of Barbadian popular music and entertainment culture by focusing on pivotal phenomena, artists and movements in the evolution of Barbadian popular music and culture. Best concentrates, in particular, on transformations since 1980 and 2000 respectively, each of which marked the ushering in of new opportunities and challenges to the creation and dissemination of Barbadian popular music. His study considers the telling roles played by the expanding influence of western popular culture, the Internet, post-dancehall and post-soca aesthetics, cyberculture, digital culture, and the subterranean lure of traditional culture. Readers will find especially compelling Best’s analyses of selected artists, musical genres, and phenomena, such as Gabby, Rihanna, Jackie Opel, Alison Hinds, Rupee, Red Plastic Bag, Lil’ Rick, spouge, tuk, ringbang, gospel, dub/dancehall, calypso, soca, folk, alternative, hip hop, Crop Over, Jazz Festival, National Independence Festival of Creative Arts, BajanTube, party politics and entertainment, popular bands, music technology, the Internet and new frontiers of cultural expression. This book will be of significant interest to scholars, students and all those curious about Caribbean popular culture, the popular music of Barbados, and the impact of emerging technologies on cultural development in a small island state.

The Melodramatic Nation: Integration and Polarization in the Argentine Cinema of the 1930s

Funny Business: Popular Comedy and Entertainment Culture in Northern Ireland Lance Pettitt (bio) This essay offers a case study of a comedy performer within the entertainment culture of Northern Ireland (NI) between 1949 and 1974. Over a decade ago, Sean Connolly outlined some of the definitional difficulties faced by “the would-be historian of popular culture” in Ireland; he observed that the “issue of cultural interaction across social boundaries” (Connolly 1996:83–90) at particular historical conjunctures and specific locations was central to cultural history. Popular comedy (Palmer 1994:7) is replete with representations of social taboos and taste limits made visible and audible, but its production and audiences also involve complex processes of boundary reformulation. This essay explores how an entertainment business was structured during a period of political rule in NI that was dominated by Ulster unionists. Often fiercely, unionists upheld the position of NI within the United Kingdom (UK) after Ireland was partitioned in 1920. This case study is therefore set within an overarching narrative of a unionist political history—from the postwar reassurance about the “permanence” of the union (the Ireland [End Page 123] Act of 1949 with its “guarantee”) to the traumatic dissolution of the NI parliament (1972) at the height of the “Troubles.” It explores how an entertainment business was distinguished by “degrees of shifting attachment and interaction” (Williams 1958:310) with formal and informal political and cultural institutions. And it analyzes the cultural hegemony enacted in comic performance (McConachie 1989:48) by investigating the multiple institutional and cultural contexts in which such entertainment took place. The historiography of social and cultural life in NI before 1968 remains under-researched. Leslie Clarkson has advised that academics “should not partition social processes, nor impose patterns on the past where none existed, but [try] to understand the nature of human activity in the mundane matters of getting and spending” (Clarkson 2000:12). But this model for analyzing material production and consumption seems to capture only partially the role of culture in the social processes of NI. Grey (1983) has surveyed how the urban population of Belfast routinely spent its leisure time on popular entertainment up until 1914, and Bardon has addressed the comedy and entertainment programming of the BBC (Bardon 2000). Non-academic collections of reminiscences of popular hobbies and pastimes from the 1930s to the 1960s (Love 1982) provide insights into the everyday economics of leisure. Such demotic cultures, produced and consumed as inconsequential fun, including those mediated via radio, film, and television, potentially provide rich resources for understanding cultural history and for developing cultural theory (Graham 2001:155).1 The transformations of entertainment culture after 1945 may be usefully tracked through the career of James Young (1918–74), the dominant comic figure within the NI entertainment industry. Though Young has been much celebrated in popular memory, there has been little sustained academic analysis of his significance to a [End Page 124] wider cultural history (Cranston 1996; Bardon 2001; Moore 2003; Pettitt 2005). While The Force of Culture (1999) shows how unionist elites attempted to produce a cohesive political identity out of literary and cultural activities, including various public rituals and BBC programs (McIntosh 1999:2–3), my emphasis here lies in exploring the cultural significance of an entrepreneur-performer operating in a “business” that presented itself as apolitical and was experienced by its audiences as “only entertainment” (Dyer 1992:11–18). I suggest below how one might understand a transitional phase in the contemporary history of the popular culture of a region—a juncture where residual forms of live performance coexist with and are transformed by broadcast transmission; a period of cultural history defined as existing between the lived memories and the electronically recorded traces of comic performance. Though it is axiomatic that to better understand filmed and broadcast comedy, we need to know about prior live entertainment forms (Medhurst 1986:185), we also need to locate such performances, “to make the interpretation conscious by showing historical alternatives; to relate the interpretation to the particular contemporary values on which it rests,” while avoiding the sense that we can “return” the performance to its period (Williams 1961:69). More broadly, within cultural studies there...

Audiences in popular theater are much more prepared to surrender themselves to a composer going down the route of the opera. On 9 January 2006 Andrew Lloyd Webber's Phantom of the Opera (1986) became the longest-running theatrical event in Broadway history. Reporting the fact, the BBC characterized The Phantom as the “most successful entertainment venture of all time,” observing that it had earned nearly three times more than the most lucrative film, James Cameron's Titanic (“Phantom musical surpasses record,” BBC News 2006). Lloyd Webber's earlier Cats (1981) ranks as the third most popular theatrical work ever written (behind Les Misérables), and several of his other musicals—Jesus Christ Superstar, Evita, Starlight Express—have also enjoyed phenomenal success. But despite unprecedented popular acclaim, or because of it, the development of a significant body of Lloyd Webber criticism has been remarkably slow. As recently as 2006 Jessica Sternfeld could state, with only slight exaggeration, that “Andrew Lloyd Webber … exists in a research vacuum” (5), contrasting that fact, as others had done, with the critical attention given to Lloyd Webber's American rival, Stephen Sondheim. The only serious critical book to appear in the decade of Lloyd Webber's greatest triumphs was Michael Walsh'sAndrew Lloyd Webber: His Life and Works (1989), and when that book—still unique as a full-length critical study—went into a second, expanded edition in 1997, Walsh ruefully noted that he had been “widely taken to task by critics for the effrontery of treating Lloyd Webber and his work seriously” (256). Only in the last few years has Lloyd Webber finally been treated “seriously,” in a manner befitting his amazing prominence in the modern cultural landscape, and several fine studies have emerged: Stephen Citron'sSondheim and Lloyd-Webber[sic]: The New Musical (2001), John Snelson'sAndrew Lloyd Webber (2004), and Sternfeld'sThe Megamusical (2006). These scholars agree that Lloyd Webber's works are much finer than his many detractors have allowed; but also that, qualitative issues aside, the popularity and influence of the musicals make them worthy of study. Lloyd Webber's critical reception has been fraught with contradictions. Like his most obvious British forbears, Henry Bishop (1786–1855) and Arthur Sullivan (1842–1900)—both knighted, incidentally, while Lloyd Webber has been made a Lord—he has been intent on bringing increased artistic respectability to popular theatre. In fact, Andrew Pinnock's astute comment on what Bishop was trying to achieve in the 1810s and 1820s exactly describes Lloyd Webber's career in the 1970s and 1980s: “Bishop understood his audience. He did nothing to shock them; he tried, over time, to widen their range of musical experience and to raise their expectations” (5). But the result of Lloyd Webber's reformist project was a series of works so popular that their artistic agenda was generally overlooked, and he has been repeatedly criticized, often in vituperative terms, for cynically pandering to the supposedly corrupted taste of what Michael Feingold specifies as “[t]he semi-educated middle-class world” (Village Voice, 2 February 1988; quoted in Sternfeld: 267). Of course, there are other ways of assessing such popularity. George Perry, an admirer, finds an “insight into prevailing tastes … met with offerings of impeccable quality,” and in this compares Lloyd Webber to the American filmmaker Steven Spielberg (81). Glancing in a different direction, Keita Asari, who was instrumental in popularizing Lloyd Webber's works in Japan, attributes the latter's “universal” success to the fact that he is a “genius who unfolds melodies through various modes that somewhere reverberate classical music” (quoted in Walsh, “Magician”: 58). From almost any critical point of view, Lloyd Webber's central opus is The Phantom of the Opera. It has proved, by a wide margin, his greatest success, and his ambition to “raise the expectations” of his audience is most clearly displayed here. More than any of his previous musicals, The Phantom came close to winning over the critical establishment, with even hostile critics immediately recognizing it as the key work in his career, the one on which his reputation would ultimately rest. “Mr. Lloyd Webber's esthetic has never been more baldly stated than in this show,” maintained the influential and generally negative Frank Rich, sensing that Lloyd Webber's career to that date had reached a logical conclusion in The Phantom. An artistic trajectory that began with Lloyd Webber hitching his wagon to late 1960s “progressive rock,” with its clear “classical” (for want of a better word) pretensions, that evolved through Evita (1976), boldly described as “an opera,” had now produced the most operatic musical ever heard. Early reviews repeatedly referred to The Phantom's operatic dimension, sometimes questioning whether it might be called an opera. Lloyd Webber himself suggested that it could, perhaps should be: “What do we mean by opera, anyway? And where does that put Phantom? Obviously there is a world of difference between Phantom and something like Sugar Babies. But there is no difference today between opera and serious musical theater” (quoted in Walsh, “Magician”: 60). Jerrold Hogle gets it right, I think, when he defines the Lloyd Webber Phantom as a “popular opera,” a work that embodies “many of the contradictions behind the deeply troubled forms of entertainment in middle-class Western culture” (203). He might, though, have said “world culture,” for The Phantom has fared exceptionally well outside the West: it has, for example, been running in Japan since 1988, and for many young Japanese defines what “theatre” is. Such an international impact sharply raises the questions of where the appeal of the show ultimately resides, and what sort of cultural work The Phantom does. The present article is an engagement with those questions. It would be impossible to write a definition of an opera that, while including all those works defined as such in The New Grove Dictionary of Opera, somehow excluded The Phantom of the Opera. It is safe to assume, in fact, that those who reject the notion of The Phantom being an opera do so not because of concern about generic niceties, but on the assumption that a “true” opera could not possibly be so outrageously popular. But a “popular opera” (allowing, for the sake of argument, the possibility of such a thing) must, by definition, be popular; significantly, many of those “semi-educated middle-class” people who have embraced The Phantom understand it to be an opera. In April 2007, for example, a Yahoo! Canada discussion board addressed the question: “What is your favorite opera?” Many of the respondents made fairly predictable choices from the classical repertoire: Mozart's Nozze de Figaro and Don Giovanni, Verdi's La Traviata, and Puccini's La Bohème. But three people chose The Phantom of the Opera (making it the favorite of these favorites), and one chose Les Misérables. Internet searches reveal the same pattern: many bloggers, amateur reviewers, and participants in online discussions, from all around the world, make the claim that The Phantom (and rather less often Les Misérables) is their “favorite opera.”1 There is little to be gained from arguing that all these “ordinary” music lovers are mistaken in their understanding of what opera is, but a good deal to be obtained from the recognition that The Phantom satisfies a craving many people have for the experience of opera, or, more precisely, of liking opera. It is (at the least) a work of popular musical theatre that attempts to be as operatic as possible without, however, repelling an audience who would ordinarily consider the idea of “opera” intimidating. Cathleen Myers has described The Phantom as “an opera lovers' dream musical”: it would be more accurate to call it a musical lovers' dream opera. The suggestively titled collection High-Pop: Making Culture into Popular Entertainment (2002) is useful in clarifying the cultural issues involved here. The book makes no mention of The Phantom of the Opera, or indeed of Lloyd Webber, but the writers establish a larger narrative of cultural shifts that valuably illuminates this musical's unprecedented success. That narrative starts with the “sacrilization of culture” (Collins 4) in the nineteenth century, sees that influentially challenged by the arrival of pop art in the mid twentieth century, with its “determination to move the popular into the world of legitimate culture” (6), and then presents “high-pop” as a “reversal of that flow … transforming Culture into mass entertainment” (6). “High-pop,” which is viewed as having started in the 1980s, before becoming fully visible in the 1990s, involves a wide range of interconnected phenomena: from lavish film adaptations of Shakespeare's plays and Jane Austen's novels, to “blockbuster” art exhibitions attracting hundreds of thousands of viewers, and the advent of bookstores with sofas and cafes. The book spells out and explores the contradictions: “high-pop” likes to present itself as offering “refined” cultural experience superior to that afforded by “mass” commercial culture, yet its products are aggressively branded and marketed, and it tends to become a form of “quality” consumerism. The cover illustration, a photograph of a number of T-shirts printed with Shakespeare's portrait, encapsulates some of these contradictions. One of the contributors to High-Pop writes specifically on opera, and his essay provides a useful context for the more operatic aspects of The Phantom of the Opera. John Storey's“‘Expecting Rain’: Opera as Popular Culture?” begins with the recognition that for many people opera is “the very embodiment of ‘high culture’,” but proceeds to argue that in recent years it has become “more and more a feature of everyday cultural life” (32). Storey points to the increasing use of opera extracts in films and advertising, the emergence of opera singers with pop-star status, and the proliferation of recordings (especially “highlights” collections) and introductory books (Teach Yourself Opera, Opera: A Crash Course, etc.). Much of this, he argues convincingly, is aimed squarely at the culturally aspirational instincts of the “high-pop” sensibility. For example, the 1997 publication Opera for Dummies has a cover blurb defining “Who You Are”: “For starters you're an intelligent person. We can sense it, and we're never wrong about such things. After all, you picked up this book, didn't you?” (quoted in Storey: 38). My conclusion from the evidence Storey presents, however, is that the desire to like opera is far stronger than actual opera appreciation. This has led to a great proliferation of what might be termed “entrance level” materials (“highlights” collections and so on), while making comparatively little difference to such “advanced” forms of opera appreciation as actually sitting through one. As Storey's figures show, opera attendance in Britain increased by less than 3% during the 1980s. Moreover, recent interest in opera, and advertisers' and filmmakers' willingness to make use of opera, does not apply to all opera, but is essentially concentrated on opera from Mozart to Puccini, or from about 1780 to 1930. These limits to the scale and scope of “high-pop” appetite for opera actually come close to defining the audience to which The Phantom of the Opera principally appeals. Lloyd Webber never presumes too much on his audience's desire for opera, and even offers his own little “crash course” in the art form from Mozart to Puccini. To get some purchase on these issues, it is useful to return to Lloyd Webber's previously quoted claim that “there is no difference today between opera and serious musical theater.” That statement is absurd if understood, with grammatical literalness, as meaning today's “serious musical theater” (i.e., works like The Phantom) is no different from today's opera. The Phantom of the Opera is stylistically a world apart from contemporary “serious” opera, such as the works of Harrison Birtwistle and Peter Maxwell Davies in Britain, or of Karlheinz Stockhausen and Philip Glass elsewhere. What Lloyd Webber obviously meant is that serious musicals “today” (specifically the late 1980s) speak with the sort of voice opera used to employ when it was a popular art form. Hal Prince, who directed Phantom, had earlier made the same argument in relation to Evita: “opera is and always has been musical theater of its time in a form with limited dialogue. … Puccini and Verdi were pop composers of their era … those operas were the showbiz musicals of their times” (quoted in Walsh, Andrew Lloyd Webber: 105). Getting Opera: A Guide for the Cultured but Confused, one of the recent guides discussed by Storey, advised its readers: “don't be afraid of opera because some force has foolishly built it up as the ultimate in refinement. Opera has historically been a popular art form that aimed to entertain ordinary people” (quoted in Storey: 40). Opera scholars would want to qualify all these claims, but they are partly true, and essentially well-intended. As a “popular opera,”The Phantom of the Opera seeks to join—quite explicitly—that older tradition of popular operatic entertainment, one best exemplified, as Prince suggests, in the Italian tradition from Rossini to Puccini. As such, it employs a distinctly old-fashioned operatic sound, for which the story, set in the Paris Opera House in 1881, provides the perfect excuse: Lloyd Webber's operatic musical aligns itself with the glamour of opera in its most glamorous period. Puccini's death in 1924 has often been seen as marking the end of opera as “a popular art form.”Storey follows a number of American scholars in attributing the process by which “opera was transformed from entertainment enjoyed by the many into Culture to be appreciated by the few” (37) to the cultivation of exclusivity by operatic institutions. This argument seems more than problematic in the American context,2 and certainly makes no sense in Italy, and little in France or Britain. It is more the case that first operetta, then cinema, drew off much of the popular following opera had enjoyed in its heyday of broad appeal. At the same time, Wagner and the academically trained composers who followed him (many of whom had little practical experience of theatre) tended to introduce advanced music into their operas, thus establishing an increasing divide between “serious” opera and more popular forms of musical theatre. The Phantom of the Opera does not try to close that gap (in the way Michael Nyman's operas do, say), but rather returns to a reference point prior to the moment when that gap became a yawning gulf. In commercial terms, it bears the same sort of relation to “serious” opera that operetta bore a century ago, but while operetta became popular by consciously distancing itself from opera, The Phantom has courted popularity precisely by gravitating toward opera. In a sense, what operetta stole from opera— the “middle-brow” audience, the hummable tune—The Phantom of the Opera gives back, at the same time picking up just enough “elitist” glamour to satisfy “high-pop” aspiration. The Phantom of the Opera is not just “operatic”: it also plots its own relationship to opera, and in doing so invents a tradition for the modern “high-pop” musical. Gaston Leroux, who wrote the French novel Le Fantôme de l'Opéra (1910, translated by Alexander Teixeira de Mattos, 1911) on which the Lloyd Webber musical is based, worked for many years as a theatre critic, and knew a great deal about contemporary opera. His novel is accordingly (and appropriately) of to various composers and their operas, popular being the most musical Phantom of the Opera (in its which first Lloyd Webber's attention to the theatrical of the story, opera there is, a good deal from as well as from operas by and Lloyd Webber's Phantom very little in the way of “opera though, and does not in any way from earlier This artistic that Lloyd Webber was not with to opera lovers in the way and he three little of operas that the and opera of the These have some critical most of it and with the of which composers Lloyd Webber is of the musical of these and their in the work as a is to be from for while the meaning of the in their to the larger musical of story, I a set of in which these comment on musical theatre and the audience's not only about opera, but about its modern “high-pop” After the the on the of the Paris in where a opera, by a composer is in The is from like any number of earlier operas, and the lavish and with and even a the have repeatedly as the opera composer though, as “[t]he operatic is not to be down to one In any in operatic as a sort of for French of which are specifically in Le and La More though, Lloyd Webber's audience is to about Frank Lloyd Webber's opera … at the of such less than as But this the the of the of people who have seen (and The Phantom of the Opera well this is Lloyd Webber's I not because it makes of This mass audience, the as a of the sort of opera that might have been seen in Paris in And what the is that in the world of opera, the and the are often The of the of as well as the great of and is by a Italian who to his and finds it even to the of his always an audience As has recently defining the of often for the they and generally if you understand the that they what they is not to be … And so The or of opera something that very the few lovers of as much as it the many lovers of Lloyd One of the the to fine in of then starts to of of A few into the there is an by the Phantom, which to any the one of the is then given the to the and does so with such that is given the to the at that to it to the and it before an As often in Lloyd Webber's musicals, the or does a good deal of up with and establishing relationship with de who in to the same from his But at the of the is even more critics have that it is not at all like and some have tried, to it down to Michael for example, it “a of the or Stephen (Village 2 February 1988; quoted in Sternfeld: the first to actually the the But he is to argue that the its that gap between the operatic world and the In other it the audience from the of to the of Lloyd Webber's own and it is safe to that of people have at this point in the with a sort of this is what come The almost of is indeed a very Lloyd Webber a fact that has been more obvious to hostile For the serious opera this first of The Phantom of the Opera is rather On one the is an accurate of French on the other it a that seems Lloyd But the larger for whom The Phantom was are less to be about such than that something so as had should out to such an In other this first to an that many musical are to have absurd and then them to that it The Phantom thus a on opera to be by many of the audience, while at the same time the idea that the “highlights” in opera are the As noted the “high-pop” many people the world of opera precisely through the experience of opera lovers the is to out the limited not interest in opera that the audience aimed at That audience starts to that it might like to more of the what it gets is Lloyd Webber's own “popular opera” that up the most immediately aspects of lavish the But of does something in fact, not a opera but a musical it invents a tradition for the modern musical and it with the of the In doing it to the culturally aspirational instincts of the audience, discussed The musical is no a to opera, but a modern development of A useful on the cultural of Lloyd Webber's is obtained if one on the fact that the most successful of British musicals in the when Lloyd Webber was his was best as the composer of so of the of music that he could not the was in the of the music and had made his reputation in the late with a of His musicals were in the sense that their with the popular music of the was immediately In other the British musical by it more to the of the music and and in a sense it can be said he too a tradition for it, his to that what they were was somehow in in the of One could a with the from Lloyd Webber's opera The first of The Phantom of the Opera begins with and with the very different but by an Italian composer is as an opera a Italian that had in the and produced in Mozart's three operas and its most of the of is but the proceeds far enough for the audience to understand that it is about a a with a who is as and that he has to to of while actually to in the to It has often been suggested that is a of Mozart's Le Nozze Figaro where there is a who and is in with a are for critics have the for that can only be Sternfeld The for the a with Le from in the same way that from As Le Nozze is one of the operas in the classical this is as close as Lloyd Webber to to the of opera by some of his audience. can be understood as a sort of of in Le Nozze the is the of and a in the is a while is “the of the But The Phantom as a is certainly not a with a agenda and the of this of elsewhere. As with the earlier the theatrical experience of The Phantom is by of the operatic in But Lloyd Webber his audience too well to make the of that they much about opera. by an he gives his audience some idea of opera over with little of operatic assume, from the and of that is an earlier opera than In any the Phantom them in no for is made to to his like the There is no that there are and lavish in as there were in so in the that Lloyd Webber is an operatic tradition for the modern the audience is to that the of opera evolved into the of opera that in evolved into the modern Andrew Lloyd Webber musical. There is art in the way The Phantom of the Opera key in operatic in just a few Opera lovers and opera critics would certainly the broad just from Mozart to to Lloyd Webber, as a but a argument might be made that it is an in of the and of the audience for opera. Audiences to the of The Phantom of the Opera, which can be characterized as Puccini with might have been to if “opera” is this they had a the art form in the first In a sense, Lloyd Webber that with the third of his Don This is different from the in being much more to the story, and in being written by the Phantom rather than a supposedly opera In the described as having worked for years on an opera of that He to it to in the of first to his on the that it is a of music of an is not “there is some music

Critiques of Popular Cultural Representations of 9/11TERRORISM TV: Popular Entertain- in Post-9/11 America. By Stacy Takacs. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas. 2012.PORTRAYING 9/11: Essays on Rep- resentations in Comics, Literature, Film and Theatre. Edited by Veronique Bragard, Christophe Dony, and Warren Rosenberg. Jefferson, NC: MacFarland. 2011.It should come as no surprise to critics and consumers of popular culture that the attacks of September 11, 2001, were, in many ways, a media event. While a few thousand trapped in planes and smoking buildings experienced the attacks firsthand, and millions of New Yorkers witnessed the events from their city streets, billions more know of the events only through screens of various sizes, and through the page. Since that time, public figures and public intellectuals have engaged in an interpretive tug-o-war to define, or not define, this starkly emotional event, which has come to be encapsulated in the ideographic moniker Cultural critics as diverse as Bill Maher and Susan Sontag paid the price early on for daring to posit unacceptable viewpoints, while seemingly the vast majority of mediated information conformed to political and public senti- ments that decontextualized the attacks, classifying them as unprovoked evil. What has been written in the past decade, either representing the events of 9/11 or critiquing those representations, could fill several libraries. For this essay, I will examine two books, recently published, that give scholarly treatment to representations of 9/11.The books reviewed for this essay have in common that they take popular culture seriously as a barometer for public attitudes, and do not get caught up in critical nihilism where they see popular culture as only repressive or progressive. Where they differ is that one focuses its rich, theoretical mining on television as a potential vehicle for shoring up hegemonic ideologies, while it simultane- ously opens avenues for critique of those ideologies. The other aims for breadth as opposed to depth (not that its approach should be considered shallow) as it scrutinizes other forms of popular culture: namely, comics, literature, film, and performance.In the introduction to Stacy Takacs' impressively researched book, Terrorism TV: Popular Entertainment in Post-9/11 America, the author states her position in contrast to those who would view media as a part of a vast conspiracy to control the masses:While there is clearly a political-economic convergence of interest between Hollywood and Washington, however, the recourse to conspiracy to explain this convergence oversimpli- fies very complex processes of social control and implies the public plays no role in the formation, maintenance or alteration of power relations. The biggest flaw in this conspiracy theory is its assumption that military-media coproductions always achieve the desired ideological effect-support for the United States and its military. (17)Throughout her book, Takacs demonstrates the ways in which popular television post-9/11 swung from jingoistic programming that primed the public to accept draconian policies from the Bush administration to a proliferation of program- ming that critiqued the administration and its hawkish war record. This shift suggests that public attitudes, and the relentless profit motive for commercial television, played at least as important a role in programming themes as did administration spin.As Takacs resists easy classifications of news programming vs. entertain- ment programming, the chapters often include analysis of both, side by side. As she notes in the introduction, Rather than reimpose some false distinction between information and entertainment, nonfictional and fictional programming, my approach is to treat all program types as simultaneously entertaining and informative (20). The result is a fascinating and persuasive analysis of militain- ment, and the subsequent resistance to militainment, as the years placed psychic distance between public attitudes and the event we refer to as 9/11. …

Theatrical Liberalism: Jews and Popular Entertainment in America

List of Illustrations Acknowledgments Introduction PART I: SATIRE IN OVERALLS: THE KEYSTONE FILM COMPANY AND POPULAR CULTURE 1. The Fun Factory: Class, Comedy, and Popular Culture, 1912-1914 2. Funny Germans and Funny Drunks: Clowns, Class, and Ethnicity at Keystone, 1913-1915 3. The Impossible Attained! Tillie's Punctured Romance and the Challenge of Feature-Length Slapstick, 1914-1915 PART II: MORE CLEVER AND LESS VULGAR: THE KEYSTONE FILM COMPANY AND MASS CULTURE 4. Made for the Masses with an Appeal to the Classes: Keystone, the Triangle Film Corporation, and the Failure of Highbrow Film Culture, 1915-1917 5. Uproarious Inventions: Keystone, Modernity, and the Machine, 1915-1917 6. From Diving Venus to Bathing Beauties: Reification and Feminine Spectacle, 1916-1917 Conclusion Notes Filmography Index

The Complexity of Authenticity in Religious Innovation: “Alternative Worship” and Its Appropriation as “Fresh Expressions”

Johannes V. Jensen's novels Madame D'Ora (1904) and Hjulet (The Wheel, 1905) represented some of the most popular works of early twentieth-century Americanist fiction in Europe. Taking Jensen's first novel, Madame D'Ora, as my focus, I show how his work participated in an ambivalent construction of America as an imaginary space of both danger and cultural renewal, one that combined the modern (technology) with a dangerous, ‘atavistic’ influence. Through an investigation of Jensen's use of tropes of primitivity, in particular, I argue that such literary Americanism in fact represented an effort to work through changes taking place within Europe itself. Specifically, Madame D'Ora deals with the rise of new forms of mass culture and popular entertainment – such as the cinema – and their effect on traditional European intellectuals. Within this context, Jensen represents the new ‘American’ forms of technology and popular culture both as a hope for overcoming European decadence and as a dangerous form of cultural and psychic primitivization.

Harry Potter and International Relations. Edited by Daniel H. Nexon, Iver B. Neumann. Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield Publishers, 2006. 224 pp., $72.00 cloth (ISBN: 0-7425-3958-X), $26.95 paper (ISBN: 0-7425-3959-8). International relations theory inevitably arises within a particular context and setting, whether it is the aftermath of World War I, the middle of the Cold War, or the start of the twenty-first-century war against terrorism. From the Peloponnesian War and the armed conflicts of the European Middle Ages to the carnage of the twentieth century, seminal writers from Thucydides to Machiavelli and from Hobbes to Clausewitz have distilled enduring theoretical perspectives from the events of their time. What Harry Potter and International Relations does, however, is broaden the contextual basis for thinking about international relations theory to encompass popular culture as well as political experience. As editors Daniel Nexon and Iver Neumann point out in their introduction, in recent years there has been an increasing interest in the relationship between popular culture and international politics (see, for example, Lipschutz 2001; McAlister 2001). One has only to watch such television series as The West Wing or Law and Order to see fictional representations of political life that have been widely disseminated as part of popular culture. Where fiction and reality differ or converge, of course, is sometimes in the eye of the beholder. The “facts” of international politics constitute first-order representations of political life, whereas popular entertainment is a second-order or fictional representation. Through Harry Potter and International Relations , Nexon and Neumann hope to help bridge the chasm between these first- and second-order representations. International relations, of course, studies the interactions among states and other groups that constitute the global system. To the extent that popular culture …

The power of popular culture lies today in its global reach; its ubiquity; and its ability to reproduce itself virtually without limit. Popular culture also shapes and is shaped by ideology, including ideologies about sex, gender, and sexuality. Popular media, from its beginnings in the early twentieth century, have understood that “sex sells,” and depictions of sexual content and imagery abound in popular film, television, and advertising, among others. Mainstream critics and feminist critics have often bemoaned what has been seen as regressive and often objectifying portrayals of sex and sexuality. But queer readers have often found escape and solace in popular entertainment, in a world “over the rainbow” that allows for fantasy and alternative readings of even the most putatively heterosexist texts. The texts of popular culture, as critical studies theorists and theorists of color have insisted, are always ambiguous, permitting multivocal interpretations and readings; those readings will vary depending on the social location of the reader. This chapter looks at the ways that queer theory and queer readers have been able to identify with popular culture texts, the ways that queer readings open up possibilities for textual interpretation, and how we might understand the increasingly common portrayals of LBGT people in popular media.