Incisive analysis about “the power of culture to inflame our emotions” and render reasonable debate inert.
A movie is more than just a movie in this exploration of the symbiotic shifts of politics and popular culture.
In a country that once prized pluralism and consensus, the center will no longer hold, as superheroes, zombies, and apocalyptic action flicks have pushed popular culture both toward the far left (Avatar) and the far right (Clint Eastwood). “Eastwood begat Reagan and Rambo, who came and went,” writes Vanity Fair contributing editor Biskind (My Lunches with Orson: Conversations between Henry Jaglom and Orson Welles, 2013, etc.), “but the culture continued its rightward drift, arriving at Steve Bannon, who famously said, ‘Darkness is good.’ ” The author shows how the standard tropes of popular narrative—the good guys vanquishing the bad guys who spread crime and chaos—have been subverted by both the left and the right. Biskind’s analysis tends to reduce popular culture into ideological tracts, regardless of entertainment value, and to become mired in plot summaries. However, he convincingly demonstrates how movies and TV have softened—or hardened—audiences toward an embrace of the extreme, past the point where reason, pragmatism, and conventional morality hold sway. Emphasizing attitudes on authority and on aliens, monsters, or anything that poses a threat to humanity by being different, the author maintains that today’s blockbusters “have normalized the extremes so they have become the new mainstream….Reason and science are on the defensive, while behavior that was once beyond the pale…has become the new norm as the public good is replaced by self-interest.” Though the popular shifts help account for the rise of Donald Trump, Biskind shows how both parties invoked the apocalypse to appeal to voters inflamed by the endgame scenarios of popular culture. “No longer,” he writes, “are we fighting for our way of life, or, as Superman put it, for ‘truth, justice and the American way.’ Now the stakes are considerably higher. We are fighting for life itself.”
Incisive analysis about “the power of culture to inflame our emotions” and render reasonable debate inert.Pub Date: Sept. 11, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-62097-429-2
Page Count: 256
Publisher: The New Press
Review Posted Online: June 26, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2018
A scholarly but resonant analysis of ``the cultural meanings of the welfare system,'' probing the mistaken assumptions behind fundamental policies forged during the 1930s. Beginning in 1890, writes Gordon (History/Univ. of Wisconsin), single mothers were portrayed as a symptom and cause of social decay; unlike today, however, the situation was seen as a temporary misfortune that usually befell white immigrants, often widows. Middle-class women's groups helped to create ``mother's aid'' for the deserving poor; the author calls this policy (a forerunner of the current Aid to Families with Dependent Children, or AFDC, program) ``maternalist,'' rooted in the subordination of women in domestic roles. But there were other points of view: Black women activists, notes Gordon (Woman's Body, Woman's Right, 1976), had less distance from those they wished to aid; they emphasized universal education and health programs rather than charity. The thinkers behind Social Security, all white and nearly all male, focused their lens on money and jobs for men, even though they knew it was a fallacy to consider men the sole supporters and protectors of women. During the New Deal, social movements ``valorized'' the elderly and unemployed, ignoring single mothers; the women's movement was quiet, and the lack of African-American political power meant that blacks' views on welfare were ignored. Gordon argues that the Social Security Act of 1935 created generous programs for the elderly and unemployed that operated under a single, federal standard; she cites a range of factors, including accommodations for southern employers and bureaucratic infighting, leading to the stratified, state-administered Aid to Dependent Children (later AFDC). Gordon doesn't enter the current policy debate, but she does note trenchantly that in order to fight inequality we must make such entitlements as corporate tax breaks and home mortgage deductions as ``visible as welfare.'' The arguments get complicated, but this is challenging history—and a goad to clarify modern-day rhetoric.
Pub Date: Sept. 14, 1994
ISBN: 0-02-912485-9
Page Count: 300
Publisher: Free Press
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 1994
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Art historian Hollander tries to set the record straight about the ``tyranny'' of fashion and to clear its bad name, making a reasonably strong case but offering a surprisingly lifeless account in the process. Hollander (Moving Pictures, 1989, etc.) spends most of the book establishing modern masculine sartorial superiority, setting up the contrast between the men's suit, with its brilliant design- -serious, sexy, timeless—and what, until this century, was mere ephemeral female fashion frippery. From the 1600s until the early 1900s, women's dress became increasingly theatrical and decorative, and received more attention from society (i.e., men), while men's dress set the classical standard. Obscuring female form and motion with tiny waists and voluminous skirts, women's clothing earned fashion the reputation of being manipulative and deceptive. Hollander asserts, to the contrary, that fashion is an ``imaginative art.'' Only in the early 20th century, however, did women's fashion become realistic and dignified. The introduction of short skirts after WW I gave coherence to the female form (and made exposing legs, and thus the wearing of pants, possible). It is just recently, Hollander argues, that female dress has begun to set any significant standards for Western fashion: ``Women finally took over the total male scheme of dress, modified it to suit themselves, and have handed it back to men charged with immense new possiblities.'' Sex and Suits has several major weaknesses, however. Most frustrating, given the book's historical scope (from the Greeks to the Gap), is the profusion of generalizations (``In general, people have always worn what they wanted to wear; fashion exists to keep fulfilling that desire'') and occasional preposterous pronouncements resulting from her attempt to divorce shifts in fashion from social forces. Also, her take on the relationship between gender and contemporary fashion is dated. Still, despite its un-hip feel, a coherent defense of fashion's integrity. (45 b&w photos, not seen)
Pub Date: Sept. 9, 1994
ISBN: 0-679-43096-2
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 1994
BOOK REVIEW
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