1) David Thorburn (a beloved teacher of mine in college) has written about ‘consensus narrative’ systems, the sites of cultural values-rehearsal – oral-formulaic ancient poetry/performance, Elizabethan theatre, the (serial) novels of Dickens’s time, American film up to the 50’s or so, then American TV, and so forth. As Thorburn explains it, these systems are aesthetically conservative and socially slow-moving in order to do the cultural ‘work’ you’re describing, Tim – so you get one Hamlet but not ten. When film passed from its position as the ‘water cooler’ medium, it was free to do other kinds of work; so you get Altman, Lucas, Scorsese, Coppola, making more personal pictures, perhaps more radical in one way or another, but no longer commanding the central position in the ongoing cultural conversation. (Look at Star Trek: the Original Series vs. the films, or Altman’s remake of The Long Goodbye vs. the book and earlier film version(s).)

Atop which: the birth of the computer/video game/arcade game (the screen you talk back to, the movie you direct), right around the time of Star Wars itself, might play into the shift that emschwar is talking about. Games are, to a degree, stories/worlds explicitly for imagination-liberation. I was born in ’79, so I don’t remember life without video games (I can’t imagine how you people survived), and I imagine my generation conceives of its relationship to pop culture very much through that ludic lens. (Look at the popularity of Saturday morning cartoon-related or -derivative fare like http://www.homestarrunner.com !)

2) Today’s sitcoms still do this cultural ‘work’, but in a family- or work-centered way, as you say. But you also see similar work done in something like The X-Files, which was only an aliens show in look and feel. (Really wasn’t it a military-industrial-complex gov’t conspiracy show, the exorcism of Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan? Those are the ‘big event’ episodes anyhow – though you could watch some of it as Mulder rebelling against the world his gov’t-connected G-man father made for him, i.e., well, the exorcism of Nixon and Reagan. ;v)

Then again, not that many people watched that bloody show. Maybe you have to look to ‘reality TV’ (what a stupid term) for the populism you seek.

(There’s a comment or post brewing in my head about learning-by-playing, as in games and Internet entertainments and the marketing tie-ins for Star Wars etc., vs. learning-by-watching, and how the degree of ‘interactivity’ of a text/world has some effect on its cultural portability and the amount of ‘work’ it can do. But yeah, very half-baked at this point.)

At the time, I had no referent for this, but it seems to me now the dichotomy was clear: my teachers were approaching literature for what it meant, and I was trying to approach it in the same way I approached Star Wars, as a vehicle for my imagination.

I suppose what I’m concerned with here is why so many cultural critics of a certain age and orientation (both left and right) regard the “Star Wars” watershed as a bad moment, as the decline or evacuation of what American culture should be. They don’t always blame “Star Wars”–sometimes it’s superheroes they hate, or something else. I’m not talking here about high culture snobs, but critics who seem to expect that popular culture be something other than what it has become. In this particular case, I feel I’m right to suggest that it has something to do with an expectation that popular culture should have a functionality that these critics do not perceive in post-Star Wars entertainments, that there is some relation between our mass culture and some kind of social “work” which is going unfulfilled or has been neglected.

It may be that younger eyes see different things in old works than those whose eyes were young in the day. Even when the actors lacked skill the viewer was able to read the meaning of a pregnant pause by a stone faced hero, understanding the unspoken interior meaning implied by the situation even if it was poorly performed. Perhaps young eyes miss this and interpret it as a blank look on a blank mind?

When Star Wars rolled around we old children took it right in stride, seeing the same old story told in an entertaining, though childish, new way. . . again. The implicit content became more explicit, but a glimpse of feminine ankle or calf no longer titillated either. The same thoughts were expressed in burlesque ways, as if the audience was assumed to be a bit culture deaf and so unable to read more subtle presentations.

It may be that the dominant institutional discourse changed gears, but the public discourse simply absorbed a new fashion for saying old things, and was comforted a bit that the wheel had turned again and was still on a familiar path, even if the kids were a bit gross and shouted what was once said in a normal speaking voice, spoke what was once whispered, and showed what was once implied.

Gary, I agree that Star Wars has some of its ancestry in the Western–but it’s no longer doing the work of the Western. It also has some of its ancestry in SF prior to 1970, and that was doing its own kind of work (several kinds) for quite a while in American culture. (For example, the obvious connections between postwar American experiences of globalization in the 1950s and the figure of the “alien” in a lot of SF during the same era.) SF on TV in the 1950s and Westerns were often very closely mapped on one another.

But I would stick to my guns (so to speak) and say that when Star Wars rolls around, something happens, the work of popular culture becomes unmoored from some of its most urgent or obvious functions. There’s a deferral of the social meaning of popular entertainments from dominant public discourses about what society “needs” from its popular culture.

“Lord of the Rings. Here’s a book which ascended to its popularity privately, through word-of-mouth and intimate discovery, mostly among audiences born after 1960.”

That’s not how I remember it. It was people born in the 40’s that popularized the series.

“fantastical science fiction like Star Wars–frequently trafficked (and still traffic) in imaginary worlds where hierarchy and inner merit have some correspondence. Fans are slans; much of the work we read avidly and dreamed constantly allowed us to imagine universes where our intelligence, our insight, our moral character, our will, our skill, made us knights or wizards, Jedi or Deryni, superheroes.”

Like cowboys. I suspect that’s why such stories are often called space westerns. They use light sabers like six-shooters, and have better horses.

I don’t see it Timothy. Only the details have changed. Hauberk westerns, horse westerns and space westerns do the same “work” as Homer’s heroes.

I think it’s fair to say that LOTR could only have been written by someone whose mind was shaped by a pre-20th-century (or at least pre-Great War) culture, and would probably only have been turned into a phenomenon by people culturally situated as the Boomers were.