There are many definitions and approaches towards culture. Frank Raymond Leavis perceives culture as something elitist, kept by the minority. According to him, the twentieth century is marked by the cultural decline. Most of the contemporary culture is classified as popular culture, as it is shared by bigger masses of the society, omnipresent and crosses international boundaries. This ubiquity was achieved due to the Industrial Revolution and the emergence of the different types of media. The technological development made possible the production of cheap culture products. The popular culture is frequently referred to as mass culture, which conveys rather negative connotations. In the second half of the twentieth century many intellectuals initiated a debate on the mass culture. One of its key figures was Dwight Macdonald whose approach was highly critical. He believes that “mass culture undermines the vitality of high culture”[1] and leads to the infantilization of people. Moreover, Earnest van Haag compares its consumption to the certain form of repression: “the empty texts and practices of mass culture are consumed to fill an emptiness within”(An Introduction 1997: 39).
Yet despite the common criticism of popular culture and its superficiality, there were some intellectuals who dared to oppose it. Stuart Hall and Paddy Whannel in The Popular Arts discarded the arguments of popular culture critics, which stated that “all high culture is good and that all popular culture is bad, for an argument which says (…) that some popular culture is also good”(An Introduction 1997: 64). Furthermore, they claimed that there is no use of comparing the music of Cole Porter and the one of Beethoven as they were creating different types of music, and thus bringing different types of satisfaction. Nor it is a question of superiority and inferiority.
Raymond Williams, whose works are considered to be the foundation of culturalism, represented another „liberal” view. He claims that “culture is ordinary, in the sense that culture is not a collection of special objects locked away in a museum”[2]. Williams rejects the Marxist idea of people as masses. He believes that “there are no masses, only ways of seeing people as masses”[3] and perceives culture as “a definition of the ‘lived experience’ of ‘ordinary’ men and women, made with their daily interaction with the texts and practices of everyday life” (An Introduction 1997: 56). Williams suggests interactional view of culture that ruptures the confines detaching literature, politics, culture and everyday-life issues. He rejects the exclusivist notion of culture, seeing it as rather collective, democratic than individual idea and coined the term good common culture. In “Culture and Society” Williams states that there is no need for measure of equality between common and elitist culture, since “a physicist would be glad to learn from a better physicist” and “a good physicist” would not consider himself “a better man than a good composer, chess player, carpenter or runner”[4]
The example of good common culture is “Gilmore girls” series, produced by WB, which first appeared on television in 2000, and now has just started its seventh season. It is an adorable, intelligent comedy-drama focused on the relationship between a young single mother, Lorelai Gilmore (played by Lauren Graham) and her teenage daughter, Rory (Alexis Blendel). Lorelai’s strongly independent nature made her oppose to her old-money family after she became pregnant and refuse to marry the father of her child. She decided to raise daughter on her own and promised herself to provide her with the opportunities she never had. To give Rory life different from the one she used to have, far away from the confines of propriety. Lorelai started as a maid in Independence Inn but after some time she became its manager. Her daughter has grown into an intelligent, sensible and well-read girl, “who must occasionally play the parent to her impetuous mother”[5]. They were dreaming of Rory’s education at the Harvard University since Rory was 4-years old and it became possible after this young woman was admitted to a prestigious prep school. Gilmore girls are the best friends, they share same interests, same intellect and understand each other without words (though they use plenty of them). They live in a fictional town in Connecticut, Stars Hollow. The place is filled with the eccentric but adorable, perfectly fleshed out characters. Besides presenting common problems the girls have to face, the authors of the series decided to include many allusions and references to famous classic movies, important personages of public life, but also to literary texts, the canon of literature, authors, philosophers, cultural approaches and tendencies or historical events. Dan Jewel, a senior editor at Biography Magazine in New York, states that the show is “filled with small charms, from a terrific ensemble cast to dialogue packed with more clever one-liners in an episode than are in an entire season of most of the sitcoms”[6].
“Gilmore Girls” series’ popularity makes it a part of popular culture yet it is also highly praised by the critics for its great sense of humor, wit and omnipresent cultural references and is called by Jonathan Storm, a reviewer from The Philadelphia Inquirer, “the most endearing and literate prime-time TV show ”[7]. Raymond Williams stated that nowadays “we have much more bad culture (…), but we also have much more good culture. (…) we live in an expanding culture, and all the elements in this culture are themselves expanding” (Williams 1997: 14). Moreover, Whannel and Hall in The Popular Arts suggest that rather than worrying about the effects of popular culture we should look forward or even educate a more demanding audience. And that is what the “Gilmore Girls” series is actually doing. The show expands culture by integrating high culture elements with the popular culture, makes it more approachable, and thus guides and trains the more aware audience.
This incorporation of the references to the canon of the literature, cultural approaches and tendencies, movements etc. into the TV series is the actual mixture of a high and popular culture, of the classic literature and the popular teenage-series. It makes people aware of many books they should know, or gives new, fresh view on them and adds some novel interpretation. We may find those highly esteemed representations of high culture in new contexts, notice how they may fit contemporary, everyday life. And thus, just as Williams said, also this elitist culture just as the common culture can become a part of everyday life or may represent it. One of good examples here would be a Lorelai’s words quotation referring to Samuel Beckett’s Waiting For Godot: (Lorelai and Rory were on one of the Friday dinners at the Gilmore’s residence; they were waiting at the table for Lorelai’s father, Richard, and the girls were ravenous) “Godot was here, he said: ‘I ain’t waiting for Richard’, grabbed a roll and left”[8].
Furthermore, Rory is such a delightful character that her being so well-read seems to make her teenage fans fascinated with her, want to became so erudite either. The classic and canon literature is then spread and applied to the kids who are believed to be interested in nothing more than computer games and the latest make-up trends. This protagonist actually makes reading in vogue, as all the teenagers who look up to her wants to be like her, and thus feel impressed by her being so literate. She makes both the American and the world canon literature popular by making it approachable for kids, and thus the high culture is expanded into the popular culture and somehow becomes a part of it. Eventually, “Gilmore Girls” turns, to a certain extent, high culture into a popular one, being then both popular and elitist. This endorsement of reading a classic literature encouraged the Family Friendly Forum’s Script Development Fund to support the show.
Williams in “The Analysis of Culture” says that we “shall find in some cases, that we are keeping the work alive because it is a genuine contribution to cultural growth” and we should “relate the interpretation to the particular contemporary values on which it rests ”[9]. And that is what the show’s authors do. Using the classic literary positions and situating them into the funny dialogues, making of the important motives some kinds of metaphors of an everyday life adds some freshness and makes them more appealing for the contemporary audience. So not only kids but also the adults feel attracted to read some of the mentioned books, to know better its protagonists. One of the most frequently quoted novels are F.Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby and Herman Melville’s Moby Dick, which are obviously considered to be one of the greatest masterpieces of American literature (f.ex. before stealing a yacht: “You know the beginning of Moby Dick, when narrator says that when he finds himself growing grim about the mouth and wanted to knock the people’s hats off, he takes to the sea? Well I feel like knocking people’s hats off”[10]). But beside them, in the series reappear the names of Henry James (“What is this? A Henry James novel? The young lady acts up and her family ships her off to Europe?”[11]), Charles Dickens (“I love e-mail. Everyday Rory and I write each other multiple times.” “You enjoy typing to people more than talking to them?” “Wrong perspective. E-mail is a return to the romantic days of letter writing. It’s pure Dickens”[12] or “This is the kind of cold you read about in Dickens’ novels. We should be in a workhouse or shilling for Fagin…It’s been the coldest winter in the history of winter”[13]), Edgar Allan Poe, Marcel Proust, William Shakespeare (“(…) there’s cute jealous and there is Othello”[14]; about Romeo and Juliet production: “How often do you get to see teenagers speak in iambic pentameter and kill themselves?”[15]) or the Russian writers like Pushkin or Dostoyevsky. Not mentioning the multiple references to classic plays and movies (utterance ‘gentleman caller’ instead of ‘boyfriend’, from Tennessee Williams’ “A Streetcar Named Desire”) and incorporation of its famous quotations into everyday language (“Louis, I think it is a beginning of a beautiful friendship” from Casablanca). All these cultural and intertextual repartees keep the high cultural artifacts alive in a common awareness.
There is a constant challenge to guess what they refer to at a given moment. It’s like a quiz. The authors do not explain what refers to what, and the audience is expected to figure it out on their own. That means that the audience is actually believed to be intelligent, which is not that frequent among the TV producers. It is a real intellectual feast; each time you notice something you missed the last time you watched it. What is more, if the audience does not recognize some personage or title mentioned in the show, people feel like they want to know who that person was in order to get a hint. And in the Google era, there is nothing easier than to put a name in the Google searcher. As they finally get the results they may become so interested that we want to learn some more about a given person, cultural movement, book, movie etc. mentioned in the show. And thus the audience’s intellectual capacity enlarges, the newly gained knowledge makes them more aware of their culture or the culture of other nations.
John Storey claims that “good popular culture (popular art) is able to re-establish the relationship (‘rapport’) between performer and audience that was lost with the advent of industrialization and urbanization” (An Introduction 1997: 66). “Gilmore Girls” does restore this kind of relationship. Not only the audience feels close to the protagonists and their problems but also becomes a part of their extraordinary and incredibly intelligent world full of the popular and high culture references.
Storey citing The Popular Arts states that it “is possible ‘to break with the false distinction… between the ‘serious’ and the ‘popular’ and between ‘entertainment’ and ‘values’” (An Introduction 1997:65). “Gilmore Girls” is both ‘serious’ and ‘popular’ and stands for both ‘entertainment’ and ‘values’. It combines those elements and expands the definition of both popular and high culture, presenting that these notions do not exclude each other, and that their coexistence is possible. It not only makes the components of elitist culture popular but also plays certain didactic role by using its protagonists and humorous dialogues to encourage teenagers, and adults as well, to read classic literature, get interested in history and culture.
A.Frąckowiak
[1] Storey, John An Introduction to Cultural Theory and Popular Culture; 1997
Hereafter cited in the text as An Introduction
[2] Williams, Raymond “Culture is Ordinary”; In Ann Gray and Jim McGuigan (Eds.), Studies in Culture:
An Introductory Reader; London: Arnold 1997, pp. 5-14; Hereafter cited in text as Williams
[4] Williams, Raymond Culture and Society; Harmondsworth: 1963
[5] Wertheimer, Ron “A Mother and a Daughter, Both With Growing Pains”; New York Times: Oct. 5, 2000
[6] Jewel, Dan “WB’s Drama Is Stooping Where It Need Not”; Media Life: Nov. 11, 2002
[7] Storm Jonathan, from The Philadelphia Inquirer; http://abcfamily.go.com/gilmoregirls/critics.html
[8] quotation from “Gilmore Girls”, season 2, episode: “Back In the Saddle Again”
[9] Williams, Raymond „The Analysis of Culture” In John Storey (Ed.), Cultural Theory and Popular Culture: A Reader; 1993 pp.64
[10] quotation from “Gilmore Girls”, season 5, episode: “Blame Booze and Melville”
[11] quotation from “Gilmore Girls”, season 5, episode: “Say Goodbye to Daisy Miller”
[12] quotation from “Gilmore Girls”, season 4, episode: “Scene in A Mall”
[13] quotation from “Gilmore Girls”, season 5, episode: “Girls in Bikinis, Boys Doing the Twist”
[14] quotation from “Gilmore Girls”, season 3, episode:
[15] quotation from “Gilmore Girls”, season 2, episode: “Run Away, Little Boy”
