Customer Reviews

Trash Culture: Popular Culture and the Great Tradition

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This book was great. Based on the postmodern premise that there is value in both high Culture and low culture, Simon bases his chapters on well-tested (in the Cal Poly classroom where he teaches) theories that many elements of recent culture are easier to interpret when compared and contrasted with High Culture. So, he compares "Star Wars" and "The Faerie Queen", the shopping mall and the formal European garden, Playboy and The Book of the Courtier, Star Trek and Gulliver's Travels. And with each comparison, your eyes grow wide as you see the similarities. It's a wonderful way to evaluate modern cultural production. So, basically, anyone at all open to postmodern ideas will love this book. If you're a strict modernist you will probably hate it, but it'd be good for you to read it ;-)

I just finished reading this book for a class at Cal Poly (where Richard Simon taught, and probably taught the class I'm taking). It's hard to know exactly what to say about this book, because says the same things that Carl Jung and Joseph Campbell said years and years ago; that certain archetypes are recurrent in human myth, across times and across ethnic and geographic groups. The only difference is that Jung and Campbell attributed this to a "collective unconscious", whereas Simon in this book attributes it to the continuing influence of classic literature. Usually.

When describing Star Wars as a watershed moment in popular culture ( so far, true), he attributes its lineage to _The Faerie Queen_, which I've never heard of. What I have heard, REPEATEDLY, is that George Lucas cribbed Campbell's work on mythic archetypes extensively as he wrote Star Wars. Every mythic archetype Campbell ever wrote about is in the Original Star Wars trilogy, and it's not coincidental at all. However, Simon glosses over this (or is ignorant of it) and then claims that George Lucas must have read The Faerie Queen, as most of its scenes are somewhat close to Star Wars if you squint real hard and replace sex with imperial domination. He then claims that the story of Luke Skywalker rising to challenge his warlord father Darth Vader is somehow allegorical to the Vietnam War. The crux of this fantastic claim is that a son rising up to challenge his father must have to do with Vietnam, and not the numerous stories in history about sons challenging their fathers (Perhaps the ancient Greek myth of Zeus throwing Chronus into Tartarus is also a response to the Vietnam War?)

However, when he claims that The National Enquirer, et. al. are the same as Greek Tragedy, he talks of how this is possibly indicative of some human love of tragic and redemptive stories. It would appear that there is an extensive body of work (Jung and Campbell, for a start) examining just this phenomenon. He then proceeds to ignore this phenomenon entirely.

Overall, this book is old argument warmed over. It seems exploitative, and not like the work of scholarship it's presented as. However, it does seem like it would do well as a "beach" book.