Why a professor writes about Buffy
How a Marquette University philosophy professor accidentally fell into the role of pop culture expert
I wish I could say that my decision to publish on popular culture was intentional. In fact, it was largely accidental. Trained as a philosophy historian, I wrote my first paper on popular culture for a conference. The graduate students running the show asked me to provide a keynote talk. I joked I’d do it — but only if they let me talk about Buffy the Vampire Slayer, a TV show I watched avidly.
To my surprise, they called my bluff.
So I was stuck coming up with something. How was I going to do this talk? How could I still be philosophical? To make the paper work, I brought in some Shakespeare. It was then I realized I could integrate my philosophical interests—and other interests—with pop culture. Since then, I’ve continued to write on pop culture and even co-edited a book with Rod Carveth about the TV show Mad Men, among other writings.
In retrospect, though, my interest in writing on popular culture seems natural. It’s an outlet for me to explore philosophical issues that interest most thinking people.
But it’s not new. In fact, it stretches back to Plato.
The combination of juxtaposing “high culture” with “popular culture” has long been a philosophical commonplace. Plato did it in the Republic when he criticized the poets and playwrights of his day, which shows the importance Plato placed on the influence of popular culture. For him, a good city depended vitally on the stories its citizens heard, saw enacted, or read. Of course, Plato was highly critical of the popular culture of his day, though for us that popular culture stands at the very pinnacle of what we take to be high culture today. As Alexander Nehemas has written, “Scratch the surface of any attack on the popular arts — the early Christians against the Roman circus, the Puritans against Shakespeare, Coleridge against the novel, the various assaults on photography, film, jazz, television, pop music, the Internet, or video games — and you will find Plato’s criticisms of poetry. For the fact is that the works of both Homer and Aeschylus, whatever else they were in classical Athens, were, first and foremost, popular entertainment.”
Still, I think Plato’s concern bears a close resemblence to that expressed by Nick Hornby in his novel High Fidelity”
“What came first – the music or the misery? Did I listen to the music because I was miserable? Or was I miserable because I listened to the music? Do all those records turn you into a melancholy person? People worry about kids playing with guns, and teenagers watching violent videos; we are scared that some sort of culture of violence will take them over. Nobody worries about kids listening to thousands — literally thousands — of songs about broken hearts and rejection and pain and misery and loss.”
(Or you can watch the movie version here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nSlleE9s9gI)
But what are we to make of today’s popular culture? How can we think about it philosophically without resorting to knee-jerk distinctions that privilege writing about high culture over popular culture?
It’s easy to criticize popular culture. I’m not here to say that popular culture and high culture are the same, but it’s become increasingly clear to me that the line between them is awfully fuzzy. Some of the best high cultural works deal with the same problems as the best popular culture works.
Anyway, once I found I could integrate my philosophical interests with other interests, I found I couldn’t stop. I wrote on music, comic books, movies, and television. Most recently, I contributed an essay to a volume on the TV show Veronica Mars and have a forthcoming co-edited volume (with Jacob Held) on the British fantasy novelist Terry Pratchett.
Most of the issues I write about when I write about popular culture are recognizably philosophical topics: the relation between the individual and society; the effects of routine and bureaucracy on people’s actions and beliefs; how we can know what others are thinking; the relation between our experience of the world and our self-knowledge; and the relation of the past and inherited traditions to present conditions.
Let me give two examples.
First, from Mad Men. The presumably main character, Don Draper, exemplifies problems we all face. On the one hand, there’s the question of who he is. He has taken on an assumed identity in an attempt to escape his past, yet we see him continually flashing back to incidents in his childhood that were clearly formative of his character as it now exists.
Despite his advice to Peggy Olsen in season two when he tells her “This never happened. It will shock you how much it never happened,” you can never forget the personal past and the way it shapes you.
At the same time, he himself feels the weight of history and the ways its constrains him and he also feels the pressures of conformity. He has to take on the role of “successful advertising creator,” though the corporate environment in which he finds himself is constricting.
And he’s always engaging with people younger than himself: his mentoring Peggy, his marriage to Megan, and his various affairs are all an attempt to feel that he’s younger than he is. But he himself admits cluelessness about the present and the shape of the future, at one point telling his co-workers “Let’s pretend we know what 1963 looks like.”
The larger philosophical points here are two-fold. One can never be a blank slate or reinvent oneself from scratch. Who you are is a in great part a function of your early experiences. At the same time, the show highlights the massive uncertainties of modern experience. “Let’s pretend we know.” But that’s just it — we can’t know, can no longer know, what 1963 (or 2014) looks like.
The artfulness of this quote is striking. It’s both a philosophical proposition about the lack of certainty in modern times, what Hannah Arendt talks about as thinking without a banister, and it’s the shows creator warning us that his vision of 1963 is pretend. That kind of historical knowldge is no longer possible for us. The contingencies of history are too much to contain in narrative.
A second example, this one from the TV show Gilmore Girls, a show created by the enourmusly talented Amy Sherman-Palladino. The show centers around the rleations ship between a single mother and her daughter who live in a somewhat eccentric small town in Connecticut.
The location is important because it’s the location of so many classic movies that today are known as “screwball comedies,” movies distinguished by their wit, fast-paced dialogue, and concern with how to live well under the conditions of ordinary life, which, after all, can be extraordinary.
The daughter in the series, Rory, is talking to her mother, Lorelei, about the men they’re each in love with. At the end of the conversation she says, with conviction that “Every relationship is just a big honkin’ leap of faith.”
The colloquialism of the statement is charming, but the sentiment is one that is related to those I identified in Mad Men. We can’t know about relationships. There are no guideposts. Even more, in this quote I hear echoes both of Kierkegaard, who makes it clear that the certainties of the past are not available to us and we need to make a “leap of faith,” but even further back in time, there is an echo of Martin Luther, who, in breaking with the certainties of his present found he could no longer pretend he knew what 1517 was like.
I know that statements like this can strike the casual viewer of TV as a stretch. After all, it’s only TV. But I’m sure there were ancient Greeks telling Plato to lighten up because “it’s only a play.”
All I can do as someone who writes about popular culture is invite the reader to consider the possibility that, in the words of Stanley Cavell, thinking about popular culture is an opportunity “to learn to think undistractedly about things that ordinary human beings cannot help thinking about, or anyway cannot help having occur to them….”
These are just two instances of what I find fascinating about popular culture. It can capture a sense of the experience of life as it is lived to today, but at its best, make us sit up, perk up our ears, and do some thinking.
The stories they tell entrance us, but they do not merely entertain us, though they do that in abundance. Popular culture can tell us about ourselves, our past, our present, and raise profound questions about who we are and what we think we know — but really don’t.
