The Triumph of Pap Culture

By Frank Trippett

Summertime is the season for sanctioned cultural slumming, or so holds a seldom examined article of American folklore. The basic notion is hinted at by language that appears all the time in cultural journalism--"summer entertainment," "summer movies," "summer reading." Such phrases suggest that it is all right for respectable Americans to indulge their appetites for cultural cotton candies when it is too hot to digest quality stuff. Anybody caught at the beach reading something other than Proust or Nabokov is thus assured of amnesty.

The folklore is sound as far as it goes, but it does not go nearly far enough. Cultural slumming is certainly big in the summer, but nowadays it hardly lets up in the fall, winter and spring either. The American craving for cultural junk has become a yen for all seasons. Book buyers did not wait until summer to turn Miss Piggy's Guide to Life and 101 Uses for a Dead Cat (ugh!) into bestsellers, and disc jockeys will not stop broadcasting "easy listening" schmaltz when autumn arrives. The rush for fatuous books on diets and moneymaking never lets up, and of the endless boom in frothy tales like Harlequin Books and Silhouette Romances, Book Marketing Executive Kay Sexton of Chicago says: "People are absolutely addicted."

In fact, pop (for popular) culture has become--to borrow the word that means childish, meatless mush--mostly pap culture, a.k.a. trash, kitsch and schlock. In the ten alltime top moneymaking movies, most of fairly recent vintage, the pap quotient is stunning; the list includes: Star Wars, Jaws, The Empire Strikes Back, Grease, The Exorcist, The Godfather, Superman and The Sting. The same is true of the very hottest novels (among them: The Godfather, The Exorcist, Jaws, Jonathan Livingston Seagull and Love Story) and of the top nonfiction books of the past ten years (The Late Great Planet Earth, Chariots of the Gods, Your Erroneous Zones, The Joy of Sex). And almost everybody knows the pap quotient of television: Hee Haw is still going strong.

Though the prevalence of lightweight cultural matter may not be surprising, its universal acceptance is nonetheless striking. Two decades ago, the priests of high culture railed at the possible harm to mind, spirit and aesthetics that might result from the proliferation of junky cultural works--"Masscult," to use the sinister word that Critic Dwight Macdonald put on the lot of it. Said Macdonald: "It is not just unsuccessful art. It is non-art. It is even anti-art." Now cultural pap is bigger than ever, but the champions of high culture seldom bother to protest any more. Pap has triumphed as an American staple, and now so abounds that it tends to be noticed, like the air, only when it contains some particularly noxious pollutants.

Pop pap, to be sure, draws occasional fire. A new film version of Tarzan, the Ape Man opened last week to great volleys of critical derision and scorn. And rightly so, since this version of Tarzan--directed by John Derek and starring his wife Bo Derek as Jane--spoils a perfectly good pap yarn by trying to transform it from a juvenile adventure story into a piece of erotica. In contrast, the hottest new "summer" movie, Raiders of the Lost Ark, has won loud applause from most critics and all audiences because it does precisely what pap is supposed to do. Raiders, a compilation of cliff-hanging adventures of the sort formerly featured in weekly movie serials, is designed to appeal to the child--even the child in the adult spectator.

By definition, cultural pap plays to the child in everybody. It can offer only entertainment, diversion, maybe distraction, without any promise of redeeming cultural value. When a work offers more--exaltation or the possibility of elaborate aesthetic responses--it has ceased to be pap; it verges on becoming art. Unlike art, pap is easy to absorb, which is precisely why it is perennially popular--and not only in low places. Dwight Eisenhower relished his Zane Grey westerns just as Ronald Reagan relishes such epics by Poet Robert Service as The Shooting of Dan McGrew and The Cremation of Sam McGee. John Kennedy enjoyed Ian Fleming's James Bond yarns, and Lyndon Johnson found it nice to have Muzak piped into the White House. And why not? Pap, though bipartisan, is inherently democratic.

Yet pap has its standards, and they are often as elusive and controversial as those of high culture. "Someone's kitsch is somebody else's masterpiece," says Film Critic Vincent Canby. Author Judith Krantz alluded to the book Alien, when it had the nerve to knock her own kitschy Scruples out of top spot on the bestseller list, as "a 270-page piece of schlock." Every piece of pap has its own critics and partisans, as every consumer of the product realizes sooner or later. Humorist Russell Baker is not being merely funny when he writes: "I am a glutton for trash. I love it in almost all forms except television. I can race through two or three smutty novels and a half-dozen gossip magazines and hear the Top 40 playing on the stereo in the background while the television viewer is wasting three hours and getting nothing but the tepid, watered-down stuff afforded by three or four sitcoms and an evening soap opera."

Clearly, the U.S. has evolved a special pap-culture aesthetic.

Sometimes it is as intricate as the aesthetic theory that Litterateur D.B. Wyndham Lewis applied to poetry. "There is bad Bad Verse and good Bad Verse," said Lewis, and a great many Americans now say pretty much the same thing about pap. In fact, the devotees of good bad pap, particularly in the film form, add up to a subculture within the pop-pap culture.

This fact has even given rise recently to commercial festivals of bad movies featuring films like The Terror of Tiny Town, a 1938 western with a cast of midgets. Books like The Golden Turkey Awards (1980) and The Fifty Worst Films of All Time sell tens of thousands of copies. The Dial magazine earlier this year offered an article titled "Five Great Bad Movies." Author John Malone discussed Duel in the Sun, Elephant Walk, The Naked Jungle, The Rains of Ranchipur and Legend of the Lost, and ventured guidance on how to tell a good bad movie from a bad bad movie. Says Malone: "A great bad movie must be in color."

Actually, despite all the intricate aesthetic distinction, good bad pap appeals to some whimsical people for the same reason that simple good pap appeals to others: entirely as a source of fun. Many observers fear that the explosion of pap in the media-ridden 20th century might harm society's more serious culture.

So far, as Sociologist Herbert Gans points out in Popular Culture and High Culture, there has been no evidence to support such worries. Ultimately, pap is an annoyance and a hazard only to those who take it seriously--which, perhaps significantly, seldom includes those who enjoy it. --By Frank Trippett

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