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COPYRIGHT 2004 Blackwell Publishers Ltd.
IS POPULAR CULTURE EVIL? CERTAINLY IT DEALS WITH THEMES OF EVIL AND wickedness. It is hard to generalize, but Hollywood certainly thrives on a steady diet of evil, from the most sophisticated art house drama to the goriest horror flick. TV "reality" shows put deception and naked ambition under the microscope. Popular songs bemoan romantic betrayal and social injustice. Popular culture is fascinated by evil, in all of its many varied forms. But here is another, perhaps more perplexing, question: How do we see popular culture's evil as evil? How is it possible to perceive evil at all, inside or outside popular culture?
There are many different possible answers. Evolutionary biologists claim that good and evil are simply transmuted forms of species survival instinct. Developmental psychologists point to early childhood socialization. Religious perspectives, such as Christianity, look to a universal general revelation and our receptivity to such revelation. However we gain such a sensitivity to evil, it has proved to be widespread, and it runs deep within us.
But what interests me is not necessarily the genesis of our recognition of evil, but its development. Our recognition of evil proves, over time, to be extremely flexible and open to socialization. Our understanding of evil is always enculturated, informed by and inscribed across a panoply of texts continuously in circulation around (and through) us. When we spot evil, it is always by means of a mediated gaze, as through a reflecting telescope--a refracted, inflected image. And one of the most pervasive (and notorious) of these "agents of inflection" has been popular culture. How does popular culture influence the way we see evil? That is the question that this article seeks to address.
It is a common assumption that popular culture influences minds and worldviews the way an open drain influences a piece of lint in the bathtub, or the way a hungry blue whale inhales a school of helpless krill. Popular culture draws passive minds downward into its gaping, manipulative maw, usually through titillation, shock value, and sheer repetition. Over time, it reshapes you (and worse, your children), effectively warping your worldview past recognition by brute force, as it were. We could call this the "direct assault model," and it has some merit (e.g., it's hard to watch some of the music videos in circulation on MTV without feeling somewhat assaulted). But I believe that the direct assault model by itself comes up short. There is something more going on in popular cultural texts vis-a-vis our perception of evil than such a facile model can account for.
This article sets out to explore that "something more"--the ways that popular culture informs and shapes our perception of evil. I have found many insights into popular culture using Paul Ricoeur's theory of narrative representation. For our particular task, I will focus on a specific tension or dialectic within what Ricoeur calls "Mimesis[.sub.3]," where the world of the text and the world of the reader meet. I believe that we can find an analogous tension in the way that popular culture influences our perception of evil. Finally, I will examine two specific cases: the American daytime television talk show, and a very popular computer role-playing game (RPG) called Baldur's Gate II.
Let us begin with a brief rehearsal of the salient points of Ricoeur's theory of narrative.
Trouble in Text-World: The Tension in Mimesis[.sub.3]
Ricoeur's theory of narrative representation draws upon Aristotle's understanding of how art (specifically, tragic poetry) imitates life. He rejects Plato's "specular model" of representation, in which art is seen as inherently defective because it deviates from the original (Ricoeur, "Mimesis" 137-38). For Plato, a lake's reflection represents a tree better than a painting does, because the lake imitates reality more closely. Ricoeur turns instead to Aristotle's understanding of art as a creative and interpretive imitation (a "mimesis") of the human world of action and suffering. Rather than art being defective, the creative and interpretive nature of mimesis deepens the meaning of the world by ordering it into a plot, thereby generating a world with its own narrative intelligibility (138-39). Stories project worlds that render human reality more understandable. How can we understand this narrative mimesis, this interpretive understanding of human reality?
Ricoeur wants to understand narrative mimesis in context, so he uses a fairly familiar communications paradigm: speaker [right arrow] discourse [right arrow] audience. He sees these as three moments in a dialectic of narrative representation, which he dubs Mimesis[.sub.1], Mimesis[.sub.2], and Mimesis[.sub.3]. Mimesis[.sub.1], or prefiguration, deals with our preunderstanding of the world that makes narrative possible (social...
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