Plus Que Ça Change

Renew

Archiving the Ephemeral

If I find out that you have bought a $90 red light sabre, Tara, well there's going to be trouble. -- Kevin Brabazon A few Saturdays ago, my 71-year old father tried to convince me of imminent responsibilities. As I am considering the purchase of a house, there are mortgages, bank fees and years of misery to endure. Unfortunately, I am not an effective Big Picture Person. The lure of the light sabre is almost too great. For 30 year old Generation Xers like myself, it is more than a cultural object. It is a textual anchor, and a necessary component to any future history of the present. Revelling in the aura of the Australian release for Star Wars: The Phantom Menace, this paper investigates popular memory, an undertheorised affiliation between popular culture and cultural studies.1 The excitement encircling the Star Wars prequel has been justified in terms of 'hype' or marketing. Such judgements frame the men and women cuing for tickets, talking Yodas and light sabres as fools or duped souls who need to get out more. My analysis explores why Star Wars has generated this enthusiasm, and how cultural studies can mobilise this passionate commitment to consider notions of popularity, preservation and ephemerality. We'll always have Tattooine. Star Wars has been a primary popular cultural social formation for a generation. The stories of Luke Skywalker, Princess Leia, Han Solo, Chewbacca, Darth Vader, Yoda, C-3PO and R2D2 offer an alternative narrative for the late 1970s and 1980s. It was a comfort to have the Royal Shakespearian tones of Alec Guinness confirming that the Force would be with us, through economic rationalism, unemployment, Pauline Hanson and Madonna discovering yoga. The Star Wars Trilogy, encompassing A New Hope, The Empire Strikes Back and Return of the Jedi, was released between 1977 and 1983. These films have rarely slipped from public attention, being periodically 'brought back' through new cinematic and video releases. The currency of Star Wars is matched with the other great popular cultural formations of the post-war period: the James Bond series and Star Trek. One reason for the continued success of these programmes is that other writers, film makers and producers cannot leave these texts alone. Bond survives not only through Pierce Brosnan's good looks, but the 'Hey Baby' antics of Austin Powers. Star Trek, through four distinct series, has become an industry that will last longer than Voyager's passage back from the Delta Quadrant. Star Wars, perhaps even more effectively than the other popular cultural heavyweights, has enmeshed itself into other filmic and televisual programming. Films like Spaceballs and television quizzes on Good News Week keep the knowledge system and language current and pertinent.2 Like Umberto Eco realised of Casablanca, Star Wars is "a living example of living textuality" (199). Both films are popular because of imperfections and intertextual archetypes, forming a filmic quilt of sensations and affectivities. Viewers are aware that "the cliches are talking among themselves" (Eco 209). As these cinematic texts move through time, the depth and commitment of these (con)textual dialogues are repeated and reinscribed. To hold on to a memory is to isolate a moment or an image and encircle it with meaning. Each day we experience millions of texts: some are remembered, but most are lost. Some popular cultural texts move from ephemera to popular memory to history. In moving beyond individual reminiscences -- the personal experiences of our lifetime -- we enter the sphere of popular culture. Collective or popular memory is a group or community experience of a textualised reality. For example, during the Second World War, there were many private experiences, but certain moments arch beyond the individual. Songs by Vera Lynn are fully textualised experiences that become the fodder for collective memory. Similarly, Star Wars provides a sense-making mechanism for the 1980s. Like all popular culture, these texts allow myriad readership strategies, but there is collective recognition of relevance and importance. Popular memory is such an important site because it provides us, as cultural critics, with a map of emotionally resonant sites of the past, moments that are linked with specific subjectivities and a commonality of expression. While Star Wars, like all popular cultural formations, has a wide audience, there are specific readings that are pertinent for particular groups. To unify a generation around cultural texts is an act of collective memory. As Harris has suggested, "sometimes, youth does interesting things with its legacy and creatively adapts its problematic into seemingly autonomous cultural forms" (79). Generation X refers to an age cohort born between the mid-1960s and the mid-1970s. Finally cultural studies theorists have found a Grail subculture. Being depthless, ambivalent, sexually repressed and social failures, Xers are a cultural studies dream come true. They were the children of the media revolution. Star Wars is integral to this textualised database. A fan on the night of the first screening corrected a journalist: "we aren't Generation X, we are the Star Wars generation" (Brendon, in Miller 9). An infatuation and reflexivity with the media is the single framework of knowledge in which Xers operate. This shared understanding is the basis for comedy, and particularly revealed (in Australia) in programmes like The Panel and Good News Week. Television themes, lines of film dialogue and contemporary news broadcasts are the basis of the game show. The aesthetics of life transforms television into a real. Or, put another way, "individual lives may be fragmented and confused but McDonald's is universal" (Hopkins 17). A group of textual readers share a literacy, a new way of reading the word and world of texts. Nostalgia is a weapon. The 1990s has been a decade of revivals: from Abba to skateboards, an era of retro reinscription has challenged linear theories of history and popular culture. As Timothy Carter reveals, "we all loved the Star Wars movies when we were younger, and so we naturally look forward to a continuation of those films" (9). The 1980s has often been portrayed as a bad time, of Thatcher and Reagan, cold war brinkmanship, youth unemployment and HIV. For those who were children and (amorphously phrased) 'young adults' of this era, the popular memory is of fluorescent fingerless gloves, Ray Bans, 'Choose Life' t-shirts and bubble skirts. It was an era of styling mousse, big hair, the Wham tan, Kylie and Jason and Rick Astley's dancing. Star Wars action figures gave the films a tangibility, holding the future of the rebellion in our hands (literally). These memories clumsily slop into the cup of the present. The problem with 'youth' is that it is semiotically too rich: the expression is understood, but not explained, by discourses as varied as the educational system, family structures, leisure industries and legal, medical and psychological institutions. It is a term of saturation, where normality is taught, and deviance is monitored. All cultural studies theorists carry the baggage of the Birmingham Centre into any history of youth culture. The taken-for-granted 'youth as resistance' mantra, embodied in Resistance through Rituals and Subculture: The Meaning of Style, transformed young people into the ventriloquist's puppet of cultural studies. The strings of the dancing, smoking, swearing and drinking puppet took many years to cut. The feminist blade of Angela McRobbie did some damage to the fraying filaments, as did Dick Hebdige's reflexive corrections in Hiding in the Light. However, the publications, promotion and pedagogy of Gen X ended the theoretical charade. Gen X, the media sophisticates, played with popular culture, rather than 'proper politics.' In Coupland's Generation X, Claire, one of the main characters believed that "Either our lives become stories, or there's just no way to get through them." ... We know that this is why the three of us left our lives behind us and came to the desert -- to tell stories and to make our own lives worthwhile tales in the process. (8) Television and film are part of this story telling process. This intense connection generated an ironic and reflexive literacy in the media. Television became the basis for personal pleasures and local resistances, resulting in a disciplined mobilisation of popular cultural surfaces. Even better than the real thing. As the youngest of Generation Xers are now in their late twenties, they have moved from McJobs to careers. Robert Kizlik, a teacher trainer at an American community college expressed horror as the lack of 'commonsensical knowledge' from his new students. He conducted a survey for teachers training in the social sciences, assessing their grasp of history. There was one hundred percent recognition of such names as Madonna, Mike Tyson, and Sharon Stone, but they hardly qualify as important social studies content ... . I wondered silently just what it is that these students are going to teach when they become employed ... . The deeper question is not that we have so many high school graduates and third and fourth year college students who are devoid of basic information about American history and culture, but rather, how, in the first place, these students came to have the expectations that they could become teachers. (n. pag.) Kizlik's fear is that the students, regardless of their enthusiasm, had poor recognition of knowledge he deemed significant and worthy. His teaching task, to convince students of the need for non-popular cultural knowledges, has resulted in his course being termed 'boring' or 'hard'. He has been unable to reconcile the convoluted connections between personal stories and televisual n

Packaging the Gifts of Nation

Fetishising Flesh

Slice and boil the one that got away the one that would play the lead in the Squash that Ate Chicago... the monster that always has the crowd wild eyed and screaming my god! is that really A zucchini. Strain off the water Adding one bouillon cube (any kind) and one tablespoon of olive oil Puree and serve hot and steaming with a slug of cold sour cream dumped into the center of each portion. Top with a sprinkle of dill seed, salt and season to taste. and now let us praise the chef the only artist whose creative work must speak to every sense the literary labors of Shakespeare are immense feeding and filling the soul... but a steady diet of language leaves the stomach growling and although it would garnish your life and delight your eye a garden salad by Picasso would be as tasty as old canvas and varnish and whatever the sculpture Rodin might put on the table would be a masterpiece for sure but nothing you could get your teeth into no doubt the sound of a string quartet is more uplifting than the sizzle of bacon in a pan but by intermission a sweaty musician doesn't smell as good the fine art of cookery demands the heart hand and eye of a complete renaissance man and as always muttering into her napkin counterpoint to this my wife: "Why is it when a woman cooks a meal it is just a meal but when a man cooks a meal it's such a big big deal!" Citation reference for this article MLA style: Ric Masten. "Killer Zucchini." M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 2.7 (1999). [your date of access] <http://www.uq.edu.au/mc/9910/zucchini.php>. Chicago style: Ric Masten, "Killer Zucchini," M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 2, no. 7 (1999), <http://www.uq.edu.au/mc/9910/zucchini.php> ([your date of access]). APA style: Ric Masten. (1999) Killer zucchini. M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 2(7). <http://www.uq.edu.au/mc/9910/zucchini.php> ([your date of access]).

'The Truth Is Over There'

Postmodern theory, quite rightly I think, warns us against the grand narratives of modernism; the stories that purport to show history as a progression to a present or future enlightened state. Such narratives are problematic because they produce the idea that history is somehow inevitable and fixed and perfectly knowable. I want to apply this notion of the grand narrative to a highly specific case study -- a certain genre of computer strategy games: the 'god' game, which utilises the grand narrative as a innate structuring principle. The god game is a sub-genre of the strategy game -- a genre that grew out of an analogue hobby: warfare simulations and board games. When transferred to the computer, the genre took with it many of its built-in restrictions -- "playing fields" composed of hex grids, elaborate tables charting vital statistics, and a "turn-based" playing regime. The advantages of the computer were that it could automate a machine opponent for the human player to compete against -- and it also automated the various dice rolls and charts that made the games tedious to the uninitiated. Most of these warfare simulations limited their subject matter to specific historical settings -- great battles and so on --, but the transfer to the digital medium enabled more ambitious aims. Simply put, to chart and direct the course of human history. The two first and still most famous attempts to do this were Sim City and Populous. The former put the player in the role of mayor and town planner, and charged them to build and maintain a city. The latter conferred on the player Godhood -- and placed them in charge of a small band of worshippers who had to be looked after by changing the landscape and calling down volcanoes and earthquakes on rival tribes. These games look primitive today, but they developed and refined the conceptual and visual vocabulary (particularly the "gods-eye-view" -- the sense of viewing and manipulating the events on screen from a great distance that paradoxically imparted perfect detail) that virtually all their successors would utilise. It was a game (portentously) called Civilization that would first marry the god game elements and the strategic warfare elements with a codified and modular map of human history. In it the player was directed to lead a tribe (the English, the French, the Egyptians etc) throughout human history, researching new technologies, exploring, fighting, conquering, until the space age. The final goal, the telos, was to construct a spaceship that could successfully transport the player's chosen tribe to the Alpha Centauri solar system. The choice of tribe affected a few initial starting conditions -- principally the number of beginning technologies. But other than that it assumed no overriding cultural differences or imperatives and imposed on all an ahistorically westernised path of conquest and colonialism. Historical changes and events were rendered into discrete, abstracted symbols -- monuments to build and place in a player's city. And these symbols were resolutely western -- Shakespeare's Globe, Darwin's voyage on the Beagle, the Manhattan project. I don't think it is too much to suggest that computer games such as this are highly effective tools of the hegemonic apparatus, through their seductive encoding of specific historio-political models through an entertaining front end. The time is ripe to begin to develop more sophisticated and resistant reading strategies to respond to these most beguiling of games. Citation reference for this article MLA style: Nick Caldwell. "Games R US -- and Most of the Western World as Well: The Hegemony of the Strategic Computer Game." M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 1.5 (1998). [your date of access] <http://www.uq.edu.au/mc/9812/strat.php>. Chicago style: Nick Caldwell, "Games R US -- and Most of the Western World as Well: The Hegemony of the Strategic Computer Game," M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 1, no. 5 (1998), <http://www.uq.edu.au/mc/9812/strat.php> ([your date of access]). APA style: Nick Caldwell. (1998) Games r US -- and most of the western world as well: the hegemony of the strategic computer game. M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 1(5). <http://www.uq.edu.au/mc/9812/strat.php> ([your date of access]).

Invading the Ivory Tower

XX @ MM

"You Have a Basket for the Bread, Just Put the Bloody Chicken in It"

Welfare in the Future -

The End of the Virtual Community

Unacceptably New

The Audience in Media Activism