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references)

1) Using an example drawn from television, examine how certain myths, as defined in

the readings and the course, are perpetuated and/or challenged. In what ways are

dominant ideas or worldviews expressed? How do they work to position us as viewers?

What does this tell us about the ways popular culture can serve to reinforce and/or

undermine power relationships?

There is a reason Community still has a resolute fanbase obsessing over its episodes and

characters through fan works and its subreddit. For a show about the exploits and

interpersonal dynamics of an eclectic study group at Greendale Community College, it draws

upon its audience’s pop culture trivia when it incessantly comments on other media. Viewers

accordingly herald the show as quintessentially postmodern. Appreciating Community’s

postmodernism allows me to decipher its hegemonic hyperreality and discourse on fandoms.

Recognizing how Community embraces the aesthetic worldview involves dissecting

postmodernism’s intertextual nature in one of its episodes, “Contemporary American

Poultry,” by referencing and pastiching mafia films. Employing the insights of the

worldview’s thinkers, like authorial meaning’s collapse from Roland Barthes, will contribute

towards explaining the place of the episode’s allusions in a social context. Community’s

references and pastiches promote imbuing people’s lives with pop culture.

Before delving into postmodernism as a notion, let alone apply it to the mafia homages of

“Contemporary American Poultry,” defining signs and codes in terms of the worldview is

vital. While signs are indicative qualities representing an idea (signified) in a concrete form

(signifier), codes are the established principles allowing signs to impart their intended

concept. Codes are the conventions and context whereby signs construct their meaning

(Kruger et al., 2004). A sign of postmodernism is a culture of quotations given theorist,

Fredric Jameson, makes his assertion as to why this culture contributes toward the

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worldview’s philosophical code. After all, postmodernism is “a world in which stylistic

innovation is no longer possible” (Jameson, 1985, p. 115). On that note, quotation culture

calls for cultural production where texts are merely a collage of familiar elements. In this

vein, references are crucial in constructing Community’s signature humor. Not only is the

dialogue in the show overflowing with pop culture quips, but its filmmaking can also render a

referential subtext. This intertextuality results in stories functioning on a contextual level

accounting for the story’s significance in an array of media artefacts and images (Collins,

1993). Community is consequently hyperconscious of its relationship with other works. A

case in point is “Contemporary American Poultry” invoking The Godfather as viewers watch

Jeff leave the room and turn to look back to see Pierce kissing Abed’s hand at the doorway

while Troy slowly closes the door, shutting Jeff out (Cutler et al., 2010, 6:40). There is also

an allusion to the opening voiceover of Goodfellas when Abed narrates, “As far back as I can

remember, I always wanted to be in a mafia movie” (3:45). These tributes to the mafia genre

paradoxically deprive the show of its originality. No longer do Community episodes claim

their identity given they are merely postmodernist products dialoguing with various works.

With that in mind, the show’s quotation culture perpetuates a postmodern myth: the author’s

death. Against this context, myths convey an ideological connotation as the logical,

established truth from challenging alternative notions. According to Bignell (2002), they

appropriate existing signs to make them function on another level, directing readers to decode

signs in one way and no other. Such is the case in light of postmodernism reframing

intertextuality as a medium for advancing and validating the belief about original thinking’s

implosion. The belief criticizes and rules out the attitude that artists decide the point of their

pieces since this attitude imposes limitations on how decoders should interpret their works.

To cite Barthes (1977), “a text is not a line of words releasing a single ‘theological’ meaning

(the ‘message’ of the Author-God), but a multi-dimensional space where a variety of

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writings, none of them original, blend and clash” (p. 146). Look no further than when

Community goes beyond quoting texts. Rather than controlling meaning with creativity, the

show’s writers and directors merely derive their ideas from past cultural production. Only in

recycling, recirculating, and recapturing the style and substance of past aesthetics can it

appeal to tasteful viewers who take delight from textual interplay. Indeed, the show goes as

far as to penetrate its audience’s pop culture subconscious when it transcends its typical

sitcom vocabulary. Community highlights “the relationship between [its] creator, [Dan]

Harmon, and the media-literate audience,” which “recognizes a shared and sophisticated

knowledge between encoder and decoder” (Hanna, 2014, p. 158). Its episodes absorb and

simulate prior genre storytelling approaches to evoke the viewer’s media experiences. In

“Contemporary American Poultry,” the plot is intentionally reminiscent of Goodfellas. It

follows the study group’s rise in dominance through the chicken finger supply chain at

Greendale in the same way as Henry Hill’s ascent in the mob ranks. Chicken fingers corrupt

the group just as the supply chain of illegal drugs deprave Henry. Another example is a

tracking shot accompanying doo-wop music and narration during a crime montage about the

study group’s chicken finger distribution process (Cutler et al., 2010, 12:52), which exudes

Martin Scorsese’s gangster filmography. What these pastiching endeavors represent is the

episode being nothing but a web of preexisting works imploding its sense of authorship.

Since episodes communicate their outlook via pop culture vocabulary, Community

subsequently naturalizes postmodernism’s hyperreality as the inevitable, compelling

consequence of diminishing the author.

To realize why Community convinces its audience in championing media as a surrogate for

experiencing life, an introduction to hegemony. Hegemony is a process where a worldview

becomes dominant due to myths naturalizing said worldview’s ideas by making them appear

common sense. Myths perpetually beget hegemony considering hegemony is an authoritative

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power’s struggle in winning consent to its influence from those it subjugates (Eagleton,

1994). The myth that creators hinge on intertextuality, evident in authorship’s collapse, to

depict their experiences is a testament to postmodernism’s power in imposing hyperreality,

the seamless interweaving of reality with textual interpretations of reality. Hyperreality

submits people to media exposure, which they presume as authentic, to the point of shaping

their cultural expectations and ideals. They infer value from representations of

representations over real-life itself since both are indistinguishable (Baudrillard, 1994). This

postmodern authority is reinforced in Community episodes vindicating the filtering of reality

in pop culture’s image like they are interdependent. That is, the show likens media as a social

necessity for communication as they mediate and articulate human messages. It does this in

reworking other texts for its own ends out of adopting them into its character arcs. As Wells-

Lassagne (2012) puts it, Community “[transforms] the mundane … into the spectacular,

insisting on the elements of fiction in our everyday lives” (para. 24). Hence, its viewers are

uncertain where realism ends, and pop culture begins. Cultural products function as a frame

of reference for navigating experiences personally. A shot-for-shot visualization of the final

scene from Sixteen Candles in “Contemporary American Poultry” contextualizes the

wholesome relationship growth between Jeff and Abed (Cutler et al., 2010, 19:40). The

episode also thematizes Abed’s need to resolve his struggle in connecting and socializing

with people through successfully running a chicken finger supply chain based on his

understanding of mafia films. In his words, “[I am] not doing a mafia movie. … Before, I

needed [movies and TV shows] because the day-to-day world made no sense to me. But now,

[everyone is] speaking the same language: chicken” (10:22). Magnifying the narrative with

intertextuality is indicative of the sincerity Community extracts from other texts, even if they

originate from a fictitious complex of media tropes. Doing so opens up a corresponding

discourse on the way fans draw genuine social significance from the contrived show.

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Namely, the discourse being Community’s postmodern communication supporting a

participatory culture where several viewers go beyond watching the show to enrich their

consumption experience. What is meant by discourse is the means the media apply their

language to enforce importance towards social forces influencing people. Put simply,

discourse “defines [the framing of subjects]” in “positioning who it is possible to be and what

it is possible to do” (Thomson, 2011, para. 2). With regards to Community, its implosion of

originality invites sophisticated viewers to share in the show’s intertextual construction

considering they invest in its hyperreal story as much as its creators. When they decode its

layers of referential insights, the show empowers them as prosumers circulating their

appreciative sentiments about Community among themselves. Detmering (2014) posits fans

want to cultivate their relationship with it in sustaining an online community emotionally and

critically attached to Community through their collective pop culture understanding. The

show accordingly offers an incentive for these sophisticated viewers to be vocal participants

contributing to an interactive space creating dialogue in social networking platforms like

Reddit and Tumblr. Fortunately, Community’s writers weave in its responses and audience

opinions into its writing because they are rewarding this transmedia viewership. An example

of this is Dan Harmon, the show’s creator, asking his Twitter followers to suggest names for

the monkey, which they dubbed Annie’s Boobs, featured in “Contemporary American

Poultry.” Similarly, Pierce’s attempts to coin the slang, streets ahead, in the episode hints at

the tweets from Harmon mocking a disapproving viewer for supposedly inventing the term.

Inserting these interactions instils meaning in these individual expressions amid Community’s

fandom, affirming fan contributions matter to its storytelling. As such, the show’s community

engagement upholds postmodernism’s self-creation politics since its fans reject canon in

favour of tailoring its narratives to cohere with their subjectivity. Self-creation is about

defining people’s individuality according to their deviation from enculturated norms. In

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Foucault’s words (1997), one’s relationship with their identity is one “of differentiation, of

creation, of innovation” (p. 166). Critical and imaginative outlets for fans to personalize what

the show could be like, from opinion posts to textual poaching, is emblematic of their internal

values and desires.

On so many levels, Community is an epitome of postmodernism. Its intertextuality denotes

the worldview’s quotation culture. The show’s pastiching confirms a postmodernist collapse

of creativity and authorship. These references and pastiches amount to a reality where

Community’s characters and themes relate with contrived texts, hegemonizing postmodern

simulations of reality. This hyperreal communication is representative of a discourse

concerning fans identifying with the fictional show when they draw meaning in Community’s

online community through sharing creations and socializing, which sustains self-creation

politics associated with postmodernity. Community consequently treasures pop culture as a

means to an end and an end in itself.

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References
Barthes, R. (1977). Image, music, text. Fontana Press.

Baudrillard, J. (1994). Simulacra and simulation.  Michigan Publishing.

Bignell, J. (2002). Media semiotics: An introduction. Manchester University Press.

Collins, J. (1993). Genericity in the nineties: Eclectic irony and the new sincerity. In J.

Collins, H. Radner, & A. Collins (Eds.), Film theory goes to the movies (pp. 242–

263). Routledge.

Cutler, E. (Writer), Dornetto, K. (Writer), & Shapeero, T. (Director). (2010, April 22).

Contemporary American Poultry (Season 1, Episode 21) [Television series episode].

In D. Harmon (Showrunner), Community. Sony Pictures Television.

Detmering, L. (2014). “Just tell me the rules, and I will follow”: Active viewership,

community engagement, and Dan Harmon’s Community. Studies In Popular

Culture, 37(1), 39–56.

Eagleton, T. (1994). Ideology and its vicissitudes in Western Marxism. In S. Žižek

(Ed.), Mapping ideology  (pp. 111–125). Verso.

Hanna, B. (2014). “That’s so meta!” Allusions for the media-literate audience in Community

(and beyond). In A. Lee (Ed.), A sense of Community: Essays on the television series

and its fandom (pp. 147–160). McFarland.

Jameson, F. (1985). Postmodernism and consumer society. In H. Foster (Ed.), Postmodern

culture (pp. 111–125). Pluto Press.

Kruger, S., Rayner, P., & Wall, P. (2004). Media studies: The essential introduction (2nd

ed.). Routledge.

Foucault, M. (1997). Ethics: Subjectivity and truth. New Press.

Thomson, P. (2011, July 10). A Foucauldian approach to discourse analysis. Patter.

https://patthomson.net/2011/07/10/a-foucualdian-approach-to-discourse-analysis/

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Wells-Lassagne, S. (2012). Transforming the traditional sitcom: Abed in Community.

TV/Series, 1. https://doi.org/10.4000/tvseries.1560

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