Reading Culture II

ENG 333: Introduction to Cultural Studies

• How can dominant ideologies successfully
present themselves as simply the way the Barthes’ Mythology: Recap
world should be?

• By appropriating popular culture and

repurposing it.

• They drained popular ideas of their real

meaning and then repackaged them to create
myths. That created new and often very
different implications.

• Images, he called signs, were stripped off

meaning when they were removed from their
proper context.

• The result was the spread of a uniform,

unthreatening and above all bourgeoise
ideology – a comfort blanket of myth that
might be cozy and reassuring, but could
easily prove stifling.
• The myth of a charismatic revolutionary
• What did he really stand for? How has he been depicted in popular
culture?
• And what does his iconic image represent now?
• Barthes argues that the signs the society projects unto the
revolutionary bear very little relations to his actual qualities.
• Stripped of this context, his image becomes a sign with other uses.
• It can exploit consumer’s eagerness to identify with qualities that
they believe symbolize youthfulness, rebelliousness, hatred of
authority.
• Companies that exploit the image, introduce a second order of
signification, a new myth, one that symbolizes something different.
It’s an image drained of real meaning, one that no longer refers to
the revolutionary's real beliefs.
• Before long his photohgraph is approproiated to sell all sorts of
products. Buying which a consumer thinks she is making a statement
about her individualism, rebellion and anti-capitalism. When in
truth, the image is now a capitalist commodity.
• By buying the commodity, she buys into tht conformity.
• It’s a sort of a rebellion the bourgeoise society is happy to live with.
• Popular culture has taken a real person whose real ideas posed real
danger, and turned him into an image, which has been safely
reinvented as myth.
• Companies that exploit the image, introduce a
second order of signification, a new myth, one
that symbolizes something different. It’s an image
drained of real meaning, one that no longer refers
to the revolutionary's real beliefs.
• His photograph is appropriated to sell all sorts of
products. Buying which a consumer thinks she is
making a statement about her individualism,
rebellion and anti-capitalism. When in truth, the
image is now a capitalist commodity.
• By buying the commodity, she buys into the
conformity.
• It’s a sort of a rebellion the bourgeoise society is
happy to live with.
• Popular culture has taken a real person whose real
ideas posed real danger, and turned him into an
image, which has been safely reinvented as myth.
Can You Read
Signs?
Understanding The Myth of Sherlock
 Who is Sherlock
Holmes?

• Arthur Conan Doyle first introduced literature's most intriguing detective, Holmes in his novel  A Study in Scarlet in 1887.

• Holmes was instantly popular, and went on to feature in a further 56 short stories and 4 novels by Conan Doyle over the next 40 years.

• before making the leap to other mediums, starring in countless movies, TV shows, stage plays, and even video games, becoming the most prolific fictional
character on screen too.

• From 1908 to 2018, Holmes has appeared on screens big and small over 250 times (CNN).

• According to Guinness World Records, Sherlock Holmes has been portrayed on TV and film more than any other literary human character.
 Why is Holmes such an enduring character?
• Holmes is known for his proficiency with observation, deduction, forensic science and logical
reasoning that borders on the fantastic.

• Knowledgeable in many subjects, including anatomy, chemistry, mathematics, law, and

sensational literature, just to name a few.

• Has a deep appreciation for music and plays the violin.

• A physically imposing character, standing at six feet tall and proficient in boxing, fencing, and
singlestick.

• Has a sharp wit and many physical strengths to match.

 Is he perfect? The person we all wish we could be?
The detective is by no means perfect, has his vices.

• Holmes is logical to the point of being cold and dispassionate. He’s cold, highly calculating, far removed from
emotion and sympathy

• Has no interest in romance or romantic relationships, is emotionally distant.

• Throughout the Holmes stories, the detective doesn’t have the kindest opinion of women in general.

• Makes sweeping generalizations about women which could be, by today’s standards, considered misogynistic.

• Holmes also has an obsessive personality.

• He frequently turns to drugs like morphine and cocaine, both of which were legal in 19 th  Century England.
 Modernizations, Why Holmes?
The mythological content

• Illustration of the power of the human mind.

• The sparks of ratiocination allied to a thorough awareness of anthropological and

cultural worlds Holmes can always divine the essence of things.

• The ‘natural’ excess of his detecting brilliance.

• Neither a professional whose knowledge is properly social and institutional, nor an

asocial loner whose know-how is atavistically locked inside the self,

• Holmes represents the benevolent bourgeoisie—with his servants, his biographer,

his proletarian helpers, his payment per case—all clothed in meritocratic garb.

• His status is supposedly earned through performance, for example, through his
magical readings of dust and detail and deportment, but such tricks merely affirm
his nature.

• Social class is displaced by genius, a transition that should be awkward but is

nonetheless smoothed over by dramatic richness.
 The Embedded Myth in many Sherlocks
• Myth functions in two stages here.

• First, the difference between original and ‘conversion’ is asserted, as the diversity engineered by new actors,
new production design, and slick televisuality is amply celebrated.

• Then, from this plurality, a unity is mysteriously produced: the figure of Sherlock Holmes is true for all time,
a common pattern underlying all the versions and all the competing visions whose diversity is but an empty
house distracting from the essential bricks and mortar of the Holmesian edifice.

• What is more curious is that the mythical character of the leading detective is purified rather than challenged
through reinventions of the day.
 The Embedded Myth in many
Sherlocks
• Difference is essential to all the twenty-first century Sherlocks, so that media brands can defend their ‘uniqueness’
by referring to other ‘unique’ brands: Benedict Cumberbatch treads the Spencer Hart catwalk at London
Collections, and Belstaff supplies the coat that defines this Sherlock’s silhouette and outline.

• Cumberbatch’s Sherlock is suited and booted beyond his apparent income; an urbane fashion classic perfectly at
one with contemporary consumer culture, his masculinity realized simultaneously through mental prowess and
sartorial elegance.

• Myth effortlessly combines the values of capital and art .

 The Embedded Myth in many
Sherlocks
• Showrunners’ and movie directors’ names thus become another brand condensed into the general fog of
mutually reinforcing brands and celebrities: Guy Ritchie, Lucy Liu, Benedict Cumberbatch, Jonny Lee
Miller, Spencer Hart, Steven Moffat, Robert Downey Jr, Belstaff, Mark Gatiss, Martin Freeman, Jude
Law.

• Multiple contemporary Sherlocks are distinguished through the actors who embody them. Each brings a
specific stardom, and each brings a distinct physique and physiognomy to the part: Robert Downey Jr’s
wiry frame is just about plausible as a fistfighting, action-hero Holmes, while Jonny Lee Miller proffers
a more robust, ‘blokey’ shape compared to the elongated and lean form of Benedict Cumberbatch.

• Downey and Miller code a sense of the ‘geezer’ detective when set against Cumberbatch, whose
appearance is strongly readable in relation to very differently classed embodiment.
 The Embedded Myth in many
Sherlocks
• Displaying an awareness of contemporary cultural norms and mores, these Sherlocks are
reconfigured visibly and obviously to make ready sense to today’s audiences.

• The mythic unity underlying different Sherlocks who can otherwise be taken to represent
their own self-branded distinctions and their own authorial artistry.

• To engineer a sense of timelessness and universality, an overarching, fixed, and stable

Holmes has to be deduced from the shifting signs and clues of popular culture.

• Nowhere is the essential Sherlock on view; this is a fiction produced out of and through
fictions: a story about stories.

• Sherlock is almost an idea, a platonic idea of human reason and cleverness that can be
readily referred to without ever actually being found in existence. by remaking a figure
already sedimented in cultural history, new versions can align themselves with the virtues of
history rather than shallow nowness.
 The Embedded Myth in many
Sherlocks
• The basic activity of all contemporary Sherlocks is undoubtedly that of appropriation; languages of
homage and fidelity permeate the public statements of showrunners and directors as they testify to a
lineage stretching back to 1887.

• In this regard, the real genius of Holmes is that reimaginings can be tailored to current trends and tastes
while appearing to dissolve these surfaces into the profound depths of diachronic culture.

• His fall into negation is instead one that descends from real, historical cultural difference to imagined,
ideological sameness.

• We are therefore dealing here with a character whose death is a strict impossibility, since whether or not
any one author “kills” him off, Sherlock Holmes’ rebirth is always already guaranteed at the level of the
idea, and on the plateau of mythological unity.

• Reboots in fact retreat into ideologies of cultural timelessness, albeit deceptively dressed up in the
sharp suits and the billowing coats of fashionable transformation.
 The World of Wrestling
• How ideas become naturalized: looking at Wrestling as a demonstration of such myths,
including those pertaining to justice, good and evil

• Has a history, goes all the way back to ancient Greece.

• Wrestling a spectaclular form that presents a narrative, has its roots in ancient Greek
theatre, enacting a kind of a play for its audience.

• Not a sport, but a spectacle. No one thinks there is a competition going on. It is scripted in
advance.

• What we see is not ever conclusive moments like in judo, boxing, that are to be avoided.
In real competitive wrestling, people try to avoid defeat.

• Defeat is something that is part of the spectacle. People gyrate, contort their faces,
exaggerate their expressions to lend a sense to what defeat or victory means. It all plays
towards the entire spectacle.

• These narratives extend far beyond a single match.

 The World of Wrestling
• The actors appeals to certain codes that people understand and associate with goodness and evil.

• What codes are used to elicit a sense of anger to certain character, to convey someone is good versus evil.

• What the people want when they watch this competition is intelligibility, to see things that makes sense to them
culturally as they understand certain signs referring to certain things such as good, evil, justice.

• A t the core of all these is a demonstration of justice or lack there of. People hate the characters who break rules.
They contribute to the audience’s animosity towards those people, generating a very affective, embodied response.

• To play with that cultural understanding of justice, to be able to exploit it, to reveal the extent to which we are very
much attached to and committed to it and want to defend it and using that in order to present certain actors as evil
and good. In the world of wrestling, where everything is good and evil it puts forward an ideal image and
understanding of things. It complies to our very basic understanding of law of justice, of good and evil.

• Ideal image of things complies to our basic understanding of law, good and evil and justice, speaks to a kind of
natural law.

• Not only provide good entertainment, but affirm our understanding of what justice is, to naturalise it and have it enter
into the world as myth and and become natural as though it cannot be questioned.
Thank you