Culture Is Created From the Ground Up
In the book Common Culture: Symbolic Work at Play in the Everyday Cultures of the Young Paul Willis used group interviews to investigate teenagers and their use of media and other cultural forms. Willis looked at the everyday cultural life of teenagers in the British city of Wolverhampton and found that teenagers do not passively consume cultural products such as films, fashion, music and television, but actively engage in symbolic activity with these products. Willis concluded that teenagers appropriate these cultural artifacts and symbols to express their own interests, meanings, experiences, and values. This indigenous common culture, or culture with a small “c”, is more vibrant and meaningful to young people than the objects and experiences of high culture.
In a section on film, Willis interviewed young people about their experiences viewing films in general: the participants immediately began to discuss horror films in particular. Willis discovered young people “do not simply assess horror films using the terms and strategies that the genre provides. They also use other interpretive skills which they have acquired from their filmic and televisual viewing more generally”. For teenagers, watching horror films “is an interactive and active process involving its own kind of symbolic work and creativity” . This emphasis on the active audience is in tune with scholars such as Michel de Certeau, John Fiske and Henry Jenkins. At the core of their work, and Willis’, is the key insight that individuals negotiate and even struggle against and oppose the cultural and media texts around them often taking (poaching de Certeau would say) materials and meanings from these products of the dominant culture and working them into their everyday lives in unpredictable and even subversive ways. This symbolic play creates a kind of common or grassroots culture (folk culture?) from the commodities of the culture industry.
The work of de Certeau and Willis is key in understanding how individuals maintain different types of autonomy within a social and cultural landscape that often attempts to diminish or completely suppress any autonomy whatsoever. Although this thread in Willis’ work becomes the problematic notion of “resistance” in later discussions, it is important to remember that there is always an invisible world of “making do” within cultural and media landscapes that allows for individuals to survive with something like an autonomous zone in the midst of surveillance and control. The manner in which we think of these small zones of autonomy within a society of control is always the problem. How much power is there? How do they relate to more overt acts of resistance and revolution? Are they really just forms of co-option and incorporation into larger structures of power? I would suggest that we cannot answer these questions in any meaningful way without the work of Willis, de Certeau, Fiskes and others.
An aspect of this symbolic work and creativity was expressed when various participants noted how certain formal or technical aspects of the film watching experience increased their involvement and pleasure. One participant stated that he preferred watching horror films in theaters, as opposed to television, because the large size of the theater screen enhanced the emotional impact of the movie. Other participants commented that watching horror films alone at home on television could be frightening because of the solitude of the viewer. Without the sociality of a theater audience, the isolated home viewer is immersed in the film and is easily overcome with the reality of the horror movie. This domestic context of viewing helped amplify the terrifying pleasure of the film.
Another viewing strategy involving the technical aspect of horror films related to the area of special effects. Willis discovered that young adult viewers interacted with the special effects by feeling “simultaneously fear and appreciation of artifice”. Teenagers could at the same time suspend their sense of reality and believe in the frightening reality of the special effects and also stand back and appreciate the artifice of the special effects.
Another aspect of the symbolic activity of teenagers and their viewing of horror films appeared in the audience’s active participation in creating the feelings of terror and fear. This active participation manifested itself in the audience’s familiarity with the genre of horror films. Viewers often knew what was coming next in the story, and consciously played with these feelings of expectation to intentionally heighten their experience of fright. Other teenagers described increasing their pleasure in the film by self-consciously manipulating their own levels of believability in the fantasy of the film. As one teen pointed out, “It’s just that some people are very believing. The more believing you are, the more frightened you are.” Other teenagers saw it as a challenge to resist the feelings of fright and dread and took pride in that resistance.
Finally, some of the participants saw the characters of horror films in terms of their own social and political experiences. For example a young female viewer mentioned that one of the best things about horror films were the portrayals of the female protagonists. The female viewer selected women in horror films as feminist characters and made them central to the films’ meaning creating for herself a political and social narrative that is sometimes ony implied in the text.
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