Narratives from Popular Culture: Critical Implications ...

5

This chapter critically examines six political television narratives: The Weather Channel, The Fox News Channel, 24, The Rachel Maddow Show, The Daily Show, and Torchwood. The implications of those television narratives, their impact on adult learners, and suggestions for classroom practice are discussed.

Narratives from Popular Culture: Critical Implications for Adult Education Robin Redmon Wright Few phrases in the English language have the power to hush a room and capture attention like, “Once upon a time.” The human species loves story. And it’s no wonder. For tens of thousands of years, storytelling is how we were taught, how history was documented, how all knowledge was passed on. It is encoded in human nature to love a good story—and to learn from stories. And, if the stories entertain, all the better. Entertaining, engaging stories become popular. They become narratives that shape our cultures. Popular cultural narratives are embedded in our daily existence. They take particular forms such as epics, fables, parables, biographies, fairy tales, bildungsroman, tragedies, comedies, or dramas. They are worked into genres, mediums, and venues that appeal to the entire spectrum of personalities. There are metanarratives that become so pervasive in popular culture that they shape our accepted “norms.” Many contemporary cultural narratives meld into a public pedagogy that teaches what Marcuse (1965, p. 102) calls “repressive tolerance” of control by multinational corporate/political interests, and thereby reinforces a capitalist hegemony of systemic inequality and oppression. We allow ourselves to be dominated by such narratives because they become our lived reality. This chapter will provide examples of those narratives, together with contrasting narratives in popular culture that represent possibilities for resistance to that hegemony. These latter narratives

NEW DIRECTIONS FOR ADULT AND CONTINUING EDUCATION, no. 126, Summer 2010 © 2010 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Published online in Wiley InterScience (www.interscience.wiley.com) • DOI: 10.1002/ace.371

49

50

NARRATIVE PERSPECTIVES ON ADULT EDUCATION

offer alternative scripts for human interactions that promote liberty, equality, intellectual growth, and community. Through those counternarratives we glimpse possibilities for more inclusive and egalitarian metanarratives for our future. Finally, this chapter concludes with a discussion of how adult educators might use the power of those alternative narratives of resistance to facilitate learning.

Popular Culture, Narrative, and Adult Learning For most people there are only two places in the world—where they live and their TV set. (DiLillo, 1985, p. 66)

In earlier work (Wright and Sandlin, 2009a), Jennifer Sandlin and I summarized various ways popular culture and entertainment media have been taken up by adult educators. That literature review highlights the importance of popular culture as a source of informal learning and a site of public pedagogy for adults. Much of the research in this area illustrates the way popular cultural narratives are constructed by powerful elites to reinforce dominant, oppressive, inequitable power structures and promote U.S. consumption and global imperialism, while simultaneously structuring the illusion of promoting democracy (Jarvis, 2008; Usher, 2008). This is not surprising, given the reality of what Kunz (2007) calls the “Culture Conglomerates.” In particular, he is referring to the six multinational corporations that, in 2004, owned all of the major and “minimajor” film studios, all of the major broadcast television networks, 84.9 percent of domestic box office revenue, 93.94 percent of the prime-time television programming, and 76.1 percent of the 60⫹ million cable and satellite services in the United States (Kunz, 2007, p. 220). Some of these same corporations own substantial shares of the Internet as well as utility companies, oil and gas companies, weapons manufacturers, hotels, theme parks, and myriad other profitable industries. Moreover, as of 2005, the 118 people on the boards of those conglomerates are directors of 288 other national and multinational companies (Miller, 2007). Following the money behind the media validates Studs Turkel’s (2003) claim that “liberal media” is “an obscene phrase. . . burlesque.” Many popular cultural narratives are narratives produced by a neoliberal culture industry for the purpose of promoting commodity consumption as the preeminent measure of success and happiness, while diminishing the sense of social responsibility and social justice. The most pervasive popular cultural narratives invading, and sometimes monopolizing, our everyday lives are the stories performed for us on television. McLaren and Hammer (1996) argue that television narratives literally “colonize” our “interior” (brains). They view television not as a teller of tales to be engaged and decoded through the filter of our lived experiences, but as a plague that destroys our critical comprehension skills (p. 84). They posit that New Directions for Adult and Continuing Education • DOI: 10.1002/ace

NARRATIVES FROM POPULAR CULTURE

51

the “perpetual pedagogy” of “mainstream television programming. . . works as a corporate mobilization of desire for objects that are constantly misrecognized as real” (pp. 85–86). The rapid escalation of consumerism, consumer debt, foreclosures, and antidepressant sales in recent years would seem to support that dark view. Yet my research reveals that television narratives sometimes embolden viewers to oppose cultural systems of oppression (Wright, 2009; Wright and Sandlin, 2009b). I recognize, and am alarmed by, the burgeoning neoliberal ideological infiltration into our social and cultural realms through television narratives—and I agree with McLaren and Hammer (1996) that TV is the primary “way in which capitalism is able to secure cultural and ideological totalization and homogenization . . . [and] to insinuate itself into social practices and private perceptions” (p. 106). But I can also appreciate the brilliance of those rare television narratives that manage to spin a tale of opposition to the monstrous corporate teat that suckles them. The stories we are told are not limited to prime time. Corner (1999) asserts that although “no one would want to argue about the importance of narrative” (p. 47) in television dramas and soaps, the stylization and theatrical presentation of television news, documentaries, and other nonfictional programs convert them into cultural narratives that serve to story, and thus organize and shape, public knowledge (pp. 47–59). He calls for the impact of these narratives to be investigated not only by a linguistic analysis of television’s content, but also by research into “the meanings attributed by viewers and in the values and dispositions which the medium’s performed or overheard versions of social exchange indirectly activate in everyday living” (p. 46). According to Morley (1980), viewer interpretation is derived from the interplay of popular culture narratives with the many other narratives (family, class, race, community, etc.) shaping consumers’ lives. Those interpretations may be “dominant” (hegemonic), “negotiated” (both tolerant and resistant), or “oppositional” (resistant). Hegemonic television narratives are carefully constructed cultural narratives intended to reinforce the status quo. As Rossiter and Clark (2007) assert, “cultural narratives can lead to mere ethnocentricity, particularly if we do not recognize it as a narrative” (p. 21). These narratives play on collective fears, reinforce stereotypes, and provide explanations for social injustices that seem natural and true based on cultural myths. However, “when the story no longer suffices to explain new circumstances or events . . . an enlarged story or a different story is entertained” (Rossiter and Clark, 2007, p. 23). Therefore, as the activities of multinational corporations, through whatever actions, increase the disparity between the rich and poor, when social services are cut in the face of increased profits, and individual liberties continue to be eroded, viewer interpretations may move from “dominant” to “oppositional.” Corner (1999) calls for research into those spaces between the narratives televised for public consumption and the converging stories of viewers’ New Directions for Adult and Continuing Education • DOI: 10.1002/ace

52


lives. He hopes scholars might gain insight into how viewer engagement with television narratives, and the impact of the pleasures and emotions those stories evoke, form “patterns of taste and practices of taste formation” around questions of “knowledge, information, the supporting of citizenship, provision for minority groups, and the relation of the national to the international” (p. 107). As a critical adult educator interested in adult learning from popular culture, these goals parallel my own.

Television Narratives of Neoliberal/Neoconservative Hegemony I am gross and perverted I’m obsessed ’n deranged I have existed for years But very little has changed I’m the tool of the Government And industry too For I am destined to rule And regulate you I may be vile and pernicious But you can’t look away I make you think I’m delicious With the stuff that I say I’m the best you can get Have you guessed me yet? I’m the slime oozin’ out From your TV set. (Zappa, 1973)

Zappa is right; television shapes public opinion. And there is “a growing body of literature that explores the linkages between popular culture and world politics, arguing that popular culture, whilst reflecting politics, also plays an important role in producing and popularizing it” (Van Veeren, 2009, p. 363). According to media scholar van Zoonen (2005), political stories in popular culture, both fictional and real, “are told through four basic frames. . . the quest, the soap, bureaucracy, and conspiracy” (p. 17). She defines quest and soap stories as “rooted in the individual efforts of (groups of) people” and narratives of bureaucracy and conspiracy as “stories of dark collective forces whose workings extend beyond individual control or change” (p. 17). In the following section, I examine six political television narratives through the lens of van Zoonen’s four frames: quest, soap, conspiracy, and bureaucracy. The Weather Channel. Most casual viewers of The Weather Channel will not notice its political metanarrative. But the covert nature of its New Directions for Adult and Continuing Education • DOI: 10.1002/ace


53

cultural–political story is the reason I chose to include it here. At the diegetic level, the level of the actual story being told without the narration, The Weather Channel tells the story of the daily weather and scientific predictions of probable conditions in the immediate future, interspersed with hypodiegetic (story within a story) stories of past climate-induced experiences. However, that at the extradiegetic level (the level of how the story is narrated by the storyteller), the metanarrative of The Weather Channel supports the right-leaning political agenda of mainstream media. According to Miller (2007), “meteorology performs the same structural task as religion: explaining forms of life seen as outside the control of those experiencing them” (p. 144). The explanations given for natural disasters depicted in the various programs on The Weather Channel completely ignore human agency. Instead, the stories are constructed as heroic myths, man against an awesome, powerful nature, David against Goliath. Meteorological events are anthropomorphized in this metanarrative. Flooding rivers are described as “angry”; heat waves are said to be “cruel”; tornados are “killers” that “target” towns. Often weather events are described as acts of God—ascribing agency to a deity assumes that it is not to be questioned. Most of these narratives are framed as quest narratives, as people search for both loved ones and meaning in the face of devastation. Decidedly absent from these narratives of “humankind versus nature” are descriptions of the urban sprawl that destroys natural drainage and the role of dams, irrigation canals, and other human alterations of rivers and streams in causing flooding, mudslides, and unnatural erosion. Climate change, the most newsworthy and urgent weather story in history, is rarely mentioned. The disastrous flooding from rising ocean levels around the world is ignored. But, along with heroic quest narratives like Storm Stories, commentators discuss the need for flood insurance, generators, and storm shelters—the sales pitch offers viewers the “solution” to the problems weather creates. In the fall of 2009, when teaching a graduate adult education class of seventeen masters and doctoral students, I asked, “How many of you have heard of the Kyoto Climate Treaty?” One student raised his hand. Given the politically far-right narratives around climate on TV, this is not surprising. As van Zoonen (2005) points out, the political messages on the right are far simpler than the more complicated messages of progressives. In the narrative presented on The Weather Channel, the message of the political right is conveyed, reinforced, and naturalized. Fox News Channel. Like The Weather Channel, Fox News tells a decidedly right-wing political story dressed in the distinctly disingenuous tag line of “fair and balanced.” Its far-right political agenda has been documented often and well in academic literature and can easily be researched through sites like mediamatters.org. A 2003 Program on International Policy Attitudes (PIPA) report supports my assertion that adults learn from the New Directions for Adult and Continuing Education • DOI: 10.1002/ace

54


narratives of television, including the narratives of television news programming. PIPA is a joint program of the Center for International and Security Studies at the University of Maryland and the Center on Policy Attitudes. The study found that 80 percent of Fox News viewers believed things that were simply not true about the war in Iraq, beliefs that were themes of Republican disinformation. This is certainly not surprising. Fox News and its parent company, Newscorp, are owned by Rupert Murdock, a staunch proponent of unregulated capitalism. The metanarrative of Fox News is a conspiracy tale. Correspondents frequently refer to all other sources of news as a conspiring single entity, the liberal media. They position their story as a counternarrative to that left-wing conspiracy. Their pundits are characters who profess their righteous indignation and their pious loyalty to truth in the face of what they posit as the left-wing propaganda of other news sources. What is, in fact, a corporate-controlled, overwhelmingly right-wing mainstream media is described in the narratives on Fox as the far-left position. This perpetuates the cultural myth in the United States of a liberal bias in the media when the opposite is true. With this conspiracy plot as their extradiegesis, Fox News tells its tale of alarm and apprehension. Fear is both Fox News’s theme and its aim. In Fox’s story, U.S. citizens are targets of terrorists, leftists, socialists, communists, fascists, liberals, and, of course, the weather. Even non-news, like Tiger Woods’s private life, becomes a Fox News Alert. Fox pundits are alarmists and their rhetoric is filled with hyperbole. The result of this theme of conspiracy and trepidation is to instill fear in viewers. Insecurity and fear for one’s safety, possessions, family, and future increases ethnocentricity and self-interest, decreases philanthropic thoughts, and narrows viewers’ worldviews. 24. The Fox television drama, 24, is a political soap, both in structure and narrative. It has the seriality and interwoven structure of soaps (Zagalo and Barker, 2006), along with soaps’ exaggerated focus on personal drama. 24’s extradiegetic narrative is the age-old battle between good and evil, with the United States as good and terrorists as evil. It is a narrowly ethnocentric, even bigoted fable that posits anyone opposed to an uncritically represented U.S. as evil. At the diegetic level, it is the story of Jack Bauer, played by Kiefer Sutherland, and his associates. Each season depicts a 24-hour period in the life of Jack Bauer, who works for the Los Angeles CounterTerrorist Unit (CTU). The hypodiegetic level is peppered with the actions of associated CTU agents, government officials, various terrorists, and other shadowy operatives. A prevalent political theme running throughout is that of torture and rendition, which is depicted as necessary, commonsensical, and efficacious. And, of course, despite overwhelming research evidence proving that torture is ineffectual, in the narrative of 24, it works. Van Veeren (2009) posits that “the fiction of popular culture and the reality of politics are inseparable” (p. 362). She argues that 24’s fictional narrative New Directions for Adult and Continuing Education • DOI: 10.1002/ace


55

supported the Bush administration’s war on terrorism, and its intertextuality with the superhero myth makes it resonate with viewers—establishing the torturer as selfless hero. Clucas (2009) points out that popular culture “provides a doorway to the ethical world” (p. 9) and that 24 makes the case for the ethics of torture. While showing a torture scene every 1.8 episodes, 24 demonstrates to viewers that torture is valuable, permissible, heroic, and urgently needed (Clucas, 2009). The program also serves both to desensitize viewers to the idea of torture and to demonize the “other.” In 2000, James Der Derian argued that a military–industrial–media– entertainment network (MIME-NET) has been created that blurs the distinction between the real and the fictional, between the public and the state, between military and civilian (Der Derian, 2000). Clearly, television narratives like those found in The Weather Channel, Fox News, and 24 support his assertion, and illustrate the imperative need for media literacy as a foundational element of all adult education practice. The narratives of television must be deconstructed, analyzed, and evaluated as more than simply information sources or leisure entertainment.

Television Narratives of Resistance Fortunately, although much television programming reflects a neoliberal worldview, there are a few narratives of resistance offering plotlines with a more progressive and socially just theme. The Rachel Maddow Show. First airing on MSNBC during the frenzy of the 2008 presidential election, The Rachel Maddow Show (TRMS) is a political talk show with a difference—Rachel Maddow. With a Ph.D. in political science from Oxford University, Maddow is a refreshingly intelligent and academically sound political pundit. TRMS is a narrative of bureaucracy; the central theme is exposure of bureaucratic structures underlying both the problems and the purveyors of social injustice. The goal is to transform the way political narratives are understood by the public. TRMS employs an impressive staff of researchers and archivists who conduct solid investigative journalism that is often only given lip service by other news programs. TRMS digs for truth behind the stories. One result, at the diegetic level, is recurring narratives exposing corporate–political manipulation of media, money, politicians, and the public. Rachel Maddow, herself, represents a counternarrative to conservative mainstream political narratives. She is openly progressive and openly lesbian. She connects the political events she is reporting to her own life and to the lives of others. When interviewing guests, particularly those with opposing viewpoints, she is respectful, but relentless in pressing for answers to probing questions. As she provides informed commentary on U.S. politics and issues, she embodies a story that resists the dominant cultural narratives of sexism and heteronormativity. New Directions for Adult and Continuing Education • DOI: 10.1002/ace

56


The Daily Show. Comedy Central’s The Daily Show (TDS) with Jon Stewart can be read as a political quest narrative. TDS uses satire and humor to challenge, expose, and ridicule media coverage of politics. According to Baym (2005), TDS seeks to “revive a journalism of critical inquiry and advance a model of deliberative democracy” (p. 259). At the extradiegetic level, TDS’s quest is for “fact, accountability, and reason in political discourse” (Baym, 2005, p. 273). The fulfillment of this quest requires the transformation of the present system of broadcast journalism in the United States now driven by market pressures and providing unquestioning support for multinational corporate interests. The knight leading the charge on this quest is Jon Stewart. Jon Stewart is both brilliant and incredibly funny. At the diegetic level, TDS is a satire of mainstream news programs. Stewart anchors what he terms a fake daily news report, conducts interviews, and employs a group of correspondents whose rotating titles humorously reflect their topics—such as his “Chief Black Correspondent.” The segments parody traditional tenets of broadcast news. Yet a comparison of the substance of the news reported on TDS and network news broadcasts during the 2004 elections revealed that TDS contained as much substantive information as the actual news programs on the networks (Fox, Koloen, and Sahin, 2007). Stewart’s frequent denials that TDS is a real news program serve to disarm and engage both his audience and his guests. Thus disarmed, guests often reveal more than they intended. Throughout the political interviews Stewart weaves a narrative of concern for the escalating deterioration of political debate and democratic dialogue. The effect is a program that manages to “articulate an ethos of democratic dialogue as a moral imperative” (Baym, 2007, p. 112, italics in the original). Stewart “uses humor and goodwill to move beyond ideological rigidity and reductionist polarization and toward a deliberative exchange that seeks to find mutual solutions to collective problems” (Baym, 2007, p. 112). Despite the narrative’s sometimes silly, occasionally crude, and always funny carnivalization, TDS offers viewers a serious exploration of political issues while cleverly criticizing the steady degradation of political discourse on mainstream broadcast news programs. Torchwood. Torchwood is a science fiction series that recently concluded its third season on BBC America. Created by Russell Davies, Torchwood is a spin-off of the four-decade cult TV favorite, Doctor Who (of which Torchwood is an anagram). Set in Cardiff, Wales, Torchwood, like 24, is about an organization, in this case the Torchwood Institute, that exists to defend the population against hostile threats. But instead of working for a government, the Torchwood Institute is “outside the government, beyond the police” as its opening narration informs viewers. Torchwood defends the earth by “tracking down alien life on earth and arming the human race against the future.” Torchwood is a soap that offers a narrative of political morality that counters that of 24. New Directions for Adult and Continuing Education • DOI: 10.1002/ace


57

The Torchwood team is led by Captain Jack Harkness, played by John Barrowman. Although Jack speaks with an American accent, viewers learn that he is alien, that he cannot die (a story told in Doctor Who), that he is already over 400 years old, and that his sexuality is not self-limiting—he may be sexually attracted to the full spectrum of sexual designations for humans or aliens. The extradiegetic story for Torchwood is one that directly contrasts that of 24. Although both series contain “good versus evil” story lines, in Torchwood the evil and the good may be alien or may be human. Right and wrong are contextualized and critically examined. The lines between them are often blurred. Torture is not permissible. Hostile aliens are put in cells beneath the Hub (Torchwood’s base). One member of the team, Gwen, is hired specifically because she is extremely empathetic and caring. Part of her job is to seek to communicate with these aliens and to understand them. The government, in several story lines, is corrupt and elitist. An example can be found in the third season (2009), when alien invaders demand a third of the human children in exchange for sparing the rest, and the governments of Earth readily agree to deliver the children from the poorest school districts because they are deemed less valuable. The evil resides in both the governments and the terrorists. Torchwood symbolizes a third option—an independent organization working for justice and against evil in whatever form it may take—a universal Southern Poverty Law Center, if you will. At the diegetic level, each episode involves a moral dilemma for one or more of the Torchwood team. The complexity of negotiating differing worldviews, cultural values, beliefs, and moral codes is explored through a framework established by The Doctor—value life, support democratic principles and egalitarianism, and protect those who cannot protect themselves. The world of Torchwood is depicted, not as the dichotomous “us” (or United States) and “other” of Jack Bauer’s 24, but as the omnipolitical, omnisexual, omnicultural world of Jack Harkness.

Television Narratives and the Adult Education Classroom While I have been writing this chapter, the U.S. Supreme Court overturned the McCain/Feingold law that strictly limited corporate funding of political campaign ads. Now multinational corporations can spend billions to influence elections—and thus politicians—severely eroding the significance of citizen support for candidates with social justice, rather than corporate, agendas. There has never been a more urgent need for adult educators to teach media literacy and, more importantly, to utilize the power inherent in television’s popular cultural narratives. The visual dimension that TV adds to storytelling increases reader/viewer emotional engagement dramatically. If adult educators are interested in social reform and justice, we cannot dismiss New Directions for Adult and Continuing Education • DOI: 10.1002/ace

58


or minimize television’s role in shaping cultural perceptions, individual identities, and worldviews through its narratives. In a recent graduate class, I used a story from popular culture to illustrate the concept of a media-constructed political and cultural hegemony. Because I strive to be a critical educator, it likely comes as no surprise that the subject of corporate media as a hegemonic tool often arises in class discussions. Perhaps predictably, some students cling to an apathetic attitude, refusing even to engage in the topic. In anticipation of such attitudes, I first showed this class an episode of Doctor Who. The 2005 episode entitled “The Long Game” (Davies and Grant, 2005) stars Christopher Eccleston as The Doctor, the last of the Time Lords who has basically adopted the human race after his home planet, Gallifrey, was destroyed in the Time Wars. Written by Russell T. Davies, this episode finds The Doctor and his human companion, Rose, played by Billie Piper, on a news-broadcast space station overlooking planet Earth in the year 200,000. As a time traveler, The Doctor knows the earth year 200,000 as the time of the Fourth Great and Bountiful Human Empire spanning three galaxies, and he wants to show Rose this rosy future. Unfortunately, something has changed since his last visit. Investigating, he finds that the station controls all 600 television news broadcasts to the 96 billion humans. The Doctor is disturbed to find that there are no aliens on board the station, and that humans have become xenophobic. Moreover, the journalists are just incurious receptacles who have news streamed into their brains via implanted chips and ports. Suddenly, one of the journalists, Suki, is promoted and sent off in celebratory fashion to the five hundredth floor, where “the walls are made of gold” and from where “no one ever returns.” It is revealed to viewers that, in reality, management has discovered that Suki is a member of the Freedom Fifteen, a resistance group working to expose the news media’s surreptitious control of humankind. This control assures nonquestioning acquiescence to war, social injustices, bigotry, and tyranny—and it has stunted natural evolutionary processes. Suspicious, The Doctor and Rose proceed to floor 500, where they find The Editor, played by Simon Pegg. The Editor explains that he is an employee of a huge “banking consortium” and his charge is to control humanity while the banks manipulate the economy, close the borders, and create a climate of stupefied fear. The journalists who have been promoted to the refrigerated five hundredth level are actually dead. Their bodies, however, are still being used to operate the control panels via the brain implants. They are literal automatons. The final twist comes when The Doctor realizes that The Editor is supervised by an editor-in-chief, the Mighty Jagrafess of the Holy Hadrojassic Maxarodenfoe (“Max” for short), who scoffs at humanity’s deluded belief that there is still a Fourth Great and Bountiful Human Empire. Max is a huge, gray monster who was installed ninety-one years earlier by the banking consortium as part of the ceiling of level five hundred. He is a genius at manipulating information for desired psychological effects. In exchange for these New Directions for Adult and Continuing Education • DOI: 10.1002/ace


59

services, Max, an enormous, limbless glob of contempt for humanity, resembling a giant leech with a huge, fang-filled, salivating mouth, has been provided a caretaker to keep him cool and to prevent his overheating. Indeed, The Editor is highly compensated by the powerful bankers for looking after his extremely metabolic, news-filtering supervisor. As The Editor explains, Max has “shaped and guided” the human race, ensuring its “knowledge and ambitions are strictly controlled by its broadcast news.” The Editor goes on: Create a climate of fear and it’s easy to keep the borders closed. It’s just a matter of emphasis. The right word in the right broadcast, repeated often enough, can destabilize an economy, invent an enemy, change a vote.

By manipulating the news, The Doctor observes, Max has “bred a human race who doesn’t bother to ask questions” and who, guided by greed, will “trot into the slaughterhouse if they’re told it’s made of gold.” Max’s powerful human partners rely on humanity’s uncritical, unthinking belief that the media is an unbiased purveyor of information as the mechanism of their own enslavement to capital. But one journalist, Cathica, played by Christine Adams, begins to doubt the news truths as she responds to The Doctor’s queries about the poverty, the whereabouts of the aliens, and how the news is validated. Her subsequent actions prove to be Max’s, and corporate media’s, undoing. She defeats the Jagafress by simply thinking and then using what she knows. As level five hundred begins to self-destruct, The Editor exclaims to Max (who is dying from the heat of his media network feeding back on itself) that they were defeated by “a member of staff with an idea.” This story represents what van Zoonen (2005) would classify as a political conspiracy narrative. As my students watched the program, they recognized the power of Cathica’s questioning of her assumptions, leading to her transformation from slave to liberator. Students noted that the actor who played Cathica was of African descent, and discussed the significance of that choice. They engaged in an animated discussion, drawing parallels between the story and a variety of issues surrounding oppressive politics, corporate–media manipulation, and a consumer society. By the end of the three-hour class, all felt they understood the concept of hegemony much better than before, and they often referred to the episode throughout the remainder of the semester.

Final Thoughts on Television Narratives and Adult Education Van Zoonen (2005, p. 18) found that television audiences use the political narratives they watch “to express their understanding, reflection, judgment, and utopian visions of politics and politicians.” I contend that Max, or what New Directions for Adult and Continuing Education • DOI: 10.1002/ace

60


he represents, is a political reality. In 1961, President Eisenhower expressed his concern that if corporations and industry were allowed to influence the military and government, the monster that emerged could destroy this fledgling democracy: In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist. We must never let the weight of this combination endanger our liberties or democratic processes. We should take nothing for granted. Only an alert and knowledgeable citizenry can compel the proper meshing of the huge industrial and military machinery of defense with our peaceful methods and goals, so that security and liberty may prosper together (Eisenhower, 1961, p. 1037).

Eisenhower could not have foreseen the systematic destruction of monopoly laws and other regulations that would propel the military–industrial complex into bed with both the increasingly monolithic banking industry and the media conglomerates—the purveyors of our cultural consciousness. The media has not only been neutralized as a means to creating “an alert and knowledgeable citizenry,” but it has been absorbed into the monster. Max represents that monster. And because he, that is, the military– industrial–corporate-banking complex, uses popular media to create widespread repressive tolerance, educators must consider ways to use the handful of narratives of resistance that are profitable enough to remain on the air to expose it. My students will long remember Max, and how he manipulated the entire human race into a life of greedy consumerism, ethnocentric isolationism, and alienated self-interest by “the right word in the right broadcast.” They will also remember that he was the tool of humans in the banking industry—greedy, power-drunk profiteers bent on owning and controlling the human race and its resources. Television narratives “can undo as well as embody ideology” (During, 2005, p. 16). Science fiction narratives, by their very nature, force the audience to think about possibilities outside our everyday lived reality. Jarvis (2005) asserts that fictional narratives “can push ideas to their limits. . .escape the literal, and give concrete and dramatic form to issues” (p. 39). Showing “The Long Game” to my adult education class gave dramatic form to a concept that many find difficult to grasp—capitalist hegemony. References Baym, G. “The Daily Show: Discursive Integration and the Reinvention of Political Journalism.” Political Communication, 2005, 22(3), 259–276. doi:10.1080/ 10584600591006492. New Directions for Adult and Continuing Education • DOI: 10.1002/ace


61

Baym, G. “Crafting New Communicative Models in the Televisual Sphere: Political Interviews on The Daily Show.” Communication Review, 2007, 10(2), 93–115. doi:10.1080/10714420701350379. Clucas, B. “24 and Torture.” In B. Clucas, G. Johnstone, and T. Ward (eds.), Torture: Moral Absolutes and Ambiguities. Baden-Baden, Germany: Nomos, 2009. Corner, J. Critical Ideas in Television Studies. Oxford, United Kingdom: Clarendon Press, 1999. Davies, R. T. (writer), and Grant, B. (director). “The Long Game” [television series episode]. In R. Miles and G. Rowland (Producers), Doctor Who. London, England: British Broadcasting Company, 2005. Der Derian, J. “Virtuous War/Virtual Theory.” International Affairs, 2000, 76(4), 771–788. DeLillo, D. White Noise. London: Picador Press, 1985. During, S. Cultural Studies: A Critical Introduction. London: Routledge, 2005. Eisenhower, D. D. Public Papers of the Presidents, Dwight D. Eisenhower (Vol. 8, pp. 1035–1040). Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1961. Fox, J., Koloen, G., and Sahin, V. “No Joke: A Comparison of Substance in The Daily Show with Jon Stewart and Broadcast Network Television Coverage of the 2004 Presidential Election Campaign.” Journal of Broadcasting & Electronic Media, 2007, 51(2), 213–227. doi:10.1080/08838150701304621. Jarvis, C. “Real Stakeholder Education? Lifelong Learning in Buffyverse.” Studies in the Education of Adults, 2005, 37(1), 31–46. Jarvis, P. “The Consumer Society: Is There a Place for Traditional Adult Education?” Convergence, 2008, 41(1), 11–28. Kunz, W. M. Culture Conglomerates: Consolidation in the Motion Picture and Television Industries. New York: Roman & Littlefield, 2007. Marcuse, H. A Critique of Pure Tolerance. Boston: Beacon Press, 1965. McLaren, P., and Hammer, R. “Media Knowledges, Warrior Citizenry, and Postmodern Literacies.” In H. A. Giroux, C. Lankshear, P. McLaren, and M. Peters (eds.), Counternarratives: Cultural Studies and Critical Pedagogies in Postmodern Spaces. New York: Routledge, 1996. Miller, T. Cultural Citizenship: Cosmopolitianism, Consumerism, and Television in a Neoliberal Age. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2007. Morley, D. The Nationwide Audience. London: BFI, 1980. Rossiter, M., and Clark, M. C. Narrative and the Practice of Adult Education. Malabar, Fla.: Krieger, 2007. Turkel, S. “No Brass Check Journalists.” In These Times, October 22, 2003. [http://www.inthesetimes.com/article/639/no_brass_check_journalists/] Usher, R. “Consuming Learning.” Convergence, 2008, 41(1), 29–46. Van Veeren, E. “Interrogating 24: Making Sense of U.S. Counter-terrorism in the Global War on Terrorism.” New Political Science, 2009, 31(3), 361–384. doi:10.1080/ 07393140903105991. van Zoonen, L. Entertaining the Citizen: When Politics and Popular Culture Converge. Lanham, Md.: Rowman & Littlefield, 2005. Wright, R. R. “Unmasking Hegemony with the Avengers: Television Entertainment as Public Pedagogy.” In J. A. Sandlin, B. D. Schultz, and J. Burdick (eds.), Handbook of Public Pedagogy: Education and Learning Beyond Schooling. New York: Routledge, 2009. Wright, R. R., and Sandlin, J. “Cult TV, Hip Hop, Shape-Shifters, and Vampire Slayers: A Review of the Literature at the Intersection of Adult Education and Popular Culture.” Adult Education Quarterly, 2009a, 59(2), 118–141. Wright, R. R., and Sandlin, J. A. “Popular Culture, Public Pedagogy, and Perspective Transformation: The Avengers and Adult Learning in Living Rooms.” International Journal of Lifelong Learning, 2009b, 28(4), 533–551. New Directions for Adult and Continuing Education • DOI: 10.1002/ace

62


Zagalo, N., and Barker, A. “Television Drama Series’ Incorporation of Film Narrative Innovation: 24.” In A. Barker (ed.), Television, Aesthetics and Reality. Cambridge, United Kingdom: Cambridge Scholars Press, 2006. [http://nelsonzagalo.googlepages .com/Television_2006_NZ.pdf] Zappa, F. “I’m the Slime.” On Over-Nite Sensation [CD]. Salem, Mass.: Rykodisc, 1973/1995.

ROBIN REDMON WRIGHT is assistant professor and co-coordinator of the Adult Education Graduate Program at the University of Texas at San Antonio.

New Directions for Adult and Continuing Education • DOI: 10.1002/ace

Copyright of New Directions for Adult & Continuing Education is the property of John Wiley & Sons, Inc. and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use.