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Rockwell Matters

March 17, 2008

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On Feb. 23, the first skit on “Saturday Night Live” consisted of a mock presidential debate between Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama. Clinton was given impossible-to-answer questions; Obama was coddled. The point, fair or otherwise – I’m not sure it WAS entirely fair – changed the course of the campaign. Clinton mentioned Obama’s maybe needing a pillow in their next real debate. Clinton came on a later “Saturday Night Live” to prove her chipperness. Obama started getting tougher questions.
 
Does this mean that “Saturday Night Live” is now the decisive force in American politics, a kingmaker (or queenmaker) able to shift the trajectories of a political career with the wink of an eye? Not exactly. Obama lost Ohio and Texas for other reasons than just Amy Poehler.
 
Yet pop culture does matter. More immediately and directly than the high arts, it can reflect and, more rarely but more dramatically, affect the “real” worlds of politics, social mores, finances and, not least, celebrity image.
 
I’m sure you can all think of good examples, and you are invited to do so on the “Rockwell Matters” page at wnyc.org/music. Despite the ongoing American fascination with science fiction — I was a boyhood devotee in the 1950’s — surely the attention paid to Stanley Kubrick’s film “2001” in the spring of 1968 made the actual moon landing in July of 1969 all the more dramatic yet familiar. Our very obsession with the possibility of alien life, reflected in film and television shows like “Star Wars,” “Star Trek,” “Starman,” “Close Encounters of the Third Kind,” “ET” and “Contact,” has primed an eager curiosity about non-human civilizations, benign or malign.
 
Or look at Tom Stoppard’s play “Rock & Roll,” still on Broadway. No better example of the ability of popular culture to change the world can be seen in the main character’s passion for rock music, be it the Czech Plastic People of the Universe or the Rolling Stones. Another character denigrates the ephemerality of art compared to the “real” world. For Stoppard, nothing can be more real than art.
 
When Frank Rich became a New York Times columnist, his stated intention was to link the worlds of popular culture and politics, to show how the one plays off the other, with neither necessarily first in the causational chain. Whatever you think of Rich’s politics — me, I like them, by and large — his grasp of this connection is spot on. Did macho archetypes like John Wayne and Clint Eastwood lead us to Rambo and Iraq? Do the high arts lose something in their Olympian distancing from the real? Did Neil Young and Bruce Springsteen make a faster, stronger response to 9-11 than John Adams? Just asking.
 
— John Rockwell
 
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