Myth #1: Theatre is High Culture. Film is Low Culture

We know, of course, that theatre has never been the exclusive province of the wealthy, nor has film ever been confined to the lower class. Yet the notion that theatre is culturally superior to film continues to permeate theatre and performance studies in any number of ways, even if the terms “high” and “low” remain unvoiced. We see it in theatre people’s characterization of film and television as sites of “selling out.” Village Voice theatre critic Michael Feingold epitomizes this point of view: “a disheartening number of theater folk share the tourist audience’s preoccupation with mass culture, to the point where I sometimes feel like the hero of Ionesco’s Rhinoceros, watching his friends turn into stampeding animals. But I’m not capitulating, even if the popularity of a show like Glee proves that an impulse from the theater can sometimes stir up TV’s currents.”⁴   We see it in the patronizing tone of surprise that theatre critics use to praise a Hollywood star who performs well in a live theatre role, as well as the gleeful malice with which those same critics eviscerate the film star who acts poorly on stage. As Patrick Healy writes, “Hollywood stars often come to Broadway to prove something to themselves or to audiences, though they rarely admit it.”⁵

We also see it, interestingly enough, in performance studies’ valorization of the live as superior to the mediated, epitomized by Peggy Phelan’s oft-quoted formulation, “performance’s only life is in the present.”⁶ It is all very well to celebrate performance as that which disappears, to highlight theatre’s capacity to surprise, to point to a tradition that stretches (in the West) back to Thespis. Yet in so doing, do we not also implicitly and explicitly devalue those theatrical innovations and interventions that seem to smack too much of film? Why, as Jessica Sternfeld writes, do “theater scholars develop an arrogant, even disgusted tone when mentioning the megamusical, if they mention it at all”?⁷ Why, when we have rejected—or at least challenged—the (neo-)Aristotelian approach to drama in so many other quarters, does Spectacle remain the most abject element of theatre studies? For the same reason, perhaps, that Ibsen, Strindberg, and Chekhov still abound on U.S. stages, despite a quarter century or more of attempts to de-canonize Dead White Guys: European modernism, with its attendant anti-theatricality, still lurks as the American art world’s unindicted co-conspirator.⁸

Film studies is haunted by the high-low myth in a different way. Concerned with establishing its legitimacy as a discipline, cinema studies for many years adopted many of the aesthetic prejudices of theatre, considering only certain types of film to be worthy of serious scholarly investigation. Films that proved too popular with the masses were suspect as art, unless and until they achieved canonical status. Most especially, film studies has tended, like theatre, to eschew sentiment, lavishing greater praise and attention on films marked by reflexive irony or existential dread, another sign of European influence.⁹ Hence film and media studies finds itself with a catch-22: having argued for disciplinary legitimacy (and even superiority) on the grounds that their object of study reaches more spectators than any other art form, the field for many years focused on those objects more likely to be enjoyed by a self-selected few. Only in the last twenty years has the scholarly study of popular film and television become widespread. Lee Grievson notes that the 2003 renaming of the Society of Cinema Studies’s as the Society of Cinema and Media Studies “marked a newly expansionist sense of what the discipline would cover.”¹⁰

So where are we? Theatre scholars, rapidly losing ground to film in the academy (as measured in majors, facilities, and teaching lines), gravitate toward performances that demonstrate theatre is a “higher” art form than film. Film scholars, battling to win ground from theatre (and literature), have until recently aimed their sights at work that establishes film as a “higher” art form than the general public might think. What falls out of this equation are the popular performances, including those most likely to span both disciplines: the filmic adaptations of Broadway hits, the musicals based on movies, the televised plays, the live-to-movie-theatre broadcast, and so on.

The most likely site for discussions of such “crossover” performances is popular culture studies, which since the 1990s has begun to immigrate into nearly all academic domains. But popular culture studies in general, whether concerned with the live, the mediated, or the material, is further bounded by a generalized distrust of the so-called Culture Industry, a view that rests on the Marxian assumption that artworks generated for profit are (by definition) exploitative of the masses who consume them. While such a view has value as a diagnostic, challenging us to think critically about the entertainment we consume, it is ultimately self-negating. Combined with assumptions of high and low culture, such critique leads us to the absurd conclusion that the audience (the People) are always right, except for the many times that they are wrong, hoodwinked by hegemonic capitalist (and later neoliberal) structures of power.