Carmen & The Simpsons & Quality

T. Birch, Films and popular culture.

Cartoons, as schematic encapsulations of fundamental cultural structures, have little room for the expression of personal vision through plot or character. Films aspire to "art" and require a "vision" (e.g. through screen persona, the play of darkness and shadow, dialectical oppositions of thought and image, etc.) that must nevertheless conform to these same cultural structures. The opportunity for learning, however, need not be better in one genre versus another. And which particular example of entertainment is a "better" experience is not always an easy question to answer. An undergraduate classroom exercise in Aesthetics demonstrates the nature of this question and its importance in understanding cultural norms through art: if asked whether a good episode of The Simpsons is better than a bad production of the opera Carmen, students will nearly always choose the Simpsons. But this is not because (I would assert) students do not understand opera. In such a case, The Simpsons really is a better choice. The search for quality entertainment goes on! -- while the public suffers from various delusions about what forms of entertainment must be good or bad, and confusion abounds about the role of "credible" narratives in a postmodern world.