Searching for Classic Themes Amid the Detritus of Pop Culture

Although many of us may spend more time than we care to admit watching television, perusing magazine advice columns or sneaking furtive looks at the supermarket tabloids, we tend to dismiss these habits as self-indulgent wallowing in trash culture. Richard K. Simon, a professor of English and chairman of the humanities department at Cal Poly San Luis Obispo, would like us to recognize that this may not be the case. In “Trash Culture,” he goes to great lengths to demonstrate how a lot of what we think of as trash bears a striking resemblance to some of the most revered works of high culture, a.k.a. the Great Tradition.

In George Lucas’ “Star Wars” series, for example, Simon sees a space-age version of Edmund Spenser’s 16th century verse epic, “The Faerie Queene.” Both stories are about a young man learning the virtues that will make him an exemplary member of society. Both follow the young hero-in-the-making as he comes to the aid of a distressed lady battling dark powers whose significance is allegorical.

The struggles of the returning Vietnam warrior Rambo, Simon points out, echo those of Odysseus. The tempestuous love affairs and convoluted plots of the soap opera “Days of Our Lives” remind this professor of Jacobean revenge tragedy. The sitcom “Friends,” he amusingly suggests, “is ‘Much Ado about Nothing’ transplanted to a New York City coffee shop, with Ross and Rachel as the inexperienced lovers Claudio and Hero, Chandler as the witty Benedict, Monica as the outspoken Beatrice, Joey as the worldly Don Pedro, and Phoebe as a generic Shakespearean fool.” Simon also argues that the adventures of the Enterprise crew on “Star Trek” parallel some of “Gulliver’s Travels.”

Elsewhere, Simon expounds upon the merits of Cosmopolitan magazine as a kind of latter-day Bildungsroman for women, in the mode of Jane Austen’s “Sense and Sensibility” or Flaubert’s “Madame Bovary.” In Playboy, he finds a modern-day version of Castiglione’s “Book of the Courtier.” Sliding yet further down the evolutionary ladder, Simon sees the Enquirer’s tabloid tales of celebrity woe as the postmodern version of tragedy.

In some ways, Simon definitely has a point. By unthinkingly relegating commercial products such as movies and sitcoms to the realm of “trash,” we evade the responsibility of making aesthetic, moral and cultural judgments about them. To fail to notice the distinction between a brilliantly written and acted comedy such as “Friends” or “Seinfeld” and a mediocre sitcom such as “Three’s Company” simply because they are written to please a mass audience is akin to making no distinction between Dickens and a 10th-rate popular novelist. In one of his most interesting chapters, Simon slyly compares the happy, hedonistic, boundlessly selfish never-never land depicted on television commercials (he calls it “adtopia”) with the virtuous, self-denying “Utopia” envisioned by Sir Thomas More. The citizens of “adtopia” have many more choices, he notes, but they always seem to prefer relationships with products to those with people.

But, although Simon takes some account of qualitative differences among works of art, he is on the whole rather too quick to welcome any new version of a classic to the canon of cultural greatness. Now, insofar as certain themes or subjects are pretty much universal--choosing a mate, losing a mate, learning right from wrong, suffering, striving, seeking justice--the fact that they can be found everywhere from Shakespeare to Jenny Jones does not prove anything at all. Indeed, Simon’s enthusiasm for studying pop culture in college courses is a good instance of why more and more people have become skeptical about the value of a college education.

Although Simon’s “discoveries” may not be as important as he claims, his book certainly provides some food for thought and a reassuring sense of the continuities between the glorious past and not always inglorious present.