Popular Culture Review Vol. 5, No. 1, February 1994 | Page 7

The Hypervisual Standard
of American Popular Culture
We are all a nation of peeping toms.
Alfred Hitchcock, Rear Window
Unlike the other nations of the world, the United States has
based its highest aesthetic standards and most revered institutions
upon popular preferences and not vice versa. That is to say-and as
absurd as it may seem-from the Puritans to the present day, the
principles and innovations employed by our greatest writers and
painters and musicians and politicians have come simply from a
popular pastime, that of ogling or looking, watching. Thus, for
example, when Emerson declares that he becomes "a transparent
eyebaH"—"! am nothing; I see all; I become part or parcel of God"
("Nature" 24)—he is projecting this sentiment not from any
traditional or "serious" literary obligation or even European
"mysticism," but from a desire merely to acknowledge the exact same
impetus that will lead the popular quartet of the '50s to rejoice,
"Standing on the Corner, Watching All the Girls Go By." Indeed,
both the pragmatic and euphoric ocular activities performed and
enjoyed by all American citizens on a daily basis serve as the origin
not only of Jonathan Edwards' "surprising conversion" to the "Light"
but also of American video mania, pornography, interior decorating,
advertising, marital love and The Evening Eye-Witness News. This
"American Religion of Vision" (Meyer 1045) is as much responsible for
the spectacular successes of Billy Graham as for the high ratings
garnered by the Super Bowl.
Here, of course, we study or observe popular culture so that we
may match its original wisdom and standards against the "classics"
of our society, be these aesthetic, religious, scientific, or political. In
like manner, we take summer vacations to popular parks or resorts in
order to test the genuine power and thrill of our own sightseeing with
that of Zane Grey’s "purple sages" or our national hymns, announcing,
"America the Beautiful, from sea to shining sea"; or, concomitantly,
we inevitably test our own observations of polluted rivers and urban
decay against the felt truth of Faulkner's countrysides ravaged "by
men with axes and plows" ("Bear" 199) or against the validity of