Popular culture as a myth-making phenomenon

Pop culture equates with Mass Culture. This is seen as a commercial culture, mass produced for mass consumption. The specificity of the functioning of mass culture (and, in particular, fiction) in America is due to the action of numerous factors, among which the most significant are probably: an immeasurably higher degree of social democracy compared to old Europe; high level of literacy among the population; massification of society, which occurred at a rapid pace; early awareness of the fantastic commercial benefits of targeting a readership of many thousands.

In the early twentieth century. grassroots genres of art - market literature, circus, pop, mass song, romance and cinema - have developed into a new and viable system, which has adopted in folklore a number of its social functions. Aesthetic language of the lower classes and their sense of life, which the artist of the XIX century. found directly in folklore, now increasingly manifested in "mass culture", which absorbed the simplest - and basic - folklore models. The future historian, no doubt, considers the fact that "Kitsch" was formed and discovered just when the era of traditional folklore was coming to a natural end. For the democratic urban masses, "kitsch" became a substitute for folklore in the folklore-free era, and for high art, a "source" that used to be folklore.

… If you think about what, in fact, is an attractive kitsch for the masses, which makes it massive, it turns out that it acts with its elementary, but produced

and proven by millennial practice - and therefore faultless - signs of emotionality. These signs are so simple that they blur the line between the signal of emotion and emotion as such. In search of expressive cinema, Sergei Eisenstein solved a similar task for himself, and the course of thought led him to the circus - an aesthetic phenomenon that seems in no way subject to the known definitions of folklore (the circus is not "oral", is not "collective" and in general is not "verbal"), but nevertheless - deeply folklore in nature. The circus turned out to be exactly the kind of mass art that most fully “preserved” mythological and folklore elements - the simplest signals of emotions, indistinguishable

from emotions - and continuously works with them. Rethinking the word borrowed from the circus, Eisenstein called his discovery "montage of attractions" and transferred it to the art of cinema.

The myth of Superman in American consciousness

Superman introduced a new world of heroes with super powers. A refugee from the planet Krypton, baby Kal-El finds himself with extraordinary powers after arriving on Earth. Adopted by the Kents, Kal-El develops a dual life as the timid Clark Kent and the invincible Superman.

At first the simply drawn Superman had limited abilities, but as Jerry Siegel developed the stories and Joe Shuster delegated the actual drawing to other artists, both the character and his appearance became increasingly sophisticated. After he grows up, Clark Kent becomes an apparently mild-mannered reporter for the newspaper The Daily Planet in Metropolis, a generic American city named after Fritz Bang’s futuristic dystopian film. At the same time, his alter ego, Superman, militates with evil. As a decade of debilitating economic depression reached its end, fans of popular culture thought they saw in Superman a figure who suggested that hidden beneath the average man was an epic figure ready to emerge and solve the world’s problems.

There is a fairly close relationship, generally, between a society and its heroes: if a hero does not espouse values that are meaningful to his readers, there seems little likelihood that he will be popular. The term “super” means over, above, higher in quantity, quality or degree, all of which conflict with the American equalitarian ethos. I believe the answer to this dilemma lies in Superman’s qualities and character. He is, despite his awesome powers, rather ordinary – so much so that he poses as a spectacled nonentity of a reporter in order to avoid publicity and maintain some kind of privacy.

This schizoid split within Superman symbolizes a basic split within the American psyche. Americans are split like Superman, alienated from their selves and bitter about the disparity between their dreams and their achievements, between the theory that they are in control of their own lives and the reality of their powerlessness and weakness.