1981) At the recent wedding of my stepson, my husband sat companionably between his former wife (the mother of the groom) and me. The groom, in his toast, warmly acknowledged the bride's ex-husband (the father of her son), who was there with his longtime partner, who sat next to the lesbian couple with their new baby. The new husband of my husband's ex-wife introduced us to the daughters of his two previous marriages, one of whom described the difficulties of living with your ex-husband in the apartment right above you. All in all, a typical post-modern family - one typical of Republicans as well as Democrats, conservatives as well as liberals, rich as well as poor and, in this case, England as well as America.

Carol Tavris
"Goodbye, Ozzie and Harriet" in
New York Times Book Review (9/22/1996)
[review of She Works/He Works by
Rosalind C. Barnett and Caryl Rivers and
In the Name of the Family
by Judith Stacey]

[Note: See Don Delillo's surreal comic novel White Noise (1984) for a good fictional example of a "postmodern family" - a disparate group of people loosely held together by bonds of blood, marriage and propinquity.]

1982) Like Reagan's trickle-down economics, trickle-down culture was supposed to help deliver the goods to the masses. With a little help from "Masterpiece Theatre" broadcasts, Book-of-the-Month-Club subscriptions and endless museum reproductions of Van Gogh's "sunflowers," cultural missionaries like Mortimer Adler and Will and Ariel Durant were going to make us a more civilized nation. Unfortunately, something else has happened. We've somehow slipped into a Classic Comics limbo, where it's hard to tell what's parody, what's rip-off and what's just user-friendly adaptation.

In the process, stylistic innovations have been divorced from the artistic visions that begot them. Form is wrenched apart from function, and the shock of the new is diluted by imitations. [...] If familiarity does not exactly breed contempt, it does breed indifference and impatience.

Entropy, of course, is a fact of life in the realm of popular culture. Even things without pretensions get homogenized and softened. Over the years, Mickey Mouse evolved from a roughneck sort of rat into his current amiable self, and Columbo, too, evolved from an irascible maverick into an avuncular snoop. Hitchcock gave way to De Palma, and Marilyn to Madonna. [...]

To understand why the trickle-down process has accelerated so swiftly, it's useful to go back to the critic Dwight Macdonald. In a famous 1960 essay, Macdonald identified three sorts of culture: High Culture (think Cezanne and Eliot), which articulate's an artists' idiosyncratic and often demanding vision; Masscult (Norman Rockwell and Erle Stanley Gardner), which tries to "Please the crowd by any means," and Midcult (Pearl Buck and Thorton Wilder), which disguises Masscult's reliance on formula with pretentious allusions.

Back then, high culture stood smugly apart, secure in its elitism. In today's marketplace, however, elitism has no value - money has become the only yardstick. Thus High Culture lusts after the market share of Masscult. [...] In a world where alienation is stylish, Masscult has also discovered the profit in co-opting the avante-garde. Music video makers routinely lift poses from obscure movies and photography books, while smoothing away the rough edges. And by appropriating a few anti-establishment gestures, advertisers (like Benneton) and performers (like Dennis Rodman) have found that they can enjoy the publicity value of controversy, while posing no real threat to the status quo. Indeed, Dadaist highjinks are now the province of David Letterman and Howard Stern.

Michiko Kakutani
"Culture Zone: The Trickle Down Theory"
New York Times Magazine (9/22/1996)