Why I Love Pop Culture

I spend so much of my life consuming pop culture for critical purposes, with an eye to what I’m going to turn into a column, and how I’m going to interpret something, that sometimes I forget why I love pop culture. It’s sort of like when I used to be an ice cream maker (yes really) and I got sort of bored with ice cream, as an institution; I could make some kickass, mighty fine ice cream, but I’d forgotten the whole reason people consume ice cream, why I was making it in the first place, what the whole point was.

There’s a reason I started consuming pop culture and was willing to push through the cultural barriers created by spending my early childhood in Greece and missing out on a lot of the pop culture phenomena other people in my age bracket take for granted. It wasn’t until high school that I really started engaging with pop culture, and realised I’d been doing it on a subconscious level my whole life. I was steeped in pop culture references and actually becoming a student of pop culture gave me a deeper appreciation for all those things. (And helped me figure out why people looked at me funny sometimes.)

I love pop culture because I love to be entertained. There is a special feeling I get when I’m settling into a chair and cracking open a new book, throwing in a DVD to rewatch, consuming a great piece of art. It’s a thrill that tingles all the way down my spine as I look at this piece of art that someone has made for me. It’s the thing that swells up inside my chest and makes me grin despite myself every time I’m at the movie theatre and the opening credits start to roll. The same thing that uncoils at the end of the movie and makes my eyes mist over during the credits (well, wait, that might actually be the overcranked A/C).

We humans have longed for entertainment for a long time. Those stuffy ‘classics’ people shove down your throat in school were the pop culture of their generation. A Tale of Two Cities was pop culture. The Sistine Chapel was pop culture. Ὄρνιθες (The Birds) was a work of pop culture. Discussing Greek theatre with my father recently, we were talking about the tendency to pick over the bones of Greek drama, and he said ‘what if these guys were really just writing these plays to entertain people, and people thought they were fun, so they kept going?’ It made me think about the potential for critical meta-analysis of the things we’re consuming now by scholars 2000 years in the future. What’s going to survive, and what are people going to think of it? Will it be Days of Our Lives that people turn to as the informative text on US culture in the 20th century?

I like entertainment. I like to laugh. I like to feel my heart catch at the back of my throat. I like to be royally pissed on behalf of whichever character is getting totally fucked over. I love pop culture that tears at my emotions and puts me through the wringer and makes me feel like I need a warmup towel when I’m done. Wait. That sounds dirty.

And I love the connections that pop culture creates for me. Common ground is only a shared favourite television series away, the cover of the novel you’re reading, a mutual appreciation for pop art. Sometimes other divides seem unbridgeable; there’s no way I’m going to reach a person, until I find the chink in the armor and we can talk about pop culture. And sure, sometimes pop culture is the means to an end or the backdoor to a serious discussion. But also? Sometimes it’s just the foundation of a great new friendship that I’ll enjoy for years to come.

And, yeah, I love what pop culture says about me, and about society. I love pop culture as a vehicle for commentary you can’t get away with in other forms of media. I think pop culture is a tremendous tool for change, especially when the creators aren’t consciously setting out to create change, but rather to make something fun, and entertaining, and awesome that creates change along the way. And I love tearing apart the things I love to see how they’re put together and how people interact with them. That, too, is part of my love of pop culture.

Pop culture saved my life; not in a hyperbolic sense but in the sense that during a severe depressive episode several years ago, it really was a television show that I was living for. And it was moving through that television series that gave me something else to live for. All the psychotherapy in the world couldn’t give me that; it took a creator of art who wanted to make something entertaining to do that.

And that’s pretty fucking cool.