In the 1970s, it even seemed as if cinema would die the death so often predicted for it. King said: “Do you notice something?” Higham said, “What?” And King said, “Every time she appears there’s something glowing at the back of her head.” Higham wondered if King “thought this was something spiritual that had crept into the picture from heaven.” But it was Higham’s own little miracle.Film has lost the all-embracing dominance of the days when Albert Camus, growing up in the settler world of French Algeria, noticed all the young men trying to look like Clark Gable and the young women copying Marlene Dietrich. Whenever St Bernadette (Jennifer Jones) was on screen, Higham put a spotlight glow behind her, “just like you would use to make a head stand away from the object behind it.” He and the director then looked at some cut reels. This was the story of the visions at Lourdes : director Henry King; Linda Darnell as Virgin Mary; four Oscars, 1943. Charles Higham, a leading Hollywood cameraman, reports in his memoirs how he worked on The Song of Bernadette. Films are the classic case of cultural group-think, in spite of the craze for attributing everything to the director. It shouldn’t be held against them.A mass-cultural object is never a one-person production Better call it a process than an object Newspaper editors seldom write their own headlines TV presenters almost never write their own scripts.

6) of the Ford Transit van; the Eurovision song contest; Keira Knightley v Kate Moss; Botox v cosmetic surgery; cherry-flavour Coca-Cola; Scary Movie 4. This universality is very different from Shakespeare’s or Tolstoy’s But it’s what gives these arts their strength. It’s not media that use people, but people that use media.About other arts, the non-knowledgeable have to clutch at some escape-phrase like “I don’t know much about it, but…” Mass art is what everybody knows about. Anybody’s opinion is as valid as anybody else’s: the latest re-design (No.

Not all the readers of the Sun or OK share the values of what they’re reading. The social historian EP Thompson once spoke of the “stubbornness of being.” In other words, people are tougher than that. Not all the people who watch Big Brother want to model themselves on Chantelle (though some do). It’s important, always, not to read into the content, or apparent content, of mass culture a statement about the people who’re using that product. The more specific the better: Angela Carter, for example, on the symbology of red lipstick; John Berger on the slippery ethics of war photography; Reyner Banham on the iconography of the potato crisp.Attempts to build more elaborate structures of interpretation miss the point about mass art: its surface Its secret depth is that it has no secret depth. Marshall McLuhan’s global village has arrived: email and texting replace the long-gone natter over the garden fence.To capture the fluidity of the mass arts, the best writers take one specific item or process and look at it in depth: George Orwell’s essays, McLuhan’s The Mechanical Bride (about the imagery of car ads), David Thomson or Pauline Kael on movies. The internet magazines Popbitch and Holy Moly! flourish by purveying nothing but sheer gossip.