Consuming Passions: The Dynamics of Popular Culture

by Judith Williamson

Hardcover with unclipped dust jacket, in very good condition. Jacket is sunned at the spine, and edges are creased and nicked. Boards spine ends are slightly bumped, and page block is lightly tanned and blemished. Boards are clean, binding is sound and pages are clear. LW

Genres: Nonfiction

224 pages, Hardcover

First published September 1, 1985

Reviews

[Trevor · Rating 4 out of 5]

I really loved the other book by Williamson I read years ago – Decoding Advertisements. It is off the scale good – something people need to read if they want to understand how advertisements work on us even when we can ‘see through them’. This was good too, but it shows its age more – which is ironic since it is more recent. The problem is that it is a series of short pieces, many of them on film, and because it was written quite a while ago the films are Raging Bull or 10 or Body Heat. At one point she mentions a retrospective of Doris Day’s films that were being shown on television. She compliments these in a way I wasn’t expecting and says that Doris Day turned down the role of Mrs Robinson because of the exploitive way sexual relations are portrayed in the film – gosh – ahead of her time or what? I remember hearing a ‘joke’ about Day by someone, maybe Bob Hope, saying that he’d known her for a very long time, even before she was a virgin. Williamson’s reading of her films is much more interesting than I remember them and she praises her characters as more interesting from a feminist perspective than, say, Munroe’s. All that said, the films still date this book.

A lot of this is good – she gives an interesting overview of Saussure’s Signified, Signifier and Symbol in Decoding Advertisements, and here she gives an equally interesting sketch of Pierce’s semiotic structure (Icon, Index and Symbol). These are good concepts to be familiar with and getting quick and clear thumbnails is nothing to be sneezed at.

The more familiar you are with the films from the 1970s and early 80s, the more you will get out of this. In fact, you are likely to get much more from it than me. I’m nearly certain I’ve seen many of the films discussed here, I’ve a vague memory of Tess, for instance, but even while she was running through the plots of some of these, I couldn’t for the life of me remember anything of them at all. It was all a lifetime ago. For example, she describes a sex scene from Body Heat that starts with the male character smashing a window to get to the female one. I’m certain I saw Body Heat at the time, I was excited about the idea of a remake of Double Indemnity, which I really liked, but I’ve no memory of this scene at all – which is odd, because smashing a window as a prelude to sex is so daft you might think it would stay with me.

The best of this is the chapter called ‘Nuclear Family? No Thanks’. It looks at how the anti-nuclear and environmental movements have adopted quite sexist tropes that she says undermine their otherwise progressive narrative. These tropes often evoke women as ‘earth mothers’ who, as nurturers, have a special affinity for protecting the environment as well as defending their children and their families. Stereotypes of women as nature and man as civilisation could hardly be expected to make a feminist jump for joy. I was a bit annoyed at myself reading this, because I’d read Cresswell’s In Place / Out of Place and he has a chapter in that on Greenham Common and the sexism of the earthmothers passed me by.

The last chapter is also a must read. It suffers, I feel, from the same formal issues that hinder other chapters here too. These chapters are short essays published about the place and the form often doesn’t offer the elbow room to really develop her arguments. So she starts the last chapter discussing Hoggart’s idea that the working class subvert the meanings of the cultural artifacts they consume, rather than merely accepting the ideological meanings imposed on them – and then references post-modernism where ‘one can claim as radical almost anything provided it is taken out of its original context’. And I think there is a lot in this, but saying it isn’t nearly enough. Don’t wet my lips, let me drink.

She makes the point that Marx’s capital focuses on the commodity because while production might well construct the base of society, we find meaning in the things we consume rather than in what we produce. This is necessary in capitalism, since what we produce is alienated from us, while our identities accrete with each new purchase.

I really wanted more of this – she goes on to link this to Thatcher’s revolution of selling council housing to people so they could all become homeowners. She rails against this since she correctly points out that the desire to own your house is related to feeling insecure and unprotected by society – and that the solution isn’t to move to homeownership, but to increase the reality of security and social protection. Forty years on, we see the outcome of this in the UK. Home ownership among the young in particular has plummeted. For instance, ownership between 25-34 year olds went from 53% in 1984 to 26% last year, in Wales from 505 to 28%, in South Yorkshire from 45% to 20%. A couple in their late 20s in the 1980s typically took three year to save for an averaged sized deposit, now it would take them 19 years. Ownership hasn’t proven to be the path to security it was promised to be, at least, not for the majority of people.

I’m not sure I would recommend reading this, but there is no excuse for not reading Decoding Advertisements.

[Jacob Lehman · Rating 4 out of 5]

Feminist/socialist critique of advertisements, films, and the anti-nuclear movement.

I read this as part of my project to read one book from every aisle of Olin Library at Cornell; you can read my reactions to other books from the project here: https://jacobklehman.com/

A fuller review/reaction will follow on my website.

[Sean Saunders]

Looking at advertising through a Marxist lens. Consumer fetishism!

[Daniel Proctor · Rating 2 out of 5]

Beautifully written but so many decades on it's woefully outdated.