It’s Alive! It’s Alive! (Pop Cultural Icons For the Ages)

Here’s a test that will rekindle those nightmares you used to have about high school English. Name a character from nineteenth century literature that you could guarantee most people you know would be familiar with. Got one? Okay, now name more than one. How many can you come up with?

So far, I’ve thought of four. They aren’t characters from the often-touted literary works that many departments of literature are assigned to keeping alive for the present and future generations. But if you went up to anyone who has grown up in Western culture – even the stereotypical guy sitting in front of a TV watching a football game through a boozy haze – you would get a glint of recognition by saying any of these names: Frankenstein, Dracula, Scrooge, or Sherlock Holmes. Of course, your unwilling test-taker might get Dr. Victor Frankenstein mixed up with the monster he created. And he might not even be aware that there was a novel by Bram Stoker. He might wonder if that guy Dickens ever wrote much else besides A Christmas Carol. And he might be puzzled when you mention the guy from Baker Street. “I thought you said the character had to be fictional.” I would even throw in another ‘character,’ despite the fact that he was real. Jack the Ripper was in fact fictionalized in any number of the so-called penny dreadfuls of his day – fan literature, if you will. And his name in the popular imagination precedes his history by a fair bit.

Why do I bring this up? Because it’s the post-Oscar, post-Golden Globe, etc. season when many people have tried to determine just what it is that is the best our culture has to offer in terms of the arts. We’ve watched and we’ve nodded. But do we believe that Brokeback Mountain has the gas to live on, or is it rooted in a current cultural crisis that will date it? I’ve had that feeling before, watching many films that were hard-hitting in their time and then…pfft! I didn’t see the film Philadelphia until about ten years after its release. And the A.I.D.S. story had moved on beyond the events of the film. Think back to the serious dramas you’ve seen in the past – which ones leap to your mind? Okay, try this instead – are you more familiar with 1981’s Best Picture Oscar winner, Chariots of Fire, or with another of the nominees that year, Raiders of the Lost Ark? Which one has the most steam at this point in time?

Many of us who have taught English at one point or another like to imagine that the truly great and profound writers will last, even if we weren’t there to promote them to the sleepy and those who are actually asleep. But even Shakespeare’s most familiar characters – say, Hamlet and Macbeth – don’t have the staying power in the popular imagination that someone like Don Quixote has – a character created by Miguel de Cervantes who, as fate would have it, died in 1616, the same year as Shakespeare ditched the mortal coil. And if you look again at the nineteenth century novel, who remembers the classics from that period without having a Wikipedia chronology open in front of them? And yet if you mention The Three Musketeers, people tend to respond, even though Alexandre Dumas wouldn’t be considered a literary giant by today’s standards.

All I’m saying is that the popular culture of the past has given us some of our most iconic and enduring figures and too often the literary world fails to recognize the power these figures have in our cultural consciousness. Why these figures? Why for so long? And that’s to not even mention King Arthur and Robin Hood who have outlasted their often nebulous authors and gone on to Hollywood fame and fortune. Call it the revenge of the populace.

Doesn’t this make you wonder, then, what cultural icons we are creating even now that might last beyond our time? Maybe there aren’t any right now. One look at the serious lineup of Oscar nominees for the past year, and you have to wonder if those stories will outlast the times they are commenting on. Don’t get me wrong – I don’t wish them ill. But will any of the characters in those films rise again to fight another cultural day, following in the footsteps of Batman and King Kong?