The owl of Minerva and the NBC peacock

THE OWL OF MINERVA AND THE NBC PEACOCK

By Paul A. Cantor

Shows About Nothing: Nihilism and Popular Culture from `The Exorcist' to `Seinfeld'

By Thomas S. Hibbs

Spence, 192 pages, $22

Popular culture has become an equal opportunity target of criticism for the increasing number of academics who write about it. Left-wing critics view movies and television as the tool of corporate America, and condemn them both for creating a consumerist ethos that keeps the products moving off the shelves and for defusing potentially explosive impulses in the general population that might otherwise be channeled into revolutionary activity. Right-wing critics view popular culture as undermining the very American regime leftwing critics think it props up. According to the Right, Hollywood offers up a disorienting menu of alternate lifestyles to the American people, subverting their traditional morality and religion in daily orgies of sex and violence.

Thomas Hibbs is a right-wing critic of popular culture. As his subtitle indicates, he regards popular culture as nihilistic, seducing Americans into a vision of life "beyond good and evil;' in Nietzsche's famous phrase. His title refers to TV's most popular situation comedy in the 1990s, "Seinfeld;' the self proclaimed "show about nothing." Plumbing its existential depths, Hibbs even has a section headed "Seinfeld's Dark God:' But despite his conservative view of popular culture, Hibbs manages to rise above the partisan heat and smoke of the debate and actually shed light on the subject. Unlike Marxist critics, Hibbs writes about popular culture in terms the ordinary populace can understand. His clear, spare prose is a welcome relief from the turgid, jargon-laden writing one generally finds in left-wing treatises on popular culture.