The Smithsonian Tackles Pop Culture

Two books accompany recent exhibitions at the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of American History (NMAH) that tackle the role of popular culture in the American national experience. While under the same Smithsonian roof, the two projects—one focused on the Disney theme parks and the second on American entertainment more broadly—differ dramatically in attitude and approach. As such, they offer fascinating case studies for public historians. In this brief review essay, I will describe and compare the projects in light of the ways they elevate certain challenges for public historians, including how we address the scholarly community on one hand, and the public on the other.Disney Theme Parks and America’s National Narratives: Mirror, Mirror, for Us All accompanies the exhibit curated by author Bethanee Bemis that finished a one-year run in mid-2024. An article of a similar title appeared in the February 2020 issue of The Public Historian. Bemis has been a museum specialist within the museum’s Division of Political and Military History since 2010. For Bemis, who describes herself as part of “the Disney generation,” the Disney parks are more than an academic subject of interest. Of her generation, she writes, “we had never known a world in which the Disney brand wasn’t a dominant force in our everyday lives” (xi). According to the book’s front piece, the target audience for this text is “students and scholars of history, media, cultural studies, American studies and tourism.”Bemis’s approach strikes me as even-handed tending to the defensive. She writes, “While scholars do not generally agree on whether Disney’s role in narrative-making should be considered as ‘good’ or ‘bad,’ the historiography of Disney suggests they do agree that understanding Disney (not just the theme parks emphasized here, but all aspects of the brand) is an important key to understanding the American public” (2). Bemis frames scholarly attacks on the brand, including disparaging terms like “Mickey Mouse History” and “Disneyfication,” as alienating to a public deeply invested in Disney (117). The notes and list of references alone make her book worth the price of admission and valuable to those researching Disney and American popular culture.In the four chapters of Part 1, “Establishing Disney Parks as Sites of American Identity,” Bemis focuses on the ways in which the Disney brand “gained the cultural capital to become a recognized site of national collective memory.” These factors include the “translation of folk history into physical experience,” “the role of Disney characters as American symbols,” and the “legitimization of Disney’s version of history through association with national figures and holidays” (4). I especially enjoyed the description of how Disney’s creative work found its way into the war effort. In the two chapters of Part II, “Negotiating American Identity at the Disney Parks,” Bemis takes a cultural studies approach to examine how changes at the parks have become entailed in complex negotiations of racial and gender identity. The book seeks to both focus on the theme parks and yet at the same time invoke “the brand at large and all it encompasses” (4). This scope presents some challenges for her project.Over the course of Bemis’s broader project, including the article (2020), book (2023), and exhibition (Spring 2023–Spring 2024)—consequential changes at Disney have impacted her thesis. Obviously, some of this is out of Bemis’s hands. (As public historians, we also find ourselves, ironically, at the mercy of history.) Roughly concurrent with the run of the exhibition, Disney has seen dramatic reversals of fortune: collapse of its stock value, slowing park business, declining linear television business, struggling streaming business, billions of dollars in box office failures, and multiple lawsuits alleging discrimination. Because the public square is now primarily virtual and video games dominate the entertainment business, Disney’s struggles in online and interactive entertainment would also be relevant. These woes may have come to a head over the last two years—presumably after Bemis wrapped up the research for this book—but the causes are not recent occurrences.Red flags were certainly apparent within the scope of Bemis’s research. In framing Disney as a timeless mediator, she glosses over its evolution from a private creative shop guided by Disney himself to public conglomerate managed by factions of executives. The tenure of CEO Bob Iger goes without mention, during which the company expanded via acquisitions including Pixar (2006), Marvel Entertainment (2009), and Lucasfilm (2012), beginning a trend of creative atrophy for Disney itself. Then, Bemis downplays Disney’s involvement in social politics—and the consequence thereof. In the fall of 2023, CEO Iger assured investors that the company would “quiet the noise” in the culture wars and admitted its movies “were too focused on messaging and did not prioritize quality storytelling.” “Creators lost sight of what their number one objective needed to be”—to entertain—Iger acknowledged.1 In an SEC filing, the company admitted to suffering consequences “relating to misalignment with public and consumer tastes and preferences for entertainment.”2 For a legendary entertainment company like Disney to lose touch with its audience seems no small matter.3 But if history is not abiding by Bemis’s thesis, the good news is that she will have plenty of material for a follow-up book—one I hope she will write and that I look forward to reading.Entertainment Nation: How Music, Television, Film, Sports, and Theater Shaped the United States itself represents an American pop culture object: the coffee-table book. As the companion to the NMAH’s exhibition of popular culture artifacts from the last 150 years, it features high-quality images of artifacts from the original Star-Spangled Banner of 1814 to the original Kermit the Frog Muppet. The book features short essays from authors including curators Kenneth Cohen and John W. Troutman as well as many others. Basketball legend Kareem Abdul-Jabbar pens, dare I say, a slam-dunk Foreword, a succinct and pithy description of the workings of pop culture from a bona fide authority. Museum director Anthea M. Hartig describes the project as “One of the most ambitious projects the Smithsonian Museum of American History has ever planned and delivered” (8). As a milestone, the Smithsonian’s Entertainment Nation certainly deserves the attention of the public historian, and I expect it will provoke some lively debates. The physical presentation of the book is what you could expect from the Smithsonian; it will grace the coffee table.In their Introduction, curators Cohen and Troutman describe how the Smithsonian began collecting artifacts associated with the entertainment industry in the 1960s. They cite the success of M*A*S*H*: Binding Up The Wounds (1983) as a watershed moment that led to other exhibits on “commercial entertainment, including Negro League baseball, Hollywood, Sesame Street, and the electric guitar” (14). However, this is the museum’s first foray into entertainment/pop culture as such. They divide the book into five chapters, grounded in binary metaphors of conflict: “Harmony and Discord,” “Signal and Noise,” “Comedy and Tragedy,” “Gaining and Losing Ground,” “Heroes and Villains.” Each chapter features a grab-bag of artifacts and photographs.The sheer scope of the project is impressive. As someone who has worked on pop culture exhibitions, the collective team behind the project have my admiration. However, subjects as broad as entertainment or pop culture easily overwhelm. The decision to include sports under the umbrella of “entertainment” may have been ill advised. Likewise, delineating chapters by medium rather than contentious topics may have been a more successful strategy. And instead of reaching back to the early nineteenth century, they may have been better served by limiting their scope to the era of mass media. While there is probably “something for everyone” in this collection, a viewer/reader will likely find something important missing or question the historical significance of such-and-such artifact. No Elvis? No Michael Jackson? No video games?However, despite the sprawling scope, the conceptual focus of Entertainment Nation is rather narrow. Technically, the exhibition as presented in this book is not about entertainment per se, but racial and gender representation in entertainment. Hartig hammers this point home in her Director’s Note, which leads off with a Black Lives Matter (BLM) T-shirt as worn by NASCAR driver Bubba Wallace. When the curators state that “Almost every object in this catalog could have been placed in any of the chapters,” they reveal this rather one-note nature of the project (18). Again, speaking as an exhibit producer, this admission suggests to me that the project could have benefitted from more time on the proverbial drawing board, and more diversity of perspective.To compare the books/projects is to note some stark differences in their approach to popular culture and public history. Generally speaking, they both take what could be described as a “cultural studies approach.” However, Bemis invokes the concepts of nostalgia, enjoyment, and entertainment in a positive sense. Nor is she ambiguous in viewing Disney’s relationship with the public as a promising one. Here, she challenges decades of disdain from the neo-Marxist and postmodern traditions, which positioned Disney as an emblem of the “culture industry.”4 Perhaps the most extreme of the attacks came from Jean Baudrillard in Simulacra and Simulation (1994). Baudrillard repeated the urban myth that Walt Disney had been cryogenically frozen, and argued that Disneyland exists “a bit like prisons are there to hide that it is the social in its entirety, in its banal, omnipresence, that is carceral.”5 For him, Disneyland was complicit in the collapse of reality itself: Disneyfied simulations, such as Main Street USA, had replaced real places in our collective consciousness (hence the book’s title). Bemis breaks boldly—and for me, refreshingly—from this tradition.Entertainment Nation, on the other hand, sits squarely in the academic tradition of suspicion of the entertainment industry. For the collective authors, entertainment is not only not particularly entertaining, but primarily a milieu of conflict as evidenced by the chapter themes themselves. Moreover, in the chapter explicitly focused on technology (as well as elsewhere), the creators of significant technology—including the Apple PowerBook, Dolby Cinema Processor, and Fairlight Computer Musical Instrument—get no mention. Instead, the curators present technology as a platform for racial/gender conflict—the idée fixe of the project. And in spite of the earnest tone, an attitude of ironic cynicism or ennui shows through in places such as when Theodore S. Gonzalves scoffs at the notion that depictions of Asians between South Pacific (1950) and Crazy Rich Asians (2018) have progressed in a positive direction: “At this rate American audiences will be able to get their next fix of an all-Asian cast in 2036. Progress!” (92). Unlike Bemis who conveys an abiding love for Disney, scholars like Gonzalves express ambivalence (if not outright scorn) for pop culture itself.The projects showcase fundamental challenges of public history, including how and when we choose to meet the public through historicization of our subjects. While it’s true that Bemis downplays the contemporary social politics that have impacted the history of Disney’s brand, the presentism of Entertainment Nation represents a more significant flaw. In the case of South Pacific, Gonzalves’s criticism of the seventy-year-old musical glosses over the work’s progressive nature in its own day. The plot focuses on a nurse from Arkansas and a Marine from Philadelphia, who struggle to overcome their racial prejudice. But one would not know that from his presentist critique, which comes across as rather harsh and unsophisticated. Elsewhere, the editors and Tsione Wolde-Michael, founding director of the Smithsonian’s Center for Restorative History, bend over backward to present the more recent genre of rap/hip hop music in the most favorable terms. They celebrate rap/hip hop as “a platform for social commentary and activism” and completely overlook the genre’s ongoing entailment in the promotion of misogyny, gang violence, homophobia, and drug use (191). The result is history that feels revisionist and unreliable.Speaking as a one-time entertainer and exhibit producer, the one-note sociopolitical agenda, worldview, or ideology driving Entertainment Nation strikes me, ironically, as a bit of an injustice: There is a lot more to entertainment than social-political conflict. And members of the public, expecting to be entertained by an exhibition about entertainment are likely to feel surprised if not sideswiped. The idée fixe creates conflict within the project itself: the Foreword by pop culture icon Abdul-Jabbar seems to belong to an entirely different project, one that would celebrate pop culture in a genuine, unironic manner:Pop culture isn’t just a simple entertainment...it’s a vibrant language that articulates our shared hopes, shared joys, and shared pain. Its effectiveness is that it expresses these thoughts and emotions through images, stories, music, athletics, and dance—languages of sound, sight, and movement that transcend mere words....Sometimes the power of pop culture comes not just from the work itself, but from the communal, tribal rite of sharing the experience with others (6).He closes with a slight misquote of the Bard, but important all the same: “What is it we see when we look at Captain America’s shield...? We see ‘the stuff that dreams are made of.’ (Look it up.)” (7). If the “bad news” is that Entertainment Nation suffers from myopia and divisiveness, the “good news” is that it has plenty of room for growth over its twenty-year journey at the National Museum.Disney Theme Parks and America’s National Narratives and Entertainment Nation, aimed at the scholarly and popular audiences respectively, represent dramatically different approaches to public history. In tandem, however, they validate the argument that Camille Paglia has been making for decades: that popular culture is our culture.6 Bethanee Bemis aims to overcome academics’ disdain for the Disney brand to highlight the importance of its theme parks in the negotiation of a national identity. Hers is a bold, positive vision, even if it suffers from inconvenient timing or errs a bit in overlooking Disney’s recent missteps. With Entertainment Nation, the Smithsonian makes a bold, twenty-year commitment to entertainment/pop culture as such. However, to me, the project feels mired in yesterday’s theory and today’s social politics. Like Disney, the creators have chosen to prioritize their message over their entertainment. And, as in the case of Disney, I expect there is a price to be paid

Art · History · Music History and Culture