THE POPULAR CULTURE STUDIES JOURNAL VOLUME 1 NUMBERS 1 & 2 2013 Editor BOB BATCHELOR Thiel College Associate Editor NORMA JONES Kent State University Associate Editor LAUREANO RALON Figure/Ground Communication Assistant Editor MYC WIATROWSKI Indiana University Assistant Editor MAJA BAJAC-CARTER Kent State University Please visit the PCSJ at: http://mpcaaca.org/the-popular-culture-studies-journal/ The Popular Culture Studies Journal is the official journal of the Midwest Popular and American Culture Association. Copyright © 2013 Midwest Popular and American Culture Association. All rights reserved. Cover photo credit (partial and adapted): "Untitled," © 2009 Arwen Ferraris, used under a Creative Commons Attribution- ShareAlike license: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/ EDITORIAL ADVISORY BOARD ANTHONY ADAH VICTOR EVANS Cinema Arts & Digital Technologies Communication Minnesota State University, Moorhead Thiel College AARON BARLOW JUSTIN GARCIA Engklish Anthropology New York City College of Technology (CUNY) Millersville University Faculty Editor, Academe, the magazine of the AAUP JOSEF BENSON ANDREW F. HERRMANN English Communication Studies University of Wisconsin-Parkside East Tennessee State University PAUL BOOTH JESSE KAVADLO College of Communication English DePaul University Maryville University of St. Louis GARY BURNS WILLIAM KIST Communication Education, Health, and Human Services Northern Illinois University Kent State University KELLI S. BURNS LARRY Z. LESLIE School of Mass Communications School of Mass Communications University of South Florida University of South Florida BRIAN COGAN MATTHEW MIHALKA Communications Music Molloy College University of Arkansas-Fayetteville ASHLEY M. DONNELLY LAURIE MOROCO Department of Telecommunications Communication Ball State University Thiel College LEIGH H. EDWARDS SALVADOR MURGUIA English Sociology Florida State University Miyazaki International College ANGELA M. NELSON KATHLEEN TURNER Department of Popular Culture English Bowling Green State University University of Mississippi LAUREANO RALON MARYAN WHERRY Founder English and Journalism Figure/Ground Communication Western Illinois University Quad-Cities PHIL SIMPSON SHAWN DAVID YOUNG English Visual & Performing Arts Eastern Florida State College Clayton State University SARAH MCFARLAND TAYLOR Department of Religious Studies Northwestern University THE POPULAR CULTURE STUDIES JOURNAL VOLUME 1 NUMBERS 1 & 2 2013 CONTENTS Editorial: What is Popular Culture? 1 Bob Batchelor ARTICLES Daniel Amos and Me: The Power of Pop Culture and Autoethnography 6 Andrew F. Herrmann When the Abyss Looks Back: Treatments of Human Trafficking in Superhero Comic Books 18 Bond Benton and Daniela Peterka-Benton Being-in-the-Technologically-Mediated-World: The Existential Philosophy of Marshall McLuhan 36 Marcelo Vieta and Laureano Ralon 9/11 Did Not Take Place: Apocalypse and Amnesia in Film and The Road 61 Jesse Kavadlo “I Did Them Things So You Wouldn’t Have To”: Secret Window and the Characters Who Won’t Stay Dead 84 Jan Whitt Boardwalk Empire: The Romantic Side of Crime and Capitalism 100 Ashley M. Donnelly Why Engaging with Ray Browne and Marshall Fishwick Matters: A Review Essay 116 Bob Batchelor INTERVIEW Figure/Ground Communication Presents: Arthur Asa Berger 126 Interviewed by Laureano Ralon BOOK REVIEWS New Perspectives on Classics Texts 138 Confidence Men and Painted Women: A Study of Middle-Class Culture in America, 1830-1870 Nathan Saunders Reviews of New Books 142 Gaga Feminism: Gender, Sexuality, and the End of Normal Tammie Jenkins Harry Potter and the Millennials: Research Methods and the Politics of the Muggle Generation Veronica Popp ABOUT THE CONTRIBUTORS 148 Welcome to The Popular Culture Studies Journal! Popular culture is at the heart of democratic citizenship. It serves as an engine driving technology, innovation, and information, as well as a methodological lens employed by the many scholarly fields that examine culture, often from an interdisciplinary perspective. Yet, despite its growing significance, we argue that there are not enough venues for publishing pioneering popular culture scholarship. Thus, the need for The Popular Culture Studies Journal. The articles, essays, and book reviews in this inaugural issue of PCSJ demonstrate the scope and breadth the editorial team would like to pursue as this publication accelerates up to full speed. Taken as a whole, they encompass many critical areas: theory-development and building, exploration of contemporary challenges, links to the discipline’s history, and innovative analysis and assessment across mass communications channels, including literature, television, and film. Andrew F. Herrmann’s lead article, for example, demonstrates the way scholars might use popular culture in autoethnographic research. In addition, the piece also reveals how critical popular culture is as one creates, develops, and employs a worldview. Each article in PCSJ pushes the envelope in a similar manner. The editorial team also wanted to use the launch the new journal to showcase several innovations. Foremost, PCSJ is partnering with Laureano Ralon and his award-winning Figure/Ground Communication website (www.figureground.org) to feature an exclusive interview with an important popular culture scholar in each issue. We are proud that the first interview is with Arthur Asa Berger, one of the world’s preeminent scholars across communications, mass media, research methodology, and popular culture. Berger is a towering figure in popular culture studies, thus an ideal first for PCSJ. Also, to provide a new twist on traditional book reviews, PCSJ features “New Perspectives on Classics Texts,” the opportunity for today’s scholars to re-assess and reconsider a classic book and its influence over time. We hope readers will share other ideas with us, so that we can offer additional new advances. In closing, the editorial staff has chalked up numerous debts in producing this double issue. First, we would like to thank the members of the MPCA/ACA leadership team and the members who comprised the Journal Committee. In addition, we would like to thank filmmaker Brent Jones for designing the splendid cover, which helps us create a brand immediately differentiated from other academic journals. Of course, we also thank the Editorial Advisory Board members for their diligent efforts. A special note of appreciation to Thiel College, the journal’s academic home, and President Troy VanAken and Dean Lynn Franken for their warm support. We hope that each MPCA/ACA member finds The Popular Culture Studies Journal useful and important. Please dive into the journal and let us know what you think! Bob Batchelor Editor Editorial: What is Popular Culture? BOB BATCHELOR After decades (or maybe centuries) of asking this bedeviling question, scholars around the world still agonize over how to express popular culture. Is it as water is to the fish, as our intellectual forefather Ray B. Browne concluded, or is it simply all that is not elite or high culture? Moving from the tactical to the strategic or meta-level, one might wonder if popular culture is even a thing. Perhaps it is more like the air or oxygen than water or maybe the atmosphere itself, something we know exists but cannot visibly see or easily explain. Maybe it is more like the sun, always there, essential to life, yet a thing we know relatively little about, particularly given its centrality to our very existence. Regardless of one’s specific definition, it is impossible to deny the ubiquity of popular culture in contemporary society. It is so rampant that it could be viewed as a kind of common or global language that links people across geographic, class, race, gender, and economic lines, though these factors certainly play a critical role in how one speaks or interacts with popular culture. The notion of standing around a water cooler at work and discussing last night’s new television series or film debut is important in how culture breaks barriers—anyone can participate. This idea remains central even as the water cooler itself rarely exists in today’s workplace and has more or less become a part of pop culture lore. My inclination is to view popular culture as the connections that form between individuals and objects. It is one’s engaging with a popular culture entity that then produces a feeling in the person that takes culture to an emotional level. I suggest that it is this instinctual link to culture that results in the chemical reaction that bursts in one’s brain when encountering popular culture items. That rush can feel like or actually be chemistry, hatred, attraction, antipathy, or love. Whether it is a favorite novel, particular film, or piece of music, we are chemically attuned to popular culture. Observer’s claim that the brain is “hard- wired” to comprehend many things, popular culture is one of the most critical. In examining literature, for example, scholar Richard M. Dorson explains: The Popular Culture Studies Journal, Vol. 1, No. 1&2 Copyright © 2013 1 Bob Batchelor 2 A tale is not a dictated text with interlinear translation, but a living recitation delivered to a responsive audience for such cultural purposes as reinforcement of custom and taboo, release of aggressions through fantasy, pedagogical explanations of the natural world, and applications of pressures for conventional behavior. (21) Again, on an instinctual level then, popular culture is the manifestation of our physical desire for culture. I hazard this is why a baby will