Hello from Phildelphia…
Not too far from where I’m sitting as I write the first draft of this post is the Philadelphia Museum of Art, home to perhaps one of the most well-known images of a museum in American popular culture– the “Rocky Steps“. Repeated throughout the franchise, ranked as one of the most enduring moments in entertainment, and spoofed and rearticulated in television and movies, Rocky Balboa’s triumphant moment at the top of the PMA east staircase has become a cultural icon. In the movie, running to the top of the steps represents an achievement for Stallone’s character, as his training regiment improves his fitness and skills as a boxer. Read another way, the scene could be articulated as part of a class-based narrative as well: working-class Rocky, fighting his way up the exterior of the museum, is also fighting his way up in the heirarchical culture the museum represents. By improving himself, he is improving his way in the world.
The museum as a place of self-improvement is only one of the theoretical articulations museologists have given to the institution– others include the museum as a place of colonialism (or post-colonialism), as a shrine, or as a place of business. While the academic literature on museums is extensive, however, there has been very little investigation on the pop culture “literature” about museums, such as how they are depicted in the movies, on television, or in novels. How have museums been depicted in popular culture, and do these depictions reinforce or dispute the ways in which academic museologists have theorized about the space? What can be said, if anything , about our culture’s view of the museum as an institution (if we take as a starting point the idea that American culture is, in many ways, popular culture)? This project will investigate these questions.
In general form, the project will be an online exhibit or digital essay. Using film as object, however, opens the project to a variety of choices. Developing this project as a monograph or essay, for example, would be one method– describing the scene, then detailing the interpretation, in much the same way as this blogger analyzes Back to the Future. Film could also be included as illustrative of the text, as in this Yale University film studies site. Youtube features a blog-style interface (which might also be a way to involve the audience with the interpretation), but one method of interrelating film and text that I think might be interesting to investigate is that used by the VH1 program Pop-up Video (an example is here) . Though coding this sort of interactivity presents some problems, both Youtube’s video annotations and the Reuter’s news service offer free, online versions of this annotation method. If hyperlinked “museum labels” and interpretive paragraphs can be substituted for the simple pop-up “info nuggets”, then the project audience will also be able to interact with the film in a non-linear, non-narrative way, drilling down where they wish to form their own narrative between the images and the ideas.
What a great topic! You could take the interactivity aspect even further by allowing readers/viewers to suggest other examples of museums used in popular culture. Your topic might also work well in the format of a blog, you could annotate and expand the content over a longer period of time as you come across other examples. It could potentially be infinitely expandable.
You seem to be concentrating on museums’ depiction in film and TV. Do you see this project going much beyond that medium? You mention novels, but what about depictions of museums in radio, comic books, and video games?
Adding some blog or posting capability is certainly an option– allowing users to not only suggest other texts, but to comment on the interpretations and give their own would allow the site to share the authority and inquiry, much the way the Smithsonian’s WW2 exhibit a few years ago became as much about the comments as the objects on display.
It certainly could be infinitely expandable– for the moment I’ll just focus on a selection of films, though one or two that come to mind immediately (_Relic_, for instance) are also novels, and both media feature/ focus on different sets of images. But, if I organize by “theme” rather than by “object”, it might be fairly easy to expand to cover other media…
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