Critics and Builders

Welcome to Critics and Builders

2008-08-19T13:29:41-05:00

For contact information and my daily teaching schedule, please see my student and parent welcome page.

As my About Page notes in more detail, Critics and Builders is my web home, as both a teacher and a cultural critic. Because of time constraints, however, I've had to suspend posting here on my present academic interests, which are the many intersections of education and technology with a particular focus on issues of media literacy.

You'll still find plenty of resources here -- in the old posts and in the various blogrolls. And this page is still the first stop to guide students and parents to information and materials for the courses I'm presently teaching (see the top right column). It's also the place to find any "resource guides" I construct around conference presentations or other research I am conducting (see a little bit further down the right column).

You can also find my writing at PopPolitics.com, one of the original sources for cultural criticism on the web, which I co-founded in 2000. While new content has been sparse on the site the last few years, we hope to have a revamped site up by the end of 2013.

In the meantime, you can catch my quick thoughts on Twitter: @bheidkamp.

If you have questions or just want to say hi, feel free to contact me anytime.

Media Literacy Week: Are You Participating?

2007-06-29T16:15:43-05:00

The National Media Education Conference, sponsored by the Alliance for a Media Literate America (AMLA), took place this week in St. Louis. While this might sound like yet another conference of like-minded academics theorizing and socializing -- and therefore something that has little relevance to the real world or your life -- people in-the-know know better.

The president of the MacArthur Foundation, Jonathan Fanton, spoke with urgency recently about the importance of media literacy in a Philadelphia Inquirer op-ed. Inspired by Henry Jenkins and his work on "participatory culture" -- in which Jenkins sees a younger generation learning a great deal from their interactions in the digital world -- Fanton offers a wake-up call:

We, in the sunset of the old information culture, are not understanding this new media literacy soon enough. Those who have no opportunity or desire to be part of these revolutionary digital communities may be deprived of vital virtual skills that will prepare them for full participation in the real world of tomorrow.

In this new media age, the ability to negotiate and evaluate information online, to recognize manipulation and propaganda, and to assimilate ethical values is becoming as basic to education as reading and writing. Those truly left behind in the evolving digital culture will be those children who fail to bridge this participation gap.

Our challenge is to harness these educational forces, opening our classrooms to the learning in which children now engage largely outside of school. We may find that the best way to institutionalize and encourage this new media literacy is to understand and harness what our young digital culture seems to be doing pretty well on its own.

Fanton's point is reinforced by recent studies about the power of online gaming.

Whether the focus is gaming, television, or any other form of visual or digital media, though, the concept of media literacy allows us to recognize the great potential of these new forms of communication and connection while taking a critical look at how they can both empower and disempower us.

It's very easy to demonize new media -- or to co-opt the idea of media literacy for a specific moral agenda (as social conservatives have begun to do). What we should be doing, however, is educating.

That's what good cultural criticism does. That's what any classroom purporting to prepare students for a successful life is engaged in.

And that's the direction our social activism should take. The Campaign for a Commercial-Free Childhood is one example of a group on the virtual frontlines. Check out their latest analysis of the marketing of violence to children in the promos for the upcoming "Transformers" movie.

And don't just take my word on media literacy -- the Governor of Missouri, the Missouri Senate and the City of St. Louis were so proud to be hosts of the National Media Education Conference that they proclaimed it "Media Literacy Education Week."

Two of the keynote speakers at the conference were Renee Hobbs, who directs Temple University's ground-breaking Media Education Lab, and Henry Jenkins, who directs the MIT Comparative Media Studies Program.

Both of their keynote addresses are worth exploring in their entirety. Hobbs provides an authoritative overview of the latest media literacy research. And Jenkins, using the debate over Wikipedia as a springboard, discusses the actual challenges and consequences of "new media literacies" that younger generations are encountering.

Jenkins has been doing a lot of great work for the MacArthur-funded Project NML -- for which he has attempted to articulate what it means to a literate participant in the digital age. He explains in his keynote:

Educators need to work together to insure that every American young person has access to the skills and experiences needed to become a full participant, has the ability to articulate their understanding of the way that media shapes our perceptions of the world, and has been socialized into the emerging ethical standards which should shape their practices as media makers and participants in online communities.

This context places new emphasis on the need for schools and afterschool programs to foster what we are calling the new media literacies -- a set of cultural competencies and social skills which young people need as they confront the new media landscape. Participatory culture shifts the focus of literacy training from individual expression onto community involvement: the new literacies are almost all social skills which have to do with collaboration and networking.Just as earlier efforts at media literacy wanted to help young people to understand their roles as media consumers and producers, we want to help young people better understand their roles as participants in this emerging digital culture.

So much for the stereotype of the nerdy, asocial kid glued to his TV in the basement. It's about time we got over that.

x-posted at PopPolitics.com

An Invitation to Think

2007-06-17T19:29:34-05:00

I usually don't collect quotes -- preferring to get my ideas in their full and necessary context. But the following nugget from Umberto Eco provokes plenty of thought all by itself:

A democratic civilization will save itself only if it makes the language of the image into a stimulus for critical reflection, not an invitation to hypnosis.

Thanks to Renee Hobbs, and her Media Education Lab website, for the reference.

Shaping Youth, Shaking Up the Media

2007-06-12T15:34:23-05:00

Shaping Youth, an organization "concerned with media and marketing’s impact on kids," started a blog late last year, and the posts has been consistently thoughtful and substantive -- thanks chiefly, it appears, to Amy Jussell, the founder, executive director and main author of the blog.

So, of course, it has been added to the Critics and Builders blogroll.

What is somewhat unique about the organization is that it aims "to shift harmful messages in a more positive direction with the help of industry insiders." But that doesn't mean that that the blog is afraid to call out the hypocrisies and general shortcomings in most corporate marketing campaigns.

In fact, it would be interesting to hear a little more about how those conversations with "industry insiders" are going.

You Are Your Own Project

2007-03-21T22:54:00-05:00

As promised in the previous post, the latest addition to the Critics and Builders blogroll is Project Girl, a Wisconsin-based initiative that aims to empower middle-school girls to "deconstruct media messages," "learn of the value of art," "create positive friendships," and "encourage activism for productive changes and reform":

Project Girl strengthens your skills in the fight against having your life controlled by people whose primary mission is to sell you a product, tell you how you should look, or act, or what your dreams and values should be.

The "girl-led" Project Girl website is a little rough around the edges, but it showcases several cool interactive features and many voices that we need to hear.

Their real focus these days, though, is their exhibition at a local college, which is the culmination of over two years of monthly workshops that have attempted to foster media literacy. It places student art next to professional art, all of which addresses subjects such as body image and advertising.

They've been getting some great press from The Capital Times and the Wisconsin State Journal. Both articles do a nice job of showing how much both young girls and their caretakers are yearning for this type of empowerment.

Whether you are part of the revolution or not, it's everyone's responsibility to start building the new world.

Trust Everyone (Under 30?)

2007-03-18T22:49:02-05:00

Emily Nussbaum of New York magazine (via Mitch Wagner of InformationWeek) provides one of the more insightful explorations of how the web revolution is transforming the way we are thinking about personal privacy and public morality. Actually, she claims it's transforming the younger generations and leaving the rest of us behind:

In the past ten years, a new set of values has sneaked in to take its place, erecting another barrier between young and old. And as it did in the fifties, the older generation has responded with a disgusted, dismissive squawk. It goes something like this:

Kids today. They have no sense of shame. They have no sense of privacy. They are show-offs, fame whores, pornographic little loons who post their diaries, their phone numbers, their stupid poetry—for God’s sake, their dirty photos!—online. They have virtual friends instead of real ones. They talk in illiterate instant messages. They are interested only in attention—and yet they have zero attention span, flitting like hummingbirds from one virtual stage to another.

“When it is more important to be seen than to be talented, it is hardly surprising that the less gifted among us are willing to fart our way into the spotlight,” sneers Lakshmi Chaudhry in the current issue of The Nation. “Without any meaningful standard by which to measure our worth, we turn to the public eye for affirmation.”

Clay Shirky, a 42-year-old professor of new media at NYU’s Interactive Telecommunications Program, who has studied these phenomena since 1993, has a theory about that response. “Whenever young people are allowed to indulge in something old people are not allowed to, it makes us bitter. What did we have? The mall and the parking lot of the 7-Eleven? It sucked to grow up when we did! And we’re mad about it now.” People are always eager to believe that their behavior is a matter of morality, not chronology, Shirky argues. “You didn’t behave like that because nobody gave you the option."

Nussbaum identifies and investigaTes three key attitude changes that have begun to define the younger generation: "They think of themselves as having an audience"; "They have archived their adolescence"; and "Their skin is thicker than yours." She ultimately concludes with the following provocative reflection:

Right now the big question for anyone of my generation seems to be, endlessly, “Why would anyone do that?” This is not a meaningful question for a 16-year-old. The benefits are obvious: The public life is fun. It’s creative. It’s where their friends are. It’s theater, but it’s also community: In this linked, logged world, you have a place to think out loud and be listened to, to meet strangers and go deeper with friends. And, yes, there are all sorts of crappy side effects: the passive-aggressive drama (“you know who you are!”), the shaming outbursts, the chill a person can feel in cyberspace on a particularly bad day. There are lousy side effects of most social changes (see feminism, democracy, the creation of the interstate highway system). But the real question is, as with any revolution, which side are you on?

The answer for many of us is we're on the side of the revolutionaries but we'd like, without being patronizing or cynical, to provide a little context.

What will that context look like? Maybe something like Project Girl. More in a bit ...

Close Readers

2007-02-26T22:25:19-06:00

Julie Bosman of The New York Times reveals that fans of Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert are not the idiots we thought we were. They even read:

The Comedy Central audience is more serious than its reputation allows. The public may still think of the "Daily Show" and "Colbert Report" audience as a group of sardonic slackers, Gen-Y college students who prefer YouTube to print. But publishers say it's a much more diverse demographic -- and more important, a book-buying audience.

"It's the television equivalent of NPR," Ms. Levin, of Free Press, said. "You have a very savvy, interested audience who are book buyers, people who do go into bookstores, people who are actually interested in books."

While those demographics might not come as a surprise to people who recognize that political comedy based on often subtle irony requires intelligent engagement, it's still worth noting how few places in American culture cultivate that type of viewer/reader:

Television programs that devote significant attention to serious authors have practically gone the way of the illuminated manuscript, publishers lament .... But the Comedy Central shows are also becoming extremely competitive for publicists placing their authors. After a "Daily Show" appearance, several publishers said, the author's Amazon ranking rises and the daily sales figures "pop," in industry parlance. It is not at all unusual, one book publicist said, for a title to go from a 300,000 rank to a spot in the Top 300 -- not often the case after shows like "Charlie Rose."

This entry is cross-posted at PopPolitics.com

Bringing Sexy ... Back Where It Belongs

2007-02-22T21:13:00-06:00

American Psychological Association's Task Force on the Sexualization of Girls issued a report Monday confirming what we all know: images of women and girls have become increasingly sexualized, and those images are virtually ubiquitous in American culture.

What is new, beyond the urgent tone and the remarkable thoroughness of the report, is the Association's focus on the dire consequences that exposure to those images has on young women -- "harming girls' self-image and development." We're talking everything from eating disorders to lower test scores.

Even if you consider yourself aware of the problem, you won't see purveyors of these images -- the media and the marketers -- quite the same way again. Sleazy would be an understatement.

Almost as noteworthy as the report itself is Stacy Weiner's article on it -- "Goodbye to Girlhood" -- in The Washington Post. She nicely highlights the key issues in the report -- but also provides some historical context, citing Diane Levin's argument that much of the problem can be traced back to the deregulation of the children's television in the 1980s -- when product placement really began.

Weiner's article also points to a way out: teaching media literacy. The article ends with Genevieve McGahey, a 16-year-old who has become empowered by her mother's and her school's commitment to educating her for the real world:

"It's a little scary being a young girl," McGahey says. "The image of sexuality has been a lot more trumpeted in this era. . . . If you're not interested in [sexuality] in middle school, it seems a little intimidating." And unrealistic body ideals pile on extra pressure, McGahey says. At a time when their bodies and their body images are still developing, "girls are not really seeing people [in the media] who are beautiful but aren't stick-thin," she notes. "That really has an effect."

Today, though, McGahey feels good about her body and her style.

For this, she credits her mom, who is "very secure with herself and with being smart and being a woman." She also points to a wellness course at school that made her conscious of how women were depicted. "Seeing a culture of degrading women really influenced me to look at things in a new way and to think how we as high school girls react to that," she says.

This entry is cross-posted at PopPolitics.com

Thank You, Washington Post

2007-02-20T21:10:24-06:00

Very rarely does big media want to help the little guy. But The Washington Post, one of the country's best newspapers (both online and off), has started a great public service.

They are now hosting high school newspapers on their website:

Our goal is to create a thriving virtual community for high school journalists and their peers, a place where students and other washingtonpost.com readers can see what schools are writing and comment on their work.

Although I'm a big fan of student blogs, I think there is an even more important place for student journalistic voices, well-researched and well-edited. So far only three high school newspapers are online -- and it's only the Washington area -- but it's cool stuff.

YouArt: Seeing The Highest Common Denominator in Mass Culture's Latest Medium

2007-02-11T15:13:35-06:00

Ann Hornaday of The Washington Post spent two weeks living inside the YouTube world -- and she discovered, instead of it being a cesspool of low culture as she has presumed, it is a place of a dynamic aesthetic and endless potential -- at least as represented by its most inventive manifestations.

Yet she still feels the need to offer some "guiding principles" for the artists of this new online universe. Here's a sample of her advice:

Resist facile irony.

In other words, snark is easy, satire is hard. YouTube may be the ultimate postmodern medium, and as such it falls prey to postmodernism's greatest failing: pastiche. For every attitudinal teenager proving how well he can imitate "Jackass," YouTube has also allowed -- albeit in smaller numbers -- gifted artists-slash-essayists' work that both exploits the medium and engages the world. Take Ze Frank, whose site is a veritable trove of games, Web casts and dada-esque ephemera that comment on everything from politics to online culture to Frank's own peripatetic travel schedule.

Other principles include "Your limitations are your strengths" and "Indulge the arcane."

Her ability to recognize the best and the worst tendencies of such a new medium makes her analysis fresh and worthwhile. But the best part is her selection of what might be called YouTube's greatest hits. Just when you think you've been e-mailed them all ...

This entry is cross-posted at PopPolitics.com

The Color of Rock

2007-01-31T21:41:05-06:00

Jessica Pressler has a great little piece in the New York Times about how African American fans and creators of rock music have to negotiate a path between white fans of rock who assume they are outsiders and black fans of more traditionally black music who see them as sellouts.

The article unearths the complex layers through which we construct race in American culture.

Historically, of course, the foundations of rock were set by artists like Chuck Berry and Little Richard, but as with friends of different races who become more conscious of race as they enter high school, black musicians began to drift into genres in which they found more ready acceptance and less cooptation and compromise.

And, socially, the entire rock aesthetic is not a perfect cultural fit. Nelson George, author of "Buppies, B-Boys, Baps & Boho's: Notes on Post-Soul Culture," suggests,

Black kids do not want to go out with bummy clothes and dirty sneakers ... There is a psychological subtext to that, about being in a culture where you are not valued and so you have to value yourself.

Yet, artists from Hendrix to Living Colour persist -- and, as the article reveals, a black fan base for rock music is able to buck the resistance, maintain connections and sustain itself.

All of which reminds me of one of the best scenes in Spike Lee's "Do the Right Thing" in which Mookie (Spike Lee's own character) almost convinces Pino, the racist son of Sal, the pizza shop owner, that he is black. He asks him about his favorite basketball player (Magic Johnson) and his favorite movie star (Eddie Murphy). Then he says, "Last question: Who's your favorite rock star?"

Pino hesitates because he see the trap he has already entered.

Vito, Pino's brother, eventually has to say, "It's Prince! He's a Prince freak."

Mookie then says, "Sounds funny to me. As much as you say nigger this and nigger that, all your favorite people are 'niggers.'"

To which Pino responds, "It's different. Magic, Eddie, Prince are not niggers, I mean, are not Black. I mean, they're Black but not really Black. They're more than Black. It's different."

In that context, whatever you hear someone like Lenny Kravitz (not my cup of tea) or, for that matter, Prince this weekend during the Super Bowl halftime show, you have to stand up and cheer for people whose iconoclastic choices force mainstream American culture to negotiate -- and potentially reevaluate -- its own assumptions.

This entry is cross-posted at PopPolitics.com

I (Heart) Television

2007-01-29T21:35:00-06:00

Glenn Sparks, a professor of communication and mass media effects expert at Purdue University, suggests the best thing we can do for our relationships this Valentine's Day is to turn off the TV.

"There may be programs we like to watch together, and this is good," Sparks says. "But there is a concern that a television that is always on interferes with how we communicate." His research indicates that television watching reduces the amount of time spent talking, listening and making eye contact when friends are in the same room.

Too much of anything can be damaging, of course, but I'm not sure a reduction in talking, listening or eye contact is necessarily bad for relationships. I bet television watching also results in an increase in cuddling, hand-holding, mutual laughter and a bunch of other fun stuff.

What is happening here is yet another overdetermined attempt to demonize TV. We would never be having this conversation about reading books, going to a museum or even seeing a double-feature -- even though they probably produce the same effect. As a culture we can't seem to get over the idea that TV has invaded our sacred domestic sphere, which we have supposedly reserved for some idyllic nuclear-family activities, whatever those are.

As one of my favorite websites put its, it's time for "Television Without Pity."

This entry is cross-posted at PopPolitics.com

The Myth of the Great Teacher

2007-01-28T21:33:00-06:00

In a New York Times Op-Ed, Tom Moore, a 10th-grade history teacher in the Bronx, responds insightfully to recent cinematic images of teaching -- specifically teaching in underprivileged schools. Ultimately, he sees most films as missing the pedagogical point:

The great misconception of these films is not that actual schools are more chaotic and decrepit -- many schools in poor neighborhoods are clean and orderly yet still don't have enough teachers or money for supplies. No, the most dangerous message such films promote is that what schools really need are heroes. This is the Myth of the Great Teacher. Films like 'Freedom Writers' portray teachers more as missionaries than professionals, eager to give up their lives and comfort for the benefit of others, without need of compensation. Ms. Gruwell sacrifices money, time and even her marriage for her job.

Moore notes an exception -- The Wire -- which we would as well. But his point is well-taken: dedicated teachers are great, but without resources and reinforcement, they are fighting a futile fight. And when films and television shows glorify the individual teachers, they are actually participating in a reactionary ideology, which insists that money and community support don't matter.

And the letters to the editor in response to Moore's piece make it clear he has struck a chord.

Plus: Speaking of cinematic misrepresentations of work, find out how recent films are also making employment at fashion magazines a lot more interesting (and relevant) than it actually is.

This entry is cross-posted at PopPolitics.com

Smells Like That Sexist Advertising Spirit

2007-01-05T21:52:36-06:00

The image on the right is the promotional poster for a new film opening this week, Perfume: The Story of a Murderer. I haven't seen the movie or read Patrick Suskind's bestselling book on which it is based, but my point isn't to criticize the film itself. It is to condemn, once again, marketing that, in order to titillate its audience, fetishizes both parts of the female body (as opposed to seeing the body as a whole -- with a head and mind attached to it) and the victimized, frequently bloodied and/or dismembered female body.

The story of the film and the book concerns a man who murders virgin young women to preserve their scent, which he believes is the perfect perfume. The reviews of the film are somewhere between mixed and poor -- but, it should be noted, almost every critic praises both its visual artistry and its courage.

Some might, in fact, argue that, far from endorsing the fetishization I condemn above, the film is actually about the danger of a man's out-of-control sexual appetite. More than one critic, though, is disturbed by the lack of an internal check in the film -- and see the visual artistry at the service of something rather sinister. Violet Glaze of the Orlando Weekly writes: "As the body count of sexualized corpses increases (an indignity sharpened by the hypocrisy of staying above the navel to clear an R rating) Perfume starts to resemble an olfactory Peeping Tom minus the intellectual chops necessary to back up its atrocities. It's a shame the rancid, misogynist undertone of lowest-common-denominator slasher porn overwhelms all its redeeming qualities."

But, as I said, how the film ultimately deals with this issue is not really my concern here. The marketing of a film -- or any narrative -- often overwhelms the story itself, since most people likely will see the marketing out of context that sit through the whole work.

And the image the marketers use for Perfume (see it in live action on the film's official website) follows a long and increasingly intense sexist advertising tradition.

First, seeing women as sex objects is nothing new, but in the last few decades advertising has increasingly dehumanized women by portraying them as animalistic or, as in this case, showing only an outline or just specific fetishized parts of the female body.

Consider how many fast-paced trailers for films and TV shows have what seems to be an obligatory random shot of a woman, usually with her head not in the picture, taking a piece of clothing off. To cite simply the example that flashed across my screen as I was writing this post, take a look at the last few moments of the TV spot for the upcoming Alpha Dog.

Sometimes this dehumanizing and fetishizing is "benign" -- portraying women as dolls, perhaps -- but it can also have a very creepy side, when violence against women becomes part of the appeal. See Christine's earlier post on how this disturbing trend has infected television drama.

In the Perfume image, the blood-as-rose-petals seduces the casual viewer in this subtle but devastating system.

Note: I must credit About-Face, an amazing website whose goal is to "to equip women and girls with tools to understand and resist the harmful stereotypes of women," with cataloging the most egregious advertising "offenders," as they call them, a few of which I link to above. And it's great to see that About-Face just launched a blog -- so I'm sure they'll be scooping me on this stuff soon.

And, speaking of scooping, I was surprised Bag News Notes -- another remarkable website that analyzing popular visual imagery -- hadn't picked up on this yet (although their focus is usually the news). But, as you can see, they've been busy breaking down the visual imagery of a rich political week.

This entry is cross-posted at PopPolitics.com

A Crisis of Respect: Boys, Education and Television

2006-12-03T21:43:00-06:00

Anyone claiming that our educational system has become biased against boys in recent years must read Michael Kimmel's "War Against Boys?" in the latest issue of Dissent magazine.

Kimmel recognizes that boys, on many levels, are not doing as well as girls in school -- but broader factors, involving race, class and, most significantly, hypocritical cultural expectations, are to blame, not the feminist movement or a softening or "feminization" of our culture at large:

Countless surveys suggest that young boys today subscribe to a traditional definition of masculinity, stressing the suppression of emotion, stoic resolve, aggression, power, success, and other stereotypic features. Indeed, the point of such successful books as William Pollack's Real Boys and Thompson and Kindlon's Raising Cain is to expand the emotional and psychological repertoire of boys, enabling them to express a wider emotional and creative range.

How does a focus on the ideology of masculinity explain what is happening to boys in school? Consider the parallel for girls. Carol Gilligan's work on adolescent girls describes how these assertive, confident, and proud young girls 'lose their voices' when they hit adolescence. At that same moment, Pollack notes, boys become more confident, even beyond their abilities. You might even say that boys find their voices, but it is the inauthentic voice of bravado, posturing, foolish risk-taking, and gratuitous violence. He calls it 'the boy code.' The boy code teaches them that they are supposed to be in power, and so they begin to act as if they are. They 'ruffle in a manly pose,' as William Butler Yeats once put it, 'for all their timid heart.'

Kimmel, a professor of sociology at SUNY Stonybrook, has always been one of my favorite popular academics, able to speak eloquently to a wide audience while maintaining an academic rigor. His book-length study, Manhood in America, can at times simplify complicated historical issues but it is always at the service of making his research useful in the here and now. The implication of all his work -- inspired heavily by Pollack, Thompson and Kindlon in recent years -- is that we need to stop being so reactionary in our advocacy for boys and starting seeing them as real people -- with complex desires that are buffeted between strong social and historical forces:

To many who now propose to 'rescue' boys ... all boys are the same aggressive, competitive, rambunctious little devils. They operate from a facile, and inaccurate, essentialist dichotomy between males and females. Boys must be allowed to be boys -- so that they grow up to be men.

But what boys need turns out to be pretty much what girls need. In their best-selling Raising Cain, Michael Thompson and Dan Kindlon describe boys' needs: to be loved, get sex, and not be hurt. Parents are counseled to allow boys their emotions; accept a high level of activity; speak their language; and treat them with respect. They are to teach the many ways a boy can be a man, use discipline to guide and build, and model manhood as emotionally attached ... [W]hat they advocate is exactly what feminists have been advocating for girls for some time.

With this perspective in mind, no place -- in our popular culture, at least -- is giving boys more respect than two television series -- The Wire and Friday Night Lights.

The Wire, in its fourth season, continues to go where no show has gone before. This season's focus on public education reveals the humanity of the boys most in need of "rescuing" -- those disregarded and dismissed in America's inner cities. Traditional models of manhood are failing them, but finding a safe alternative space to express themselves always seems out of their reach.

From the opposite end of America, Friday Night Lights also explores the limitations of those traditional models of manhood (for a critical overview see Mimi's Avins' recent homage in the Los Angeles Times). The violence of the drug war on the streets of Baltimore has more in common with the violence on a high-school football field in rural Texas than you might imagine.

The four football players we closely follow -- Matt Saracen, Jason Street, "Smash" Williams, and Tim Riggins -- are all beneficiaries and victims of a culture that defines them in the narrowest of terms. All of them have desires that transcend football -- even though not all of them know what to do with those desires -- but no one seems to want to listen.

The most moving parts of the shows are when someone does hear them, whether it be a girlfriend or a coach. The entire tension of the show, in fact, is based on whether or not the boys will recognize, express, or receive an understanding ear toward their deeper, sensitive identities.

And that is the true "crisis" boys face. While it might be safe for some viewers to see the cultures represented in The Wire and Friday Night Lights as very particular to drug-infested inner cities or isolated, football-obsessed rural towns, they are only intensified microcosms of American culture at large.

This entry is cross-posted at PopPolitics.com