“Subversion” and “Imitation”
in Romanian Popular Culture
Talking about popular culture in Romania inevitably means discussing the
impact of American pop culture on Romanian cultural forms. Extended through
out Europe in Amero-Euro-(local) hybridized forms, traces of American culture
can be found everywhere in the media, entertainment, music, film as well as in a
number of myths and stereotypes. Romanian television, for instance, the major
form of popular entertainment, shares programs or program formats with Ameri
can television.
Why would television channels in Romania broadcast American movies and
serials? Why would talk shows in Romania follow the format of an American talk
show? What would be the effects of American myths and stereotypes on Romanian
culture? Or of shopping and food consumption? Could the Romanians have been so
‘unimaginative’ to import a model without ever thinking of creating an ‘authentic’
one? Or could it be merely the consequence, or the fate, of any consumer society,
which Romania has become after the Cold War, to share forms of popular culture
with various countries of the world? Is the American model so appealing that it is
being imported almost without discrimination in a former communist country or is
it merely the effect of globalization, which has touched Romania as well and has
covered, besides economy, areas such as culture and education?
It will probably be interesting to have a short description of pre-1990 Roma
nian popular culture with a view to explaining the emergence of post-1990 pop
forms and some of the global/regional influences that they have undergone since
then. The Cold War decades in Romania were a time when, to oppose ‘decadent’
western capitalist culture, the communist leaders labeled Romanian culture as “so
cialist” and kept it under control through centralization, censorship and the impo
sition of the communist ideology. Thus, it forcibly became standardized, imita
tive, and schematized, not to fit the ‘culture industry’ as Adorno described it, but to
suit the ‘top-down’ requirements of the communist cultural politics. Features like
standardization, imitation and schematization could describe socialist ‘mass’ cul
ture to the same extent to which they could, and still can, be found in the capitalist
‘culture industry’, with the distinction that there was even less room for creativity
within the limits of standardized products. The discrepancy between ‘socialist’
and ‘capitalist’ forms of culture thus lay not only in their pursuing a different ide
ology, but also in the imposition of the former from ‘top-down’ as opposed to the
‘bottom-up’ politics of the latter.