BOOK REVIEWS
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between something called ‘high’ or ‘elite’ culture and something called
‘popular’ or ‘mass’ culture remains alive and well in American culture” (2).
Even so, Weinstock insists that “what makes South Park so much fun to
consider from an academic perspective is the [fashionably postmodern] fact that
the program is hyperaware of itself as participating precisely in a debate about
the value and influence of popular culture” in the world today (2). And it is this
philosophical attitude about South Park and its “rightful” place in society that
serves Weinstock well as his edited collection of thoughtful, penetrating, and
rigorous essays unfolds.
Following the titular example set by Roland Barthes’s The Pleasure o f the
Text, Part One of Taking South Park Seriously is titled “The Pleasures of South
Park." The four essays in this section begin with “‘Bigger Longer & Uncut’:
South Park and the Camivalesque,” in which Alison Halsall turns to Mikhail M.
Bakhtin’s Rabelais and His World in order to argue that South Park's
“camivalesque humor and the pride that creators Parker and Stone take in
rejecting official dogma and in mocking ‘high’ culture make South Park so
deliciously liberating and important as a popular text” (23). Halsall proceeds to
consider South Park as an exemplar of American carnival, the phenomenon of
laughter as resistance, fart jokes and the V-chip (“a little microchip that sends a
small jolt of electricity through a child each time he or she swears”), and talking
turds, before concluding, rightly, that via “the comic energy of the carnival,
Parker and Stone provide [their viewers with] a cathartic (and irreverent)
alternative to established American social values” (32, 35).
A provocative title—“The Pleasures of South Park: An Experiment in
Media Erotics”—creates an immediate interest in Brian L. Ott’s theoretically
sophisticated essay, in which he succeeds in his attempt to tackle the problem of
“postmodern textuality” (since, for him, South Park is the epitome of a
postmodern text) by going “in search of [the] textual pleasures” the series offers
in order to “map the contours of a theory of media erotics by examining
postmodern textuality in terms of significance rather than signification” (40). Ott
adds that, since “pursuing the meaning or ideology of South Park is fruitless, I
will instead explore its meaningfulness—the way it speaks directly to the body.
My central question is not what does South Park say to viewers, but how does
South Park arouse viewers” (40). The analysis that follows considers South
Park's arousal capability in terms of the categories of the abject, the
camivalesque, the intertextual, the ironic, the liminal, and the depthless. For Ott,
each of these concepts offers viewers of South Park “the possibility of
[experiencing] nonhegemonic pleasure” and, as regards his overall project, in
“examining the various ways in which texts arouse viewers, critics both
illuminate why some texts resonate with viewers and others do not in an imagesaturated culture, as well as expand the repertoire of pleasures available to
viewers” (52-53).