Twitchell's Thesis

The flavor of Carnival Culture is pungent. The jacket cover sports a famous pop art collage, ⁴⁰ featuring a jockstrap­bottomed "Adam" and a pasties­breasted "Eve" revelling in their commodified "Eden." ⁴¹ Inside, the text is peppered with graphics ranging from Horace Vernet's 1834 portrait of a military hero on horseback, ⁴² to a photo of the leather­clad heavy metal rock group, W.A.S.P. ⁴³ Complementing this, Twitchell uses a lively and sometimes campy writing style that entertains, inviting the reader to entertain ideas on pop culture.

Twitchell's thesis: We live in an age of vulgarity. It is an age in which high culture has been significantly overtaken by low culture. In Twitchell's view, "[w]e are rapidly approaching the point where there will be no border between Lower Aesthetica and Upper Vulgaria." ⁴⁴ In fact, we have become so vulgarized that the very notion of vulgarity is vanishing: "It is not that we think it bad manners to criticize someone else's taste, as much as it is that we have lost the concept of taste as a measure of criticism." ⁴⁵ Consequently, the vulgar entertainments of "the other" have often become the standard aesthetic for us all. ⁴⁶ No longer willing to label entertainments as vulgar, Twitchell argues, we are also "unable to classify their opposites as art." ⁴⁷

"[T]he center of gravity­the 'norm'­in Western culture and world culture is dropping. What marks our times is that the speed of descent has increased dramatically." ⁴⁸ Reserving express judgment throughout, the University of Florida English professor posits that "taste has shifted more dramatically in the last two decades than in the entire century." ⁴⁹ This shift in taste has been accelerated by a key component of American popular culture ⁵⁰ ­- the business of entertainment. America's devotion to the amusement creed leads Twitchell to make comparisons to Renaissance religion:

An apt analogy for American show business might be the Holy Roman Catholic Church of the early Renaissance. The Church's great power was its willingness to pay attention to its audience and to provide a steady stream of images that were comforting and inspiring. It never forgot that every act was an exchange: audience attention and support were traded for the promises of purpose and hope. But even the Church pales in comparison with modern mass media. ⁵¹

Having made this argument, Twitchell then proceeds to his most powerful metaphor, the Carnival:

Perhaps a better analogy might be that institution which grew up alongside the Church and both subverted and reinforced its doctrines­the Carnival. Here the barter is simpler: pay up and see what you want. Redemption can wait. If modern culture may be seen in terms of a competition for audience between high and low entertainment, between art and vulgarity, between the Church and the Carnival, then the Carnival is having its day. Mardi Gras is less and less dependent on Lent.... In the twentieth century, especially since the 1960s, the gatekeeper/cleric has wandered away and the carnival barker/programmer has taken his place. "Step right up, folks, right this way and see..." ⁵²

At least two causes are, in Twitchell's view, responsible for the carnivalesque quality of life and discourse in America: the conglomerated and globalized entertainment industry fueled by bottom­line profit margins, and the unsophisticated and undisciplined appetite of the democratic polity for amusement. It is the merger of all forms of mass media­book publishing, movie producing, radio and television broadcasting­in an oligopoly of diversified conglomerates that is vital to our amusement­industrial complex. Whatever artistic calling may have motivated the early media independents, the conglomerates have traded that calling for cash, and have transformed the industry "into the creation of entertainments for which the only standard of judgment is financial." ⁵³