“Don’t Dream It, Be It”

Abstract

Milton Singer’s phrase “cultural performance,” adopted by social scientists as a unit of analysis for circumscribing “plays, concerts, and lectures... but also prayers, ritual readings and recitations, rites and ceremonies, festivals, and all those things we usually classify under religion and ritual rather than with the cultural and artistic” (71), can be productively applied to many of the quasi-cultic creations and recreations enjoyed by many young Americans in the early years of the twenty-first century. Singer’s search for a unit of analysis ended when his Indian friends suggested that if he wanted to understand “who we are,” he should attend local performance events in which what was on display for all to see was “who we are not.” In the same spirit—from skate boarding to eroticons, from goth costuming to online gaming, and from fan fiction to poetry slams—the current generation of adolescents and postadolescents have devised/discovered myriad forms of performative self-expression and group identification that allow for the instantiation of “who we are” via the always temporary category “who we are not.”

Liminality, marginality, and structural inferiority are conditions in which are generated myths, symbols, rituals, philosophical systems, and works of art. These cultural forms provide men with a set of templates or models which are, at one level, periodical reclassifications of reality and man’s relationship to society, nature, and culture. But they are more than classifications, since they incite men to action as well as to thought.

—Victor Turner, The Ritual Process: Structure and Anti- Structure

As a popular form of religious life, movies do what we have always asked of popular religion, namely, that they provide us with archetypal forms of humanity—heroic figures—and instruct us in the basic values and myths of our society. As we watch the characters and follow the drama on the screen, we are instructed in the values and myths of our culture and given models on which to pattern our lives.

—M. Darrol Bryant, “Cinema, Religion and Popular Culture”