Thinking about Thinking about Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs

Tania Modleski’s article for this week invokes (and rails against) the common perspective among theorists of mass culture as “feminine” and thus inherently “less” than the more masculine High Art.  As the argument goes, women “lose” themselves in consuming escapist literature and thus cease to be productive, while men read books that make them think, making their pursuit of knowledge constructive.  The real issue with women as consumers, it seems, is not that they are not “thinking”, but that they are not attending to their household duties.  The act of young women reading is particularly offensive to this perspective because they are not learning how to do housework.  Mass culture, by definition, seeks to apply to everyone, and thrives on passive consumption.  It serves merely to entertain, not provoke thought, and thus, by these standards, is a nonproductive pastime.

In thinking about last week’s screening of Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs and how it possibly relates to notions of sexuality and gender, I arrived at the following.  Reviews of children’s films, particularly animations (the assumption is always that animation is for kids), often come back to the question, “what’s in it for the adults?”  The hallmark of a fantastic children’s film is one that can also be independently enjoyed by an adult audience, as they are better attuned to “get” the jokes and think about the underlying themes of the narrative.  Modleski’s article examines “the way in which mass culture is condemned as a ‘feminised’ culture” by “orthodox” historians, who claim that it is somehow “lesser” because of women’s sentimentalizing effect.  But isn’t children’s entertainment, as in the film we screened, considered inferior by the same criteria? 

It is often mindless entertainment that encourages consumption among children, rather than provoking thought.  The fact that great children’s literature, film, and television exists seems to negate all of these arguments in the same way that great women’s literature does.  Without getting overly simplistic, it seems that mass entertainment, in its most basic form, can transcend the boundaries of the lesser simply by making us think.