Are we living in reality or in a reality show? This is the first question that comes to mind after reading Pop Culture (Carocci Editore, 2025, €13.00, 100 pages) by Vanni Codeluppi, professor of Sociology at the University of Modena and Reggio Emilia. A short, concise essay that stimulates intriguing, never banal, and at times disturbing reflections on so-called pop culture, popular and mass culture. In short, from Disney to Squid Game, the culture that shapes the imagination of our time and which in recent decades has increasingly transformed into the principal form of culture in advanced societies.
The book offers an original interpretation of pop culture, based on the analysis of a few significant but highly successful figures and phenomena. Disney, Marilyn Monroe, Barbie, Blade Runner, Madonna, Lady Gaga, Taylor Swift, Marvel superheroes, Big Brother, and Squid Game have become protagonists of pop culture and, when studied, allow us to understand the ways in which it operates and has evolved from the early 1900s to the present day.
Just think of the impact cinema had on shaping the imaginations of twentieth-century men and women. But how much reality is there in cinema? A lot, but without the presumption of replacing cinema with real life, not even when it was neorealist or hyperrealist cinema, designed to depict society with nuances as close to reality as possible.
Directors and screenwriters are, in fact, well aware that they are filming the world through their sensibilities, their ideals, their point of view, and their creativity. This is, after all, the essence of cinema: fiction even when it seeks to be realistic at all costs. Writer Filippo Tommaso Marinetti had already intuited this at the dawn of cinematography when, in his Technical Manifesto of Futurist Literature (1912), he wrote: “The cinema offers us the dance of an object that divides and recomposes itself without human intervention. It also offers us the backward leap of a swimmer whose feet emerge from the sea and bounce violently on the diving board. Finally, it offers us the running of a man at 200 kilometers per hour. These are all movements of matter, outside the laws of intelligence.”
Today, however, we are confronted with media that are much more invasive and pervasive than cinema. We're talking about television and especially the web, media that are seen as extensions of real life, as places not so much physical as mental where we live our lives, meet people, experience emotions, and spend our time.
Consider the profound impact on users of some computer games in which virtual reality is specifically designed to replace the real world, reproducing it as faithfully as possible. Think again of talent shows and reality TV shows, where the claim to depict reality is clearly expressed, indeed, emphasized as the very basis of the show itself.
It's easy, then, to fall into the trap of identification, the mystification of feeling part of media and spectacular mechanisms that seek to imitate life and can be more engaging than life itself. More engaging because they're carefully crafted, based on scripts and screenplays, on settings and characters designed to make us feel at home, whereas our true home is the world with its unpredictability, its banalities, people and non-characters, settings and non-settings.