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Journal of Popular Film and Television

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Gender and Class Mobility in Saturday Night Fever and

Flashdance
a
Chris Jordan
a
Pennsylvania State University , USA
Published online: 14 Jul 2010.

To cite this article: Chris Jordan (1996) Gender and Class Mobility in Saturday Night Fever and Flashdance, Journal of Popular Film
and Television, 24:3, 116-122, DOI: 10.1080/01956051.1996.9943721

To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/01956051.1996.9943721

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Downloaded by [Central Michigan University] at 08:26 26 January 2015

he American success ide-
ology has historically
been constructed on the
basis of a tension be-
tween masculinity and femininity.
According to Rick Altman, the film
musical mediates this opposition
through a "dual-focus narrative" built
around parallel protagonists of opposite
sexes and divergent values. This dual-
focus structure requires the viewer to be
sensitive not so much to the narrative's
chronology and progression but to
simultaneity and comparison between
the male and female leads (24).
The Hollywood musical, which his-
Downloaded by [Central Michigan University] at 08:26 26 January 2015
torically has been directed almost
exclusively by men, reinforces this
major opposition through a depiction
of men as breadwinners and women as
sex objects. Often, this dichotomy is
embellished by additional oppositions.
Thomas Schatz observes that females
are frequently characterized as tamers
of males through marriage. Converse-
ly, males are often portrayed as con-
trollers of women's sexuality (197).
During the early 1970s, Hollywood
made the working-class male a symbol
of traditional masculine values
(Biskind and Ehrenreich 206). The New
York Times praised actor Sylvester Stal-
lone in Rocky as "the first leading man
in a long time who projects the image
of a Real Man" (Klemesrud 48D).
The re-embrace of traditional mas-
culine norms was counterbalanced by
another outlook in the character Tony
Manero (John Travolta) in Saturday
Night Fever, a film that condemns
working-class masculinity as a sign of
arrested development and portrays the
patriarchally ordered home as a hotbed
of domestic dysfunctionality (Biskind
and Ehrenreich 207). The film also
portrays dance as a liberating form of
expression which frees its male pro-
tagonist to express a more effeminate
demeanor.
Between Saturday Night Fever's
release in 1976 and Flashdance's pre-
miere in 1983, rising financial insecu-
rity in Hollywood inclined studio
executives to tailor popular movies to
fit a media-manufactured characteriza-
tion of single women as burnt-out
Gender and Class Mobility
overachievers and lonely sufferers of
infertility (Faludi 1 13). It was within
such an environment that director
Adrian Lyne was catapulted onto Hol-
lywood's "A" list of directors on the
basis of the overwhelming success of
Flashdance. Lyne's attitude toward the
feminist movement of the 1970s is evi-
dent in Flashdance's anti-feminist
themes. "You hear feminists talk," he
told journalist Susan Faludi, "and the
last ten, twenty years you hear women
talk about fucking men rather than
being fucked, to be crass about it. It's
kind of unattractive, however liberated
and emancipated it is. It kind of fights
the whole wife role, the whole child-
bearing role" (Faludi 121).
While Saturday Night Fever por-
trays marriage as an institution that
limits women's opportunities for
upward mobility and personal autono-
my, Flashdance echoes Lyne's senti-
ments in its depiction of marriage as its
heroine's only viable alternative to a
life of loneliness and economic stagna-
tion. Flashdance also depicts its
female lead as a sex object created by
and for a male gaze. The concept of the
male gaze maintains that Hollywood
defines the female body as a form of
erotic spectacle which plays to and sig-
nifies male desire (Mulvey 809).
The History of the Film Musical's
Male-Female Motif
The American film musical's
dichotomous characterization of men
as breadwinners and women as sex
objects has been a constant throughout
its history. Altman argues that the
trend remains unbroken from the Gold
Diggers series of the 1930s (in which
men are characterized as sources of
gold and women as objects of beauty)
to Howard Hawks's 1950s musical
Gentlemen Prefer Blondes (which
turns on the simple observation,
"Don't you know that a man being rich
is like a girl being pretty?'). On the
basis of this dichotomy, "marriage is
seen . . . as the only way to join beau-
ty and riches, to effect not a compro-
mise but a merger" (Altman 25).
This construction of sex roles has
been complemented over the film
musical's history by the genre's sexual
objectification of women. Such a con-
vention is a hallmark of film musical
pioneer Busby Berkeley's movies, in
which a tracking shot along a row of
chorus girls' faces is counterbalanced
by a similar shot between their legs
(Altman 217). This technique counter-
balances the close-up, which personal-
izes a seemingly anonymous row of
characters, with a voyeuristic shot that
womefi ape
m ~ ' ~ t i ~while
$e,
reduces each chorus girl to an inter-
changeable sex object.
Often, the dichotomous portrayal of
men as providers of money and women
as providers of sex is embellished by
additional oppositions. Females are
frequently characterized as tamers of
men's sexuality through marriage
(Schatz 197). In Oklahoma! (1955), for
example, Laurie is a farmer whose
ordered lifestyle is symbolized by
fenced-in spaces, while Curly is a
rancher whose world is wide open and
free. Laurie's taming of Curly through
marriage parallels the resolution of dif-
ferences between farmers and ranchers
and Oklahoma's transformation from
an open wilderness to an organized
society (Altman 309).
Conversely, men are often portrayed
as controllers of women's sexuality.
Such a motif, according to Schatz, is
implied by the portrayal of the man as
 118
an older, patriarchal figure and the
woman as a younger, childlike charac-
ter. In Swing Time (1936), for exam-
ple, the fleet-footed Fred Astaire con-
descends to take dance lessons from
Ginger Rogers in order to free her
from the stuffy, institutionalized con-
fines of a ballroom dance studio. In
doing so, "he initiates her sexually and
musically" (Schatz 197).
The Film Musical's Male-Female
Motif and Saturday Night Fever
During the early 1970s, a nascent
male liberation movement champi-
oned a "new man" unencumbered by
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traditional masculine norms. Femi-
nism inspired such a movement as
men's liberation activists like Jack
Sawyer argued that women's struggle
for equality "need not be a battle
against men as oppressors." Instead, as
Sawyer contended, "the choice about
whether men are the enemy is up to
men themselves" (32).
The key to male liberation was the
destruction of sex-role stereotypes.
Countercultural spokesperson Charles
Reich's The Greening of America equat-
ed men's adoption of more androgy-
nous dress styles with their freedom
from a masculine role. Reich declared
that "a boy does not feel he has to dress
in a certain way or 'he will not be a
man'; he is not that anxious or con-
cerned about his masculinity" (236).
As Barbara Ehrenreich has noted,
the men's movement's advocacy of
androgyny was paralleled by the
homosexual community's establish-
ment of norms that in some ways freed
heterosexual men from a fear of being
labeled homosexual. The heterosexual
male who rejected traditional stan-
dards of masculine dress was no
longer automatically suspected of sex-
ual deviance (128).
A man's potential for liberation was,
however, linked to his class of origin.
Reich defined male liberation as the
matriculation of three levels of "con-
sciousness." These levels happened to
correspond to stereotypical, class-cir-
cumscribed ideals of masculinity. John
G . Cawelti has observed that "Con-
sciousness 1" described the nineteenth-
JPF&T-Journal of Popular Film and Television
century, working-class, self-made man
enslaved to conservative ideals of mas-
culinity, while at the other end, "Con-
sciousness 3" corresponded to the
postcountercultural, liberated man sen-
Character Tony Manero's only escape
from his working-class life
is the fantasy world
of the 2001 Disco.
sitive to the needs of others (148). In
essence, The Greening of America
described male liberation as contingent
on one's upward advancement from
the blue-collar norms of boyish mas-
culinity described in Consciousness 1
toward the middle-class ideal of male
sensitivity outlined in Consciousness
3. Saturday Night Fever champions a
Consciousness 3 masculinity.
John Badham, director of Saturday
Night Fever, has noted the influence of
this gender/class nexus on his work.
"[My work] seems to have this idea of
people looking to grow and improve
themselves in one way or another," he
told Cineaste in 1978. "One thing I
liked about Saturday Night Fever was
that it was about a guy who's trying to
get out, who first of all doesn't know
that he wants to get out, then gets up the
courage to move himself into a differ-
ent situation" (5).
Plot
Saturday Night Fever's pro-
tagonist Tony Manero is a
19-year-old high school
graduate who works in a
hardware store as a paint
salesman and lives with his
parents. His parents follow a
culture of traditional gender
roles in which an ethos of
economic individualism sub-
verts the communal values of
the family dinner hour. A
construction worker emascu-
lated by prolonged unem-
ployment, Mr. Manero inter-
rupts the dinner table conver-
sation by vehemently reject-
ing his wife's suggestion that
she get a job. Tony's parents
Tony's limited chances of upward
mobility can be found through personal
growth rather than material success.
gain their sense of dignity from their
son Frank Jr., a Catholic priest. As the
parents of a priest, they are recognized
members of the community. A formal
photograph of Frank Jr. on the mantle
implies the sense of self-worth he con-
tributes to their otherwise dreary lives.
The patriarchal, working-class out-
look instilled by Tony's home life is
reinforced by the hardware store. The

hardware store, like Tony's parents'
home, is a world where individuals are
alienated from each other by the rules
of bottom-line economic individualism.
When Tony delivers to his boss a can of
paint purchased from a competitor and
informs him of its price, his boss
shouts, "That son-of-a-bitch! Just wait
until he runs out of something!" Tony
offsets the rival store's competitive tac-
tics by further raising the price and
telling a customer-ironically played
by actor John Travolta's own mother-
that he's giving her a "special price"
because she has had to wait so long.
The theme of economic individual-
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ism is a constant in Tony's personal
relationships as well. As one friend
reverently recites an anecdote about
an uncle who cheated a business part-
ner, another recognizes the limita-
tions of their collective aspirations,
complaining that "it's a stinkin' rat
race. Nobody's ever going to give you
a chance."
Tony's only escape from his mean-
ingless, working-class existence is the
fantasy world of the 2001 Disco,
where he and his friends are trans-
formed into "The Faces." Disco music
arose to mainstream popularity from
the underground gay nightclub culture
of the early 1970s and provided a fas-
cinating microcosm for studying this
culture's impact on conventional mas-
culine norms. Under the swirling
lights and clothed in soft, colorful fab-
rics, Tony expresses a more feminine
side of his personality when he asks
his partner Stephanie, "how come we
never talk about how we feel when
we're dancing?"
Elaborately dressed and groomed,
Tony expresses this more feminine
side of his personality through stun-
ning dance moves that win accolades
from aggressive female admirers.
While disco's popularity reflected
mainstream society's embrace of a
new masculinity, it also mirrored a
widespread public desire to escape the
bleak realities of economic recession.
The high school graduate who worked
at a gas station but had the right look
and a few good dance moves was
transformed into a star beneath the
Gender and Class Mobility
mirrored disco ball. Although Tony's
environment imprisons him and limits
his options (according to Travolta, the
real-life characters on which he based
Tony had one thing in common: "They
all wanted to get out of Brooklyn"), he
lacks the job skills necessary to be
upwardly mobile (Orth 63).
Saturday Night Fever's stylistic
revision of the film musical's relation-
ship between song and dance and
everyday reality reflects this culture of
survival. Like the conventional musi-
cal, Saturday Night Fever celebrates
"a highly stylized representation of
middle-class
woman as the
tarnet O$ a
life," in which "a different mode of
reality, the inner reality of feelings,
emotions, and instincts are given
metaphoric and symbolic expression
through the means of music and
dance" (Scheurer 308).
However, Saturday Night Fever
simultaneously recognizes song and
dance as only temporary excursions
from reality rather than transcendental
forces imbued with the power to trans-
form the prosaic limitations of human
existence. Where "life properly lived
is a dance" in the conventional musical
(Altman 307), the songs and dances in
Saturday Night Fever are "identified
as performances, bound by the natural
limitations which normally attend to
such presentations" (Telotte 3). As
such, they occur only in performance
spaces like the 200 1 Disco and a dance
rehearsal hall, leading Tony to observe
that he would like to be able to get the
"high" the disco affords him "some-
place else" in his life.
Saturday Night Fever reconciles
Tony's limited chances of upward
mobility in a flat, mid- 1970s economy
by redefining social mobility as
personal growth rather than material
success (Biskind and Ehrenreich 210).
The spokesperson for the reform of
Tony's "barbaric" attitudes is Stephanie
Mangano, a fellow disco dancer from
his neighborhood who has made the
move to Manhattan and secured a posi-
tion at a high-profile talent agency. Her
ambitions to join the middle-class and
her distinctly feminine demeanor tran-
scend the series of structural opposi-
tions that define Tony's world. She is
from Brooklyn but lives in Manhattan;
she is far more feminine than Annette
and the other women of the disco, yet is
capable of holding her own ground
with the Faces (Kelly 245). Stephanie
also transcends Tony's sexist classifica-
tion of women as virgins or whores.
She is sexually involved with an older
man, yet is sufficiently self-reliant and
monogamous to refuse Tony's numer-
ous sexual advances (Keeler 165-66).
Stephanie's ability to mediate Tony's
dilemma is realized in the film's final
scenes. Tony's sense of alienation from
his friends reaches a breaking point
when he learns that a retaliatory fight
against a rival Puerto Rican gang in
which he reluctantly participated was
misdirected. His frustration over 2001's
limited relevance to his aspirations as a
dancer is confirmed when he and
Stephanie are awarded first prize in a
dance contest on the basis of the
judges' prejudicial attitude toward a
superior Puerto Rican couple. As the
rigged contest so clearly illustrates,
"even the dance is vulnerable to the
inconsistencies that . . . overshadow the
rest of [Tony's] life" (Keeler 167).
Tony leaves the disco contest en-
raged and vents his anger by attempting
to rape Stephanie in the back seat of a
car. She violently deters his advances
and returns to Manhattan. Stephanie's
rejection of Tony's advances leads to
 120 JPF&T-Journal of Popular Film and Television

his attempt to recover his wounded
sense of manhood by joining the other
Faces in their usual Saturday night ritu-
al of acrobatic displays on the Ver-
razano-Narrows Bridge. On this partic-
ular occasion, however, Bobby C.,
Tony's most desperate and effeminate
friend, is killed. The bridge thus serves
as an apt metaphor for Tony's dilemma
by revealing the precariousness of his
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characterizes its male lead as the con-
troller of its female lead's sexuality.
The Film Musical's Male-Female
Motif and Flashdance
Between Saturday Night Fever's
release in 1976 and Flashdance's
release in 1983, a mid-1970s culture of
gender liberation and androgynous sex-
ual norms was replaced by a more tra-
The film attributes Alex's admission
into the bureaucratic, nepotistic dance
academy to her natural, street-intlu-
enced ability and gritty experience.
Alex's boyfriend Nick Hurley also uses
his own exemplary rags-to-riches suc-
cess tale to provide the encouragement
she needs to audition for the academy.
In contrast, Alex's mentor Hannah is
unable to supply such support because
she is old and frail and has only the
faded memories of her own successes
as a dancer to offer as encouragement.
Alex defines her vision of success on
the basis of a commodified, performing
"Other" that she becomes during her

nights onstage. Poverty is attributed to

individual attitudes of sloth and deca-
dence, as Alex's fellow dancer, Jeanne,
goes to work in a striptease club and
remains grounded in working-class life.
Success is thus constructed on the basis
of individual achievement, class tran-

With actor Jennifer Beals's face and dancer Maria Jahan's body,
Alex is a composite rendering of an ideal woman.

macho values when applied to the com- ditional culture of circum-

plexities of adulthood (Keeler 167). As
the sun rises over Manhattan, Tony
finds his way to Stephanie's apartment.
A new relationship emerges from their
meeting as Stephanie offers him fnend-
ship and forces him to reconsider his
class-bound ways of perceiving. He
resolves to move to Manhattan, and
they embrace in an ambiguous final
shot.
Saturday Night Fever thus portrays a
middle-class woman as the tamer of a
working-class man. Stephanie becomes
a spokesperson for middle-class mas-
culinity by forcing Tony to reconsider
his boyish machismo and prodding him
into a more mature strain of sensitivity.
However, Stephanie's decision to be
Tony's friend rather than his lover cele-
brates her freedom to choose an inde-
pendent lifestyle. Seven years later, the
musical Flashdance argued that there
could be no permanent sexual satisfac-
tion for a woman who refuses a subor-
dinate role. In doing so, Flashdance
scribed gender roles. Femi-
nism's "freeing" of men
from the rigid role of bread-
winner was suddenly seen
by anti-feminists as under-
mining the housewife's
fragile privilege of financial
support (Ehrenreich 147).
Flashdance concurs with
such a position by predicat-
ing its heroine's middle-
class upward mobility on
her conformity to the role of
trophy wife.
Plot
~ l ~ is the
~ story
h d In Flashdance,
~ ~ ~only ~by attaching an upwardly
of Alexandra Owens, or mobile man can a woman attain respectability and
success.
Alex, a 19-year-old woman
who lives in Pittsburgh. A factory scendence, a commodified self-image,
welder by day and a "legitimate" night- and patriarchal domination.
club dancer by night, she becomes the The story line fuses the convention-
girlfriend of the nouveau-riche factory al musical's dual-focus celebration of
owner and a promising student at a marriage as a way of joining beauty
prestigious performing arts academy. and riches with Rocky's plot line about

a working-class underdog who upends
a system of institutionalized snobbery
and corruption through the support of
a loving spouse. Rocky's narrative tra-
jectory depicts the patriarchal family
as a naturally ordered entity that pro-
vides the protagonist with the strength
to triumph in a public sphere of free
market competition. Flashdance simi-
larly contends that its protagonist
upends the institutionalized confines
of a stuffy dance conservatory because
she assumes a naturally ordered posi-
tion of submissiveness in relation to
her patriarchal employer/lover.
On the basis of vivid images Flash-
Downloaded by [Central Michigan University] at 08:26 26 January 2015
dance establishes an opposition be-
tween female independence and nurtu-
rance and contends that women
become "old maids" if they do not inte-
grate themselves into the terms of
patriarchy by latching onto the first
man who proposes to them. Alex's
older fellow dancers fret over men who
do not call as they lift weights and
apply makeup in anticipation of such a
moment. Alex's own aspirations of
becoming a "respectable" dancer are
fueled by her mentor Hannah's stories
of dancing in the Ziegfeld Follies, but
ultimately Nick is the one who
arranges an audition for Alex through
his impressive business connections.
Elizabeth Traube has identified
within 1980s films a tendency to
"appeal to regressive desires for a pro-
tective paternalism by condensing
feminine or feminized power with
early psychosexual fears of the engulf-
ing mother" (1 6). A final freeze frame
in which Alex and Nick are locked in
an embrace suggests that Alex's real
victory is landing a man rather than
gaining admission to the exclusive
dance academy.
This parable symbolically reconciles
two contradictory poles of female ado-
lescence. Adolescence is generally
defined as a masculine construct, and
thus becomes the source of contradicto-
ry expectations when applied to female
adolescents, who are encouraged to be
both rebellious and subservient. The
contradictory aspects of female adoles-
cent socialization are activated when
girls are asked to develop masculine
Gender and Class Mobility
aspirations of independence and pro-
fessional desire, as well as a personali-
ty style of caring for others, nurturing
children, and being gentle and
unassertive. Female adolescence thus
becomes a process of negotiating two
contradictory discourses: adolescence
and femininity (Hudson 42). Flash-
dance naturalizes subservience and
caretaking as proper career goals for
young women by defining loneliness as
the only other viable alternative. As
well, it suggests that a woman's best
means of gaining power is by captivat-
ing a man with her body.
Setting and Characterization
Flashdance's primary setting is a
nighttime, inner-city, working-class
milieu of bars and streets that perfect-
ly summarizes "the male-adolescent
quest for adventure, rebellion, sexual
encounter, peer relationships, and
male privilege" (Lewis 43). Director
Lyne uses neon-light signs and wet,
reflective asphalt surfaces to glorify
the ritualized male adolescent activi-
f l s ah aqtif icial
colla5e of Bemale
Cerluty, f l l e x
substa~~tiates the
myth that womea
m e made to be
looked at.
ties of "stepping out" and "cruising" in
search of sexual fulfillment.
While such a depiction of the street
clearly signifies it as a domain of male
adolescent privilege, it simultaneously
demarcates it as off limits for young
women. Johnny C., the owner of a strip
club (played by Lee Ving, frontman of
the early 1980s Los Angeles hard-core
punk band Fear), repeatedly harasses
Alex as she walks down the street, mis-
takenly identifying her as a prostitute.
Alex turns to Nick for protection from
Johnny C., defining herself as a sex
object created by and for his gaze. As
well, it is as an object of the male gaze
that she gains employment in the work-
ing-class Mawby's Bar.
Alex's characterization is calculated
to play on female adolescents' physi-
cal insecurities. Alex is in actuality a
composite rendering of a woman
because she is a blend of actor Jennifer
Beals's face and dancer Maria Jahan's
body. This composite method of phys-
ical characterization is typical of
advertising fashion photography, in
which female images of impossible
perfection are created by a coordinated
industrial process.
As an artificial collage of female
beauty, Alex substantiates the myth
that women are made to be looked at
and that men do the looking. Such a
myth encourages women to view their
looks as a source of power and to pred-
icate their self-esteem on their ability
to attract the male gaze. In contrast,
Saturday Night Fever's heroine con-
structs her sense of self-esteem on the
basis of her job skills.
The image Alex cuts as a success
icon creates a dangerous standard of
feminine beauty for both adolescent
girls and boys. Extreme alienation sets
in when young women see such a
model as a standard for emulation
(Ewen 91). Such a characterization of
femininity also sets a dangerous defini-
tion of sexual relationships for teenage
boys by fetishizing the female body in
ways designed to define women as
material signifiers of men's social sta-
tus and masculine prowess.
This characterization of Alex, espe-
cially in relation to her best friend
Jeanne, is exemplary of the Hollywood
musical's depiction of women. Male
ambivalence toward the female image
motivates the film musical's text and its
audience toward two extremes: the
fetishization of women as figures to be
put on a pedestal or the devaluation and
punishment of them as guilty objects
(Mulvey 309). Alex is characterized as
 122
the former by accepting a role as an
index of Nick's wealth, while Jeanne is
ultimately relegated to dancing as a
stripper in Johnny C.'s nightclub.
The message is clear: women denied
self-sufficient avenues of upward mo-
bility must latch onto a man, either as a
fetishized ornament or an object of
explicit derogation. It is by latching
onto an upwardly mobile man that
Alex mediates the opposing goals of
nurturance and independence that
females are offered during adolescent
socialization.
Iconography
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Flashdance's iconography further
drives home its definition of Alex as an
index of Nick's wealth. Various shots
construct Alex as an artifact created by
and for the male gaze. The film illus-
trates the song "Maniac," for example,
by showing Alex "performing" to it
feverishly in the exercise-video style of
stationary dancing. The camera frag-
ments various parts of her body in sin-
gle shots, including her buttocks, her
feet, and her thighs. That type of fram-
ing also occurs during Alex's floor-
show routines in Mawby's Bar as Nick
looks on, mesmerized by her lithe body.
According to Mulvey, such visual
techniques reinforce patriarchy's defi-
nition of women as possessions (31 1).
The technique of fragmentation does
so by translating the female body into a
series of interchangeable parts. Alex is
defined as an animated pinup whose
humanness is denied by the inter-
changeability of her image with mil-
lions of other similar images of
women. The technique of objectifica-
tion inherent in the heroine's display of
her body through onstage dancing sim-
ilarly constructs her as a possession
created by and for her boss's "gaze."
Close-ups of Alex's face counterbal-
ance the depersonalizing, fragmented
shots of her body by distinguishing her
as an individual. The close-up has long
served such a metaphorical purpose in
film. For example, D. W. Griffith fre-
quently used the close-up in alternation
with crowd shots in order to under-
score the theatrical conventions upon
JPFBrT-Journal of Popular Film and Television
which individual identity became
based in a mass society (Susman 282).
Close-ups of Alex's face "pseudoin-
dividualize" her body style, mitigating
the loss of her "aura" of uniqueness
that results from the film's fragmenta-
tion of her body into interchangeable
parts (Benjamin 676).' One shot fash-
ions Alex's dancing body into a
"trademark" for the movie. This image
serves as a none-too-subtle sexual
metaphor, and its inclusion on both the
Flashdance soundtrack and videotape
packages reflects the film's premise
that women should be viewed as
objects of a male gaze.
Flashdance and the Decline
of the Film Musical
Flashdance's reduction of the film
musical to music video is indicative of
the reasons for the film musical's dis-
appearance from mainstream cinema
in recent years. Altman contends that
music video has undercut a "classic
syntax whereby narrative is not just an
excuse for music, but stands in a par-
ticular, structured relationship to that
music" (1987, 121). Nonetheless, the
film musical's construction of gender
relations provides insight into popular
cinema's role in making sense of love
and romance.
NOTE
1. Walter Benjamin discusses how an
original artwork loses its aura of "unique-
ness" through mass reproduction.
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CHRIS JORDAN is an assistant professor
in media studies at the Pennsylvania State
University.