Susan Smulyan sets out here a series of case studies that emphasize the top-down nature of the processes by which popular culture is produced, dwelling particularly on the ideological constraints the culture industry places upon consumers. These days, when the agency of audiences and the disruptive indeterminacy of meaning are routinely celebrated in popular-culture studies, Smulyan's reluctance to embrace the popular as a site of spontaneous resistance is welcome. More welcome still is the detailed care with which she explores the complex negotiations that occur between producers and consumers around the manufacture and marketing of cultural commodities, negotiations which, she argues, tend to reflect and reproduce the dominant ideology.

A case in point is the chapter on the “gendering” of nylon as a replacement for Japanese silk in women's stockings. Smulyan demonstrates how, from well before Du Pont unveiled the new material at the 1936 World's Fair, scientists, manufacturers and marketers worked together to attribute a symbolic meaning to nylon which conformed to the assumptions about gender prevalent in the culture at large. When, in the “stocking riots” of the 1940s, women consumers rebelled against the way their nylons were being made and sold, they did so largely within the terms established by the manufacturers. They were ultimately pacified by a gendered discourse which insisted upon the inseparability of femininity and consumption and asserted that neither provided a sufficient basis for challenges to scientific or commercial authority.

At work behind Smulyan's case studies is the old and far-from-exhausted Althusserian notion of “interpellation.” Nylons-buyers were being provided with subjective and cultural identities as women and as consumers, and even their acts of resistance were profoundly shaped by the scientific, commercial and cultural institutions that manufactured and mediated the product. The same applies to the many purchasers of popular guides to the staging of amateur minstrel shows, an activity that in the 1920s and 1930s was surprisingly common in schools, colleges and clubs throughout the United States. Minstrel-show manuals provided tools with which participants could reinforce an understanding of themselves as white and middle class while, through the activity of cultural production, distinguishing themselves from the masses who passively consumed commercialized entertainments.

Smulyan's other case studies make similar points. Especially interesting is her discussion of the export of American movies to Japan as part of that country's post-World War II “democratization.” Here Smulyan demonstrates that indeterminacy of textual meaning, often valorized as potentially subversive by those who look to the popular for points of cultural resistance, might actually reinforce rather than undermine dominant ideologies. Heated debates about the suitability of particular films as vehicles for the “re-education” of Japanese moviegoers deflected attention from the establishment of a mode of film distribution that entrenched US economic and cultural supremacy and redefined filmmaking in Japan as purely entertainment-oriented. Textual politics in this case were of far less consequence than the institutional politics which surrounded the production and dissemination of popular forms. That is a caveat that students of popular culture should not forget and of which Smulyan's book valuably reminds us.