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Pop pap, to be sure, draws occasional fire. A new film version of Tarzan, the Ape Man opened last week to great volleys of critical derision and scorn. And rightly so, since this version of Tarzan—directed by John Derek and starring his wife Bo Derek as Jane—spoils a perfectly good pap yarn by trying to transform it from a juvenile adventure story into a piece of erotica. In contrast, the hottest new "summer" movie, Raiders of the Lost Ark, has won loud applause from most critics and all audiences because it does precisely what pap is supposed to do. Raiders, a compilation of cliff-hanging adventures of the sort formerly featured in weekly movie serials, is designed to appeal to the child—even the child in the adult spectator.
By definition, cultural pap plays to the child in everybody. It can offer only entertainment, diversion, maybe distraction, without any promise of redeeming cultural value. When a work offers more—exaltation or the possibility of elaborate aesthetic responses—it has ceased to be pap; it verges on becoming art. Unlike art, pap is easy to absorb, which is precisely why it is perennially popular—and not only in low places. Dwight Eisenhower relished his Zane Grey westerns just as Ronald Reagan relishes such epics by Poet Robert Service as The Shooting of Dan McGrew and The Cremation of Sam McGee. John Kennedy enjoyed Ian Fleming's James Bond yarns, and Lyndon Johnson found it nice to have Muzak piped into the White House. And why not? Pap, though bipartisan, is inherently democratic.
Yet pap has its standards, and they are often as elusive and controversial as those of high culture. "Someone's kitsch is somebody else's masterpiece," says Film Critic Vincent Canby. Author Judith Krantz alluded to the book Alien, when it had the nerve to knock her own kitschy Scruples out of top spot on the bestseller list, as "a 270-page piece of schlock." Every piece of pap has its own critics and partisans, as every consumer of the product realizes sooner or later. Humorist Russell Baker is not being merely funny when he writes: "I am a glutton for trash. I love it in almost all forms except television. I can race through two or three smutty novels and a half-dozen gossip magazines and hear the Top 40 playing on the stereo in the background while the television viewer is wasting three hours and getting nothing but the tepid, watered-down stuff afforded by three or four sitcoms and an evening soap opera."
Clearly, the U.S. has evolved a special pap-culture aesthetic.
Sometimes it is as intricate as the aesthetic theory that Litterateur D.B. Wyndham Lewis applied to poetry. "There is bad Bad Verse and good Bad Verse," said Lewis, and a great many Americans now say pretty much the same thing about pap. In fact, the devotees of good bad pap, particularly in the film form, add up to a subculture within the pop-pap culture.