In his book Highbrow Lowbrow, Levine describes the historical emergence of a cultural hierarchy in the United States during the nineteenth century. Before that time there was little cultural stratification—be it of cultural products or of audiences. This was a time when opera could exist simultaneously as a popular and an elite art form, a time when American audiences might hear a soliloquy from Hamlet and a popular song in the course of an evening’s performance. Levine tells us no art form – opera, theater, painting – was "elevated above other forms of expressive culture… they were part of the general culture and were experienced in the midst of a broad range of other cultural genres by a catholic audience that cut through class and social lines. This situation began to change after mid-century." 

The change, which Levine calls ‘the sacralization of culture’ involved the establishment of a hierarchy of cultural products and spaces…. The reasons for [this] in the nineteenth century are, as Levine argues, complicated. Then as now, "culture"—as a concept—had politico-economic as well as aesthetic and social resonance, and "aesthetics by themselves cannot account for the nature of the mores and institutions" that accompanied the historical development of high culture. As Levine observes, "these were shaped by the entire [historic] context—social, cultural, and economic—in which that development took place". Certainly, the categorization and stratification of cultural products seems, at this remove at least, to be the logical aesthetic extension of the stratification, compartmentalization, and commodification that accompanied most cultural production during industrialization and the rise of capitalism. And as leisure activity increasingly became both a signifier of social status and a reason for cultural consumption, it was only natural that the cultural products consumed during leisure time would themselves emerge as important signifiers of social prestige and class standing. 

But while Levine stresses the need for a holistic paradigm to explain the cultural shift that occurred in the U.S. during industrialization, he also emphasizes the degree to which the sacralization of culture served particular partisan political goals. For Levine, cultural stratification was one logical outcome of a conservative political reformation: "Once we understand that the drive for political order was paralleled by a drive for cultural order, that the push to organize economic sphere was paralleled by a push to organize the cultural sphere, that the quest for social authority (‘the control of action through the giving of commands’) was paralleled by a quest for cultural authority (‘the construction of reality through definitions of fact and value’) we can begin to place the cultural dynamics of the turn of the century in clearer perspective." 

Certainly, we see the way that the impetus to sacralize specific cultural products, spaces, and historical artifacts as “culture” had the same sociopolitical and economic implications it has today. Now, as in the late nineteenth century, "there is… the same sense that culture [in the sacralized sense of the word] is something created by the few for the few, threatened by the many, and imperiled by democracy; the conviction that culture cannot come from the young, the inexperienced, the untutored, the marginal".

- Joan Hawkins, The Cutting Edge: Art-Horror and the Horrific Avant-garde (p. 10-11)

If the operative criterion in paracinema culture is affect, the most frequently expressed patron desire is to see something "different," something unlike contemporary Hollywood cinema. As A.S. Hamrah and Joshua Glenn put it, "Let's face it: Hollywood films are cautious, uninventive, and bland, and young filmgoers are increasingly uninterested." Paracinema fans, like the cineast elite, "explicitly situate themselves in opposition to Hollywood cinema", and they do so in a way that academics would recognize as highly sophisticated. As Sconce notes, "the paracinematic audience recognizes Hollywood as an economic and artistic institution that represents not just a body of films, but a particular mode of film production and its accompanying signifying practices. Furthermore, the narrative form produced by this institution is seen as somehow 'manipulative' and 'repressive,' and linked to dominant interests as a form of cultural coercion". Paracinema consumption can be understood as a a reaction against the hegemonic and normalizing practices of mainstream, dominant Hollywood production.

- another excerpt from Cutting Edge. It's worth noting however that the way paracinema fans position themselves in opposition to Hollywood and the way cineastes do and the complexities of why are extremely different. From personal experience within both circles, I've found paracinema fans are looking for something more "shocking" and "less safe", understandably so within their interests, but the word "politically correct" as an epithet is also thrown around an awful lot as well. Cineastes on the other hand are usually asking for something more to chew on, something more substantial - but also hold an air of derision over what they perceive to be or associate with a lesser art form. Where the two meet is in the increasingly less rare combo of visually/viscerally, as well as intellectually, stimulating and innovative works, something that can be seen exemplified in films as early, if not earlier (Lewton comes to mind), as Cronenberg's Shivers to Zulawski's Possession - and additionally throughout both of those director's oeuvres. When the two meet and genres are breached, audiences from both sides aren't repelled but rather their interest is peaked. Low culture enthusiasts find themselves fully capable and even interested in comprehending complex themes while cineastes find themselves just as able to appreciate and at times learn to embrace the horrific. They may not seek it out as top priority but it's these films that breach that gap that lead to a greater understanding/internal expansion of both parties involved. What keeps me especially hopeful and enthusiastic about such art forms is both the destruction of pompous value systems by cineastes, which among the younger set is significantly more lenient already, and the destruction of unquestioned stimulation through misery that's prevalent among low culture consumers, esp. when this exploitation of misery is so often at the expense of women and women's bodies.

Open the pages of any horror fanzine--Outre, Fangoria, Cinefantastique--and you will find listings for mail-order video companies that cater to afficionados of what Jeffrey Sconce has called "para-cinema" and trash aesthetics. Not only do these mail order companies represent one of the fastest-growing segments of the video market, but their catalogs challenge many of our continuing assumptions about the binary opposition of prestige cinema (European art and avant-garde/experimental films) and popular culture. Certainly they highlight an aspect of art cinema generally overlooked or repressed in cultural analysis; namely, the degree to which high culture trades on the same images, tropes, and themes that characterize low culture.

In the world of Horror and cult film fanzines and mail-order catalogs, what Carol J. Clover calls "the high-end" of the horror genre mingles indiscriminately with the "low-end." Even more interesting, European art films that have little to do with horror... are listed alongside movies that Video Vamp labels "Eurocine-trash." European art films are not easily located under separate catalog subheads or listings. Many catalogs simply list films alphabetically, making no attempt to differentiate among genres or subgenres... Where art films are bracketed off, they are often described in terms that most film historians would take pains to avoid. Instead of presenting Pier Paolo Pasolini's Salo (1975) as a work that explicitly links "fascism and sadism, sexual licence [sic] and oppression," as the Encyclopedia of European Cinema does, Mondo simply notes that the film "left audiences gagging."

 The operative criterion here is affect: the ability of a film to thrill, frighten, gross out, arouse, or otherwise directly engage the spectator's body. And it is this emphasis on affect that characterizes paracinema as a low cinematic culture. Paracinema catalogs are dominated by what Clover terms "body genre" films, films that Linda Williams notes, "privilege the sensational." Most of these titles are horror, porn, exploitation, horrific sci-fi, or thrillers; other non-body genre films--art films, Nixon's infamous Checkers speech, sword-and-sandal epics, and so forth--tend to be collapsed into categories dictated by the body genres that are the main focus...The design of the catalogs... enforces a valorization of low genres and low genre categories.

Williams identifies three pertinent features shared by body genres (which she defines as porn, horror, and melodrama). "First there is the spectacle of the body caught in the grips of intense sensation or emotion."; the spectacle or orgasm in porn, of terror and violence in horror, of weeping in melodrama. Second, there is the related focus on ecstasy  "a direct or indirect sexual excitement and rapture," which borders on what the Greeks termed insanity or bewilderment. Visually this is signaled in films through what Williams called the "involuntary convulsion or spasm--of the body "beside itself" in the grips of sexual pleasure, fear and terror, and overpowering sadness". Aurally, ecstasy is marked by the inarticulate cry--of pleasure in porn, of terror in horror, and of grief or anguish in melodrama.

Finally, body genres directly address the spectator's body. This last feature, Williams argues, most noticeably characterizes body genres as degraded cultural forms: "What seems to bracket these particular genres from others is an apparent lack of proper aesthetic distance, a sense of overinvolvement in sensation and emotion.....viewers feel too directly, too viscerally, manipulated by the text". The body of the spectator involuntarily mimics "the emotion or sensation of the body onscreen". The spectator cringes, becomes tense, screams, weeps, becomes aroused.

- Joan Hawkins, Cutting Edge: Art-Horror and the Horrific Avant-garde

I just began this and so far it resonates deeply since ~trash horror was my initial catalyst into seeking something "more". A large part of my heart is still full of love for so-called low culture and always will be. This also explains my fascination with pop culture esp. how it intermingles with "high culture" and why I fucking hate people who assume there's one or the other or that either is inherently "better". Since the author's a woman and has so far cited many women, I'm gonna assume at one point she'll be going deeper into the gendered aspects of body genres... specifically how melodrama, horror, and porn are all dependent on the exploitation of female emotion (often in conjunction w/ their bodies - explicitly so in porn), which repulses me in theory but I also find and have found myself identifying with strongly bcs of - bolded for emphasis where this applies. In some way, without the thoroughly misogynist body genre (excluding heterosexual porn, but certainly not excluding heterosexual pornographic imagery which i--and inescapably we as a culture to varying degrees--have been heavily exposed to) I never would have fully realized my feminist consciousness and I've seen similar sentiment from others. I rly hope the book delves into some of this phenomenon as well.