Pop Is Deep
A Conversation with Film Scholar Noah Tsika
Noah Tsika is the kind of scholar I always imagined existed but never quite discovered until I got to Queens College and was assigned to do a teaching observation.
Noah Tsika is a professor of media studies at Queens College, CUNY. He is the author of Cinematic Independence: Constructing the Big Screen in Nigeria, Screening the Police: Film and Law Enforcement in the United States, Pink 2.0: Encoding Queer Cinema on the Internet, and other books on film.
He just published a crazy good little book called I’m Not There, about the impressionist Bob Dylan biopic of the same name by Todd Haynes. It’s a scholarly analysis of the film, but also one of those guilty pleasure reads — kind of like those little books in the 331/3 series of short books about individual albums, like Blue Moves or Diamond Dogs. It’s the kind of writing where it’s just you and the author, going deep into an experience you both lived.
Noah’s official specialty is Nollywood Cinema — a genre of low-budget movies from Nigeria. Sometimes they’re even shot on camcorders, but are still seen by millions of people in movie theaters or on videocassettes and DVDs. And some film snobs deride the genre as cheap, dumb, pop stuff for the uneducated masses. But we on Team Human know that things that really resonate with people may be doing so for deeper reasons than meet the eye — and judgments to the contrary are usually kind of racist or at least elitist and definitely closed-minded and dumb.
Don’t let today’s political excuse for populism change your opinion of pop. For my money, it may just be as deep as things get.
Here’s an excerpt of my conversation with Noah Tsika. Let it stand as my version of what the best scholarly conversations actually sound like.
Noah Tsika:
I’ll always be interested in U.S. film history, but I’m also committed to the study of African cinema and, more specifically, in Nollywood.
Douglas Rushkoff:
I was lucky because I’ve sat in a couple of your classes, first as an observer, but then as a student, and it was weird watching Nollywood movies. Some of them are shot almost in home video. They seem really cheeky and cheap, but then you start watching and go, “Oh, wait a minute, there’s old Nollywood lore woven into this!”
Their belief in magic, and, for me, the films were about retribution. Who gets punished and who doesn’t in these movies is way different than us.
Noah Tsika:
Yeah, so many old Nollywood films — films made on VHS cassette, straight-to-video films produced in the early 1990s in Southern Nigeria — are steeped in the occult. The moral economies of the occult come into play in so many of them. As you say, questions of justice, questions of retribution. They’re so wild. They’re so much fun. I love them as genre films. When I was living in Dakar, I was going to festival screenings and I was going to museum screenings. Dakar is the birthplace of Ousmane Sembène, the father of African cinema. It’s a place where the art of film is appreciated.
There are a lot of film snobs in Senegal. There’s a culture of appreciation for the moving image and for a certain conception of cinema in Senegal. So when I was living there, I was enjoying all of that, but I was also hearing complaints. I was hearing people say, “Oh, that fucking Nollywood! That is just the scourge of the continent.”
They were saying that Nollywood, to them, represented a regression — that it was the anti-Sembène, anti-arts, crass commercialism. I thought, “Oh God, I’ve got to see more of this.” It made me develop an appetite for Nollywood. So many people in Senegal were complaining about Nollywood, that I knew I had my next project. I started to watch Nollywood movies and got hooked. I got completely addicted and I’m still addicted to Nollywood movies — as hundreds of millions of people around the world are.
Douglas Rushkoff:
It was weird for me because I’ve always been a lowbrow-is-highbrow kind of guy. I like Beavis and Butthead and Ren and Stimpy and all these things as like, “Oh no, these are deep.” And then, maybe because I got more educated, I started to think, “Okay, I can watch the good Criterion movies.” It was sitting in your class that made me think, “Well, wait a minute, maybe lowbrow is the opposite of what I’ve been thinking.” In other words, that lowbrow in some ways, or the most popular cultural expression of something, is in some ways the most refined because it’s been through all of these filters.
I’ve been watching those Viking TV series on Netflix lately. I know they’re shit on a certain level, and they’re not particularly accurate to the real Viking history; but in some ways they are the most accurate expressions of the themes and mythic underpinnings of Viking lore by virtue of the fact that they have survived and we still relate to them now. Christ, poor Christ, he’s still stuck back in the Bible, because we still worship him here in this culture. But Thor — because he lost his place frozen in actual worship — has been liberated to popular culture And he has made it to the very heights of pop culture through additional filters. Thor, in some ways, is a more advanced god, because he escaped his role as something to get worshipped officially.
Noah Tsika:
I’m in complete agreement with you. That is central to aspects of Nigerian culture. This idea of lowbrow is highbrow. This refusal to relegate anything to the category of lowbrow.
Douglas Rushkoff:
Well, because then you’re relegating yourself to it. It’s like, “No, we are poor, we are uneducated, we are common, but we’re deep.”
Noah Tsika:
We’re still deep, we’re intellectuals, we’re smart, we’re capable of reading texts, we’re not naive spectators, we’re not gullible, we know what these generic categories consist of, and that’s what we like about them. We like that we understand them. We like that they’re familiar to us.
I go back to that great quote from Dennis Potter, who said that he doesn’t make the mistake that high culture mongers make of assuming that because people like cheap art, that their emotions are cheap too. Nollywood movies, even at their quote-unquote worst, are remarkable reflections of certain societal conflicts and cultural practices that are themselves incredibly deep, rich, meaningful, and contentious.
Douglas Rushkoff:
Do you ever get pushback for being a white American scholar? Is there any feedback that you’re not allowed to study this stuff?
Noah Tsika:
Yeah, that comes up now and again, and I don’t have a good answer for that. People will continue to resist the idea of someone from the United States, from a non-African background, genuinely enjoying Nollywood movies. I continue to say that I simply do. I simply love them. I am as addicted to Nollywood movies as Hollywood movies, and I study both.
I go back and forth and I sometimes combine the two. I look at the role of Hollywood in Nigeria. My last book looked at the history of Hollywood studios attempting to infiltrate the Nigerian market, to develop the Nigerian market, to construct movie theaters and oversee them, influence them.
Douglas Rushkoff:
The most interesting aspect of that to me is the hand-painted Nigerian posters of American movies.
Noah Tsika:
Oh yeah. That practice started in Ghana, and there’s a lot of crossover between Nigeria and Ghana in terms of video production and the cultures of consumption that we associate with video production. Yeah, those posters are amazing posters of Hollywood blockbusters. My favorite poster is probably the one of Rambo. There’s so many other ones. I mean, they’re all just incredible.
Douglas Rushkoff:
And it’s fun. And it’s just so celebratory and it’s localized on a certain level.
Noah Tsika:
Definitely. They’re so idiosyncratic and exuberant.
Yeah. Really.
Douglas Rushkoff:
That’s the thing. I feel like in this world, especially with how cynical everyone is, we are starved for exuberance.
Noah Tsika:
We are. We sure are.
