First, perhaps the ambiguous title of "The Wow Climax: Tracing the Emotional Impact of Popular Culture" needs a little explanation, in order to avoid any misguiding interpretations. In the early 20^th century in the United States, the Vaudevillians used to refer to "The Wow Climax" (or the "Wow finish") to point out the sensational finale of an act, the dazzling punch that was seen as the ultimate moment of about any performance onstage during the old Vaudeville era: "the moment of peak spectacle and maximum emotional impact in an act" (p. 4). The author, scholar Henry Jenkins (from MIT), had published many books and articles about contemporary popular culture; he now focuses precisely on that "Wow" phenomena with countless examples in various domains, from popular movies to video games, in order to understand the way spectacles and their specific audiences conceive what a "good" performance should be (and how it should end) (p. 4). To say it in a few words, this is a scholarly book about how emotions are shared in the public sphere and the media: how they are produced, organized and sometimes criticized, and how audiences do or might react. Here, emotions are understood and studied mainly from a sociological perspective, apprehended as a collective experience rather than an individual phenomena. Jenkins postulates from the start that "the emotions generated by popular culture are never personal; rather, to be popular, the text has to evoke broadly shared feelings" (p. 4). Historically, the "Wow Climax" concept has many other sources under different names, like Sergei Eisenstein's early theoretical writings on the "montage of attractions" (p. 6).

The Wow Climax contains nine individual chapters; half of those were previously published elsewhere and the whole book could therefore be read randomly (i.e. picking up chapters in about any different order). At least two of the chapters (2 and 5) can be seen in their entirety on the Internet: "Monstrous Beauty and the Mutant Aesthetics: Rethinking Matthew Barney's Relationship to the Horror Genre", plus the chapter on Stephanie Rothman's Terminal Island. Both can be found on Henry Jenkins' web site (see: Jenkins web site; the reference is at the end in the "Works cited").

In this book, each chapter covers a specific topic: videogames, the aesthetics of the film horror genre, television heroes such as Batman, masculinity in the WWF (World Wrestling Federation), Stephanie Rothman's feature film Terminal Island (1973), and the case of the scandalous Mexican-born star Lupe Velez (as seen on the book's cover). The last three chapters borrow from ethnographic methods when studying the attitudes of younger audiences and childhood in general: children who watch TV shows (chapter 7), gender issues (chapter 8), and nostalgia about the 1950s television series (chapter 9).

Using combined approaches in his timely analysis, Henry Jenkins focuses on the narratives in various genres: either counter-cinema, television series, comics, and of course literature; but he also explores some less common genres such as the wrestling narratives (p. 83), the narratives in some obscure feminist utopian novels (p. 116), and even some narratives in bedtime storytelling (p. 164). However, the Vaudeville reference brought in the introduction demonstrates that there were some significant nuances to be made between the basics of storytelling and the rules of show business. Jenkins argues that "Vaudeville was not about telling stories; it was about putting on a show, and more than that, it was about each performer's individual attempt to stop the show and steal the applause" (p. 4). This exploration into various genres can bring us to a series of concepts and notions from various disciplines, such as the links between melodrama and masculinity, in a universe where males are not allowed to express feelings of sadness or feebleness in any sense, excepted for instance in the country music or wrestling (p. 60). In this particular case, Jenkins uses his own methodology: he introduces an idea at some point, he discusses it with some illustrations, and then suspends his reflection until it comes back somewhere else in a new fashion (p. 60).

Throughout this book, Jenkins brings some interesting, often new concepts (like the symbolic uses of the body; physical spaces, p. 189; "boy culture", p. 191), which are always introduced with clear definitions, often located with useful distinctions, for instance when referring to the fundamental difference between mass culture and popular culture: "Mass culture is mass produced for a mass audience. Popular culture is what happens to those cultural artefacts at the site of consumption, as we draw upon them as resources in our everyday life" (p. 65).

An habile and experienced theoretician, Henry Jenkins had already pleased us with many excellent books in the last two decades (see his innovative book Textual Poachers: Television Fans and Participatory Culture, 1992); therefore, the reader used to continuity and logical progression in a text might sometimes feel uncomfortable with the many (apparently) unrelated topics brought here through the "Wow" link from one chapter to the following one. But although this is not his best book, Jenkins' writing is often interesting because he brings many references, insights, comparisons, timely analysis, often with familiar materials in his selected case studies: from the first Lassie stories to the outrageous wrestling shows (which we all have watched at least once on television). Some chapters are typically scholarly written (but still very much understandable), while other pieces seem more ethnographic and sometimes autobiographical (like the third chapter on "Death-Defying Heroes", or his nostalgic essay on Lassie in chapter 9). Despite these positive points, I would have to express one quibble. Since we have various investigations and interdisciplinary inquiries in many different veins, I would have appreciated a final chapter with a few concluding remarks from the author; here, the last pages of the book are just reflections related to one of the nine chapters, without any mention about most of what the book brought (his new ideas, hypotheses, concepts, tentative conclusions) in almost 300 pages. Therefore, I do not find here the same unifying strength and synthesis of French sociologist Dominique Mehl in her excellent, overlooked book on a similar topic titled La télévision de l'intimité ([Intimacy on television], Paris: Seuil, 1996), which I hope will be translated in English someday.

Since we have here an interdisciplinary approach, I believe The Wow Climax has a wide potential for readers from various fields in social sciences and media studies, but also from cultural studies, fan cultures, audience studies to film studies and youth studies. Even undergraduates would benefit from and understand this clearly written book.

Works cited:

Henry Jenkins, Textual Poachers: Television Fans and Participatory Culture, New York, NY: Routledge, 1992.

Henry Jenkins, "Monstrous Beauty and the Mutant Aesthetics: Rethinking Matthew Barney's Relationship to the Horror Genre", http://web.mit.edu/cms/People/henry3/horror.html (chapter 2 in The Wow Climax).

Henry Jenkins, "Exploiting Feminism in Stephanie Rothman's Terminal Island". Henry Jenkins web site, http://web.mit.edu/cms/People/henry3/rothman.html (chapter 5 in The Wow Climax).

Dominique Mehl, La télévision de l'intimité. Paris: Seuil, 1996.

© 2007 Yves Laberge

Yves Laberge, Ph.D., Québec City, Canada

Categories: Psychology, General