2. New changes of the subculture and punk cinema
Since the 1980s and 1990s, the traditional boundary has been broken continuously: the consumerism swept the world, the world culture integrated, the postmodernism and new liberalism took root. We can see that class politics and class consciousness are gradually declining. The rise of consumption patterns and Internet culture further promote the cultural globalization and the homogenization. The related theories about youth culture research of Birmingham School has faced serious challenges. Many scholars began to question that the binary opposition in class, gender, generation, race and subculture only exists in the theoretical research and the real situation is complicated and unsettled. With the arrival of post modern society, global/ local, virtual/ real, commercial/ independent, daily/ edge and other binary distinction levels in the symbolic consumption era have gone, but represents a highly variant cultural landscape” （Bennett, Kahn-Harris, 2004）
The identity of group members also has provisionality, mobility, fragmentation, virtuality, hybridity and other unstable characteristics. Based on this situation, the western education circle put forward “post subculture studies” or “post subcultural theory” concept in the beginning of the 21st century, so as to “ interpret the identity mixed situation of subculture population in the changeable and complicated new media era and increasingly popular culture symbol consumption era”. The cultural theorists no longer emphasize the edge attribute of subculture and youth culture and purely interpret the attitude and behavior as “weaving resistance code”. Instead, they intended to focus on the whole lifestyle of young people and realized the positive role of the youth as consumers on the production of cultural products. Dick Hebdige believed that with the rise of consumer culture, the “trouble youth” and “entertaining youth” in the youth discourse began to integrate and the imaginative collective of the subculture has gradually disappeared under the pressure of material limitation” （ Dick，2002）. “The response of subculture is neither pure identity or pure refusion, neither ‘commercial use’ or ‘genius rebel’. It is between the unsettling transformation of ‘politics’ and ‘pleasure’” (Dick,1984).
Sarah Thornton will describe the rave club subculture that was popular at the beginning of the 1990s as “popular segment" and "fuzzy opposition". Martin Roberts believed that the subculture industry has currently become an important part in the cultural industry and it has occupied a stable and favorable position. The alternative music, independent film, underground comics, extreme sports and other minority cultural groups constitute the basis of post modern social differences. From the commercial benefits, they even surpass the mainstream cultural capital in the usual sense. The elegant culture, popular culture or subculture are no longer closely related to "class", "hegemony" or "resistance" concepts, but show the “different tastes and fashion” under the market operation (Tony,2005). The youth subculture is no longer regarded as the bottom cultural disease and the new subculture group also represents the mobility and fragmentation characteristics. It can be said that almost every young person is a partial or temporary subculture member, because subculture capital and ideology have already penetrated into all aspects of daily life.
In the post subculture era, the Internet and mobile media platforms provide unprecedented "participation" opportunities for individuals. Andy Bennett believed that the Internet provides the possibility for the formation of “anti-hegemony subversive strategy” of young people, so it is “a giant new resource” of the anti-capitalist group . Henry Jenkins thought that the personal media breaks the hegemonic position of the media giant and the communication “centralization” model and provides consumers with the creation practice opportunity, so that consumers could have the ability to participate in the production of mainstream media contents. People are expected to separate from the hegemony of media giant and share the multiple alternative meaning formation. The network communication media makes all information and culture involve into the process of “circulation and democracy” and shows a certain opposed political power. When the consumer experience is converted into a new text production, a new “loose subculture collection or ‘ecosystem’ forms. The users of personal media produce their own dissemination system and form a “"shadow cultural economy” described by John Fiske, which is free from the official media. And the behavior is authorized. The Internet provides a platform for the ultra-left group, ultra-right group, all progressive and reactionary cause. Then the post subculture no longer exists in the "underground".
The post subculture era opens a new face of punk cinema. In early 1970s, the domestic video system launched by Japan SONY and Panasonic Corp was popular in the west. At the same time, the image new technology cable and satellite TV has also been widely used. In the 1990s, the digital video disc (DVD) provided lower cost, higher return and more convenient viewing experience (the audience can watch movies on the computer or portable media player) and could also attract fans to collect through adding film footages, different clip versions, trailers and other "additional materials". The new labor policy, Sundance Independent Film Festival and a series of policies and brands have been launched. These changes all contribute to the development of low budget films. Hollywood blockbusters also launched their own low-end product lines and used a large amount of "cult symbol resources" to attract the audience. They hoped to get high rate of return with a low budget. It means that the use of punk style has become a routine means for the filmmakers and the industrial production has also integrated punk style into it.
Overall, the punk cinema during this period have new characteristics: first of all, the mainstream and commercialization has become the norm. The dependence of independent movie companies and independent filmmakers has been enhanced. While obtaining more money and opportunities, it has formed a close and far negotiation relationship with Hollywood; secondly, film festivals, video rent and Internet viewing have become new communication modes. The punk cinema have undergone fundamental changes in the production, dissemination, acceptance and other aspects. The boundary between the mainstream and non-mainstream movies is also more muddled.
3. Text analysis: cross-media narration of The Blair Witch Project
Here, through the text analysis of a low-budget independent film, The Blair Witch Project (1999), we will clearly see how do punk cinema form in the collective writing of enterprise group, multi-media and fans through the movie making propaganda in the post-subculture era. The Blair Witch Project can be called as the world’s biggest movie event in 1999. On the surface, this is a common low-budget independent film. It was taken by two graduates from not famous universities and its production budget is only thirty-five thousand dollars. The actors are little known and the screen is cheap and rough. There are tens of thousands of films like it every year and they just appear in Independent Film Festival and then will be forgotten. But The Blair Witch Project became the movie with the highest rate of return in the history. It harvested the sales of one hundred and fifty million dollars and obtained the budget of sequel and TV series. The heroine was famous overnight and even the critics who always sniffs at the horror themes praised it. It opened a horror film style with the combination of “mockumentary” and “reality show”. It is different from the popular Italian “Mondo ” films and the copy works at the end of 1970s. The Blair Witch Project used the constantly switching subjective perspective camera. Later, REC (2007), Paranormal Activity (2008), Cloverfield (2008), The Dyatlov Pass Incident (2013) and other such kind of films emerged. Although they were also very popular, they failed to replicate the success of The Blair Witch Project.
Compared with the traditional broadcast TV and cinema dissemination (playing trailers, displaying posters, etc.), the successful films in the post-subculture era. Microblog, WeChat platform, trailer download, official website, fans BBS and multimedia interaction has become increasingly important channels. J. P. Telotte even thought that the network marketing strategy could integrate all advantages of the traditional marketing mode. All the advertising means are available in the official website and non-official website created by fans, including:
Exquisite image poster, dazzling old-fashioned propaganda slogans, star interviews and real-time chat rooms, stills, trailers, downloadable video clips, quizzes related to movie, acoustic music, etc. These websites not only try to attract potential audience to go to the cinema and buy tickets, but also effectively tell how the filmmakers and issuer treat the film. It makes the audience to watch and understand the movie in the movie narrative context that has been already constructed and even decides the pleasant sensation that we will feel from it. (J. P. Telotte, 2001)
From this point of view, The Blair Witch Project became the most successful typical case of the network marketing means with online and offline interaction at the end of 1990s. In 1999, Artisan Entertainment Company (J. P. Telotte, 2001) purchased The Blair Witch Project at the Sundance Film Festival at the price of one million and one hundred thousand dollar. Before it, the company has publicized Pi (1998) and Steven Soderbergh’s The Limey (1999) through the network mode and built a certain visibility. At that time, the producer of The Blair Witch Project has had a website. The marketing veteran of Artisan Entertainment Company, Amorette Jones, who had fulfilled his potential in the marketing department of Global, Columbia, Samsung, MGM and other companies, invested a large amount of money (about twenty million dollar) to further refine the website content and strategy, so that people were “completely fascinated by the things on the Internet” (J. P. Telotte, 2001). Meanwhile, the traditional means were also carried out overwhelmingly, including making TV publicity on MTV, displaying posters on the college Journal, spreading a lot of dramatic "wanted poster" on the weekly and magazines for young readers, etc. It was worth noting that all the offline activities were closely related to online contents: The Internet firstly claimed that some mysterious film footage were discovered and released some mysterious pictures taken by a 16 milli hand-held camera. At that time, some wanted poster about missing students appeared on the paper media and television program surveyed the “real background” of these activities. The offline behaviors attracted the recipient to participate in the further online tracking and all means led the people to the cinema. The interactive conversion of multimedia platform made the boundary between the reality and virtuality fuzzy. Each marketing means made the movie contents penetrate in the daily life to constantly stimulate people's curiosity: it seemed that three students were really missed near Burkittsville in Maryland. They were filming a documentary, which is about a local terror witch legend. A year later, someone found the film left by them inadvertently. Artisan Entertainment Company pieced them together and put it on the Internet. Here, the website was no longer only advertising, but also constituted a part of the film: some extra materials that can’t be seen in the movie can be found, such as the background of “missing filmmakers” and the follow-up stories after their missing in the mythology research of the legend of The Blair Witch Project. For the younger generation who has grown up along with the Internet, the film actually created a strange experience passing through the virtual space and realistic space. One of the producers of The Blair Witch Project, Eduardo Sanchez pointed out that compared to the “background story”, they also hoped that the audience could get a kind of “completely independent film experience” (J. P. Telotte, 2001). Compared with the old-fashioned horror means in the traditional horror film, the horror of The Blair Witch Project was that it led the audience into a completely unknown, complex, hidden and vivid "real" territory.
It was worth noting that The Blair Witch Project created a large number of topics before and during the movie release. The upsurge still continued for a long time after the release of the movie and was always surrounded by various questions, doubts and discussion. This clearly also benefited from the public relations myth of Artisan Entertainment Company. When the puzzles on the multimedia platform were gradually revealed, Artisan Entertainment Company timely offered the back stories and aroused people’s interests once again: Why the cameras that are used could be finally returned to the seller and get a full refund? How the actors improvise and take all the shots? How the two directors make the hungry actors suffer from insomnia and separate them to stimulate their real inner experience? (J. P. Telotte, 2001) The producer said that the three actor believed the legend in The Blair Witch Project and the actors didn’t know some terror plots in advance, so some of their reactions on the screen were real. Compared with the movie itself, the success of The Blair Witch Project basically owes to the series of unique cross-media practice. In the current era with the widespread video website and mobile phone shooting, the success of The Blair Witch Project in 1999 is obviously groundbreaking.
4. Incorporation of subculture
Generally speaking, novelty and fashion have always been pursued by market demands in the commercial development, therefore, as the subcultural group generates new and confrontational modes, these styles will quickly be "collected" by the fashion market. Fox-Genovese(1987) has described the resistance style by the market in this way: when social resistance turns into the category of fashion. What fashion gathers would be various kinds of strange things. As his kind of stuff has been full of novelty, it must be constantly updated, and used as a trading tool with the stirring things. In the view of Birmingham School, the ‘incorporation’ and ‘transaction’ from this market is the beginning that business incorporates the sub-cultural style.
The reason why the sub-cultural resistance style could be integrated and utilized by the capital and market, primarily lies in that, the subculture of Western society after the 1950s has been the product of mass culture, entertainment industry and commodity consumption to a large extent, the subculture style tends to be the styles reflected in leisure and consumption, and subculture has also used its ambiguous relationship with its industry at the same of serving it (Dick,1979).In The Popular Arts, Hall has also mentioned that: Vendors have quickly made money from this volatile market. This market is very easily stimulated, as the profits are too high, and the market is also highly sensitive to fashion. Vendors have known that fashion and style play a key role in controlling teenagers' purchase flow. We are vulnerable to being bewitched by fashion, and teenagers seem particularly so (Stuart and Paddy,1964).
A more significant cause to incorporate subcultures in the market is that, aiming to spread the subculture style with the market, the dominate culture enables it leave the grass roots and ground, thus to incorporate it into the sphere of influence of dominated cultures.
Through the market incorporation, the significance of subcultural styles is no longer subversive, but ‘drew close to the dominated ideology again’, thereby making the sub-culture lost the original sense of resistance.
There’re mainly two scholars expounding the business incorporation in the Birmingham School - Clark and Herbegie, and their research can be analyzed from two processes: Firstly, how the sub-cultural style changes from the rebellious style into the consumption style, and secondly, how this consumption style loses the sense of resistance of sub-culture.
4.1 Subculture: from the rebellious style to the consumption style
The spread of youth subcultural style, has gone through a process from the "grass root" to the fashion market. It is a commercial process, and more a "cultural inclusion" process (Antonina, 2001).
Clark's words, in my understanding, should include the following points: firstly, the spread of sub-cultural style can only proceed in the mature market system, "the small-scale record shops, record companies, fashion boutiques and one or two companies producing women's costumes" have actually formed a "sub-cultural industry chain." Secondly, different from the general phenomenon in the past, the sub-cultural industry is the "emerging industry" of capitalism. Thirdly, subculture has been transformed into a popular culture and business phenomenon by the "subcultural industry", the original subculture has become fashion, and the rebellious style has become the consumption style and market style. The society’s fashion no longer spread through the imitation from above down.
Once the subculture style originally with the class dimension becomes a commodity, it will be mitigated and diffused as a "universal" symbol, losing its class meaning:
Clark's words about subculture can be summarized as: when sub-cultural style becomes the popularized consumption style, it will lost the class consideration, and get mutually separated from the original subculture situation, making the youth subculture no different from the iron plate of youth culture and homogeneous whole culture, thus it has become a classless culture, bourgeoisified and the ‘partial conspiracy of producers and sellers, which in turn forms the mutual identification with the "hegemony" painstakingly operated by the bourgeoisie and confirms the myth that youth subculture is only the result of the too big generation gap ( Dick, 1979).
4.2 Yesterday’s Resistance, Today’s Fashion: the disappearance of subcultures
Clark and Herbegie believe that, in the final analysis, the process of business incorporation that subcultural style has experienced did not occur spontaneously. In the process the subculture style evolves into daily necessities, most of the styles have lost the original meaning and value, thus it would lost the shocking resistance, and when the commodity economy spreading the whole world turns the subcultural symbols into lucrative goods, undoubtedly it will produce a devastating blow on the subcultures: "subcultures convey information through the goods, making the commodity meanings distorted or erased by purpose." "The creation and dissemination of the emerging styles is inevitably linked to the process of production, publicity and packaging together, which will inevitably lead to the weakening on the subversion power of subcultures (Dick, 1979).
Originally, subcultures were intended to express the rebellious style, while they’re expressed with the rebellious objects in a better texture in the market. Based on this, Herbegie said with sadness: the commercialization of subcultures "indicates that subcultures are approaching death step by step (Dick, 1979). The style of youth culture may be unfolded with the symbolic challenge, while inevitably, they must declare the end by establishing a new set of practices, that is, to create new products, new industries, or to revive the obsolete industries.
This indicates that the incorporation of the dominant cultures has been filled with contradictions: on one side it is "bar-kill" - the fear of moral panics (public opinion repression, attacks and containment) and on another side it is "adulation" - an advertising campaign and imitation (publicity, favor and obsessed in the sub-cultural style), and both of them are rooted in a deeper social and cultural crises (Dick, 1979). In real life, punk rock bands have also repeatedly received similar resistance and adulation in the tour at the same time.
It is the two continuous recovery processes of the ideology and commodity incorporation that support the repairing of the "broken orders" of culture. Meanwhile, as a "folk demon", "the other", "the enemy", "ordinary people" and "fashion", subcultures are absorbed into a funny spectacle in the dominated myth, all the resistance meaning of the subcultural style has gone, the subcultures and mainstream cultures converge together(Peck, 2001). In Marcuse's words, it is: criticism disappears and pauses, and this means that "the society with no opposition" was born.
5. Subculture Capital and Excorporation
Clark and Herbegie have made the most research on ‘incorporation’ among the Birmingham school members so far. We have quoted their views many times in the above texts. However, within the Birmingham school, Clark and Herbegie’s research have also encountered opposition and criticism, and McRobbie had questioned and criticized Herbegie's "incorporation" theory(Peck, 2001). With a "radical populism", Birchham School's edge scholar Fiske also held a skeptical attitude of Herbegie and Clark's point of views, and he was optimistic attitude the "excorporation" of the youth subculture. However, what must be noted here is that: no matter how optimistic McRobbie and Fiske were on the incorporation and excorporation of subcultures, the incorporated subcultures would always achieve partial compromises with the dominant cultures, thus losing the spirit of resistance more or less, and this is the fact that scholars "with uncritical populism" cannot avoid (Sarah, 1965).
5.1 Sub-cultural Enterprises and Subcultural Capital
In the book Postmodernism and Popular Culture (1994), McRobbie from the Birmingham School has proposed question and reflection on some blind spots in the subcultural theory of the Birmingham school, which have involved the relationship between subcultural style and market incorporation:
As far as I can see, one of McRobbie’s criticism is the most worthy of attention, that is, what is the attitude of the subcultural group itself on the incorporation (market and commodity production)? Whether it’s all rejection and refusal? Is there any motive of initiative acceptance? Where there is any initiative for the subcultural groups in the consumption and the market? Herbegie did not elaborate this in details, and his main concern is the deformation of sub-cultural styles after the incorporation – the subversion and the disappearance of the resistance power. Only in talking about the "Sex Pistol" Band, Herbegie got astounded when this band kept so unruly and hard-edged that their contract were scraped by the record company for many times after being incorporated. However, he did not explain it further.
It could be said that the criticism from McRobbie is very pertinent, blind spots indeed existed in the incorporation theory during the early state of Birmingham School that is ignoring the positive role of the sub-cultural groups themselves in the market. According to McRobbie’s analysis, the reason is that: "subculture style can be dealt", this concept is far from that faith that "the working class’ youth subcultures resist the bourgeois hegemony", which makes the subcultural style look no longer so pure. McRobbie believes that: after the punk phenomenon, this romantic concept is truly too idealistic (McRobbie, 1986). McRobbie conducted the demonstration mainly combining the research of the "second-hand clothes" and "flea market" in the "punk phenomenon", she assumes that subcultures is not in the way that "it is not related to business, and has no interested in it. (McRobbie, 1986) " "In fact, the entire punk cultures are using the mass media to promote themselves, and from the beginning, it opened a series of stores to directly sell clothes to the youth. (McRobbie, 1986)” "With the disappearance of traditional occupations, subcultures have created many new job opportunities. In this invisible economy sphere not recorded in texts, many new occupations have been created in subcultures and the show business separately.
In McRobbie’s point of view, although the commercialization of subcultures has made subcultural become the commodity of the mass market, its political meaning does not disappear, after the incorporation subcultures do not stay away from the resistance to the dominant cultures: "we do not have to consider these activities as the hard times for the purely commercial subcultures, which stay away from the traditional resistance: on the contrary, these activities are at the center of the deviant. (McRobbie, 1986) " "If we temporarily deconstruct the concept of 'confrontation' and treat it on the level of daily life, we would find that the development of sub-cultural enterprises and institutions is actually in the living means under the conditions of 'cultural aesthetics' (with the industrial ebbing tide as the background), it is a special manifestation of the resistance to society, and according to McRobbie’s statement, rather than rejecting the popularity, promotion and market incorporation of subculture styles, subcultures welcome them – and sub-cultural enterprises and institutions are the means for subcultural groups to make a living (Gamman, McRobbie and Walkerdine, 1992). Even being "market oriented" and "incorporated", subcultures can also complete the confrontation.
5.2 Cultural Optimism: Excorporation
What does commercialization mean for subcultures? Is it a blessing or curse for the market incorporation? In this regard, McRobbie did not make a clear evaluation. However, she did not show such a strong sense of despair on commercialization like Herbegie, and on the contrary, she faintly expressed the attitude of cultural optimism (Gamman, McRobbie and Walkerdine, 1992).
Opposite to cultural pessimism (represented by Adorno et al.), cultural optimism is one of the main attitudes towards cultural commercialization, and the American scholar Taylor Cowan has a wonderful summary on this in the book Business In Praise of Commercial Culture. The main view of "Cultural Optimism" is that: art has gained the prosperity and development in the modern capitalist system; the market economy promotes artists’ independence, liberating it from cultural consumers’ direct demands; technological progress has benefited the culture, and money is the way to achieve creative performance and artistic communication; the well-developed market has a variety of mechanisms to support the diversity of culture, thus to liberate the artists from the potential autocracy of the mainstream market interests; and the capitalist wealth and cultural diversity have enhanced artists’ freedom to cultivate critics and audiences.
This kind of "cultural optimism" is consistent with the subsequent thinking of the edge scholar of the Birmingham school - John Fiske. As a representative of "Radical Populism", Fiske has gone further than McRobbie, and he insists on an optimistic mass culturalism. The "mass culture" mentioned by Fiske in Understanding Popular Culture (1989), is quite different from the "mass culture" described in Adorno’s Enlightenment Dialectics. To a large extent, it is the symbol system favored by subculture groups and has a strong subcultural characteristics, and it also include the subculture incorporated by the market. Fiske did not blindly pay attention to the "incorporation" process, but to explore the "mass vitality and creativity." He believes that in the consumption of the goods in the mass culture, subcultures turn into the mass culture after being incorporated, which would not make subcultures lose the sense of resistance. On the contrary, subcultures have been conducting the excorporation to cope with, avoid or resist the "dominate power", as the adolescent subculture fans still have vitality and creativity (identification and productivity), they can carry out resistant decoding of the cultural goods, use the goods for "excorporation", deal with and challenge the social order dominated by the strong power in the "guerrilla warfare" of symbols and "generate" pleasure and meaning in the process of collage and re-creation, and he even said extremely that: "readers are cultural producers, not the cultural consumers." "The main idea of guerrilla warfare or mass culture lies in that is invincible. Although capitalism has a history of nearly two hundred years, the dominated subcultures have always existed, and resist the final incorporation without any compromise - the public of these subcultures have always been planning a new way of 'tearing their own jeans'."
Fiske's optimistic attitude on the "incorporation" of mass culture and subculture has been subject to much criticism. British scholar McGuigan had intensely criticized Fiske, assuming that Fiske supports "the uncritical populism and consumerism":
In my understanding, even McGuigan's criticism here is very sharp, it also seems a little nitpicking. In the final analysis, there are many differences between subcultures and anti-cultures, after all, the Jamaican hoods enchanted by rock and roll cannot become the heavily armed panther party. However, a little criticism of McGuigan still makes sense, that is, the "uncritical populism” is worthy of doubt. No matter how optimistic the market and business are, incorporation indeed causes digestion on the subcultures, and this fact cannot be changed only by pure consumption, "the irrational praise of popular culture is failing to see the power relations, as well as the dialectics between the mainstream culture and subordinate culture, McGowan's such criticism, has actually mentioned the crucial point of Fiske. Taking the "Sex Pistol" as an example, once the "Sex Pistol" had been fully incorporated into the market and controlled by the mainstream culture, whether they can still retain the original creative right? And whether could they still create sharp songs “God Save the Queen "? Even if they could do this, whether they would be blocked by brokers and record companies before they pass the government's review? Refused to be incorporated, subcultures will lose the foundation of settlements to a large extent; being incorporated means commercialization and the obedience to another set of rules to a certain extent, thereby facing the threat of being manipulated and deconstructed. This may be the fate that subcultures cannot escape when they resist within the system through styles.
Conclusion
To sum up, the appearance of electronic media has affected the whole society and people's lifestyle currently. This paper gives a relatively clear explanation about why many researchers believe that mass culture has gradually tended to be homogeneous and typed and the information dissemination is gradually scattered and fragmented. The electronic media promotes the media convergence, but secretly shrinks and weakens the potential critical space. This paper also provides a more optimistic view is that electronic media is expanding the scope of public domain continuously. The “symbolic violence” has the ability to destroy and break all the traditional boundaries, so the growth of ‘heterogeneous elements” becomes possible. With the development of punk cinema as an example, this paper shows how can it as a film subculture enter the core area of film production, transmission, reception and criticism from a certain vulgar peripheral position. The underground identity of the punk cinema disappeared along with the bankruptcy of midnight and small theaters. It turned into a strategy and means widely used by the film industry and penetrated into the mainstream culture. The carefully crafted punk cinema is the collective creation of enterprise group, multimedia and fans. Due to limited time and word account, this research only discusses punk cinema within CCCS theory and only have The Blair Witch Project as an example. Further punk cinema research could thus focus on other subculture or cinema theories from different culture school. I also suggest that attention should be pay to more least punk cinema. It is worth noting that changes in punk cinema can not be simplified as “incorporated” product in the Birmingham school, but the changing landscape developed by subculture capital in the era trend of new media platform and culture capital globalization. The punk cinema in the post-subculture era is a cross-text, cross-media, cross-cultural and cross-region flowing content and it shows the cultural diversity of the whole era.
