THE VULGAR

R from Warm Bodies: https://cnsbranches.wordpress.com/2015/05/18/warm-bodies-imagine-dragons-and-conversion/

“The denial of lower, coarse, vulgar, venal, servile—in a word, natural—enjoyment, which constitutes the sacred sphere of culture, implies an affirmation of the superiority of those who can be satisfied with the sublimated, refined, disinterested, gratuitous, distinguished pleasures forever closed to the profane. That is why art and cultural consumption are predisposed, consciously and deliberately or not, to fulfil a social function of legitimating social differences” (Bourdieu 503). 

With each remix we encounter, there’s different levels of enjoyment the audience gleans from it depending on the context of their past cultural consumption. For example, people who have never been forced to read through Romeo and Juliet may not recognize its influences in something like Warm Bodies on their own. Although they miss out on the references, they can still appreciate the story in that form because it’s zombies and comedy and love and entertaining. The problem becomes when people are so wrapped up in their sense of high culture that the existence of Warm Bodies bothers them because it distorts the refinement of the original text, and they’re so distracted by the changes to the story and their discomfort with the setting that they’re unable to acknowledge its natural value.