Media Governance and Industries Lab Blog

by Natalia Sineokaia

At last year’s Cannes Film Festival, one of the most discussed films was The Substance (2024) — a body-horror drama that shocked audiences and critics alike. Its bold aesthetic and disturbing themes seemed to come out of nowhere — but did they really? Scratch beneath the surface, and you’ll find its roots in fringe cinema, B-movie splatter, and visual languages that were once excluded from mainstream respectability. This cinematic moment raises a broader question: what else are we overlooking when we ignore non-mainstream cultural forms? This post makes the case for why studying the margins of pop culture matters — especially those that fall outside both elite and mainstream frameworks.

Popular culture is a massive field — but not everything within it receives equal academic attention. In fact, many cultural objects occupy an awkward space: neither refined enough to be considered “high-brow” art, nor successful enough to dominate the mass market. Think of low-rated films, obscure European animations, forgotten zines, erotic magazines, or cheaply printed comic books. These are precisely the kinds of objects that scholars tend to overlook – not necessarily because they lack meaning, but because they don’t align with dominant
ideas of what is worth studying.

As Pierre Bourdieu noted in Distinction, taste is socially constructed – and academia is no exception. What we study reflects what we value, and what we value is often filtered through institutional, capitalist, and hegemonic lenses. As a result, research on popular culture can become skewed toward commercially successful or canonically endorsed material – narrowing our understanding of culture as a whole. The so-called “uselessness” of peripheral media objects often hides their sociological richness and ideological complexity. Their exclusion leaves blind spots in how we understand cultural dynamics, identity production, and power structures.

Studying marginal cultural artifacts can tell us what mainstream texts often can’t. These objects — created outside dominant institutions or aesthetic canons — serve as raw, unfiltered expressions of collective desires, anxieties, and identities. As Raymond Williams proposed in his theory of structures of feeling, it is often in non-canonical texts that we can sense the emotional contours of an era before they solidify into formal ideologies.Take European animation, for example. Often labeled “niche,” it resists the polished universality of American productions like those from Disney or DreamWorks. Films such as Long Way North (2015), about a Russian girl searching for her grandfather in the Arctic, explore deeply local and personal narratives unlikely to pass through global market filters. Their ideological and stylistic diversity stems from their authenticity — and, paradoxically, from their marginality. What doesn’t aim to be global often ends up more honest.

Similarly, underground comics, VHS horror, and web-based microdramas reflect ideologies that exist outside dominant discourse — or prefigure future mainstream trends. These artifacts help us study culture not as a finished product but as a process: messy, plural, and in constant motion.
If, as Stuart Hall argues, culture is a site of ideological struggle, then academia has a responsibility to examine all sides — not just the dominant one. By keeping peripheral cultural texts in view, we support ideological plurality, give voice to marginalized creators, and challenge the cultural hierarchies that define what counts as “serious” or “worthy.”

Marginal objects are also often where innovation starts. Siegfried Zielinski’s media archaeology approach encourages us to explore forgotten and overlooked media as potential sites of creative resistance and historical alternatives. Tarantino’s cult-inspired cinema and Cronenberg’s body horror — once fringe, now revered — illustrate how ideas from the margins often migrate into the mainstream. What starts in the underground doesn’t always stay there.
Moreover, the process of studying non-mainstream forms forces us to reflect on our own academic biases. Why do we ignore certain genres or formats? What political or ideological structures shape our syllabi, conferences, and journals? Marginal texts push us to ask uncomfortable but necessary questions — and that, in itself, is a valuable scholarship.

Culture is not static. It is a living, breathing organism — continuously evolving, breaking its own rules, and redrawing its boundaries. The binary between center and periphery, like the outdated high/low culture divide, rarely holds under scrutiny. Today’s fringe can become tomorrow’s classic. The grotesque becomes aestheticized. The niche becomes global. And in the process, our understanding of cultural value expands.

As researchers, we shouldn’t assume that importance lies only where the spotlight shines brightest. Often, it’s in the shadows — in cheap comics, forgotten animations, awkward formats, and risky aesthetics — that culture experiments, struggles, and reinvents itself. By studying non-mainstream, non-elite cultural objects, we honor the full complexity of the cultural field and take seriously the voices and visions that dominant institutions leave behind.
To study the margins is not to romanticize failure or obscurity. It’s to affirm that meaning, identity, and power circulate in more places than we’re usually taught to look. It’s to recognize that the canon is not neutral — and that expanding it is not only intellectually honest but politically necessary.

References

Bourdieu, P. (1987). Distinction. A social critique of the judgement of taste. Harvard University Press.

Hall, S. (1981). Notes on Deconstructing “the Popular”. In R. Samuel (Ed.), People’s History and Socialist Theory. Routledge & Kegan Paul. 

Lattanzio, R. (2024, May 19). ‘The Substance’ First Reactions: ‘F*cking Insane’ Body Horror ‘Instant Classic’ Shocks and Repulses Cannes. IndieWire. https://www.indiewire.com/news/festivals/the-substance-first-reactions-cannes-1235006766/https://www.indiewire.com/news/festivals/the-substance-first-reactions-cannes-1235006766/

Williams, R. (1977). Marxism and literature. Oxford University Press

Zielinski, S. (2006). Deep Time of the Media. MIT Press.

Natalia Sineokaia is a M.Sc. student at the Department of Communication, University of Vienna.