How Spider-Man, Starbucks and McDonald's beat the beatniks.

The idea that something called "mass culture" would reduce the life of the mind to homogenized glop dates all the way back to at least the late 18th century, when Germany's J.W. Goethe worried that the newest high-tech tool of his day, newspapers, would emulsify the world into group-think: "We have newspapers for all hours of the day. . . . This is communicated from house to house, from town to town, from empire to empire, and at last from continent to continent."

The threat didn't reach America in a way anyone would notice until sociologists in the 1950s started writing about masscult, conformism and men in gray flannel suits; within 24 hours of the announcement a guy in Greenwich Village burned his suit, stopped shaving and called himself a "beatnik." It's been a long and honorable battle, this determined resistance by individualists to American marketing's compulsion to massify everything it touches. But I knew the 50 Years War was really, finally over on reading that this past weekend from sundown Friday to sunup Monday, Americans of every age, creed and color came together, not to worship but to watch "Spider-Man," a movie, which took in $114 million, the most moolah ever for an opening. That take came on the wings of a marketing campaign that cost $50 million. This, it may be said, is big.

Let anti-globalists trash Starbucks and French farmers torch McDonald's. No matter. American marketing is taking its world-wide victory lap. What now?

The Journal's John Lippman reported Monday that Hollywood sees its future in "franchise" movies like "Spider-Man." For example, Ang Lee, the director of such elegant films as "Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon," has signed to construct the first film franchise around the Incredible Hulk. Goethe would weep.

No one is rediscovering the wheel here. Come to think of it, rediscovering the wheel may be the secret to all commercial life. The idea that one decent idea can become a "franchise" extending to the horizon, whether a Spider-Man movie or a sneaker with a check-mark on the back, merely repeats the insight into human nature that made McDonald's founder Ray Kroc rich selling cheeseburgers beneath two fat yellow curves of metal, which he magically called the Golden Arches. Charlie Chan movies were a franchise. So was Seinfeld. Even the sound of Frank Sinatra's voice, stamped onto hundreds of songs. Sam Adams produced a nice beer; now there seems to be a Sam Adams beer for all sorts of things, like the changeover to daylight saving time.

Living with the reality of mass marketing has been one of the greatest love-hate relationships in all American history. European intellectuals tend simply to resent and hate it. Both leftists and conservatives consume it, all the while worrying that the more the mass market spreads, the more it flattens everything. The latest, quite ironic bipartisan complaint is that public radio is abandoning classical music. Its audience was shrinking. Conservatives love commerce, but can barely tolerate commercialism, such as plastering logos on every pro golfer's baseball cap. America, land of logos.

The sense grows that one is everywhere being confronted, manipulated and pushed by someone's marketing campaign. Yet despite the torrent, no backlash has emerged like the beatniks of the '50s or the hippies of the '60s and '70s. We have the anti-global demonstrators, but they're obviously idiots. Where's the outrage?

It's nowhere, because the fact is that "Spider-Man" (the ultimate misfit) is really good. So is Sam Adams beer and Starbucks coffee, Callaway golf clubs, Pepsi, Prada, Krispy Kreme, Harry Potter, Barnes & Noble, Walgreens, Wal-Mart, the Discovery Channel, Levis, LensCrafters, Absolut, ESPN, Dominos and Diana Krall.

The mass market in America, the median of quality, has risen, not fallen. We may all be drinking from the same coffee cup and spending weekends together watching the same computerized movie graphics, but, as the saying goes, it's all good. The fears of corporatized conformity were overblown. East Germany was conformity. This is commercial anarchy born of competition.

For every brand mentioned in the paragraph above there are dozens of in-category alternatives. The pressure on the two once-solid cola franchises is so great that Coke and Pepsi are now selling flavored waters. Retailers are producing their own brands of personal computers, almost like flavored waters, because people say they want more choices than the current PC market offers. If you don't like Hollywood's momentary obsession with comic books, you can buy a DVD player and order rentals of every imaginable old classic movie from Netflix.

Somehow, despite the hard sell, it's gotten harder to succeed by selling junk. Sneakers not long ago were cheap foot-burners; now it hardly matters which of 15 brands of running shoe you buy; they're all good. Today franchised products have to deliver a predictably elevated experience, or they'll fail, and fast. If the next franchise installment on "Spider-Man" is no good, our democratized culture will empty those megaplexes by Monday morning, no matter how many 50 millions Columbia spends on marketing.

None of this is meant to ignore that the products of America's mass culture, especially in entertainment, often go bottom-fishing for the bottom line, producing people and producers that can be meretricious, coarsening or corrupt. That won't change until people learn the difference between what's classy and what's simply crass. And that won't happen until the public schools in this country are as dedicated to quality as the people making flavored water. Don't hold your breath.