Breakthrough Writer

Chapter 4, The Hollywood Sign; Robert B. Ray, “The Thematic Paradigm” (365-385)

Chapter 4, The Hollywood Sign; Robert B. Ray, “The Thematic Paradigm” (365-385)

One. What is the debate about films in the history of US cinema?

Either movies are an opiate to drug the minds of the masses so they are distracted from the hegemony, the powers at be, or movies are “populist” in that they champion the interests and concerns of the common man and aim to be subversive to hegemonic forces.

Americans who debate this get caught up in an either/or fallacy. The answer to the question above depends on what kind of film.

Two. What are character and plot archetypes in films?

A character archetype could be the following:

The Wise man

The Fool

The Pollyannaish Do-Gooder

The Nosy Neighbor

The Gossip

The Know-It-All

The Needy Parasite

The Troglodyte

The Hipster

The Dandy

Damaged Goods

Man on a Quest, AKA The Searcher

Malcontent

Perfectionist

Earth Mother

Femme fatale

Black Widow

Predatory Satyr

Here are some plot archetypes:

Buddy films, bromances, frenemies, odd couples, and other variations

Battles between good and evil

Heroic quest

Conquering the evil witch, stepmother, earth mother, the evil woman, the psycho woman, etc. (dreamed up by sexist patriarchs, it is suggested on page 367)

Battling the Sea Monster in Jaws, Moby Dick, The Host, etc.

The Struggle to Return Home or to Find a Home

Enduring Suffering

A Battle between two more or less equal forces

Consummation, an obsession that results in death (often a love story)

A lot of these archetypes exist in the viewers’ collective unconscious and are absorbed without being articulated.

Three. What is a postmodern movie?

Postmodern refers to many things:

One, the film makes references to other films and modern cultural artifacts like the discussion of fast food in Pulp Fiction.

Two, the film makes references to the film industry or becomes self-referential in a way that creates a meta view of the film itself. By meta, we mean we are thinking about the way we are thinking about the way we are viewing the film.

Three, the film stylizes violence and romance in a way that is more ironic than sincere. In this regard, postmodern refers to an attitude, usually subversive about the conventions of our society.

Four, the film is iconoclastic in many ways including the blurring of lines between what is conventionally perceived as high and low culture. The mixing of these cultures is a trademark of the postmodern film.

Fifth, the film refutes the notion that there are new films and new images; rather, there is the deconstruction of past films and images and this deconstruction serves to give us an oppositional view of the world rather than a conventional one. By recasting existing cultural codes in new contexts, the filmmaker is double-coding (369).

Four. In what way are movies metaphors for larger cultural concerns?

Invasion of the Body Snatchers, ostensibly a monster movie, was really about the paranoia of Communist infiltration in the 1950s.

Godzilla was about our fear of the mutations that might occur in the Nuclear Era.

 

Five. How do we “read” the film Batman?

 

We must look for intentional and unintentional signs, metaphors, archetypes, and cultural signifiers.

 

One sign is the shift from old Jack Nicholson Joker the villain with a purpose to the new Heath Ledger Joker the Nihilist who simply wants to make people suffer for suffering’s sake. Why? Because the audience sees a world that is more evil than in past eras. And this evil is that there is money in giving to people’s hunger for seeing violence. We don’t question success as a box office hit the way we might have in the past; therefore, our increased tolerance for violence is a sign of our moral decay.

 

Robert B. Ray, “The Thematic Paradigm” (377)

 

One. What type of contradictions do Americans have that inform the type of movie characters they want to see?

 

Americans are ambivalent about community. They want community, but they also want radical individualism.

Americans want freedom and individual initiative, but they also want the comfort of belonging that results from conformity.

Americans want to set their roots in a place, but they also want to wander and explore the frontier.

Americans want to give that “home-cooking” friendly innocence to their neighbors, but they also want to protect themselves from The Other, the stranger, Los Otros.

Americans want to be natural, but they also want to be civilized, enjoying all the consumer trappings of the “successful.”

Two. What is the outlaw hero?

A man-child, a person who never grows up, is the preferred hero. We mythologize childhood with innocence and wisdom. We are fleeing maturity and part of this flight is the Hunger for More, a childish notion of the good life. Our youth cult makes us demonize the old man so that the Wise Old Man is now the Crazy Old Man.

The outlaw hero is a misogynist, a misanthrope, and an iconoclast. He dislikes marriage, people in general, and society’s rules. The outlaw hero embodies our anxiety about civilized life, how the conformity of it will kill us and extinguish our individuality.

The outlaw hero is afraid of many things but most of all he is afraid of himself. He is running away from himself.   

The outlaw hero is a skeptic who is skeptical, even disdainful, of any ideology that is presented to him.

The outlaw hero does not adhere to any system for tackling problems; rather, he is improvisational, using ad hoc solutions for any crisis he faces.

The outlaw hero engages in the unorthodox and clashes with some superior who prefers convention. We see this dichotomy in the Sheriff and the Deputy.

The outlaw hero is a reluctant hero and often feels displaced; he is therefore a misfit.

Hirsh Sawhney, An Idiot’s Guide to India (405); Matt Zoller Seitz, The Offensive Movie Cliché That Won’t Die (407); Mita Sengupta, “Race Relations Light Years from Earth” (412)

One. How does Hirsh Sawhney support his claim that the hit movie Slumdog Millionaire is guilty of peddling “poverty porn”?

The film over-simplifies the cultural shifts in India, avoiding nuance and instead embracing clichés, trite images of bleak poverty that “titillate foreign audiences.”

The slum actors were underpaid and therefore exploited.

Boyle, the movie’s director, “grossly oversimplifies poverty and our relationship with it.” He scapegoats thugs and low-lifes for poor people’s misery but in fact the culprits are “corrupt government officials, gargantuan multinational corporations, and suspect IMF structural adjustment programs.”

By ignoring the real culprits, American and British audiences can delight in the “poverty porn” while feeling innocent: “As a result, his movie does allow us to believe that we have been responsible global citizens by engaging with the intensity of third world slums.”

There is also this condescending message that “the West is the solution to India’s problems.”

 

Matt Zoller Seitz, “The Offensive Movie Cliché That Won’t Die” (407)

 

One. What is the implicit condescension of the wise black person, as mentor, in American film?

 

Why isn’t the black person the “leading man,” the primary hero? I mean, if the black person is so wise, as he is portrayed in the film, then why doesn’t he take center stage?

 

It almost seems as if the wise black people who populate American films were put on Earth to serve the white heroes who take all the glory.

 

Spike Lee, African American director, has coined this wise assistant “The Magical Negro.” He is a “saintly African American . . . who acts as a mentor to the questing white hero,” who seems to be disconnected from the community that he adores so much . . .”

 

Lee uses the obsolete and offensive “Negro” term to refer to a time in American history when the word meant a black man who was still subservient to whites. More specifically, Spike Lee is referring to a relationship between a “master and a servant.”

 

Another implicit condescending and racist part of this relationship is that the wise black person never uses his special powers to help himself, to help raise himself up. It’s as if he lives to give all his wisdom, strength and energy to the white hero man.

 

American cinema and literature has obsessed over this motif for over a hundred years. For example, Stephen King’s fiction is a “factory” of black wise men.

 

Two. What is the danger of applying to motif to President Obama?

 

The President, on an implicit level, is not a leader but a subordinate who uses his “wisdom” to appease the dominant power structure.

 

Applying this motif to the President is a way of undermining his authority in a passive-aggressive, dishonest fashion.

 

We have to see the above in the context that when Obama beat Romney, the challenger Romney, who lost, still had a higher percentage of the white vote than did Ronald Reagan in the 1980s. So there is still a racial divide in this country; the difference is that America isn’t as white as it was during Reagan’s reign.

 

Three. What other psychological motivation is there behind white people’s longing for the black wise man myth?

 

Whites feel guilt because they know that on many levels people of color have a bad deal. Some black commentators, for example, commenting on the innocent young, unarmed man, shot in Ferguson, Missouri, said that black people live in a “terror-dome.” This dome of terror, especially, exists in the world police arrests and incarceration.  Blacks and whites commit same level of drug crimes but for those same crimes there is a radio of 10:1 greater blacks than whites in prison. Today there are more black men in prison than there were black slaves at the height of slavery.

 

Therefore, the happy-go-lucky wise black person is a comforting, albeit racist myth, for a lot of black people.

 

Mitu Sengupta, “Race Relations Light Years from Earth” (412)

 

One. What is the basis of the author’s claim that Avatar is a racist film?

 

The movie has coded race types that fuel a “white guilt fantasy.” The dominant men who rule the culture and are responsible for ruining the culture are white men. On one hand, they are guilty of being destructive; on the other, they are the “ones in charge.”

 

The blue people are “people of color” who have been colonized by the whites.

 

Stereotypes abound: White people are, in the words of David Brooks, “rationalist and technocratic while colonial victims are spiritual and athletic, and that nonwhites need the White Messiah to lead their crusades.”

 

This motif of the white man saving the colonized people of color is a common motif and is among other things patronizing, racist, clichéd, and, to use the words of the author, “reinforces pernicious stereotypes of the ethnic ‘other’ as disorderly, meek, and stupid . . .”

 

Two. Is there anything in the depiction of the Na’vi that mitigates the predictably racist premise?

 

First, unlike other “White Messiah” films, the Na’vi live in a superior world than the decaying landscapes of the malignant “Sky People.”

 

Second, the Na’vi need nothing of the white man: Their “pantheism, community solidarity, and oneness with nature . . . are celebrated wholeheartedly, while the American way of life . . . is condemned.”

 

 

 

Three. How does Jake Sully conform to the dichotomous hero described in Robert B. Ray’s “The Thematic Paradigm”?

 

He is both conquering and submissive; he is both a rebel and a conformer; he is both a fighter and a peacemaker; he is both a killer and a lover; he is both an imperialist and an assimilationist; he is both a teacher and a student.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Linda Seger and Jessica Hagedorn 386-404: Hero Myth and Asian Women Stereotypes in Film

Linda Seger, "Creating the Myth" (386)

One. What is a myth?

It’s a universal story that connects with all of us; it tells us something about ourselves, either our past struggles or our future aspirations; it is based on all cultures, folk myths, religions, and legends.

Rites of passage or initiation rites are common myths. How did we transition from child to adult? How did we gain acceptance from the tribe, the clique, the community?

Seger writes that “The hero myth has specific story beats that occur in all hero stories.

Two. What is the hero myth?

We must begin with our hero mired in a world of banality; our hero is overcome with ennui on one hand and wanderlust on the other. “If only I could get out of his boring, monotonous hellhole.”

Then there’s a trigger event, a visitor, a crisis, some kind of catalyst that sets things in motion.

Sometimes the hero’s talents are called upon but he says, “Screw this, I’m going to stay in my apartment, drink beer, eat apple pie, and watch cartoons.” He is the archetype of the reluctant hero. In this case, the crisis escalates until the hero is forced to take on effective and urgent action.

When the hero embarks upon his quest, be it self-discovery, the conquering of evil, or whatever the case may be, he or she is often accompanied by a companion, a helper, which can take the form of a wise man, a witch, an elf, a homunculus, a mysterious visage, a ghost, a shadow figure, an officemate, a long-lost friend, a former enemy, etc. This person becomes a sort of mentor, helping deliver the hero from his tangle of confusion and unreason.

Then the hero must transport into a special world where he undergoes a radical transformation from ordinary to unordinary. He may become Other Worldly, Super Human, or remarkable in some other way.

However, the hero cannot undergo this transformation without being subjected to a series of greater and greater hurdles and obstacles that test his character.

Along the hero’s journey, he must hit rock bottom, languishing in despair, self-doubt, and perhaps outright nihilism, concluding that he is a loser and that the world is too evil a place to attempt to impose any meaning or goodness on it.

During this “black moment,” however, the hero finds a spark that “gets him off his butt.” He somehow finds his special power, perhaps with the help of his mentor, that resurrects him from his spiritual death and with his rebirth and can now “seize the treasure,” whatever that treasure may be. (Before we go on, let us recognize that this hero motif informs every folk legend, myth, and religious fable known to the human race because the hero motif is universal.)

Once the hero acquires the treasure, whatever that might be, he must now return home, but not without a chase from his opposition. In movies, this is often the third-act chase scene.

At the conclusion of the hero story, we must see that our hero is a changed person, wiser, smarter, and stronger than before. Along with this transformation, we find our hero is now re-integrated into society.

Three. What is the healing myth?

We begin with our hero crushed by a broken spirit. He is a broken person. He may want to die or at least he has lost the will to live and the will to assert whatever talents cause him to flourish in this world.

Then the hero suffers some kind of outer or existential wound that incapacitates him and forces him to confront his brokenness in a radically different way. I once spoke to a student from the Caribbean who said they have a folk story that says this: We are going along in our life on auto pilot, not really examining what we are doing, but eventually we get a surprise visit from the bald muscle giant who ambushes us and forces us into a wrestling match. We come away from the wrestling match with some kind of limp or injury, but in nursing our injury we rebuild our life in a way that makes it superior to the life we had before we had our encounter with the giant. Only when we try to heal from our wound, which has become so life defining that we can no longer ignore it, do we begin the process of transformation and healing.

 

Jessica Hagedorn, “Asian Women in Film: No Joy, No Luck” (396)

 

One. What ironies informed the stereotypes Hagedorn points out in her essay?

 

White women play “exotic” Asians who are portrayed as dangerous, cunning, seductive, and duplicitous. Tricksters, “airheads,” and prostitutes are the common characters. The worst part, in the words of Hagedorn: “Most Hollywood movies either trivialize or exoticize us a people of color and as women. Our intelligence is underestimated, our humanity overlooked, and our diverse cultures treated as interchangeable.”

 

She continues to observe that “good” means submissive; “bad” means a “demonized dragon lady.”

 

Hagedorn’s most damning condemnation of American films depicting Asian women is on page 403: “In Hollywood vehicles, we are objects of desire or derision; we exist to provide sex, color, and texture in  what is essentially a white man’s world.”

 

Two. Why does Hagedorn hate the highly praised 1993 film Joy Luck Club?

 

In the ostensible name of dignity and nobility, the movie is so sanctimonious and earnest that it is cloying and saccharine sweet, as if a realistic depiction of Asian women has to be soaked in earnest tragedy and melancholy, as if humor can’t be part of the complex character portrait. The daughters were passive, docile, malleable, and as a result were victims of their fate. The daughters were merely “receptors for their mothers’ amazing life stories.”

 

Also the daughters assimilated too easily into American society to the point that they appeared to have no sense of individuality or self as one would expect from such easy conformity.

 

All the tragedies eventually had a numbing effect on her.

 

And we arrive at this stereotype: “Must ethnicity only be equated with suffering?” 

 

 

  

But a hero's journey has its dangers: cliche, self-centered view of the world based on blurring line between reality and fantasy, narcissism, lack of diversity in the hero portraits and other problems as we see here:

 

 

 

 

  

 

 

 

 

 

 

Drake Bennett, “Guiding Lights: How Soap Operas Can Save the World” 349-363

Drake Bennett, “Guiding Lights: How Soap Operas Can Save the World”

One. What is the purpose of dishing up “Gomorrhic dysfunction” in daily soap operas?

According to global development experts, soaps shape behavior “in ways that are subtle, profound . . . and positive.”

The soaps are apparently bringing a moral community through the TV waves and providing cautionary tales: “Look what can happen to you if you engage in these types of immorality.”

Additionally, the soaps are raising important issues of the day like women’s rights, spouse abuse, infidelity, teen pregnancy, alcoholism, HIV, racism, gambling, financial responsibility, etc.

Even more startling, poor Brazilian women were emulating the rich, small families they saw on soap operas, called novelas.

The poor Brazilian women wanted to be more like DINKS, less like DKNI.

Their identification with these novelas is so strong, they name their children after the characters. The mothers see the novelas characters as members of their own family and community.

Soap operas watched in rural areas give those rural dwellers urban attitudes and lifestyle aspirations. This translates into the rural families wanting fewer children.

Soap operas also discourage women from in engaging in “louche, antisocial behavior.” Louche means disreputable and sordid.

Two. What moral contradiction does the author see in soaps as “edutainment”?

The may give moral instruction, but they also titillate with their scandalous spectacle of immoral indulgence, so that the viewers are being moralistic on one hand and salaciously voyeuristic on the other.

The author is suggesting perhaps that we should be skeptical about the long-term moral power of a venue that makes sin so tantalizing and addictive.

Neil Gabler, “The Social Networks” (355)

One. How has television become the new surrogate friendship?

Lacking social connection perhaps, viewers are hungry for television programs centered on communal connection so that TV shows take place where friends gather like coffee shops, living room, neighborhoods, school music programs, hospitals, bars—what Gabler calls the “friendship machine.”

David Brooks, commenting on this “friendship machine” discussed by Gabler, writes that young people, who marry later than ever, have a hunger for extended friendships:

But the change also reflects something deeper about the patterns of friendship in society. With people delaying marriage and childbearing into their 30s, young people now spend long periods of their lives outside of traditional families, living among diverse friendship tribes. These friendship networks are emotionally complicated and deeply satisfying — ripe ground for a comedy of manners.

Brooks goes on to point out that the hunger for friendship extends to parents who have too little time for friendships except for living vicariously through TV friendships:

Then, when these people do get married, friendship becomes the great challenge. Middle-aged Americans are now likely to live in two-earner families. But despite career pressures, they have not cut back on the amount of time they spend with their kids. Instead, they have sacrificed friendship time.

Brooks observes that Americans have given up one-on-one friendships, “dyadic” friendships, for “networked” friendships. These “networked” friendships are less intimate, less committed, less intense, and less mature.

Gabler writes that the surge in “friendship” TV shows is taking place at a time when Americans are more isolated, friendless, and disconnected than ever. Americans have one-third less nonfamily friends today than they did in a previous generation.

There is however “friendship lite” with the thanks of Facebook, which is championing phony friendships.

Two. Do these friendship shows comfort us?

Gabler warns that they actually remind us of our alienation and loneliness. We’re too busy working and commuting and raising families to have friends. We feel alone and we’re scared. We watch friendship shows to comfort us, but we see people living the life we only wish we could have. We don’t recognize ourselves in these “friends.” Our only consolation is to have a “nonstop fantasy” of friendship from watching Friends, Seinfeld, Community, Men of a Certain Age, Sex and the City, It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia, Desperate Housewives, Glee, Raising Hope, Modern Family, etc.

We live vicariously through their bonhomie or cheerfulness. These shows are “pure wish fulfillment.”

Reading the Signs, numbers 3 and 4, will make good research paper topics.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Rita Koganzon, “All Camped Out: How ‘Glee’ Became a Preachy After School Special” (326) and Jame J. Weinman, “Fox News Attempts to Get Funny”

Rita Koganzon, “All Camped Out: How ‘Glee’ Became a Preachy After School Special” (326) and Jame J. Weinman, “Fox News Attempts to Get Funny”

“All Camped Out” by Rita Koganzon

One. How is Glee an exercise in hypocrisy?

On one hand Glee paints women as liars and manipulators working “under the strictures of monogamous relationships” (326); on the other hand, Glee wants to preach a “sincere message for its younger viewers.”

Two. How does Glee skewer “troglodyte culture”?

The show is set in a small town where the people are close-minded, provincial, ignorant troglodytes whose prejudices create conflict with the artistic, blooming adolescents who populate the high school.

Troglodyte culture is a culture where there is no thinking, just mindless acceptance of traditions and rituals in order to conform to the status quo. Troglodyte culture is about the perpetuation of ignorance.

A troglodyte is a “cave dweller.” We refer to the cave metaphorically, which is to say a troglodyte shelters himself in a cave of ignorance and darkness. He only associates himself with members of his own tribe. Another term for troglodyte, in fact, is a tribalist. The tribalist or troglodyte loathes change, innovations, new ideas, creativity, the arts. He remains in long, protracted age of ignorance called the jahiliyyah.

The opposite of a troglodyte is a cosmopolitan, a student of the world, a person who soaks up the diversity of culture and experience and as such is open to new ideas. The cosmopolitan is curious about new things and constantly uses self-criticism to make constant improvements; the troglodyte, on the other hand, feels threatened by change and fresh experience, and he despises anything that might make him look critically at himself. The troglodyte is content with his smug mediocrity.

Unfortunately, critics point out that in Glee’s attempt to pit cosmopolitans against the small-town troglodytes, that the show has become annoying and arrogant: a “cloying combination of underdog elitism and progressive cynicism” that condescends to people who are different than them. In an ironic turn of events, the Glee writers, who fancy themselves as cosmopolitans, are acting like troglodytes or tribalists.

Elitism, the idea that we are more educated and generally more superior to the “Ignorant Other,” is in itself a form of ignorant tribalism.

The hero is Glee is the loner, the misfit, the loser, the outcast, and the pariah who cannot conform to the troglodyte culture. Instead, he blossoms by finding his particular niche and escapes the small-town hell and can now gloat that he has “made it” by escaping the ignorance of his troglodyte neighbors. But his gloating shows a lack of spirituality and instead renders a type of ignorance and arrogance that, ironically, are attributes of the troglodyte.

The portrayal of the small town isn’t even convincingly troglodyte. The high school’s arts program, for example, is wealthy and can “afford a full band and multiple costume changes for each of the club’s performances.”

Buffy the Vampire Slayer also takes place in a small town and the show derides its small town characters in the same way Glee does. In fact, this condescension is a common motif for a lot of TV shows, so common in fact that the motif is a cliché.

The clichés are further dolloped in Glee with the soap opera of characters who have made “Bad Life Decisions”; even more clichés are larded on the viewer with “didactic after school” preaching of various messages the writers wish to disseminate for our benefit. To make sure these sermons are inculcated into our heads, the “self-important Glee Club diva” Rachel delivers sermonettes about pregnancy, alcoholism, and other issues of the day.

Jaime J. Weinman, “Fox News Attempts to Get Funny” (347)

One. What is Fox News so desperate to be funny?

They’re desperate for “street cred” because it’s well known their viewership is the most ill informed and misinformed of all cable news TV audiences.

Secondly, they are desperate to fight back against all the mockery, scorn, and ridicule they suffer (rightly so in my opinion) from satirical news shows like The Daily Show with Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert.

Thirdly, Doug Giles, a conservative columnist, warned Fox News that they would lose the cultural wars unless they learned how to make viewers laugh.

Fourth, by trying to use comedy, Fox News is showing they want to get a younger audience. Their need for youth is desperate when we consider that the average age of a Fox News viewer is 68.8 year old.

The future belongs to the young and the young like humor.

Two. What is the dilemma of conservatives who wish to be funny?

According to Gavin McNett, conservatives are not hard-wired to be funny. They are hard-wired to be serious and stuck in a “hermetic, self-referential world view” that doesn’t allow for the kind of creativity and surprise rendered by comedy (348).

The evidence is that indeed the conservatives on Fox are not funny if we look at their program The ½ Hour News Hour. They’re segments with a laugh track, a very bad sign.

Anti-liberals Parker and Stone of South Park may indeed have episodes that “hate on” liberals, but unlike Fox News conservatives, Parker and Stone are not conservative Kool-Aid drinkers or fanboys. They have episodes that lambaste conservatives as well (a point the author curiously leaves out).

 

 

 

 

 

TV's Anti-Heroes and Mad Men

Stephen Garrett, “Why We Love TV’s Anti-Heroes” (318)

One. What is a hero?

He or she is a larger than life figure, someone who radically changes the way we see things, and someone who radically elevates our possibilities.

Michael Jordan changed what we believed someone could do on the basketball court. Bo Jackson redefined the combination of speed and strength on the football field.

Two. How do today’s TV heroes radically differ from previous eras?

Today’s heroes have colossal psychological flaws: They’re self-serving narcissistic liars. They’re overcome with self-pity, lust, sloth, and other forms of venality. They are self-deceiving and they are morally blind. They can be brash, obnoxious, and unfaithful. Yet we love them. Why? 

We live in the post World War II era, according to Garrett. Back then, morality was black and white, Us vs. the Nazis. We were the good guys; they were the bad guys. But in today’s war on terror, the conflict is more ambiguous, including the use of “torture,” however you define it, in this conflict.

In other words, some would argue that we now have to use morally ambiguous means to fight terrorists and this moral ambiguity is embodied in the new anti-hero.

To add to our new heavily-flawed hero, there are forces in the government, bureaucracy, police, prison system, big business, and the power structure that seem so corrupt that to conform to those forces would not be “good”; rather to rebel against them, even if employing dishonesty and trickery, could be seen as more heroic.

There is even a “crisis of confidence” in the democratic processes and democratic leaders that create an atmosphere of the disaffected, cynical, nihilistic hero.

The turning point in the Morally Deformed Hero Era happened with The Sopranos and Tony Soprano, the killer millions fell in love with.

The ruthless businessman and the sociopath become so close to one another that the moral line became blurred in our age of hyper-competitive Darwinism.

In The Wire both the “good buy” and the “bad guy,” morally ambiguous terms, fail to effect change in their power structure. They are both feeble, helpless characters lost inside the power structure and since we, the TV viewers, also feel helpless inside the power structure, we connect with these morally flawed characters.

Television, in short, is a reflection of nihilism, hopelessness and despair and we crave characters that reflect our feelings of helplessness. TV is more than happy to feed our nihilistic, self-pitying appetites, so they have flooded us with these moral miscreants and now as a society we suffer from, to borrow from a Newsweek headline, “Too Much of a Bad Thing.” We now have “anti-hero overload,” which extends beyond drama to comedies like Curb Your Enthusiasm.

The age of the classic hero is permanently over, according to Garrett. We’ve lost our innocence; we’ve been expelled from Eden and must slog through life with this new anti-hero paradigm chained around our necks.

 

Natasha Simons, “Mad Men and the Paradox of the Past” (322)

One. What does it mean when Simons says the show Mad Men takes place on the “cusp of dissolution”?

In the 1960, the USA was transitioning from mass conformity to big authority and big business to counterculture, a time of big drugs, marital infidelity, and escalating divorce. Americans threw away their old, conventional roles, but not knowing “which new suit” to wear created an identity crisis and a moral crisis as well. This crisis morphed in the 1980s into self-reliant capitalist predator who lives for nothing but Darwinian advantage over other humans and as such America, suffering from moral dissolution in the 1960s, is now slogging toward being a dystopia with a dying middle class, an expanding service class, an expanding prison population, and an education system geared for the rich, to make sure their privilege stays intact for perpetuity. This latter state of affairs is evidenced by the growing wealth of our country’s One Percent while the rest of us suffer lower and lower living wages.

To review, moral dissolution means moral disintegration to the point of being so numbed to moral rot that one can no longer even feel guilt; rather, one suffers a greater hell: numbness, enervation, and hopelessness. We call this condition both moral dissolution and nihilism.

Two. What is the show’s creator Mathew Weiner’s “conflicted relationship” with the 1960s?

On one hand, he’s fascinated by it because it is the generation of his parents. On the other hand, he sees the 60s as a “hypocritical façade” and he longs for a safe passage to true liberation. The “happy ending” is “Deliverance from this sexism and repression and cigarette smoke . . .”

The Mad Men in the show represent the old generation or the Old Guard, the business elite who remain sexist and racist and who will either change with the times or die off like dinosaurs.

Don Draper is most comfortable when he’s the 1950s Man in the Grey Flannel Suit, “a stoic firmly in the past.” But as he shifts in the 1960s, his stoic veneer crumbles and his emotional wreckage becomes more and more prominent. This is his “journey.” Or to use modern parlance, this is his meltdown.

The above would happen except that Natasha Simons observes, “Weiner’s flaw is that he loves Don Draper too much to make him that relic.” Therefore, Draper will be sympathetic and adaptable to the new Age of Aquarius, the 1960s, and in doing so Weiner will compromise Draper’s psychological realism and verisimilitude. To put it this way, Draper, who is a moral hypocrite in earlier seasons (lecturing his wife about being a good mother while picking up drunk prostitutes at midnight), becomes more sympathetic in later seasons.

Conservatives see America as a flawed country in the 1960s, which for them embodies hedonism (pleasure seeking as the highest ideal) and the selfish Me Generation.  Liberals see sexist, racist pigs ruling the nest in the 1950s only to be taken over by conscientious liberals in the 1960s.

You want to hear something crazy? Both camps are partly right.

The author seems to be saying pick your poison: Be a mindless follow-the-leader consumer in the style of the 1950s or be a gluttonous consumption monster merely for your own selfish purposes like “self-expression” as stylized in the 1960s and beyond. Both groups are moral miscreants and frauds. In the end, I conclude that Simons’ essay is misanthropic, being hateful of EVERYONE.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Chapter 3: Video Dreams; Francine Prose, “Voting Democracy Off the Island” 271-304

One. How is the age of digital images different than the prior age of language?

Whereas words have arbitrary, abstract meaning, images resemble the object they represent so their meaning is not abstract at tall. These images are called icons. We now “read” the world differently. Words require cognitive abilities; icons are more sensuous, a matter of vision, not thinking.

Two. What is the danger from the shift from language to icons?

Icons create knee-jerk reactions, acting without thought.

Icons tap into mythologies that contradict more nuanced, gray realities.

Icons convey propaganda by tapping into unconscious fears and desires.

Icons give us over simplifications of complex situations.

Icons can convey innocence to gloss over something ugly, morally complicated, our outright evil.

Icons can convey evil about something that is more of a tangled mess that defies easy labels like good and evil.

Three. What are “extreme lifestyles” in TV trends?

The formula is simple: Take ordinary people, those the audience can connect with, and place them in an extreme situation like a teacher who becomes a meth maker and dealer in Breaking Bad.

Four. When we analyze television programs, what should be our foremost thought?

The show is designed to make money, that is, good ratings, and connect with as many people as possible. Therefore, the show must reflect a trend of thought and value systems.

The ads are a “complement” to the show and that they are supposed to address the demographic that is deemed to be a viewer of the program.

Francine Prose, Voting Democracy off the Island: Reality TV and the Republican Ethos

 

One. How is cruelty celebrated in the reality show Average Joe?

 

In fact, the “average Joe” is a car crash of the unattractive, socially awkward outcast whom is mocked and ridiculed because he represents the ultimate “joke” and humiliation for the female contestants. We are invited to laugh and deride at those who are at the bottom of the Darwinian Reproductive Chain. Why? Because we can. And because we have no scruples about “kicking the guy lying in the gutter.” We are so pathetic that we feel uplifted by indulging in the schadenfreude of the less fortunate. We can infer, then, that reality shows cater to our lowest human denominator. Some would even go so far as to say reality shows, “a dash of brutality, a soupcon of voyeurism,”  are a cancer on society.

 

Two. What mistake did Melana make that got her stuck with a “confederacy of losers”?

 

She went for “personality” over “surface appearance,” a violation of the Reality TV Code. Now she must pay the price. Personality, character, values, a core of authenticity—all these things are rubbish in the world of the chiseled hunk that represents the aspirations of Reality TV watchers.

Three. What is Francine Prose’s thesis?

That the cesspool of moral bankruptcy embodied by reality TV shows—narcissism, dog-eats-dog competiveness, pathological lying, ruthlessness disguised as “self-reliance,” voyeurism, sadism, immoral individualism, and Darwinian brutality—bear striking similarity to the moral depravity and psychological delusions engendered by the rhetorical excesses of the Republican Party. See paragraph 23.

Prose goes on to say that Republicans in charge of the War Machine who wanted to drum up American support for the invasion of Iraq were enticed by the way the American people could be manipulated by a “false reality” show and wanted to borrow a reality show’s formula to embed reporters in the Middle East where Americans could see the good guys, Us, taking down the bad guys, Them.

We don’t mind that reality shows are scripted, Prose observes, so we surely won’t mind, the War Machine believes, if they script a false pretense for going to war.

Writing Options, Reading the Signs, page 293, Numbers 1 and 3.

One. In an argumentative essay, support, refute, or modify Prose’s proposition that the guiding principles that underlie reality TV are the same that shaped the policies of the George W. Bush administration.

Two. Read or reread the Introduction to this chapter, and write an essay in which you analyze whether the appeal of the episode of Average Joe that Prose describes is based on schadenfreude. Alternately, watch another current RTV program, particularly one that is based on voting contestants out of a competition, and conduct the same sort of analysis.

"A Moral Never-Never Land: Identifying with Tony Soprano" by James Harold (296)

 

  

  

 

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Chapter 3: Video Dreams; Francine Prose, "Voting Democracy Off the Island" 271-293