Pop Culture and Reality - Essay Example

Pop Culture and Reality Plato wrote in The Republic that poetic mimesis is potentially so dangerous to the fabric of society that it could conceivably lead to society’s being ripped apart.1 One of Plato’s longest lasting influences has been the kneejerk reaction by contemporary society to blame any individual act upon the media. Modern day pundits, in their never-ending quest to find quick and shallow answers to profoundly complex problems have stumbled over themselves to blame any act of antisocial behavior—especially when that behavior is violent—on whatever medium happens to have any even the most tangential connection to the act, whether it be music, movies or television. Sometimes, though very rarely, even books get blamed for the actions of unbalanced people. The most infamous recent example of society’s desire to shift the blame from where it belongs to media influence involves the student massacre at Columbine. Rather than investigating how it was that teenage boys could gain such easy access to an arsenal that Charles Manson would have envied, the Goth music of Marilyn Manson was decided upon as the foundational imperative behind a couple of bullied, nerdy kids deciding to shoot their schoolmates in cold blood at point blank rage. There is little question those individual scenarios like these border on utter hysteria, but it is also equally true that Plato was onto something profound in his realization that the masses are affected by long term exposure to the images they receive through entertainment. Critics of the concept that media has little real effect on influencing the actions of individual audience members rightly make the argument that basing arguments to the contrary on extreme acts is unfair since the people singled out as evidence that of the link between media influence and individual acts typically have engaged in such aberrant behavior that it is impossible to identify a single motivating factor. On the other hand, when these critics—who are very often creative artists themselves—attempt to absolve the media of any part in the actions of people whatever, they are being hopelessly naïve. Anyone seriously questioning whether the media has an influence on society as a whole need look no further than Super Bowl Sunday. If the media wasn’t positively assured of the effect they have on audiences, then why would so many big corporations plunk down millions of dollars for the privilege of airing a thirty second commercial during a single football game? In a country where profit means everything and every dollar spent must be accounted for down to the penny, it is simply beyond all reason to honestly to believe that those companies willing to make that investment don’t have proof that commercials have power over consumers. One of the arguments concerned with media influence, of course, is just where the power lies in the influence. While the big companies that shell out millions to air commercials during the Super Bowl no doubt have specific intentions on those ads are meant to influence the audience, and while they no doubt have much demographic evidence to confirm their willingness to make those million dollar bets, nonetheless it is a fact of life that intention does not necessarily result in the desired effect. Aristotelian theory was centered on authorial intention; contemporary moves the onus of intention onto the receiver whose job it has become to decoding any meaning into an image or text. Bakhtin certainly understands the value that Aristotle placed on the author when he writes “Certain features of language (lexicological, semantic, syntactic) will knit together with the intentional aim, and with the overall accentual system inherent in one or another genre”.2 In other words, a primary feature of media studies today the assumption that audience arrives at a piece of entertainment with expectations of form, style and content that cannot be undone by interpretation; an intended romantic tearjerker cannot be interpreted by the audience as anything else because the filmmaker’s intention was to create an emotionally fulfilling story with a very definite type of investment and payoff. Aristotelian views on the influence of media was the standard for most of the next two millennia; in, fact it would not be until the twentieth century that any real challenge would arise. The theories of Karl Marx and Sigmund Freud are those that have given rise to the greatest influence of critics challenging traditional Platonist and Aristotelian traditions regarding how the media influences people. Freudian psychology and Marxian social factors became the preferred method of reading the true meaning of media. Opposition to these new theories and a return to traditional Aristotelian approaches had their biggest impact under the Chicago School, put forth by such critics as R.S. Crane and Elder Olson.3 The Chicago School rejected the notion of the criticism that in turn had rejected the whole idea that authorial intention should have any bearing on a text. One of the arguments is that such strictly defined definitions of intent have an ideological component that merely serves to reinforce and reproduce the prevailing ideology. This is particularly true of the Marxist theory, which views media strictly in terms of social control. Audiences respond to media expectations by reproducing them as conventions that naturalize an ideological viewpoint.4 For instance, a reality TV show may not intentionally set out to reproduce the capitalist ideology, but it does so nonetheless because the audience naturalizes the elements of the show that have already been unconsciously reinforced by the makers. Television has taken on the role of engineering instructions for social norms by implying that is a natural state of affairs where men inherit all the power and wealth while are left to battle each other for supremacy by looking better. The introduction of the Reality TV genre has transformed the issue of gender to a new echelon where the very idea of realism is contradicted by the express lack of reality. Many of this new breed of low-budget TV portray spoiled rich people engaging in activities that serve to underline the divide between the average person and the ultra-wealthy, but by doing so it reinforces this kind of behavior as the norm. These shows also tend to show contestants showing nothing but disrespect and disloyalty to not only their opponents but also their own teammates. Reality TV has an especially disturbing influence on younger people and most especially on younger woman. The structure of these shows reinforce the concept that having money is everything and you cannot be considered a successful unless your bank account is overflowing. An additional problems is that Reality TV showcases the exceptional as the norm and thereby make the overwhelming majority of their audience feel inferior in comparison. Even those television viewers who recognize the problems inherent within the genre often can’t resist occaisionally tuning in because the shows themselves are discussed on news shows as if they were actually news. In the cases of the more popular Reality TV shows like American Idol or Dancing with the Stars, the combination of word of mouth, high ratings and the treatment of the shows as worthwhile news has an effect on the daily responsbilities of both young and old. It is one thing for workers to congregate around the water cooler and discuss the events of 9/11, but it can only be considered a distraction from the real business of life to spend that time discussing who was voted off a reality show the night before. These shows sink their fangs into the culture of America by discouraging college students from spending their nights studying and by distracting people at work. Reality television endorse the commonly held assumption that that competition is vital to one’s success in a capitalist economy when the real truth is that the big business interests who produce and advertise on these shows abhor competition and would love nothing better than to drive their rivals out of existence. Every company in every business in America today thrives on the hope that one day it will achieve its dream of monopoly. Reality television shows don’t reinforce this true reality, however; by disguising the true nature of what they are—which is really nothing more unique that a bigger and more lavishly produce game show—these shows reinforce the false belief among viewers that life is nothing but a competition that permeates its way into every single form of discourse that makes up life in America. Even though most of the shows make an effort toward creating a false sense of the importance of teamwork, the ultimate reality is that in the end there is still only one winner. The networks that make these shows have churned them out incessantly for nearly a decade now, not because they are proud of them as artistic achievements, but because they are exceptionally cheap to make. The description of them as “reality” shows may originally have been a fluke of luck courtesy of a writer looking to be clever, but the networks and producers jumped on the opening. In describing these shows as "reality" the networks and producers are—probably unknowingly—offering solid evidence that Karl Marx was absolutely right when he asserted that capitalism most constantly reproduce itself in order to survive. By describing their shows as a mirror of “reality” the makers are clever replicating the system that has brought them success. The inherent suggestion is that shows are replicating society, when what is really happening is that society is replicating itself according to how those in power want people to believe society should be. These shows inculcate in their audience the very idea that competition is what “real life” is all about; an idea that big business wants viewers to see as the natural state of society. If people buy into these images coming at them every night on television shows and naturalize and normalize an ideology that states everything is life is a cutthroat competition, who wins? The corporations who want to hire only those willing to do whatever it takes to get to the top. The idea that the producers of entertainment seek to create an audience that responds to reality in the way they’ve been conditioned to by previous entertainment was an underlying theme of a recent film, although it may be anyone’s guess as to whether that theme was Aristolelian in its authorial intention or an unconscious by-product. Certainly this serious theme was not forwarded by its makers, since it was without question intended to be a summer hit comedy. The story of Nacho Libre takes place in Mexico, but one aspect of the film that cannot be ignored is its not particularly flattering critique of the cult of the media celebrity. The title character, despite growing up in a small, poor Mexican orphanage, is as influenced by movies, television and comic books as American, and the bulk of the humor of the movie is derived at by way of his reactions to the people and situations with which he comes in contact. Nacho doesn’t know how to respond to people with genuine emotions; all he has is what he has learned from watching television. Much like the Chauncey Gardener in the movie Being There, he doesn’t really possess an authentic personality; what he thinks and believes has been engendered into his psyche by the entertainment industry. The effect when watching his reactions are unnerving; the first reaction is laughter at his self-conscious and typically inappropriate re-presentation of what he has learned. This is followed by the realization that everyone else does exactly the same thing. Among audience members with a higher degree of self-awareness comes the truly sickening understanding that we are all detached from a genuine comprehension of why we engage in a variety of actions, thoughts, and opinions every day. Many moviegoers leaving the theater may catch themselves on occasion striking a pose or uttering a line they learned from a movie or television show, but how many of them ever stop to question whether their opinion or views were shaped such as directly by the media? The influence of female pop singers from Madonna to Britney Spears have been co-opted by their audience members in a perhaps even more distressing way. These women spend millions on personal trainers and plastic surgery to make themselves unrealistically attractive and desirable to men which has the trickle effect of making the romantic possibilities for these men believe they have to go to equally ridiculous lengths in order to approximate what is seen as the ideal object of sexuality and beauty. Many young women and men cannot grasp that all of entertainment is based on trickery and fakery and that the image projected by these women isn’t any more real than the stories taking place in their favorite movies. It is all about the advertising image and not the reality of authenticity. Many studies on the effects of culture on the masses have concluded that social groupings are robustly fashioned by what the media and advertising portray as the accepted norm. Advertising often depicts images that are unattainable and places worth on attributes that are often deemed undesirable from a social cohesion perspective. Critics hold advertising responsible for creating new generations of youth culture that is distinguish by crash materialism and the search for status. The result is an increase of pressure on people to conform to these unrealistic ideas of normality. Popular culture is devised with the purpose of making profits and uses advertising to encourage the audience to spend money. The line is blurring between straight advertising and the entertainment media that is supported by the money that advertising brings in. That is why people will be inspired to buy products they have seen their favorite stars use in movies or television shows.5 (Meister and Japp 5). Profitable television shows are made that way only if they are also supported by sponsors, and therefore requires popularity, the most popular shows are those aimed at a passive and uncritical audience. Those aspects of the society's culture here represented are familiar interpretations either of reality or of real issues. It is only to be expected that that demonstrations of pop culture will be popular with audiences and advertisers alike. Plato’s fear was that people would not be able to distinguish between reality and imitations of reality. In certain situations that inability has led to individuals to act in deranged behavior, but those should be viewed apart from their connections to media influence. More disturbing and ultimately dangerous to society is the mass influence that media has on society and the individual’s unwillingness or incapacity to question just how profound that is that effect upon them. There can be no question the media does have an impact on society, but too often the concern about that impact is approached from either the too narrow perspective of whether a book or movie led a person to commit a crime. The very fact that so many billions of dollars are spent producing, marketing and advertising during entertainment presentations should be enough to convince society that the influence of media extends far beyond whether a few songs was responsible for children invading their school with guns and bombs. The influence of media is deeply ingrained that the real problem lies in the fact that most people never stop to question just deeply the influence lies. Works Cited Bahktin, Mikhail. "Discourse in the Novel." Literary Theory: An Anthology. Ed... Julie Rivkin and Michael Ryan. Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishers, 1998. Cox, Stephen. "The Atlas Society and its Objectivist Center." Foundations Study Guide: Literary Theory. 2005. 15 May 2007 . Chandler, Daniel. Introduction to Genre Theory. 15 May 2007 . Meister, Mark, and Phyllis M. Japp, eds. Enviropop: Studies in Environmental Rhetoric and Popular Culture. Westport, CT: Praeger, 2002. Plato. The Republic. Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing. 2004. Read More