It is easy for one to find common themes in literature, so common in fact they have a name 'Universal Themes.' These days our entertainment tends to favor not only these themes in constant repetition but seems to downright plagiarize older works.
As an example I present three different pieces of art produced in different time periods, by completely unconnected creators and with completely different production methods. Star Wars was created by George Lucas from the seventies into the new millenium. The Matrix was produced by Andy and Larry Wachowski in 1999. The Lord of the Rings was written by J.R. Tolkein more than sixty years ago and only made it to film in the last ten years. All three are remarkably similar from a reasonably objective standpoint.
Star Wars centers around the character of Anakin Skywalker who is the true tragic hero. There is technology that borders on magic and if that weren't enough, there is actual magic. It is through an all powerful but mystical force dubbed, 'the force.' How original. The main character is messianic in nature since he must sacrifice himself to restore order, peace, and harmony to the galaxy. His order, the 'Jedi' all have lightsabers, a powerful weapon that can only be wielded by someone strong enough in the force. Yoda, the most powerful Jedi in the order has a wizards powers and is still a fierce warrior, despite being a sage who constantly counsels against anger. In the end Anakin casts his master Darth Sidious into a flaming pit to save the galaxy from his evil powermongering.
The Matrix centers around 'Neo.' After a great war between humanity and the newly spawned machine society humanity is taken prisoner in it's entirety and hooked up to the machines' power grid like batteries. They put us in artificial comas and plug our brains into an artificial world, "The Matrix" created just for us to keep us producing more power than truly comatose humans would. Neo must use his almost magical powers in the Matrix to assist his order, the humans who occupy the last human city called Zion. His mentor is a fierce warrior named Morpheus who wields a katana like an expert in the Matrix and helps Neo realize his full potential. In the end Neo is forced to sacrifice himself to broker a peace between the machines and humans and save the world from their evil powermongering.
In 'the Lord of the Rings' Frodo Baggins, a hobbit from the Shire, is forced to accept the burden of the One Ring. An insidious tool of power used by the Dark Lord Sauron to enslave the world. The Elves assist him in his journey with their ancient magic and their mystical weapons. Other fierce warriors accompany him, including the true king of Gondor and a sage wizard named Gandalf who is also a warrior of great power. Instead of dying, Frodo's sacrifice is his piece of mind, the ring begins to drive him insane with it's power and he almost becomes Saurons puppet. At the last minute he destroys the one ring and saves the world from Saurons Evil Powermongering.
When compared side by side in this fashion the similarities of these films and books jump off the page. The cookie cutter nature of these films is indicative of many pieces of contemporary art. The Samurai epic, or the Sci-Fi space opera, the whole Harry Potter series, most have a common thread running through them. All of this art seems to focus on the idea of one character with a terrible mission. They must give their own lives to rescue humanity from an awful fate at the hands of a despotic tyrant. A familiar story that has repeated in one form or another for the last five thousand years.
Monday, April 28, 2008
Monday, April 21, 2008
Essay #7
Did you ever notice how formulaic television is? I have found at least three examples of the exact same show run through three different time periods. It started with the Flinstones where we have a modern working man married to a gorgeous but accepting redhead who doesn't mind the poverty. The Jetsons were the next big thing where we had a modern working man married to a gorgeous but accepting redhead who didn't mind the poverty. The next time was on Family Guy where we had (you see where I'm going with this?) a... you already know. The funny thing is that all of these series were animated and not for children, they were all run later in the evening and catered to adults.
The Flintstones had the quirky neighbor who was also the best friend, and the spitting image of Art Carney.. There was a strange resemblance to the Honey Mooners which I think was a little more than incidental. Fred represented the hard working blue collar man of the fifties and early sixties. He was tough, a little grouchy but really a good guy at heart. His wife was the fantasy woman, thin and pretty but patient with his working mans salary. They really had love in their relationship. And she was a redhead. They had a pet which was different than the Honey Mooners, but although we saw Dino all the time we never really saw the Sabertoothed Tiger that locks fred out of the house in the end credits.
The Jetsons were slightly different but the same basic concept. It was set in the far future and the gimmick of technology was the hook. George was more of a lower middle class schlep. He had a nice house and a maid. He also had a hot wife who was patient with his working mans salary. And she was a redhead. The Jetsons had the notable addition of talking children, different than the babies in the Flintstones, but a vast improvement from the Honey Mooners which had no kids at all. The Jetsons had Astro the huge dog which was like Dino with a speech impediment.
We move into the nineties and now we have Family guy. The dog talks well and is a Brown Alumni, there are three kids, and the setting is the present time in a little Rhode Island town called Qouhag (pronounced Ko-Hog.) Peter Griffin the fat working man with no real intellect to speak of who marries Louis Peuterschmidt, the daughter a wealthy new England blueblood. She is patient with his working mans salary because there is genuine love between them. The baby is supposed to be an androgenous anti-christ figure who progressively becomes less of the latter and more of the former. The langauge is filthy compared to the first two series I mentioned. If by some cosmic accident in the space-time fabric Family Guy were to accidentally play during the Flintstones live air in the fifties it might actually kill someone.
These shows have subtle differences but are still essentially the same plot. Variations on a theme though they may be they are what the people want. You may not want to admit it but at some point you have probably fallen prey to the T.V. Land Ministry of Love's wiles. You don't think so? Did you like The HoneyMooners, Eight is Enough, Leave it to Beaver, Happy Days, Everybody Loves Raymond, Roseanne, The King of Queens, The War at Home, Father Knows Best, The Donna Reed Show, Eight Simple Rules for Dating My Daughter, Seventh Heaven, Married With Children, The Jeff Foxworthy Show, Home Improvement, Bewitched, Mr. Belvedere? The worst part is I could go on. I sometimes wonder at the grand variety of the same thing we are presented with on television. On Channel One we have music video, two is video music, three is videos to a song and etc. etc... etc....
The Flintstones had the quirky neighbor who was also the best friend, and the spitting image of Art Carney.. There was a strange resemblance to the Honey Mooners which I think was a little more than incidental. Fred represented the hard working blue collar man of the fifties and early sixties. He was tough, a little grouchy but really a good guy at heart. His wife was the fantasy woman, thin and pretty but patient with his working mans salary. They really had love in their relationship. And she was a redhead. They had a pet which was different than the Honey Mooners, but although we saw Dino all the time we never really saw the Sabertoothed Tiger that locks fred out of the house in the end credits.
The Jetsons were slightly different but the same basic concept. It was set in the far future and the gimmick of technology was the hook. George was more of a lower middle class schlep. He had a nice house and a maid. He also had a hot wife who was patient with his working mans salary. And she was a redhead. The Jetsons had the notable addition of talking children, different than the babies in the Flintstones, but a vast improvement from the Honey Mooners which had no kids at all. The Jetsons had Astro the huge dog which was like Dino with a speech impediment.
We move into the nineties and now we have Family guy. The dog talks well and is a Brown Alumni, there are three kids, and the setting is the present time in a little Rhode Island town called Qouhag (pronounced Ko-Hog.) Peter Griffin the fat working man with no real intellect to speak of who marries Louis Peuterschmidt, the daughter a wealthy new England blueblood. She is patient with his working mans salary because there is genuine love between them. The baby is supposed to be an androgenous anti-christ figure who progressively becomes less of the latter and more of the former. The langauge is filthy compared to the first two series I mentioned. If by some cosmic accident in the space-time fabric Family Guy were to accidentally play during the Flintstones live air in the fifties it might actually kill someone.
These shows have subtle differences but are still essentially the same plot. Variations on a theme though they may be they are what the people want. You may not want to admit it but at some point you have probably fallen prey to the T.V. Land Ministry of Love's wiles. You don't think so? Did you like The HoneyMooners, Eight is Enough, Leave it to Beaver, Happy Days, Everybody Loves Raymond, Roseanne, The King of Queens, The War at Home, Father Knows Best, The Donna Reed Show, Eight Simple Rules for Dating My Daughter, Seventh Heaven, Married With Children, The Jeff Foxworthy Show, Home Improvement, Bewitched, Mr. Belvedere? The worst part is I could go on. I sometimes wonder at the grand variety of the same thing we are presented with on television. On Channel One we have music video, two is video music, three is videos to a song and etc. etc... etc....
Friday, April 11, 2008
Essay #6
My mother would never let me have any toy modeled after an instrument of violence. I was not allowed to have so much as a water pistol. I think this was to teach me the meaning of those objects. Guns kill people, read that again, guns kill people. Swords rend flesh and clubs flatten heads, tools of war are no good she taught me. In the eighties computer games were just beginning and my mother wouldn't let me have any part of them either, now I understand why. The horrid images portrayed in these living nightmares of futuristic apocolyspe would frighten anyone sane. Anyone, that is, but our children. Our children are exposed to a daily diet of violence that makes them numb to the absurdity of it all. They are taught from the time that they are around seven or eight that violence is not only cartoonish, it is fun and cool. On television they see killing and maiming, gun violence and rape. In the movies they see even more graphic examples of the worst in human character. In video games they are taught bloodlust, they are taught to thrive in environments where violence is par for the course. In other words, theory becomes practise. Our children have four thousand calories a meal of deep fried carnage and it is only getting worse.
Visual media has always had violence. It started with Punch and Judy, it's emblazoned on the human mind from an early age that people hit one another regularly. In television it hit it's first good stride. We had a new media with which to describe the wonderfully destructive urges we all feel, art represents life after all. We had a new media that would let us live vicariously the feeling of power that violence gives. It started with Westerns. The men would run around and the bullet'ers' would shoot eachother but the bullet'ee's would show no blood or wound, they would just fall down. Later in the episode everone was still alive and just wrapped in bandages or some such ludicrous premise. Then a little later when shot the cowboy died. Then in the sixties we prefered more sex in our advertising but by the late seventies violence was beginning to become entertainment again. We had cop dramas with many deaths or murders per episode. We had crime dramas where they had to solve a murder. We had the A-Team where thousands of rounds flew but no one was ever actually shot. Eventually we had educational television. Did you ever watch this stuff? It is about weapons we have, weapons we had, or weapons we want. There are myriad documentaries about world war 2 yet few about the life of Mother Theresa and Ghandi, even on the biography channel. There are movies about those kind of people.
Movies started before even television had become ensconsed in our homes. People went to see them even before they had sound. A man played a piano score timed to coincide with major points in the film until they finally figured out how to sync a soundtrack. Then the great war movies began. Howard Hughes made his world war one airplane epic and people felt what being a combat pilot was like. John Wayne let us feel what it was like to fight in the Great War and then the Westerns started again. Clint Eastwood taught us to enjoy shooting down foes for justice, Charles Bronson let us all be vigilantes. We learned how to enjoy slaughtering teens at campsites in the Friday the Thirteenth movies. Stephen King showed us how it would feel to kill your whole family in the Shining and how it felt to telekinetically kill a whole prom full of people in Carrie. Always before these acts a jusitification, a circumstance that made the violence seem reasonable was presented and then the acts made a sort of sense. Steven Segal, Jean-Claude Van Damme and Sylvester Stallone starred in good examples of this. In their films we lived the experience of punishing those who have offended justice, we give pain to those who have hurt us. Their message is always the same.
Then in the early eighties we were given video games. The first was 'Pong', it was addictive and non-violent. That wasn't enough, eventually we developed the Atari and it came with a game cartridge that had over ten games on it. Some warplanes, some tanks, and a few sports. Then the nineties brought us Nintendo, Playstation, and X-Box. This is where video games reached the pinnacle of realism. The games allowed us to combat eachother through the realm of anonymity known as the internet. We could shoot, stab, slash and hack eachother to bits in any fictional reality we wished. We could kill eachother as our favorite movie star or in the context of our favorite Sci-Fi heroes world. We had 'UnReal Tournament' which was known as a 'First Person Shooter' where you moved through the game in a first person perspective and shot and killed enemies up close. The idea of the game was a tournament to the death with the galaxies hardest fighters. We had 'Real Time Strategy' where you moved and developed whole armies and fought them against eachother. People the world over log on even now for the chance to kill eachother in the cyber world. Now we have Grand Theft Auto. These games involve becoming the head of a crime organization by stealing, killing, sleeping with prostitutes and taking drugs.
The question is does the popular media influence our minds? The answer is not simple. One could speculate that poplular entertainment simply represents a progressively more violent civilization but the entertainment seems to outmatch the violence in civilization to a great degree. If you want to understand the effect of the media in peoples lives, however, you might steer clear of the facts and figures. The empirical data would confuse the issue and at it's heart is a question no numbers can describe anyway, a moral one. The effect of the media is best described by the media itself. I witnessed a gruesome and unimaginable beating on the news today. Apparently a young girl had been posting negative statements about some other girls on the internet and those girls had read them. They invited her to one of their houses, locked her in a room and beat her into unconciousness. They waited until she woke up, and then beat her into unconsciousness again. They beat her so badly that she could not see or hear for two days later and the worst part is that they taped it. They taped it with digital camera and then posted it on the internet so that everyone could see it. Why would they tape violence and post it for all to see? Simple, the media is where that kind of thing belongs. You tell me, what is the media doing to us?
Visual media has always had violence. It started with Punch and Judy, it's emblazoned on the human mind from an early age that people hit one another regularly. In television it hit it's first good stride. We had a new media with which to describe the wonderfully destructive urges we all feel, art represents life after all. We had a new media that would let us live vicariously the feeling of power that violence gives. It started with Westerns. The men would run around and the bullet'ers' would shoot eachother but the bullet'ee's would show no blood or wound, they would just fall down. Later in the episode everone was still alive and just wrapped in bandages or some such ludicrous premise. Then a little later when shot the cowboy died. Then in the sixties we prefered more sex in our advertising but by the late seventies violence was beginning to become entertainment again. We had cop dramas with many deaths or murders per episode. We had crime dramas where they had to solve a murder. We had the A-Team where thousands of rounds flew but no one was ever actually shot. Eventually we had educational television. Did you ever watch this stuff? It is about weapons we have, weapons we had, or weapons we want. There are myriad documentaries about world war 2 yet few about the life of Mother Theresa and Ghandi, even on the biography channel. There are movies about those kind of people.
Movies started before even television had become ensconsed in our homes. People went to see them even before they had sound. A man played a piano score timed to coincide with major points in the film until they finally figured out how to sync a soundtrack. Then the great war movies began. Howard Hughes made his world war one airplane epic and people felt what being a combat pilot was like. John Wayne let us feel what it was like to fight in the Great War and then the Westerns started again. Clint Eastwood taught us to enjoy shooting down foes for justice, Charles Bronson let us all be vigilantes. We learned how to enjoy slaughtering teens at campsites in the Friday the Thirteenth movies. Stephen King showed us how it would feel to kill your whole family in the Shining and how it felt to telekinetically kill a whole prom full of people in Carrie. Always before these acts a jusitification, a circumstance that made the violence seem reasonable was presented and then the acts made a sort of sense. Steven Segal, Jean-Claude Van Damme and Sylvester Stallone starred in good examples of this. In their films we lived the experience of punishing those who have offended justice, we give pain to those who have hurt us. Their message is always the same.
Then in the early eighties we were given video games. The first was 'Pong', it was addictive and non-violent. That wasn't enough, eventually we developed the Atari and it came with a game cartridge that had over ten games on it. Some warplanes, some tanks, and a few sports. Then the nineties brought us Nintendo, Playstation, and X-Box. This is where video games reached the pinnacle of realism. The games allowed us to combat eachother through the realm of anonymity known as the internet. We could shoot, stab, slash and hack eachother to bits in any fictional reality we wished. We could kill eachother as our favorite movie star or in the context of our favorite Sci-Fi heroes world. We had 'UnReal Tournament' which was known as a 'First Person Shooter' where you moved through the game in a first person perspective and shot and killed enemies up close. The idea of the game was a tournament to the death with the galaxies hardest fighters. We had 'Real Time Strategy' where you moved and developed whole armies and fought them against eachother. People the world over log on even now for the chance to kill eachother in the cyber world. Now we have Grand Theft Auto. These games involve becoming the head of a crime organization by stealing, killing, sleeping with prostitutes and taking drugs.
The question is does the popular media influence our minds? The answer is not simple. One could speculate that poplular entertainment simply represents a progressively more violent civilization but the entertainment seems to outmatch the violence in civilization to a great degree. If you want to understand the effect of the media in peoples lives, however, you might steer clear of the facts and figures. The empirical data would confuse the issue and at it's heart is a question no numbers can describe anyway, a moral one. The effect of the media is best described by the media itself. I witnessed a gruesome and unimaginable beating on the news today. Apparently a young girl had been posting negative statements about some other girls on the internet and those girls had read them. They invited her to one of their houses, locked her in a room and beat her into unconciousness. They waited until she woke up, and then beat her into unconsciousness again. They beat her so badly that she could not see or hear for two days later and the worst part is that they taped it. They taped it with digital camera and then posted it on the internet so that everyone could see it. Why would they tape violence and post it for all to see? Simple, the media is where that kind of thing belongs. You tell me, what is the media doing to us?
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