of course they're only stories
…I find myself catching bits of these programs and they invariably wind me up. I react to them emotionally. Their narratives have a kind of inverted effect on me. Where they seek to lull the viewer into a slippery comfort zone, they have me grinding my teeth and cursing. Why ?
Prosaically: in all of these things, set in the US, some kind of evil or lunacy inevitably needs to be treated or overcome. Last night on ER there was a particularly chilling example. A man had stolen a tank and was advancing on the hospital. They discussed the tank weaponry and showed footage of a tank crushing cars. People in those cars became patients (inevitably Latinos – crying out in Spanish, the other language)… At the end of the show, the hospital will stand, the lunatic in the tank will be apprehended, the forces of democracy will prevail. Meanwhile …on Newsnight we see – More tanks, driven by americans, causing genuine havoc. And how will this narrative be resolved?
… these pieces of TV, which all have essentially similar narrative arcs… show a menace being unleashed within society, which the valiant defenders of society shall eventually overcome, whilst – and this is important – learning a vital lesson in the course of their duties. As though the negative effects of the anti-social contains within it a redemptive element in so far as through the understanding of the anti-social mechanism (individual/ act etc), society enriches itself again and coheres and can proceed with hope towards its next test/ episode.
…the processes of history we are living through mirror exactly this. The ‘bad guys’ in Fallujah (the terrorists) shall be overcome through the force of democracy, (state force is always the ultimate arbiter of right and wrong, even if that is sometimes ‘medical’ force) and the State of the Union will be strengthened through this action. We shall move onto the next episode, unconcerned by the poor *latinos* (take your pick) crushed in the tank’s wake, who have laid down their lives in the name of a more sophisticated social consensus.
...the frightening thing is that millions of people who oppose in theory thiz US attitude towards history, perpetrated over the course of the past twenty five years or more, willingly soak up the cultural imperialism being beamed into their homes every night of the week. These narratives become part of our mindset... from Tokyo to Mumbai, from Iceland to Lesotho.
From Bangladesh, 290404
Prosaically: in all of these things, set in the US, some kind of evil or lunacy inevitably needs to be treated or overcome. Last night on ER there was a particularly chilling example. A man had stolen a tank and was advancing on the hospital. They discussed the tank weaponry and showed footage of a tank crushing cars. People in those cars became patients (inevitably Latinos – crying out in Spanish, the other language)… At the end of the show, the hospital will stand, the lunatic in the tank will be apprehended, the forces of democracy will prevail. Meanwhile …on Newsnight we see – More tanks, driven by americans, causing genuine havoc. And how will this narrative be resolved?
… these pieces of TV, which all have essentially similar narrative arcs… show a menace being unleashed within society, which the valiant defenders of society shall eventually overcome, whilst – and this is important – learning a vital lesson in the course of their duties. As though the negative effects of the anti-social contains within it a redemptive element in so far as through the understanding of the anti-social mechanism (individual/ act etc), society enriches itself again and coheres and can proceed with hope towards its next test/ episode.
…the processes of history we are living through mirror exactly this. The ‘bad guys’ in Fallujah (the terrorists) shall be overcome through the force of democracy, (state force is always the ultimate arbiter of right and wrong, even if that is sometimes ‘medical’ force) and the State of the Union will be strengthened through this action. We shall move onto the next episode, unconcerned by the poor *latinos* (take your pick) crushed in the tank’s wake, who have laid down their lives in the name of a more sophisticated social consensus.
...the frightening thing is that millions of people who oppose in theory thiz US attitude towards history, perpetrated over the course of the past twenty five years or more, willingly soak up the cultural imperialism being beamed into their homes every night of the week. These narratives become part of our mindset... from Tokyo to Mumbai, from Iceland to Lesotho.
From Bangladesh, 290404
posted by maldoror at 17:32
1 Comments:
i remember that episode of ER.
i think the guy in the tank
had some kind of previously established
personal agenda with the ginger-haired doctor.
maybe you needed to see the earlier episode.
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