Fear the Right Things

So far this has been one of the most intriguing classes I’ve taken in the two years I’ve been at UMass. From the local news, television shows, to films we can see how our media perpetuates the culture of fear in our society. I’ve always been rather skeptical about certain representations in the media, but as a white, middle class female certain things were just invisible to me. I think the readings and films we have viewed this year definitely have opened my eyes to the facts rather than the mask that politicians and media outlets parade in front of me. Overall the biggest lesson I’ve learned is that money sticks with money, and the rest can just eat cake.

One of the most interesting articles to me this year was Sharrett’s analysis of film in our neoconservative culture. No doubt it was definitely one of the most difficult reads, however it revealed so much about our culture’s economic system and the media representations used to keep it in place. One of my favorite points he made was how liberal rhetoric gets used to make people believe that are system accommodates to disparate groups in society, yet as he says the ‘neos’ just make our corrupt system follow a lawful course.

This has been one of the most challenging courses, but I feel I’ve learnt so much from the material and also my peers. I think the discussion helps a lot in expanding my thoughts because to really understand our culture is to garner multiple perspectives from diverse backgrounds. Some people mention things in class and I just think, wow I never would have seen it that way, but it makes so much sense. The culture of fear can be seen everywhere, and personally for me I see it in my parents the most. Perhaps when you have kids you begin to fear the world they will grow up in more than your own. I hope this class will ease my own exaggerated fears, as it has thus far, and allow me to concentrate on more important things like global warming and economic disparity.

Welcome to the Emerald City

After watching the pilot episode of Oz and several clips from other seasons I feel truly terrified of the prison system through this lens. This hostile barbaric environment is filled with murderers, even though statistically most prisoners are incarcerated for drug charges. To see the real Wizard behind the curtain of the prison system watch the documentary, The War on Drugs: The Prison Industrial Complex.  This film enlightens viewers on the reality of the penal system and the police force that drives this “war,” as one scholar describes it as “the war on poor people.” The American penal system is now driven by profit rather than rehabilitation, which becomes detrimental to our society, specifically poor urban societies. Our neoliberal capitalist society perpetuates a cycle of oppression and inequality towards poor people of color and our corrupt legislation and media representation mask this reality. People feed into this system because they believe crime is rampant (yet Glassner tells us crime rates are decreasing) which leads to stricter and longer sentences paid by American tax dollars. The incarceration rate has grown exponentially and Americans understand this shielded environment through media images of prisons and criminals.

The hit HBO series Oz premiered in 1997 and ran until 2003. Ironically the demographics of an HBO audience are mainly white and wealthy, so basically opposite of prison demographics. Check this site out for the numbers on HBO audiences: http://www.quantcast.com/hbo.com.  As Yousman mentions in his study of the show, Inside Oz, that the viewers who receive this representation of prison have no real life experience with either going to prison or knowing someone who has gone. This becomes extremely dangerous because their reality won’t be blurred by this image if they have no reality to distort. People take this show as the truth and praise it for its authenticity, but who are they to know what’s authentic about prison life? They believe since HBO doesn’t need to censor their material that the writers aren’t holding back the truth. This continues the discourse that men of color are violent criminals that need to be locked up, and it’s all driven by one thing: money.

Media outlets and politicians use rhetoric to scare us into thinking that our biggest problem in this country is drug use, as Ronald Reagan put it “America’s crusade” against drugs. I’m not condoning drug use but people are made to think poor urban youth slip through the cracks of society because of drugs and spend all our money to rehabilitate them in prison. From what I’ve seen in the Emerald City’s prison is crime increases on the inside, so I guess rehabs out of the question. We should be taking this money to rehabilitate positive social organizations not the police. The police profit from drug charges and more arrests which equals more money for them and less for the rest. They target poor communities, put these images in front of a white audience and preserve our culture of fear. All that’s left is to make a twisted hyperviolent prison show ironically headed by a black man to show us that black men can succeed because it’s not our system’s fault if you fail, it’s only the individual to blame.

It isn't only a movie

In Adam Simon’s The American Nightmare horror films from the 1960’s and 70’s are discussed in their relation to sociopolitical struggles of the time. Right from the start Simon does a brilliant job of cross cutting real life news media images and fictional clips from horror films. The shots are so similar you can barely tell what’s the news and what’s just a movie. The documentary includes interviews with classic terrifying directors George Romero, Wes Craven, David Cronenberg, John Carpenter, and other writers and scholars in the horror media field. If anyone wants an insight on the relationship between societal fears and fantastical horror films this documentary delivers.

The main theme addressed in Nightmare is society’s deep-rooted terrors unleashed on the big screen, which gives us both a sense of pain and joy. I think an interesting point they made was the fascination viewers have with wanting to go behind that door to see the monster. The monster intrigues us because it is a human just like us. So in this society do we become either victim or victor of the American dream? One professor interviewed states that we teeter on a thin line between pain and relief because pain is an inevitable part of the social experience. The connection between society and body is unbreakable allowing us to always find something relevant to our unconscious fears. Cronenberg believes that you can’t get body without society and society without body. He made an interesting point about society’s battle to repress our innate nature, and this is where we find our struggle with pain and relief, with society and psychosis.

An interesting topic a couple of the directors brought up was reintroducing our infantile fears. The idea of being eaten is a major fear that we actually become familiarized with when we are just babies. Adults coo over little babies nibbling at their toes saying, “oh you’re so cute I could just eat you up.” They also reference the scene in Texas Chainsaw Massacre where they tease her to the point of tears and then mock her cries. The directors pluck at the ingrained fears from our childhood that we then relate to our current and much more broad struggles in our contemporary life. It isn't only a movie when it shows reflections of our real life societal concerns, revealing something much deeper.