Granted, this obsession with youth and targeting of the teenage demographic has been a staple of visual media for almost as long as television as a medium has existed, but starting around the time of the High School Musical franchise, the global network of marketing genius known as Disney further transformed entertainment into the kind of consumer-based, multi-platform spend-a-thon that has paved the way for Glee.
Glee as a consumer item is no longer a product, but an interactive experience. The show doesn't stop with the rolling of the credits, like a virus, it has infected our day-to-day lives. The music follows us, a zombification of hits long past, chasing us down with the rich baritones and flutish altos of fresh young faces.
The bloated body of the Glee phenomenon reeks with the corpses of stereotypes and television tropes rehashed in every wholesome teen drama from the Brady Bunch to the failed remake of 90210. Every character, if not a stereotype of one kind is a mash-up of several. Every issue they face is taken directly from the files of every afternoon special since the original Degrassi.
But Glee isn't the only mechanism in this globalization of Western society. All of pop culture has followed suit. Music takes its place, shaping and reflecting the civilization that creates it. Lady Gaga?
Where postmodernism confirmed Shakespeare's aphorism that all the world's a stage and all the men and women merely players, the current shift in the pop culture clime not only seeks to reaffirm it, but to shape reality after it.
For the past year or two glee clubs have been popping up on school campuses across the country as the infection has spread. Gleeks rise proudly in misfit solidarity, singing their experience acapella and accompanied, performing to rabid audiences. Reality is becoming the fiction. We conform to these stereotypes in efforts to mimic the triumphant underdog status of our media heroes.
Earlier this month, there was a news story about costumed crime-fighters patrolling the streets of Seattle.
I titled this post "the fourth wall is breaking" because we're becoming the characters in our own story. We're reading about ourselves.
4 comments:
well said, Ace. =)
There's also the phenomena of costumers on Halloween. But I suppose those costumes are still products...I only brought up costumes because I was going to bring up Avatar--and I'm not talking about the airbender. The blue people costume was one of the highest selling ones this year, complete with youtube tutorials for how to do the makeup-and I'm pretty sure some of the adults that picked the costume wanted to wear it because they really wanted to be naavi. The hyper-realism is what sucks us in and doesn't let go. It's what permeates our day to day lives and keeps us watching.
Granted, I've only seen a few episodes of Glee. I just don't have television and don't have the drive to keep up with things online. Glee took the world by storm, and even non-watchers know the plotline.
The last sentence interests me, because, as an actor, I've heard more than once that the purpose of theatre (and presumably all performances of stories. Film, TV, etc.) is to hold the mirror up to life. I get what you saiy, but find it interesting that instead of us holding the mirror up to life, life is holding the mirror up to tv.
And that, dear Puck, is where I find I have trouble with this.
We've moved so far beyond the telling of stories that in becoming them, in embodying and creating ourselves based off of them, our function is reversed. If life is holding up the mirror to the performance, we're caught in a feedback loop because the function of theatre and the arts has not changed. So a mirror held up to a mirror, and I think for everyone in Augmented Realities right now, this becomes especially relevant as you look at The Invention of Morel, no?
Our protagonist is trapped between the mirrors, between his reality on the island and between the projected reality of Morel's invention. The perfomance, the remembrance of the past, i.e. Morel, overlaps with the current existence on the island. It's this liminal state of not quite one or the other that drives us insane because we feel called to enter one or the other and refuse to entertain both.
It's been a few years since I've read that book, so maybe someone with the text a little fresher in their mind would care to compare?
For my part, I would like to offer connections to Queen City Jazz, which I read for Nanotexts, and then found myself referencing again and again in my Music ISP with Tony spring quarter.
Basic synopsis: nanotech plagues destroy most of the modern world, survivors live in fear, giant bees representative of a literal hive mind.
What it comes down to is circularity and repetition, which I've written about again and again and again. It's the feedback loop, building upon and sustaining itself. It's the reason for this postmodern view that there is nothing new, just reflections and distortions of things that have cropped up a million times. But if reading the Invisibles taught me anything, it's that the now is the eternal new. Just because someone else thought of it before you doesn't change how significant it is to you in the moment.
In recognizing that life is imitating art (Oscar Wilde, anyone?), we remove ourselves, at least temporarily from the loop, slightly to the side where we can see the reflections moving back and forth. For the most part, I feel like these kind of revelatory moments make us laugh because it is an absurd thing to see: the blue people and the Gleeks.
So we laugh. We laugh because it's painful. And then we move on and everything changes. Because the closer the mirrors are to each other, the quicker the reflections meet, and like a game of telephone, the more repetitions you have, the more opportunities you have for the meaning or part of the message to get lost.
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