Thursday, March 4, 2010
King Kriggle Post class for 3/4/10
Well after an interesting class with Dr. Casey a few things have come to my mind. First of all I found the Poster and Dorfman articles very interesting but what was very interesting was the video that we watched of the people getting drunk at disney and the one with snow white in about 6 different languages. First of all the people getting drunk at the different various places in Disney that each represented different countries was interesting because it created a meta-narrative about the place, from this you would draw a conclusion about the actual location and believe that that was the culture of the area. Clementine brought up the fact that the French area was not French…except for maybe the bread haha, but it draws an interesting conclusion as to the fact that do people imagine that is what america is? Is disney the unifying thing that makes everyone love/hate or admire america? I wanted to know this so I went to the disney site and found that it was very easy to view this site in just about any language that you would want to. It was interesting how so many cultures could meet in one place and be so incorrect about one another. This was further shown in the drunk video. Moving on to the snow white thing it is interesting that poster mentioned, as well as Dr. Casey, that disney went across cultural lines and formed a bridge between the different cultures. At the very base of the entire thing disney is capitalism, it is a business, but then again it is so in so many different places that it almost would seem counterproductive to argue about any of it because it brings so many people together. I think Dorfman and Eco hit the nail right on the head and the basic idea was that disney is a good place and does good things but you have to be aware of what is going on. If you don’t have a critical viewing or experience of it then you are just a robot like everyone else in the park.
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I must say I agree with what you say. And this is what we were discussing in our small groups today in class. Disney is fun and it does bring people together in one place to share a good moment. But what is important is being aware, being conscious that it is not reality, that a huge chunk of it is business, that most importantly it is not American culture.
ReplyDeleteAlso, I know some people in class are frustrated because they feel like this class is a huge criticism of the american way of life or of America in general. But it is not, it's just because we focus on the USA, it is what we know best and what stands out the most. But our coments are valid for every country, and everything around us. After CMC 300, I was at my Spanish film class and the professor brought up something that made me think of today's class right away. He was telling us about latin american channels on TV and how he cannot stand them because they give us, as outsiders an idea, more of a false idea of the latin american culture. we associate these dumb telenovelas with that culture and might assume that they only care for romance, drama and so on. Or might think that they live that way in their countries. But it is not reality and it is not an accurate culture of the latin American culture or heritage. Basically as Jordan said we do not know much about each other and judge ourselves on the things that are the most showing but that are definitely not the best way to learn about outside our nations. This is why we need to evaluate everything with a critical eye and question ourselves if we believe this is an accurate representation. This does not mean we cannot enjoy the inaccurate. The importance is consciousness of it.