Monday, April 22, 2013

"Media Magic" by Mantsios, Connections

Mantsios' piece focuses first on the myths about class that we learn through mass media. It is stated that only twenty three companies own more than half of the media that we see, and there are some ridiculous and appalling statistics about americans and the amount of time they spend watching television (28 hours!) and listening to/viewing other media outlets like periodicals and the cinema. I don't capitalize americans intentionally, by the way.

Some of the myths Mantsios talks about struck me, so I am going to attempt to draw some connections to outside sources of media that I find relevant to a few of those mentioned.

1) The Poor Do Not Exist/The Poor Are Faceless/The Poor Are Undeserving/The Poor Have Only Themselves to Blame:

The working class is often not depicted at all in mainstream media. When they are depicted, their identities are often irrelevant, sidekick characters, and they are painted to have gotten themselves into this mess rather than ever focusing attention on the fact that there are institutional and systemic factors at play, here. For example, in this clip from my favorite show, True Blood, which is about a town in Louisiana of a crew of characters who work in a bar as cooks, waiters and waitresses. The town is full of vampires and other monsters (who represent minorities: i.e. the vampires recently "came out of the coffin" and are fighting for the "VRA: Vampire Rights Amendment), meth addicts and meth cookers, and working class people fighting for the common good. In this clip, we see Tara and Lafayette, a Black Feminist Woman who educates herself and bounces between jobs because she openly doesn't take shit from her racist and sexist employers, and a gender bending Gay Black man who constantly has three different jobs and in this scene is currently a cook, a prostitute and a drug dealer. The representations of "poor" here are highly explicit though never openly discussed, making them and their plights visible but limited, and depicting them as bringing some of their difficulty upon themselves as Mantsios discusses (i.e. when Lafayette mentions Tara's inability to be social enough to keep a job).

Another problem Mantsios discusses when it comes to representations of class (and classism for that matter) in media is the idea that it is rational for us to believe when learning from media that the rich and the middle class ARE us, and that it is easy to attain these class positions. An example of that can be seen in the popular television show Gossip Girl in which almost every character is white, beautiful, able bodied and upper middle or upper class. All of their clothes are beautiful, some of them fight problems like alcoholism and drug addiction, but otherwise their lives are glamorous and full of gossip and partying while there is no mention of class positions less privileged than their own. A clip of Gossip Girl can be found here:

As you can see, the show takes place on the upper East Side, one of the characters Dan Humphrey achieves access into the world of the wealthy and elite through blogging and romantic relationships with upper class women, and there are wild and extravagant depictions of beautiful jewelry, alcohol, parties, weddings, dresses, and more throughout the whole show that become a fantasy world of envy for viewers while simultaneously making it seem as though working class people (who are the viewers of the show making up so much of America) can possibly have access to this kind of a world.

Finally, I'd like to discuss Mantsios' idea that the middle class is a victim. In the television series Breaking Bad the main character, a middle class working man with a family, discovers that he has cancer and is forced to come up with an idea to generate income for his family and new baby. As a result, he begins cooking and distributing meth out of a trailer truck and the series is all about his struggles with illness and lack of resources and the trouble he gets into as a result of his actions, but the viewers are made to feel sympathy for him as a middle class family man looking to provide for his family and fulfill his gender role. A clip of the show can be seen here:

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