The Media and the Military

Averting our Attention with Storytelling...

I have to admit that reading that article about Mathew Shepard was a real eye opener. My initial reaction to reading about his story was more positive than it should have been; I felt like it was a good story of justice being served. Justice was indeed served to Shepard’s murderers but as the authors of this article, Aoki, and Ott, point out, the media used Shepard’s case as a story of two “monsters” preying on an “innocent victim.” This angle on the story helps us sympathize with Shepard but it averts our attention from larger social implications of the murder. Instead of facing the fact that much of our society is still intolerant of homosexuals the news media helped the public view the crime as a despicable act by low intelligent hicks, the news media played this up to be a tragic event that society is not held responsible for. The reason for this comes from humanity’s need to cope with the world around them through storytelling.

Human beings are storytellers by nature; ancient humans used the constellations to tell stories, humans pass down stories of myths and urban legends for centuries, a group of friends might reminisce on old “stories” that happened in their younger days, and one of the most popular forms of entertainment for people for the past one hundred years is going to the movies to see a story onscreen. It only makes sense that our news be delivered to us in form of a narrative because that’s what we’re most comfortable with. Maybe we need to evolve as a species beyond the need for narratives to make sense of our world so we can focus on making the world a better place to live for everyone.

Movie’s That Subvert “Princess” Norms.

I re-watched the first Shrek movie recently and I had forgotten about what a clever parody of fairy tales it is. After reading the articles about “Princess culture” I started realizing that Shrek is a great subversion to the idea that ultra-femininity, being superior to others, and materialism, i.e. being a princess, will bring a girl happiness. In Shrek, the main female character, Princess Fiona, is a legitimate princess to be sure; she wears a crown, believes she’s in charge (for a while at least) and has the idea that she will be happy when she marries her “perfect prince.” This is contrasted by the fact that she never plays the damsel in distress (she’s a martial arts expert), she can belch on cue, and, oh yeah, she turns into an ugly ogre at night. In the end she realizes she, as well as Shrek, let go of their skewed ideas about what will make them happy and fall-in-love-and-happily-ever- you know the ending. That movie shows what no Disney movie ever does; you don’t need to be a princess to be happy.

I also thought of the movie Tangled as I was reading those articles. That movie also subverts fairy tale tropes for comic effect like Shrek. It is a Disney movie but the princess, unlike most Disney princesses, does not have an overly sexualized body. In fact, she is small and skinny as compared to the voluptuous and curved Jasmine from Aladdin or Meg from Hercules. Instead of emphasizing her body, the animators chose to emphasize her face, which gives a character more of an identity rather than just being the prize for the male lead to win. If Disney continues to make princess movies I hope they are done similar to Tangled.