Bella Post-Class 3/27

Jameson wrote, “Pastiche eclipses parody”. In class, Dr. Rog described pastiche as a “blanket” of sarcasm–similar to John Stewarts infamous eyebrow raise. Stewart uses just enough skepticism to make the audience laugh, without making an outright joke about the issue. Parody, however is different. Saturday Night Live is parody. The actors on the show imitate events, re-creating situations the audience knows about while making the events seem outlandish and ridiculous. I feel that Jameson’s ideas about pastiche and parody directly connect with Chomsky’s ideas about propaganda. Comedians, though they are considered by many to be the ‘court jesters’ of the media, play a huge role in government propaganda. They may poke fun, but by presenting an issue like the War in Iraq, they are merely reinforcing the significance of the event, and are giving it more publicity, therefore establishing a cultural obsession. Chomsky wrote that the role of propaganda is important to “inculcate individuals with the values, beliefs, and codes of behavior that will integrate them into the institutional structures of the largest society” (Chomsky 257). In class, we talked about school being one of the biggest institutional structures that assimilates individuals into the functions of society, but I wonder if media itself could be considered one of these institutional structures. We talked about the idea of “cultural schizophrenia” affecting the public–they begin interacting with ‘psychotic experiences’ and can’t distinguish what’s real or not. I think one of the biggest examples of this is reality TV. Reality TV is almost a parody on life¬–the producers are probably sitting on the sets laughing at how ridiculously stupid their audience is for believing that the shows are unscripted, unrehearsed, and unplanned. I would have really liked to have gotten into this discussion a little deeper, and related the two topics we discussed in class (Pastiche/parody, and propaganda) and how they work together.