Rubber Soul, 3/27

"Pastiche eclipses parody"
"Parody finds itself without a vocation"

I watched the Jon Stewart Comedy Central skit with the advisors on stock telling people what the smartest businesses were to invest money in. Each video clip showed some stock advisor assuring that the business was solid and unyielding and then a caption would follow the clip with how long it was until that business went under, or how low that stock plummeted. There was nothing invented to make this skit funny. It was comedic merely because it was facts pieced together to show how incredibly pretentious and wrong these advisors actually were. Ultimately the reality of the events became the parody without need for adding to the ludicrousness. This act of postmodern criticism allows for realization of seemingly trustworthy systems. 50 years ago, if people made claims like these, the public eye wouldn’t have been reminded of the failings from such a trustworthy American news source. I just saw the movie Born on the Fourth of July, and the movie is based on actual events surrounding Vietnam and what the American people and the American soldiers went through. At the start of the war, the public was told that communism was taking over and that the war would be a quick and clean sweep. The movie played hits from the time period in the background. Scenes of war, soldiers on hospital beds getting their limbs amputated, and patriotic parades with veterans wheeling down the road in wheel chairs were layered with pop songs like “Brown Eyed Girl” and it created a very eerie effect. The cross between what people were listening to on the radio safe at home in America with the suffering and death going on in the war was nothing humorous but the contrast was stark and undeniably ironic. There was no need to invent anything to make the movie any more shocking. What people initially believed about Vietnam couldn’t have been more false and it is the reality of the situation that’s so intriguing and entertaining about the film.