What the Shea

invisiblelad:

sunisup:

Sometimes I hear people say that racism/sexism/etc in culture isn’t important or worth criticizing.  ”Oh it’s just a book,” they say.  ”It’s just a crappy TV show.”  ”It’s just a commercial.”

This argument always baffles me.  It’s like if you put poison into a fish-tank and then say “Oh well I didn’t poison the fish, I just poisoned the water.”  The fish lives in the water, dumbass; it’s completely submerged in and surrounded by the water.  I’m pretty sure that poisoned water is going to affect the fish.

Similarly, we all live constantly immersed in this miasma of information that we call “culture.”  People are not born prejudiced.  We don’t emerge from the womb knowing that all black men are scary thugs, that all Latinas are spicy sexpots, that all Indians are violent savages, that all women are weepy and frail, that all gay men are depraved pedophiles, and that all people in wheelchairs are objects of pity.  We learn these things, usually starting at a very young age, and we often learn them from our culture — the books we read, the movies we watch, and the constant barrage of advertising that we don’t really pay attention to but which still manages to seep into our brains, and which shapes the way we think about the world, for better or for worse.

If you want to save the fish, you need to purify the water.

The meta-ness of Katniss’s strategizing is interesting; by having Katniss think through how to symbolize and act out  generic falling-in-love story for an audience hungry for vicarious entertainment, Suzanne Collins is also having her narrate the novelist’s problems in plotting the novel. Collins foregrounds the emotional manipulation of the story, problematizing it while indulging it along stereotypical lines, a clever means for having it both ways. This aligns we, the readers, with the audience of the violent reality show within the novel’s universe. Would we really want the Hunger Games put to a stop? Doesn’t our compulsion to keep reading betray us in that regard?

I say a lot of things about Marvel Comics, and some of their movies have been a little spotty (Elektra, Rise of the Silver Surfer, etc.), but their soundtracks are alwaysalwaysalways THE BEST.

So fucking excited.