Concepts That I Love: Part 1

Current Mood: avoidy
Current Music: "Loaded Gun" by Slaughter

As the title indicated, this is the first of a series of blog posts about concepts that I love. Here we go.

I like social commentary. I like it best when it is very subtle, even better if it is scathing and/or witty. Often, this sort of commentary can be found in film, editorials, or other popular mediums.

Examples of social commentary by other people: Animal Crossing and Dick In A Box.

More overt examples (such as in A League of Their Own when a woman announces a radio segment entitled appropriately enough "Social Commentary" discussing women playing baseball) are fine, but I also like to make bold statements that arbitrary things are social commentary, and then do my best to justify it. In a sense, it's almost combining the best of my bullshitting abilities with a healthy dose of improv, but the end result is a thought exercise that's ended quite well a number of times.

A prime example of this would be my previous post (and submission to the school paper) about the social commentary inherent in Dr. Mario. This came about when somebody asked me if there was any reason the game was arranged as it was - why the pills were dispensed in that order, why the germs had their particular design, etc. I responded that it was obviously social commentary, somebody called me out, and the end result was that essay.

Once, while watching the Discovery Channel, I saw an ad for a show entitled The Deadliest Catch. The basic gist was awesome Mike Rowe (who also hosts Dirty Jobs) narrates a documentary-style show about fishermen in the Bering Sea catching Alaskan king crab, which is an incredibly hazardous occupation. The style of the commercial was ominous, but very little actual crab were shown. Yes, that probably was meant to demonstrate that the focus of this show was the "human element", but it struck me as odd. I therefore concluded that it was social commentary. In this particular case, the commentary was that people are the deadliest catch. However difficult it was to live on a small boat in 80 foot swells on a stormy sea, trying to eke out a living catching monster crab- the true underlying theme of the show was that humans were the deadliest creatures at sea, what with their technology and pollution and such. Y'know, the typical anti-technology radical Greenpeace/PETA type argument.

The grammatical framing of such a statement - that "the Deadliest Catch is people" led me to brainstorm a list of things that "is people". So far it's a short list:

Things That Is People:
*The Deadliest Catch
*The Most Dangerous Game
*Soylent Green

(readers: please suggest other things that is people)

At any rate, a half-assed analysis of why I love social commentary so much probably could be legitimately traced back to high school English. Oftentimes I would get frustrated when the teacher, other students would effortlessly discern the true "meaning" behind some piece of prose or poetry - something that I struggle with to this day - so I became cynical and bitter about it. Rather than seriously study the material and attempt to master such...insight, I took it a different direction and made it my own. I mean, really - a lot of times I'm told that in a particular piece of work that "the author's intention" was such and such a thing, but unless I see a notarized statement to that effect, I think a lot of it is up to interpretation. Sometimes, the tree is just a tree. Perhaps this is wrong, and I am biased to think that there should be less emphasis on what is considered "correct" when we are interpreting some dead guy's intention writing some novel he probably banged out the night before his publishing date to try and pay the bills.

But hell, I'm just an engineer.