Lecture: Consumerism (OUAN401)

This was an awesome lecture because it was extremely relevant to my area of study for C.O.P. It also woke me up to the harsh truth that perhaps I am not as unique and special as I think I am.

Nah, that can't be true. It's just literally everyone else who's been brainwashed, not me. What a bunch of suckers.

The best part about this lecture was learning of Sigmund Freud and his nephew Edward Bernays, and how Bernays exploited what he knew about how brains work from knowing Freud and applied it to manipulating people's emotions to become one of the greatest pioneers of consumerism. He birthed an entire culture of female smokers with his campaign in the 20s and was a propagandist in the Great War who applied these principles to everyday marketing. He said that we must  "regiment the public mind every bit as much as an army regiments their bodies."

Freud spoke about how our modern way of living, with social taboos and laws, doesn't satisfy the primal, sexual, animalistic part of the brain that yearns for dominance. In evolution, we want to climb the hierarchy and buying stuff as a mark of status is a way of channelling that need. Freud even said that we shouldn't have been surprised that the Great War happened as it was inevitable, given the way humans are hardwired to crave dominance.

A major theme of this lecture was revolution. Trotsky said that "revolution is impossible until it is inevitable", but what I heard today made me think about whether this could be true. The speaker told us that our Western society is more unfair than it's ever been, which is true to extent. Council houses are being torn down to build luxury flats, university is becoming more expensive and the big companies like Amazon don't pay fair taxes. The rich are getting richer and the poor are getting poorer, so why are there no stirrings of revolution? Why do young people so consistently fail to show up to vote?

It could be our culture of consumerism. We receive short term gratification from buying products and brand names that, through clever advertising, make us think we've achieved something or grown as people while the real achievements we should be striving for are social change!

This is from an Apple Macintosh ad from 1984. Man! Look at this sexy macintosh user. A bronzed, athletic revolutionary. She's not afraid to break the confines of society's draconian constrictions.She's different! Wait a second. I HAVE an Apple laptop! I'm just like this woman in the advert! I'm a revolutionary too!

This is from the exact same advert. Man, I sure am glad I'm nothing like any of these dumpy squares who DIDN'T buy a Macintosh.

As long as we all remain compliant and passive, there will never be a revolution!

Well, I guess we sort of had a revolution last June.
But it was a bit shit.

I'm not putting myself on a high horse, here. I am just as much of an armchair revolutionary as the next pretentious guy sat at his laptop with no real problems, but I speak truths!

Deciding on an animation to analyse (OUAN401)

I'm having a hard time finding an animation to analyse that relates to my quote, the key themes of which are propaganda, social control, hegemony and elitism and that sort of thing. The obvious candidate for this is "Animal Farm" from 1954, an easy film to relate to the topic of propaganda as it is literally an allegory for life under Soviet Russia.

My problem with this, though, is that it may be a quite generic option. The first thing that pops into everyone's heads is Animal Farm and while there's a tonne of stuff to discuss, it's been discussed plenty of times before.

The films "Antz" and "A Bug's Life" both involve themes of a social hierarchy and social control, as the societies of ants are a perfect model for communism. Perhaps they would be good options. The ants are assigned roles by a totalitarian government, and there is a strong theme of one character defying the social norm and breaking out of their role, just like in the book 1984! To a lesser extent, this is present in Bee Movie with bees, but I will never taint this module by including such a film.

I'm sure that I could slide a link to social control into some movies that aren't traditionally associated with it, and offer up a new angle on them. Like the theme of social control in "Cinderella", where the upper class prevents the lower class from mobilising upwards. It's a METAPHOR for how the Tories try and implement grammar schools and stuff like that. Or what about Pinocchio? Not much more of a clearer metaphor for indoctrination than LITERALLY having a voice in your ear that tells you what is right and wrong according to it's own subjective views.

I'm not implying that Jiminy Cricket is Stalin or anything, but I definitely am

Or I could analyse an animation in context, one that is itself an example of propaganda and mental manipulation, rather than one that alludes to these things.

I could look at any propaganda cartoon. Some good ones could include "The Millionaire", a 1963 Russian Cartoon in which a dog inherits his owner's fortune, but as a result becomes a filthy decadent capitalist. Or any of the cartoons that Disney made in the war where Donald Duck was a Nazi.

The Millionaire (1963)