Televisionland

This is interesting because it was made in the sixties--by an actual advertising company lampooning its own practices.


This clip is especially interesting for me because I found it at In Media Res, a site which is apparently dedicated to the scholarly analysis of youtube videos. Every week they pick a subject (this week was toys, apparently), and five professors/scholars of different disciplines write short essays analyzing a video/videos that have to do with that topic, and then other scholars comment and respond to the same videos. So you can read about the collectible toy phenomenon and the shift from play to consumerism, or, alternately, how the collection of toys can offer new kinds of "play." If that's not your cup of tea, you can read about the Disney "Princess" fascination, with feminist responses, psychological responses, Marxist responses, etc. etc.

It's probably not fair to call them Marxist, actually. I guess it would be closer to anti-capitalist, though I'm not sure if that's the term for the actual school of thought. There's precedent: Ludwig Mises used the term in his book "The Anti-Capitalist Manifesto (note: Ludwig Mises was a very staunch supporter of capitalism, in the Austrian school of economics.) But he was talking about Socialism, and near as I can tell the people I'm labeling "anti-capitalist" aren't advocating socialism. It's closer to the Marxist/Feminist argument, with the idea that the capitalists (well, companies) are closely tied to the white patriarchy, and are selling ideologies as much as they are products. But there is little discussion about class structure, and it's oddly reversed: the Marxist criticism I've read tends to see money/product as a means of maintaining power; this argument sees the dissemination of these ideologies and the power contained there-in as a means of gaining money. Power is the means, not the goal. The "capitalists" are thus "bad," not because their ultimate goal is bad, but because the byproducts of their attempts at that goal are damaging. (I'm inferring all of this. They never actually used the term capitalism or evil or anything). It reminds me a little bit of one of the themes of White Noise, actually. I'm sure there's a scholarly term for it (and it may actually be a new/newer than what I've covered version of Marxist criticism, for all I know. I'm woefully deficient in my theoretical studies...)

Whatever you want to call it, it's a view that I have been seeing more and more. It seems particularly interesting to me because its proponents, as near as I can tell, are not advocating an alternate economic theory (as was the case with earlier Marxist or Socialist criticism). They seem more interested in analyzing how the current system is working (or not working, as the case may be).