How Hollywood plays to your weaknesses

Everybody's a fish out of water. Most movies involve fishes out of water. This is because Hollywood has happened on a quirk of human nature: everybody can relate to this. Everybody can relate to not feeling like they belong.

You are each so unique, audience
Note how in every small-town, even if everybody else is a dumb hick, there is always that one person from there who is pretty cool, this person is either the hero or the loyal sidekick to the hero. Every real life dumb hick who sees that movie will identify with that person. They won't see themselves as being any of the other assholes. The same goes for the ghetto, the large corporate office or any other place where the denizens can be stereotyped. The way you get people to identify with your lead character is to make it clear that they are better than everybody else.

Everybody is the hero of their own little movie life.

When the movie ends the hero must have a girlfriend
Everybody wants a sexual relationship. More than that, sexual relationships are a measure of happiness. You have to fall in love with somebody to be happy in life, and have a good future. You can kill the bad guy, rescue the hostages, save the city from destruction, but you haven't really won, and cannot be truly satisfied unless the audience can see that you are now in a new relationship.

There must be a climactic showdown
People believe that confrontations are are definitive and that when one person emerges as “victor” from a confrontation, this indicates that they are victors in life. You can't really settle anything without a climactic battle to determine who is more dangerous or, in many cases, lucky. The bad guy has to die or get beaten up, what's more the fight has to go on for a really long time so that you know that the good guy really has to work for his pay off. He has to get hurt a lot so that when the bad guy gets blown up, skewered, or has a shipping trailer fall on him you feel relief or even joy.

Revenge is always a good idea
People are naturally vindictive. Even in situations where retaliation is not practical or reasonable, everybody still wants it. You got cut off on the way to work this morning, your boss adopted a certain tone when instructing you, a customer of below-average intellect insulted you. Everybody carries a set of repressed grudges. Seeing somebody act on their grudges on film allows a release of tension and delight in vicarious brutality.

Why racial stereotypes exist

How black people and Jews were depicted throughout history serves to show the capacities in which racists are comfortable with them. The caricatures are fantasies, ideal, comforting situations that make bigots feel good, that’s why they exist. This is offers insight on what racists want now, how they want to see black people and as indicators of what they do not want, of what makes them uncomfortable.

The African tribesman/
This one is so primitive that even a barely literate person can feel superior. The black people they encounter are usually nothing like this, so this provides them with relief on several levels.

It means that black people are not real competition. It is a reminder that if you think of them this way they are more funny and pitiable than threatening. It takes the unknown out of the equation. You know what they are, and you don’t have to fear them since they are too dumb and backward to be really threatening. The need for caricatures like this is greater when the person is less secure about their own accomplishments in society.

The violent criminal/conniving villain
This stereotype provides comfort in that it excuses the brutal impulses. It means that you are justified in lynching or in threats because they would do worse to you. All of them. Anything you do, no matter how brutal, is justified because that is how they are. They are like cockroaches that by existing in your house deserve death. You get to transfer all your bitterness and bloodlust to these insects because they are evil by nature. In addition to this you get a feeling of moral superiority. You have never raped anybody, never stolen, but these people have. Simply by never having done something you get to feel righteous unlike those people who need good works to do that.

The big penis/financial genius/good ones
This is a concession. By conceding that the people you loathe do have “useful” qualities you add legitimacy to the supposed weaknesses. It’s like the exception that proves the rule. You get an excuse, you are not some evil bigot, you are just “honest”.

Prince and Tom Petty

Madonna and the dead fans

There are millions of you paying to go see a handful, or one, of them. They don’t want to see you, the individual, but you want to see them badly. They have power, but you don’t except as a part of the crowd that they control.  One individual bee does not matter to a beekeeper, and you the member of an adoring audience numbering into the thousands, don’t matter either. You are faceless.

People with that kind of power have to arrogant because everything in their lives show them to be better than each of you. They have more money, they get more attention, they have less stress. You give of your wages to make them more wealthy in return for a few hours around a stage with them on it. They have to see themselves as gods because you keep telling them that that’s what they are.

Do you seriously think that any act of kindness that they perform is not done purely for their own benefit? Do you think that Madonna seriously gives a shit about the anonymous worker-ants, the nameless cattle that get caught under her stage? The only bad thing about this for her is the potential for lawsuits and the inevitable bad publicity. I am not sure she is wrong. When people abase themselves they have to expect to be seen in that way, to be judged as less than.

Real life is “unimaginable”

"I just can't believe that there's people in the world that are capable of this type of hate," Ashley Markham, 26, told ABC's "Good Morning America" today. "This is just unimaginable." via Daughter of Slain Fla. Couple: 'This Is Unimaginable,'

Since when is murder “shocking” or “unimaginable”? Since TV that’s when. People get their news and their entertainment from the same medium it is inevitable that they get the two mixed up sometimes. It’s unimaginable because they think that what they see on the news happening to other people every day doesn’t really exist. They never in a million years thought that the crime that they see every night on the evening news could come out of the picture-box and affect them.

It’s like going to the doctor and getting a cancer diagnosis. You need to know now that something at some point has to kill you. You just learned the truth from a guy on the Internet, but you know what? You probably still don’t believe it. You think that somehow you are going to live forever.

All of these people think that if you live far enough from the real world, out in their gated suburbs free from minorities and poverty that somehow real life will never touch them. They get immersed in their lives of quiet comfort and forget that there is a world of people who want more than what they have so they get shocked when anything bad happens. Sequestering yourself from real life makes everything “shocking”.

Why newspapers so very badly need to die

Ok, so these guys went to journalism school and learned all the tricks of the trade. They do not like having all their hard word and expertise devalued. I understand that. Professional web-developers tend to look down on people who never went to school operating websites, chefs tend to look down on home-cooks as barely-competent amateurs. I get that. It goes with being being trained in anything, you resent all the people who have not paid their dues. It still does not mean that your product is worth my money.

The truth is that of all the professions listed above, journalists are the least necessary. Their “professional product” least worth paying for.

When was the last time a journalist did anything useful? Seriously. What have you read in a newspaper or seen on TV that changed how you went about doing anything? The front page of the New York Times today has stories about Judge Sotomayor, the CIA-Cheney conspiracy to hide things from congress, and Obama’s trip to Africa. Most people in America have made their minds up about Cheney and Sotomayor without having to read the Times, and their opinions have nothing to do with anything these people say or do. Most of the content of the major news outlets is worthless. It is reportage for the sake of reporting. You have all these journalists and this equipment so you have to put something out or it would all be wasted. There is a lot of effort put into making it seem important, meaningful, but it’s not. In a way bloggers have highlighted this. With hastily written, ungrammatical, inconsistently spell-checked work cobbled together in basements, they can put together a product that sells almost as well.

I did not know Michael Jackson, and aside from liking one or two of his songs back when I was still young, I have no sentimental connection to the man. If his passing and the subsequent issues were of any importance to me I would bookmark TMZ.com, not purchase a magazine or newspaper. Every issue that a newspaper might cover has dedicated bloggers who are obsessed with that one thing, people who would sell their first-born to find out something new and to share it with a network of similarly obsessed individuals. The blogs might be repetitive and hard to read, but you will get more information in five minutes than you would from a long, padded-out NYT article written by some disinterested preppie.

The big question is why this is even being debated. There was once a time when the fastest you could get your news was in the next days’ paper, where the stories would be fact-checked and edited and those writers would get another 24 hours to follow up. You got your stuff slowly because there was no more efficient means of dissemination than tree-flesh. Now there are better ways, or one better way, something faster and more efficient. All the stuff that we didn’t have to know is available along with the very few bits of info that it might be useful to have.

Brilliant Nike Marketing Strategy re: Jordan Crawford

So you are looking down the road at your next big marketing project, a kid named Jordan Crawford, and you need to get his name out there, get him in the market’s consciousness before he goes pro. You know this about the market:

1) It loves access to a secret
Like sex tapes or hidden cameras. People are voyeurs by natures, creepy little Chuck Berry’s desperate for access to a peephole. 

2) They have tremendous faith in the Internet
The belief that the Internet is a “wild west” not yet controlled by corporate or government interests means that people think that they might be allowed to see something that those in authority do not want them to see.  This “scandal” thrives on the fact that people have been searching for this video.  
 
3) A great many people dislike LeBron James
So much so that daring to compare him to Michael Jordan still puts you in great danger of being shot in certain circles. Many believe him to be an over-marketed Nike mascot who gets away with cheating on a regular basis. They actively want to believe that a kid, particularly one named “Jordan”, dunked on James.

4) There is a lot of sports-withdrawal going on right now
If you are not into baseball this time of year sucks. You want to go into football mode, but you are scared. You go into it too soon and you have to suffer till the season starts. You don’t even want to start thinking about basketball yet. Still any little bit of news grabs and holds your attention, like news of the girl that dumped you a decade ago. You pay attention even though you know it’s pointless.

5) Sports-fanship is largely about recalling things
What happened in such and such a season, the names of the positions, plays, colleges, who got drafted where, by whom, and in what year. Nothing is more important than knowing the name of people. It’s hard if these people are from a different country, or culture with strange names, but that just makes it more of a challenge, something for the true sports geek to feel proud of. This gets Nike and Lebron James even more deeply implanted in the media than they were previously.

It’s easy to fabricate a story like this
Seriously, the whole thing is about tantalizing rumor that seems to make somebody look bad, which, of course, is the most tantalizing kind of rumor. It has elements that have to get you hooked but that are not really verifiable. Meaning they can be easily disproved and dismissed at a later point. Whether or not you actually ever view the footage you know the name Jordan Crawford.