The Cultural Studies Effect

Thanks to Cultural Studies, I cannot watch TV shows or movies anymore without analyzing if they support Marxist Critique. I think the biggest impact came when i was watching the Hunger Games I couldn't stop thinking about comparing the movie to the episode of the Simpsons that we analyzed in class. A basic overview of the Hunger Games is basically that there is a low class group of people that are in districts. The upper class,aka the capitol, is filled with rich people that chose tributes from the districts to partake in these hunger games to face other people in a game where they are locked up in a forest and the last one to stay alive, lives on, forcing everyone to battle each other. When watching this, I kept comparing it to the Simpsons episode because the Simpsons episode did not support Marxist Critique fully. In the Simpsons, at the end of the episode Marge stated that she belongs in the middle class and that she should just stay there. That statement took the whole episode off that rode of supporting Marxist Critique because it failed to continue Marxist Critique and instead supported the idea that a middle class family should just never move up but instead stay put, where they belong, eating at a fast food joint. When watching the Hunger Games, you could definitely see it supporting the Marxist Critique because you could see how the rich behaves, dressing in fancy clothes with big hair and the woman drenched in makeup as they control the poor and make them fight against their will while the Capitol sits in these nice chairs watching the tributes go at it. It supports it the most when you see the way the Capitol dress and act as they see themselves as more worthy of living, then the lower class. I had trouble saying if it fully supported a Marxist Critique because the two winners of the Hunger Games ended up becoming part of the upper class. Then I thought about it and I believe that it does because in society it seems like they would be part of the Petty Bourgeois as they were not born into the rich but they made there coming from a poor family. Overall this has been the biggest take away after Cultural Studies because I now watch things with a different lens. I know this isn't a complete overview of what I have learned but this is the thing I learned that has had the biggest impact. The other big take away is finding out how every character I enjoy watching, is nihilistic and I had not noticed until this class. The biggest is the character of the Joker. I have grown to love the joker due to his lack of care for how this world is ran by society. He really believes nothing matters and that is why he goes around causing havoc, because he just doesn't care. Then he has satirical moments where he just completely mocks society and it makes the scenes great. Those were definitely my biggest takeaways from cultural studies.