12/28/2023 0 Comments Seignfeld the big saladHowever, when he finds out his annoying neighbor Newman is her former lover, his face darkens… One doesn’t have to watch the whole episode to know what will happen next. I chose a short excerpt from Seinfeld’s episode 88 (season 6, episode 2, The Big Salad). Maybe a small example can lift a tip of the veil. I must say that there is more social reality in Seinfeld than in most academic sociology.” Probably the contemporaries of Shakespeare appreciated his portrayal of human relations in the same way we enjoy Seinfeld, without really understanding his perspicaciousness regarding mimetic interaction. They recognize something that is very common and very true, but they cannot define it. They identify themselves with what these characters do because they do it too. People do not have to understand fully in order to appreciate. In order to be successful an artist must come as close as he can to some important social truth without incitin g painful self-criticism in the spectators. Seinfeld is a show that gets closer to the mimetic mechanism than most, and indeed is also hugely successful. From a moral point of view, it is a hellish description of our contemporary world, but at the same time, it shows a tremendous amount of talent and there are powerful insights regarding our mimetic situations. It is also the only show which can afford to make fun of political correctness and can talk about important current phenomena such as the anorexia and bulimia epidemic, which clearly have strong mimetic components. I do not like the fact that Seinfeld constantly makes fun of high culture, which is nothing but mimetic snobbery, but it is a very clever and powerful show. Of course there are exceptions, like the popular sit-com Seinfeld, which uses mimetic mechanisms constantly and depicts its characters as puppets of mimetic desire. Yes and no, because the majority of Hollywood or TV productions are very much based on the false romantic notion of the autonomy of the individual and the authenticity of his/her own desire. The conformism and the ethical agnosticism induced by media such as television could also produce forms of mimetic polarization at the mass level, making people more prone to be swayed by mimetic dynamics, inducing the much-feared populism in Western democracies.ĭo you agree, however, that movies, TV and advertising draw heavily on mimetic principle, therefore increasing our awareness on this score? Of course, because it is based on a false form of transcendence, and therefore it has a containing power, but it is an unstable one. Could we consider the expansion of the mass-media system, and the ideological use of it, as a ‘kathechetic’ instrument as well? “ Guy Debord wrote that ‘the spectacle is the material reconstruction of the religious illusion’ brought down to earth. The seventh chapter, Modernity, Postmodernity and Beyond, reads the following (pp. Girard develops his thoughts in a conversation with Pierpaolo Antonello and João Cezar de Castro Rocha. He even dares to compare television series Seinfeld to the works of William Shakespeare (1564-1616). His approach is very nuanced, as he distinguishes between positive and negative aspects of these phenomena. In the book Evolution and Conversion – Dialogues on the Origins of Culture (Continuum, London, New York, 2007), René Girard talks about popular culture and discusses the power of mass media. THE BIG BANG THEORY – THE WHITE ASPARAGUS TRIANGULATION.THE FRESH PRINCE OF BEL AIR – THE COLD WAR.PLEASANTVILLE (GARY ROSS) & BIBLICAL FEMINISM.DON’T BLAME THE NON-EXISTENT GOD BUT FOCUS ON THE REALITY OF LOVE.THE BEATITUDES & THE THREE RELIGIOUS VOWS.CHRIST VERSUS NARCISSISTIC SADOMASOCHISM.A SUBVERSIVE KING OF FREEDOM AND LOVE: THE CRUCIFIED CHRIST.WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE – A MIDSUMMER NIGHT’S DREAM.THE BIOLOGY OF VIOLENCE (DIRK DRAULANS).MILGRAM OBEDIENCE STUDY / STANFORD PRISON EXPERIMENT / SOCIAL COGNITION / ROBBERS CAVE EXPERIMENT.
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