I'm really not sure how I feel about this...
Last night's new "South Park" about Britney Spears was really... disturbing. It wasn't funny, but I don't think it was trying to be. It was definitely a condemnation of the people who 'handle' her but... I don't know. It really upset me, as her whole life has in the last year, but the episode, I just, I don't know how to explain it.
If you missed it, you can watch it on line, just click the link above... *sigh*
posted by Shannonymous @ 6:27 PM
11 Comments:
ok. i watched it.
is it awful that i thought it was hysterical?
it kind of amazes me that South Park still has it. relevant, biting commentary doesn't come much better than this.
the show's willingness to literalize the metaphoric is downright theatrical. and the level of absurdism the show is willing to reach for would make Ionesco, Beckett, and Kafka pretty proud.
bb
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i also got a kick out of the parallels with Shirley Jacskon's "The Lottery."
woohoo for literary allusions in our irreverent animated satires.
bb
were you able to somehow forget, while you were watching it, that she is a real person??
i guess it just hits too close to home for me:
http://shannonymous.blogspot.com/2007_03_01_archive.html
scroll down to the post: "oh baby baby"
ha.
yeah, probably, I dunno. maybe i'm just too dern desensitized.
thing is - imagine if they had made a "fictional" pop star character instead, let's say they called her Smitney Brears. And they made a story about a popstar so driven to the edge by a public who seems to somehow WANT her to meltdown because it makes for such good gossip and media coverage, and oh, hell let's admit it -- people like watching someone pretty, rich, and famous fall. It makes not being pretty, rich, and famous be ok (which it is, of course, but that's another sort of national cultural self-confidence issue alltogether). So she's driven so far to the edge that she blows her head off. Only she's still alive. And they throw her back into the recording studio, keep taking pictures, keep reporting and talking about her TOTALLY OBLIVIOUS to the fact that she's missing a head.
The sting, of course, is being directed at the media and the public.
So - changing her name, making a thinly-disguised fictional account - we'd still know the cultural reference point, I don't know if it would make much difference.
She wasn't really the target of the satire, the paparazzi and the public who eats it up was.
I mean - don't get me wrong, it was horribly uncomfortable and disturbing, but I thought it was kind of inspiredly so. And isn't that what South Park,lord bless it, has always been?
bb
Not SP's best, but a very funny episode none the less.
Britany has obviously become the primary example of everything that is wrong with our celebrity culture.
We are also to blame because enough of us watch the stuff, in order to make it a lucrative business.
The papparazzi are no better.
You and I both have a college friend who is dating someone in that profession. We have never met this individual , but everyone i've talked to, who knows her, looks down upon her boyfriend because of his carrer choice.
SP is the best social satire on TV. Perhaps ever in the history of that medium.
For a great episode, see the one from two weeks ago in which Cartman gets AIDS.
The AIDS episode was great- I think about it every time I try to get people to give me $ for the AIDS Walk.
"The cure for AIDS is... ... massive amounts of CASH!!"
bb
Duh. Yeah. Thanks for the recap! ;)
I have to go with BB on this one. SP continues to be brilliant and relevant and always unsettling... but then isn't the point of (not to sound too nerdy about it) good art?
And... I loved the Lottery references.
fink
I'n not just sure. I'm H-I-V positive.
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