Reflections On The Summer of Shark
by digby
James Poniewozik at Time recalls the summer of 2001, when the entire media came unhinged over Chandra Levy and sharks and muses that the media now engage in fearmongering and tittilation pretty much all the time:
To live every week like it’s Shark Week, then, might be a metaphor for living in our media environment: to spend every week titillated by unlikely threats, getting whipped into frenzies, yawning over high-minded stuff like health-care policy and supping from the delicious chum bucket of hysteria. The President is a secret Kenyan who faked his birth certificate! Terrorists are coming to get you! And the world is going to end, six different ways! But first a word from our sponsor.
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In Discovery’s The Colony, 10 volunteers are barricaded in a warehouse, without running water or electricity, to simulate surviving after the end of civilization. The band of engineers, handymen and medical professionals (the magazine columnists, I assume, have long since been eaten) fends off “gangs” (played by actors), filters water and goes through coffee withdrawal.
In The Colony’s scenario, a pandemic did us in. But, the show helpfully notes, it could have been “human conflict, nuclear bombs, natural disasters, chemical and biological warfare. Without warning, the world as we know it can come to an end.” Until it does, enjoy the show!
On The Colony, every week is Shark Week. And what with upcoming apocalypse movies like The Road and 2012 and the end-of-days rumblings of talk TV and radio, the same is now true for the rest of us. Superterrorists, natural disasters and megaviruses are not imaginary. But they’re more viscerally scary and easier to apprehend than vital but boring systemic problems like the economy and public health.
It strikes me as a bit odd that the infotainment complex is hitting the fear button so hard right now. I was always told that during the depression Hollywood made a lot of fantasy and upbeat comedy because people wanted an escape. I’m not sure that isn’t true now. I don’t watch a whole lot of TV for relaxation, but when I do I certainly don’t want to watch something that’s going to make me feel more fear and anxiety than I already do.
But the humiliation rituals on reality TV and the violence in the movies right now are just mind-boggling — I watched a Mamet flick the other night that just about made me sick. I don’t know about you, but I feel as if our society is in a sour, sour place right now — and justifiably so. It doesn’t seem like pumping up the anxiety and fear can be good for people who are already stressed out beyond belief.
But hey, I’m old so maybe it’s just Driving Miss Daisy time for me. Far be it for me to become one of those scolds telling the kids they shouldn’t listen to that “yeah yeah” music. But it kind of creeps me out.
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