How TV dramas informed and misinformed perceptions of the war on drugs
npr.org
npr.org
Disclaimer: I watched it back the day, procastrinating was made easier during afternoon instead of home work. Also, Jessica Biel.
I'm so glad I was completely consumed with interest in computers and programming all throughout the 90s. I almost never watched television, and after watching this, I'm glad I didn't.
It never fails to amaze me that people are stupid enough to believe a fictional program they watch, which even has disclaimers at the end of each program telling you its fictional. I'm sure someone with rush to the defense of these idiots and claim they're just "gullible" but I'm not sure that's better.
People want heroes. Heroes need bad guys. People thus want bad guys and will celebrate the groups that oppose them as heroes. In the US we had heroes fighting japs and nazis, then commies (notably no one ever fought the confederates in pop culture...).
But come the age of globalization in the 80's and especially after the collapse of the USSR, we just ran out of bad guys.
So we made some up out of the junkies on the street. I mean, certainly there was crime in that world. And at the top it was organized. And there was real violence between cartels and dealers. Those were bad guys! Go get 'em, heroes!
TV didn't do that. We did it to ourselves. TV just reflected what we all agreed on.
Also, I don't think _we_ need them, but narratives that justify the above do.
Friends and Seinfeld didn't have heroes and bad guys.
Worth noting that a lot of those you just mentioned either had direct government funding, or received government assistance, because of who they depicted as the bad guys.
It wasn't just human nature to paint them as the bad guys, it was part of a propaganda machine (overtly at first during WWII), and continues to this day. If you want to depict the US military in Hollywood, they will help you to do so, with certain rules about what you do or don't depict.
Until recently, TV networks received similar funding if they kept a anti-drug thematic in their works. (Though receiving networks of said funding said they didn't rewrite anything to fit those messages).
> TV didn't do that. We did it to ourselves. TV just reflected what we all agreed on.
I'm afraid I don't think that is clear. TV was actively influenced. What we watch was influenced. To what degree did that influence extend into the social conscience? That's a bit beyond me.
In modern mass media I can't contradict that, but Stephen Crane's book The Red Badge of Courage was very well received. I believe it is often ranked among the best American novels.
That could be worth unpacking, that one. The confederacy get remarkably good treatment by comparison. I think there's maybe a couple of Westerns on the subject? By comparison there's a lot of films depicting them as misunderstood honorable victims of circumstances.
Having watched a lot of bad 80s films in lockdown, it's remarkable how many post-apocalyptic settings look like New York if it was never cleaned up. The peak of course is Escape from new York
There are all sorts of messy cross-correlative details too like big budget works taking fewer risks and being less original owing to the stakes.
https://twitter.com/storyslug/status/1297996912822493196?lan...
Superheroes acting above the law is a fairly generic problem outside of that
The Wire, graciously excluded as it takes a nuanced perspective.
The truly bizarre aspect of so many of these is that the story tends to pit the main characters against 'the man', or 'the system'. But for any normal person, they are 'the man'.
For example, in The Rookie, the titular character gets shot at at an alarming frequency per episode. If cops had to endure so many shootouts, a) their life expectancy on the job would be in the order of a few months at most, and b) militarization and shoot-first-and-ask-questions-never would be understandable (not defensible, but understandable). Seriously, front line soldiers in war zones do not see as much action as rookie cops in LA presumably do, if the show is taken as realistic.
Or almost in any cop show, only guilty people ask for lawyers. And if the lawyers get someone out of jail, it is depicted as an injustice and a technicality.
The list goes on and on. Police procedural, both comedy and drama, suffer from a serious lack of verisimilitude.
There's no such thing as being good, and no such thing as being evil.
I was going to say that this was created in the wake of 9/11 and, for the US, it was a sort of catharsis. But the US hasn't existed without an enemy, it appears to proactively create them.
The X-Files is one of the few series I know to directly call that out, because that's been US modus operandi ever since the Brits and the Confederates stopped being an enemy. An entire episode is literally "what do we do? we have no enemies." But of course, the show continues with the invention of a new threat.
That is not the theme of Dirty Harry.
Callahan is fighting against a city overrun with crime, struggling against an inept, and in the other films in the series, corrupt, bureaucracy and police force. People forget that major American cities weren't the crime-free near-utopias they are now, or at least, were before COVID-19 hit. New York City was widely regarded as a bit of a shithole back then and in the early 80s.
The viewer is meant - and many did - to sympathize with Callahan as bends, and outright breaks, the rules in the pursuit of justice in a world where it all too often escapes the victims.
Particularly when it comes to getting eyeballs on TV, or a movie. People making that content are thinking about what people will want to watch.
Does someone "glorified 'The Thin Blue Line'" (just picking a random bit from this article) because they saw it on TV... or is TV responding to what that person already thinks / wants to watch?
It's super easy to think about other people who we don't share the same views with as: "Oh those people are just misinformed because X influence." But I'm not sure that's always the case.
It's a little bit of both. There is a model of society called the "base and superstructure" [0]. The base comprises of the means of production as well as everyone's relationship to the means of production. Superstructures, like art and culture, are built on top of the base and are both shaped by the base as well as re-enforce the base.
I literally will disgrace the national flag with my own version of it, and you know what? I'll even throw a punisher logo with a thin blue line, because you know, the punisher loved cops as much as I did.
This whole damn nation was founded on respecting the authority and licking boots.
I think King George III might have a different take, eh?
And it doesn't have to be an either or. They can both mutually shape each other.
I don't doubt they both have influence, but why / how you write a cop show isn't why you make an ad for coke either.
If I want to sell someone a burger I already made what they want "the burger" presumably to what they want to eat. Now I want them to know about it.
I maintain that art affects society. Scorsese makes Taxi Driver, some crazy guy watches it, decides to shoot Ronald Reagan to impress Jody Foster. Would crazy guy have done the same thing regardless of the movie? Maybe. Would he have done it on the same day, at the same time, in the exact same way? Probably not.
The world where Scorsese chose to make Taxi Driver is different than the one where the movie never existed; maybe the difference is trivial, but -some- effect is there. The remaining question is the extent of that effect.
The fact that when I imagine a cop, I imagine "Bad Boys" and "Law and Order", even when I haven't watched these shows for over a decade, is a testament to art's effects. Maybe this image was born out of the crime waves of the 70s-80s, but the image persists, affecting how people feel on topics of policing.
It's an open question whether art influences society or vice versa, but I can tell you from firsthand experience that executives in show business have no doubt it's the former, and they revel in that power. It wasn't for me, I quit after a year.
They didn't ;)
Not sure that means much.
> Particularly when it comes to getting eyeballs on TV, or a movie. People making that content are thinking about what people will want to watch.
But what they will want to watch isn't what they already know, it's what they are comfortable with. There is new information, the problem is new info that challenges the viewer too much. The better artists walk that line better: they find ways to present challenging information that will go down easily.
Note that the article quotes the Lear Center's research; it's named after and founded by Norman Lear, who made (among many other shows) All in the Family, which covered political issues, including race, and without pulling (many) punches, in 1971 and was an enormous hit. I highly recommend watching the first season - great on many levels. And it will press your buttons, even today.
"If you want to tell people the truth, make them laugh or they will kill you." (Attributed to many people, from Oscar Wilde to George Bernard Shaw to Richard Pryor)
I doubt that more people have read Paradise Lost than have read the Bible
If it's too outlandish it doesn't resonate with people, so it's bound by the outer limits of what society accepts. However that outer limit has a lot of play room and let's you shift the overton window in terms of influencing society.
It's a feedback loop.
At best it can help shape society to be better. Introduce and normalize ideas like interracial romance (Star trek) or expand people's minds (e.g the Tulsa riots in Watchmen were the first that many had heard of it)
At worst, it's propaganda, cementing us in our beliefs. Like the example of drugs used in the original post, but worse, normalizing authoritarianism.
My biggest take from a lot of those interactions was how much they're like tech founders. I swear that if one particular vendor had discovered a IIc instead of LSD in the mid-80s, every one of us on this site would know his name.
Experiences like that really chip away at the "Thin Blue Line" narrative where these flawed people are our last line of defense against the degeneracy of drugs.
I don't know if I'm missing the point here, but if this is true, then wouldn't it follow that drugs are something that society should be fighting against?
Unfortunately, we fight a war on drugs and make people like that into enemies. I don’t think fighting is the solution and if it is, I’m still waiting for results.
Hollywood is as liberal as the NRA wants it.
Timely for the Daniel Taylor findings.
When I've asked others about their views on debunked popular delusions, they often reply, "I always knew [insert premise] wasn't true".
If as many people disbelieved these premises as self-report post-debunking, the premise would have never been popular. Media outlets would have never sold the rationale. The important feature of propaganda, is that you are not aware that it is propaganda.
Therefore, it is worth looking at current promotions and examining currently held beliefs.
Even if we arrive at the eventuality of a full end to the drug war, if all non-violent offenders are released - We still can't give those people their lives back. A self-righteous retrospective won't put the pieces back together.
What are the current mythologies the presses are selling and how do they impact civil liberties?
https://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=101033...
How are they meeting new people? I've never seen a suburb with a nightlife or quality restaurants.
How are they dating? Do they invite people over on the first date?
Where are they buying their groceries?
I understand the desire to have space if you're raising a family, but I can't understand why a single person would willingly live in the suburbs and choose not to own a car.
Grocery stores are abundant. Is the idea of bicycling with groceries impossible, because of media portrayals? I don't see that.
Cars are a hassle and expense. Insurance, repairs, fuel and tickets. The opportunity to be pulled over and searched after an alleged traffic infraction. If you want to leave the country and your rental lease it is another item to store.
When I was dating (I'm married now) I lived in the city center in an apartment, but it didn't matter because I met my wife online anyway.
We met up in public for the first time at a bar about a mile from my apartment. This would have been the same experience had I already lived in the suburbs, except being 23 at the time, she might've thought I was lame.
And I'll tell ya, I didn't meet new people living downtown anyway. I met new people through work. Who is going to bars or restaurants to meet new people? Nobody I know
I also feel like the mortality/morbidity risk would be materially higher such that it would not make sense for the average person.
Expect a similar outcome for the new biosecurity state.
Of course, these views are near heretical. Just like questions about the drug war decades ago. Then there are the horrors of a climate apocalypse which we must not question.
NPR can give themselves a pat on the back while promoting all of the above, without acknowledging their participation in the War on Drugs. It is all a bit rich, beyond hypocritical. Observe that most of the topics above are flame war material here at HN, well...
It's hours a day training.
Unfortunately before zombies drugs were a easy way to hurt people without remorse. Added bonus easy storylines.
Hollywood being a drug mecca knew what they were doing.
You can still see in this article the heavy Hollywood influence. They are treading carefully and probably don't even know why.
Doing this perfectly would not be easy, but I suspect perfection is not an absolute requirement.