Motives For Entertainment: The Case For Pop Culture

Trent Butikofer

February 2, 2017

Mrs. Clayton

AP English Lang Comp 2nd hour

Motives for Entertainment: The Case for Pop Culture

Every year it happens. New TV shows, movies, books, and songs are released, constantly pushing the limits of the depiction of illegal, violent, sexual, and just plain unrealistic content. Every year people wonder why these types of pop culture garner such a large audience, despite being so immoral and impractical. Is this type of pop culture really what society wants? Do they really reflect society’s true principles in life? They do – but not in the way one would think. Pop culture reflects society’s desire to develop their own lives – through resolving real-life conflicts and facilitating self-image and ambitions.

David Denby, staff writer and film critic for the New Yorker, explains the appeal for unrealistic high school movies; “My guess is that these films arise from remembered hurts which then get recast in symbolic form…” (819). He speaks on the appeal of westerns; “…when the gangster dies, he cleanses viewers of their own negative feelings” (820). The appeal isn’t the violence of the westerns or the entertainment of the high-school dramas, it’s the satisfaction and resolution people get when they see the villain fall. Writer and editor Chuck Klosterman relates this to the “Walking Dead” craze; “A lot of modern life is like slaughtering zombies…Zombies are like the Internet and the media and every conversation we don’t want to have…as long as we keep deleting what’s in front of us, we survive” (847,848). Zombies represent all the things people want to avoid. Every zombie that dies feels like a conflict being resolved, every villain that falls feels like a real enemy being crushed. Watching fantasy conflicts be resolved gives one motivation to solve one’s own

Writer Daniel Harris explains this, “We expect [celebrities] to be the pillars of our society, moral leaders who scold us for the errors of our ways…We seek to… alleviate the sense of belittlement we experience from living in the shadow of its inconceivable affluence and glamour” (842). People covet after celebrities’ bodies because they desire to relieve the pain of not being beautiful or successful. In a submission to The Inquiries Journal, Taylor M. Chapman further elaborates on this, “[media] certainly help[s] to shape the most important aspects of being human, like ‘our identities, our dreams, our hopes, our ambitions, and our fears.’” Pop culture plants the idea that celebrities are the pinnacle of society, the ultimate humans, and the masses believe it, obsessing over the smallest aspects of their lives in order to ease their lack of self-confidence. The last appeal of pop culture is society’s desire to achieve their ambitions. Musician and American writer James McBride speaks to this with his experiences with rap music,