Embedded Files
Professor Imada's lectures on freak shows, more specifically those orchestrated by P.T. Barnum, opened my eyes to Hollywood's tendency to misrepresent the history and lives of real people. The aspects of reality that aren't so shiny and pristine are often glamorized, disregarded, or downplayed. The complexity of cultures and the plights and prejudice faced by others are reduced for the sake of time and plot.
The news, at the time of this page's construction, is filled with endless headlines of the growing panic over the spread of the corona virus pandemic (officially known as COVID-19).
Of course, I understand why they do this—it's what sells. Audiences love the idealistic worlds movie characters live in. Most people want to watch things that are (on the whole) happy and make them feel good. Most people want movies where the protagonist is the good guy, good trumps evil, and love prevails. If audiences wanted to see things that were sad and depressing they would go outside or watch the news. Hollywood thrives on selling us tickets to escape from our own realities. Let me make it clear that I'm not trying to say that what Hollywood does is inherently evil or anything. I just think that it's important to acknowledge the sources of the entertainment which we consume and be aware of the narratives which they spoon-feed us.
In the Twilight series by Stephanie Meyer, the Quileute people, a real Native American tribe with a small reservation in Washington state, are made out to be werewolves in a giant misrepresentation of their culture. Rather than becoming werewolves, Quileute legend has it that they were actually transformed from wolves into humans by a transformer. There's no problem with Twilight telling a story about vampires and werewolves. The problem lies with the way that the movie is most likely the only exposure the general public will ever have to this culture and the portrait it painted was just completely and utterly wrong.
For another example of Hollywood rewriting reality, let's look at the 2017 movie The Greatest Showman. If I watched that movie without any sort of critical lens, I would probably get the sense that the main character, P.T. Barnum, was this amazing, successful, family guy who loved his wife and created this sort of refuge or utopia for people ostracized for their physical differences. There's nothing inherently wrong this movie's message or its optimistic, rags-to-riches storytelling. The problem lies with the fact that P.T. Barnum was, in fact, a real person and most of the people who served as the oddities for his shows got much less than the happy endings we see in the movie.
This is the trailer for the movie if you haven't seen it and wanted to get a better sense of what happens.
The exhibit "What is it?" posed the costumed African-American man as the missing link between man and animal. This further perpetuated the perceived bestiality, incivility, and unevolved nature of non-white peoples in American society.
Far from what the movie would have you believe, Barnum was probably not all that concerned with creating a big, happy family among his spectacles. He was more concerned with using them to draw in crowds for his own profit. The "freaks" in his freak show were mistreated not just by the outside world, but also when they were in the show. An African-American man named William Henry Johnson became the star of Barnum's exhibit "What is it?," which essentially posed the man as the missing link between civilized man and animals. Johnson had very little say in his participation in Barnum's exhibits as he had had severe mental disabilities and was sold into the circus business by his parents as a child. For 10 years, he had been forced to put himself on display for onlookers to gawk at.
These acts were not treated as people, but as animals or objects. In life and sometimes even after death they were made into exhibits so that "normal" white Americans could feel better about themselves. I suppose it was because even if they weren't perfect, at least they weren't like the "freaks" in the freak shows. These extraordinarily bodied people were so far disassociated by others from being human that even after her death, the bearded lady Julia Pastrana's body was put on display by her own husband so that she could continue to make him profit postmortem.
Cook, “Of Men, Missing Links and Nondescripts: The Strange Career of P.T. Barnum’s ‘What Is It?’ Exhibition.” Freakery (pp. 139-157)
HumCore Winter Reflection
HumCore Winter Reflection
I find that my writing for my website and writing for essays differs quite a bit in its level of formality. On my website it is much more effective to write relatively casually. I can use the first person much more than I would consider acceptable in an academic paper and I feel more comfortable trying to address my audience directly. Depending on the instructions for assignment and its nature, I am also able to include visuals that might seem a bit silly. This is especially obvious on the pages "A Mirror for Disney" and "A Post Summer Break's Dream" from last quarter since those assignments required quite a bit of creative writing and thus I felt I had more freedom to include whatever visuals I deemed fitting. Most of the ethos I developed came from the sources I cited and linked to in my assignments. This quarter I definitely felt that I found the topics that I was able to link with my prior knowledge of pop culture to be more interesting. When Professor Imada covered Twilight's relationship with the Quileute nation and P.T. Barnum I enjoyed being able to deepen my understanding of things I had never previously considered critically.
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