Entertainment as indoctrination…

This piece has some very good comments on the corrosive effect of much of what passes these days for entertainment, said comments being stimulated by the recent Oscar (Yawn! Ho hum.) awards.

Ah yes, the Academy Awards gala-that annual confab of Hollywonk glitterati promoting silly hair and partial wardrobes-has come and gone. In its wake, there is good news and bad news.

The good news first: Despite the ignorati, er, glitterati balloting for the best films of the year, the only votes that really mattered were those Americans cast at the box office.

In Hollywood’s estimation, the “Best Picture” nominees were Brokeback Mountain (26th), Crash (49th), Munich (64th), Good Night, and Good Luck (89th) and Capote (100th), in order of each movie’s box office gross-in other words, America’s opinion of these pictures. In all, Hollywood’s Fab Five grossed $235,643,912 and averaged $26.3 million in profits.

On the other hand, the top five picks according to the rest of America were Star Wars: Revenge of the Sith, Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, The Chronicles of Narnia (The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe), War of the Worlds and King Kong. These films grossed $1.41 billion and averaged $125.4 million in profits.

You’ve got to love it! On the other hand:

…here is the bad news: entertainment is the subtlest and most effective means of ideological indoctrinating. It creates a psychological opening through which cultural messages bypass the intellectual filters that arrest most input for critical analysis. Because the context for these messages is “entertainment,” they get a free pass into the mind’s cultural context, where they compete, at a subconscious level, with established ethical and moral standards. Those at greatest risk for this form of indoctrination are adults, whose behavior is strongly characterized by their emotions (you know who you are), and all children.

There’s more to this discussion, & it’s well worth taking a look at, and giving it some thought.