Wednesday, April 14, 2010

Third Analysis: American Cartoons and Marx

The American public is bombarded by cartoons today. There are many sorts of American cartoons, many which make people happy through wise comedy that exceeds the expectations of their silly visuals. One such sort of American cartoon that has become popular on a mass international scale is the cartoon about the average family. An example of this is the wildly popular television series Family Guy.



The main characters of the show being the average family makes Family Guy particularly interesting to analyze from a Marxist perspective, much like I've done to the movie Silent Hill in reflection 6, - is Family Guy for or against the revolution?

Clearly Family Guy glorifies the working class life, as seen in the above clip. The father, Peter, shows no interest in intellectual (bourgeoisie) matters like the newspaper except insofar as they assist him with his silly, crude sense of humor. Turning the intellectuals into jokes is a recurring theme in Family Guy and most average family cartoons. Family Guy characters that are intellectuals are hilarious farcical exaggerations - people with outrageously long "sophisticated" names, a man with such an exaggerated high-class accent that his words are inaudible, the sophisticates at the New Yorker magazine who don't have toilets because they have no anuses. Marx would no doubt find these characters to be a great show.

However, simply that Family Guy glorifies the working class does not necessarily make it a Marxist show. Perhaps the appreciation of the working class is being used in the case of American cartoons as a way to put false satisfaction for capitalism into the American working class. For example, Family Guy father, Peter, may celebrate the working class in order to keep workers happy while they're being taken advantage of elsewhere - economically by the bourgeoisie. If this is the case, then Marx would be adamantly opposed.

In the end, a show like Family Guy cannot be judged so simply as just being a 'show for the people,' regardless of its Marxist overtones. Capitalists may just as easily have used the Marxist image for their own profit. It's impossible to know the truth, but if we recognize the stranglehold that capitalists have and enforce on the media, the latter idea seems more realistic.

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