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Is the purpose of US television news solely to induce a state of abject terror? It certainly looked like it the other day. Hurricanes, exploding manhole covers, black people shooting one another: the whole natural world is attacking Americans! I was also watching an amazing documentary about Fidel Castro on PBS. It turns out he was marked for evil from an early age.
Which brings me to the new Thesis You Should Write. Prison Break (torrents) is an odd program. It’s structured at all points to be as reassuring as possible: at one point, a flashback was inserted _in the middle of a speech_ so that the flashback ended with the character saying a line he then immediately repeated in the present day. As Geo pointed out, the contemporary practice of revealing the plot in the ‘next week on…’ section of the show likewise has the effect of avoiding any possible uncertainty; the cliffhanger has been replaced with the teaser so that you know what you are getting and will be comforted when it arrives. But _at the same time_ as being Foucauldian in it’s form, its content is also as Foucauldian as fuck: the main character _has tattooed a map of the prison on to himself_.
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“Is the purpose of US television news solely to induce a state of abject terror?”
Well, yes, of course it is!
Comment by Me @ 9/23/2005 2:07 am