oliver pierce #3

My blog post will be about my response paper. In the last blog post I made a biting criticism of Alexandra Rowe’s post about how pop culture is important to academia. Whether I believe this or not is not important. What is important is that I relay how much I enjoy creating an argument. So I asked myself what would be the most enjoyable prompt for my response paper and I chose option number 1 and decided to rail against my comment about her blog post. By seeking a compelling answer against my knee-jerk reaction to attack her point that “cotton candy”or popular culture is important to academia I uncovered new insights I wouldn’t of found if left to my own devices.

“Dr. Strangelove” is a film about the funny and unavoidable destruction of the known world. This kind of story is labeled as political satire. It’s also quite funny. Rowe makes the point that this kind of entertainment has just as much bearing in academia as The Great Gatsby. Although she doesn’t say that verbatim, she implies it. When presented with the historical context of the film one can be sure that it is meaningful and important in its message. It may have had a different message in the time of its release but today it has one message. The cold war was only cold because of the constant threat of total annihilation.

The two goliath mockumentaries of the 21 century, “Parks and Recreation” and “The Office” can be used to better understand the socio-political backdrop of 2004-2015 America. In “The Office” the characters face very real problems of downsizing. This fact is made apparent before the Great Recession hits! What does this mean? This means the term downsizing was well known and harped upon before the most recent economic calamity hit the world in December 2007. How then do the employees of Dunder Mifflin manage to ride out the year 2008? By way of the fact it is just a TV show that isn’t really dependent on any economic factors other than those of its television network. But the employees still deal with the same world we all live in, well maybe a funnier world. There are probably no bosses like Michael Scott that haven’t already been fired rightfully. The point is that the sociopolitical backdrop of the world is referenced in the Mockumentary “The Office.” This is important because it is a departure from the beloved sitcom “Friends” which took place in NYC during the 9/11 attacks but never so much as causally references the attacks in one episode. In the world of “Friends” the twin towers still stand. The 9/11 attacks are referenced in “The Office” multiple times because their falling’s effect on the realistic and halfway true world of reality is what “The Office” is made of. Reality. This particular bit of pop-culture doesn’t lie to us about the world by negating certain topics on the forefront of our minds. By sticking to reality “The Office” maintains historical significance and ceases to be just “pop culture” or “cotton candy.”