ENG 303 Professor Gary Konas Liu Meiyi 12/1/13 Illusions and Truths of Visual Media When I finished

watching Snow White, I really thought one day my prince would come to pick me up on a white horse. He would give me a true love kiss and I would become his princess and live happily ever after. I also had dreams about a group of people with black suits brought me to a palace and their boss told me that I was his only daughter and he sent me to a normal family for my safety and now it was the time I should inherit his estates which were worth billions of dollars after being affected by tons of soap operas. But as time passes, to believe that TV programs and movie scenes will happen in real life is getting harder and harder. We gradually master the regular patterns of storytelling: the main character will never die, good will defeat bad at the end, and the most powerful weapon in the world is love. So how can visual media continue to control our minds to be their loyal fans and keep donating money to the media industry? They have tricks. Tony Soprano, the main character of HBO TV series The Sopranos, is not a typical good guy. He is a gangster, kills people, and earns illegal money. If the main character is a bad person, what do we do to make him likable? Well, we portray him as who he is, a real person. A gangster with a normal life. Here was the time that TV series began to tell the truth. James Harold, a professor of philosophy at Mount Holyoke College who wrote the article A Moral Never-Never Land: Identifying with Tony Soprano, admits he likes Tony

Soprano for who he is. In his article, Harold tries to make the audience agree that Tony deserves his love even though knowing he is a morally bad person. Can you still like a person despite the fact that he is a vicious and dangerous criminal? Harold brings up this question and gives his answer, I wont like him if he were a real person who lived down the street from me (Signs of Life in the USA 274). This is a progression of the audience that in their subconscious they see these characters as signifiers within the art world instead of real people. Those producers make these characters real enough for you to like them but at the same time not afraid of them. Also, knowing the real and complete person means to see him from different perspectives. In The Sopranos, the character Tony is portrayed not only as a gangster, but also a father, a husband, and even a patient. These different stances represent Tony as a fully developed person who cannot be defined as simply good or bad. Although the audience knows he is a fictional character, they can still stand on Tonys position and get an idea about gangsters real life. Most parts of Tonys life are the same as yours and mine, except killing some people and being worried about being killed. He takes his daughter to a nice college; he has a Russian mistress, young and beautiful, and also a wife, elegant and smart. These signs are typical for any rich man and represent his personality as well. Once the audience has discovered good traits of the character, they will like him, pity him, sympathize with him, and are happy for him even knowing he is a gangster. Harold says Tony is morally bankrupt (279), but I dont agree. He is simply doing his job. He doesnt randomly kill innocent people on the street, he kills other gangsters only when he needs to. It shows he has moral concepts and wont hurt anyone who does not deserve it.

Who is morally bankrupt? The murderer of 20 children among 26 victims of Connecticut elementary school. Audience tends to like those main characters, because they are made to be likable. It is a good trend that filmmakers have stopped creating perfect characters who are absolutely morally right. In Gossip Girl, there is no morally totally right or perfect characters, but they are all adorable. These characters are closer to the real world and in the real world, people make mistakes. But there are some characters who never make moral mistakes; Forrest Gump obviously is one of them and having an IQ below 75 may be the reason of being morally perfect. The problem of a movie with a morally perfect character is that it can be subversive. Aeon J. Skoble, who teaches philosophy at the University of Central Arkansas wrote the article Forrest Gump: A Subversive Movie and thinks that way. If Forrest Gump is a subversive movie, then I find many popular movies subversive. All the movies about Superheroes and superpowers are subversive. They teach people that the world is never fair: some people are born with superpowers; others are so special as to be chosen as superheroes. If you are not one of them, then you have to have a good fortune and wait for a radioactive spider to bite you. Forrest Gump can be seen as a superhero because he did saved lives and won champions. But his superpower is his low IQ which makes him can only focus one thing at a time and try his best to do it. Are you willing to be the hero and still pay the price? As far as I know, those heroes all have gone through extreme toughness to become the people they are and it isnt easy. In my world, there is no subversive movie, only people who look at it from a subversive point of view. We dont have superpowers, so we work hard, and try to survive. I find the same purpose of these subversive movies is to give people hopes in the real world rather than anti -

intellectual in Skobles words or envy other peoples fates. The real World is hard, but it doesnt mean we should give up. I understand Harolds worry from his article that some people think art is dangerous because of its manipulative power; I also understand Skobles claim that decent movies can be subversive. But instead of saying these visual media are manipulating our minds, I would like to say they are playing with our conventional thinking. When I read Hamlet, I never doubted his fathers ghost was telling the truth, but who told you ghosts cant lie? When I was watching Forrest Gump, I thought Jenny would come to Gump at the end and live a happy life, but who told you beauty wouldnt die? A lot of signs in daily life we take for granted but never ask why. Jessica Hagedorn in her article Asian Women in Film: No Joy, No Luck asks why Asian women in films are always pathetic and unfortunate. She thinks Part of the reason is Westerners dont like to see Asian women who have good fate and I totally agree with her. Hagedorn says, Contrived tragic resolutions were the only way Hollywood got past the censors in those days. With one or two exceptions, somebody in these movies always had to die to pay for breaking racial and sexual taboos (Signs of Life in the USA 388). Those filmmakers make illusion for the audience and subconsciously force them to believe what they want them to believe. It reminds me of my trip to Chinatown in Chicago. I thought it would be nice to see Chinese there. But to my surprise, they seemed more welcoming to non-Chinese people. What surprised me most was the setting of Chinatown. It was old, very old. Every shop reminded me of my childhood, like at least 10 years ago. Do these Chinese really not know what China looks like now? No, but they prefer to be that way because this is what Chinatown should look like in Americans eyes. Chinatown has not changed for decades, what you see in a Bruce Lees movie

can still be seen in the 21st century. I am glad that Chinese culture always seems so mysterious and historic to Westerners, but the miserable fate of Asian women as one of the classic signs of our culture is remembered by them at the same time, which doesnt seem right. Charlies Angels, as one of my favorite western movies in childhood, has an Asian woman actor named Lucy Liu. Her fate in the movie is not miserable at all and shares the same characteristics as Cameron Diaz and Drew Barrymore, a gorgeous fighter and sexy spy. But the reason why the bad fortune doesnt come to her is because she doesn't have the characteristics of Asian women except her looks. We are living at a time that is hard to tell if things are good or bad. Various visual media provide us complicated facts which are already attached to related social conventions and stereotypes. The task for the audience is to distinguish truths from illusions and not be fooled easily. You may agree or disagree with them; you may like or hate them. But as far as you have your own judgments towards them, you belong to a wiser reader group than most.