Family Moab

Family Moab
In Arches National Park

Wednesday, March 5, 2014

Mirror Unreality

Just continuing on this thought process that we never see real life portrayed in the media. The Oscars just celebrated all of the folks in movie-making that go behind making unreal scenes: hair and makeup, costume and set designers, cinematographers, and film editors. They construct alternate worlds, peopled with characters, not actual individuals. And yet we try to replicate what we see by striving for physical "perfection," the right clothes and makeup, the immaculate house as our stage set and the hero / heroine as our significant other. We mistake the images for truth, and we seek to mirror unreality.

These are first world, or "champagne problems," had by those of us with food in our bellies and a roof over our heads, but the media's false images affect anyone around the world with access to television or film, or internet, and I would guess it only worsens the divide that they feel. That thought calls to mind images from The Hunger Games, where citizens of the Capitol dye their hair and skin and create crazy costumes and jewelry from a surfeit of time and money while the inhabitants of poor outlying districts struggle to avoid hunger. Is that what we seek to replicate? The images of the Capitol were only slightly over-the-top, and struck a bit too close to home; the movie made me feel that I should question everything in order to avoid such a fate.

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