I used to teach media criticism in graduate school and we would deconstruct images like these - it was amazing to watch the lights go on as the students realized that there are messages...and then there are messages. I had many students credit the class with changing the way they viewed media - we focused particularly on network and local news and other infotainment - and at least one student curse me for ruining television for him forever.
~springrain - I have had many similar experiences and it's frightening to realize just how much we've internalized certain "scripts" from the media. If I'm by myself at home, washing the dishes with my back to the door because that's how the kitchen is configured (bad feng shui, I know
) I feel uneasy and keep checking over my shoulder. Why? Because "this is the part in the horror movie where the Villain sneaks up on the Unsuspecting Female." We have scripts about romance, relationships ("You complete me." Gag on Tom Cruise.), gender, work, money, you name it. Sometimes I feel like just a compilation of scripts, running subconsciously while I pretend to be driving the mental contraption. Even resisting the scripts merely feeds into another script - "countercultural pseudo-bohemian poseur buys subversive t-shirt." Awareness of the irony doesn't necessarily render the following of the script a self-directed act.
I do think awareness is the first step to freedom, but I find that as often as not it leads to paralysis, at least for me. I stand there at the grocery store, for example, looking at sixteen different brands of peanut butter - this one reminds me of my childhood; this one has a very attractive label; this one's on sale; this one's organic; this one donates profits to charity - and wonder about the semiotic significance of my eventual purchasing decision. "What does this peanut butter say about me?" THEY'RE ALL FRICKING MADE OF PEANUTS. The only real difference is the branding.
I just read a great book by William Gibson - "Pattern Recognition" in which the protagonist is allergic to brand identifiers. She grinds the "Levis" logo off the grommets (?) on her jeans. Tommy Hilfiger gives her a migraine. The Michelin Man sends her into shock. I found myself noticing the presence of branding and it made me realize how incredibly saturated we are by advertisement and branding, how we ourselves are branded (remember the origins of the word - the hot iron searing flesh), how unaware we tend to be - it's just background noise.
So, short of the cataclysmic destruction of our society, is there any way out? Is awareness enough to reverse the damage? Is it possible to reclaim our psyches or are we forver doomed to be tools of the image-makers? Since they play on already-existing human tendencies to make everything MEAN something, is there any way to turn it off, or to turn their methods on them and produce more empowering meanings from the symbols we're given?