Post-Class Blog

After discussing Satire and Parody last class on Thursday, I began to think about different movies that base their entire plots on parody. Parody is the use of misery, sarcasm, ridicule of the like in exposing, denouncing, or deriding. The first movie that came to mind was Not Another Teen Movie.



Here we see the different movies parodied such as Bring It On, 10 Things I Hate About You, She’s All That, American Beauty, and many more. They make fun of the fact that every teen movie has the popular jock, the token black guy, the cruelest girl in school, the cheerleaders, etc. It points this out in a comedic way which shows us how often these stereotypes are portrayed in ‘teen flicks’. I found it interesting that they made fun of hegemony in the sense that the token black guy stays out of the conversation and is only in the movie to say stereotyped sayings such as ‘that is wack’. The white male is the one who always plays the jock and gets any girl he wants.

I found it interesting how in today’s culture we now parody other movies. Other movies that do this are Scary Movie, Date Movie, and Not Another Teen Vampire Movie. There are many YouTube videos where everyday people create parodies on movies such as Twilight or satires of the news and politics. This shows our participatory culture in that these people take something and make it into something new.

In class, we also discussed ideology in a way that made me had a better understanding of it. The Golden Rule is the notion that there is a ruling class and then everyone else. The Binary Oppositions include fast vs. slow, new vs. old, upward vs. downward, among many others. What I never realized about ideology is the fact that it tells us something discriminating about these … one is better than the other. This is how our culture operates. There are the bad and the good, the poor and the better. There is no happy medium between the two. With that said, ideology shows us the structure of our culture and how it operates.