| Popis: |
Truth and Consequences interrogates the ways in which over two dozen works of fiction and film find meaning in the game show. Writers and filmmakers use the game show intermedially as a metaphor for what it means to be a person, a lover, a family, and a citizen in the media age. Despite media culture’s promises of global equality and connectivity (and one’s efforts to realize that promise), individuals wind up isolated by market-driven deception, wealth, or ethnicity. People use media to achieve greater intimacy with others, but the market nudges them to keep their distance from each other in the name of exploring options. Other networks can still assert themselves, such as the family, but can only sustain themselves if they openly defy and rewrite the rules of the media culture they inhabit. Although America espouses a commitment to democratic freedom, the state partners with imagemakers to make one’s lack of choice entertaining and resistance self-defeating. Amidst these obstacles, Americans still feel called upon to remember, to connect, to buzz in, to answer in the hopes that an escape awaits in the next round, behind the next door. |
