| Friday, October 28, 2005 |
03:16 - Dropping the mask
|
(top)  |
Last week's South Park episode really seems to have made some waves. Not only is it the most talked-about episode I've ever yet seen in the blogosphere, it's even scored a place as the object of Zack Parsons' derision at SomethingAwful.com:
South Park recently did an episode about global warming along the same lines as Crichton's book. God knows I didn't watch it because I can get my fill of juvenile quasi-libertarianism from the Internet, but I'm guessing from the commercials I saw that the episode was about how liiiiiiieeeeberals keep making up these ridiculous doomsday scenarios about global warming that never come true. Thanks for setting things straight, South Park. I know I can rely on you to get to the bottom of issues of global importance and then thumb your nose at them and say "here's a song where Cartman calls someone a bitch." Then at the end you can have Stan give a completely straight-faced restatement of your heavy-handed yet wholly sackless political opinion in case the crayon-eating untrainables who still watch South Park failed to get your point.
Wow! They must really be earning that "edgy" badge these days, if they're drawing fire from SA. It's a matter of course that just about every entity in pop culture that pokes its head above the ledge eventually comes in for mockery on SA, to say nothing of within South Park itself; if the writers of either production actually like some other show or actor or public figure, the best compliment they can ever afford to give them is to ignore them. Public figures who appear on South Park and aren't lampooned negatively I can pretty much count on one hand—Sidney Poitier for one, Radiohead, The Simpsons, and precious few others, most of whom are treated neutrally (Bush) or as meaningless, absurdist ciphers (Robert Smith). Explicit endorsement is all but unheard-of. SA, for its part, can't afford to say anything nice about anyone or anything either, lest it look like it's not disillusioned about something.
It's pretty clear that South Park, like The Simpsons, has up till now enjoyed the lofty status of being something the SA writers didn't feel was worth picking on, because, well, they watched it themselves. (Obviously Zack knows it well enough to have a ready-made snarky reason to act like he doesn't watch it.) But now... hoo-boy, now there'll be hell to pay. South Park has officially crossed the line into the well-populated territory of shows and pop culture icons that it's hip to make fun of, and to make fun of people for watching. It used to be edgy and smart and subversive in a way that most shows that claim to be "subversive" could only dream; now it's juvenile and simplistic, the province of "crayon-eating untrainables". Ain't it funny how that works?
I think it just means they're on the right track. Especially considering that, y'know, they're like, y'know, right about so much stuff.
|
|
Brian Tiemann
