Free Term Paper on Anti Families
In TV’s Anti-Families: Married . . . with Malaise, Josh Ozersky talks about
the repackaging of American TV families from Ozzie and Harriet into Rosanne.
From the point of view that the corporate world has manipulated television
viewers into watching TV he shows the exaggerations of current day dysfunctional
TV families. He goes on to discuss what the effects of these shows are on family
values.
Ozersky mentions the idea that a boundless discontent exists in our
culture and its beginnings are found with the family, “where social patterns are
first internalized.” Ozersky furthers this notion by saying that boundless
discontent means there are boundless needs. An understanding of the origins of
these boundless needs in American culture can be understood from the context of
The More Factor, by Laurence Shames. “An endlessly fertile continent whose
boundaries never need be reached, a domain that could expand in perpetuity, a
gigantic playing field that would never run out of room and on which the game
would get forever bigger and more filled with action.”
The corporate world
knows this all too well as they exploit the needs of consumers and manipulate
them into buying their product. In Ozersky’s words, “Given TV’s entirely
corporate nature, it is unreasonable to assume that the channels are referenda.”
Ozersky reminds us that many of these corporate executives are independent in
the market and have not experienced a rich family life.
What kind of effects
on viewers do these dysfunctional families have? Ozersky points out that in
mocking traditional family values on TV real families are sabotaged. He explains
how this happens by saying that problems within the family are trivialized
preventing any healing and only causing discontent.
While TV is criticized
on TV and even by us, we somehow become flattered and keep watching anyway. Why
do we do this? “ . . . To feel superior to TV and yet keep watching it,” as
Ozersky writes. It delivers the dream of having our cake and eating it too. By
criticizing TV we put ourselves above it, yet we deem it harmless and continue
to watch it anyway. Ozersky says that we have no power of our own to reject this
“anti-life world” which we see on TV because we have been manipulated into
thinking we have control.
In going back to the idea that American family
values portrayed on TV have changed we must accept that so has the real American
family. The corporate advertisers have shown us dysfunctional families in a
terribly exaggerated form that matches the attitude of our current generation.
By allowing television to penetrate our lives so deeply we subject our power and
ourselves to the corporations whose goals are only to gain money.