Character

I found our discussion about characters and characterization very interesting. It makes sense that to build a character you must constantly being putting them into new situations, I believe Mr. Jenkins put in terms of "piling stress, to force the character to reveal how they will behave in all situations. It became almost a game as I was walking home, trying to recall all of the characterizations I had seen recently. I kept trying to think of characters who always act the same no matter how the situation changes. The first thing that came to my mind were all of the muscle men films, with characters who seem to always get out of a situation by lifting something over their head. I also began to think about sit-coms, and I couldn't help but wonder if these are truly characters. While yes these characters are put into different situations each week, but none of them seem to have any sort of increased pressure, you have no sense that anything can go wrong. It may simply be that because they are sit-coms that are shown every week, the audience loses the ability to feel any sort of slight risk. Family Guy has often poked fun at the non-linear, non-existent for the most part, timelines of sitcoms and maybe it is this "no loss" guarantee that makes sitcoms so effective. When people come home from a nine to five job, they don't want to sit and think about how miserably they are living their lives. They don't want to be asked and presented with questions about their mortality and consciousness, they want be told when to laugh. They want to watch fake beings live out fake lives, and the sit-com gives them a chance to go inside the conscious of these fake beings for the ultimate voyeur experience. It allows them to gain a false sense of happiness. They laugh on queue as if the studio applause light was mounted above their mantle, and continue to live in agony only to find comfort in being able to participate in the life of someone who has everything, someone who knows not death or sorrow.
I will admit that I enjoy television. The film major inside of me wants to smack myself for some of the shows that I watch. To be honest the cinematography and camera work in television is very disheartening. The constant cuts and boring composition may be some of the factors controlling our attention span and turning us to zombies.