Media’s indeterminate power

ECHOING THE late “Muppets” creator Jim Henson, a Manila TV network invites viewers to watch the Filipino movies it regularly airs by saying that life’s like a movie.

Unfortunately it isn’t. Only in the movies—and, one might add, in the soap operas that daily attract millions of watchers all over the planet—do debutantes marry stevedores, justice for the aggrieved is ever gained, and doing good rewarded. In life the former aren’t likely to even meet; but if they do, the differences in their backgrounds and economic and social status are likely to be so vast they might as well be from different planets. Unlike in the movies in which Fernando Poe Jr. often played an avenger, in real life the justice-seeker who takes up a gun to avenge a wrong is likely to end up dead somewhere, or in prison.

No matter. Movies and TV soaps are thought to be forms of escape, which supposedly accounts for their popularity. But the paradox is that they also speak to the human search for the meaning absent in reality—for a world of moral order in which good is rewarded, evil punished, and love triumphs over class divisions and every other adversity.

In the 1950s the Nobel laureate Albert Camus thus described the essential role art plays in human existence as a form of rebellion against an indifferent universe. Camus’ essay on “Art and Rebellion” (In his collection of essays titled The Rebel) was focused on the novel and the poem, but might as well have been talking about the movies as well. Because they’re both a mass medium as well as an art form, movies and their video counterparts that millions watch over television and the Web have a far greater reach than novels or poems, and therefore a level of influence difficult to accurately gauge. What’s likely, however, is that they shape perceptions of life among their vast audiences, and, although forms of escape from the hard realities of living, also drive expectations of it.

Both news and entertainment media also shape behavior as well as perceptions through the stereotypes they encourage. The Hero and the Villain, the Lover and the Loved One, the Criminal and the Law Enforcer, the Victim and the Victimizer, the Soldier and the Rebel, the Politician and the Concerned Citizen—all are media types that have been, and continue to be, defined by the media.

The Victim, whether of a crime, a natural calamity, or a political upheaval, almost always behaves when within range of a camera or microphone in predictable ways that virtually replicate the behavior of other Victims as they’ve been presented by the media in reports on real events as well as fictional melodramas.

As with Victims so with Victimizers. Before a camera or mike, even serial killers behave with predictable professions of either innocence or ignorance, as does the rapist, the kidnapper and the mass murderer, in a demonstration of the power of the media to invite imitation of how, so say movie and TV serial scripts, such media types think and behave.

In a reversal of the Aristotelian formulation that art is an imitation of life, life now would also imitate both art and the media. Millions after all live under their influence, whether by vicariously sharing with movie and serial heroes and heroines, and even their real life portrayers, lives of excitement, glamor, and most of all, some meaning—or by aspiring for the same lives, in too many instances through whatever means.

The media also construct as well as propagate, and not only through the movies, images, and visions of alternative lives. Advertising regularly draws media viewers, readers and listeners into other worlds where life’s not only easier but also predictable, pleasant, and governed by the order their own real lives lack. Inevitably, for some at least, the media through advertising contribute to the yearning—and the attendant frustrations—for lives different from the miseries and meaninglessness that characterize existence for those caught in the vise of poverty. The images of wealth and power, and of beauty and glamor, also drive the crimes against life and property so common in poor countries where the media are nevertheless part of everyone’s existence.

Because the media include in their embrace such art forms as movies and soaps (no matter how improbable or plainly bad the plot) as well as advertising and news, the range of their power is in many ways still undefined and only partly determined. What is certain, however, is that that still to be explored power exists, making media practice among the most promising as well as the most dangerous means human beings have devised to understand the world and to communicate with one another.