Dear Viewer, Everything You See is Fake.
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Last night I was sitting and eating dinner with my girlfriend when a commercial for Disney’s new The Lion King came on TV. We watched in silence as the epic imagery and recreations of some of our favorite childhood characters and songs danced across the room, retelling in just 30 seconds that beautiful story about love and friendship that so many of us have enjoyed as kids or parents. As soon as the trailer ended, with an image of Simba’s face painted in red clay on a cave wall, my girlfriend turned to me and said, “That’s going to be so good. We have to see it.”
I wasn’t sure why exactly, but I knew as soon as I watched the trailer that I didn’t want to see it. When I told her this and she asked why, I found that I had become strangely emotional, on the brink of tears for a reason I could not explain. I sat with my lips shut tight for fear that opening my mouth would cause me to start visibly crying, leaving her to wonder what the hell was going on with this 28-year-old sitting at the dinner table with tears in his eyes over clips of talking animals.
I forked through my chicken without saying a word, rummaging through my head to try to figure out why this commercial, designed to evoke a feeling of awe, instead evoked sadness.
As I thought more about it, I realized that what I was feeling was a sort of devastating hopelessness. There was something about the fact that this movie will capitalize (to the tune of hundreds of millions of dollars) on the emotional experience of witnessing such stunning natural beauty, and that all the proceeds will benefit a company with an unimaginable global environmental footprint. Parents and their children are going to pay to marvel at the sites and species disappearing in front of our eyes, and the price of admission will go into the pockets of a corporation that in many ways embodies the ethos that is driving their very destruction and extinction.
There was something deeply frustrating about that. I finally opened my mouth to respond:
“I don’t know. It feels exploitative. It feels so…fake.”
The point of this is not to pick on Disney or The Lion King. There are much bigger fish to fry in the environmental struggle and The Lion King was merely a catalyst for the thought that led to this article. What I think it is illustrative of, though, is not only how routinely and effortlessly our world’s problems are separated from their sources, but how often the source of a problem is positioned — explicitly or, in this case, implicitly — as a solution.
Consider, for example, Disney’s recent launch of the “Protect the Pride” campaign, which included a $1.5 million donation to the Lion Recovery Fund to “celebrate the upcoming release of [its] groundbreaking new film.” Combine the heartwarming story, the goosebump-provoking scenery, and a multi-year campaign to help double the lion population, and all of a sudden the very corporation many view as the archetypal American capitalist enterprise appears to be standing right alongside us in the fight to rescue our planet from greed.
What [The Lion King] is illustrative of, though, is not only how routinely and effortlessly our world’s problems are separated from their sources, but how often the source of a problem is positioned — explicitly or implicitly — as a solution.
Clearly, the feeling that what I was viewing was somehow fake bothered me, and as I thought about it for the rest of the evening, it occurred to me that this property of fakeness could be applied to almost anything I saw.
As a consumer of media, this is painfully evident everywhere. Commercials are designed to get me to feel a certain way so that I will buy something, always concealing the negative aspects of a product or service, or the company that provides it. Corporate crisis responses find the most impactful ways to ask for forgiveness, promise change, and distract me, oftentimes from negligence that has been hidden for years and continues once the public moves on to something else. Corporate media and news agencies — comprised of six companies that own 90 percent of the media — dictate what I view as real and important. The politicians I see on TV employ pollsters, analysts, communications firms, and writers to take advantage of underlying sentiments and seize control — and while it is not true that all politicians are ill-intentioned liars, the reality is that they all practice selective truth.
This sort of overt deception is largely the domain of marketing and communications professionals who engage in it unknowingly in order to do their jobs. The Lion King, to be clear, is not in this category. Still, though, it implicitly sends a message to viewers that Disney is as inspired by the wonders of our natural world as they are. It becomes hard for viewers not to feel that the all-powerful and influential Disney cares as much as they do about preserving these things. And maybe Disney does care a whole lot — but they certainly do not care about it more than their profit, and that’s the part you’ll never see or hear about.
All of these explicit and implicit deceptions, when taken together, create a shield that protects the public from the truth and the powerful from public outcry. At times, we punch holes in it, but they are awfully skilled at patching it back up.
