Blog Post 3: Competitive Salad Making

Media is everywhere, like it or not (usually not), it’s impossible not to be inundated with nearly every form and fashion of media there is. Sitting in the doctor’s office, there’s a soap opera playing in the corner. Waiting at the bank, there’s a rack of glossy magazines. Driving out into the desolate countryside to try to escape the ever present hand of the media…there goes a billboard for Billy Ted’s truck stop/funeral home.  Media. It’s everywhere. It’s all the time. It’s an inescapable side effect of living in an economy driven by consumption and at a technology level that includes not dying of the plague. And while it’s not by any means the worst thing that’s ever happened to humanity, it’s certainly one of the most annoying. That, and UTD parking.

Being a media consumer is just a fact of life, and really it’s always been a necessarily passive act. Until, of course, it’s framed within the context of a literary analysis. Now years and years of being trained to find simile and metaphor and symbolism has all come flooding back on a vengeful tide of English teachers and term papers. Every show on Netflix is now akin to Shakespeare, every advertisement a sonnet. Suddenly all that time spent underlining the work of Mark Twain has been translated into something far more ubiquitous and twice as hard to ignore. Like it or not, now I’m not just a consumer of media, I’m an active consumer of media, and it’s a real headache.

You wouldn’t think Chopped had any sort of deeper meaning but you would be wrong. The logo, the music, the lighting, the edits, all of it has a purpose and all of it makes what equates to four adult men and women trying really hard to make a salad into an action packed highly tense competition of the gods. It’s ludicrous, it’s absolutely ludicrous that Chopped, a competitive show that almost always ends in a grown man making ice-cream out of raw fish or boiled beats, can be made to seem on par with something Bruce Willis would star in. But that’s the power of timing, camera angles, and sleek steel graphics. And now Chopped is ruined for me. Ruined. How can I ever take bread pudding seriously again, knowing it’s all just a sham of color manipulation and sound effects and that in reality it’s just a very high energy episode of Martha Stewart? I can’t, that’s how. The nerve of this class.

I really liked Chopped.