October blog post

Mediated culture

When I was a kid I never thought of Disney as a way of using subliminal messages behind their movies because I was too innocent to realize what was going on but now that I’m older and I understand more things, I get to see things I’m not ok with in the movies. Last year, I had to do a project in which I had to subtitle a video and a friend chose, a video where using Disney movie songs a guy through a parody, denounced the subliminal messages hidden behind those movies. 

If you think about the movie the beauty and the beast, we can see the typical stereotypes where the woman is at home and needs to clean and obey to the man but if you think more about the movie, who gets married with a beast in real life? Isn’t that considered zoophilia? What are we teaching to kids?

Also, we can see how racist they are in every Disney movie as we can always see that they promote the white supremacy and we never see references to black people or Latinos in a context where they are smart or they are always the evil person of the story. Moreover, in Mulan for example, we see the stereotypical Asian features where the woman can’t speak her mind in front of a man and if she does so it’s not well seen because it used to be an oppressive culture, but things change and being that way in the past doesn’t necessarily mean that it’s still that way in the present. So as it was mentioned in the video played in class the other day, one of the speakers said “its racist but hey, its Disney” so does that mean that Disney has the right to do whatever they want just for being Disney? I don’t think that’s fair especially since they know they get their messages to a lot of children and the images they see on TV influence them as they grow up because children, imitate everything they see, “we shape ourselves to conform to someone else’s expectations for us”.