Today was a milestone day, so to speak. My Film History class today was a lecture on interpretation within the context of a film, or even TV shows. So to show how someone can interpret something we watched a very famous episode of “South Park” entitled “Chinpokomon,” an obvious spoof on Pokemon. And believe me, it’s not every day in which one hears a lecture that digs farther into “South Park” than Kevin Smith digs into “Star Wars.”
For those of you who don’t watch “South Park,” here’s a synopsis of the episode. The boys in the show start hopping on the train with the newest toy craze from Japan called “Chinpokomon.” They obsess over this new fad so much that they start literally turning Japanese over it. They learn Japanese and start getting into the Japanese culture and everything, blissfully unaware though that a Mr. Hirohito of the Japanese Chinpokomon company is brainwashing them into battling against the evil United States government and bombing Pearl Harbor.
As usual, a laughably stupid scenario. After the episode, the teacher, Mr. Kerner, gave us all his thesis and interpretation of this episode. One thing I’d forgotten was that Hirohito was Emperor of Japan during World War 2, something which explains the whole Pearl Harbor connection. His argument: this episode was a reversed simile to history. Whereas in the episode we have Japan influencing the United States, what really happened was that the United States influenced Japan. And with force too. At the end of World War 2, the U.S. forced Hirohito and his country to abandon their culture and westernize. Also, we can learn from this episode that consumerism can be a very dangerous thing because of the effects it has on children.
Alright, I’ll accept that as a theory. After all, it’s only a theory. Now here was my take on the episode. Hirohito was a war-man. He and his country wound up trying to take over China during the Chinese civil war. They allied with Nazi Germany in a mission for conquest. When they did that, of course, they started influencing parts of China that they had conquered with their own culture. Then, after he was forced to surrender, parts of Japanese culture obviously remained. Just look at pictures of Japan, Japanese movies through history, music and everything else. There’s something about it that Westernization certainly didn’t do. The image of the samurai is still a pretty strong one. Unless we invented that in our culture.
As for the opinion on consumerism, I guess that sort of goes along with a lot of the San Francisco State mentality. A lot of folks over there I already know believe that capitalism is evil and whatnot. Heck, I just walked through their bookstore today and it’s no surprise that there were books on Mao Zedong out on stands there…among other books that bashed Bush and promoted atheism. It all seems to go together. In my opinion though, capitalism as a whole is not evil, of course. If it was, most countries of the modern world wouldn’t be resorting to it just to keep their economy alive. Communist China, for instance. Not so communist anymore with that whole capitalism thing though.
At this point, Lauren would probably tell me that I’m getting to interpretive here, so I guess I’ll stop. But there’s one more unrelated thing that I wanted to bring up that was somewhat amusing. Near the end of the class, we started watching “The Wizard of Oz” and inevitably, the legend of the “hanging dwarf” came up. This legend has been debunked time and time again, of course. I even recall a time where I spent quite a lot of time convincing a total idiot that it was only a myth. Of course, when the time comes that you’re supposed to see the hanging dwarf (which was really a bird stretching it’s wings), there was an unusual amount of chatter behind me. I turned around and whispered loudly to them “Did you guys see the hanging dwarf?” It got some laughs, but after class was over, someone did ask if there was really a hanging dwarf. The teacher didn’t know, but some girl in the audience did say to us all that there was a suicide but not on camera.
All things considered, I believe Mr. Kerner and I are going to have an interesting time this semester.
