Porkins Policy ReviewUncle welcomes Spike Robinson and Pearse Redmond to the broadcast. They are both cohosts of the Undue Influence In Popular Culture podcast series. Here, the conversation runs the gamut from the truth about magazine crews to the utility of a good spaghetti mop. Uncle was very pleased to have learned something during this episode.
In this month’s episode, Pearse and Spike take a look at two cult-related episodes from the popular cartoon shows, The Simpsons and King of the Hill.
In The Simpsons episode entitled “The Joy of Sects,” Homer joins the Movementarians, who promise their followers a life of Bliss on Blisstonia – if only they give up all their money and follow their Leader, by toiling in the lima-bean fields. The whole town falls under the group’s spell until Marge gets the family out. Spike and Pearse discuss the inaccurate Hollywood “cult” tropes – and consider the few bits the episode got right – as well as dissecting the extremely erroneous “deprogramming” of the Simpson family.
Moving onto the King of the Hill episode “Fun with Jane and Jane,” Pearse and Spike explore what makes this a much more accurate picture of a high-control group – and which tropes weren’t so accurate. In particular, they discuss the excellent job Hank does in helping Peggy and Luanne leave the group on their own terms, in sharp contrast to the forcible kidnapping and deception Marge employs to “rescue” her family in the Simpsons episode.
Before you tune into this informative and high-spirited discussion, we encourage you to watch the shows so you have them fresh in your mind. Also mentioned in this podcast is a former episode with Christian Szurko, available here.
In this month’s episode, Pearse is joined by Spike Robinson to launch a new series, “Undue Influence in Pop Culture,” where they plan to examine various popular movies, television series and books through the lens of undue influence and coercive control. This month, they compare and contrast two episodes of classic Star Trek: “Return of the Archons” and “A Taste of Armageddon.”
“Return of the Archons” is a classic example of how Hollywood portrays thought control or “brainwashing”, with a population of blissed-out automatons, only breaking out of tranquility for their purge-like Festival – a society completely under the control of a supercomputer, which was programmed six thousand years ago by the “savior” of their race, Landru. The people are glassy eyed and speaking in a strange, stylized sort of language, with no autonomy or independent thought.
However, it is in “Taste of Armageddon” that the real face of cultural coercion can be seen – for two planets fighting a mechanized, computer-calculated war, their cultures have become so tightly controlled that otherwise sane, rational people – people who talk normally and even persuasively about their “system” are so under the influence of their leaders that they will “willingly” step into vaporization booths, rather than face the indoctrinated phobia of what might happen to their world if they do not comply.
Using these two episodes as a starting point, Spike and Pearse discuss what mind control is, what it isn’t, and how our popular culture informs our opinions on this highly complex subject.
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