Made my fair share of media in my career. This article explains why good advertising works. And claims it is only long format narrative tv and film. With the number of commercials out there selling fried fat and sugar water to fat, dying Americans this guy is worried about a shark purge from 30 some years ago that he doesn't cite a source for. Won't someone please think of the hammerheads?

He just chose to concentrate on movies and their effect on our culture. I agree that he could have used advertising to illustrate his point, but the writer chose not to approach the subject from that angle. I like the article for the way it explains how we use stories to understand our environment and history. Humans need stories to motivate themselves to act in order to accomplish things, for better or worse.

Where is the writer saying ads don't do this as well? I may have honestly missed it...

... unless you are schizophrenic or otherwise crazy.

The movie angle is even dumber than the gun angle.

A good (or successful) movie influences your view on a subject. How many times have you left a movie and thought, "I never thought about (x) that way before?" We don't generally think of 'influence' and 'control' in the same way, but the things or people that influence us have a certain degree of control over us. The degree of influence that someone or something has on us varies according to our mental health as well as other factors.

... and saying "make you think about something or reconsider something" is not the same as "make you do something".

A person that does something evil because he saw it in a movie was already evil or crazy and I really do not want to get into any more censorship type solutions. We already have some by requiring a person to be of a certain age to see certain material and that is enough.

I just think we should acknowledge the influence that media has over us so that we give a little more consideration to an idea before we embrace it. Cracked is a humor site and I don't believe it's the author's intention to change any public policy with this article. It's comedy, but any good comedy makes you think a little bit about your beliefs. Examining our motivations to act, even if done in a light-hearted manner, is a good thing.

But very few people limit themselves that way, most Americans marinade themselves in entertainment and infotainment much of which has little to nothing to do with objective reality..

Eventually the bullshit stories we see on the screen do influence our thinking to a much greater degree than most of us realize..

Thanks for sharing!

It's the best, maybe only, way to explain the insanities of our societies.

Most of us wander through a world of make-believe.

The movies are bad enough but what the bloody hell, for example, is a "free market?" Of what possible utility is a system that allows poor people to starve and destroys the natural environments we all depend upon for survival? When do we start ignoring the stories in our religious texts that tell us we should all reproduce like rabbits or locusts or algae in a pond, knowing full well that this kind of exponential population growth never ends well.

Things can't just keep going the way they are without a rude awakening in our near future. I think that is what a lot of our "prophecies" actually predict. Humankind continues on its path until it becomes unsustainable, a crisis happens, and a new paradigm emerges. There's really no "prediction" there, it's just part of the cyclical nature of life and it's the way things have always been. I suppose we'll either change or a few of us will become something else and the process will begin again.

then what makes the rabbits do it?

We are quite ordinary animals, but in our stories we are something else.

We have anthropomorphized ourselves.

I got cable a couple years back, hundreds of channels, and almost all of it is the shallowest sort of tripe.

It seems that the shittiest fantasy is still better than reality for most people.

is taken up with "reality" shows. Contests and real people following what their own mean-spirited little head tells them to do, rather than what some writer puts into a script and plot. How many episodes of Surivor will there be? How about Big Brother? The Amazing Race? Wipeout? The Bachelor? Star search?

I did not get the Rifleman channel.*

But you didn't like Sean of the Dead or all the TV shows about Ants?

Once I took Leonard Maltin's movie rating book and looked at his rating of all the movies I have seen. Not that I agree with all of his ratings, but as I went through the list, it made me think - I sure have watched a lot of crap.

*from an SNL skit when cable was first coming out, they mocked the idea, saying that there were so many channels that there was going to be no way to fill them all - except with specialized re-runs. That there would be a channel devoted just to re-runs of old TV shows like Rifleman.

My "premium" services repeat the same limited list of movies over and over again; they just twiddle the lineup ever so little now and then so that you get the illusion of novelty, but 90% or it is hero movies, debased comedies, and TV sitcom sort of things with the sort of focus on bodily functions that you expect in High School. In fact that's exactly it, it's almost all infantile.

So if they have the rights to show, say, Pretty Woman and Hook, then they are going to repeat those movies in their schedule for a month multiple times, to get the most value for it. But that's only a theory to explain all the obvious re-runs. Probably a lot of TV is for the junior high crowd. Who has more time to watch TV?

And those movies are wasting assets.
In fact you could argue that TV itself, the whole industry, is itself obsolescent now.
A good thing too. What a disaster it's been.
And your point about the nature of the audience is well taken.

Heck. "Braveheart" is quite accurate compared to "JFK."

We have an excuse for why film-makers screw up like this on movies like Braveheart, most of the stuff it's based on is propaganda.
Historians back then were not exactly known for being accurate.

"JFK" got two facts right.
Kennedy was killed.
Clay Shaw was put on trial.
The rest of that movie was total fiction.

There is no excuse for Oliver Stone(d)'s taking so many liberties with the truth.