The Purge - The Impacts of TV and How It Manipulates Our Minds and Relationships
The Purge - The Impacts of TV and How It Manipulates Our Minds and Relationships
In Louisville Kentucky, on a hot August Friday back in 2014, the Purge began. You remember the movie “The Purge,” right? It was a fictional thriller that came out one year before the Louisville event. It was a thriller which asks the question, “what if all crime was legal for one night, every year like a holiday?” Literally all crime: murder, theft, property damage, etc.
The movie starred Ethan Hawke and Lena Headey hiding in their mansion as gangs stalked their neighborhood. Well, in 2014, Louisville had their Purge, and it was advertised on Twitter as a violent city free-for-all that would last 10 hours and 30 minutes. An unnamed user posted the original tweet with the message, “Who's trying to get the Louisville Purge started with me?” Funny joke, but later, other posters joined in like Jeremy Daugherty, who tweeted promotional posters of the film with Louisville photoshopped into the title. The tweets claim these Purge posters have been found all over the city that same day. A Reddit user with the name of embritt74 created a Louisville Purge Mega thread and attached it to an official Louisville subreddit, where people started to message each other about the upcoming violence. Later that night, a popular online magazine, “Thought Catalog” published a live blog which included reports about increased violence, explosions, and gunshots throughout the city.
The next day, the Louisville Purge got picked up by Gawker, who called the “Thought Catalog” article a fictional account. During the following week, The Purge hoax was reported by the New York Daily News, the BBC, Time, People, E-Online, and Up Rocks as well as local stations and radio. The Louisville Purge may have been fabricated. It may have been a hoax, but the reactions and the money lost by businesses was very real.
In the AMC show Mad Men, Don Draper says how commercials dictate our perception of love: “The reason you haven't felt it is because it doesn't exist. What you call love was invented by guys like me to sell nylons. You're born alone, you die alone, and this world drops a bunch of rules on top of you to make you forget those facts.”
Don Draper is a cynic, no doubt. But there's no denying that marketing Disney and Hallmark have influenced our expectations of romantic love. If you don't believe me, watch the Facebook feed of all your single friends when Valentine's Day rolls around. Today, our topic is all about how Hollywood and marketing have colored our perceptions.
Myth 1: As rational adults, we can all separate TV from reality.
It was perceived that TV was bad for you as a kid. But for me, TV was compelling. It taught me how to interact with my friends. It taught me what the perfect family structure was. However, the lifestyle of a lot of people on TV life is unrealistic. Why we picked today's topic was due to these people on TV. Is the way they are hurting our own real lives? Is it making us better or worse? Does it change us? Are we setting our expectations and our bar based on what we see?
The average American watches TV 4 hours a day. So, if you live to 65, that's 9 full years of watching TV. Now, if you have put that much attention on something, it has to have some influence on you.
One of our delusions that I looked up is something called The Truman Show delusion. Have you ever seen the movie The Truman Show? It's a fun Comedy-drama starring Jim Carrey, and he lives a suburbanite life and doesn't realize he's on a television show.
Naturally, if we watch too much television, we do get sort of an inner voice for this. We get a narrator as if you are listening to an audiobook or read long enough. You can emulate the narration style or the vocal cadence. Needless to say, whatever you're listening to or reading, you can emulate that narrative. After the Truman Show came out, some people started developing real psychological delusions about this. It's called The Truman Show delusion, and it was presented by Joel Gold and Ian Gould. The Purge in Louisville Purge is a good one case of this. Another one was when somebody claimed the 9/11 attacks were fabricated, and cameras had been planted in his eyes to capture his reactions to the 9/11 attacks. So, he thought that these were happening to get a rise out of him like The Truman Show. He was diagnosed as a person with schizophrenia, so that explains why he started going through this delusion.
How often do you have to hear a commercial or narration on television before it sticks before it makes you susceptible? We're going back to old-school advertising, where they came up with something called the rule of seven. The idea is that if you run something past a viewer's eyes seven times or more, you will generally catch their attention enough to where it becomes actionable. Someone will begin to actually think when they do a commercial seven times, they might consider the ad.
I was looking at Psychology today, and LinkedIn had an excellent article about this, and it's called The Mere Exposure Effect. And it means that when a listener or viewer develops a preference for what you're showing them. It's with repetition, and the repetition reaches its peak around 10 exposures. If you overexpose people, then it can do more harm as it becomes annoying. The mere exposure effect says that it's after about 20. when you get up to the 20 range, you start heading to that point, becoming a dislike. In summary, 10 to 20 means you're going to get actionable responses from people if it's available. If you get that same commercial 20+ times, you start getting annoyed. With this in mind, you don't have to be suffering The Truman Show delusion. You are already in this. You're already a target of this mere exposure effect by just being a consumer who sees ads.
Myth 2: Well, at least we have an idea of how successful we should be. We live in the real world. So, we must have a firm grasp on how much things cost, and what our family structures should look like.
When I was a kid, The Cosby Show was the number-one sitcom. Everybody watched it every week. It's an African-American family with two doctors and perfect gorgeous kids. We all want Cosby's life, but I think more people relate to The Simpsons more.
So, how much are the apartments worth in television shows, and how much are we basing our own metric of success on this? For starters, have you seen the show Friends? If you have, you have witnessed Monica's apartment, the central apartment that they all hang out in. Estimates say that the apartment on Friends is about $4,500 a month. Not rent-controlled, meaning just open market, would be $7-8 thousand per month. In retrospect, the characters are all starting their careers. They're all young, and when they began the show, Monica was a chef, Rachel was a waitress. And those are the two primary Breadwinners. So, to make an $8,000 house payment, you need much more income than that.
Sitting on the carpet watching TV, I think, why are we so miserable? Why is our house such a dump? People on TV have amazing apartments, but they couldn't afford to pay the utilities and/or live in those buildings in real life. I'm setting my expectations based on somebody else's living accommodations when in reality, there's no way they could afford it.
As for The Simpsons, someone online had paused an episode right where Homer Simpson has his pay stub out. I expected someone to estimate how much he makes as a nuclear safety inspector. The show tells us Homer Simpson makes $11.99 an hour in season seven, which comes out to be about $24,000 a year and with inflation. That's about 37k a year now. Their house is estimated by Movado real estate to be worth 289k. And then a wife and three kids, it isn’t happening; It's very unrealistic.
I wanted to know how this whole nuclear family structure came up, with the idea that it gets very swampy and convoluted very quickly, even for somebody who's used to doing convoluted research. I ran into a lot of things like articles about Catholic structure and church structure, as it is like a lot of the family structure that we see today. A lot of it stems from Puritan and Christian religious beliefs or practice. And a lot of it also comes down to what's financially feasible. But the number one indicator I could find the one consistent metric for what is a nuclear family was Christmas. Christmas is the perfect picture of a nuclear family, and there's a real history behind why we have that image in our heads. We've got these images stamped in our heads, almost like they've been photo shopped into our brains for what a nuclear family looks like, and it really just comes back to Christmas.
Christmas movies just get played over and over by most stations and get so much exposure. It became the Christmas standard, and It's a Wonderful Life became the movie everyone just thinks of when they think Christmas. And then suddenly we get the image of a nuclear family.
Myth 3: At least we know what we want in a partner. No way the most fundamental need for human contact has been skewed by Hollywood, right?
As far as love, we're going to get into personal relationships and how much our expectations are formed by television. The first one is being attracted to the people on TV. We're attracted to those people because of their personalities and their looks. It also twists our expectations of our significant other who we marry. We now want our significant other to be all types of love. We want them to be tall, thin, handsome, beautiful and have a huge house. But the thing is that those who make a lot of money are always at work. People are expecting their partners to be all things to them, when they realistically can’t.
Something often heard is, “he's a wonderful man and a loving father. I like and respect him, but I feel stagnant in the relationship. I feel like I'm not growing, and I'm not willing to stay in a marriage where I feel stagnant for the next 30 years.”
My views are completely skewed on this. I usually read about people in the Victorian era where you would be married because it was financially stable. It made sense, and it increased your life. You weren't so much partners, more like business partners. And if you also loved each other, that was a huge bonus. Today, love and being everything is highlighted and has distorted relationships, which drives divorce. And divorce isn't really represented that well on TV.
So, we're going to move on slightly because we're covering a lot of material here. Have you heard of something called the Bechdel Test? We're going to transition to women being represented in television and film. This came out of a cartoon that was made by Alison Bechdel in 1985. And it was out of a comic strip called “Dykes”. The test was a snarky, interesting way to demonstrate that women are not represented well in most media.
Bonus: Greek words for love
Final Thoughts
As Americans, we have had a love affair with Hollywood's version of reality for generations, easily since the first official Hollywood film was finished in 1908, The Count of Monte Cristo. Since then, we've been borrowing our expectations and perceptions from TV, movies, and commercials and integrating them into our lives. We take brand advice and political beliefs from ads every day.
We associate landmarks and cities based on what we’ve seen on TV, almost like we've copied and pasted movies into our picture of reality. Our expectations for income, our homes, our apartments, and to a limited degree, our family structure crib from Hollywood. Even our expert station from our spouses. Our loved ones can be framed by Hollywood from a very young age.
In short, we've all been given a template of what to expect by movie and TV producers. So, if someone screams, "the Purge is on!" why wouldn't we believe it, even if it's just for a day?