I've been binge watching The Simpsons lately as Easter Break leaves me no motivation to do college work. Fortunately, I stumbled upon something relevant to fill up my somewhat dead CoP blog, which is the couch gag from an episode titled MoneyBART. Banksy uses this opportunity to criticise, in a controversial manner, the outsourcing method for production that Fox has been using, which is highly capitalist in nature, as it increases the efficiency of the production to catch up with the tight production deadline. It is a necessary capitalism, but it comes at the expense of the welfare of the animators due to the rigour of the work.
Although Banksy's political statement was for greater good of humanity, the depiction of the situation is taken to the extreme, and does not portray the actual situation that is happening. As a result, offended the CEO of AKOM, the South Korean animation studio which is involved in the production of The Simpsons. Banksy's intent is to clarify the message by using explicit visual cues, some media authorities perceived that he went overboard, even in the most trivial detail like the stereotypical representation of Asian race. But, why would Fox allow the publication of content that damages their reputation?
On one hand, this could be seen as a unique case of the media loosen up on the strict media control to depoliticise the working class by allowing artists to voice out their opinion in popular animated sitcom. Thus, helping the masses to realise the flaw in capitalism and consumerist culture, and realise the importance of creativity and independent thinking to improve the current situation. On the other hand, it has the potential to depoliticise the working class even more since audience could give a sense of pity towards people in the developing country and feel helpless at the same time because they could not do anything to improve the situation. This leads to the acceptance of situation, in which the working class would carry on with their daily routines thinking that they have better lives as compared to those workers in developing countries. The masses becomes desensitised towards such dystopian scenario, and hence passive, to prevailing socio-political issues, which is where the problem lies as Adorno had identified in his theory of Culture Industry. According to Adorno, the culture industry gives off retrogressive traits to the masses, as their way of thinking is shaped by what is deemed to be 'popular' by the upper class authorities, so that they are not capable to think independently and come up with novel ideas that can change the society for the better.
On a totally unrelated manner, analysing this animation leaves me a thing to keep in mind as an artist: it is important to be objective even when making explicit satire contents so as not to offend people and avoid trouble. There is a reason why Banksy doesn't go public, because there is a chance of him being chased down by unhappy politicians, or even Asians because they are under-represented in the couch gags. (Seriously, our eyes ain't that small)
