Examples for this quadrant aren’t nearly as easy to think of compared to the first quadrant, but I think there’s one to be had with The Expendables and its sequel. When I say “doesn’t really matter,” I mean that I won’t think you’re a bad and/or stupid person for missing the point. It was easy to interpret, but it doesn’t really matter if you didn’t get it. Let’s start with the top left hand corner and work counterclockwise through the different quadrants. I just happen to think that the two-by-two matrix is a convenient way of visualizing scenarios controlled by two variables. (I swear, I have not been to business school. Using these two variables, let’s create a handy two-by-two matrix to illustrate four archetypical scenarios for misinterpretation of pop culture:
#Original open gangnam style free#
That being said, feel free to duke it out on the comments.) I of course acknowledge the inherent subjectivity of any such exercise. (Note: for the sake of this post, we’re going to bracket any discussion of what it means to “correctly” “interpret” the “meaning” of a piece of pop culture.
#Original open gangnam style movie#
Someone who actually believes that The Muppets is a liberal conspiracy to brainwash children is missing out on the positive themes of an entertaining movie and, more importantly, exhibits the lack of sound reasoning that goes along with being trapped in a nightmarish right-wing propaganda machine. The consequences of misinterpreting The Muppets, however are more severe. Sure, we’re missing out on some interesting social criticism, but it’s targeted at a different cultural context, and our not getting it is not some indicator of lack of intelligence or sensitivity on our part. The consequences of us not getting “Gangnam Style” aren’t particularly severe. The meaning of “Gangnam Style” is nearly impossible for a non-Korean to get, whereas the meaning of The Muppets should be obvious to anyone who isn’t trapped in a nightmarish right-wing propaganda machine. We missed the point, but not in the same way that Fox News missed the point when it saw a nefarious communist subtext in The Muppets. When thinking about our failure to fully understand “Gangnam Style,” I considered it in the context of these examples. We’ve traced the source of Ronald Reagan’s misappropriation of “ Born in the USA,” we’ve taken down Fox News’s allegation of communist ideology in The Muppets (with a Marxist interpretation of The Muppets, ‘natch), and we’ve written thousands upon thousands of words about how critics and audiences repeatedly fail to appreciate the critique of fascism in Starship Troopers. Here at Overthinking It, we’re no strangers to episodes of pop culture misinterpretation. It turns out I was just talking out of my ass.) In other words, we were all missing the point of the video, and we would have continued to have missed the point were it not for those articles that explained the meaning for us. I was mostly talking out of my ass just to be clever, but I thought it had a fighting chance of being accurate. (Using my thin-but-nonexistent knowledge of Korean culture, I wrote several paragraphs analyzing the symbology of the horses through the lens of Chinese astrology. But even with the help of translated lyrics, our interpretations were incomplete at best and laughably off base at worst. This is made a concerted attempt to decipher the video, starting with the visual aspects that aren’t dependent on understanding the lyrics.
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