Yes Men

I had never seen either of the ‘Yes Men’ movies, so was intrigued to watch the older one. At first I was like, whaaaat? However, their technique seemed to be pretty effective in certain environments. I found it quite amusing that in the scholarly setting, people did not seem to react, for instance when one of the guys donned the gold ‘leisure suit’. It made me wonder if the people were even listening to the presentation or paying any attention whatsoever. Ironically, the students did react to the offensive presentation and in a pretty strong way too. Who knew that the students would pay more attention than the scholars? Hmmm.

I found it really hard to believe that they could get away with pretending to be the WTO when in fact they were exploiting that organisation... It seems quite scary to me and makes you wonder how many other people have had the same idea without others noticing what’s going on.

I feel that the ‘Yes Men’ movie did partly relate to our assignment for this week because it is all about adding a new meaning to something or twisting existing information to give a new meaning. Another example of this that I know of is on a comedy show in the UK called ‘Mock the Week’. (Check it out, it’s very funny). Occasionally on this show, they will show a clip which is a couple of minutes long, for example they might choose the now famous clip of the newly wedded royal couple greeting their public on the balcony of Buckingham Palace. A comedian from ‘Mock the Week’ would then alter that clip by adding their own voiceover commentary in order to make the clip amusing and something it was not intended for. Another example which my friend showed me last week is of an Australian politician – someone had taken phrases or just words that she had spoken and put them together to make a rather offensive music video.

Although these types of media manipulation can be offensive, they can also be very effective and are sometimes needed in order to bring a situation to light. For example, in my video for the found footage project, I wanted to show that achieving a goal is not going to happen just because the President’s wife wants it to. There are so many barriers in the way and misleading commercials which prevent a goal which will most likely never be achieved on a large scale basis.