A certain YouTuber of my acquaintance gets very upset at a certain political figure for having once poured a beer badly. He has Feelings on the subject, and he’s mad at her for having basically How Do You Do, Fellow Kids her way through it. He has not, so far as I can tell, stopped to consider that maybe she hadn’t ever poured a beer before, but she had to look like Just Normal Folks for the cameras. And our idea of Just Normal Folks is heavily influenced by our media in a way that perhaps we don’t consider—in this case, especially given that I’m pretty sure most of my friends who drink beer drink it straight out of the bottle or can.
Obviously, an important factor in the whole thing is that, yes, the movies are an industry, and the studios believe that the way to sell the most tickets is to appeal to the widest array of people. Which means making as many characters as “normal” as possible—it’s one of the reasons all those “quirky” women in films are clumsy, because that’s a quirk that doesn’t make them unattractive to the audience and therefore reduce their marketability. However, it’s also true that the studios are inherently conservative—if they preserve the status quo, they always know what will make them money. So they encourage people to believe that there is one way to be.
Where this comes up most often, I think, is in issues of representation. Ask anyone who’s outside the cultural norm how often some aspect of themselves appears on the big screen. Especially when that’s not what the movie is actually about. How many movies have mentally ill characters without the movie’s being about mental illness? How many movies have LGBT characters without that being some important aspect of the movie—either the plot or the film’s sole intended audience? Even something as simple as looking ordinary—or, worse, below average—might as well not exist as far as the movies are concerned, and that’s a place where the movies are outliers, not a statistical norm. Most people are not mentally ill; most people are not as attractive as movie stars.
People in the movies are overwhelmingly likely to be cis het white dudes. TV is a little broader, but not by much. Men will enjoy sports. Women Be Shopping. Childfree couples are rare; so are single parents unless that’s what the movie is about. People in the city rent; people in the suburbs own. Everyone has a car, unless they live in New York. No one’s a vegetarian unless they’re weird. No one is either deeply religious or vocally atheist, unless that’s what the show is about. No one is poor, unless that’s what the show is about—and characters who think they’re poor are still better off than the average American in a lot of ways; see the episode of Friends that actually addressed issues of class. And, yes, there’s one.
Our media leaves us with both a deep distrust of and a craving for conformity. “Pleasant Valley Sunday,” by The Monkees. The planet Camazotz, in A Wrinkle in Time. The HOA-run perfection of “Arcadia” on The X-Files. At the same time, there’s a definite expectation that people will fit a certain mold unless that’s what the show is actually about. You will know how to pour a beer, because it’s unthinkable that you don’t drink or that you just drink out of the bottle or can. And because of that, even real-world humans have a hard time breaking that mold. Gods forbid you want a spicy mustard, you know?
