you got a society that bases everything on looks and not alot else ...... and thats capitalism and thats america baby!
surfin isn't all wrong. This is society’s fault as much as it is Rolling Stone's. It's naive to pretend that there is such thing as agenda-less media. All media is a business and all of it is a form of
entertainment. Obviously Rolling Stone is out to sell copies and they know exactly what they're doing with this. As controversial as the cover is, there will be way more people interested in picking up a copy then boycotting it, regardless of their feelings toward the choice of picture (for or against).
Natural Born Killers (one of my favorite movies of all time) is a parody of this exact situation. The message NBK sends is the media circus exists only because, and is fueled by, society's addiction to the "train wreck". We need to be flooded by play by play, not a beat skipped, graphic media coverage of all the details of horrific and tragic events. I'm not saying if it's right or wrong, I'm just saying that it's a pretty twisted aspect of society’s nature. I'm not saying that I'm not guilty either; I'm as much a product of society as everyone else.
When I saw the RS cover I couldn't believe it. That photo completely sends the wrong message. It
glorifies,
celebritizes, and makes a
sex symbol out of a twisted idealist and murderer. Immediately I associated it with images from NBK.
Those type of images from the flick were always really amusing to me, and I like the message they send as symbolisms in part of a parody of this matter. But to see it realized on the cover of RS was really disturbing to me.
You can say that the picture sends messages like, "
the enemy looks just like you"
, "it could be the boy next store" and all that kind of stuff. I agree that those are important points to convey, but they are way more tastefully done in written word as part of the article itself. Using that picture to convey these ideas is tasteless, insensitive and puts a whole different spin on the matter. I don't disagree with some of the messages the picture sends, I disagree on the delivery and approach.