Cultures divided by a T.V. - A big difference in programming hinders cultural understanding

Probably the greatest thing about Fall Break weekend was the fact that I could stay up Sunday night without fear of Monday-morning repercussions in terms of my class attendance. For some reason, there's actually a pretty good late-night Sunday lineup. Comedy Central shows Dave Attel's Insomniac, which is even more fun over a few beers (for kicks, you could try to keep up with Dave, but the show's only a half-hour, so I'd be leery) and The Critic (only one episode this week thank you, Mr. Stand-up-guy-who's-not-as-funny-as-Jon-Lovitz), and my personal favorite channel, Cartoon Network, shows a whole bunch of really, really weird stuff that they call collectively Adult Swim. How weird, you ask? Well, let's just say that one of the bits is about a meatball, a box of fries and a milkshake that solve mysteries (sort of. they're not very good at it). Weird, but oddly entertaining in a way.

I could go on and delve more deeply into the wonders of Aqua Teen Hunger Force, but that's not really what I was looking to devote this column to. One of the other shows on at that late hour is a Japanese program called Cowboy Bebop. It's an anime, a genre of which I've been fond for some time, although I do have to admit that I have yet to make it all the way through Akira, after two tries. The source of my interest lies with a summer in early high school during which a friend and I worked our way through all the anime the local video store had (well, almost all they had some that was 18+, and we were 14 or 15 at the time) while drinking over-sweetened instant iced tea and eating Ritz crackers by the box-full. We discovered such classics as The Ultimate Teacher, in which a half-man, half-cockroach (though we don't find this out until the end, because before the last scene, in which he's defeated by a half-man, half-spider, he looks perfectly normal, except that he loves walls, which doesn't change the way he looks, but was still an awfully strange thing to say) takes over a thoroughly undisciplined school and sets things straight with his strict discipline, which then becomes over-strict and evil, after which it's discovered that he's a secret government project and is defeated, end of story. Oh yeah, and someone uses a stack of coins as a weapon.

Is anyone else confused?

Don't get me wrong. we kept watching anime, even after that, but we were confused. We wondered if we had missed something. We wondered if it came off better in Japanese. We kind of hoped it did, actually. It would make us feel better. Gradually, we came to accept that our lack of understanding was a cultural thing and that the fact that it came across to us as an exercise in Dada was part of the appeal. Or something like that. after all, 14-year-olds aren't necessarily the world's greatest theorizers.

Since then, I've become an ardent fan of Dragonball Z, and I have to say that although I generally have no idea what's going on in the two episodes I've seen, Cowboy Bebop is beginning to grow on me, although judging by what I can catch in the rapidly-moving decoupage scenes that make up the opening credits, it just might take itself a bit too seriously.

But how can you not love a show with an end theme like The Regular Folk Blues (at least I think that's what it was.the thing I remember most is that the title, sung as part of the chorus, was in phonetic English)?

This leads me to my theory, the crux of this whole column, which I admit has been floundering a bit until now: I think that Americans just might be culturally unprepared (possibly given that most of the movies made here are about explosions sometimes sex, too, but mostly explosions) to relate very much to movies from other cultures. I even have another example. This week, I watched A Story of Women, a French movie set during World War II.

Basically, the story is this: a woman, raising her children on her own due to her husband's absence in a POW camp, performs an abortion to help her pregnant, unmarried neighbor. Later, she meets a prostitute named Lulu at a hairdresser's shop and, to form a bond with her, tells Lulu of her own experience with illegal dealings, and tells her that Lulu should look her up should she ever be "in trouble." Word spreads, and soon enough, she's performing abortions for money.

In the mean time, her husband comes home, and for some undefined reason, she won't sleep with him. She uses the money from the abortions to move the family into a bigger house, one room of which she rents to Lulu for her and her clients' use. Then she starts having an affair.

Eventually, her husband, disgusted at these goings-on, turns her into the police by means of an anonymous decoupage note, and the government, given its interest in moral matters, takes a very harsh view of it and sentences her to death. Standard downward spiral, it seems, and yet, somehow, the movie doesn't really get preachy. Well, a little bit towards the end, but by and large it doesn't seem to have what in an American movie would be the inevitable moral message one way or another.

Unless of course, I missed it. I got the impression that it was just about what the hardships of war and greed can do to someone, but nonetheless, I was having some trouble getting exactly why she kept going morally downhill. It just contributes to my point. We're unprepared by our media exposure for unclear motivations and plots that aren't strictly out-of-the-box.

The theory's still in its formative stages. I hope to gather more information as time goes on. Look forward to future analyses of other non-American films that I'm not quite sure if I understand or not.