[Some] Koreans’ Perception of The West Wing

Posted on April 27, 2008
Filed Under Korea, esl & other teaching, films&tv | 7 Comments

A few weeks ago, in one of my classes, we watched that episode of The West Wing titled “Han,” where a North Korean musician playing in the White House informs President Bartlet of his wish to defect, in preparation for a panel discussion on the depiction of leaders in American media. (We also looked at scenes from a King Arthur film that the department had on hand.) I found my students had some interesting things to say about it, though.

Well, not “say,” in many cases, but I always have students write up a Prep Sheet and a Reaction paper, before and after a panel discussion, respectively, and I’m working through the Prep Sheets for the West Wing panel right now. There’s lots of good stuff, such as discussing the logic of a fantastical Democrat Administration on TV during a Republican Administration’s rule, or the relative lack of women in high positions in the West Wing even in this supposedly utopian, egalitarian, “dream” administration. Lots of good stuff. But there’s lots that took me by surprise, too.

While I’m on a marking break, I thought I’d note a few things among my students’ reaction papers that were really odd, unexpected, or surprising, for anyone interested.

West Wing Cast Image

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7 Responses to “[Some] Koreans’ Perception of The West Wing”

  1. MarkDGuppy on April 28th, 2008 2:36 am

    I’ve heard it elsewhere, and at first blush it looks like the right answer – a lot of issues that Democrat’s deal with are usually sexier and easier to dramatize than Republican issues. Funding for afterschool lunches is visually more interesting than signing tax cuts into law.

    That said, and while I’m not Ayn Rand’s biggest fan, I do think there is a pontential goldmine for someone who does want to sing the praises of being an entrepreneur. Along the same lines, and I believe another potentially “Republican” friendly Tom Wolfe’s The Right Stuff was a brilliant work of non-fiction. It’s hard to believe that we don’t see more movies and novels set on air carriers or involving aviation or space travel (but in the nuts and bolts sense, not the Star Trek sense) and I fail to understand why creative people have ceded so much ground to non-fiction writers.

  2. MarkDGuppy on April 28th, 2008 2:41 am

    Whoops, garbled that a bit. I meant to say “potentially ‘Republican’ friendly topic is military aviation and space travel.”

  3. gordsellar on April 28th, 2008 12:46 pm

    Mark,

    Well, forgive me if I’m being partisan but I find it’s less often that Republicans deal with things that would benefit me were I an American. It’s hard to make things sexy when they benefit the masses less and a small elite more, and this is, indeed, what my impression of Republican policies are like. It might be unfair, but it’s my impression.

    On the entrepreneurial narrative: yes, Rand is horrible, but actually, in SF, the whole business/enmtrepreneurship trope is still big. In the hard SF area, for example, Stephen Baxter has written several works (especially the Manifold novels) that deal with space travel and antrepreneurism; but space travel is a dud for many of the hard SF writers for reasons Charles Stross discusses quite sensibly here.

    There are sensible criticisms of his arguments in various places online (like here and here) but very few of the objections are reasonable within a sensible time-scale, or given the technologies we can reasonably expect to have in the next fifty or hundred years.

    In other words, the reasons space travel is a bust for entrepreneurial types is because to date, it hasn’t ever made a profit, and it’s unlikely to do so for the next while yet.

    Yet, I should note, Stross and others often focus on economics, on characters that could be considered “entrepreneurs” of a kind, and often enough in a positive way.

    The easy reason? Because air setting a story on an air carrier or (realistic) space shuttle is hard if you want to (a) do it right and (b) write about something other than the space shuttle or air carrier. Mostly (a), I think. Jetse de Vries has accused the SF-writing community of being lazy in its habitual turning to dystopia and shunning optimistic or celebratory perspectives on innovation and change, and I think he may well be right in that.

    I know you weren’t specifically talking about SF, but it seemed a fitting genre to point at for the discussion, and it’s the one I know best…

  4. Mark on April 28th, 2008 10:35 pm

    Well, you don’t have to feel all that guilty about being partisan, as what I wrote dealt largely with impressions, and it’s one I’m willing to cede, that at first blush, Democrat’s do have the high ground when it comes to those sexy dramatic issues. Keep in mind that you run the risk of sounding like the late, great New Yorker film critic Pauline Kael, who upon learning that Ronald Reagan had been elected or re-elected asked, “How? Nobody I know voted for him.” Conservative commentators have been dining out on that comment for years.

    However, if you want to move this beyond partisanship and actually get into someones head, go back and watch a film like Lock, Stock, and Two Smoking Barrels, Snatch, or The Bank Job. None of the guys in these films are corporate fatcats, and some are more criminal than entrepreneurs, but the fact is, even if they never voted “tory” or “Republican” as individuals, or saw themselves as corporate guys, it’s groups of lower middle and middle middle voters like that who put Republicans into office.

  5. Mark on April 28th, 2008 11:09 pm

    Caddyshack is perversely enough a good place to start when looking for the appeal of Republicans, despite the fact that the villains are a bunch of country club Republicans.

  6. gordsellar on April 28th, 2008 11:11 pm

    Oh, well, I know people who vote Republican. They just perplex me. Then again, anyone who has real faith in Democrats perplexes me too. I just like the ideology the Dems bait-and-switch better than the ideology the Republicans do.

    And I don’t have to go as far as LS&2SB or those other films; middle-class people like my own mom seem to be sympathetic enough to the right-wingers in Canada on image and sound-byte alone (sometimes without knowing anything about their platforms, even) to put right-wing governments into power. I think it’s a marketing thing, and the Right has always been much better at marketing itself to the masses than the Left, even the very moderate Left.

  7. Mark on April 29th, 2008 12:35 am

    Perception is reality;)

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