http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m4ozVMxzNAA
In this commercial “The crying Indian” we follow a Native American Indian travelling through water that is swarming with pollution. He pulls his boat ashore on to a repulsively littered earth and starts to cry at what he witnesses around him. As he approaches a nearby highway, a non native member of America throws some litter out of his/her car. The narrator then states “People start pollution, people can stop it”.
In this scene we as a viewer are set up so that everywhere we look there is pollution and litter to give the effect of how poorly we treat the earth as a society. The writer of this commercial is showing us two opposing cultures, American’s today and the Native Americans. In our culture we are aware that the Native Americans are caring and connected to their land so the writer relies on our cultural knowledge of their heritage to make us feel ashamed on how we are treating the land today. We recognize the Native American very well in this clip, we get close up shots of him as the tear runs down his face whereas the other people that are featured are in their cars on the freeway and are portrayed as cold and negative towards our land. We today are all guilty of littering at some point in our life this is why the commercial impacts us so much. But does this mean that we do not care about our earth? I don’t think so. We have come along way since the campaign to stop littering was introduced. It is now a rare occurrence to see people blatantly throwing litter straight out on the streets. This commercial is using the extremes of how bad littering could be in order to get the point across, and it does. It causes us to revaluate how we treat our land, and whether we take as much care of the world around us as we should do. It also poses the question on whether maybe we should all be crying with the Native American.
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8. Todays society pollutes and litter an enormous amount. Some of us tend to not care or bother cleaning up the filth on the sides of our roads and cities. We just accumulate all of this filth and its ruining our planet. Pollution and littering was the big idea behind this commercial or advertisement.
ReplyDelete4. I think an assumption that you can take out of this commercial is that American's are messy slobs. They come and take over a land that isn't there's, that was someone elses, and don't take care of the land by poluting it. We are technically sharing this land (even though we've taken over it) with the natives and we should take better care of our home.
ReplyDeleteIt is essentially saying that Americans and filthy slobs, and that we are destroying the Earth with litter and other hazardious materials. The reality is we are not actually throwing bags of garbage out the window every minute. The ad is hoping that we surrender to improving our bad habits and really realize what we are doing to destroy our Earth. In realizing the ad is hoping that people can find a way to reverse the situation we have come to be in.
ReplyDelete4. This ad is blaming us (humans) that we are ruining the earth with our trash that we do not dispose of properly. Then now because of us the earth is polluted and not as beautiful as it was.
ReplyDelete5. The power relations are the indian representing nature and our present civilization representing littering and as a result, destroying the environment. The negative aspects that are excluded are that they didn't show the results of what happens after littering besides the crying indian. However, they probably didn't litter as badly as depicted in this video.
ReplyDelete2. The ad is portraying basically that the "white man" or the average person is poluting this earth. By showing the contrast of the indian begining canoeing so peacefully then going to a bunch of people in cars just throwing garbage out on the highway. Though both sides of this may be true in special cases, I doubt you will find indians canoeing down rivers everyday, nor will you find a string of 15 cars just throwing junk out of thier cars. This huge gap between this exagerated portrayal of good people who don't litter, and the bad people who do can be bridged by the fact that at some point in life most people have indeed littered, just not commonly. I do however have to say that maybe this gap was larger back when the commercial was made in the 1970's, but I highly doubt it was nearly this extreme.
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