Community Ken Burns

On a recent Community episode (S3 Ep14), the show parodies Ken Burns’ Civil War documentary with a Greendale Community College Pillow Fight Mocumentory.  The Ken Burns documentary is a comprehensive nine episode series that should be shown in ever high school in America. This, while always hilarious, is also one more example of the ground breaking way Community shows us the mediate forms in which we communicate and experience the world today, in context to this episode, as compared to say Civil War Times.

I also can play violin theme, Ashokan Farewell that plays throughout the the episode. It’s a rustic soulful melody.

To set this up for those who do not follow the show, Troy and Abed start another whimsical hi-jinx of building a huge pillow fort in the school. Dean Pelton encourages the pair telling them about a world record. Troy wants to go for the record and to use blankest to cover ground. Abed, in his true to character neurosis, sees blankets as mediocrity, along with some egging on of Vice Dean of the Air conditioner Repair School cameo, John Goodman, he stands against the blanket fort from taking up enough room in the college to set the record. The fight is on! 

Community many times switches its format mainly to Mocumentory, but also other like animation, and clamation. This is how it is able to parody the many different ways in which 21st century first world people experience the world. This pillow fight is documented in several different ways. Through in person interviews with the characters involved, cell phone videos, text message conversations, Facebook posts, emails an others. I would ask for you to take a moment and consider what it would have been like if all these technologies were around during the Civil War era. All we have to go off of are recounts of the people who are there and through on new form of media photographs.  But if we had that type of the digital documentation, imagine what kind historical insights that we could have gleamed from it. From watching this episode I can see this digital documentation happening in the modern world now.

But what does this all mean? It means that that as new media makes communication ever more accessible and convenient, greater is our ability to see and better understand the world around us. Take for example the scene in which the war breaks out between the two factions. It is documented on a cell phone because more people carry camera phones as opposed to an actual camera. If this type of technology did not exist there may have been no way to show what was going on, unless someone had a traditional camera which is much less uncommon because they are less convenient.

I mention this because I want to draw a parallel to the shooting of Oscar Grant, which was a tragedy that would have never been exposed without the use of camera phones. Rodney King was lucky because a camera was present in that situation. Who knows how many instances like that may have happened before it was caught on tape. Now with the convenience of camera phone nothing noteworthy can happen without digital documentation of it. It makes me think twice about doing just about anything as I consider this blog post.

Community’s clever writing and staging of situation makes me consider things that I would not normally think about. This episode makes me consider wonder about the untold stories of the Civil War.  I hope you will consider what I have written here and look at community