5/25 Merchants of Cool


In the film, Merchants of Cool, it discusses a lot of ideas of how teens today are spending so much money on different products based on trends and what are defined as “cool” to the teen’s eye. What causes these trends are what the media portray men and women. Teens eventually want to be like what they see on the screen and the media watches how kids aspire to be those people on screen. This idea of trends and spending can be related to how popular culture controls our social lives. The teens try to act like what they see in media because they think it is considered acceptable and cool to the teenager eye. When the film started talking about subcultures like the one for the rock band, it reminded me a lot about cultural resistance. When the film was interviewing people, the interviewee was stating how they did not care about what other people thought about them and they did not care if cars honked at them. This is an act of cultural resistance because they had the middle finger and painted their face black and white. To the average teen’s eye it would be strange, but to different subcultures, it's a way to go against the popular culture.

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