YESSSSSSSSSSSSS MEN

I really enjoyed watching “THE YES MEN” and wish we could have finished the movie in class! The guys were hilarious and I couldn’t stop laughing the whole time. I thought their approach to showing consumers in society was brilliant. I was blown away that the people at one of the first conferences, which was supposedly full of people of higher education and from big businesses, did not even crack a smile or look around the room to see if they were on candid camera when one of the yes men ripped off his suit to reveal the hideous costume underneath; the phallic costume. They were so casual with what was going on and actually believed the ludicrous the yes men were feeding them. On the other hand they finally got their response they wanted out of college kids. Leave it to college kids to be the open and honest ones. I thought it was pretty sad that many corporations contacted the yes men thinking they were members of the WTO just because their websites looked similar to the real WTO site. It just goes to show they don’t even care enough to take the time to research who they are bringing to their conferences. I thought it was awesome that while the YES MEN were disguised as the WTO they even got a large sum of money donated to them from one conference and they didn’t even have any second thoughts of giving it back, they were just excited to put the money to new ideas. It takes some guts for these guys to stand in front a group of highly sophisticated and probably rich group of people and pose as members of corporation with fake ridiculous names, but they did it with class.

The reason we watched this in class is because the YES MEN are a culture jamming activist group and since we just barely learned what culture jamming is, this fit in perfectly. I don’t think it goes hand in hand with Assignment #5 but rather with Assignment #6. Found Footage is going to be a hard project to accomplish because there are so many ways to approach it and complete it. The Yes Men used mixed media to get their point across through the documentary and I think it worked well. I’m not sure what I want to do yet for my assignment, but I too was hoping to do a culture jam. Maybe with reality show clips, poking fun at them and creating an underlining beat.