Shameless tells us about the history of the Gallagers. A completely unstructured family, made up of six brothers, an alcoholic and drug addict father, and a bipolar mother who appears intermittently both in their lives and in the series. We cannot fit it into drama or comedy; We cannot label it or pigeonhole it and that is probably one of the reasons for its success. Today in PostPosmo, we want to talk to you about Shameless' critique of the capitalist system American - and global.
Is Shameless a critique or a capitalist product?
Audiovisual content broadcast on American television can be art, entertainment, fun, but also commitment and criticism. Although it seems unthinkable to us, Americans can be self-critical. And this makes us find ourselves before one of the great paradoxes of television: series that intend to criticize -and they do it- but that in turn they have become great capitalist products. We could very well be talking about Breaking Bad (and we will).
Shameless It is a clear example of the situation in which capitalist societies live. In this case, the children of an alcoholic, who live in one of the worst neighborhoods in Chicago, have inherited their father's situation.
That is the first criticism with which we collided head-on: inheritance.
➟ Shameless critique of inheritance
Theoretical capitalism proposes a society where everyone has what they get for their merits, and its defenders cling to this definition, but where does that leave inheritance? In a fair, meritocratic society where we all have the same opportunities, inheritance should be left aside.
But inheritance is a bitch.
Shameless, sometimes pessimistically and sometimes making us laugh, shows us how these young Gallagers have inherited not only a house that is falling apart, but history that repeats itself. As if that were not enough, inheritance can also be genetic.
➟ Criticism of class differences
Chapter after chapter, the Gallagers and their neighbors have to make a living - almost always illegally - in order to survive. Paul Abbott, the creator of the series, introduces in the scripts a critic acid to prostitution, to American healthcare, to the educational system.
The series shows us how, despite forceful attempts to change their lives, to climb to a higher position on the social ladder, the Gallagers stagnate at the bottom of the pyramid, in a state of poverty that barely allows to survive. There is no change, there is no revolution, there is no escalation. They try hard, but class prejudices, the differences between their education and that of the rest make them return again and again to the starting point.
➟ Criticism of prostitution
Svetlana
Criticism of prostitution is done with humor and cunning. One of the family's neighbors finds out about the misery that his wife is charging for sexual services. Outraged, he takes his wife out of this place. Of course.
And he sets up a brothel on his own. He say yes.
At first, everything is disguised as a fight to get rights for them (let's not overlook here the scriptwriter's criticism of regulationism), and, how could it be otherwise, we see how the prostitutes continue with their same misery. The money has simply changed from one hand to another.
And, it is that, more than a criticism of prostitution is an arduous criticism of the corruption of money. How this Golden God exceeds the limits of love and puts a price on the -supposedly- purest act.
Which makes us reach a conclusion already reached by Plautus about two thousand years ago: Homo Homini Lupus, man is selfish, and money helps reinforce this idea.
We see that Shameless is a Plautine work in the XXI century.
➢ [Perhaps you may be interested in our essay on pornography]
The success of Shameless
And the American public watches the series, loves the series - fact verifiable in its success -, but where is the change? The criticism is already made, but it seems that the Americans themselves see it as fiction when it comes to nothing more and nothing less than its crude reality. What is the problem? Why is there no "revolution"? They are putting a mirror in front of us and we are looking at the ground.
Although we believe that television acts in this case as a weapon against capitalism, capitalism has engulfed it and taken it over. We see this series, which could be a good first step for change, turned into a battery of dramatic situations that entertain a viewer who does little to change his own dramas, but instead dedicates himself to seeing the protagonists of this fiction fall more and more into the void.
Isn't that helping to increase the feeling of conformity? Isn't he showing us, for the umpteenth time, that the system always comes out on top?