'Dark Side Of The Moon' & Social Media

‘Dark Side of the Moon’ & Media Theories

Along the last two centuries, philosophers, sociologists, psychologists… thinkers of any matter, have discussed about the media, their influence on society, culture and spreading of information, and the power they’ve being gaining all over these years. I’ve chosen the video ‘Dark Side of the Moon’ to illustrate some of these theories and make adigression over them.
* ‘Dark side of the moon’
First of all, I think it’s important to explain in what consists ‘Dark side of the moon’ and do a summary of it. ‘Opération Lune’ (its real name) is a French mockumentary, which is a fake documentary that shows fictitious facts as real. It’s important to know that the ideas shown in every mockumentary aren’t real, even if they seem so, to keepourselves aware of what we are going to see, and to make sure we do a proper interpretation of it.

In this mockumentary, the director, William Karel, want us to think about man’s landing on the Moon. He starts talking about Stanley Kubrick and his relationship with the NASA because he wanted to use a special camera for his movie Barry Lindon. Then it goes over the Cold War issues, and the StarWars that started in the 60s with John F. Kennedy, that led to a race between the USA and the URSS to be the first in landing on the moon. It all began when the URSS got Yuri Gagarin into space. As the mockumentary says, the USA had lost in Berlin, in Vietnam and also in the outer space, so they were decided to win in the Moon issue. To support their purposes, they encouraged Stanley Kubrick to makea propaganda film. The result was ‘2001: A space odyssey’, based on Arthur C. Clarke’s novel. Everyone was impressed. The spaceships, the cosmonauts’ suits… everything was so real.

The Star Wars carried on and neither of them was making real progress. Both, the USA and the URSS had a lot of accidents, failures… so the USA, stubborn on getting the victory this once, decided to make a fake moviein which the cosmonauts were landing on the moon.
While we see how they hired a very elitist and closed crowd that was in charge of the filming, and how they hired Kubrick to direct the fake film, we also find out that William Karel didn’t really question if they got there or not. He doubted it, but he didn’t denied that Armstrong, Aldrin and Collins. He just emphasizes the fact that all theparaphernalia that surrounded the event, in which the USA had focused all its political and economical efforts, was a lie. In the mockumentary, Karel shows different interviews to politicians and public personages that talk about how president Richard Nixon made the decision of faking the landing on the moon. For this purpose it shows apparent mistakes on pictures (like the cosmonauts’ shadows, aphotograph where you can see two lamps enlightening the landscape, or how you can see one of them illuminated from the front, and also from behind, but you see no evidences of the sun…) that support the idea of a fake film.
It also talks about how paranoid got Nixon, and how he ordered the CIA to get rid of everyone involved with the film. It tells us how then he repented of his decision and triedto undo it, but he couldn’t, and most of the people died... At the end, the mockumentary shows a series of bloopers as hints for us to discover the fake nature of it.
* Relationship with theories
Of course, there are several connections with different theories. A good theory to start with is Thompson’s Social Theory. But, to find a better relation between the video and this theory, let’spostulate that the mockumentary is true, and the man’s landing on the moon was faked.
We see how mass media work as one of the 4 kinds of powers: the symbolic. It’s power lies in the information, and the capacity that mass media have of spreading. We can also realize that, even if it was a fake or not, the media expanded the information all over the world. The Star Wars was a race, yes, but a...