The show that I chose to watch for this week's assignment is My 600 lb. Life. My coworkers constantly come to work and describe the show and what it is about, but I have never had the opportunity to watch it. It came on Wednesday, and at first it was very hard to try to tie in the conversations just by watching with no sound. There seemed to be a strong sense of family on this particular episode. The lady was surrounded by children, who I initially assumed were her kids. She was receiving a lot of help from them such as day to day tasks. Bathing, cooking, even putting lotion on.
The show started showing pictures of her when she was younger so I assuming she was giving background on how she gained so much weight and what her childhood was like. She also began to travel, with a man to this office. A guy came in with a doctor's coat on and I was assuming at this point she was reaching out for help to lose weight. Watching this show was very emotional. They were speaking with those children individually and also with her. She would seem to be screaming in several points during the show, and I assumed she was venting her frustrations of that lifestyle.
Watching this show with no sound, and then going back to watch it with sound, many of my assumptions were right. Three of the children she had adopted from a cousin that could not support them, then she had two that were her own. She is a school teacher and she spoke about how difficult it is to engage with her students with that large amount of weight that she is carrying. She was going into details about how food is a comfort to her. And the segment when she was screaming at the man in the car with her, that was her brother. He drove her to Texas to see a specialist that deals with morbidly obese clients. She began to get frustrated with the process and took her angers out on him.
This experience shows me that even with no sound, communication can be a visual act. I did not get every assumption right when watching the show, but I grasped a great deal of detail just by seeing body language and tying in key pieces of information.
Jasmine, I watch this show a lot with my mom. It is very interesting and I love seeing the subjects overcome their obstacles regarding their weight. I do think that it would be difficult to figure out what's going on without sound though because for a lot of the subjects of the shows, their mobility is limited. There are never any real facial expressions for the family and friends in the shows either.
ReplyDeleteHow interesting that you and I both felt music played such an integral element to the show. It shows how communication is so much more than words.
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