South Park: 2015 Finale

South Park: "Sponsored Content," 19.8 (18 Nov. 2015); "Truth and Advertising" 19.9 (2 Dec/ 2015); "PC Principal" 19.10 (9 Dec. 2015). Trey Parker, dir., script.

Season finale in a three-story arc that "parodies the abundance of online advertising, native advertising and clickbaits while humorously linking them to artificial intelligence, while continuing its season-long lampoon of political correctness." Relevant here for the idea that internet ad-blocking has acted as Darwinian selection pressure for more intelligent ads, leading to AI that can become embodied in human form, and is in Leslie, passing as a girl at South Park grammar school. Jimmy has the rare "ability to distinguish actual news stories from online ads" and in a witty extended allusion to the Rachel/Deckard interview with the Voight-Kampff Test in BLADE RUNNER (1982), we see Jimmy interviewing Leslie and determining she is an embodied ad. Cf. and definitely contrast embodied intelligence in a femme fatale with Robot Maria in METROPOLIS and with Ava in EX MACHINA.

Note also sub-motif of intimate human relationships with devices simpler and far more mechanical than computers and other internet platforms: guns. Aside from complexly ironic scenes of guns for all helping to resolve family and other relationship conflicts, especially striking is the scene at the South Park Gun Show where the guns are displayed like dogs at upscale dog shows. Note also final shot of the epitome of gentrification, the Whole Foods market for South Park, being figuratively banished by the people of the town — and then actually floating off like an alien mothership — and Leslie on the phone imitating Barack Obama, like the Terminator imitating Sarah Connor's mother in THE TERMINATOR.

RDE, 05/II/17