They Shoot Horses Analysis

There are three groups that have power in They Shoot Horses, Don’t They?; the kids, the audience, and the leadership. These groups represent different genders in the way they’re presented and how they interact with each other. The kids are the feminine, cautious and intuitive, the audience is the androgynous, passive and oblivious, and the leadership is the masculine, blunt and tricky. These traits shed light on why each group uses their power in such different ways and why the kids and the leadership are closer to each other than with the audience. The kids embody the feminine, the quiet, wary, and calculating. They have an immense amount of power in the contest; they can easily refuse to do something and shut the entire place down. After …show more content…
They’re constantly exerting their power to impress the audience, but never to a degree where they hurt the kids. To them, money isn’t nearly as important as the kids. The masculine sees it as its responsibility to take care of the feminine, almost as compensation for continuously exploiting them for the audience’s attention. As time goes on, the leadership’s care deepens because they get to know the kids remaining on a much more personal level. They forget and dismiss old contestants, though, an example of this being when Mario is arrested. When the story gets into the papers and mentions the marathon, Socks Donald gets very excited over it, and is thankful that Mario had been in the marathon and arrested even though originally he is absolutely pissed at Mario. The situation gives the contest extra publicity, but at the same time Socks forgets that there is a human that suffered for this. The leadership are very blunt and direct with the kids, as opposed to the ambiguity and dishonesty that they present to the audience. The kids, being the feminine, would be able to detect that something was wrong through their intuition. They always know what the leadership are planning regardless - to lie to them would be equivalent to telling them that dragons were going to come down from the sky and barf rainbows. The kids most definintely aren’t idiots. The audience, on the …show more content…
This is important for understanding how events turn out and why people treat one another in certain ways. It also explains why the audience always seems so distant and far away; the leadership and the kids just don’t understand them in the way that they understand each other, and decide to keep in their comfort zone by supporting each