REPRESENTATION & REALITY
Remember that all media texts are re-presentations of reality.
There is plenty of theory about the reality of representation.
Here are some useful notes.
What relationship does TV have to the reality of the world
around us?
All representation is a form of distortion: the words and images of
television refract all realities in particular ways.’
What are the key issues in considering representation:
Three Key Questions:
- who is doing the representing? – a question about production.
- What is being represented and how is this done? – a question
about textuality.
- How are representations understood by audiences? – a question
about reception.
David Buckingham, ‘The media do not just offer us a transparent
‘window on the world’ but a mediated version of the world. They don’t
just present reality, they re-present it.’
Jonathan Bignell: Television has a continuing interest in the present
moment, in documenting what is happening now, and engaging with
the lives lived by its viewers
- in part this comes from the fact television began as a medium of
live broadcasting, and still broadcasts both live programmes and
programmes that are not live but masquerade as being live.
‘Realist texts’ conceal their own processes of construction, purporting
to be merely a transcript of ‘reality’, whilst in fact offering a highly
controlled, ideological representation of the world.
‘Verisimilitude’ is a term which means ‘having the appearance of
truth’. Verisimilitude , then, indicates the extent to which a text
conforms, not to reality itself, but to our expectations or
understandings of reality.
Anti-realist: films that foreground the process of making a film or
‘constructing a story – so that actors talk directly tyo camera, the
camera is in shot, events are presented out of sequence.
Social Realist – present events drawn from everyday life and which
adopt a camera, sound and editing style that draws attention to the
authenticity of the events.
Expressionism – a way of presenting an image so that the character’s
emotions are expressed through the depiction of the ‘external world’.
‘Progressive realism’ according to Raymond Williams is a realism
which will be about rather than simply like the real.
Stuart Hall suggests forms of ‘ideological work’ performed by
television
- in an increasingly fragmented society, TV provides images and
representations of ‘the lives, meanings, practices and values’ of
social groups unfamiliar to us. TV ‘fills in’ our picture of the world
through its representations, classifies these representations, and
works to secure our consent to the ‘imaginary unity or
coherence’ it then constructs.
John Grierson’s 1933 definition of documentary as ‘the creative
interpretation of actuality’.
Representation of Race
Alvarado et al (1987) argue that there are four main categories of
race representation in the media:
The exotic, the dangerous, the humorous and the pitied
Stuart Hall (1981) proposes that there are three kinds of
representation of black people – the native, the entertainer and the
social problem.
Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno rejected the idea of
pleasures: ‘to be pleased means to say Yes…pleasure always means
not to think about anything’.
Gender
Jane Miller: The purpose of feminism as I see it is to disturb,
irrevocably, the steady male gaze and the unquestioning male
possession of the structures of economic and cultural power. (1990)
‘The image of woman operates in film as a sign, but one which refers
not to the “reality” of women’s lives, but to the desires and fantasies
of men.’
Claire Johnston identified that ‘apparently strong female central
characters in film are constantly reduced to erotic spectacles or are
“punished” within the narrative for their rebellions, but also to the way
in which these figures remain sites of anxiety within the film text,
threatening always to disrupt its narrative and ideological coherence.’
(114)
Laura Mulvey argues that ‘the image of woman in film is one
constructed by and for a patriarchal culture, enabling man to “live out
his fantasies and obsessions…by imposing them on the silent image of
woman still tied to her place as bearer, not maker, of meaning’.
E Ann Kaplan: Where woman takes on a ‘male’ action role, the
female antagonist “nearly always loses her traditionally feminine
characteristics in so doing – not those of attractiveness, but rather of
kindness, humaneness, motherliness. She is now often cold, driving,
ambitious, manipulating, just like the men whose position she has
usurped’ (1983)
Sex and the City: reflects on a time when for the first time in history of
Manhattan that women have had as much money and power as men –
plus the equal luxury of treating men as sex objects.’ (126)
Is content analysis any use when considering questions of
representation?
- collect and categorise objective facts
- form hypotheses and explain them
- eliminate human bias from the process of investigation
- devise experimental methods to prove or disprove he validity of
the data
Criticised for:
Privileging description over analysis (and content over form), and for
remaining sensitive to the researcher’s biases in identifying and
labelling categories.
Does representation in media texts alter how we see the real
world around us?
Julie D’Acci: ‘It is through representational or signifying systems such
as language, photography, film and television that the categories that
seem so natural to us and the differences that organise out thinking
and our lives (like masculinity and femininity, male and female)
actually get determined’
Michel Foucault: Rather than audiences or viewers coming to the
television screen with already-formed identities, television
genres….actually help to inform the identity in question.
What are stereotypes?
According to Walter Lippmann in 1922, stereotypes had four major
characteristics: they were an ordering process; a short cut; referred to
the ‘real world’; and expressed our ‘values’ and ‘beliefs’.
Categorisation is a basic cognitive process that people employ to make
sense of their lives and their group affiliations
Alison Griffiths: stereoptypes as rigid, simplistic, overdetermined and
inherently false…they misrepresented people’s ‘lived identities’ by
falling back upon narrowly conceived preconceptions of racial, cultural
and gendered difference, thus perpetuating myths about social,
cultural and racial groups.
Richard Dyer: ‘The ideological work of stereotyping involves closing
down the range of possible meanings, making fast, firm, and separate
what is in reality fluid’