Contents
Aberrant Decoding ...................................................................... 2
Anime ......................................................................................... 3
Auteur Theory ............................................................................. 4
Roland Barthes ........................................................................... 5
Baudrillard……………………………………………………………………….6
Binary Oppositions ...................................................................... 7
Codes and Conventions.............................................................. 8
Feminism .................................................................................... 9
Freud and Psychoanalysis. ....................................................... 10
Genre. ...................................................................................... 12
The Hypodermic Syringe Effect ................................................ 12
Ideology .................................................................................... 16
Institutions ................................................................................ 18
Intertextuality ............................................................................ 20
Claude Levi-Strauss .................................................................. 21
Laura Mulvey and the Male Gaze ............................................. 22
Marx ......................................................................................... 24
Moral Panics ............................................................................. 26
Media Violence ......................................................................... 28
Narrative ................................................................................... 29
CS Peirce. ................................................................................ 35
Postmodernism ......................................................................... 30
Vladimir Propp’s Narrative Roles and Functions Theory ........... 31
Reading a text........................................................................... 32
Realism..................................................................................... 33
Representation ......................................................................... 34
Semiotics .................................................................................. 34
Uses and Gratifications Theory. ................................................ 36
Applied Media Theory Multiple Choice Test .............................. 37
Media Theory Applied in an Essay ............................................ 45
1
Aberrant Decoding
Texts can be read in a number of different ways (see preferred reading),
some texts are more open to a variety of readings than others. Texts that may
be read in a number of ways are known as polysemic texts. When someone
misreads texts, either intentionally or not, this is known as aberrant decoding.
An example of this would be a mentally ill person playing music backwards to
see if there was a hidden message from the Devil for them.
A teenager in Oakton, Virginia, was obsessed with The Matrix; he bought
posters, a long leather trench coat and finally a 12-gauge shotgun, similar to
the one used by Neo in the film. Josh Cooke then entered his parents’
bedroom on February 17th, 2003 and shot both his mother and father dead.
The teenager claimed that his parents were not real, just part of The Matrix.
This would be an extreme example of aberrant textual decoding. The
teenager lacked what the French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu called cultural
competence; the ability to understand art forms and distinguish them from
reality.
Media Debate
In media studies, examiners like to see
students engaging in contemporary
media issues, theories and debates. A
debate arising from aberrant decoding
relates to the issues of textual
censorship and the freedom of the
individual to make informed choices.
Total immersion video games such as
Manhunt are increasingly popular with
young audiences. Manhunt, which can
be extensively researched on the Internet, has been the cause of great
controversy. The game is banned in New Zealand, Australia and parts of
Canada because of the intense levels of brutal violence players are
encouraged to use in order to reach the higher levels; victims can be slowly
killed with plastic bags, wire and wooden stakes. The game was linked to the
murder of Stefan Pakeerah, 14, by his friend Warren LeBlanc, 17. Giselle
Pakeerah, the victim's mother, claimed that LeBlanc had been 'obsessed'
with the game after the former pleaded guilty in court. A moral panic was
created and big UK retailers refused to stock the game and withdrew it
from sale. Sales of the game rose as young players wanted to know what
was so terrible about it! It eventually came to light that it was the victim, not
the killer who had been obsessed with the game. The media debate in this
case is; should young people have access to such violent material, which
may cause fatal aberrant decoding? Some countries have decided to ban
all video games such as Greece in 2002. Are the fears of contemporary
censors really justified?
2
Anime
Cartoons and animations have been thought of as essentially entertainment
for children. Walt Disney tried to appeal to a wider audience with Fantasia, but
the public were unsure of what it was all about, and the film was not an
outstanding success. In Japan, animation has appealed to all ages, both in
moving image and print media formats. It is not unusual to see adults reading
comics on the bullet train to work in the morning. In the 1980’s so called adult
animations, known as anime began to be noticed by film buffs in the West.
The breakthrough movie was 1988’s Akira that received numerous awards
from around the world. In 1995 Ghost in the Shell was released and has been
seen as one of the main influences on the Wachowski brothers who used a lot
of the images and iconography from the animation in their 1999 blockbuster,
The Matrix. Therefore, the use of anime is a good example of intertextuality to
discuss in any essay.
Anime has a distinct style and with its adult audience, some of the themes
covered can be quite explicit and shocking to younger consumers. Cartoon
does not mean childish entertainment in the world of anime. A mass audience
is slowly developing across the world as global communication increases
contacts. In 2002 Hiyao Miyazaki’s Spirited Away received an Oscar for best
animation. Anime has come of age.
Going Further
Anime is a very popular media form that is culturally determined by its
Japanese roots. Most media production is in the USA, leading to what many
critics have called cultural imperialism –American values and ideologies are
increasingly dominating the global village referred to by Marshall MacLuhan. It
is not uncommon to see young people in remote parts of the world imitating
rap and hip hop stars and using the latest ‘gangsta’ slang from Los Angeles.
Is globalisation just another word for Americanisation? Anime is a distinctly
Asian art form that is popular in the West, therefore is a good example of a
contemporary media development that is reversing the trend of cultural
imperialism. Anime as an art form has a fan base that is often IT literate
(‘geeks’) and therefore students can find a wealth of material for research on
the Internet, making anime an ideal subject for an extended research project.
Related to anime is the concept of genre. Anime has very distinct and diverse
genre forms such as hentai, mecha, kodomo and sentai. An interesting
cultural aspect of anime and its print media form, manga, is the erotic nature
of many representations. This eroticism is particularly unacceptable in the
West because it involves young people, leading to calls for some of the
material to be censored.
Discussion
Research sentai as a genre form on the Internet and discuss whether it
should be censored in this country.
3
Auteur Theory
Most Hollywood films come from a factory-line
production: producers, editors, special effects, set
designs are all made in-house by a giant media
institution like Time-AOL-Warner. The bottom line is
the driving force in Hollywood: will the film and its
spin offs make money for the institution? There is
little room for artistic taste in this free for all, and
directors tend to be at the whim of the studio
executives. Directors in Hollywood tend to be mere
workers for contract, not gifted artists. Every so often
a director breaks free of this stifling Hollywood
system and manages to have a serious input into the
look and feel of a film, its mise-en-scène, its themes, its style and its script.
These brave individuals have become known as auteurs; good examples
would be Orson Welles, Alfred Hitchcock, Francis Ford Coppola and Sir
Ridley Scott. Classical auteur theory stated that Hollywood, with its
mechanical system of film production, tended to have fewer genuine auteurs
than European art cinema. Auteurs tend to be interested in themes that repeat
across a range of different films in different genres, for example the British
director Michael Powell tended to be interested in defining what being English
really meant, this focus may be found in a number of his films such as A
Matter of Life and Death and The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp. There are
many problems with auteur theory that can be researched independently, for
example, how many films does a director have to make before he or she
becomes an auteur? Is the art director often overlooked when considering
main directorial input? Can auteurs make popular movies? Is Spielberg an
auteur or a populist?
Going Further
To perform well in media studies students
need to refer extensively to actual
contemporary texts they have studied, as
opposed to generalised, blanket statements
about ‘the media’. An excellent example of a
contemporary auteur is Quentin Tarantino.
A really interesting extended research study
into the claims of Tarantino’s many fans that
he is an auteur could focus on his most
notorious film texts: Reservoir Dogs, Pulp
Fiction, Jackie Brown and Kill Bill. Tarantino
has also directed an episode of the popular
TV crime series CSI, bringing his own style
to the production. Actually defining the
Tarantino style would be an interesting
project, looking at the subtle changes that
have taken place in the auteur’s recent
productions.
4
Roland Barthes
Barthes was a French media theorist who was writing from the 1950s through
to the 1970s. Barthes’ work is complex and many layered, so any summary
will inevitably miss much out. Writing about semiotics, he described all texts
as complex bundles of meaning, which can be unravelled to create a whole
range of different meanings. Barthes unravelled or deconstructed a number of
texts and came to the conclusion that texts may be open (with numerous
semiotic threads to pull) or closed, with only one obvious thread to grasp.
Texts that can be read in a number of different ways are known as polysemic
texts. The threads referred to, Barthes called narrative codes. He identified
four different narrative codes but the one you will find most handy to refer to in
any essays or examinations are the enigma codes. Enigma codes are to be
found in all successful texts from Bob The Builder to CSI. The most obvious
aspect of enigma codes is that they are constructed primarily to attract and
hold the attention of the audience, normally by creating a mystery or puzzle
which the audience want to see solved – why has this man been murdered?
Working on the London Underground, workers unearth a strange, ancient,
deformed skull; Why is it there, what did the creature look like? What is that
dark shadow in the trees? Enigma codes can take many different forms and
some are more successfully applied than others. Enigma codes are
constructed in order to attract audiences, so are a form of advertising
designed to pull in more customers: Barthes’ analysis could be interpreted by
Marxists like Gramsci and Althuser as evidence that media texts are
essentially capitalist, bourgeois products designed by the ruling class to
extract money from the proletariat.
Going Further
Another important aspect of Barthes’ work is the context in which
audiences receive texts. Each individual will bring his or her own
experiences to bear when decoding a text, making each person’s
experience of it different. Texts become networks of meaning,
rather than a given and linear form, with the author’s intentions of
primary importance. When audiences have been exposed to a
communal trauma, they will tend to experience similar responses
when exploring a text. A good example to refer to when
considering the importance of wider context is the film text The
Siege, made in 1999. In the text Arab terrorists are responsible for numerous
bombings (including hostage-taking in a school) in New York, so the US Army
has to enforce martial law and starts arresting and torturing Arab suspects in
detention centres. Non-Arab Audiences interpreted the film as primarily a
harmless action/adventure genre text at the time of its release. The same film
would be interpreted very differently in the light of the events of 9/11,
Guantanamo Bay and Beslan; indeed, could the film actually be financed or
made in the present state of fear and the ‘War on Terror’ and the selfcensorship that prevails in the liberal media establishment? The fear that the
text would be seen as inflammatory, racist or discriminatory would probably
have stopped production before the first reel of film was exposed.
5
Jean Baudrillard
Jean Baudrillard, a French media theorist, has been dubbed the prophet of
postmodernity. Baudrillard’s best-known work is a series of essays called
Simulacra and Simulation, in which he examines the power of representations
in the pre-modern, modern and post-modern worlds. If you watch the first ten
minutes of The Matrix you will see Neo/Anderson reading Baudrillard’s
essays, a telling insertion by the directors, hinting at the narrative to follow.
According to Baudrillard in the pre-modern world (before 1500) audiences
were rarely confronted with representations of the real because the
technology was simply not available, so there could be no confusion between
the virtual and the actual. In the modern world (1500-1900) industrialisation
and mass production allowed an endless series of representations to enter
the collective consciousnesses of the audience, but it was still more than likely
that people could distinguish between the simulation and the real. In the postmodern world, audiences are so saturated in representations, that these now
precede perceptions of the actual, subtly changing them in the process. An
example of this can be seen in how many victims of 9/11 described their
trauma as the twin towers collapsed as “..like a film…” This small comment
has enormous consequences when one considers it fully – a simulation of the
real (a film) was the reference point for something actual, a bizarre reversal of
normality. Baudrillard goes on to explore where this phenomenon might take
humanity, and concludes that it is a ride that we must simply enjoy for the time
being! As media products such as video games become ever more
sophisticated, will the possibility arise that some people will choose to spend
their lives in the predictable comfort of cyberspace rather than in the actual
world of relationships, pain, mishaps and confusion?
Another interesting aspect of Baudrillard’s description of post-modern society
is the multiplication of simulacra: texts that are copies of each other, with no
hard bed rock reality behind the original creation. A good example of a
simulacrum is the tribute band phenomenon: groups of talented musicians
spend hours impersonating music, gestures and clothing of an original band,
some making a good living out of this simulacrum! When one considers that
many of the original bands were cynical marketing exercises in the first place,
the mind begins to recoil at the level of simulation happening. Baudrillard
discovered more and more simulacra appearing in post-modern societies,
from themed pubs, theme parks, computer simulation ‘God games’ (The
Sims), virtual online communities – all ‘realities’ that have no actuality behind
them. A study of Baudrillard’s ideas can be extremely disconcerting as you
realise the degree to which post-modern societies have no anchor to anything
substantial. Baudrillard’s prophetic role is assured, and his questioning of
where the world of simulacra may end is of critical importance to media
students who want to really think about the societal consequences of their
studies. The best text that explores many of Baudrillard’s questions is The
Matrix: study the French master, then see the film again, and it will become
clear how much the film owes to his works.
6
Binary Oppositions
The French anthropologist, Claude Levi-Strauss examined how narratives
unconsciously reflect the dominant ideologies of a society through oppositions
in the text. For example, in I, Robot, we find a constant opposition between
the virtual and the real, between machine and human, between logic and
belief, dark and light, simulacra and reality. Why do we find these binary
oppositions in so many contemporary science fiction texts? Our society is
being profoundly affected by technology and many people are worried about
where our world is heading. Will carefully crafted software replace teachers,
and therefore schools? Will machines quietly take over the reins of control
and destroy mankind, a theme picked up in many contemporary texts such as
The Terminator trilogy?
Another contemporary dread relates to environmental collapse, with a fear
that Mother Nature will take her revenge on humanity. This fear can be seen
in many contemporary factual documentaries about killer asteroids, freak
weather conditions, killer earthquakes, the coming ice age/killer drought,
super volcanoes and mega tsunami. Experts set out the science, and then the
CGI department creates lifelike simulations of Los Angeles being consumed
by magma, or London being engulfed by a huge North Sea storm surge. This
popular hunger for Biblical doom is fed by Hollywood with texts such as The
Day After Tomorrow, Twister, Dante’s Peak and Armageddon. These texts all
set up binary oppositions that neatly structure the narrative of each text: man
against nature, man against machines, settled prosperity against refugee
poverty, prophetic challenge against arrogant political inertia, normality
against disruption, control versus chaos and so forth.
Examination Tips
Many students refer to binary oppositions in very
vague terms in their answers to set essay
questions. To tighten up your answer, always refer
to the original thinker behind the concept, Claude
Levis-Strauss, and then explain that binary
oppositions reflect contemporary ideologies and
fears, with specific and named examples to show
your understanding. Here are two examples of how
exemplification and detail can transform a
response:
1) “…In I, Robot we see binary oppositions at
work such as robots against humans…”
2) “In I, Robot we can see Claude Levi Strauss’s binary oppositions at
work such as the hero, Detective Spooner and the ‘evil’ robot Sonny,
representing good humanity versus cold, evil machine. This reflects
contemporary fears of the increasing power of technology…”
Answer two would score considerably more points in an examination because
it is engaged and exemplified properly, whereas response one is partial and
implied.
7
Codes and Conventions
These are the rules that media texts generally stick to, whatever the type or
genre. A good example of a print media text that uses recognisable codes is
The Sun newspaper in Britain, which always has a bold splash head, a pagethree model and a huge sports section. Codes and conventions are
connected to the key concepts of institution, genre and audience. Institutions
like codes and conventions because economies can be made and the
planning of productions are streamlined and cheaper. An example of this
would be a morning TV chat show where the physical set and narrative format
of the show says pretty much the same. A good example is Trisha Goddard:
watch three episodes and analyse what stays the same in each one, it is
surprising how little changes apart from the guests, but even these begin to
look alike! Innovation is risky and can cost an institution a small fortune if it
upsets audience expectations. Audiences feel comforted and familiar with
certain codes and conventions, actively seeking out generic texts for their own
use and gratification. Horror fans go to see the latest text expecting gore,
scares and the thrill of being seriously frightened. ‘Rom-com’ fans go to see
the boy meets girl plot, expecting narrative resolution or “They all lived happily
ever after” by the end of their two hours.
Texts like James Bond movies, have clearly defined codes and conventions:
there is always a struggle between good and evil, there are beautiful women,
fast cars, gadgets, slick puns, Bond’s controller, M, and Bond’s technical
expert, Q, and there is always a happy ending. All Bond movies stick to these
codes and conventions because that is what audiences want, and a happy
audience means big profits for the institution that has financed the film. A
Bond movie where Bond starts to behave differently, crying when he is hit, for
example, would simply not work for many audiences. Texts that break codes
and conventions could be seen as post-modern and subversive. Looking at
the espionage genre we can see the Austin Powers texts as post-modern,
self-reflexive texts that consciously mock the codes and conventions of the
Bond genre.
Going Further
The study of codes and conventions in certain
genres can make an excellent basis for an extended
piece of personal media research. Identifying
codeas and conventions is fairly straightforward;
identifying and analysing texts that break these is far
more stimulating and can lead to some high marks
being awarded. An analysis of audience pleasures
whilst watching spoof texts such Not Another Teen
Movie (teen genre), Scream (horror), Galaxy Quest
(Sci-fi), Austin Powers (espionage genre), Team
America (action/adventure), Airplane! (disaster
genre) would make an excellent research project. Audiences feel very clever
as they spot one scene after another from previously viewed texts.
8
Feminism
Feminists interpret the media in terms of gender representation;
how are men and women represented? There are three basic
types of feminism, and therefore three different approaches to
feminist criticisms of texts.
1. Liberal feminism
The roles of women are generally passive in media representations,
and this creates little girls who feel the need for male protection, and
little boys who have a tendency to fight and try to assert themselves to
win the attention of the female. The media therefore has a vital role in
the socialisation (upbringing) of children, and the way the genders are
represented is of crucial importance if women are to feel good about
themselves when they grow up.
2. Socialist Feminism
Socialist feminists see women as the exploited, and men as the
exploiters. Men use the media to control women and therefore
representations of women as homemakers, cleaning, cooking and
tidying, are repeated so that women will come to believe that these
functions are natural. The control of women by men is known as
patriarchy, and socialist feminists say it is their duty to challenge
patriarchal representations.
3. Radical Feminism
Radical feminists take the socialist position further and say that women
are kept in their place by the threat of or actual exercise of male
violence. “All men are rapists!” was how one radical feminist put her
case. Women are depicted as sexually available, and the male gaze is
essential for the success of any female star. Women can be portrayed
as strong, such as Carry-Anne Moss’s Trinity in The Matrix, but they
still depend on men and still have to be physically attractive. Has there
ever been a female star who has been anything other than slim and
attractive? No!, because the patriarchy still see women as sexual
playthings, and use the media to perpetuate this image.
Feminism was particularly strong in the 1970s and 1980s, with women such
as Andrea Dworkin taking the lead. Since the start of the new millennium, the
attention of many academics who focus on gender studies have shifted their
interest to how men are represented in the media.
Examination Tip
Many students write simplistic statements about gender that examiners find
irritating and an indicator of limited ability. The typical simplistic statement is
“…until the 1960s women stayed at home and looked after children, but we
now live in a post feminist world where women are represented as powerful
and equal to men…” A close examination of how women are represented in
pre 1960s texts reveals a much more complex picture which is very different
from the baby boomer myth. A good example to study is the character of
Clarissa Saunders in Mr Smith Goes to Washington (1939) by Frank Capra –
a
woman
who
is
in
control
from
the
first
frame.
9
Freud and Psychoanalysis
Freud
was
a
groundbreaking
doctor
who wrote about the
human mind at the turn of
the 20th Century. Many of
his ideas have been
rejected recently, but his
influence as a pioneer of
the science of psychology
is enormous. Freud’s ‘big
idea’ is that sexuality
governs the human mind,
and
therefore
affects
everything we do and
think. Freud’s belief that
all men are secretly in
love with their own
mothers and all women
are really little girls in love with their fathers, known as the Oedipus and
Electra complexes, was not received well at the time it was first published.
Freud used his famous couch and gently perceptive questioning to reveal his
patients’ mental problems or neuroses. Freudian psychology plays a large
part in Laura Mulvey’s ‘Male Gaze’ media theory.
Going Further
Freudian interpretations are similar to Marxist ones in that both are adopting a
structuralist approach to human organisations and behaviour. Society,
according to Freud was pre-determined by psychological structures with their
own logical outworking, so deeply ingrained that individuals were the
playthings of these forces. The individual was therefore not considered to be
responsible for his or her actions in the face of these culturally pre-determined
structures. Most people only glimpsed at the true underlying meaning of their
actions through slips of the tongue and dreams. If a science teacher was
describing an organism, she might accidentally describe it as an orgasm
because she had been reading a survey in a women’s magazine before the
lesson. The Freudian slip would indicate that her mind was elsewhere for an
instant!
Was Freud right in stating that sex was the most important drive in human
life? Recent surveys of the nature of Internet cyberspace usage suggests that
a staggering 70% of sites are directly linked to pornographic representations,
mainly of women. The pornography industry is worth hundreds of millions of
pounds every year, covering all aspects of the mass media from print, through
to film and new media sources. These figures strongly suggest that Freud was
partially correct in identifying sexuality as a key aspect of being human.
The human obsession with sexuality could be linked effectively to the uses
and gratifications theory that stresses the way audiences use media texts to
generate pleasure; the romantic comedy genre has proved remarkably
successful in recent years, with texts such as Bridget Jones’ Diary leaping the
10
bridge from written text to multi million dollar film franchise. Gender theory
also links well to a Freudian analysis of media consumption: why is it that men
are the biggest customers for explicit pornography? Laura Mulvey linked male
pleasure from narrative cinema with the male relationship with the mother in
the first hours after birth; hence the fascination with breasts in many men!
To Discuss
1. Why are men more likely to
purchase media texts from the top
shelf than women?
2. Analyse a poster for a romantic
comedy aimed at women, discuss
the use of iconography and
positioning of subjects, how does it
attract the target audience?
3. To what extent does a study of
advertising support the phrase ‘sex
sells’?
11
Genre
Genre gives the audience expectations and determines the way they interpret
the text. Genres are used in a whole variety of texts from tabloid newspapers,
radio chat shows to soaps. A well known genre is that of horror. The audience
expects to be scared, and the mediators play with these expectations. Miseen-scène is vital in helping an audience determine the generic expectations.
Characters are often generically determined in certain texts. Audiences
recognise these key elements of a genre and respond accordingly, if they
read the text in the way the mediator prefers. These key elements can be
called paradigms and two types have been identified:
1. Iconographic: signs and symbols
2. Structural: how structures in the text deal with issues such as
ideology and gender.
Generic subversion is becoming stronger and stronger in contemporary texts.
A good example of this subversion is in the film Scary Movie where virtually
every generic code is first identified, then played with, to the delight of many
audiences.
Genres tend to become ‘tired’ over time, with audiences becoming less
interested. The theorist Christian Metz identified four phases in this process:
the initial phase, the classical phase, the declining phase and finally the
parody phase. The disaster genre is a good example with The Towering
Inferno in the classical phase and Airplane! as the final parody. To survive,
genres mutate and join with others to form hybrid genres, such as Blade
Runner, which was a hybrid of the Sci-Fi and Film Noir genres.
Going further
Genre can be linked firmly to the key concept of institution
in media studies. Genres appeal to certain target
audiences, for example, soap operas tend to have a
gendered appeal (to women), which allows institutions to
precisely market goods and services to this audience during
commercial breaks. Genre also allows institutions to save
money by standardising production – using the same sets,
actors and scriptwriters for a series keeps costs down in a
business where costs can spiral upwards and audiences can become easily
bored. When costs can be accurately predicted, financial planning is easier
and long-term contracts can be awarded to suppliers and actors. This generic
approach to production can lead to predictability and can stifle creativity, as
happened under the old Hollywood studio system that began to collapse in
the 1970s.
A contemporary development has been genre hybridisation and the creation
of cross genre texts where different genres are combined together to create a
newer, fresher genre, which appeals to a new audience. A good
contemporary example is the popular TV series CSI that combines the police
procedural, crime and whodunit genres to create a new genre. Genres are no
longer separate and unique, they increasingly lend and borrow from other
12
texts; this is known as intertextuality and can be seen as a defining aspect of
post modernism.
Genre can link naturally with the key concept of audience. Audiences like
genre texts and actively seek them out for their own pleasure. Genre texts are
reassuring to audiences because of their familiarity and promoting a God-like
understanding of knowing roughly what the outcome will be. Audiences know
what to expect and usually get it from a generic text. A genre that pleases
audiences is reality TV; a good contemporary example is Big Brother that has
predictable elements such as interactivity, where the audience votes
unpopular members of the house out, and engineered disputes between the
different characters, which are focused on in the editing phase of the
production. The producers of the show call the genre a format, which seems
to have become an interchangeable term.
Discussion Questions
1) Which genres on television are most
popular with audiences? What reasons
are there for certain genres being
popular?
2) If genre texts are predictable, why do
audiences continue to consume them?
3) Has genre hybridisation become more
common in contemporary texts? Why may
this have happened?
13
The Hypodermic Syringe Effect
This media theory is all about the way an audience
receives a text. Essentially, the audience are
passive receivers of media messages that they
interpret uncritically. The theory is popular when
there is a media panic, such as the case of Jamie
Bulger, a toddler, who was brutally murdered by
two other children. The two killers’ defence rested on the fact that their young
minds had been corrupted by ‘video nasties’ that showed horrible violence as
fun. There were even echoes of the manner of the killing in a film called
Childsplay 3. The tabloid newspapers made a simple link between the
violence the two child-killers had seen and their behaviour. This link is
questionable. Most people can see the difference between reality and texts;
only a small minority indulge in aberrant decoding of texts.
A good historical example of the hypodermic syringe effect was when Orson
Welles staged a radio show that reported in a very realistic way, a Martian
invasion of New Jersey and New York on October 30th 1938. Welles warned
listeners that the production was a fiction based on a work of literature (H.G.
Wells’ War of the Worlds), but people who tuned in after the warning thought
they were actually hearing a real account of an invasion. There were scenes
of panic; traffic jams leaving city centres, and even some looting. The
audience were uncritically accepting Orson Welles’ narrative and responding.
The day after the show Welles was forced to make a public apology. One
question that needs to be addressed is that of the influence of context. In
1938 many people expected a terrible war and there were fears of an
impending war, even in America. Did the general air of panic, stoked up by
the media, create the perfect setting for Orson Welles’ famous stunt?
A good example of a contemporary application of the hypodermic theory is the
connection between anorexia nervosa and media representations of ideal
bodies. This has been exhaustively researched for women, but can also apply
to men who see ‘six packs’ and ‘pecs’ as essential and so spend a fortune at
the local gym in order to appear like the idealised versions of masculinity seen
in magazines such as Men’s Health.
Going Further
The hypodermic syringe theory is part of a wider media issue called
the effects and uses debate. The early exponents of the effects
theory were known as the Frankfurt School, and they analysed the
power of the mass media in capitalist societies such as the USA
and in totalitarian societies such as Nazi Germany. Drawing on
Marxist methodology, the Frankfurt school emphasised the power of the
media to influence a largely passive audience; to inject ideologies that
supported the stats quo and those who benefited from it – the elite.
Connected with the wider effects debate was the growing fear of the influence
of television on society in the 1960s. Groups were set up in the US and UK to
monitor the effects violent or sexually explicit material was having on
14
audiences. One such group was the National Viewers and Listeners
Association, which has become MediaWatch. These groups want to see much
greater awareness in the general public about the power and influence of the
media in our society.
Another dimension of the effects debate is connected with psychology. The
famous psychologist B.F. Skinner coined the term behaviourism, explaining
that people’s behaviour could be critically influenced by psychological
manipulation. If dogs can be made to drool when a bell is rung for food, could
people become more peaceful and democratic if exposed to positive
messages in the media? Advertisers were quick to see a profit from modifying
consumers’ buying behaviour in favour of their clients’ products rather than
their competitors’ A famous experiment that was conducted by Bandura and
Walters in 1963 was the ‘Bobo doll’ experiment. Children watched adults
attacking a doll on film, and were then filmed copying the behaviour when left
alone with a similar doll. Violent behaviour was being learned and refined in
the young by watching media texts – this was fuel for those who wanted to
censor the media and possibly led to age restrictions on certain violent or
explicit material. Critics of behaviourism and of Bandura’s work have pointed
out a number of problems:
 Animals and children are not the same! Children are hugely more
sophisticated than even the highest primates and monkeys – simple
behaviourism is too crude to explain what is going on in a child’s mind.
 Children from violent backgrounds will act out violent scenes more
readily than those from peaceful homes – violence has been cultivated
in them already.
 People try to unconsciously please experimenters – to tell them what
they want to hear. Did the children receive subtle hints that attacking
the doll was what the scientists wanted?
 Tracing the subtle cultural effect of media texts is harder to do than
assess violent acts in children – how can we ever quantify the longterm cultural effects of certain media texts?
Discussion Questions
1) Should younger audiences be
protected from violent or sexually
explicit material in the media? Come
up with three arguments in favour of
age-related censorship, three
against.
2) There is a growing movement to
restrict young people’s exposure to
the media by limiting access to TV
and games consoles in bedrooms –
is this a good idea?
15
Ideology
Every media text has an underlying set of ideas that
shape it. In the contemporary world, so-called political
correctness has a major impact on textual construction.
When someone breaks the ideologically accepted
norms of society, a backlash is the result. A good
example is the case of the BBC presenter Robert KilroySilk, who hosted a talk show. Kilroy-Silk made anti-Arab
comments in a Sunday newspaper and was forced to
resign from his post because he was felt to hold
politically unacceptable views by the institution.
Dominant ideology is that set of ideas that the majority
of the people accept. Examples of dominant ideological views are the
following:
 Women should behave modestly.
 People should look after their family first.
 Children need a lot of love and care to grow up properly.
 People have a right to earn as much as they can.
 People who earn a lot should not show off by parading their wealth
too ostentatiously.
Another good example of someone who it could be argued broke the
ideological rules was the media baron Robert Maxwell. He lived a very lavish
lifestyle and used other peoples’ pension contributions to keep his many
failing business enterprises afloat. When the Maxwell empire collapsed,
thousands of people lost their life savings and were left penniless in their old
age. Maxwell, it was asserted, was a fraud who destroyed families and didn’t
face his accusers.
Hollywood films have clear ideological roots, most are about heroic individuals
who go through testing and struggle and eventually win through against all
odds. Some good examples of this individualistic ideology can be found in the
Die Hard trilogy where John McClane defeats terrorists, or Arnold
Schwarzenegger’s Terminator. One decent man saves the Roman Empire in
Gladiator. Hollywood hates random or accidental deaths, so an enemy or
perpetrator is always present, and people are saved from certain death
situations at the last minute. Justice must be seen to be done.
Going Further
To grasp the importance of ideology in media texts, the term discourse needs
to be understood. A discourse is a set of hidden, ‘agreed’ rules about what is
acceptable in a given area of study. In science for example, experiments do
not mention the mood or disposition of the experimenter, because this is not
part of the scientific discourse. Research has shown that the personal
attitudes of an experimenter can and does have a profound effect on the
‘scientific’ results produced. For example, much of the work of the famous
sexual behaviour researcher Alfred Kinsey was highly weighted in favour of
normalising homosexual behaviour – he had homosexual tendencies himself
16
and may have had a clear interest in the outcome. Kinsey rejected data that
did not support his views, thus his research is widely questioned today. In the
media, similar discourses are created, where certain ideas cannot be
expressed because they are not part of the discourse. When terrorism is
discussed in a TV news magazine text such as Newsnight, the discourse
does not allow an interviewee to agree with terrorist acts; the discourse only
permits discussion of how to stop terrorism. In political discussions in the
media, far Left or Right opinions are outside the ‘normal’ discourse and once
again are not allowed to be discussed. This leads on to the concept of political
correctness, which is influencing every aspect of life today. The media widely
practices self-censorship where certain ideologies are now considered
dangerous and beyond the agreed discourse. To question politically correct
views on race or gender can lead to suspension or even having employment
terminated. A good example was the ending of Robert Kilroy-Silk’s media
career when he wrote an article condemning Arab culture as sexist and
backward. To avoid offending minorities, we see examples of increasing selfcensorship in many media institutions such as the BBC. A good contemporary
example of self-censorship in the media is the furore over the publication of
cartoons of the prophet Mohammed in many European newspapers in 2006.
The cartoons were deemed offensive to a religious minority and violent
protests occurred across Europe. The originator of the controversy was a
writer, Kare Bluitgen, who could not find anyone to illustrate a children’s book
about Mohammed because the artists and illustrators were scared of
offending Muslims and being physically assaulted. A Danish newspaper
published the cartoons to show that self-censorship must stop. The response
from Islamic nations worldwide was headline news, with Danish flags burned
and their embassy in one country fire bombed! The events were described by
the Danish Prime Minister as the biggest crisis in Denmark’s history since
World War Two. Ideology is a very sensitive aspect of media studies and can
easily cause offence; there is no painless way of looking at the subject, and
freedom from bias is arguably impossible.
Discussion Questions
1) Are certain opinions so outrageous that
there should be no discussion of them
permitted in the mass media? If so,
what are these ‘forbidden opinions’?
2) Is political correctness a good or a bad
cultural development?
3) Are we now subject to the whims of a
self-appointed thought police, as
predicted in George Orwell’s vision of
the future, 1984?
17
Institutions
These are the bodies that make, distribute and show media texts.
Increasingly, with the march of globalisation, huge media businesses are
being created, such as the Time/AOL/Warner group, one of the biggest in the
world, with a turnover of $380 billion, followed by Disney, Viacom and
Bertelsmann. Large multinational corporations such as Rupert Murdoch’s
News Corporation likewise increasingly own newspapers and magazines such
as The Sun and The Times. In the UK one of the biggest media institutions is
the BBC, a public broadcast service.
Institutions tend to be run by white, middle-class men and the products their
institutions create reflect the passions and interests of these men. If political
correctness is important to the governors of the BBC, then lots of non-white
newsreaders and reporters suddenly appear on TV screens, if red-heads are
in, then lots of red-headed women stars appear. Institutions such as Coca
Cola also have huge advertising budgets that they use to place their product
on screens. The media is increasingly seen as a business with huge potential
for profit making; The Lord Of The Rings trilogy will make well over $3 billion
for Time/AOL/Warner for example. Institutions shape the way we see the
world, but remain shadowy, secretive organisations that few know anything
about. Check out the Mediawatch website for more details.
Going further
An important concept students need to understand is
that of public service broadcasting institutions. PSBs
include the BBC, ITN, Channels 4 and 5, and the Welsh
language channel S4C. PSBs can be commercial or
government-funded: ITN is a commercial institution,
whereas the BBC is funded through the licence fee that
is paid by all households who own a television. There
are a number of important principles that govern the
way PSBs operate as media institutions:




 They must appeal to a broad audience
They should be available to all
They should be independent of government
They must cater for minority interests
They must educate as well as merely entertain
Some PSBs are given specific instructions when they are created, and are
checked or audited regularly to see that they are carrying out their brief. A
good example of a media institution that has a specific brief is Channel 4,
which has to provide programming that will specifically appeal to minority
groups in society, such as cultural or sexual minorities. Channel 4 has
developed a strong identity as an ‘alternative’ channel where risky or offensive
programming has taken place. A good example of such a risky programme
was the most complained about programme in British broadcasting history,
18
Brass Eye, which was a mockumentary series that satirised moral panics
about Britain’s decline, crime and paedophilia.
Independent institutions are commercial, but can make programmes in the
style, and on subjects of their own choosing. Larger commercial and PSB
institutions can buy the products of the ‘indies’ and save on production costs.
A good example of an independent media company is EMAP, which is one of
the largest publishers of magazines in the UK.
To Discuss
Some media commentators are
convinced there is a silent
conspiracy
controlling
what
audiences see and read in the
media, and ultimately, the way
most audiences may therefore
see the world. Left wing critics
such as Noam Chomsky argue
that media institutions, being
commercial organisations, are
committed to capitalism and are
generally supportive of business
and government. Conservative
critics such as Melanie Philips argue that a liberal establishment that is
committed to secular values, multiculturalism, egalitarianism and state power
controls the media in Britain. Which side do you agree with? Present your
arguments with clear evidence from contemporary news media such as
newspapers and news magazine programmes from TV.
19
Intertextuality
Many media texts make direct or subtler references to other texts. A good
example of this intertextuality can be found in The Matrix. There are many
references to other texts such as Alice in Wonderland, with references to the
rabbit hole, and being offered a magical key to another dimension of reality.
You can also find references to the French media theorists Baudrillard and
Michel Foucault as well as connections with Greek literature, Buddhist
scriptures, and Biblical allusions. Many of the actual concepts of The Matrix
came from comic books, anime art work and there might even be a direct
copying of a Doctor Who episode where the Doctor fights The Master on
Gallifrey, in a digital universe called The Matrix!
Intertextuality raises a host of issues, the most important being that of
authorship; to what extent is any text wholly new, or original? Where does a
text start and where does it end? What is text and what is context? An
example of intertextuality is a recruitment poster encouraging ethnic minorities
to join the Army, referring playfully back to a famous World War One
recruitment poster. Some texts deliberately play with intertextuality, teasing
the audience to spot the references; this has been called one of the codes
and conventions of a post-modern text. A good example of such a playful,
post-modern text is The Simpsons. Watch a couple of episodes and see how
many intertextual references you can spot, particularly to other films and
directors.
Going further
Important concepts students need to understand about intertextuality are
genre, hybridity and bricolage. If we take a well-known text such as Buffy The
Vampire Slayer, we can see references to other texts such as Bram Stoker’s
Dracula, zombie movies such as Night of the Living Dead, and comedy texts
such as Scream! By combining a number of different genres, a hybrid genre
has been used, meaning recognisable genres have been combined to create
the horror/comedy genre. When different elements of texts and genres are
added together to create a new effect, this could be described as bricolage.
The easiest way to remember all these concepts is to visualise an artist’s
palette, with a number of different paint colours. The artist could use the
colours alone to create bold effects, or could combine a number of related
colours to make more subtle tones and shades. In this analogy, the artist is
the media producer, the colours are texts and genres, and the masterpiece
will probably employ bricolage effectively.
20
Claude Levi-Strauss
Levi-Strauss was a French linguistic theorist who wrote many books on how
meaning and culture relate. Narratives we relate to each other unconsciously
reflect the ideologies, obsessions and fears of our society. These narratives
are constructed using opposites such as dark and light. If we take the
example of the science fiction genre, we can see Levi-Strauss’s point clearly.
The popular film about global warming The Day After Tomorrow (2003) shows
the fears of the society at work perfectly; the Earth’s climate has been
dramatically affected by pollution. We see in the text many binary oppositions
that relate to the obsessive fear of destruction: normal weather and extreme
conditions, calm, orderly behaviour and wild uncontrolled madness, scientists
and journalists, political masters and bewildered ordinary people, and so forth.
Going further
Media students often make a simple mistake when writing
an essay in the examination; they make broad, nonspecific references to theories and theorists and fail to tie
this securely to textual examples they have studies. Taking
a case study of a popular text, cheaply available from the
Internet and high street stores, that of I, Robot. This text is
aimed at a mass audience, and has proved popular across
the world, taking nearly $350 million. At the heart of this
text is a structure (Levi-Strauss was a structuralist) based
on clear binary oppositions of human versus machine. The
hero (a reference to Propp could be applied here) is a
human, and the supposed villain is a robot called Sonny. The hero is black;
the robot is white, an interesting reversal of their opposing roles in the film,
and also a reversal of semiotic codes and conventions. Another key aspect of
the binary oppositions is the individual, Will Smith’s character Detective
Spooner, against the corporation, represented by the real company US
Robotics. Smith plays a quirky, opinionated maverick character, always on the
edge of being disciplined by his superiors. The corporation works like a
disciplined machine; the building where the company headquarters is housed
is in fact a living example of artificial intelligence, called Vicky, a supercomputer that is using the NS-5 robots for its own ends. Other binary
oppositions in the text are control by rational computers against control by
emotional, faulty humans. Remember to use contemporary examples in your
answers – you may refer back to historic texts, but only to support or compare
with your main investigation, which is anchored in the contemporary world.
There arises an important question at this point: what is contemporary? AQA
examination board places contemporary texts in a five year period preceding
a student’s entry to the course. Some teachers like to focus on older texts that
were iconic and spoke to their generation – gently remind them that they
should be focusing on texts that have meaning for present day audiences!
21
Laura Mulvey and the Male Gaze
Laura Mulvey is an academic who approaches media texts, mainly film, with a
feminist, psychoanalytical approach; a woman’s point of view and a
psychiatrist’s perspective. Mulvey wrote a very influential article called ‘Visual
Pleasure and Narrative Cinema’, stating that the representation of women in
films is closely connected with the pleasure men receive when they look at a
beautiful woman. This pleasure relates back to the male child’s first
experiences of a woman, his mother. Mulvey’s point is well illustrated in the
work of the great British film director, Alfred Hitchcock. Hitchcock’s women are
always beautiful, and strangely, often end up as passive victims. Male film
directors enjoyed depicting the torture of women because it fulfilled deep
seated psychological needs. Many films were essentially directed by and for
‘peeping toms’. Mulvey wanted to see more positive representations of
women on the screen, ones that empowered them, rather than ones that
enforced negative stereotypes of helplessness and dependency.
Going Further
According to Mulvey, most mainstream Hollywood film invariably adopts the
position of the male’s gaze: camera shots linger over legs, lips, breasts, but
do not follow the same cinematographic rules when focusing on men. Men are
often represented as active, women as passive. Cultivation theory states that
by slowly dripping ideologies into audiences’ minds, they adopt them without
realising what is happening. The male gaze is so manifest in many media
texts that women are made more passive. Mulvey’s position is that to put the
picture straight, male scopophilic (watching) pleasures need to be denied;
mainstream Hollywood has to go, to be replaced with avant-garde film
making, which can empower women and bring down the patriarchal
dominance in media production. When traditional narrative film making has
ended its dominance of the industry, then women can start to create film that
embodies the female gaze, and audiences will be freed from the shackles of
patriarchy.
Critics of Laura Mulvey point to the popularity of ‘patriarchal’ texts with both
genders; many women are not bothered or even conscious of any male bias
in film: they want to be entertained, not empowered. Terje Skjerdal objects to
the way Freudian psychoanalysis is used by Mulvey to understand film, and
her dismissal of all mainstream Hollywood production as patriarchal, pointing
22
to texts such as Thelma and Louise (1991) as evidence that gender issues
can be represented positively and can empower women, just as effectively as
avant-garde cinema. Some mainstream texts such as Ridley Scott’s horror
Sci-Fi text Alien (1979) represent women as powerful, capable and highly
competent, in the form of Sigourney Weaver’s Ripley, who alone among the
crew of a space ship with a killer alien on board manages to kill the alien and
survive.
Discussion Point
Analyse a contemporary film text from the last two years
and see if the camera is indeed following the male gaze
theory. Can you find examples of the female gaze in any
contemporary film? Bring your findings to class and be
prepared to discuss whether you agree or disagree with
Mulvey’s view that narrative cinema is essentially
patriarchal and oppressive to women.
23
Marx
Marxist ideologies are primarily
about class and the domination of
small, powerful groups in society.
Karl Marx believed that one day the
ordinary people would rise up and
take control of society, creating a
fair and equal system where
everyone was accepted and given
equal respect. The revolution never
happened, but the way Marx
analysed society became very
powerful and is still useful today,
even though Communism has failed. Marxist critics such as Gramsci have
noted how dominant ideologies reflect the values most likely to keep the
middle classes in power and control. The people who control the big media
institutions such as Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation use their power in
the media to promote ideas that will sustain and support the system that made
them rich - Capitalism. People like Ralph Nader and Michael Moore question
the dominant capitalistic system and find a block on their work. Michael
Moore, who wrote a bestseller Stupid White Men – a critical book that
exposes George Bush as a crook, found it very hard to have his work
published because it contained messages highly critical of the American Way.
Representations of the poor, communists, women, disabled, gays and so
forth, all reflect the dominant ideology that excludes minorities. White, middleclass men control the media, so the media reflects their value system. The
Marxist position is highly biased, but is a powerful tool and worth mentioning
in any examination answer, particularly when thinking about why certain
people are represented in certain ways.
Marx - Going Further
An investigation of Marxist interpretations of the media leads most students to
the work and ideas of Antonio Gramsci. Gramsci coined the key term
hegemony to describe the relationship between the ruling class and the ruled.
To control society, particular social groups struggle to influence the
consensus view or the more widely used term, ‘common sense’. These
groups use the media to persuade others to accept and adopt their views, but
never finally succeed totally in achieving complete dominance – the struggle
is perpetual. A good case study showing the hegemonic principal at work is
the way feminists have influenced the way society has seen gender, politics
and work. A hundred years ago women were seen in a very different way –
they did not have the vote, had limited legal rights and lived in a more
patriarchal society where their life choices were more limited than today.
Through various media such as books, magazines and television and also
through direct political action, women changed the perception of their role in
society to one of greater equality. The dominant or hegemonic view is now
that the sexes are equal and the discourse is limited to discussing how this
can be further enhanced. A text that argued women were emotional and
irrational and needed male guidance to steady them would probably not be
24
made in 2007 –it would be airing views that were outside the permitted
ideological discourse. The writer Dr Laura Schlesinger aired views that were
outside the permitted gender discourse and found herself ostracised from
airing her views that women should submit to men on the mainstream
American media chat shows.
A Marxist analysis of who produces most of the media texts consumed in the
developed world shows that five major companies control the majority of
production. This places enormous power in the hands of unelected
shareholders in these companies. These institutions will tend to support the
status quo because it has served the shareholders well in the past. As
globalisation continues, more and more audiences will ‘get what they’re
given’, which will be heavily encoded with American values and produced by
wealthy media companies such as the Fox network.
Discussion Questions
1) Were the Marxists right in asserting that many
media texts encode hegemonic values that
support the status quo?
2) Have minority ideologies such as gay rights now
become hegemonic? How does the media
promote such ideologies?
3) Do liberal or capitalist elites control the media?
25
Moral Panics
When the media become obsessed with a
threat to the Western way of life (capitalism),
or to people’s health or security, a moral
panic results. A moral panic in the 1980s
followed after the Jamie Bulger case, when
two children battered a toddler to death. The
two murderers had seen a range of videos
that depicted horrible violence. A number of
videos were banned and age limits strictly
enforced as a result of the moral panic. Some recent examples of moral
panics have been an ongoing campaign against foreign migrants in the tabloid
press, stressing their cultural differences and the amount of money needed to
support them while their requests are looked into.
After the 9/11 disasters, fundamentalist Islamic and Middle Eastern terrorists
became the focus of the moral panic, on both sides of the Atlantic. More
recent moral panics could be the fear of paedophiles (Ian Huntley), amoral
professionals (Dr Harold Shipman) and the SARS epidemic, which was
reported as another possible plague that would destroy the world as we knew
it. Moral panics and people so disgusting that society despises and hates
them, known as folk devils, were identified by the media theorist Stanley
Cohen.
Moral Panics – How They Work
Moral panics can be broken down into three distinct phases: Phase one is the
initial event and its immediate interpretation. Phase two involves the mass
media fanning the flames. Phase three is the resulting social control. Here’s
how it could work in a fictional example. Anti social behaviour orders (ASBOs)
and tagging are discovered to be the only way teenagers can be initiated into
a secret elite urban gang, called Kaos, so thousands deliberately try to create
as much havoc and mayhem as possible in order to join. Kaos is cool, and
everyone who wants street credibility wants the club tattoo on his or her wrist.
A mini crime wave ensues. A right wing national newspaper exposes the gang
and its activities and demands stiffer penalties for anti social behaviour. Gang
membership rockets across the country. Kaos.com appears on the Internet to
recruit more members, causing copycat violence across many areas. Hits on
the Kaos website reach 5 million within a week. The magistrates’ courts
cannot cope with the huge numbers appearing for arson, theft and robbery,
and demand action. The government then passes amendments to the
Conspiracy Act in order to put an end to the activities of the gang. Kaos
membership peaks at 100,000 until the leaders are found to be public school
boys who set up the club as an ironic post-modern joke for their media studies
coursework about cultivation theory and the hypodermic syringe effect. The
boys become overnight celebrities, but the press deems them folk devils and
after being expelled, they are sent to a young offenders’ institution. The new
Secretary of State for Education removes media studies from the curriculum
in a bold move to keep the right wing press happy and persuade them that
she is getting tough on yobs and soft curriculum subjects.
26
Going further
The media theorist Stanley Cohen named those
who threaten ‘our’ way of life, or deviate from the
dominant ideology as folk devils. The Jews
became just such folk devils in Nazi Germany, with
many children indoctrinated into a belief that the
Jews were behind all that was bad in German
society. Today, the paedophile is the ultimate folk
devil, with rumours that one has moved into an
area likely to spark off rioting. One paediatrician
had her practice vandalised because of the
misunderstanding by local people caused by her
clinic’s name. Can you think of any other groups in our society who are
branded as fiends, or threats to ‘our' way of life?
To Discuss



Are moral panics ever justified?
Do moral panics inevitably cause freedom to be curtailed in some way?
How are moral panics beneficial to media institutions?
27
Media Violence
Every few years, a media text will feature some
particularly graphic violent act and will spark off a
media debate or panic. In the 1970’s kung fu
movies such as Bruce Lee’s Enter the Dragon
were blamed for so-called copycat violence when
throwing-stars were used at British football
matches. The occult horror film The Exorcist was
reported as the most violent and disturbing film
ever made and there were calls to have the text
censored in the UK. In the 1980s so-called video
nasties were seen as destroying the fabric of
society and many were banned as a result. The film Childsplay 3 was blamed
for the Jamie Bulger murder. Another film that was seen as simply too violent
for audiences was Quentin Tarantino’s movie Reservoir Dogs, which showed
a policeman having his ear cut off by a psychotic criminal. It is clear that this
debate will not go away. Media violence seems to be acceptable where it is
shown to be bad, or where right overcomes evil. In 1999 The Matrix was
released to critical acclaim, but some criticisms of its depiction of violence,
such as a soldier having a knife buried in his skull by Carry-Ann Moss-Trinity.
A contemporary debate about media violence is focused on Quentin
Tarantino’s Kill Bill, which features large doses of calculated violence,
committed by the actress Uma Thurman. It seems violence against the
helpless or children are the most unacceptable type, even in the permissive
New Millennium.
The media and violence debate – going further
In the tabloid newspapers where the violence-censorship debate is most
vigorous, a simple adding up of violent acts watched is linked to an upsurge of
violence in society in general. The simple answer is then to restrict what is
available in the interestes of decency and public order. A good example is the
release of a video game based on Tarantino’s violent masterpiece Reservoir
Dogs in 2006. Players can perform ultra violent acts on police officers such
as cutting off their fingers, ears, and ultimately blowing a hole in their heads.
The game was immediately banned in Australia and New Zealand, but was
given an 18 certificate and released in the UK. The New Zealand censors
wrote: "(The game) encourages the player to perform – and showcases in
slow motion – the most extreme forms of violence and brutality for the
purpose of entertainment." Here is an example of linking a media product
directly to acts of violence; the question is clear for a media student – is there
a link or not? If acts of violence watched are added up, the question arises,
how does one define a violent act? Are the commonplace acts of torture and
abuse found in childens’ cartoons such as Ed, Edd and Eddy really violent, or
just simulated for entertainment? When Robots have their heads ripped off in
I, Robot, are we seeing violence or mechanical interaction? The media
influence on the young has been referred to in the hypodermic syringe
section, but students should make it clear that they are aware of an
unresolved debate about the effects of the media in society.
28
Narrative
This is a key concept in media studies, one that
can be quite complex when looked into. Different
media texts use different narratives; a tabloid
newspaper would start its narrative with a big
impact headline, whereas a film text would keep
its biggest impact sequences until the end. Soap
operas tend to operate using open-ended
narratives; the stories rarely have closure
because following episodes keep the stories
ongoing, and the audience interested. Most texts
have linear narratives, the story has a beginning,
middle and end, organised in sequence. A classic film that broke the linear
rule was Quentin Tarantino’s Pulp Fiction, where the hero was killed in the
first part of the narrative and reappeared in the second and third parts! The
Russian media theorist Vladimir Propp wrote in great detail about the various
types of narrative functions; he observed 31 different functions, based on his
research into Russian fairy tales.
Remember that every text has a narrative, including print media. When
looking at print media, think about the way the reader’s eye is drawn into
engaging with the text, this is the textual narrative. Narrative is intimately
connected with audience. An effective narrative is one that repeatedly
engages the audience fully with the text.
Tzvetan Todorov’s Narrative Theory
Tzvetan Todorov’s narrative theory is really very simple. Most stories or
narratives start with a state of balance, wholeness, equilibrium and harmony;
the characters are at peace, all is well. If you have seen The Lord of The
Rings (2001-3), the narrative starts in the Shire, with Bilbo and Frodo living in
the rustic peace of Hobbiton. Todorov then noted that something or someone
from outside disrupts the peace and causes a state of disequilibrium or
imbalance. There follows a struggle at the end of which equilibrium and
harmony are restored, but it is a new type of harmony, changed from the
original state. If we apply Todorov’s theory to The Matrix, we have Thomas
Anderson working as a software writer and part-time hacker, he is called by
Morpheus to be reborn into the real world, and the film ends with Anderson in
a new role and world as Neo. Todorov’s model applied to the Lord of the
Rings works very well, with the outsider Gandalf bringing news of Sauron and
Saruman’s growing force, to the final scenes showing harmony restored once
more to the Shire with Sam Gamgee
returning to the peace of his little village,
but a world where no elf, wizard or ringbearer dwell…
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Post-modernism
This is cutting edge theory and the term post-modern is a hard one to define.
Without going into lots of complicated theory, here are some of the qualities of
post-modern philosophy:
1. According to the French media theorist Lyotard there are no more ‘big
pictures’ or meta- narratives, all truth has become relative.
2. Morality is culturally derived and therefore relative; your right maybe
my wrong.
3. The way you see something is more important than what you see.
Here are some qualities to look out for in post-modern texts:
1)
Self-reflexivity and subversion: texts that refer to themselves are
known as self-reflexive, for example, in a movie, when an actor
looks directly at the audience and says, “Hey, don’t worry, it’s only
a film!” Post-modern directors like to position their audiences at
some distance, as if to compel them to realise that what they are
seeing is only a constructed reality. A good example of this is the
2000 film Snatch by Guy Ritchie, where the editing is so obvious
and is even referred to throughout the film.
2)
Intertextuality: many post-modern films make playful references to
other texts, teasing the audiences to spot the references. This is
done constantly in the popular TV animations The Simpsons and
can also be seen in The Matrix where lots of references to
Baudrillard, Lewis Carol, and martial arts films are made, to name
but a few. The best example of intertextuality can be found in the
blockbuster Shrek, see how many you can spot.
3)
Mixing genres and periods: post-modern texts often deliberately
mix up different genres and periods to create interest in their
audience. A good example of this is in A Knight’s Tale where the
high culture of medieval literature (Chaucer) meets the popular
culture of the 1970’s bands Queen and Thin Lizzy.
4)
Using representation deliberately: audiences have become very
sophisticated, post-modern directors like to show how fragmented
our world has become, how we make sense of the world through
media images, that are themselves copies of other texts. Life has
become a hall of mirrors, which image is real?
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Propp’s Narrative Roles and Functions Theory
Vladimir Propp was a Russian media theorist, known as a formalist, who
analysed over 100 Russian folk tales and realised that certain characters
recurred in completely different stories: the villain, hero (heroine?!), the gift
giver, the sender, the false friend, the helper, the princess (prince?!) and her
father, the king? Propp also realised that certain narrative themes were used
again and again: preparation, complication, transference, struggle, return and
finally recognition. Propp’s narrative functions are complicated and cover 31
different functions, some of which apply, some of which don’t, depending on
the narrative. Read any good Media Studies textbook to find out more.
Let’s apply Propp’s theory to The Matrix: the hero is Anderson/Neo, the villain
is Agent Smith, the sender/helper is Morpheus, the false helper is Cypher, the
princess is Trinity, but where is the heroine’s father? Propp’s analysis still
works on a general level, but do not force narratives into a Proppian mould.
Most of the fairy tales Propp based his analysis on were created in a male
dominated world where women played a fairly passive role, hence Trinity
saves the hero in The Matrix. Feminist ideology has had an important effect
on narrative construction, thus making Propp’s analysis less applicable.
Nevertheless, Propp’s analytical system still works remarkably well despite
the passage of years.
Examination Advice
Weaker students often misapply Vladimir Propp’s
narrative theories, by forcing them inappropriately
onto texts, with the result that quite silly answers
are produced. How, for example, could Propp’s
theories be applied to a print media car
advertisement with a dark background and a bright
red sports car approaching the reader? It has been
done, because Propp is easily understood and
weaker students like to feel secure with simple
ideas, applying them wherever and whenever they
can. The sports car becomes the hero and the wild
road the villain, which is of course rather silly! The same problem applies to
Laura Mulvey’s male gaze theory: whenever an alluring female is employed in
a media text, the weaker student trots out the tired clichés about women being
sex objects: it is so dull and predictable, and annoys weary examiners! This
leads on to general advice about answering the question set, not preparing an
answer and hoping that the right question is on the paper. Carefully reading
the question is so easy, yet so few students actually do it. Break the question
into three parts: the instruction (what am I being asked to do?), the topic (what
is this about?) and the key phrase or word (what am I being asked to focus
on?). When you have understood the question, then stick to it and do not
waver until you have nailed it down with the PEE (!) rule: make a Point,
provide a detailed Example from a contemporary text you have studied, and
Explain how this example illustrates your point.
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Reading a text
When a text is created, the institutions and director
want the audience to read the film in a certain way. For
example, EastEnders the soap opera is supposed to be
a slice of real life in East London, the audience’s
reading is supposed to focus on the realism of the
mise-en-scène, thinking ‘this is like real life!’ This is
known as the preferred or hegemonic reading of the
text. After going backstage or studying media language and analysis, an
audience will see the text in a different way; their reading will be a negotiated
one. Instead of becoming engrossed in the interplay of characters, which is
the preferred way of reading the text, a negotiated reading will focus on
camera angles, use of mise-en-scène, dialogue and so forth. An oppositional
reading of a text is where an audience will disagree strongly with the ideology
of the text. In EastEnders Christians are represented in a very negative way,
as hypocrites, whereas gay people are routinely depicted as sensitive people,
in touch with their emotions. An evangelical Christian who sees homosexuality
as a sin may therefore make an oppositional reading of EastEnders, seeing
the representation as part of the contemporary rejection of traditional
standards of morality. Another example of oppositional readings would be a
modern audience’s reading of a famous documentary Triumph of the Will, a
propaganda film made for the Nazis by Leni Riefenstahl in 1934. The
preferred reading of the text is simple; Hitler saved Germany and is leading
the nation to victory. The negotiated reading focuses on the wider context and
the imaginative use of moving cameras. The oppositional reading of the text
would focus on the poisonous ideology, and seeing the text as pure racist
hate, better consigned to the trash bin of history. Audiences will often interpret
texts in very different ways depending on their background, education and
what is happening at the time they are viewing the text.
Preferred or Hegemonic Reading
The way an audience is supposed to understand a text, the way of the
mediator, is known as the preferred or hegemonic reading. When an audience
reads a text differently it is called a negotiated reading. An audience that
reads a text completely differently is sometimes an oppositional reading, or
even an aberrant reading. If we take the example of I, Robot the directors
want us to see the text as a science fiction narrative about the challenge
robotic advancements will cause as the machines outpace their inventors.
This theme is woven into the narrative structure of a police drama about the
suspected murder of a top industrial designer. The text can be read on a
simple level as a high octane blockbuster with lots of action and spectacular
CGI. A negotiated reading would look at the context of the film, considering
how the impact of technology was being encoded into binary oppositions in
popular texts. An oppositional reading would consider the outrageous use of
product placement in the text, with close ups of branded footwear and
computer companies’ logos as evidence of globalisation and institutional
synergy. Three people could be watching the same film, but from entirely
different perspectives.
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Realism (verisimiltude)
This is an important area concerned with representation in various media
texts. Firstly, all texts are mediated and therefore not realistic. Most texts,
notably those from the Classical Hollywood era, pretend that they are showing
you reality by transparent, continuity editing techniques. Characterisation,
mise-en-scène and narrative all conspire together to create an illusion of
realism, or verisimilitude. Of course, what we are seeing is someone’s highly
mediated version of reality. Many students become bogged down with issues
of realism, when often there is a simple and obvious truth; what we are seeing
is all mediated, the mise-en-scene has been carefully selected, the lighting
adjusted for effect and actors put in costumes. Media texts are by their very
nature unreal!
After the Second World War Italian filmmakers, influenced by Marxist ideas
that cinema should reflect social and class reality rather than bourgeois
(middle class) fantasy, created a type of film that used non-professional actors
and simple unrehearsed dialogue to show life as it ‘really’ was. The question
here is whose reality are we seeing; merelya marxist reality, instead of a
bourgeois one? This school of cinema was known as Italian Neo-Realism,
and a good example is Pasolini’s Gospel According to Saint Matthew where
Jesus looks rather dull and Saint John has a bad haircut and pimples. A
British example of social realism is the mod classic Bronco Bullfrog where two
incoherent teenagers find love in a monochrome Hackney in 1969 East End of
London. Realism has become less of an important concept, especially since
the advent of CGI, or Computer Generated Imagery. In texts such as The
Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy audiences clearly know that what they are
seeing is not real, but the text still works because audiences are prepared to
suspend their disbelief.
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Representation
The way a subject is shown to the audience is the essence of representation.
Richard Dyer’s typographical theory stated there were four aspects to
representation.
1. Re-presentation: What type of media language is being used to portray
the subject? If a person is shown with lighting below the face,
contrasting and sinister shadows are shown, making the subject
appear sinister, for example.
2. Being representative of: the media uses types to communicate. Often
these types are stereotypes; so all East End men have shaved heads
and intimidate people with violence. All motorcyclists are rebels that
wear leathers and speed dangerously. Careful selection of mise-enscène is used to convey meaning and reinforce stereotypes.
3. Institutions create texts for profit, not accuracy or realism. Many
audiences prefer to be entertained rather than think, so stereotypes are
used repeatedly because they comfort. Countertypes (where
stereotypes are challenged or subverted) do not go down well with
many audiences. Many audiences would feel cheated after seeing a
James Bond film where Bond turned out to be gay!
4. Audiences’ responses to representations: audiences can make
preferred, negotiated or oppositional readings of texts.
There are some important questions to ask whenever you see a
representation:
 Who or what is being represented?
 Who is doing the representation?
 Is the representation fair, truthful and accurate?
 Does the person being represented have any opportunity for selfexpression, or are words put into their mouth by editing, mise-en-scène
and so forth?
Different channels,
different truths…
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Semiotics
Semiotics is complicated; it involves the study of signs and meanings. This
sounds simple, but the more one looks at semiotics, the more it becomes very
difficult to fully understand. If we take a sign found next to an old person’s
home (red warning triangle, two bent over people, one with a walking stick in
black on white) as an example, we have two aspects: the sign itself and what
the sign means, in this case drivers beware of elderly people crossing the
road slowly. A study of this initially simple sign reveals a lot more, for example
stereotypical and ageist representations of the elderly. Ferdinand de
Saussure stated that signs use codes and conventions that mean certain
things to certain audiences, for example, red is associated with warning and
white with good in Western societies. In Western semiotic codes, red also
represents blood, whereas in China red signifies good luck! A very successful
advertising campaign for HSBC bank used this issue of cultural relativism in a
recent campaign. Meaning therefore has a culturally conditioned aspect; it can
change over time as well, in response to wider social contexts. Science meant
progress until the atomic bomb was exploded in 1945 and the Nazi
extermination camps were discovered; science then meant the possibilities of
extermination and annihilation. Scientists generally had more positive
connotations in 1936; in 1946 they began to take on more sinister
associations.
C.S. Pierce
Pierce contributed to the study of signs, symbols and meanings, known as
semiotics. Pierce believed that the essence of semiotics lay in the study of
language or linguistics. Language dominated the way human beings thought
about the world, either freeing them, or imprisoning them to think
independently. Pierce identified three categories of signs: iconic, indexical and
symbolic.
1. Iconic: a sign that represents something else. A photograph of a cat
is not a cat, but it makes us think of one.
2. Indexical: a sign that has a direct link to something else: a
thermometer is an index of temperature, so most car dashboards
have one, to indicate the temperature of the water, rather than the
words “water temperature in your radiator” – which would take up a
lot of space.
3. Symbolic: formal signs are used to indicate meaning, so a cross is
used to represent the crucifixion of Christ.
Applying Pierce to a real example, let’s look at the pop diva Madonna. Iconic
signs are where what is represented has a direct connection to reality, for
example a photograph of Madonna looks like the person it represents. An
indexical sign is one where there is a less direct link; a cartoon of Madonna
with her famous girdle and fishnets: the face may be hidden, but most people
would be able to identify her quickly. A symbolic sign is where cultural
connotations give a sign meaning, for example Madonna may signify post
modernism and the power of changing surface images in England, but she
may mean decadence and moral decay in Iran!
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Uses and Gratifications Theory
Many audience theories have focused on the effect media texts have on
audiences, seeing them as essentially passive, a group to whom things are
done by mediators. A good example of this passive audience theory would be
the hypodermic syringe model. Uses and gratifications turns the spotlight on a
different area; what does the audience do with the text, rather than what the
text does to the audience. Media theorists Blumler and Katz put forward the
idea that audiences put media texts to their own uses, instead of being
manipulated by them. Here are four distinct uses to which audiences put
texts:
1. To reinforce personal identity: texts can be used to judge how to behave
in reality.
2. To find companionship and meaning by being part of a group: going to
the cinema and discussing the latest movie with friends would be a
good example of this. Watching soap operas is another example where
people actually feel part of Walford or Emmerdale, if their own lives are
rather lonely.
3. People also use media texts to find out about current affairs, news and
weather and how they should respond to changes taking place. For
example, many people read the Financial Times in order to discover
stock prices and company fortunes.
4. Finally, people use the media to communicate with each other. The
Internet is of course the biggest way this is done, it is a medium that is
increasingly being used by advertisers. Interactive TV is also taking
off, with millions of people pressing the red button on their remote
control to vote on who should be removed from the Big Brother house,
or who should be crowned Queen of the Jungle!
36
Applied Media Theory Multiple Choice Test
1. What is aberrant decoding?
a) Misinterpretation of a text
b) Purposely changing a text's meaning
c) Not knowing what a text means
d) Not understanding a text
2. A text that may be read in a number of different ways could be called a
a) Polysemitic text
b) Polyseptic text
c) Polysemic text
d) Multi layered text
3. Who was Pierre Bourdieu?
a) A teenager who shot his parents
b) A French semiotic writer
c) A French sociologist
d) A culturally competent film director
4. Examples of successful anime films are
a) Akira and Fantasia
b) Ran and Ghost in the Machine
c) Akira and Quadrophenia
d) Ghost in the Shell and Akira
5. Which of the following is NOT an auteur?
a) Roland Barthes
b) Francis Ford Coppola
c) Orson Welles
d) Ridley Scott
6. Who described texts as complex bundles of meanings?
a) Michael Powell
b) Claude Levi-Strauss
c) Sigmund Freud
d) Roland Barthes
7. Which pair of qualities would constitute a binary opposition?
a) Love and death
b) Life and light
c) Despair and darkness
d) Logic and science
8. Which text deliberately played with generic codes and conventions?
a) The Sun
b) Scary Movie
c) Die Another Day
d) Lord of the Rings
37
9. What would be typical of the tabloid newspaper genre?
a) Detailed reporting
b) Coverage of foreign news
c) Splash headline
d) A racing supplement
10. How would feminists describe the representation of women in many media
texts?
a) Fat and hairy
b) Lazy and vain
c) Strong and sexually manipulative
d) Passive and vulnerable
11. Which type of feminism is most extreme?
a) Socialist
b) Liberal
c) Ultra
d) Radical
12. Who is known as the father of modern psychology?
a) Barthes
b) Frank
c) Felipe
d) Sigmund Freud
13. In the Electra Complex
a) Girls fantasise about falling in love with their fathers
b) Boys secretly desire their mothers
c) Men gaze at women and want to control them
d) Men use violence to achieve their ends
14. What is patriarchy?
a) Control of the media
b) Men controlling women through negative stereotyping
c) Women controlling men
d) The upper class controlling the poor
15. How do classical Hollywood texts persuade the audience that they are
seeing reality?
a) Using jump cuts
b) Using documentary style
c) Fast editing
d) Continuity editing
16. Italian Neo Realist directors used
a) Method actors
b) Professional actors
c) Non-professional actors
d) Cartoons
38
17. Who staged a radio show that supported the hypodermic syringe effect?
a) Orson Welles
b) H.G. Wells
c) Peter Jackson
d) Alfred Hitchcock
18. What factors are vital in helping an audience determine a text's genre?
a) Mise-en-scène
b) Sound
c) Narrative
d) All of the above
19. Which ideological statement is NOT currently acceptable?
a) Women should behave modestly
b) Disabled people are being punished for their sins
c) Children have rights
d) Gender should not affect a person's rights
20. What is one way media institutions DO NOT influence audiences?
a) By direct advertising
b) By product placement
c) By ideological messages
d) By drawing attention to their role in productions
21. Which of the following is NOT a big media institution?
a) Yorkshire TV
b) Viacom
c) Time/Warner
d) Bertelsmann
22. Which intertextual references are to be found in The Matrix?
a) Baudrillard, Dickens, Foucault
b) Buddhism, Christianity, Spiritualism
c) Baudrillard, Buddhism, anime
d) Anime, Dickens, Hardy
23. Who first defined binary oppositions in media texts?
a) Laura Mulvey
b) Peter Jackson
c) Pierre Bourdieu
d) Claude Levi-Strauss
24. Which type of camera use is employed to create realism?
a) Hand-held
b) Panning
c) Zoom
d) Steadicam
39
25. The director Alfred Hitchcock depicted women as
a) Sexually provocative
b) Passive victims
c) Housewives
d) A threat to the patriarchy
26. Women are represented in certain ways because men decide this. This
theory is known as
a) Freudian
b) Psychoanalytic
c) The Male Gaze
d) Marxist
27. Representations of minority groups are often negative because
a) The audience prefers visually pleasurable images
b) The media tries to promote a positive vision of the world
c) Media institutions are controlled by the powerful; minorities could pose a
threat to their dominance
d) Audiences do not want to know about minorities
28. Whose values are dominant, according to Marxists?
a) Blacks
b) Asians
c) Women
d) White, middle class men
29. Following the Jamie Bulger case there was a media panic. What was the
perceived threat?
a) Children out of control
b) Video games
c) The Internet
d) Films with adult themes being watched by children
30. Who wrote Stupid White Men?
a) C. S. Pierce
b) Vladimir Todorov
c) Michael Manson
d) Michael Moore
31. Who wrote 'Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema'?
a) Michael Moore
b) Todorov
c) Baudrillard
d) Laura Mulvey
40
32. Which film was linked directly to the Jamie Bulger murder?
a) Childsplay 2
b) The Exorcist
c) Childsplay 3
d) Chucky's Revenge
33. Which famous text broke the linear narrative rule?
a) Pulp Fiction
b) Citizen Kane
c) The Life of Brian
d) Deliverance
34. What is a linear narrative?
a) A storyline with no ending
b) A narrative with little closure after a number of developmental episodes
c) A narrative with a definite beginning, middle and end
d) A narrative using a fixed line to anchor the dialogue
35. Why might a Christian make an oppositional reading of EastEnders?
a) Because of the representation of Christians as gays
b) Because 'Christian' is used as a semiotic shorthand for 'hypocrite'
c) Because Muslims are depicted unfairly
d) Because the institution may persecute them
36. How are gay people represented in the BBC soap Eastenders?
a) As kind, sensitive people in touch with their emotions
b) As hypocrites
c) As perverted freaks
d) As deviants to be wiped out in a mad slaughter
37. Institutions like their audiences to understand the texts they produce in a
certain way. This is known as
a) An oppositional reading
b) A negotiated reading
c) A preferred reading
d) A typical approach
38. Who was depicted positively in Triumph of the Will?
a) Gays and women
b) Nazis and women
c) Jews and gays
d) Women and gays
39. Which Russian media theorist wrote about narrative roles?
a) Todorov
b) Propp
c) Antonov
d) Chernenko
41
40. Which film was reported as being the most violent and disturbing ever
made?
a) Childsplay 3
b) Reservoir Dogs
c) The Wicker Man
d) The Exorcist
41. The study of signs, symbols and meanings is
a) Semiotics
b) Binary oppositions
c) Representation
d) Symbolic interpretations
42. The Simpsons, The Matrix and Shrek all contain a vital defining aspect of
postmodernism
a) Self-reflexivity
b) Genre mixing
c) Intertextuality
d) Use of deliberate, ironic representation
43. Vladimir Propp defined a number of different narrative functions, how
many?
a) 41
b) 31
c) 29
d) 32
44. C. S. Pierce defined three types of semiotic systems, they were:
a) Direct icons, indirect icons, oppositional indices
b) Icons, indexes, signs
c) Iconic, stylistic, signifier
d) Iconic, indexical, symbolic
45. What sort of sign would an outline of a cloud be on a weather map?
a) Iconic
b) Indexical
c) Symbolic
d) Representational
46. Why are stereotypes used in media texts?
a) As a familiar semiotic shorthand that audiences can identify with
b) To enable mediators to subvert accepted norms and values
c) To challenge audiences
d) All of the above
47. What is the final phase of Todorov's narrative theory?
a) Equilibrium
b) Altered equilibrium
c) Closure
d) Disequilibrium
42
48. The uses and gratifications media theory states that audiences are:
a) Active
b) Passive
c) Tertiary
d) Representational
49. Audiences use the media to:
a) Communicate
b) Find meaning for their lives
c) Represent themselves
d) Represent others
50. What is a countertype?
a) An oppositional depiction of a group who have been stereotyped previously
b) A representation that is wholly negative
c) A generic character
d) An indexical sign
43
----------Answers---------1. (a)
2. (c)
3. (c)
4. (d)
5. (a)
6. (d)
7. (a)
8. (b)
9. (c)
10. (d)
11. (d)
12. (d)
13. (a)
14. (b)
15. (d)
16. (c)
17. (a)
18. (d)
19. (b)
20. (d)
21. (a)
22. (c)
23. (d)
24. (a)
25. (b)
26. (c)
27. (c)
28. (d)
29. (d)
30. (d)
31. (d)
32. (c)
33. (a)
34. (c)
35. (b)
36. (a)
37. (c)
38. (b)
39. (b)
40. (d)
41. (a)
42. (c)
43. (b)
44. (d)
45. (b)
46. (d)
47. (b)
48. (a)
49. (a)
50. (a)
44
Media theory applied in a short essay
What media theories, issues and debates are raised by the
popularity of The Matrix?
The Matrix first hit the screen in 1999 and quickly became a cult classic, two
sequels were eagerly awaited. The sequels were disappointing. Why was the
original Matrix so popular?
One reason the The Matrix was so popular with audiences was the concept of
being manipulated. A huge media institution financed the film, which in turn
showed an all-encompassing computer program manipulating audiences.
Real audiences are manipulated by mediating institutions such as TimeWarner. The Matrix film has become an icon of Post-modernism, a film that
works on many philosophical, even religious levels. The Matrix was what is
known as a polysemic text, and this was part of its appeal to sophisticated
audiences. Less sophisticated audiences just sat back and watched the
cutting edge computer generated images and the great action sequences.
The Media Violence debate was raised by some of the depictions of killings in
the text: was it healthy for younger audiences to watch their heroes wielding
guns and killing with such style? The Wachowski brothers’ excuse was that
none of the killings were actually happening, and everything was mediated
and constructed anyway!
Some audiences were so obsessed by the film, that they came to believe The
Matrix was some kind of prophetic text that was saying more than was
intended by the Wachowski Brothers. Web sites were devoted to decoding
The Matrix, books were written exploring the philosophical ideology behind
the text, some took their interest too far. The culturally incompetent believed
the The Matrix was reality and indulged in Aberrant Decoding; lives were taken in
the USA by one such devoted fan.
Some media commentators felt that the killings associated with The Matrix
were clear evidence of unnecessary violence; the mediators were
manipulating the audiences. However, other commentators saw the huge
profits that were generated by merchandisers as evidence of the Uses and
Gratifications Theory; people were using the text for their own pleasure and
identity. When teenagers went out and bought knee-length black leather
coats, they were identifying with Neo and Trinity and showing their
appreciation for the text.
Another reason for the success of The Matrix was the rich Intertextuality that
underpinned the film. There were references to French media theorists
Baudrillard, Foucault, to Buddhism and Christianity, to Alice in Wonderland,
and many others. One major influence in the creation of the look of the
production was Anime, Japanese adult animation. Looking at anime classics
such as Ghost in the Shell and Akira we can see the influence of the East on
this most Hollywood of productions.
45
The Ideology of The Matrix was popular with audiences too. The belief that
machines are quietly taking over the world underpins the Narrative of The
Matrix, a fear shared by many today. Against this grimly efficient enemy,
stands one lone individual, who eventually challenges the whole world order.
We see some great Binary Oppositions in the text, with men and machines used
as
46
Semiotics
shorthand for good and evil.
One of the great performances in the text was that of Carry-Anne Moss who
played Trinity, the heroine in the film. Although a strong and decisive
character, Trinity was still played by an attractive woman, an actress who
would appeal to the men who made the film and those who watched it.
Feminist critics such as Laura Mulvey saw the representation of Trinity as
evidence of the continuing power of the patriarchy. The male gaze was still
all-important in the way women were depicted in media texts. Trinity played
an interesting variation of Propp’s Narrative Roles and Functions Theory princess
figure; she was both saved by Neo and finally saves him by declaring her love
for him.
The Matrix, apart from being a thought provoking text about the meaning of
life, was also a great action movie that followed the codes and conventions of
this spectacularly successful Genre A hero arises, he challenges the enemy,
and finally triumphs after going through a number of trials. From the opening
sequences of Thomas Anderson’s life, through the struggles as he is rescued
from the matrix, to the establishment of a new equilibrium as he goes to Zion,
we see Tristan Todorov’s narrative theoretical principles working to entertain
audiences in the same way as the peasants who listened to the storytellers as
they spun their stories in the depths of the Russian winter. Despite all the
sophistication of The Matrix we still see the proven techniques of a successful
narrative being used.
Most writers mention the use of bullet time when writing about The Matrix.
The ability to freeze action, to show an actor from 360 degrees, and to see
this in startling detail, was the hallmark of the film. Audiences were astonished
at the Realism that the computer generated images made possible.
To conclude, The Matrix was not a great film as Citizen Kane was, but it was
an important one, a cultural landmark rather similar to Easy Rider in 1969. It
has become iconic to ‘Generation X’, as have the characters of Neo,
Morpheus and Trinity in their trench coats, shades, armed to the teeth and
looking so cool. The text was a massive and unexpected hit for the relatively
inexperienced directors, the Wachowski brothers. It is a shame that the
sequels lacked the cutting edge feel of the original, but this simply highlights
the importance of the text. A post modern classic, and if you haven’t seen it
yet, do so, you’re in for a treat!
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