Week Monday 28 September: three lessons

 POWER & THE MEDIA: IDENTITY and GENDER

We are preparing for the 'Power' exam question. Your final essay may consider three topics. Today's lesson on how women are represented therefore may give you a third to a half of your final exam answer.

Please email me your completed essay by Friday 2 October.

You will write a short essay on power and gender as part of this topic in answer to the exam question: "The media construct identity." How far do you agree with this view?

• define how women are represented and the media's power to shape perceptions about identity
• give an account of three to four theorists with media examples
• The Bechdel Test
• Carol Clover – last girl theory: useful if analysing representation in horror films but mainly the sub genre of slasher horror. These are often aimed at catering for male audiences.
• Angela McRobbie – post feminist icon theory 
• Laura Mulvey – male gaze/female gaze: the female form is objectified in a range of media. 
• Tessa Perkins – stereotyping has elements of truth and are based on repeated representations, both in society and within the media. 
• Judith Butler – queer theory. Gender is not the result of nature but is socially constructed through media and culture. 
• brief conclusion that relates to the exam question

In our lesson on gender, we will use these resources:

• Laura Mulvey – male gaze/female gaze. Although Mulvey herself has rejected the male gaze theory in recent years there are still strong arguments suggesting the female form is still objectified in a range of media. Can we subvert the theory and suggest male performers/actors are objectified?
• Carol Clover: the representation of the last girl model in slasher films has evolved. First depicted as a hopeless damsel in distress who is bombarded with all sorts of dread and insurmountable fear and  panic at first, the moment she is drawn face to face with her attacker, since she then appears tough as a male as she fights against the attacker with a weapon in her hand in her hopes of survival. Examples of slasher films that utilize the ‘final girl’ concept are Behind the Mask: The Rise of Leslie Vernon (2006, Scott Glosserman),  the 1997 film Alien Resurrection (1997, Jean-Pierre Jeunet), Urban Legend  (1998, Jamie Blanks). You may have newer examples?
• Angela McRobbie: McRobbie concluded from analysing constructions of gender in magazines that the media socialise us into gender roles: masculinity tends to be equated with power and aggression whilst femininity is represented in traditional roles, often as weak or subservient. These stereotypes perpetuate social ideas about gender. However, her Post Feminist Icon Theory suggests that female characters can also be determined, strong, independent and in control but also utilise their sexuality. “Lara Croft, Lady Gaga and Madonna, for example, could be identified as post-feminist icons as they exhibit the stereotypical characteristics of both the male and female – strength, courage, control and logic but also are willing to be sexualized for the male gaze. This control element of their own representation is crucial in understanding the theory”. In Rihanna's tv advert for Reb'l Fleur she has control over her representation: both knowing and innocent, Rihanna explores both sides of her nature in a visual palindrome.
• Digital technology has enabled the representation of the warrior woman in film: examples include Avatar with the CGI alien Neytiri (2009, James Cameron), Lara Croft Tomb Raider (2001), Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon (2000, Ang Lee), Mei in The House Of Flying Daggers (2004, Yimou Zhang), Mulan (2020, Niki Caro), Captain Marvell (2019) and similar films like Captain America, Wonder Woman. 
• Robotic 'service' figures tend to be constructed as compliant females: Mia the synth in the popular tv series Humans (2015-18), Arisa in Better Than Us (2018, Netflix), Ava in Ex Machina (2014)
• The director of Avatar, James Cameron, is a notable figure in the screen history of the warrior woman because his previous films include two memorable examples: Sarah Connor (Linda Hamilton) in The Teminator (1984) and Terminator 2: Judgement Day (1991), and Ellen Ripley (Sigourney Weaver) in Aliens (1986). 
• Judith Butler – Gender is not the result of nature but is socially constructed through media and culture. This theory challenges the assumption that there is a binary divide between gay and heterosexual suggesting in mainstream media heterosexuality is represented as normal. For Butler, gender is 'performative', like a theatre script that is repeatedly performed to a social audience, of acts associated with male or female. For Butler, gender is not innate, but "a series of acts which are renewed, revised, and consolidated through time". This suggests that performances of woman are compelled and enforced by historical social practice. For example, in films like East is East and Bend It Like Beckham, young Asian women are required by their parents to dress in particular ways that count as 'female' or 'suitable' (Jasminder may not wear football shorts, Meenah must wear a sari for visitors).
• Advertisements as gender scripts The conviction that advertisements are gender scripts is best summed up by Goodman (2002): ‘Because the media are the main information source about social processes and images and self-presentation, women are likely to attend to and use media images as guides for their attitudes and behaviours’. Many commentators position advertising as a powerful socialising agent among women, and, in particular, young women. In perhaps the seminal article in the field, Angela McRobbie (1978) studied Jackie! magazine and isolated a number of ‘codes of femininity’ centred on romance, domestic life, fashion and beauty used to indoctrinate young girls. Content analyses also suggest that a variety of subtle cues are used to tell young girls what might be considered suitably ‘feminine’ characteristics.

WATCH THE PRESENTATION ON THE BECHDEL TEST HERE

If you wish to read further, there is a downloadable pdf: 

WOMEN IN ADVERTISING: REPRESENTATIONS, REPERCUSSIONS, RESPONSES 

© Mercury Publications 

The representation of women in advertising has been the subject of discussion and debate for over four decades, with advertisers standing accused of utilising inappropriate and degrading stereotypes. This is currently a matter of prime concern in Ireland. The Equality Authority has recently issued a call for a background paper on the issue. This initiative has been welcomed by the National Women’s Council of Ireland. However, it has been dismissed as unnecessary by the Advertising Standards Authority of Ireland (ASAI) and by the Institute of Advertising Practitioners in Ireland (IAPI). This paper explores these issues and, in an effort to represent diverse views, draws upon discussion and empirical evidence from gender studies, consumer research, media studies and advertising studies. The paper highlights the fact that polarised views regarding the repercussions of gender representations are based upon understandings of how advertising impacts its audiences. Specifically, do advertisements operate as gender scripts or, alternatively, is gender textually mediated? The paper concludes with a number of recommendations for the advertising industry. 

Maurice Patterson, Lisa O’Malley & Vicky Story

FOUNDATION PRODUCTION LESSONS

Complete your Creative Critical Reflection questions: see last year's blog on your Foundation Production here. 

CREATIVE CRITICAL REFLECTION 1: How does your film opening use or challenge  conventions? CREATIVE CRITICAL REFLECTION 1: How does your film opening represent social groups or issues? 

CREATIVE CRITICAL REFLECTION 2: How does your film opening engage with your target audience? CREATIVE CRITICAL REFLECTION 2: How would you distribute your film opening? 

CREATIVE CRITICAL REFLECTION 3: How did your production skills develop throughout the project? 

CREATIVE CRITICAL REFLECTION 4: How did you integrate technologies - software, hardware, online - in this project?

All this work is done INDIVIDUALLY and must be completed BEFORE HALF TERM

Week Monday 21 September: three lessons

POWER & THE MEDIA: ORIENTALISM  

We are preparing for the 'Power' exam question. Your final essay may consider three topics: how black / Asian identity is constructed in the media; how women are represented in the media; how Arabian culture is represented in the media. Today's lesson on orientalism therefore may give you a third to a half of your final exam answer.

Please email me your completed essay by Friday 25 September.

You will write a short essay on Orientalism as part of this topic in answer to the exam question: "The media construct identity." How far do you agree with this view?

• define orientalism and how it relates to the media's power to shape perceptions about identity
• give an account of Edward Said's thoughts on orientalism. Edward Said was a founder of the academic foeld of post-colonial studies, whose work Orientalism was a foundational text.
• offer three case studies that support your views
• brief conclusion that relates to the exam question

In our lesson on orientalism, we will use these resources:

• What is orientalism? A stereotyping of Arab peoples and cultures
• Imperialism and orientalism: what did Edward Said write?
• Orientalism asserts the West's superiority and justifies the assertion of Western power over the East
  
• Hollywood stereotypes: Arabs as terrorists, Arab women as exotic or oppressed
• The misrepresentation of Arabs in Western media

 Watch the brief video

ADVANCED PRODUCTION LESSONS

PRELIMINARY EXERCISES 

Complete practice trailer. Post in Preliminary Exercises explaining what conventions you used. Set it out attractively. Update your preliminary exercises with additional work.

PLANNING: THE TRAILER

Start brainstorming A2 Advanced production trailer with a large sheet of A3 paper and pencils. Bank the sheets in the silver tray at the end of the lesson (don't take them home).

Write individually a brief post with an account of initial ideas: your target audience, the genre, what topics within the genre that would meet both audience's desire for satisfying familiarity and offer a USP (something new). Involve me in the discussion at early stages before you pitch it. Remember that trailers 

• signal genre clearly through mise-en-scène, sound
• take giant strides through the narrative arc so don't have continuity editing
• focus on high points
• introduce the main characters
• have key dialogue only
• build towards the end point, hooking the audience
• don't explain everything, but intrigue the audience
• have inter titles that point to key concepts
• have a strong, original film title

PLANNING: THE TARGET AUDIENCE

Write a post explaining that you set out to identify your target audience. Devise your questionnaire this lesson, complete it and send it out to suitable respondents immediately. Check with me that your spellings are correct. Ensure that you invite co-operation politely and that you thank your reader at the end. Add the questionnaire to your blog post.

Once you have a good number of replies, create a bar chart (or similar) and add the results to this same blog post so that the whole task is in one place.

• You drew on what you had learned from the FDA presentation.
• You created an audience questionnaire using GoogleForms
• You used the following questions....
• You asked your respondents to view and comment on the following trailer(s) which your target audience are likely to enjoy
• You asked your target audience to comment on the following posters which are likely to attract and address your target audience....
• You have some questions that invite a longer (qualitative) response

POWER & THE MEDIA: REPRESENTATION

We continued this topic on Friday 18 September before working individually on trailer practice. Remember that your page PRELIMINARY EXERCISES needs building up with evidence; renew work on camera angles / shots types and add any additional work that you are experimenting with (like Charlie's ident). Your practice trailer will go here, too. 

MEDIA TEXTS REFLECT & PERPETUATE STEREOTYPING UNLESS CHALLENGED 

Our introduction plunges us straight into debates about the power of the media to create representations that perpetuate the status quo and, therefore, stereotypes. In a week when the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences (Oscars)  have presented new standards for representing diversity and inclusion in the movies, with mixed reception, we look at the representations of different ethnicities. (We also note how women have been represented in media, starting with the film industry.

For Stuart Hall, representation in popular culture (like film, advertising, television and magazines) is a site of conflict where black people are routinely stereotyped in particular ways which reinforce social inequalities. He draws attention to the limited representation of black people: that there are three kinds of representation of black people – the native, the entertainer and the social problem.

To understand how Hall saw the term 'the entertainer', think how it was within living memory that shows like The Black and White Minstrels aired on primetime BBC television and the nation ate its breakfasts with Robertson's jam decorated its brand logo golliwogs. The Black and White Minstrel Show, which ran from 1958 to 1978, was arguably the BBC’s most glaring failure to understand the damage it could do when it traded in out-dated stereotypes.

In The Millionairess (1960) the movie star Sophia Loren is depicted as besotted by an Indian doctor, played by the very popular Peter Sellers. In the seduction scene, audiences are invited to laugh at (not with) Sellars who sings "Goodness gracious me!' in a cod Indian accent and black up. The idea of a non-Asian playing the Peter Sellers role may now be considered in bad taste. pokes fun at the idea that a beautiful Western woman (Sophia Loren) could find an Asian man (Peter Sellers blacked up) irresistible attractive. Even though he plays the part of a highly qualified doctor, he is positioned as a figure of fun, a shared joke, with the intended reading of the text being "Goodness gracious me, how could she!"  

The Indian Doctor (BBC1, 2012) created by Deep Sehgal and starring Sanjeev Bhaskar, is set in the same period of the early 1960s but offers a very different intended reading: the audience is offered a sympathetic understanding of what it is like to be 'the Indian doctor' emigrating a Welsh mining village and treated with at best some suspicion and at worst outright hostility. As Dr Sharma travels hopefully through the idyllic pastoral landscape, visions of Eden are under-scored by the them tune lyrics 'I'm half way to Paradise' and then ironically punctured by the reality of his arrival at the village hall where the community is being prepared for his arrival with screenings of official broadcasts about immigrants into the NHS and a showing of 'The Millionairess'. No one sees how inappropriate such racist stereotypes are (a sign of the times) but we do, as contemporary audiences.

To understand Hall's term 'the native', we look at a scene from historical text Gone With The Wind. Mammy takes the role of a plantation servant. The point here is that whilst films about black oppression are moving, revelatory and often worthy, the focus is on the black experience as 'victim' rather than as someone who has agency.

In The Help (dir, Tate Taylor 2011), the story focuses on a young writer's relationship with two black maids, Aibileen Clark and Minny Jackson, during the Civil Rights Movement in 1963 Jackson, Mississippi. As an aspiring journalist and writer, she decides to write a book from the point of view of the maids, exposing the racism they are faced with as they work for white families. Black domestic workers in 1960s America were referred to as "the help", hence the title of the journalistic exposé, the novel and the film. 

Rebecca Carroll writes: "In the contemporary film The Birth Of A Nation, the racial and political climate was ripe for a film about black uprising, even about one of the bloodiest slave revolts in American history – and soon after, as the hashtag #OscarsSoWhite went viral during the 2016 Oscars, the Academy of Motion Pictures couldn’t believe its good fortune. Oscar buzz was immediate for The Birth of a Nation, and its handsome, hardworking, golden boy director, Nate Parker. It had a legion of black supporters who saw this as a remarkable and major moment: in the wake of all these black male bodies being killed, here was one black male body that was not just living, but showing up for and on behalf of us, telling our history, and being celebrated for it. " So what went wrong? Read the article in The Guardian. 

Films with representations of troubled, failing or criminal black or ethnic minority representations include Bullet Boy (dir. Saul Dibb, 2004) with the versatile Ashley Walters. Akin Ojumo writes in The Guardian: "The award-winning film Bullet Boy is a powerful and controversial drama about urban Britain. But as the country faces fresh soul-searching over young black men and guns, does it offer a cautionary tale or perpetuate a stereotype?"

By 2015 Ashely Walters is starring as PC Ryan Draper, a lead policeman in the TV drama Cuffs, altogether a more positive and mainstream representation. "It was beautiful for once to be playing the role of a good father, a positive role model. That’s what I’m all about and I would love to see more of that on TV."

Young Brixton activists challenge cultural stereotyping

 

TEXTS THAT EXPLORE RACISM AND STEREOTYPING

• Cultural Imperialism is an issue with minorities and sub-cultures particularly when ethnicity is part of the equation (evidence of pre-1990s texts) The Millionairess (1960) pokes fun at the idea that a beautiful Western woman (Sophia Loren) could find an Asian man (Peter Sellers blacked up) irresistible attractive. Even though he plays the part of a highly qualified doctor, he is positioned as a figure of fun, a shared joke, with the intended reading of the text being "Goodness gracious me, how could she!" The Indian Doctor (BBC1, 2012) created by Deep Sehgal and starring Sanjeev Bhaskar, is set in the same period of the early 1960s but offers a very different intended reading: the audience is offered a sympathetic understanding of what it is like to be 'the Indian doctor' emigrating a Welsh mining village and treated with at best some suspicion and at worst outright hostility. As Dr Sharma travels hopefully through the idyllic pastoral landscape, visions of Eden are under-scored by the them tune lyrics 'I'm half way to Paradise' and then ironically punctured by the reality of his arrival at the village hall where the community is being prepared for his arrival with screenings of official broadcasts about immigrants into the NHS and a showing of 'The Millionairess'. No one sees how inappropriate such racist stereotypes are (a sign of the times) but we do, as contemporary audiences.
  • Richard Dyer (1979): "Stereotypes are about power. Those with power stereotype those with less power." "The ideological work of stereotyping involves closing down the range of possible meanings, making fast, firm, and separate what is in reality fluid."
  • Stuart Hall (1981)  proposes that there are three kinds of representation of black people – the native, the entertainer and the social problem. 
  • Alvarado et al (1987) argue that there are four main categories of race representation in the media: The exotic, the dangerous, the humorous and the pitied 
  • What are stereotypes? According to Walter Lippmann in 1922, stereotypes had four major characteristics: they were an ordering process; a short cut; referred to the ‘real world’; and expressed our ‘values’ and ‘beliefs’. Categorisation is a basic cognitive process that people employ to make sense of their lives and their group affiliations.
  • Alison Griffiths sees stereotypes as rigid, simplistic, overdetermined and inherently false…they misrepresent people’s ‘lived identities’ by falling back upon narrowly conceived preconceptions of racial, cultural and gendered difference, thus perpetuating myths about social, cultural and racial groups.
• British Asians are now active contributors and participants on media platforms such as films, TV, newspapers and radio (Gurinder Chadha, Ayub Kan Din, Meera Syall. In Syal's Goodness Gracious Me (1996-2000, BBC radio and TV comedy sketch) the humour cuts both ways. took Asian stereotypes but used them to illustrate comic ideas of universal appeal. It took Asian stereotypes but used them to illustrate comic ideas of universal appeal. It was wickedly apt for the creators of this show to choose a title so reminiscent of the stereotypical portrayal of Asians that had blighted the British media for decades. They set their stall almost immediately with the classic "going for an English" sketch, in which a group of Asians embody the loutish behaviour of lager swilling Brits in an Indian restaurant (one diner asks for something "really bland"). British Asians mock their own need to integrate at the expense of retaining their own cultural roots:the Kapoors (pronounced Coopers), social climbers who were at great pains to deny any of their heritage, desperate to be seen as 100% British. In the episode The Coopers Go To Church it satirizes the wholesale adoption of British culture, religion, cultural practices and accent in a comic way as the immigrants open themselves up to ridicule by gettting it all so wrong: to the Vicar "Get me a good seat, not too near the band, my good chappie." In The Kumars at No.42 (BBC, 7 series, 2001-6), Sanjeev Bhaskar creates television comedy out of self-mocking stereotypes: he plays an inept TV presenter whose parents have built him a studio for live interviews in their garden.
  
• Michel Foucault takes a more active view of audiences: rather than viewers coming to the television screen with already-formed identities, television genres actually help to inform the identity in question.
  

Stuart Hall: stereotyping

 

CURRENT NEWS

TRAILER PRACTICE

Practice today and on Monday double period.

Time for thinking creatively about making a practice trailer. With the new restrictions in place because of the current situation, there are several ways forward:

• use your year 12 Foundation Production footage
• borrow clips from the Macs in the media studio
• film in school on your mobiles

What to include?

• clear signals about genre
• inter-titles 
• reviews / awards / nominations
• name of director "From the director of ..."
• name of star talent
• clear views of star talent
• a film title
• release date
• soundtrack that build to a climax

SYNERGY & CONVERGENCE

A lesson on synergy and convergence:you have been emailed the text of this lesson.
We apply our case studies:

HOW IMPORTANT IS CROSS-MEDIA CONVERGENCE AND SYNERGY IN THE MEDIA ARE YOU HAVE STUDIED?

• Disney’s Captain Marvel (2019)
• Bait (Mark Jenkin, 2019)
• I, Daniel Blake (Ken Loach, 2016)
• Three Faces (Jafar Panahi, 2018)

I have studied the film industry. I understand synergy to refer to where two or more compatible products or organizations help each other, for example, the role of Disney in promoting and selling Captain Marvel. Convergence is the interconnection between media, technology and communication, which often relies on digital technology. A convergent hub is needed, where audiences can click through convergent links. Convergence and synergy are an important part of any film’s promotion through the marketing campaign.

REMINDERS

In your trailer analyses, add the urls at the top. Pick out key terms in a different colour. Add screenshots to support points. Keep in mind that trailers, posters and websites are part of a promotional package for each film.
It might be wise to show that you have responded to each of CIE's suggested questions by writing the question above each point as you answer it, as I showed you in class on Friday.
Your blog should have PAGES at the top. Add all your poster analyses into the FILM POSTERS and your website analyses into FILM WEBSITES. Do not delete anything that might also delete my marking in the Comment box. I will not do the marking again!
For your UCAS reference, please now email me a line about your work experience, activities, interests, community service, holidays, FutureLearn courses or career hopes.
In today's class, we will compare and contrast the websites for the following films:

• Disney’s Captain Marvel
• By comparison,  a film like Bait (dir. Mark Jenkin, 2019) presents a contrasting product with a very different website
• A film like I, Daniel Blake set out to appeal to audiences that valued social realism through grassroots marketing. It set out to expose a global issue: the vulnerabilities of people exploited in the gig economy. Revise the film's website here
• A fourth example is that of the indie film Three Faces by guerrilla film maker Jafar Panahi (2018). This film was promoted by the ICO (the Independent Cinema Office).

POSTMODERNISM: BAUDRILLARD, ECO

See Media Theory for A Level by Mark Dixon chapter 5 on Baudrillard

Key concept: the real and the hyperreal 

• 3 distinct phases of cultural evolution
• Baudrillard's key argument stems from his observation that society has experienced three distinct stages of cultural revolution that he labels 'the precession of simulcra'. In many ways, Baudrillard's precession relates the story of 20th-century secularisation and the replacement of religion as society's primary meaning maker by the mass media. The three phases of Baudrillard's precession can be described as follows:
• Phase 1- Early modernity This covers the period from the Renaissance to the industrial revolution. In this stage, cultural products (literature, music and arts) map closely to what Baudrillard calls 'a profound reality'. Culture, in this sense, creates an authentic experience when consumed. Mass culture, moreover, is dominated by the lone voice of religion and connects the masses to singular ideology – to one version of the world. Culture, too, Baudrillard tells us, is 'sacramental' in that it communicates profound spiritual experiences. As a result, early modernity produces authenticity and collectively agreed set of truths about the world in which we live. 
• Phase 2 – Modernity. The second phase, modernity, covers the period from the industrial Revolution to the Second World War. In this stage, religion and religious certainties begin to fragments, eventually giving way to early mass media forms like cinema, radio and photography. During modernity, Baudrillard argues, the authenticity and collective truths of early modernity begin to 'dissimulate', breaking down into competing versions of reality. 
• Phase 3 – Postmodernity. The final phase, the phase in which we now live, he labels post-modernity.In post-modernity, Baudrillard argues, mass media forms dominate culture, replacing the single voice of religion with the multi-channel, multi-media whirlwind of contemporary mass media.This, Baudrillard tells us, is the age of hyperreality in which cultural products no longer reference the deeper unified significations the religion once provided. In the post-modern era, culture is fragmented, its meanings and instructions are temporary, its messages commercialised and inauthentic.

Why does Baudrillard describe culture as a 'simulacra'?

Baudrillard uses the word simulacra to suggest that culture (mass media, religion, art, etc) produces versions of reality to explain our place and function in the universe. Christian religion, for instance, constructs a version of reality in which, crudely speaking, God is said to have created the universe in seven days. Of course, God did not create the world in seven days. This assertion is an early religious story that attempted to explain the complexities of the universe before science could give us a more accurate picture. Culture, of course, authors numerous other stories that attempts to explain the world we living. Importantly, Baudrillard argues,These cultural products, all versions of reality, are in fact 'simulations' quotation. The 'precession of the simulacra' refers to the way in which those 'simulations' have changed since the Renaissance. 

The ecstasy of communication

Significantly for Baudrillard, the technologies of the mass media have helped to construct what he calls an 'ecstasy of communication'. He argues that the process of making meaning has exponentially expanded in the postmodern era, permeating modern life in ways that lie far beyond the cultural capacities of previous historical periods. Baudrillard identifies the following effects of post maternity:

• The media is everywhere. In today's hyperreal world, every bus holding street corner and shop window is an advertising opportunity–indeed public spaces are so saturated with media that it is almost impossible to avoid the tidal wave of cultural messages aimed at us.
• Our private spaces have been invaded. Baudrillard tells us too that today's hyperreal media even penetrates the once safe havens of our homes. There is no escape, Baudrillard says, the incessant chatter of hyperreality: 'One's private living space,' Baudrillard writes, 'is conceived of as a receiving and operating area, as a monitoring screening endowed with telematic power'. 
• Authenticity is impossible to find or keep. Because the hyperreal world of modern media is so all-encompassing and so incessant, Baudrillard tells us, the deluge of messages offered have limited significance. Cultural products in post-modernity construct throwaway messages, forgotten almost as instantly as they are consumed. 
• Repetition and duplication effects.The post-modern media, Baudrillard further argues, repeats and  repurposes content in never-ending chain of replication. Commercially successful products are repurposed, remade, serialised or copied to attract and maintain audiences, while genre oriented storytelling replicates narrative formulas in endless echoes of products that are themselves copies of something was made along time ago. In this sense, Baudrillard tells us, we know the end of any news event before it has happened. We know how our box sets will resolve or how our gaming cut scenes will play out, because 'everything is already dead and resurrected in advance.'
• 
  

Meaning Implosion

The proliferation of media comes as a further cost in that the variety of arguments and opinions presented via television, news and online media makes it difficult for audiences to reach an objective conclusion about the real world. News outlets, for instance, produce a version of the world that we implicitly understand to be biased towards one political viewpoint, and today's media landscape it does not take too long to locate an opposing source or contradictory analysis

Indeed, products internally neutralise content through the use of opposing opinion editorials or balanced reportage. The resulting effect is to present a world in which simultaneous truths exist - a presentation, moreover, that lacks both objectivity or certainty and that leaves media audiences to effect what Baudrillard calls hyperreal 'inertia', a kind of mesmerised inability to act.

The age of advertising

'Promotion,' Baudrillard writes, 'is the most thick-skinned parasite in our culture. It would undoubtedly survive a nuclear conflict...It allows us to turn the world in advance of the world into consumable substance.' Whereas the age of modernity was dominated by cinema and photography, advertising he tells us presides over the post-modern age.That ascendancy, Baudrillard explains, has important repercussions in that the narrative strategies laid down by TV and print-based advertising form a story blueprint that influences other media products, while also configuring audiences to respond to those narratives with hyperreal 'inertia'.

Advertising, Baudrillard suggests, holds us in a hypnotic state of superficial saturation and fascination, teaching us from an early age that the mesmerising ideals of commercial advertising are rarely realised in real life. The ensuing mistrust of commercial media imagery, Baudrillard further argues, is regularly applied to other media forms. We are compelled to watch, he says, but we do not quite believe what we see.

Baudrillard suggests too that the language and narrative structures of advertising have infected other media products. News bulletins, for example, are reduced to easily digestible packages, their stories built upon the same strategies of suspense and revelation that we find in short-form advertising. Politicians, too, Baudrillard argues, have sacrificed debate and argument for news-friendly soundbites designed to effect political branding voter seduction. Drama, too, pulses in shorter and shorter scenes, while YouTube vloggers have swallowed wholesale advertising's commercial mantra by commodifying themselves - branding themselves in the same way that a shampoo ad might affect audience appeal via choreographed representations of impossible ideals.

Fictionalised reality/ Realised fiction

The blending of media forms is a further symptom of our hyperreal age Baudrillard tells us that products borrow and steal at will in order to attract our attention in today's media saturated landscape. As a result, contemporary media forms have blurred fact and fiction to the extent that, he argues, audiences can no longer tell them apart.

Documentaries cast their participants as if they were actors, deliberately orchestrating moments of narrative crisis to produce entertainment Geordie Shore,  TOWIE and Love Island might cast participants from the real world but no one is fooled. Contestants and knowingly engineer their on-screen selves to maximise the opportunities that such shows present, guided, of course by the careful hand of TV producers so that their cast might satisfy audience expectation. There is little that is real in today's reality TV.

Baudrillard suggests that the news similarly effects an ever present discourse of fictionalised crisis, generating daily doses of real-life entertainment that are populated by cameos of TV savvy politicians and business leaders who are media trained so they might deliver news friendly soundbites. News narratives, too, replicate the language and imagery of disaster movies.The news is a never-ending soap opera packaged into easily digestible parcels, into three act narratives that instantly forgotten once delivered. Any meanings and emotions produced our temporary, Baudrillard argues, replaced by the next news cycle 'in an accelerated circulation of meaning'.

The shallowness of contemporary media hyperreality, he argues, produces a deep yearning by media audiences for products that provide authenticity.The endless churn of contemporary culture, he tells us, produces a desire for stability and validity that the media tries just satisfy through nostalgic appeals and an attempt to embed reality in programming.

The real world has fast become a staple ingredient in post-modern fiction. Biopics and historical drama readily reinterpret history without due regard to historical accuracy - repackaging the world of yesterday using stock characters and audience-friendly narrative formulas. Horror films also call upon their audiences to believe that their narratives are genuine through the ubiquitous 'based on real events' tagline.The word 'based', of course, gives due license to magnify, distort or change any element of the writer's choosing. And, of course, soap opera, crime drama, family drama and work-based drama purport to offer us a view of the world using the tropes of realism to convince us of their actuality, yet do so in ways that reflect nothing of reality at all.

Particularly applies to news about news (e.g. stories about viral stories), or celebrities who are famous for being famous, where there is no clear sense of a ‘real’ lying behind the hyperreality.

UMBERTO ECO: Travels in Hyperreality

This is a book of essays covering the years from 1973 - 1986 by Umberto Eco, the Italian novelist (The Name of the Rose), semiotician, and cultural critic. (Semiotician: one who studies signs and sign processes (semiosis), indication, designation, likeness, analogy, metaphor, symbolism, signification, and communication). Eco  writes as if his audience knows a great deal about  Western Civilization, which can make this difficult to relate to and understand. Eco requires you to have a huge frame of reference and you may be looking up both medieval figures and pop culture of the 1970s, so just do so and don't feel intimidated. 

The opening essay has Eco traveling the United States, home of the Hyper Real attractions (he notes that he was in the New Orleans French Quarter the day after seeing the New Orleans Square at Disneyland). 

He traveled around the United States to examine how we construct different realities. Sometimes they are copies of European originals and sometimes, like Disneyland and Disney World, we construct fake worlds that are intended to be artificial but actually better than reality. 

The title essay is about the beautiful and horrific American sense of inflated reality as it manifests in its tourist spectacles, citing as examples a number of places: San Simeon, Las Vegas, New Orleans, Disneyland and Disney World, and particularly the Madonna Inn, an over-the-top, theme-roomed Swiss chalet hotel in San Luis Obispo. Eco doesn't sign off on the life-as-circus as he sees it here, but he gets why we do it, how the inflated story culled from a million facts and misunderstandings is the story we tell ourselves, the myth that we believe. Eco's prose is so evocative, you will want to drop everything and visit the Lyndon B. Johnson presidential library, or at least the one that appears in the text.

Here is San Simeon aka Hearst Castle aka Xanadu from Citizen Cane

The striking aspect of the whole is not the quantity of antique pieces plundered from half of Europe, or the nonchalance with which the artificial tissue seamlessly connects fake and genuine, but rather the sense of fullness, the obsessive determination not to leave a single space that doesn't suggest something, and hence the masterpiece of bricolage, haunted by horror vacui, that is here achieved.

and here he goes into metaphoric overdrive attempting to depict the Madonna Inn:

Let's say that Albert Speer, while leafing through a book on Gaudi, swallowed an overgenerous dose of LSD and began to build a nuptial catacomb for Liza Minnelli. But that doesn't give you an idea. Let's say Arcimboldi builds the Sagrada Familia for Dolly Parton. Or: Carmen Miranda designs a Tiffany locale for the Jolly Hotel chain. Or D'Annunzio's Vittoriale imagined by Bob Cratchit, Calvino's Invisible Cities described by Judith Krantz and executed by Leonor Fini for the plush-doll industry, Chopin's Sonata in B flat minor sung by Perry Como in an arrangement by Liberace and accompanied by the Marine Band. No, that still isn't right. Let's try telling about the rest rooms.

In further essays, he discusses the effect that wearing blue jeans has on one’s perception of the world (especially, apparently, the very tight kind of blue jeans), the return of the Middle Ages to modern society, his views on World Cup Soccer as a social phenomenon, and how movies become cult movies, using Casablanca as an example.

Eco suggests that fo the average American’s taste, he feels the past must be preserved and celebrated in full-scale authentic copies; a philosophy of immortality as duplication. He also feels that Americans always want more of extra, and that we are not satisfied with the average serving of life and must strive to fabricate the absolute fake - for instance the oval office in Texas. Everyone, except perhaps, New Orleans, is on his disapproval list.
In his travels across American observing various museums, mansions, amusement parks and historical sites, Eco examines every detail of the location, from its real items and imitations—such as furniture duplicated to look like a specific real piece, fabricated ceilings to look like ceilings in chapels found in Europe, to the Pompeii-mosaic-tiled floor in the Hearst Castle, Eco is offended at America’s obsessiveness about copying the original.

The essays about the modern fascination with the Middle Ages suggest that the reason for the fascination is that much that is important in the modern world got its start in the Middle Ages. 

Many of the assertions in this book about spectacle seem more true now than in the 1990s when social media has literalized many of the ideas of self as spectacle and gone are worries about authenticity. 

Travels in Hyperreality centres around America's fixation with creating such authentic fakes as to raise them to almost mystical iconography. From Disneyland, to wax museums and classical Greek and European replications incorporated into the houses of the uber wealthy.

“This is the reason for this journey into hyperreality, in search of instances where the American imagination demands the real thing and, to attain it, must fabricate the absolute fake; where the boundaries between game and illusion are blurred, the art museum is contaminated by the freak show, and falsehood is enjoyed in a situation of “fullness,” of horror vacui.”

Replicas take on lives of their own like the imitations of the original Manhattan purchase contract sold in one tourist gift shop---it looks and even smells real, and yet it is in English whereas the original was written in Dutch... a replica of a past that never was. "Museum" context further distorted by the use of fake reference photos or small scale miniature models in order to make the contrived exhibits more "authentic." Even the fictional wax diorama, like that created for Alice in Wonderland, is made to such precision as to seem real---a fiction of a fiction masquerading as real. This is the "hyperreal." And with comical perfection, Eco's metaphors match the absurdity of his subject matter:

“The poor words with which natural human speech is provided cannot suffice to describe the Madonna Inn. … Let’s say that Albert Speer, while leafing through a book on Gaudi, swallowed an overgenerous dose of LSD and began to build a nuptial catacomb for Liza Minnelli.”

America fills its cultural/historical void with next-level deception worthy of praise---entertainment as existential balm. Eco reverses the polarity as he takes us to Marinelands, a kind of Sea World where the real (aquatic creatures) are made to feel fake (routine performances, interactions with trainers, etc.). Meanwhile, the human tourists are treated like animals as they are herded from location to location, told when to sit and stay. But all this is not merely Eco applying theory to pop culture and tourist destinations---it creates a fascinating perspective on the America of the '80s. 

And just before we get lost in the funhouse, we move on to the middle ages, a whole section on how we're reliving the past, a past in which “...all the problems of the Western world emerged: Modern languages, merchant cities, capitalistic economy (along with banks, checks, and prime rate) are inventions of medieval society.” The Pax Americana struggles with its own demise akin to the Roman Empire's. The barbarians are at the gates but they can't be identified as simply as we like (despite a political climate that attempts to do so). All we know is that something definitive is slipping through the cracks (a "greatness;" a shared history... ). Eco doesn't describe it this way because he was writing these essays some 40 to 50 years ago, but they are remarkably prescient.

“Each group manufactures its dissidents and its heresiarchs, the attacks that Franciscans and Dominicans made on each other are not very different from those of Trotskyites and Stalinists---nor is this the politically cynical index of an aimless disorder, but on the contrary, it is the index of a society where new forces are seeking new images of collective life and discover they cannot be imposed except through the struggle against established “systems,” exercising a conscious and severe intolerance in theory and practice.”

His essays dealing with the contemporary medieval, both how we consider the Middle Ages today and how we are, today, medieval still ring true, even at the distance of 20-odd years. We do still dream of the Middle Ages, as the success of Peter Jackson's The Lord of the Rings trilogy, the Harry Potter films and books and others like The DaVinci Code will tell us. What we do not do in our popular culture is define what we actually mean by "medieval". Eco elucidates the "Ten Little Middle Ages" he believes we are all talking about when we call this movie, that book or this aesthetic "medieval". The important point about the whole exercise is that the Middle Ages, as historical time period, is not the point: by and large, pop culture references to the medieval, explicit or implicit, really only speak to a set of stereotypes gleaned from what we require the Middle Ages to have been for our present day purposes. 

In the section on The Gods of the Underworld, he examines the recycling of millenarian cults (Manson, Jim Jones), fears of the End Days, spiritual revivals, and Afro-Brazilian rites mixing spiritualities in a heady concoction that attempts to replace erased slave histories.

But for all these cyclical commonalities, he outlines fascinating breaks with the past and changes still in development. In the section The Global Village, he looks at  the role of communication, remarking upon the near impossibility of revolution with a globe that's under constant surveillance and capitalist production/trade exploits sometimes controlling entire countries. The multinational system itself actually relying on terrorism and small local wars to act like pressure release valves on the larger system and preclude large world wars. Mini-insurrections built into the system (keeping in mind that all this was written prior to 9/11 and the so called "War on Terror," which, while larger scale in terms of disruption and challenge to the status quo ultimately seem to have reinforced power dynamics thanks to remote warfare either by proxy or by technology... #dronestrikes).

“Today a country belongs to the person who controls communication.”

“We can legitimately suspect that the communications media would be alienating even if they belonged to the community.”

Some of his essays feel prescient: with just these two quotations, we could easily move from Russia to North Korea to Berlusconi and Trump, and then on to social media, most especially Twitter. Controlling communications allows one to shape the story, to distract, to frame the discussion. In a sense, social media does belong to the community in that participants shape the content but its form seems to dictate the kind of tribalist return that television engendered. And if Eco thought sports media had become a kind of meta-industry no longer dependent on the actual performance of real sport, we can only imagine what he would think today (sports media/talk doesn't just replace political discussion and participation as a kind of tribalist substitute as he suggests, it now delves into "fantasy" participation. 

In this post, I acknowledge the views of critics and readers from The Good Read.

Text that are relevant:

Disney films, Disney World, Pirates of the Caribbean, Harry Potter franchise

SlideShare on Postmodernism and another

Example of Postmodern TV show

POSTMODERNISM and MUSIC VIDEOS: Article here



MUSIC VIDEOS and POSTMODERNISM (Teaching Music Video Pete Fraser, BFI, 2004)
• Intertextuality

The music video is often described as ‘postmodern’, a slippery term which is sometimes used as a substitute for intertextuality. Broadly, if we see music promos as frequently drawing upon existing texts in order to spark recognition in the audience, we have a working definition of ‘intertextuality’. Not all audiences will necessarily spot the reference and this need not massively detract from their pleasure in the text itself, but it is often argued that greater pleasure will be derived by those who know the reference and are somehow flattered by this.

It is perhaps not surprising that so many music videos draw upon cinema as a starting point, since their directors are often film school graduates looking to move on eventually to the film industry itself. From Madonna’s ‘Material Girl’ (Mary Lambert 1985, drawing on ‘Diamonds are a Girl’s Best Friend’) to 2Pac and Dr Dre’s ‘California Love’ (Hype Williams 1996, drawing on ‘Mad Max’) there are many examples of cinematic references which dominate music video. Television is often a point of reference too, as in The Beastie Boys’ spoof cop show titles sequence for Sabotage (Spike Jonze 1994) or REMs recent news show parody ‘Bad Day’ (Tim Hope 2003).

John Stewart sees visual reference in music video coming from a range of sources, though the three most frequent are perhaps cinema, fashion and art photography. Fashion sometimes takes the form of specific catwalk references and sometimes even the use of supermodels, as by George Michael in both ‘Father Figure’(Morahan/Michael 1988) and ‘Freedom’ (Fincher 1990). Probably the most memorable example of reference to fashion photography is Robert Palmer’s ‘Addicted to Love’ (Donovan 1986), parodied many times for its use of mannequin style females in the band fronted by a besuited Palmer. Shania Twain copied it for her ‘Man I feel like a woman’ (Paul Boyd 1999) and Tamra Davis directed a $350 parody of it for Tone Loc’s ‘Wild Thing’ (1988).

For the near future, John Stewart suspects that the influence of video games will predominate for the younger audience with the more plasticised look of characters emerging (as seen for example in Robbie Williams’ ‘Let Love be your Energy’ dir. Olly Reed 2001 and The Red Hot Chilli Peppers ‘Californication’ dir.Jonathan Dayton and Valerie Faris 2000)

His description of the music video “incorporating, raiding and reconstructing” is essentially the essence of intertextuality, using something with which the audience may be familiar to generate both potentially nostalgic associations and new meanings. It is perhaps more explicitly evident in the music video than in any other media form, with the possible exception of advertising.