Representation

What we are looking at here is how the ideological content of a piece of popular culture works. We’ve been doing that the whole semester thus far, but to push it further, we are now focusing on the further workings of hegemony. How exactly do we end up in hegemonic loops where apparent progress is always a bit defeated?

This section will serve as an introduction to the categories of ideological criticism to come in this class: Marxism, feminism, queer theory, “race” theory and postcolonialism. We could easily add other traditional kinds of ideological content/representations that have bodies of critical discourse: physical and mental disability, weight issues, violence, religious characters/institutions, nationalism and regionalism (think of the Minnesotan stereotypes in Fargo).

The difficulty is that these ideologies are transmitted through narrative, genre, apparatus, spectacle, celebrity and the structures of entertainment. Each of these elements will be explored in a discussion of some examples of classic representational dilemmas.

Narrative

We generally assume that the dominant delivery mechanism of ideology is story. Just because a film has a racist character doesn’t make the film racist. What happens to that character at the end? The narrative has a deep semiotic power of anchorage. We often willingly submit to the ways it limits our abilities to respond. Stories give rewards to certain characters and punishments to others. Sometimes those rewards are clear.

For example, in 1987’s Fatal Attraction, the single woman Michael Douglas’ character has an affair with grows unstable and violent. She boils the family bunny. Faludi (1988) points out that Douglas’ character doesn’t pay nearly the price that Glenn Close’s Alex Forrest does. In the early drafts, he paid a heftier price for his violation of Reagan-era family values. But eventually all the blame shifted to her as the drafts progressed. The original ending of the film, where she kills herself in a bath, didn’t test well with test screening audiences, so they replaced it with the following one, which makes it even more clear what price she must pay:

Sometimes narratives have more complex ends in mind, though, as when there are mixed results for a character, as with the somewhat uplifting but somewhat depressing end for Paul Giamatti's hypocritical character in Sideways (2004). In those cases, the narrative has complexity and the problematization of its ideologies in mind, in which case other elements have more impact on ideological impact.

Sometimes there is what phenomenology calls "bracketing” (see This section in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy for more) The idea is that in certain experiences we are led to bracket off certain ideas and assumptions for various reasons. In terms of experiencing popular culture, you will often try to do this in order to not have things "ruined" for you. You will make yourself try not to see the pervasive sexism in Disney films, for example, so that you can still enjoy some childhood favorites. A good example of this bracketing comes during moralistic issues in shows where you are rooting for what in other ethical contexts would be the bad guy -- Walt the meth cooker in Breaking Bad, the robbers in heist movies like Ocean's Eleven and The Town. When the stories resolve, you are returned to a world where you judge that behavior as wrong. Some kind of price is paid to symbolize that you, the viewer, are exiting the criminal playtime, but we generally prefer that, at least in some ways, they get away with it.

It is still also possible in any of these cases for the narrative to have a smaller impact on the audience than other factors. Maybe at a moment one of the other aspects will become more important, which is what the next sections will assume, a kind of temporary eclipsing of the story. But sometimes the narrative is so univolving or ridiculous that, as an audience member, you can't help but look for other things to like if you are going to stay engaged. Cult films like Rocky Horror Picture Show, Jesus Christ Vampire Hunter, The Room and Troll 2 are examples of this.

What this means for the question of a representational dilemma is that what we are often talking aboutis that there are the ways that some of the ideological messages contradict others. When narrative messages, which are usually the easiest to control if you are trying to bring chnage to a story or genre (think of Disney's revisions of princesshood in Brave and The Princess and the Frog) are overwhelmed by some of the elements discussed below, not only can a potentially progressive story turn negative, but it can also be much more subtle, debatable and hard-to-see.

Genre

Beebee (1994) argues that genres develop as ideologies do. Producers stay relevant by incorporating elements of social change or commentary. Audiences choose the direction they want their favorite genre to go in by rewarding some versions with audience and punishing others. Audiences clearly preferred their 1980s adventure movies to aim for a kind of high seriousness, at least at times, like Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom (1985), which did well at the box office, rather than camping it up like the failed comedy version of King Solomon's Mines (1985).

These ideological messages can have their own impact, regardless of the narrative. Sometimes they reinforce, like the role of the know-it-all scientist in movies like Jurassic Park (1993) and Jaws (1975). In those movies the narratives clearly spell out the dangers of abusing or misunderstanding science. But the genre of the monster movie always has that message underneath, even if there are no scientists present, as in the original King Kong (1933), where you, the viewer are put in the position of the quasi-scientist, judging the naive characters in the films.

Riffaterre (1978) argues that when we read books we do something called the double-take. As we read, when something happens of interest, we look back and reinterpret what we've already experiencved in the fictional world as we simultaneously look forward and predict what we think will happen next and in the end. We often do this by making connections to the intertext, or the worl outside the text. I think the most powerful source of information to an audience member in those cases is the genre. I tells you whether they are likely to get together or not, whether the monster will be defeated, etc. Sometimes the genre heritage of a piece of popular culture overwhelms the other narrative elements. Think of a happy Grey's Anatomy episode. In spite of everything you keep waiting for something bad to happen because that is the genre of the romanti-tragic medical show.

An example of how this relates to a representational dilemma is the question of the badass female action hero, as in Aliens, Terminator 2, Xena: Warrior Princess, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Lara Croft and Salt. The action and/or adventure and/or scifi and/or horror genres represented in that list require the hero to solve the problems with violence. So no matter what else happens, no matter how complex the individual narrative, the generic need to solve problems with violence will always be there, pushing us, as viewers, to push the characters toward that option. We will hate it when they don't use violence or complain about it (like the entire 7th season of Buffy), making potentially sexist judgments. And when they do use that violence, how do we know they are not just men in disguise, as some critics have argued (cf. Greenberg, 1988)? They are stepping into male genres and doing male jobs. Who watched Xena for anything besides the action?

Apparatus

The earlier reading on apparatus theory and our long work with McCloud shows some of the ways that these kinds of effects can happen. Think simply of a book written in first person. If there are still a stack of pages left, you know that character is not going to die during the scene you are reading. That kind of certainty allows you to interpret certain risks in certain ways. Even if the end of the book is the character's death form a drug overdose, say, and inherent message of the apparatus is that drug abuse, although ultimately dangerous, will still give you a couple of hundred pages of experience before you have to worry about paying that price. Or, in the Fatal Attraction clip you saw above, you've probably seen enough of those kinds of movies to predict that she would come up out of the water for one last attack.

Apparatus, especially in terms of visual and musical elements, can have large effects on how you process a story. George Takei has complained about how William Shatner, during the filmic of Star Trek, would cajole directors into filming his reaction shots to lines spoken by other actors instead of the actors faces while they were saying them (Larkin, 2013). This helped make Shatner's character more important and make him a star at his costars' expense. That means an otherwise liberal and diverse show had its impact lessoned by being turned into yet another show that revolved around its white male protagonist. I can undercut a strong character with distracting or trivial musical accompaniment. In the following clip from Star Trek, you can see how a racist moment is made even more racist through the trivializing humor of the music:

Spectacle

There is similarity with apparatus here, but really we are talking about a very specific kind of moment, generally visual, where the large impact of an image is simply too great to ignore. It overwhelms the narrative. At the end of 1978’s The Boys from Brazil, evil Nazi Doctor Mengele has to die at the hands of a elderly Jewish Nazi hunter, an innocent child clone of Hitler and a pack of trained attack Dobermans (don't ask). Just to make the ideological anti-Nazi message stick, we see a close-up of one dog tearing into Mengele's bloody crotch. Take that, subtletey!

Spectacle is often what undercuts ideological progress in a number of ways. Check out the Women Fighters in Reasonable Armor Tumblr for an example of how pernicious the spectacle of the bikinied Amazon warrior has become in our comic book-filled world.

Seth McFarlane's sexist "We Saw Your Boobs" Oscar number in 2013 is another good example of this. Although the narrative of that skit portion of the show was that Captain Kirk (Shatner, yet again!) was messaging from the future about what a bad host McFarlane was, showing him mistakes like that so he could change and fix them. The narrative says that it is a critique of sexism. But the spectacle of the huge musical number complete with a dancing choir to heighten the humor of the song overwhelms the flimsy narrative's attempt to provide and excuse.

A final example is this scene from Total Recall, which always gets a laugh from the audience I can't help but feel is sexist. The narrative behind this (and you can see some of it in the clip) is that Sharon Stone's evil character has been pretending to be married to Schwarzeneggar's hero but was all the while spying on him and has now revealed her murderous side. So when she gets it in the end here, she deserves it according to the narrative. But the spectacle of this particular kind of violence couple with the joke makes it all viscerally hateful toward women in a way that will be remembered far longer than the plot details:

Celebrity

Even when we are not watching a film because of the celebrity or star in the film or show, it matters. Dyer (1986) describes the reasons for and history of the gay community's love of Judy Garland. This eventually spread to encompass Liza Minnelli, her daughter. That celebrity fandom creates a set of meanings and ideological impacts that can overwhelm every other kind of message in a text, not just the narrative.

Is The Passion of the Christ really anti-Semitic? We could debate narrative and spectacle questions on that for hours, but it is difficult not to see the movie that way after the controversy over Mel Gibson's own seeming racism have surfaced.

Celebrity functions in another way, as well. In the late 80s and early 90s, Michael Douglas played a string of roles where he seemed to represent straight white masculinity under siege: Fatal Attraction, Wall Street, Disclosure, Black Rain and Falling Down. The final film, Falling Down, could be watched as the story of a man who cracks and takes vigilante action against a variety of people in LA. One might argue that the film balances its racist moments with moments where the character goes after white people too. But given the symbolic anchorage of Michael Douglas' celebrity at that time, it would naive to assume that a 1990 audience would not see Douglas as representing whiteness, which makes it difficult to not see the movie's possibly more complex narrative as yet more racism.

As a final example, Brad Bell (2013) has argued that he wanted to make sure both actors in his gay marriage comedy web series Husbands were gay precisely because he thinks shows and movies tend to be cast with at least one (Modern Family, The New Normal) or both (Brokeback Mountain) straight actors in a portrayal of a same sex couple. He thinks this helps straight audiences accept the shows easier; they don't have to think they are watching any actual gay feelings on screen. The knowledge of the "safe" straight in there helps the audience to resist the otherwise progressive spectacle of equal time for gay kisses on screen.

Structures of Entertainment

This final element is admittedly more vague than the rest. But everyone has a different set of things that they are entertained by, so this has to be more complex. There are things that people like, emotions or experiences they seek, which are more important to them than any of the other things thus far. Perhaps they like to feel suspense. Perhaps they only like movies that are believable. Or romantic? Or have traditional Christian values or ideology? Perhaps they only like terribly made movies or movies filled with irony or surprises?

And there are, of course, popular culture texts which specialize in these more narrow kinds of entertainment. So what does this mean in terms of representational dilemmas?

By Steve Vrooman, March 2013

References

Beebee, T. O. (1994). The ideology of genre: A comparative study of geretic instability. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press.

Bell, B. (2013, Feb. 13). Panel and discussion. Presented at Southwest/Texas Popular Culture Association/American Culture Association Convention, Albuquerque, New Mexico.

Dyer, R. (1986) Heavenly bodies: Film stars and society. New York: Routledge.

Faludi, S. (1998). Backlash: The undeclared war against American women. NY: Crown.

Greenberg, H. (1988). Fembo: Aliens’ intentions. Journal of Popular Film and Television, 15, 164-171.

Larkin, M. (2013, Jan. 18). Set phasers to scratch! Catty Star Trek legend George Takei reopens feud with 'douche' William Shatner, Daily Mail. http://www.dailymail.co.uk/tvshowbiz/article-2264805/Star-Trek-legend-George-Takei-reopens-feud-douche-William-Shatner.html.

Riffaterre, M. (1978). Semiotics of poetry. Bloomington: U of Indiana P.