REPRESENTATION AND IDEOLOGY IN FILM


PART ONE

1.    Images of kinds of people on film actively contribute to the ways in which these same kinds of people are understood and experienced in the “real world” (outside and beyond what transpires within the story-world of film).  Film does so by means of Its form as well as its content.   Form includes literary design, visual design (design of mise-en-scène),  cinematographic design, montage or editing design, and sound design.  Choices in each of these areas convey particular kinds of messages and exert particular kinds of impacts, which eventually, with repetition over time and across space, become conventions.  Formal conventions maintain considerable power, especially when they are not recognized as conventions, i.e., not read critically.

2.    The Following are among the most Fundamental of American ideals:

a.)    Each and every individual is unique.

b.)    Each and every individual should have equal access to the ‘American Dream’ of ‘life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness’.

c.)    Different individuals should reach different levels of happiness and success according to their own individual effort and merit.   


    Yet considerable disparity, in actual practice, persists between the ideal and the real, in particular along lines of class, gender, sexuality, race, ethnicity, and nationality.   People do in fact exist and operate as members of social groups and not just as individuals; i.e., in American society people in fact both engage as and are treated as members of these groups and not just as individuals.  These social identities can be immensely empowering and enabling as well as central to defining who we are and what we are about.  Yet stereotypes about social groups tend to promote and maintain inequality.   (Stereotypes = reductive, pejorative identifications, and representations, of negative common features that supposedly distinguish and bind together members of a particular social groups.)
        

    American (Hollywood) film serves as a principal medium for the dissemination of these kinds of stereotypes, and, throughout its history, has primarily, if not overwhelmingly, represented the vantage point, and the self-interest, of White, Western European (especially Anglo-Saxon), upper (and upper middle) class, straight men.  

3.    Less privileged (so-called ‘minority’) social groups tend to be represented in dominant Hollywood films a.) in ways that pit their struggles for equality with the more privileged group as struggles against each other, or b.) by defining their identities in ways that at least partially exclude them from ever fitting within the dominant, mainstream, normative, and (seemingly) superior form of national identity.

4.    Ideology = a system of ideas and beliefs that a group of people shares and believes to be right and true.   Most ideological beliefs are ‘naturalized’ because of constant and unquestioned usage such that they appear ‘self-evident.’  

    
    In other words, ideology first a.) takes historically and culturally specific, socially constructed, and politically interested ideas and beliefs and b.) renders these ideas and beliefs as if they were not specific, constructed, and interested, but instead universal, absolute, and disinterested (or, in other words, ‘unbiased’).  


    Dominant ideologies = systems of ideas and beliefs that tend to structure in pervasive ways how a culture thinks both about itself and about others, including who--and what--it considers (more versus less) meaningful, valuable, right, and true.  The dominant ideology of ‘White Patriarchal Capitalism’ permeates American culture, including American film.  This ideology works to naturalize not only the dominance (and perceived superiority) of Whiteness, Patriarchy, and Capitalism but also the subordination (and perceived inferiority) of oppositions and alternatives to White Patriarchal Capitalism.  


5.    Most ideologies (including dominant ones) are only partially coherent and contain overlaps with others, as well as gaps and contradictions.  Dominant ideologies are neither stable nor rigid.  


    Hegemony refers to the ongoing struggle to obtain the consent of the people to a system that governs (and at times oppresses) them, including to the dominant ideologies of this social system.  Hegemonic negotiation continually ebbs and flows in dealing with resistance and opposition to the dominant.  Disseminating and maintaining social control takes place in part through the operations of repressive state apparatuses, which involve direct, physical coercion as well as the institutionalization of prejudice and discrimination.  Ultimately more importantly, however, ideological state apparatuses (ISAs) work to disseminate and maintain social control by winning over the ‘hearts and minds’ of the population.   ISAs include schools, churches, the family, and, especially powerful today, the mass media (among others).   


    The mass media (including Hollywood) serves as an ideological state apparatus by representing American culture in ways that endorse and reinforce dominant ideologies, thereby encouraging people not only to consent to and conform with, but also to identify with and actively assist in carrying out the dictates of the state.   Social control works best when limited overt oppressive measures are needed and when instead individuals consent to and identify with dominant Ideologies, internalizing these systems of ideas and beliefs and acting accordingly.           

6.    The mass media exercise enormous ideological and hegemonic influence today, including, if not especially, when operating under the guise of ‘entertainment’.   Entertainment always functions as part of culture, and in fact as part of an array of cultures, including as part of subcultures and countercultures as well as dominant cultures.  In fact, dominant cultures often work to reduce and dissipate the alternative,  critical, dangerous, and subversive elements of subcultures and countercultures by appropriating from the latter and adapting what has been appropriated to meet the needs and interests of the former.  This can happen through processes such as commodification and incorporation.   

7.    Cultural studies approaches every cultural artifact (including every film) as an expression of the culture that produces it, i.e., as a text that conveys information and carries ideological messages of the culture that produced it.   Cultural studies focuses on how texts (including films) express particular views of, or takes on, the worlds they represent, and how these expressions in turn create ideological effects in relation to the meanings the users of these texts derive from them (i.e., by inviting/eliciting/encouraging particular ways of thinking, feeling, believing, communicating, acting, interacting, and behaving in relations with other groups of people in society).   Examining processes of representation calls attention to the fact that we always maintain mediated relationships to ‘real life’ and ‘the real world’: we need, therefore, to critique the representational systems in place that provide this mediation for us, considering what positions and interests these systems represent (or, in other words, what biases–for and against what–they represent).  

8.    Texts (including films) are encoded with meanings; we as readers of these texts decode them when we make sense of what they mean and respond to the impact they seek to exert upon us.  Both the encoding and the decoding of meaning take place within cultural contexts that not only shape but also determine the form, content, and purpose of what is encoded and what is decoded.  No one stands outside of culture, no one ‘writes’ or ‘reads’ cultural texts independent of the influence and impact of one’s positioning within culture–including one’s construction as a subject of that culture; we all work from biased positions of one kind or another, and we all proceed from one versus another set of ideological positions–including, if not especially, when we do so unconsciously, unintentionally, and non-deliberately.  


    Dominant readings decode texts (including films) in accordance with how the text was itself encoded, following along, in other words, with the way of reading the text that the text itself invites and encourages us to follow.  Oppositional readings actively question and challenge the meanings encoded in the text and the readings of itself that the text invites and encourages.  Negotiated readings resist some aspects of the encoding, of reading the text as the text itself invites and encourages one to read what it represents, while at the same time accepting other aspects of the encoding, thereby partially reading along with what the text invites and encourages–and partially reading against this.  


PART TWO: ADDITIONAL NOTES, REPRESENTATION, IDEOLOGY, AND CULTURE

A.    Representation

1.    Representation: is not presentation, but re-presentation, and therefore is always a reconstruction of, and a stand-in for, what is represented, not the thing itself.

2.    Key initial questions to ask in assessing representations, especially of historically oppressed social groups: What is represented and what not?  How?  When? Where?  By Whom?  Why?

3.    Stereotyping=reductive, simplifying, negative categorizing.  Stereotypes insist on absolute differences as opposed to recognizing us all connected across “Spectrums of Differences.”

4.    Combating stereotypes, and other kinds of negative representations of social groups is often a more complicated task than simply opposing these negative representations with positive alternatives, because it is ultimately impossible to produce the one absolutely true or correct representation, which completely accurately reflects what the group in essence is all about, because all representations involve some kind of reconstruction of what they represent in order to create a stand-in, the representation, for the ‘thing’ represented.  No representation simply and entirely becomes what it represents.

5.    Other challenges facing the struggle for ‘positive representation’ of historically oppressed, and long negatively represented social groups: 1.) How Do You Define Precisely Who is Included in the Group to be Represented and Who Not? 2.)  How Do You Define Precisely What is Positive?  3.)  How Do You Insure that the Positive will be Widely Understood and Accepted as Such?  Also, 4.) How Adequately Does the Positive Representation in fact Represent the Diversity of the Group–is this ‘Positive’ Image too Narrow and too Restrictive, too Idealized and too much of a Burden for those who must seek to inhabit and conform to this Image?  At times, therefore, the most effective opposition to negative representations of social groups comes not simply from opposing these with positive alternatives but rather by countering these with a much wider, richer, more complex, and more diverse array of representations of the social group in question.

6.    Some Useful Questions for Assessing the Politics of Humor that Relies upon Generalizations about Categories of People:  1.) From Whose Point of View is the Joke Told?  Whose Point of View is Excluded?  2.) How is the Audience Positioned both by the Joke and the Context in which it is Told?  3.) How is the Group on the Receiving End of the Joke Generally Treated in the Rest of the Media–and, Ultimately, More Importantly, Throughout the Rest of Society?

B.    Ideology and Power

1.    Ideology=a set of ideas which explains the social world (society as a whole) and, as a result, indicates, explicitly or implicitly, how power is, has been, and should be distributed within this world.  

2.    Two Most Common Student Mistakes in Starting to Work with the Concept “Ideology”:

a.    Equating “Ideology” with “Idea”.   No.   Ideologies are always sets, or better put, systems of ideas that provide comprehensive frameworks for making sense of existence, and experience, within a society.  These are elaborate complexes–they offer world-views.

b.    Referring to People’s “Individual” Ideologies.  No.  Ideologies, by definition, are Social Frameworks, developed by many people and broadly shared by many people.   An ideology is not an individual’s eccentric or idiosyncratic world-view but rather a world-view that many people, simultaneously, subscribe to, believe, and follow.
 
3.    Ideology tends to rationalize, justify, and legitimate social divisions and hierarchies, in particular along lines of social class.

4.    The struggle to do so–to rationalize, justify, and legitimate particular kinds of organizations of society as a whole, especially in terms of division and hierarchy–is continuous.  Hegemony (= to dominance, or ascendancy)  must be continually re-secured and re-produced.   This is especially true of what is required to obtain the consent of the subordinate to their subordination, and, especially, to their oppressive–and exploitative–subordination.  

5.    The media is a crucial medium for the securing of hegemony, and, at the same time, a potentially crucial site, as well, through which to challenge, or counter, hegemony.  Key, of course, therefore is which social groups exercise relatively greater versus lesser control over, and through, the media: who, in other words, enjoys greater versus lesser power to push forward their interests, and disseminate their messages, by means of the channels the media provides.

6.    Dominant ideologies often in fact work best to do their foremost work–and that is to re-secure and re-produce the dominance of dominant social groups–when these ideologies suggest to the people who subscribe to them, and who are not in fact members of dominant social groups, that this dominance does not really exist at all, but, rather, everyone, individually, freely achieves whatever they seek–as a matter of their own individual choice–and earn–as a matter of their own individual effort.  

C.     Ideal and Actual Spectators, Frameworks for Interpretation, and Cultural Competencies

1.    Films don’t just represent things to us, but set up positions for their ideal spectators which provide spectators with frameworks for interpreting what the films represent.   Actual spectators accept the invitation to occupy these positions, as ideal spectators, when they decode the meanings of films in ways that direct correspond with how the meanings of films are encoded by the films themselves.  Codes refer to frameworks of interpretation, so this means that an actual spectator of a film accepts the position of an ideal spectator of the film when he or she uses the same frameworks of interpretation to make sense of what the film represents to him or her as the film itself does in initially creating these representations.  

2.    “Dominant readings” read films along the lines that the films themselves invite and encourage; “oppositional readings” read films along lines opposed to those the films themselves invite and encourage; and “negotiated readings” read partially with the film (as the films invites and encourages) and partially against it (in opposition to what it invites and encourages).  

3.    In addition, we approach making sense of the meanings of media texts, such as films, guided by the kinds of “cultural competencies” we have acquired and we maintain.   Different kinds of readers reading the same texts differently because they have acquired and maintain different kinds of cultural competencies.  Cultural competencies follow from social position, experience, education, etc.