“I don’t want to imitate life in movies; I want to represent it. And in that representation you use the colours you feel, and sometimes they are fake colours”.
– Pedro Almodóvar
Continuing with the effects of media in the
audience, now we’re going to see how media affects our cultural background. The
term ‘cultural studies’ was coined by Richard Hoggart in 1964, with the
creation of the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies in Birmingham. Cultural
studies aim to understand societies and their politics through the study of
cultures.
Introduction to
cultural studies
While at the very beginning the focus was on
classical cultural forms, the ones linked to ‘elites’, popular culture soon
started to prove its importance. Everyday life is also considered an essential
part, since our daily actions contribute to shape our culture. A key factor to
take into account is the context, and how social constructions (gender, race…) are
showed in different contexts. Thus, the encoding and decoding model (by Stuart
Hall) is frequently used to interpret the reactions to a certain content and
its effect depending on the context.
Cultural studies add three new aspects: consumption
as the main focus, an interest in the means of production and an approach that
starts in the text and moves to the context. It’s essential to analyse power
relations between media and audience, as well as hidden political structures
within media and media content. This attention to structures implies that the
means of production are as important as the media product itself: the ownership
of a medium influences the audience. After all, different media have different
agendas, each with their own political interests. This explains the especial
interest of cultural studies for Hollywood; a multibillion industry, key for
the US imperialism but which denies having any political purpose.
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| Source: http://culturalstudieslectures.blogspot.com.es/2012/03/lecture-eight-origins-of-cultural.html |
Representation theory
Hollywood cinema is probably the most consumed
in western society. Movies and TV shows in general represent reality, but are
not reality. It’s materially impossible to represent all parts and aspects of
reality, so when creating a content (audio-visual or not) the producers must
choose which aspects to represent. They select the signs and the codes they’re
going to use, and which of them will stay out of the product.
Representation has extremely important effects
because, as was mentioned in the previous entry, when paradigms are repeated
over and over again, they become normalised and people start taking them as
reality. Therefore, media contents and representations constructed in them contribute
to shape or reaffirm identities, ideas, prejudices…
This video shows how Basque people have been represented by Hollywood. We can see how they communicate using irrintzis (traditional screams used mostly in celebrations, to express joy), dance flamenco (an Andalusian dance) or are simply dumb South-American looking barbarians who can’t tell the difference between a geologist and a physicist, according to the always resourceful MacGyver. (Sorry the video is in Spanish).
It doesn’t surprise me that those are the
stereotypes that have made it to the US. After all, flamenco and bullfighters are probably the most recognised, most
exported cultural aspects of Spain. And there are a lot of good reasons why the
Basque Country should appear in media (beautiful landscapes, Pre-Romanesque
culture and language, wonderful gastronomy) but, sadly, the terrorist band ETA
used to be the reason behind most media appearances.
I’ve been personally asked, by non-Basque Spanish
people, questions as dumb as: “do they understand you when you speak in Spanish
in the Basque Country?” (seriously? We were speaking in Spanish, they saw my
parents speaking in Spanish all the time as well); or “do you know how to
make a Molotov cocktail?” (we don’t have a subject about explosives and weapons
in school, if that’s what they were asking). So, if people in my own country
had internalised those stereotypes, how can I expect people in other countries
not to?
From traditional tale
to animation
Now, if I mention the little mermaid, what will
probably come to your mind is a cute redhead named Ariel. In the original story
by Hans Christian Andersen, the little mermaid wishes to gain an immortal soul
like humans had. The love of the prince is the mains to obtain it, but is not clearly
her main purpose. In the end, since the prince marries another girl and the
little mermaid wants him to be happy, she throws herself into the sea. But,
instead of turning into foam as expected, she becomes a “daughter of the air”,
and will be able to obtain an immortal soul after three hundred years of traveling
around the world spreading health and happiness.
In the Disney version, Ariel doesn’t want a
soul. In this case, prince Eric becomes the object of desire (and, besides
riding a boat to stab Ursula with it, he doesn’t do much in this film; which isn’t
very common, truth be told). While Andersen’s mermaid was allowed to explore
the world, Ariel is expected to be a good girl, behave and obey his father. Instead,
she dreams of escaping this oppression and finding what she believes is her
true love. One may wonder if being a princess on the surface is going to give
her any more freedom that being an underwater princess, but oh well.
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| Source: http://www.deviantart.com/morelikethis/artists/397076939 |
Freedoms and desires apart, the most popular
song of this movie, Under the sea,
has been criticised for being racist. I had no idea about this before taking
this class, for me it was just a happy and catchy song from a movie that,
overall, I wasn’t very fond of. But looking at it now, from a more mature
perspective (and knowing what to look for), it’s true that Sebastian’s accent
(Jamaican in the original version, Cuban in the Spanish version) is a crucial part
of the representation. The overall tone of the song, along with the accent,
leads to think that there was an intention of the producers to imply that
Jamaican people were lazy and always wanted to party; not to mention the
reference of “the seaweed is always greener”. They could have chosen any accent
for Sebastian, but they chose this one, and it’s naïve to believe that it was
just a coincidence.
By the way, I can tell a geologist and a
physicist apart: the first one would be looking at the ground, while the latter
would be looking at the sky.
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