What Media Classes Really Want to Discuss

A Student Guide

Greg Smith

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2010
• Print ISBN: 9780415778114
• eBook ISBN: 9781136934186
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Media Studies

You probably already have a clear idea of what a "discussion guide for students" is: a series of not-very-interesting questions at the end of a textbook chapter. Instead of triggering thought-provoking class discussion, all too often these guides are time-consuming and ineffective.

This is not that kind of discussion guide.

What Media Classes Really Want To Discuss focuses on topics that introductory textbooks generally ignore, although they are prominent in students' minds. Using approachable prose, this book will give students a more precise critical language to discuss "common sense" phenomena about media.

The book acknowledges that students begin introductory film and television courses thinking they already know a great deal about the subject. What Media Classes Really Want To Discuss provides students with a solid starting point for discussing their assumptions critically and encourages the reader to argue with the book, furthering the 'discussion' on media in everyday life and in the classroom.

Chapter 1
“It’s just a movie”

Why you should analyze film and television

The question arises almost every semester. My introductory media class and I will be hip deep in analyzing the details of a particular film, and then a hand will creep up, usually from the back: “Aren’t we reading too much into this? After all, it’s just a movie.” Taking a deep breath, I then launch into a spirited defense of our analytic activity. After five or ten minutes of this, the student usually has a shell-shocked, what-did-I-do-to-deserve-this look on her face.

I’ve never been pleased with my spur-of-the-moment justifications of film and television analysis, which tend to come across as a bit defensive. Worst of all, they don’t deal with the full complexity of the question, and I do believe that it is a very profound question. Why are we spending so much time finding new meanings in something as insignificant as a movie or a TV show? Aren’t we just “reading into it?” The student’s question deserves a fuller answer, or rather, it deserves several answers. As a way of finding those answers, this chapter extends the dialogue started by that series of brave, inquiring students in my classes.

Nothing left to chance

“All right, do you really think that every little thing in film and TV is there for a reason?”

Lots of things in our everyday world are there by accident. If I trip over a stone that causes me to bump into someone, that jostling encounter is probably not part of a higher design. It’s just a random occurrence of the sort that happens all the time, with no enormous significance in the real world. There is a temptation to treat film and television in a similar manner, as if spontaneous things occur by chance. Nothing could be further from the truth.

Hollywood films and network television shows are some of the most highly scrutinized, carefully constructed, least random works imaginable. Of course, we know this, having read Entertainment Weekly. We all know that it takes thousands of people to create mainstream media: directors and actors, grips and gaffers. We know that producing film and television is a highly coordinated effort by dedicated professionals, but to most people it’s a bit of a mystery what all these people do. When we watch film and television, we are encouraged to forget about all that mysterious collective labor. A movie usually asks us to get caught up in the story being told, in the world that has been created for us, not to be aware of the behind-the-scenes effort that brought us this story and this world. We tend to forget the thousands of minute decisions that consciously construct this artificial world.

When I put on a shirt in the morning, I do so with very little thought (as my students will tell you). A movie character’s shirt is chosen by a professional whose sole job is to think about what kind of shirt this character would wear. Similar decisions are made for props, sound, cutting, and so on. Most mediamakers work hard to exclude the random from their fictional worlds. Sets are built so that the mediamaker can have absolute control over the environment. The crew spends a great deal of time and expense between shots adjusting the lighting so that each shot will look as polished as possible. When mediamakers want something to seem to be random, they carefully choreograph this random-appearing behavior. For instance, extras who are merely walking by the main characters are told where to go and what to do to appear “natural.” Even seemingly random events and minute details in a film/television program are chosen and staged.

But what about directors who don’t sanitize the set, who try to let bits of the real world into their work (from the Italian neorealists to Kevin Smith’s Clerks)? What about actors, such as Dustin Hoffman and Robin Williams, who like to improvise? What about documentary mediamakers who don’t script what happens in front of the camera? What about reality TV? Don’t these let a little bit of chance creep into the film? Not really (we will talk further about this in Chapter 2). One could say that these strategies let some chance occurrences make it onto the raw footage. However, the mediamaker and the editor watch the collected footage over and over, deciding which portions of which takes they will assemble into the final cut. They do so with the same scrutiny that was applied to the actual shooting. Even if they recorded something unplanned, they make a conscious choice to use that chance occurrence. What was chance in the production becomes choice in the final editing.

Italian neorealism was a filmmaking movement that began in the physica land economic devastation of post-World War II Italy. Under these conditions the Italian film industry could not make films with the technical polish of their 1930s output, and so they turned their poverty into an advantage. Beginning with Roberto Rossellini’s Rome, Open City, the Italian neorealists used real locations in war-torn Italy (instead of tightly controlled sets); available lighting (instead of nuanced theatrical light); nonprofessional actors (alongside trained professionals); and a looser, more episodic way of telling stories (instead of tightly controlled plotting). Italian neorealism strikingly contrasted with Hollywood’s slick studio output, making these films seem more grounded in the details of real life. Although the movement was short lived (ending in the early 1950s, when Italy became more affluent), its influence was enormous. Many “new waves” of filmmaking hark back to neorealism as a way to distinguish their look from the Hollywood norm. Hollywood itself incorporated some of neorealism’s features (location shooting, episodic storytelling) beginning in the 1950s to give its films a more realistic feel. Key figures in the movement include Rossellini, Vittorio De Sica (Bicycle Thieves, Umberto D), and screenwriter/theorist Cesare Zavattini.

“Come on, do directors, editors, and set designers really spend all that time scrutinizing such details?” Think of it this way. A Hollywood blockbuster may cost upto $300 million. If you were to make something that costs that much, wouldn’t you examine every tiny detail? Even a “low budget” film can cost $30 million or so. With so much money riding on a film, the scrutiny is enormous, and it extends to all levels. Of course this process, like all human effort, is fallible; mistakes do sometimes creep in (for example, an extra in Spartacus—set in ancient Rome—can be seen wearing a wristwatch). All too often, beginning media scholars have a tendency to assume that odd moments in the film/ television program are mistakes, when the opposite assumption is more likely to be true. Nothing in a final film or television episode is there without having been examined by scores of professionals who have carefully chosen the components. You can trust that if something is in a movie, it’s there for a reason.

A movie is not a telegram

“Okay, so the director really cares about the details. But do you think your interpretation is what she really meant to say?”

In high school English classes you may have been taught to look for the meaning of a literary work, a single sentence that summarizes what the author was trying to convey. So you might have boiled Shakespeare’s Macbeth down to a single sentence that reveals the moral lesson to be learned from the play (perhaps “Greed for power corrupts people”). One can reduce a literary work or film or television program to its message, which makes the game of interpretation a fairly simple one. All we have to do is figure out what the author/director was trying to say.

Some mediamakers have scoffed at the idea that their work contains any such messages. Hollywood producer Samuel Goldwyn is alleged to have said, “If I wanted to send a message, I would’ve called Western Union” (the nineteenth/twentieth-century equivalent of text messaging). What is at issue here is the conception of what communication is. The traditional understanding of speech considers a sender trying to relay a message to a receiver (often called the S–M–R model). A sender has a clear intention regarding what she wants to get across to the receiver, but she may not present her message particularly clearly. The receiver tries to understand the message, but she can misunderstand the sender for a variety of reasons. By comparing the sender’s intention with the receiver’s understanding, one can discover how effective the communication was. For example, if a receiver gets a text message asking for bail money and then starts collecting the necessary cash a successful instance of communication has taken place.

The sender–message–receiver (S–M–R) model was proposed in 1949 by Claude Shannon and Warren Weaver as an outgrowth of their work with telephone companies to improve the accuracy/understanding of phone conversations. It has been expanded to become perhaps the most dominant framework for understanding communication. A more fully elaborated S–M–R model also includes an awareness that the channel/medium affects the overall communication; that there is “noise” on that channel that can interfere with the message; and that the receiver/audiences can communicate “feedback” to give the sender a sense of whether the message is getting through. Theorists have proposed numerous elaborations and expansions on the S–M–R model, but it still remains at its core a fairly oneway model of linear communication.

It is tempting to conceptualize film and television as communication in this way. To see how effective a movie is, one could compare the mediamaker’s intentions with our interpretations and see if we “got it.” If the audience member didn’t receive the message, then perhaps the movie is poorly made or perhaps the viewer is not very savvy.

Films, television shows, plays, and novels, however, are not telegrams or cell phone text messages; they are infinitely more complicated. One of the first traps that the budding critic should avoid is thinking that a film or TV program can be understood as having a single message which we either “get” or not. To do so is to treat it like a telegram. Cinema and television are richer forms of communication than can be conceptualized as sender–message–receiver.

“Okay, so perhaps the director isn’t just sending a single message. Maybe she’s sending several messages. If we can figure out what those messages are, then we’ve got it, yes?”

First of all, there’s a big question concerning who the “author” of a film or television program is. Thousands of people put their work into a major media project. If all of them are trying to convey meaning, do we have to consider all their combined intentions? Or if some people’s contributions are more important than others (actors, directors, cinematographers, producers), then can we understand a movie as the sum total of their intentions? The question of authorship in film and television is a much thornier one than the question of a book’s authorship.

Let’s make it easy on ourselves. Let’s assume that the author of a movie is the person who is in charge of coordinating all decisions in the shooting process: the director.¹ If we can figure out what the director intends, then we’ve got it, right? If we could interview Hitchcock and gain an understanding of what was going through his mind when he made Vertigo, then we would have gained a pretty solid hold on the film, yes?

But can we reduce the film to what the director consciously intends? At times we all express the beliefs, attitudes, and assumptions of our era without necessarily being conscious of doing so. Did Hitchcock fully understand his attitude toward blonde women, or was he propagating a widely held belief in his society? Sometimes the ideology of our day speaks through us with little awareness on our part. In addition, we can unconsciously express personal issues as well as social attitudes. Many believe that the unconscious seeks to express painful things that we have repressed and buried within ourselves. These tensions can emerge

1Infilm and television, the director is usually in charge of the process of shooting, though she may not be in overall control of the final product. In some films the producer has the right to the “final cut.” In most television shows, the director of an individual episode is hired by the person in charge of the overall series, called the “show runner.” In this situation, the director answers to the show runner.

in our everyday lives through dreams or Freudian slips or the artwork that we make. Perhaps Hitchcock was unconsciously working through his own personal obsession with cool, aloof women in ways that he did not even understand as he made Vertigo. Since human beings cannot be reduced to their conscious thoughts, films should not be reduced to the director’s conscious intentions.

“Okay, okay, so if we get a sense of what the director’s conscious intentions are, what ideological beliefs she gained from her socialization, and what her unconscious issues are (admittedly a difficult process), then we’ve arrived at a well-grounded, comprehensive description of what the movie is trying to communicate, right?”

We have, if we stay within the sender–message–receiver model that works for text messaging. But let’s step outside that model. Why should we limit the viewer to making only those meanings which come directly from the sender/mediamaker? If I get meaning from media and apply it to my life, why should I have to check with the mediamaker to see if that’s the right meaning? In other words, why should the mediamaker have more authority over interpreting the film/television program than I do?

“Because she’s the director. It’s her movie,” you may reply. I would respond, “You’re the audience. It’s your movie, too.” If you let go of the notion of a mediamaker trying to convey a message, then the audience’s activity is to interpret the film according to their lives, their experiences, their tastes—not the director’s. That activity is just as valid as the mediamaker’s. A movie’s meaning does not lie solely within the film itself but in the interaction of the film and the audience.

As we learn more and more about how audiences interpret media, we discover what a striking range of interpretations people make. If we consider those interpretations to be somehow less valid than the mediamaker’s, then we lose much of the complexity of how media work, make meaning, and give pleasure in our society.

“Reading into” the movie

“But those audiences are just reading things into the movie, right?”

Let’s think about what “reading into” a movie is. “That’s simple,” you might reply. “It’s when an audience puts things into the movie that ...

Table of contents

• Contents
• Preface
• Chapter 1 “It’s just a movie”
• Part I Discussing how media work
• Part II Discussing media and society
• Part III Discussing media’s future now
• Index