Popular Culture and Representations of Literacy

Bronwyn Williams, Amy Zenger

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2007
• ISBN:
  9781134235797
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

Movies are filled with scenes of people of all ages, sexes, races, and social classes reading and writing in widely varied contexts and purposes. Yet these scenes go largely unnoticed, despite the fact that these images recreate and reinforce pervasive concepts and perceptions of literacy.

This book addresses how everyday literacy practices are represented in popular culture, specifically in mainstream, widely-distributed contemporary movies. If we watch films carefully for who reads and writes, in what settings, and for what social goals, we can see a reflection of the dominant functions and perceptions that shape our conceptions of literacy in our culture. Such perceptions influence public and political debates about literacy instruction, teachers' expectations of what will happen in their classrooms, and student's ideas about what reading and writing should be.

1 Literacy in everyday life, literacy on the screen

We start by taking you to the White House at the end of X2: X-Men United (2003), a popular Hollywood action blockbuster, as the President prepares to address the nation.

The President of the United States (Cotter Smith) strides purposefully down the halls of the White House, surrounded by a phalanx of aides. In his hand he holds a copy of a speech that he is reading aloud, pausing to ask an aide about the choice of a word: “Do we like this word, ‘annihilation’?” His aide assures him it is the appropriate word. The President arrives in the Oval Office, sits behind his desk, and begins his televised address about a looming crisis, a “growing threat within our own population.” We are given a shot of the speech from the President’s point of view, so we can see the words he is reading scrolling up the teleprompter screen.

No sooner has the President begun to speak when the lights go out, lightning flashes outside, and time seems to stop for everyone but the President and the X-men (and women) who have suddenly appeared in the Oval Office. Professor Xavier (Patrick Stewart), leader of the X-men, dressed impeccably in a gray suit, introduces his colleagues as the very mutants about whom the President was about to warn the country, but assures the President they mean him no harm.

President: Who are you people?

Xavier: We are mutants. My name is Charles Xavier. Please sit down.

President: I’d rather stand.

Xavier turns to a young woman (Anna Paquin) and asks her to hand a file to the President saying:

These files were taken from the private offices of William Stryker (the movie’s villain) (Brian Cox).

President: How did you get this?

Xavier: Well, let’s just say I know a little girl who can walk through walls.

Xavier tells the President he has been deceived about the threat—that it is not the mutants the country should fear, but a nefarious secret government project. Time continues to stand still, as the President studies the file pensively. The lights then go back on, time resumes, and the mutants have vanished from the room. The President looks back up at the words on the teleprompter but pauses, as if rethinking what he will say next . . .

And so the world is saved again. But was it the X-Men or was it literacy? Instrumental in the scene, yet almost unnoticed in the special effects, dramatic tension, and earnest acting is the way literacy practices figure centrally in what is happening on screen. The scene centers around two literacy events, the meanings of which change as the context of the events changes as a result of what happens among the characters. It begins with the President reading a hard copy the text of the speech he is about to give and discussing the appropriateness of the language. Then he begins to read the speech from the teleprompter as he sits at his desk in the Oval Office. After the arrival of the X-men, the plea of Professor Xavier only becomes persuasive when he presents the President with the “secret” file, which details, in writing, the persecution of the mutants by a rogue general. The two literacy events—the President reading a speech and then a file—are straightforward. What is more important is the way the meaning of those events shifts as the events unfolding in the scene change the context of how the speech and file are read.

The “literacy event” of reading a speech only tells part of the story. As David Barton and Mary Hamilton (1998) have pointed out, literacy events are only the observable part of “literacy practices,” which go beyond observable units of behavior to include “values, attitudes, feelings, and social relationships” (6). Thus, cultural context is vital to interpreting literacy practices. The “secret file” is a staple of so many film thrillers, either as the goal of the plot or, as in this case, the deus ex machina that saves the heroes from the villains. What is actually written in the file almost becomes less important than its talisman-like presence as the container of “truth.” (In fact, as in the case of most “secret files” in movies, we never actually get to read them, but the contents are summarized by one of the characters.) In X2, once that file, and the truth it contains, changes from being secret to sitting in the hands of power, the meaning of reading the file changes as well. As the scene ends it is clear that the words in the file have now made the words on the teleprompter empty, if not dangerous.

There is nothing extraordinary about the role literacy plays in this scene in this action film. The list of films that include presidential speeches or secret files is long. The question is not whether literacy practices are present in contemporary popular culture, in this case movies. It is much harder to find a movie without literacy represented in it than it is to find one where people are reading or writing. The more important and useful question is how do we in the audience interpret the literacy practices we find in popular culture? What do such representations tell us about how literacy is perceived in the culture at large?

Most movies are filled with scenes of people of all ages, sexes, races, and social classes reading and writing in a wide variety of contexts and for a wide variety of purposes. In the literacy practices represented, class and gender are marked, institutional hierarchies identified and reinforced, cultural power hoarded or shared, individual and social desire enacted or denied. Though often portrayed as incidental to main narratives in individual films, when taken together across a number of different films, representations of literacy practices construct and contest submerged narratives and counter-narratives about literacy. Yet scenes showing reading and writing on film go largely unnoticed, even by literacy scholars, despite the fact that these images recreate and reinforce pervasive concepts and perceptions of literacy, perceptions that inevitably influence both how we teach reading and writing and how our students respond to print literacy and to writing classes.

This book addresses how everyday literacy practices are represented in popular culture, specifically in mainstream, widely distributed contemporary movies. Though we often watch such movies without connecting the acts we are seeing to the ideas we—and our students—have about literacy, the pervasive representations of literacy have an effect on our cultural conceptions of reading and writing, from issues of identity to institutional practices. What is important about the way literacy practices are portrayed in films is not that they are different from dominant conceptions of literacy and culture, but that they reproduce such conceptions so seamlessly, and often in ways that escape our explicit attention.

OBSERVING CULTURE ON FILM

Popular culture and film have been theorized and studied from a variety of perspectives, including a rich tradition of cultural studies that examines how films are not just the product of the explicit intent of the filmmakers, but represent and reproduce ideological functions of larger culture. Cultural studies film scholarship examines how movies support and reproduce a culture’s dominant values and social orders. The cultural construction of identity, particularly in terms of gender, race, social class, and sexuality, has been a focus of much of the work in cultural studies film criticism. As Andrew Light (2003) points out, movies, like other popular culture texts, create complex portrayals of how we see ourselves and others that don’t “merely represent individuals and groups but also help to actually create understandings of who we think we are, how we regard others, and how members of groups identify and understand their group membership and their obligations to that group” (9). The mainstream films made at any cultural moment reflect to the audience a recognizable world with characters who act in a comprehensible and recognizable manner. Even in fantasy and science fiction, for example, the clothes hairstyles, furniture, not to mention the characters’ identities and relations with one another, reflect the cultural moment in which the films were made. Just by looking at the clothes, set design, and casting, it is just as easy to place a film like Forbidden Planet (1956) in the fifties, Star Wars (1977) in the seventies, and The Matrix (1999) in the nineties as it would be with any domestic drama. Though we know movies are fictional, we accept the world, characters, and actions we see in movies as consistent with the ideological truths and values that shape our lives. Literacy, as Brian Street (1995, 2001) has argued so forcefully, is also a product of ideology and defined by cultural norms and expectations just as much as by aspects of identity, politics, and economics. Theory and research on literacy as an ideological construct have increasingly focused on examining the web of “associations between cultural conventions, literacy practices, notions of self, person and identity and struggles over power” (Street 1995, 135).

In this project, we are working in the tradition of cultural studies film criticism to examine how movies represent and reproduce the ideological nature of literacy as a social phenomenon. The literacy practices displayed on the screen and consumed by the public are part of the ideological construction of what is considered literacy, what social goals it serves in what institutions, how it is perpetuated, how it shapes concepts of identity, and what cultural power is determined by who is considered literate. Like many elements of culture and ideology, however, literacy practices in mainstream movies often pass unnoticed because they are so naturalized, so normalized. Literacy practices, though they often don’t stand out in the narrative because they reproduce the dominant values and power relationships, are an integral part of the construction of culture and ideology. Of course, ideology is not seamless, and not adopted uniformly by every person in a culture. As in any text, there are often contradictions and paradoxes in how literacy practices are represented and read in movies. Even so, “the best forms of ideological critique, whatever their interest, attend to the complex ways in which films make their appeals to us as viewers in the multiple and specific places in which we as social subjects incorporate cinemas into our everyday lives” (Tinkcom and Villarejo 2001, 3). Our goal is to examine how film, as an integral part of culture and ideology, shapes and maintains our conceptions of literacy and identity.

Another theoretical tradition that shapes our work in this book comes from our backgrounds in rhetoric. By bringing to this study a rhetorical approach to reading and interpreting literacy representations in film, we can examine such moments as situated acts of expression that exist in comprehensible and ideological combinations of appeals. Both the production and consumption of movies are rhetorical, social acts that involve directing audiences toward some purpose by employing familiar rhetorical con- ventions. In any mainstream movie, stories are told, arguments formed, and identification, in the Burkean sense, is sought with the audience. Films are complex rhetorical texts that draw on rhetorics of words, images, and movement to create these narratives and arguments. Mainstream filmmakers work within genres and try to fulfill certain audience expectations (so people will pay to see the work) and so also work within dominant ideologies, whether consciously or not. Audiences watching the same films read them with the same expectations and within the same ideologies.

It is important to note, that, while we find the pervasive patterns of how literacy practices are represented to be significant in helping to shape and maintain certain ideological constructions of literacy, we do not believe that people consume such representations without thought or without adapting them to their experiences and contexts. Popular culture is not a force that people in their daily lives are unable to resist, like so many mindless cultural dupes. Rather than thinking about the audience in a theatre as sitting helpless and mesmerized before the images on the screen, it is more useful to employ Margaret Morse’s metaphor, in her discussion of television, of the popular culture “membrane” whose “function is to link the symbolic and immaterial world on the monitor with an actual and material situation of reception” (1998, 18). Movies work in much the same way, and we recognize that popular culture is not uniform in either its production or its consumption; instead people balance their experiences and readings of such texts against their individual and group lived experiences. Rhetorical theory allows the flexibility to read a film as an “isolated, substantive, and symbolic form of expression, but also through more general cultural, psychological, and rhetorical frames, ones that guide interpretation and that shape our understanding of what meanings film makes possible” (Blakesley 2003, 8). Throughout this book we are mindful that the representations of literacy practices we see on film will, in readings by others, be subject to a different set of interpretations that allow for adoption or resistance, or both at the same time.

Finally, by working in the traditions of cultural and rhetorical studies we also work in an interdisciplinary tradition. Consequently, we draw on a range of theoretical approaches to examine the literacy practices on film. Throughout the book we employ different theoretical lenses (such as feminist, materialist, postcolonial, critical race, narrative, genre, and others) to approach different issues or interpretations of what we see on the screen. We will address these theories and their applications throughout the book as they become relevant.

No one doubts that popular mass media have an influence on our perceptions of gender or class or race or sexual orientation or any other cultural construction. We should not doubt, then, that such media are influencing perceptions and practices of writing and reading. If we are to research and teach reading and writing, at any level, we need to understand how and why students and the culture at large regard literacy practices as they do and then be able to address such perceptions.

THE GLOBAL POWER OF FILM

Our initial approach to this project was to study representations of literacy in many forms of popular culture, including television, magazines, the Internet, advertising, and video games. Very quickly, however, we realized that to try to cover so many forms of mass-produced popular culture would either result in a huge, unfocused book or one that risked treating different genres and media too superficially to be useful. It was at this point we decided to sharpen our focus to contemporary, mainstream movies. Using movies as our field of study provides several advantages beyond allowing us to explore one form of popular culture in significant depth.

Movies remain a popular and pervasive form of popular culture, both in the United States and around the world. Also, mainstream Hollywood movies, of the kind we are discussing in the book, circulate as easily around the globe as any medium or cultural form and dominate the global film industry. Thus, though we are often discussing movies made in the United States, we understand that the audience watching and interpreting these movies may be sitting in a theatre or watching a DVD anywhere from London to Beirut to Hong Kong. Even when U.S. films are not being watched, they often have an effect on other films that are being made. Though they may not always be our proudest cultural export, there is no denying the global appeal of mainstream U.S. films. This border-crossing quality makes contemporary film a more intriguing and flexible form of popular culture to study than some forms, such as radio and television that may be more influenced by local cultures.

Also, with a history dating back more than century, the genre and formal qualities of film have had time to develop in ways that reveal both patterns and conflicts. Film has also developed into a form that has clearly been used for a variety of purposes, from straightforward diverting entertainment, to propaganda, to complex aesthetic and philosophical inquiry. These qualities give film a richer history and more diverse set of uses and texts than some newer popular culture forms such as the Internet.

Finally, the narrative, naturalistic conventions of most mainstream movies make them intriguing, if not necessarily reliable, mirrors of our culture and ideology. The representations of literacy on film are not always real, but often reflect dominant cultural attitudes about reading and writing. At the same time, because “there is no simple division between the cinema which functions as an instrument of dominant ideology, and the cinema which facilitates challenges to it” (Mayne 2002, 29), we can also see literacy practices portrayed on the screen that run counter to the dominant narrative and culture,.

Even as we focus our project on mainstream films, the kinds of issues and themes we are going to discuss can be easily extrapolated to other forms of popular culture. For example, the representations of literacy and how they connect to issues of gender, race, and social class can be seen as easily on an episode of ER or The Simpsons as they can be in movies. Similar connections could be made to representations of literacy in advertising, music, the Internet or other forms of popular culture.

When we have mentioned this project to friends and colleagues, their first thoughts are often films in which literacy is foregrounded and triumphant. Films that explicitly forground literacy often convey highly positive messages about it. Films about literacy also often reinforce the belief that literacy is an autonomous set of skills that one can, and should, adopt to join the dominant culture. Such messages can make triumph-of-literacy movies appealing to many writing teachers, because they echo the metanarratives that permeate public policy about literacy education, and education as well. We agree that it is important to analyze the literacy practices in such films, and their representations of literacy as salvation or commodity, and we do so in Chapter Eight.

Yet, scholars in literacy studies have pointed out that even as practices and pedagogies in schools construct institutional definitions of literacy (Street 1995), important literacy practices also exist outside of schools (Barton and Hamilton 1998; Gregory and Williams 2000). In the same vein, we also believe that there is a great deal to be learned from movies that are not explicitly about teaching reading or writing. We consequently decided to study situated literacy practices in films that had been disseminated widely and endorsed by mainstream producers, critics, and theatres. There is much to be learned in how literacy is represented as everyday aspects of characters’ lives whether in social dramas, romantic comedies, fantasies, or action blockbusters.

We began our research by viewing a broadly inclusive group of films, ranging widely across the years and including films produced in countries outside of the United States. After this initial exploration, we focused our attention within a narrower field, studying Hollywood-produced movies that were in wide release—in other words, had at least five or more copies on the new release shelves of chain video stores such as Blockbuster or Hollywood video—so that we would be watching movies that were also being watched by the culture at large. Though our work also extends to some films produced in countries other than the United States, we have focused most of this project on Hollywood movies. More than simply offering some coherence and focus for the research, it also reflects the dominance of the American movie industry in global popular culture. Like it or not, Hollywood-produced films are watched around the world and, with the exception of the Indian film industry, crowd out movies produced in other countries. Consequently, the representations of literacy practices in Hollywood movies reach more than American audiences. Even though these representations may be read differently in different cultures, we believe it is still useful to examine in detail the ways in which literacy is portrayed in these movies and hope that scholars and teachers in other cultures can use our observations as a place to begin further discussions of how these representations are read and reproduced by their audiences.

We also had to come up with a definition of literacy. On the one hand, we did not want to follow the common trend of using literacy as a synonym for any knowledge or cultural competence. This book will not include discussions of concepts such as emotional literacy or technological literacy or environmental literacy. Instead we decided to note when written words or the act of reading or writing them showed up in a movie, whether on a piece of paper, television or computer screen, street sign, newspaper, letter, book, business card, and so on. At the same time, we knew we must recognize that communication in our contemporary culture is multimodal and that we needed to be aware of how theories of multiliteracies influence literacy practices. As Barton and Hamilton (1998) note, “people use written language in an integrated way as a part of a range of semiotic systems” (9). We als...