Strategically Communicating

We love to look. The Greek understood the human “love of looking” so keenly they created the word scopophilia to summarize it (O’Shaunessy, Stadler) and Freud argued that one of the key human drives or desires is the desire to look (Mulvey, 1989). Beyond scopophilia, voyeurism and “the desire to look secretly at events, to spy on people” (O’Shaunessy, Stadler) allows for sexual gratification of viewing objects or acts, according to Dictionary.com.

In the internet age, scopophilia has coalesced with websites such as Reddit to create a thriving online subculture to escalate voyeurism from a creepy individual pursuit to a collective resource for sharing photos and bragging rights to “creepshots” (a.k.a. upskirts),  which can be described as the deliberate and secret photography of women’s crotches, breasts, and rear ends in everyday life.

Is the creepshot any different than “The People of Walmart” photos where unaware shoppers are photographed for public ridicule?  One might argue that it is the lack of a woman’s consent in creepshot photos that reality and fantasy collide to create a technological place of control and fetishisation. Voyeurs can find photos of willing women who expose themselves, so why are creepshots so popular?  Kira Cochrane of The Guardian says, “the answer involves a familiar combination of desire and humiliation. There is an interest in seeing not just any breasts, but all breasts, a sense that female bodies are public property, fair game– to be claimed, admired, and mocked.” What’s your perspective on the phenomenon of voyeuristic photos publicly posted?

O.K. let’s be real. I’m a sucker for romantic comedies.

I know. I know. I know. There are so many inaccurate portrayals of love. There are weak leading female protagonists. There are cliches and cheesy lines and orchestral music. But still…even as a media critic…I enjoy this genre.

O’Shaughnessy and Stadler write, “A number of contemporary films explore differing formations of love and family, yet a large percentage of them still ultimately reinforce coupling and having children as the path to fulfillment and happiness” (p. 288).

It’s easy to see their point. It is also easy to see that women in romantic comedies usually are beholden to a man.

I’m going to play Devil’s Advocate for a second. What if women enjoy these movies preciously because they don’t necessarily have to be strong?

While films can certainly inform, they also entertain…and to a hardworking woman who fills her days with responsibility, sometimes she might just want to go home, kick off her shoes, grab a bowl of popcorn, and escape into a world where leading men do things they don’t do in “real” life.

As a media critic, maybe it’s more important to analyze how the women watching these films respond to them. What needs are they satisfying? Could they actually be trying to construct society by supporting these narrative arcs?

I took the example used in the text with Legally Blonde and applied it to one of my favorite rom-coms, When Harry Met Sally. This final scene could end:

1. After Sally says, “It doesn’t work this way.” This ending supports a strong female character who won’t forgive her boyfriend for his wrongdoing, even despite the romantic element of New Years Eve.

2. After Sally says, “I hate you Harry; I really hate you.” This ending would show Sally as being emotionally unstable and dramatic, but still unwilling to give in to Harry.

3. It could end after the two kiss, confirming Sally’s forgiveness of Harry, acknowledging their friendship, and supporting the societal construction of New Years Eve being a time for love.

As you can see, it ends with #3. Do you think the narrative structure’s need for resolution always feels unsatisfying if the guy doesn’t get the girl, even if another resolution is presented? Is coupling the ULTIMATE resolution?

In the first eight months of 2012, U.S. retail sales of video games plummeted 20 percent says an Oct. 7 New York Times article. What’s up? Where’s the wee in our Wii?

If you’ve ever played Angry Birds, there lies one piece of the puzzle. Smart phone games have become hugely popular, can be had for pennies, and are easily accessed on smart phones. But even their popularity ebbs and flows like a bird in flight.

Of course there’s the economy. Before you can play one of the more corporate “elite” video games, you’ve invested in cable, a controller, the game, and perhaps a high-def TV. Young men have been hit hard.

And finally, narrative television as a whole is in decline (reality TV replacing sitcoms). Theatre attendance is down too.

What will cause a turnaround? Fingers are crossed that Nintendo, who is credited with saving the gaming industry after it crashed in the eighties, will score a repeat performance when its new Wii U is introduced next month.

And new business models are being born ever day. “Free thinking, independent creators are on the rise and they’re making some fascinating games,” says the Times article.

Monday, there is a Wii guitar challenge at work to raise money for charity. You know gaming’s gone mainstream when you see it pop up in a staid utility and you’re competing against a vice president that has played it and is out to win.

Question: What do you think has caused the dip in popularity? Does the decline in narrative entertainment had an effect on video game sales?

Although the processes of deconstruction we’ve been exploring in Media & Society have cast a dark shadow of analytical thinking over all of my media consumption, I know that it’s for the best. Being able to break down elements of media from basic interpersonal communication between friends to larger-scale Hollywood films seems at first tedious, but pulling apart all of these carefully crafted messages shows us so much about the nature of the building blocks.

Chapter 17 explores binary oppositions (i.e. male and female, black and white, etc.), which some critical theorists would refer to more specifically as “false hierarchical binaries.” As the text goes on to discuss, these binaries position cultural classifications in dualistic opposing categories, which are essential to organizing language. I felt squirmy, however, about the exclusion of “false hierarchical” in the text’s language, since the process of opposition so frequently constructs incorrect and socially destructive assumptions about one side of the binary (as Turner does explain on pg. 283). They also oversimplify our understanding of identifiers like race, gender, and sexuality – all three are much more complex than a binary can encapsulate.

I don’t disagree that binaries can be helpful in many way to suss out a very complicated world, but as a communicator, worry about how readily we may accept their simplicity. In what ways can we integrate complexity into our perception and discourse without overloading ourselves and our audience? Are there subtle ways, like through showing rather than telling?

In Chapter 17, O’Shaughnessy and Stadler lay out two terms with which to analyze story, binary opposition and dialectical synthesis, which offer the reader a stark view of the narrative arc of a story. “Narratives are organized around conflict and opposition, which are fundamental to narrative interest,” they say (p. 284).

While it seems undeniable that much of the material that makes for a compelling story stems from some conflict, when we read Jack Hart’s chapter, “Story” from his book Storycraft, and hear about the construction of a story from the point of view of the storyteller, O’Shaughnessy and Stadler’s black and white lines start to blur and we are left with a more compelling and multi-facetted definition of what drives a good story.

Hart tells us that is own favorite definition of a story comes from Jon Franklin and states that, “a story consists of a sequence of actions that occur when a sympathetic character encounters a complicating situation that he confronts and solves.”

It is this concept of a “sympathetic character” that I find lacking in O’Shaughnessy and Stadler’s conversation on narrative, and which I find most appeals to me as a storyteller. O’Shaughnessy and Stadler present characters mainly as objects that drive the plot, stating that “major characters are initially presented in narratives as having some kind of flaw in their character or an emotional problem.” While this may be true, it ignores the power that a good character has to bring member of the audience into the story. I find that it is often a sympathetic character that lies at the heart of any good story, even a primarily plot-driven one.

Take for example, the story that Hart relates working on, entitled “The Boy Behind the Mask,” which is the story of a local boy who is living with a major facial deformity and facing the judgment crucible that is high school. When plastic surgery nearly kills him, he and his family rally and he resolves to live with his deformity and get on with his life. Clearly this story has an element of opposition and is moved forward by both an emotional problem and the search for a cure to a physical flaw, but as Hart relates it, it is the strength of the boy that renders the reader riveted.

Hart tells us that, “a compelling story must immerse readers in another world, carrying them away from their mundane daily cares.” “The Boy Behind the Mask” accomplishes this immersion through the representation of a character that the reader cannot help but sympathize with. If the boy were not sympathetic, were a horrible human being, or handled the daunting task in front of him in a cowardly way, there might have been a simple news report, but there would not have been a narrative worth telling. Which brings me to ask, is it really enough to consider a story in terms of opposition or must we consider the deeply sympathetic nature of the characters who draw us into their stories?

One of the big ideas for me in this week’s reading was the idea that in our (heterosexual) male-dominated media environment, not only are women portrayed in a fashion that caters to heterosexual men, but the world view portrayed is also filtered through a male lens. As O’Shaughnessy & Stadler explain, “female audiences are asked to look through a male perspective, to see things through men’s eyes (2012, p.275). This reading reminded me that, as a woman, my own construction of self has been shaped by this male perspective whether I like it or not.

Sure, I might be a a savvy feminist who chooses to support media texts that I think send female-positive messages (and who chooses to critically analyze texts that don’t…), but that doesn’t change the fact that I only have access to the texts that are already out there in production – which are primarily created by men.

Here’s a pretty startling graph demonstrating the percent breakdown of women Directors, Writers, Executive Producers, Producers, Editors and Cinematographers employed in the 250 top-grossing Hollywood films of 2011 – women are in black, men in gray (here’s a link to the full article as well: http://womenintvfilm.sdsu.edu/files/2011_Celluloid_Ceiling_Exec_Summ.pdf):

If we’re ever going to create a media environment that is hospitable towards women – or really, just supportive of equal treatment – we’ll need to work towards a media environment that allows women to have more control in the processes of production. And fast.

The 21^st century motion picture has come a long way from the old days of classic Hollywood. The plots are more sophisticated, the characters are more polished and the cinematography and production aspects are nearly flawless. Unfortunately these advancements do not reflect women’s’ status in our society.

As O’Shaughnessy discusses in chapter 17, when it comes to narratives, it is not a question of whether women are positioned differently from their male counterparts, but rather how vast is the degree of difference? Unfortunately, Women continue to be placed in the old-fashioned, traditional and stereotypical roles—good girl/bad girl while male character resonate with us almost as repetitively. Our good girl, of course, includes subversive mothers, sisters and wives. The bad girl, for the most part, is any deviation from the norms above. Few narratives document the transformation from one character to the other in an attempt to teach a lesson and solidify the belief that honorable women are those who represent the traditional values in our society.

Other similar narratives that also continue to make their way into the big screen are the story of independent and career driven women who are either still seeking their prince charming or are too busy moving forward to remember their familial responsibilities including being fateful to their husband. In The American Beauty, the character of Carolyn reinforced this belief allowing us to almost justify Lester’s attraction towards an underage girl. Despite the fact that Carolyn is depicted as the stereotypical “independent” wife, she is attracted to a powerful and wealthy man reinforcing/reflecting our society’s the hegemonic structure.

Women who deviate from the social norms are often punished for their unorthodox choice by facing loneliness, social rejection and even death. Most Hollywood narratives terribly fail to admit that a woman’s path to self worth is not exclusive the traditional roles.

So the question remains, why do Hollywood films continue to recycle these outdated narratives despite women’s social mobility? Granted that as women, we till have a long road ahead to achieve equality, one shouldn’t ignore the significant progress we have made thus far. Why it is that most Hollywood films fail to reflect this progress?

So, the word Verfremdung really funny.  Brecht, I imagine, wasn’t.  I’m all for Marxism, but I’ve been scratching my head about this “estrangement effect.”  As I understand it, for Brecht it was all about breaking the fourth wall—Characters often (apparently very often) directly addressed the audience to purposefully draw attention to the constructed nature of the story.

I’ve seen films that do this, and with non-linear editing techniques they can prove to be pretty cool in a ‘heady’ sorta way.  But to say estrangement has more value as a teaching tool than narrative seems a stretch.  For one, if I’m not invested in a character, I don’t care what decisions they make.  For another, if I’m continually pulled out of the story by a narrator, I tend to want that narrator to die.

I usually don’t find myself so wrapped up in a story that I forget right from wrong or lose my critical thinking abilities—to imply that the masses are incapable of same seems like a bit of a short sell for a Marxist.  And surely there must be better ways of pushing a social agenda for the common man than avant-garde theater (!)

Are documentaries our “new” hope for delivering entertainment as a call to action? I hope not, because from 1995-current, they’ve only made up 1.08% of the movie market share.
What are some realistic ways to deliver narrative as a call to action that doesn’t have the added bonus of sucking the fun out of it?

Culture jamming is a great example of harnessing the powers of the media for good. The exploration of its benefits and pitfalls in Chapter 14 brought to mind a specific case study for the complicated process of culture jamming, one that raises some serious questions about its actual merits: the KONY 2012 campaign.

There was a pretty explosive response to this half-hour video that called viewers to action against African warlord Joseph Kony – but perhaps not the reaction its producer and central narrator, Jason Russell, was hoping for. His mission was to make Kony famous through a guerilla poster and advertising campaign carried out by people around the world, in order to make known his terrible reign and work towards stopping it. Viewers would send in money for action kits containing posters and other informational material, and disseminate its contents within their community. It sounds brilliant (and fooled a lot of people), but what Russell dubbed culture jamming can more accurately be classified as cause marketing, which involves a for-profit business partnering with a non-profit organization to create a marketing campaign that ideally makes money and benefits the cause. Russell’s organization, Invisible Children, has garnered negative attention for twisting facts in order to manipulate and enhance their message, as well as using the money they raise for questionable purposes.

When does culture jamming cross over into cause marketing? Can a cause marketing campaign truly benefit its cause without becoming dishonest and losing sight of its supposed mission?