MEDIA LANGUAGE: STRAUSS & STRUCTURALISM

Our recent work covered how hegemony influences representations.
Today, we build on our understanding of representation and media language, two of the course's 4 key concepts, that underpin how you analyse what you see in television drama questions, the film industry as well as in your own productions. We use a text book that I have bought for the media department; it has online worksheets at www.essentialmediatheory.com. We start with Claude Levi-Strauss.

 

Levi-Strauss analysed the structure and narrative of hundreds of mythic tales he collected from all round the globe. He sought to uncover the invisible rulebook of storytelling in order to look closely at the essential nature of human experience. He believed that if he discerned any common themes, the myths would reveal essential truths about how the human mind structured the world. He concluded that all stories worked through oppositional arrangements - through the construction of characters or narrative incidents that clash or jar. Moreover, he came to believe that stories and storytelling perform a vital social function: oppositional presentations are resolved to outline societal taboos and socially acceptable behaviours.

LS outlined his key academic ideas in his book The Savage Mind 1962. For LS, different cultures might speak different languages, but stories told across the globe and throughout history employ a remarkably simple but stable formula.. Myths, he argued, universally explore human experience using polarised themes (birth competing against death, wisdom competing with innocence...). Can you think of any fairy tales that support this idea?

Concept One:  media narratives use binary opposition

LS offers a structuralist approach to media language, suggesting that humans encode and decode the world using universally shared principles.
• The media uses binary oppositions to explain and categorise the complexities of the world around us.
• Oppositions can be found in the media in the presentation of characters: audiences expect villains to battle heroes; secondary characters are constructed with contrasts in terms of youth or maturity, strength or intelligence, masculinity or femininity. In news stories, criminals exploit victims; in documentaries, innocent subjects fall prey to anonymous corporations.
• Oppositions can be found in the media in the presentation of narrative themes. Print and TV advertising transforms failure into success through simplified binary presentations. TV narratives conventionally end in a grand narrative collision in order to deliver an exciting finale to their audiences.
• Media makers also apply stylistic oppositions to mise-en-scène, camera work, editing styles and image construction.The juxtaposition of different styles might include camera work changing from quiet stillness in one scene to frenzied whip pans in another. This sort of transition might reinforce wider character-oriented oppositions. They can also create aesthetic interest. Look at the table below.

• Thematic oppositions in media products can be  genre driven. Some binary oppositions are so deeply entrenched within genres that they become a genre convention (expectation). Sci-Fi regularly offers audiences 'humanity v. technology' driven narratives; crime drama 'law enforcer v. law breaker; romances resolve in romantic couplings.

WHY ARE BINARY OPPOSITIONS USED? The function of oppositions

You can draw on these points when you write about your own characters & narrative in CCR1

• To clearly explain ideas To simplify complicated ideas, viewpoints. News stories often explain complex topics by referencing interviewees with oppositional viewpoints to generate simplified overviews. When you think about writing about press regulation, for instance, you will offer oppositional views ("Arguably.... On the other hand...")
• To create compelling narratives Audiences are more likely to engage with a film if they are promised a narrative clash. What are the clashes in your own productions?
• To create identifiable character types Audiences quickly pick up the sense of direction in a story once oppositional characters are introduced (hero / villain; good guy winning his girl). Clashing characters also offer audiences a range of other gratifications - comedy, fear...
• To create audience identification Binary oppositions prompt audiences to identify with one central character, group or viewpoint. An advert that contrasts dull reality with the promise of a sparkling outcome, for example, positions the audience to empathise with that brand. Have you noticed any casting choices for villains in US films?

The poster will prompt our exploration of genre driven oppositions. Look at the heading to identify the genre then look down the list.

Concept Two: the way binary oppositions are resolved creates  ideological significance
For Levi-Strauss, myths give us a version of the world around us and generate culturally specific norms of behaviour (=belonging to a particular culture /period in time / place). Narratives provide audiences with a set of privileged behaviours that they are encouraged to copy. For example, he cites Sophocles' famous Oedipus myth. Cultural products in art, media and literature don't just present conflict; they offer resolutions to oppositions. Think about James Bond or The Avengers.

• media producers construct ideologies by positioning their audiences to favour one side of an opposition (How does 'Britishness' triumph in a Bond movie? How are the NHS presented in the Press during the Covid19 crisis?)
• narrative resolutions -  the ending of media products - often help us to diagnose which oppositions a product favours. (Who gets the girl / the medal / the hero's welcome home?) Oscar Wilde famously said "The good end happily, the bad unhappily; that is what fiction means.")

Theorists who challenge Levi-Strauss's thinking

• Stuart Hall: would argue that media products can be encoded using binary oppositions, but audiences do not necessarily decode products in the way that media producers intended
• Paul Gilroy: argues that Western binary thinking has traditionally classified ethnicity in terms of simplified white /non white and civilised /uncivilised categories. He calls for the media to move beyond these simplistic and damaging binary classifications.
• Judith Butler: similarly argues that conventional Western gender binaries mask the complex nature of sexuality.