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Culture and Cultural Studies

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While the school, the church, and the family serve as classic examples of ideological state apparatuses, potentially the most pervasive of ISAs (at least in the past century) is the mass media – newspapers, magazines, television, radio, film, video games, and now the Internet and the World Wide Web. Many theorists feel that in today’s electronic world, the media has more influence on cultural ideas and ideologies than do schools, religions, and families combined. The bulk of this book will examine historically how one branch of this mass media, the American cinema, has worked to exemplify and reinforce (and more rarely challenge) the hegemonic domination of white patriarchal capitalism.

One of the first arguments used to resist focusing on American cinema as a conveyer of ideological messages is that Hollywood movies are merely “entertainment.” Consequently, as the argument goes, academics are reading too much into these things. What do ideas like ideology and hegemony have to do with mindless escapism? To answer such questions, one has to recognize that cinema (and all other mass media) are important parts of American culture. Culture refers to the characteristic features of a civilization or state, or the behavior typical of a group or class. Culture is thus deeply connected to ideology: one might say it is the “real‐world” manifestation of ideology, since characteristic features, social behaviors, and cultural products all convey ideology.

Historically, European culture judged itself to be superior to all other cultures on the globe. “True” culture was thought to be synonymous with Western notions of high art – classical music, “serious” literature and theater, etc. – and other cultures were judged to be deficient by those standards. Today we try to discuss different cultures without making such value judgments; we also understand that any given group’s culture is more than just its most “respectable” and officially “important” art works. Culture also encompasses the modes of everyday life: how one behaves in a social situation, the type of clothes one wears, the slang one uses when talking to friends, etc. This definition of culture includes the so‐called low art of popular music, comic books, paperback novels, video games, movies, and television – forms of culture that interact with far more people than do those found only in museums or opera houses. Even language itself shapes and is shaped by culture, and thus conveys ideological meanings. For example, the Euro‐American cultural tradition that associates “white” with goodness and “black” with evil cannot help but influence how we think about race, which we often define in the same terms.

Within any given society, there are multiple cultures that differ in varying degrees from one another. In the United States, one can find a variety of cultures: hip‐hop, Chicano, Mennonite, conservative Christian, millennial, just to name a few. As intersectional theory posits, cultural identities co‐exist and overlap (for example, a black female hip‐hop millennial), but cultural groupings rarely exist in equal balance with one another. Rather, the culture of the ruling or most powerful group in a society tends to be the dominant culture, expressing its values and beliefs through ideologies and other cultural forms. The group with the most control has the greater means to produce and disseminate their preferred cultural attitudes throughout the rest of the society – their music, their literature, their standards of behavior become the norm for the rest of the society. For example, Native Americans have historically had less opportunity than Anglo Americans to get the funding or training necessary to make films or television programs. Consequently, the white man’s version of “how the West was won” has been filmed and televised literally thousands of times, while Native Americans have had very little chance to present their viewpoint of that era on film or video.

The culture of any marginalized or minority group is often labeled a subculture. Subcultures can have their effect on the dominant culture by contributing to the active hegemonic negotiation of dominant ideology, but usually this only happens to the extent that a subculture’s concerns can be adapted to the needs of the dominant ruling interests. For example, hip‐hop and rap music styles have crossed over into mainstream popular music – but in an altered (and some might say watered‐down) version. This is broadly called commodification (turning something into a product for sale) and more specifically incorporation (the stripping of an ideology or cultural artifact’s more “dangerous” or critical meanings so that the watered‐down artifact can be sold to mainstream culture). Another good example of this process is the history of earrings worn on men. Some men in the 1970s started to wear earrings as a “coming out” gesture – to announce to the world that they belonged to the emerging gay male subculture. As an act of coming out, the gesture was political and meant to challenge a dominant culture that ignored or suppressed the existence of gay men. Today, however, many, many men wear earrings – not because they want the world to know that they are gay, but because earrings for men have become a commodity that can be bought and sold as part of a depoliticized fashion trend. The gay political meaning of men wearing earrings has been stripped from the act – it was commodified and incorporated within the dominant culture. In perhaps a more recent example, tattoos were once the province of a small minority of people: mostly sailors and working‐class men who perhaps once were sailors. Tattoos signified a sort of gruff masculinity, which was initially appealing to women and gay men of decades past. Today, tattoos have been commodified and incorporated into dominant culture – people from all walks of life acquire them for a variety of reasons. It is highly unlikely that a young female film scholar with a tattoo of Atticus Finch and his daughter Jem from To Kill A Mockingbird (1962) is trying to convey her rough‐and‐tumble working class masculinity.

In recent decades, scholars in various disciplines (sociology, political science, literature, communications, history, media studies) have begun to study and theorize concepts and issues surrounding culture and ideology. This interdisciplinary research has coalesced under the term cultural studies. As its theorists come from such different backgrounds, cultural studies as a field of academic inquiry has consistently focused on multiple aspects of how culture works (and needs to be analyzed), but one of the basic foundations for this new discipline has been that every cultural artifact – book, movie, music video, song, billboard, joke, slang term, earring, etc. – is an expression of the culture that produces it. Every cultural artifact is thus a text that conveys information, carrying the ideological messages of both its authors and the culture that produced it. As a result, many cultural studies scholars are interested in how media texts express a view of the world, how these expressions create ideological effects, and how the users of such texts make meaning from them. This area, sometimes called image studies, looks at the processes of representation – the systems we use to communicate and understand our world – language, art, speech, and more recently TV, movies, and newer forms of media. These are representational systems that show us reconstructed (or mediated) versions of life, not “real life” itself. Most US citizens have never been to China, but probably know something about it from reading books or newspapers, or seeing images of it on television or at the movies. Since all media texts reflect in some way the ideological biases of the culture from which they emanate, the images of China shown in Hollywood movies or on American television will be different from the mediated images of China made in some other area of the world (and different from China’s own images of itself).

There are two stages of making meaning within any given text: encoding and decoding. Encoding encompasses the actual production of the text. A common method of analyzing encoding in film studies has been termed auteur studies. French for “author,” the auteur concept understands film or films as the imaginative work of a single specific artist, usually the director. By examining a number of films made by the same auteur, one can supposedly find common stylistic choices (ways of using the camera, editing, etc.) as well as common themes. Auteur studies became popular during the 1960s, and even now journalists will refer to “the latest Quentin Tarantino film” or “a typical Steven Spielberg picture.” The auteur theory argues that it is important to know who made a film, because aspects of a filmmaker’s personality and social position will affect the meanings encoded within it. Historically, straight white men in Hollywood made most American films; it has only been in recent decades that women, people of color, and/or homosexuals have had greater opportunities to make films.

Thus, during the encoding stage, the maker(s) of a film place meaning, including ideological meaning, into the text. Sometimes this involves specific, overt editorializing: a character gives a speech about a certain issue, or the entire story attempts to teach a moral lesson. However, the encoding of ideological meaning need not be so obvious; it might be done casually, and even unconsciously. Certain choices in creating mood or emotion, or in fostering audience sympathy (or antipathy), will also carry ideological weight. (Recall our earlier discussion of the hypothetical film about a white man and a Native American man.) To many, the process of encoding may initially sound like it applies solely to the production of propaganda, in which ideas, opinions, or allegations are presented as incontestable facts in order to sway public opinion toward or away from some cause or point. Texts that are labeled propaganda are usually encoded with overt ideological messages – cultural artifacts like advertisements, public service announcements, and political speeches. Hollywood movies are rarely labeled propaganda, yet they always encode certain ideologies. In other words, while all propaganda conveys ideological messages, not all texts are or should be labeled propaganda. In one contemporary example related directly to Hollywood, some male Star Wars fans have objected to the newer films’ emphasis on female characters, arguing that the films have become “too ideological” – meaning too feminist for their tastes. What these fans fail to see – or maybe they do – is that the original films themselves were ideological in the ways that they upheld patriarchal values in the first place.

Students sometimes want to ask about a film text, “Did the author really mean it that way?” Such a question assumes that filmic analysis is “reading too much into things” unless one can find definite evidence of a filmmaker’s intent. The response to this criticism is that all texts encode ideological meanings and messages, but those messages are not always consciously embedded in the text by its producer(s). Usually, filmmakers simply want to make a good film, tell an entertaining story, and sell tickets. Yet what is considered good or entertaining is itself going to differ according to cultural and ideological standards. Furthermore, the makers of cultural texts are not somehow removed from or above the society in which they live. They are just as much shaped by the dominant ideology as anyone else – and this can have an unconscious effect on what they put into their work. A white heterosexual middle‐class Protestant male is going to have had a certain experience of life that will translate in some fashion into the films he writes or directs, even if he is not aware of it. Similarly, a non‐white or female or homosexual filmmaker is going to have had a different life experience that will result in him or her making a different type of film (consciously or unconsciously). Also, a film from the 1980s is recognizably different from a film from the 2010s, not only because of the changes in cars, phones, and fashions, but also because of the changes in the ideological assumptions about social issues (such as race, class, gender, sexuality, and ability).


A cultural studies model of encoding and decoding.Producers, texts, and spectators all exist within larger spheres of culture and ideology.

The other stage of making meaning, decoding, involves the reception of a text. Once a text is produced, it is distributed to others (to be read, listened to, watched, worn, etc.). Those who use the produced text (that is, the audience) then decode the text’s meanings on the basis of their own conscious and unconscious cultural, ideological positioning(s). In other words, producers, texts, and receivers make up a system of communication or meaning production, and that system exists within the larger social spheres of culture and ideology. Like encoding, decoding can be overt or subliminal. At certain times, an audience member will consciously recognize she or he is being “preached to.” If an ideological position becomes too strong or apparent, people may easily reject it as propaganda (especially if the ideology being espoused challenges their own). Yet, at other times, the messages may be decoded below one’s consciousness. An imbalance that favors men instead of women as the main characters of Hollywood films might be decoded by audiences (without ever stopping to really think about it) as meaning that men are more important (or do more important things) than women.

When producers and readers share aspects of the same culture, texts are more easily decoded or understood. (If you doubt that, try decoding a website written in a language you do not understand!) However, not every reader is going to take (or make) identical meanings from the same text. Depending upon their own cultural positioning, different people may decode texts in different ways – sometimes minutely different, sometimes greatly so. Readings that decode a text in accordance with how it was encoded are said to be dominant (or preferred) readings. On the other side of the spectrum are oppositional readings, which actively question the ideological assumptions encoded in a text. Most readings lie somewhere in between these two extremes. Negotiated readings resist some aspects of what has been encoded, but accept others. Frequently, members of minority groups have social standpoints that differ from those encoded in mainstream texts, and sometimes this allows such individuals to perform readings that are more regularly negotiated or oppositional.

In most cases, Hollywood filmmakers don’t want moviegoers to question the politics of their films. Hollywood promotes its films not as political tracts but as mindless escapism, and an audience member who accepts that tenet will rarely be alert to the cultural and ideological assumptions that the films encode and promote. (One should remember that ideology is often most effective when it goes unnoticed.) The fact that Hollywood films are generally understood as mere entertainment (without political significance) is itself an ideological assumption, one that denies the importance of image studies and therefore represents white patriarchal capitalist film practice as neutral, natural, and inevitable.

Yet the act of performing a negotiated or oppositional reading is not in and of itself a radical denunciation of dominant cinema, or dominant ideology. (After all, even the oppositional spectator has signaled his or her “approval” of the text by purchasing a ticket to the film.) While such readings may criticize and critique certain ideological notions, they are nonetheless created within the same basic hegemonic framework as are dominant readings. They cannot completely negate the ideological messages found in the text, only resist them. Still, oppositional and negotiated readings can have an effect on the hegemonic negotiation of dominant ideologies throughout time. When a certain oppositional reading strategy grows within a culture to the point that future similar texts are no longer accepted by consumers, then certain ideological assumptions must be altered, and future texts may exhibit those changes. As we shall see throughout this book, the overtly racist and sexist images that were found in many films from previous decades are – in many cases – no longer considered acceptable in the twenty‐first century. Nonetheless, white patriarchal capitalism maintains its hegemonic dominance, in both American film and culture‐at‐large.

America on Film

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