America on Film. Sean Griffin
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capitalism as our nation’s dominant ideology militates against social equality in a variety of ways.
Culture and Cultural Studies
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