Law and Order

Law and Order is yet another of previously mentioned mainstream broadcasts that are sure to make professionals in its featured fields wince every once in a while. On air since the 1990’s, it has proliferated for decades despite this, because it disseminates (and creates) “dominant ideologies”. Law and Justice may not be the fast-paced, high-stakes game that the show portrays them as, but when its producers decided to ‘encode’ it with meaning, those are the values they perceived as having truth for themselves, their wallets, and the public eye. Since most people don’t actually work in the jobs portrayed on the show, the romanticized dissemination of those ‘codes’ merely taps into the culture’s ‘preferred’ interpretation. Law and order then affects its audience’s ideology by attempting to achieve ‘a perfectly transparent communication’ with its audiences: that is, it seeks to encode signs/connotations that is so widely accepted that viewers interpretations will perfectly match the meanings intended. When audiences agree to this, their ideology is accepted to be that of the ‘dominant hegemonic position’.

Not all people can decode – that is, ‘read’ the connotations into meaning – so “perfectly” however. Sometimes life experience creates for disagreements with widely accepted points of view. Audiences that can then understand the intended codes but seek to mold them into their own experiences can be said to have “negotiated readings” of the show. This will create for some conflicts. For example, if a viewer has had one or two experiences in court, and notes that the way something is being treated on the show is not exactly true to life, but otherwise think the show fairly accurate, they will have to accept the contradiction and move on.

Lastly, there are those that can interpret what is meant, but whose global beliefs run contrary. They understand what is being connotated, but their own ideology rejects it. Someone with an alternate experience of the law, and the perceptions expressed on the show will reformat what the show gives them to place it in a new context. This would be an ‘oppositional’ or ‘counter-hegemonic’ reading.

In the strange event that someone – perhaps from another culture – understood the intended meaning though a different series of codes than the producers used, this would then be an ‘aberrant decoding’.

The dominant order, then, runs more contrary to the specifics or reality, and the oppositional might be supposed to be too obscure for most to be aware of. It might then be supposed that the ‘negotional’ code is how most read, and that in disseminating its material, Law and Order continues to uphold the current hegemonic preferences, without worrying about them too strictly, as producers must be aware of audience interpretation.

Ugly

War is ugly, and war photography doesn’t seek to deny this. That very parable, present in CNN’s “Iraq Soldier” (pictured above), is part and parcel of a “myth” as Roland Barthes’ Myth Today would call it. Barthes’ myths are “depoliticized speech”, that is “the function of myth[s] …[are] to empty reality”; basically, they are systems which turns signs into signifiers, and in so doing, naturalizes concepts that society as a whole – or at least “bourgeois” society – embraces. On the surface, the picture of the soldier has its denoted, connoted, (and potentially even linguistic) messages. But if those ‘signifiers’ are then turned into signs, the ‘myth’ of the photo is born. That is, those things we look at and accept as being the unquestionable way of things.

Prominently, there are seven features to a myth: inoculation, history, identification, tautology, neither-norism, the quantification of quality, and the statement of fact. By exploring how the photo embodies all of these, a basic understanding of the image’s mythology appears.

First, the photo inoculates, that is, it “admit[s]… [an] accidental evil … the better to conceal …[a] principal evil.” Here, it is immediately acknowledged that ‘war is ugly’: buildings crumble, the gun menaces, and violence hangs in the air. These brutal elements pay surface respect and in doing so, ‘naturalize’ the image. Once viewers accept them, they never need question the ‘principle’ evil of “why war”?

Then, there is the matter of history. Barthes claims that “myth is constituted by the loss of the historical quality of things: in it, things lose the memory that they once were made.” The photo asks that we accept the solider. It does not ask for our judgment or politics. It lives very much in the now, in that there is no way it can conceive of a time before or after the snapshot.

The third principle, ‘identification’ is a myth’s ability to place everyone inside it (or give it a place around it), and allow everyone to associate. The American soldier is a warrior, a freedom fighter, etc. This photo gets deeply inside that myth. Indeed, many American soldiers work desk jobs, or have positions outside of the Middle East, but the mythology places them in danger, there.

The matter of ‘tautology’ (or, a “propositional formula that is true under any possible valuation”) is simple in naturalizing images. Since this photo depicts a soldier as he is (or, must have been at some point in the past), it can be accepted to be the way it is because it is. The reality of an Iraq soldier as photographed must be accepted, because it is reality. All alternative arguments are made impossible.

Neither-Norism in myth “consists in stating two opposites and balancing the one by the other so as to reject them both.” In the instance of the CNN picture, the viewer first looks at the solider, and says – perhaps – “this solider is violent, I reject his presence in Iraq as overbearing and an unnecessary use of force!” However, in looking at the destruction around the soldier, and knowing the alternative, says also “Al-Qaida is a terrible organization, and should be done away with: I protest allowing such things to proliferate!” In rejecting both possibilities proffered by the picture, the viewer then is free to accept the image as it is, thus naturalizing it.

Myth’s “quantification of quality” principle seeks to “economize intelligence”. In this image, the complex nature of the fight in Iraq, the multiplicities of jobs, problems, and options is reduced to the quality of a single picture so it can be easily comprehended and understood.

Lastly, the ‘myth’ of the CNN image can be understood as ‘myth’ because it contains a ‘statement of fact’. Myths tend to become proverbs, which tend to get adopted as common sense, so the statement “war is ugly” once more can be seen in the image, and as a part of its myth. It is natural for us to expect to see this accepted fact in a photo of war, and further leads to the overall cultural acceptance of it.

In the end, the myth of the CNN image may hold that “right” or “bourgeois” bent which Barthes claims is most common in myth, but is not actually a political statement. Because myth is not political. It seeks to create a reality that its audience feels is reality, whether that is the whole of the matter or not.

Morally Gray

Gray: the color that predominates the poster for the Soprano’s final episodes calls to mind overcast streets and hazy morals. According to Roland Barthes’ essay on The Rhetoric of the Image, that first, predominant impression is one of denotation. Denotation, the last of the three things he claims analyzed photographs provide: “a linguistic message, a coded iconic message, and a noncoded iconic message.” Universally, all can observe the drab coloration, the violence of the red lettering, the serious (perhaps even menacing) expression of the man in the dark suite, the choppy waters, and – nearly universally recognized – far-off statue of liberty. In his essay, Barthes claimed “if the image contains signs, we can be sure that in advertising these signs are fully formed, with a view to optimum reading: the advertising image is frank, or at least emphatic.” Since the Soprano's poster is an ad, viewers can be sure that the composition means something. Therefore, we move to the connotative value of the image, or, the social meanings we can gather by analyzing the signs of the picture. Here is where the initial grayness of the picture can come to mean a grayness of morality/purpose. The statue of liberty – which represents America, justice, immigration and freedom – is distant, giving the sensation that perhaps law is also distance in this colorless world. The other aspect of Ellis Island can tie into the man in the foreground as well; his features suggest an Italian past and immigration. The black suite can be read to mean he has done well for himself. Combining his implied past, clothes and culture brings viewers to the stereotype of mobsterness. Connotatively, then, the picture seems to produce a vibe of lawlessness, crime, foreigner intrusion, and uncertain morals. These, however, remain uncertain, and it is the text that allows the viewer to anchor this multiplicity of options.

Barthes argues that the dominant function of the picture’s linguistic message is anchorage, since “all images are polysemous; they imply, underlying their signifies, a ‘floating chain’ of signified, the reader is able to choose some and ignore others. …Polysemy poses a question of meaning…”. Here he is saying that since there are so many ways to interpret signs, text is needed to let us know what specifically the signs want you to believe. For example, one meaning of the statue of liberty is tourism. However, the harsh, black and red text doesn’t seem to play to the idea of happy consumerism, so the code for tourism is discounted. The actual message of the text “The Final Episodes – April 8, 9pm. Made in America” serves as an anchor as well. The choice of the more sinister “final” as opposed to the buoyant “finale” adds an element of potential violence. “Made in America” parodies the omnipresent “made in china” found stamped on most American toys and consumer items. It implies a unique American experience, but it also acknowledges that we are in America – which is something that most American shows wouldn’t need to do. The presence of the easily recognizable statue should be enough to tell audiences that the location is New York, one of the most identifiable U.S. cities, so by repeating the location in the text, the overcompensation makes us additionally aware of the unmentioned foreignness. These then are Italian-Americans. They are in the U.S. now, but they weren’t always. The bloody red of this last font calls to mind gunshot wounds piercing an otherwise dark setting. The linguistic message of the picture brings all the elements together, uniting what promises to be a drama of morals and laws with action and the exoticism of recent immigrants.

Aura and Authenticity in the Blair Witch Project

The 1999 faux-documentary The Blair Witch Project achieves its power though one all-important farce; that its audience believes – or can be persuaded to believe – that the film is ‘real’. This fascination with film mimicking life can be traced to many human art forms and the subjectiveness of that ‘reality’ is something that theorists continue to struggle with. In his essay The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction Walter Benjamin claims “...for the first time – and this is the effect of the film – man has to operate with his whole living person, yet forgoing its aura. For aura is tied to his presence; there can be no replica of it. The aura which, on the stage, emanates from Macbeth, cannot be separated for the spectators from that of the actor. However, the singularity of the shot in the studio is that the camera is substituted for the public. Consequently, the aura that envelops the actor vanishes, and with it the aura of the figure he portrays.” Here, the word aura can be interpreted to have a variety of meanings, one of which might be the moment’s potential spontaneity. Though the play Macbeth has been around for hundreds of years, each new actor will add something and each performance has the potential for surprise. Once something is a movie, however, it becomes solid. No matter how many times someone watches, it remains static; the aura of an instant’s ‘originality’ robbed. The Blair Witch Project attempts to regain this aura by presenting the work as fact. If an audience can accept the film as such, they can perceive it not as timeless, but as a salient moment trapped in time. The difference being the first can be viewed whenever at no expense to the movie’s meaning, whereas the second – a newly released news reel – would change the way we view the world now. We might perceive it to have an aura because (though mass produced) it can be placed in the immediate present, and so transforms our understanding of the universe that nothing after it can be the same. If The Blair Witch Project were, in fact, a documentary, Benjamin might be willing to argue its case. As it is not, we must conclude that it is only a failed attempt whose own nature forces it to fall short. The Blair Witch Project cannot have an aura as Benjamin would describe it, but mimics one skillfully enough to delude its audience – however briefly – into the illusion.

Further examining the 1999 film through the lens of Benjamin’s essay, we might look to how he compares magician with surgeon, saying that in art, painters are the former and magicians the latter. He claims, “The painter maintains in his work a natural distance from reality, the cameraman penetrates deeply into its web. There is a tremendous difference between the pictures they obtain. That of the painter is a total one, that of the cameraman consists of multiple fragments which are assembled under a new law. Thus, for contemporary man the representation of reality by the film is incomparably more significant than that of the painter, since it offers, precisely because of the thoroughgoing permeation of reality with mechanical equipment, an aspect of reality which is free of all equipment. And that is what one is entitled to ask from a work of art.” The Blair Witch Project is then entirely this highest form of art. Firstly, its medium is film and so it is inexplicably ‘true’ to reality in a way that even – say animated film – couldn’t be. Secondly, its fragmented presentation of reality allows for a sensation of near-entire “loss of equipment”. Because the clips are not complete, because the events are presented as real, because the characters themselves view life through the camera lens the viewer is asked – even more so than in a seamlessly cut film – to disengage and believe in the movie’s reality. Unlike in the matter of aura, the The Blair Witch Project’s falseness doesn’t disturb this effect. In fact, if anything, the fact that the “Project” isn’t real further compliments the piece as mechanically admirable art.

Though The Blair Witch Project may fail in its attempt to cut into Benjamin’s conception of aura – a blame which falls on form and fact, rather than execution – it does live up to his standards of modern, mechanized art in its innovative and engaging presentation.

And They Lived (Circle All That Apply: After, Ever, Happily, N/A)

Anyone who has specialized in anything presented in a Hollywood film has probably complained about it at one time or another; whether the subject be science, medicine, history, or something else entirely. In my own experience, it was my fencing club, which spent several hours a week cringing over the blunders of Luke Skywalker, Inigo Montoya, and the ensemble cast of the Three Musketeers. However we may enjoy poking fun, however, the fact remains: that there is a greater demand for mass produced L.A. blockbusters than the “realism” found in such films as Yasujiro Ozu’s 1953 Tokyo Story.

And most who'd compare Tokyo Story with Hollywood Cinema would agree: the film is more real - that is, it better fits the Webster's definition of

re·al·ism

Pronunciation: \ˈrē-ə-ˌli-zəm\

Function: noun

Date: 1817

1 : concern for fact or reality and rejection of the impractical and visionary

There are no explosions. There are no grand plots and coincidences. The characters are neither superhuman nor uniquely special. Instead, the film follows an old couple going to visit their children in a post-Hiroshima Tokyo. Their trip is not fraught by grand plot devices, but only their offsprings' busy schedules and occasionally careless attitude. The purported authenticity of the tale is drawn from the sheer normalcy of its situation. Even the media's way of presenting the events enforces "real-world" drudgery: long shots that drag into boredom, cuts that are little more than meaningless changes of scene, and simple, true-to-life sets. Tokyo Story's "truth" derives from the fact that its mundane circumstances and cast force the viewer to relate to them as people and family, since they may not engage with them as dramatic heroes.

In contrast, classical Hollywood continuity film is deeply invested in hyperbolic serendipity. There is little "realism" as Tokyo Story would define it. In Hollywood, all main characters have goals, the sets - and even clothing! - carry metaphor, everyone is a wit, and everything has a purpose. Compared to the uncertain meanderings of Yasujiro Ozu’s movie, at first glance, it might seem that the word "realism" has no part in Hollywood films. When scrutinized, however, a new facet can be seen: that at the core of all good Blockbuster films - like hope at the bottom of Pandora's box - is a grain of truth that allows audiences to connect. While cinematic protagonists may surpass authentic probability, they do so with dreams that reflect ours, problems that hit home, and with the success or grace their viewers so desperately desire for their own lives. Classic continuity films cut seamlessly, letting people know only what they need to. It is a practice that any human - when seeking to recount events to a friend - does unconsciously. When we as a species tell stories, we leave out the descriptions of sleep, food, and bathroom breaks. We tell what is salient. We tell what is interesting. Most of us exaggerate.

In the writings of Plato, he presents the idea that all objects are merely a poor imitation of one pure, metaphysical conception of those objects. Using this philosophy, the realism of Tokyo Story can be compared with the actuality of a physical chair (that is, it reflects life with its boredom and flaws), while classical Hollywood movies endeavor to be closer to what their stories would, in a perfect world, be. In this light, there is no true "realism", but only preference and perspective.