Issue 42 Autumn 2007 ISSN 0268-1951
mejmej media education journal 2 contents editorial
issue 42, Autumn 2007
2 Editorial 3 38 Reviews
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media education journal 42 3
Celebrity Big Brother 2007
Douglas Allen
Introduction opening up issues which were clearly and offensive remarks about her name, When I wrote in MEJ 40 about psychology,psychology, bubbling under the surface and waiting to accent, social status, cooking skills and reality television and its brand leader Big erupt – areas of social panic, uncertainty eating habits escalating into a full-scale Brother, little did I realise that within and unease, such as youth aggression, confrontation between Jade and Shilpa on months so many of the issues raised bullying, racism, class anger and confl ict Wednesday 17 January, with the rest of in the article would explode on to the and the role of good citizenship through the housemates at a loss about whether world stage in a diplomatic crisis of intervention by third parties. to intervene. A massive number of public unprecedented proportions. The ‘Jade complaints to media watchdog Ofcom racist bullying’ controversy made such an 4) institutional factors – how the indicated that the confrontation was impact that discussion about Celebrity Big means of production of a TV show were raising concern and anger beyond the Brother 5 (CBB5) and reality TV migrated revealed as seldom before, with issues house, and the controversy escalated into from the proverbial water cooler to the coming up for public scrutiny and debate a ‘racism’ row, reaching even Cabinet level fl oor of the House of Commons and the such as TV editing techniques, media when Chancellor Gordon Brown had to streets and corridors of power of India. fi nance, advertising and sponsorship, the give his views during an offi cial visit to economics of telephone voting, the powers India. What follows is a brief attempt to of Ofcom, the role of showbiz agents, disentangle some of those issues which and the cultural and political position of It became a Jade v Shilpa eviction contest teachers may fi nd themselves discussing Channel 4. on Friday 19 January, and when Jade was in class if they teach reality TV. It makes evicted by a massive public vote, she was no claim to great originality or theoretical Chronology virtually smuggled out of the house to provenance or rigour – it is more an Firstly a brief narrative reminder of avoid what was feared could become a attempt to organise and refl ect on some of what happened. CBB5 was launched on public lynching. Eventually Shilpa won the discourses and debates in circulation Wednesday 3 January 2007; housemates the contest on Sunday 28 January, to at the time (January 2007). were Leo Sayer, Dirk Benedict, Jermaine popular acclaim. The tabloid uproar – seen Jackson, Danielle Lloyd, Jo O’Meara, Ken by many as a witch-hunt – against the These can be covered under four main Russell, Donny Tourette, Carole Malone, ‘racist’ members of the house took quite headings : Shilpa Shetty, Cleo Roccos, Ian ‘H’ a few days to subside, as both TV channel Watkins. Initial viewing fi gures of 7.1m and participants counted the cost of their 1) audience pleasures – how aspects of the fell to 3.2m and 2.8m by the weekend, lost sponsorship deals. show – such as the narrative trajectories and most of the media gossip was about that make the routine BB series such how dull the programme was, not even For a more detailed account of events see compulsive viewing – were especially saved by CBB’s big gimmick – to introduce a well documented chronicle in Wikipedia at work on this occasion, through celebrity mag favourite and former http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Celebrity_ mechanisms such as our parasocial housemate Jade Goody, her boyfriend Big_Brother_2007_(UK) relationships with the ‘performers’, and Jack and her mother Jackiey as privileged our audience position of superiority as the guests who would be served by the others. Audience Pleasures possessors of privileged knowledge. This led to tensions and walkouts. Jackiey The power of narrative to hook an in particular raised the temperature audience proved to be crucial in CBB5. 2) popular psychology – how the skills and with her forthright manner and casual Indeed as events unfolded they seemed theories of psychology were needed even approach to remembering Shilpa’s name to take on the trappings of classical more to decode and explain the extremes and pronouncing it correctly. drama, with a fi gure of overweening pride of behaviour; and how the role of or hubris facing her nemesis and being psychology experimentation in reality TV After the servant experiment ended and destroyed through a fatal fl aw – a tragedy really came to the fore, raising sharply the Jackiey was fi rst to be evicted, Jade’s bringing catharsis to us the audience. Like issue of ethics for the programme makers. extravert personality began to dominate a scenario from a Propp fairy tale analysis, the house, attracting a clique of the young good battled evil, and the beautiful 3) reality TV as social barometer – how a female housemates around her, comprising princess vanquished the wicked witch. The simple, much derided programme became Jo and Danielle. Their behind-the-back ‘just desserts’ ending could not have been for a moment a topic of national debate, remarks centred on Shilpa, with casual bettered, as the fi nal six went out in exact media education journal 42 4
order of ‘villainy to virtue rewarded’, from The usual pop psychology issues know in advance what is in store for Danielle in sixth place (‘boos’) to Shilpa emerged and were discussed in spin- them, and have made the calculation that fi rst (‘cheers’). The previous ‘guilty parties’ off programmes like Big Brother’s Big it is worth it for their career prospects. had already been dispatched in the fi rst Brain – group dynamics, body language So in effect anyone who gets involved watershed battle between Jade and Shilpa, etc. But these took on a much greater is asking for it, as the argument goes. which had become almost a national urgency when the crisis blew up, In case of any problems or adverse ethics referendum. Morality tales were bringing in a whole new raft of heavier criticisms, psychologists are involved played out in the house and the endings psychological issues, such as prejudice, behind the scenes looking after the state appeared to satisfy our need for natural in-groups, scapegoating, aggression, of mind of participants throughout the justice – that all is right with the world, bullying, and bystander behaviour. (http: process from selection to eviction. This that what goes around comes around //news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/magazine/ time, questioning of such a laissez- – and to offer us guidance on correct ways 6273975.stm) faire approach reached a new peak as to behave. programme and post-programme reports of depression, addiction and suicide Other narrative devices increased risk created one of the heaviest our pleasure. The superior fallouts to date for a British BB. knowledge of the omniscient (‘Ethics of Reality TV’, http: viewer allowed us to watch ‘real’ //news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/magazine/ characters act out their daily soap 6702315.stm) existence unaware of the storm (See separate boxed panel for around them outside the house. information on the role of the There were particularly piquant British Psychological Society in TV, dramatic ironies, such as Danielle’s with its TV Ethics Code) musings about boyfriend Teddy while the tabloids were charting Reality TV as Social Barometer his progressive disenchantment Jade Goody and Shilpa Shetty The crucial nature of the reality TV with her on-screen ‘performance’. as a barometer of our times seemed Our parasocial interaction with to be reinforced in this series, which the characters made them our temporary As the aggression escalated, the acted out a raft of social concerns and friends or enemies, as we gossiped about programme began to look more and more battles about how to behave and what who said what to who, as we took sides, like a variation on Zimbardo’s Stanford is acceptable and what is not. Each issue expressed outrage at one or the other, Prison Experiment, with characters locked that came up had no simple answers. debated the merits or not of the ‘hands up in pressure cooker conditions to see Even basic questions such as whether off’ tactics of the other housemates, and what would happen if, as in this case, a Jade was guilty of racism and/or bullying disagreed on whose behaviour was to be volatile personality like Jade was added prompted the answer – it depends . . . It emulated and whose to be disparaged. to the mix. And like Stanford, things depends what you mean by racism. At seemed to spin out of the control of those one end of the spectrum if your defi nition In this BB/CBB series more than any other,other, nominally in charge, as the participants involves hood-wearing cross burners, she the narrative pull of voyeuristic people- performed their roles with more gusto probably is not one; if your defi nition watching was all powerful. It combined than could have been predicted. involves the unthinking propagation with other primitive urges – feelings of of social stereotypes translated into the need to take revenge, to put the guilty Here ethical elements entered the debate offence-causing remarks, then she may parties in the stocks, and if necessary to more strongly than before, with much well be. If your defi nition of bullying organize a public hanging to see off the long-felt unease about the practices of involves vicious gang-leaders beating up ‘villains’. We found ourselves turning to reality TV surfacing. If the Big Brother others or extorting money with menaces, German words we’ve always wanted to idea were to be pitched as a psychological she probably is not one. If it involves use like ‘schadenfreude’ as we gloried in experiment in academic circles, it is the basically insecure leader of an ‘in- their humiliation, and cheered on Davina unlikely that it would be allowed, out group’ being psychologically abusive and and Dermot as they give the villains a – by of ethical considerations. But renegade demeaning of an ‘out-person’ then she their standards – relatively hard time in psychology experiments that are close to may well be. the post-show grillings. the edge are alive and well in the world of reality TV where the idea of ethics appears Another contemporary issue of uncertainty Popular Psychology to be more of a fl exible concept. and debate is how you should behave This series confi rmed even more the if you are a bystander observing these central role of psychology in the reality TV Leaving aside the main obvious events. Do you intervene to stop genre, generating popular psychological commercial considerations of ratings, such something that is wrong (provided it is knowledge and debate. Two aspects of edgy ventures are justifi ed by familiar wrong – after all, everything is relative)? psychology emerged strongly from CBB5 arguments – that the insights generated Or is that an intrusion on someone else’s – clear-cut demonstrations of some of (e.g. on bullying) are valid and important issue that is not your concern and which the extremes of psychological interaction enough to justify any exploitation. Anyway may well backfi re on you? How far are you and confl ict, and the need for a full-scale the exploitation is justifi ed because it is your (big) brother’s/sister’s keeper? debate about the ethics of reality TV in people volunteering and giving consent general and the Big Brother concept in of their own free will, knowing what they Darley and Latane’s research on bystander particular. are getting in to. Even celebrities must behaviour in New York in the 1960s – after
media education journal 42 the notorious murder of Kitty Genovese in From the amount of heat generated, it CBB5 from their website, which once sight of 35 witnesses, none of whom did appears that the internet and reality TV proudly boasted of their sponsorship links. anything – brought forth theories such as are the main areas where the debate is http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/ ‘diffusion of responsibility’ and the fi ve being played out. entertainment/6274881.stm stages of thinking we go through, before deciding to intervene. We ask : Have I Institutional factors A hitherto unseen invisible institutional seen that there is a problem? Is any help One of the most interesting aspects of hand appeared to enforce a party line of actually needed? Is it my responsibility, the fallout from CBB5 was how much of sorts. Russell Brand’s potential to offend or someone else’s? Am I best equipped to TV’s often hidden ‘means of production’ became tamed and dinkle-free for a deal with it, or is someone else? Will there were revealed. In terms of editing couple of days; Davina and Dermot had be negative consequences if I intervene, and constructing TV programmes, the to take an unusually severe line with the not least for me? There was a great deal of technical language of the reality show ‘guilty parties’, turning the previously jolly responsibility being diffused and bystander once again became a key issue. The post-eviction interviews into inquisitorial thinking in the CBB house, echoing the editing process was laid bare, as certain battles of relative toughness. The debate decisions made every day by individual images and sequences rather than others over how hard or soft they were soon led viewers facing various levels of street were selected and constructed into a to greater awareness of the incestuous crime, vandalism and other anti-social particular narrative account of reality – or world of reality TV and the media, activity. ‘distortion’ of reality as victims (including revealing that Russell, Davina, Dermot and this year’s) have traditionally claimed. The Jade (and Cleo, Jack, Jackiey and Matthew It is not just the participants and viewers cries from especially Jo and Danielle that Wright...) all had the same agent John who fi nd themselves in unfamiliar they were misrepresented and that ‘yes, it Noel Management (though Jade and the territory, but the programme providers looks bad… when you show it that way!’ agency have since parted company). are caught on the horns of an uncertain helped to highlight what has always been (
BPS and TV most sinisterly, that reality TV is the new wild west frontier of psychological The British Psychological Society (BPS) produced a new Code of Ethics and experiment, in urgent need of more Conduct in March 2006 which all psychologists ‘should’ follow (the Code uses investigation and interrogation about its this word instead of the coercive ‘must’ to emphasise its advisory nature). methods and ethics. To meet the growing problems being generated by popular psychology on TV, the BPS media centre has produced a series of guidance sheets for TV It re-affi rmed the importance of reality production companies, giving advice about how psychologists can be used in TV as the key genre of current TV. But TV programmes. The most comprehensive is ‘Psychologists working within further, it suggested it is a key mediator television : the ethical implications’ which highlights the areas of the Code of of our times, highlighting contested areas, Conduct most relevant to working on fi ctional programmes (e.g.Sea of Souls) or uncertain issues and debates, disputed more importantly factual programmes. morality, and acting as a playground – or battleground – for society’s concerns and Key issues highlighted are : anxieties to be struggled over. In reality Consent – there should be informed consent from participants, and that should TV’s world, social and moral panics are mean being made thoroughly aware of the implications of the loss of privacy, raised, played out, defused, and brought the loss of control under stress, the likelihood of embarrassment and regret. under control, through imaginary magical Confi dentiality – there must be a clearly agreed line between what will be aired resolutions. in public and what is kept confi dential between psychologist and participant. Responsibility – there must be a clear defi nition nition of of the the exact exact responsibilities responsibilities for for Like that outstanding documentary the mental health of participants and when psychologists can step in if someone Capturing the Friedmans (2003), it is at risk. reminded us both of the power of the Follow-up involvement – due regard should be given to the long-term media to make or break players through implications for participants. the narratives they construct, and of the Professional boundaries – psychologists should not attempt to make judgements impossibility of the media getting to ‘the about situations outwith their area of specialization. truth’ of a set of events, even under the Manipulation – special care should be taken with programmes which change the full and continuous glare of a TV or fi lm environment to manipulate participants’ behaviour. camera. The key principles are : warning about and protecting participants from harm, not withholding any vital information from them, and assuring participants And fi nally, again most usefully for the they have the right to withdraw at any time. But what becomes of such good media teacher, it highlighted the largely intentions in the harsh, commercial world of TV? The document sums up the unseen role of institutional bodies, as key contradiction: “Media companies frequently don’t understand that ethical the people and groups who shape our considerations prevent psychologists from causing distress, being judgmental or media experience were fl ushed out of the setting up scenarios that could anger/endanger participants – all the things they backroom and boardroom, and forced to see as making good television!” make their decision-making public. (http://www.bps.org.uk/media-centre/tv-section/implications/factual/ manipulation.cfm) In short, it put up a classic case for the need for media studies, a discipline Every one of these issues appeared (and was tested to the limits?) in CBB5, which highlights and interrogates the and it looks like an issue which will become more important in the future. processes of the media. And perhaps it An edition of the Radio 4 psychology programme All in the Mind raised the tells us that the often despised reality TV issue of potential damage to children from reality TV, and Dr. Cynthia McVey genre, because of what it says about the of Glasgow Caledonian University admitted that it was a area of little if any media, society and ‘reality’ should be at research about the effects or damage. (All in the Mind, 19 December 2006) http: the forefront of our explorations and our //www.bbc.co.uk/radio4/science/allinthemind_20061219.shtml) teaching.
The effect on adults is even more of an unknown territory. McVey’s experience (In August, Channel 4 announced that as resident psychologist on one of the early reality TV docusoap programmes, the 2008 edition of Celebrity Big Brother Castaway (BBC/Lion TV,TV, 2000), has made her a leader in liaising between was to be shelved, to provide “a bit of psychology and the media, in an attempt to try to try to keep things ethically breathing space” and to take account of sound. Castaway gives us, by chance, one possible pointer to a future “a general issue of supply and demand” in trend, through its status as the only programme to be successfully sued for celebrities.) http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/ misrepresentation in the editing process, when former participant Ron Copsey 6962065.stm won £8000 from each of the two production companies in 2001. (http://observer.guardian.co.uk/uk_news/story/0,6903,508174,00.html) Additional Sources/Resources (http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/entertainment/tv_and_radio/1998795.stm) (For a fuller list of material on reality TV, see my article on the topic in MEJ 40.)
by the same principles to engage its particularly reality TV, explaining the CBBC/Newsround resources for news- audience. processes by which we are drawn into based class lessons on reality TV and such a world through a search for CBB5: It re-emphasised the importance ‘authenticity’, and how we interact with http://news.bbc.co.uk/cbbcnews/hi/ of psychology in popular television, and learn from that world. It confi rmed, newsid_3020000/newsid_3025200/
media education journal 42 7 3025245.stm Lawler, S (2005) ‘Disgusted subjects: the never seen anybody that stupid with just Television & New Media, Vol.3, No.3 making of middle-class identities’ in The one brain. (August 2002) – issue edited by Annette Sociological Review Hill & Gareth Palmer devoted to Big Mayhew, L (1997) The New Public: Brother, with articles by Annette Hill, John Professional Communication and the Corner, Paddy Scannell and others Means of Social Infl uence, Cambridge Crew, Richard (2007), ‘The Ethics of Reality University Press Television Producers’, Media Ethics,18:2, RAJAR (Radio Audience Joint Research (Spring 2007) Ltd.), Quarterly Summary of Radio http://media.www.mediaethicsmagazin Listening Quarter 3 2006, Released e.com/media/storage/paper655/news/ October 26th 2007 accessed at rajar.ac.uk 2007/07/01/AnalysesCommentary/The- Storey, J (2006) Cultural Theory and Ethics.Of.Reality.Television.Producers- Popular Culture: An Introduction 4th Ed and 2923371.shtml Cultural Theory and Popular Culture: A Hill, Annette, (2007), Restyling Factual TV Reader 3rd Ed: Pearson : Audiences and News, Documentary and Reality Genres, Taylor & Francis Radio and TV Piper, Helen (2006), review article on three Alan Brazil’s Sports Breakfast, (UTV owned reality TV books, Screen, 47:1, (Spring national station) Talk Sport, 18th January 2006) 2007 http://screen.oxfordjournals.org/cgi/ Scott Wilson in the Morning, Talk 107, (UTV content/full/47/1/133?ck=nck owned Edinburgh based local talk station) 18th January 2007 (partial transcript Bibliography below) Today Programme, BBC Radio 4 18th Online and print January 2007, business correspondent Adkins, L, Ed (2005) Feminism after Greg Wood interviews Channel 4 Chairman Bourdieu, Blackwell Luke Johnson (Including . . . Lovell, T, ‘Bourdieu, class Today Programme, BBC Radio 4 19th and gender: ‘The return of the living January 2007, business correspondent dead’?’, McRobbie, A, ‘Notes on ‘What Greg Wood interviews Bob Wooton Not To Wear’ and post-feminist symbolic Today Programme, BBC Radio 4 22nd violence’, Reay, D, Gendering Bourdieu’s January 2007, media correspondent Toryn concepts of capitals? Emotional capital, Douglas women and social class, Skeggs, B, Week in Westminster, BBC Radio 4, 20th ‘Exchange, value and affect: Bourdieu January 2007 and ‘the self’’ & Skeggs, B, ‘Context and Background: Pierre Bourdieu’s analysis of Radio Programme Transcription class, gender and sexuality’) Bickerton and Mulligan (2007) ‘Big Talk 107 Brother’ row could help Endemol in Scott Wilson with Susan Morrison Financial Times, 23rd January 2007 Calhoun, C (1992) Habermas and the (SW) so last word on the show for Public Sphere, MIT Press Thursday Susan. Collins and Evans (Eds) (2006) Media Technologies, Markets and Regulation, (SM) Yeah, we’ve been talking about Big Open University Press Brother and attempts to take it off the air.air. Crissell, A, ‘Radio Signs’ in Marris and Now that we’ve seen Jade’s bullying and Thornham (Eds) (2005) Media Studies: A all the carry on that’s going on, it seems Reader, 2nd Edition: Edinburgh University to be the most important thing going on Press in Britain today and Colin has texted us Dovey, J (2000) Freakshow: First Person in. Good morning Colin. He says morning Media and Factual Television, Pluto Press both, Big Bro, what a stouche over a game Gay, Hall, Janes, Mackay and Negus (1997) show. Not real life or Cell Block H for that Doing Cultural Studies: The Story of the matter. Anyone of them can walk out, Sony Walkman, Sage got to give credit to Channel 4, they’ve Gillespie, M (Ed) (2005) Media Audiences, created the monster Jade, made a thicko Open University Press millionaire and now they’re ruining her. Hesmondhalgh, D (2006) Media Fantastic, no more Jade. And I think Colin, Production, Open University Press you’re absolutely right, she became a Hopewell, J, ‘De Mol, Berlusconi buy media star, but now that we’ve all seen Endemol’ in Variety online, posted 14th what she’s really like, she’s not like your May 2007 ditzy, slightly dim little cousin. She’s a nasty, vicious, vindictive lady. And I’ve media education journal 42 8
Glasgow Caledonian University
Anthea Irwin
he papers that follow have been written competing for prominence and reinforcing that demonises him. Miller tells us that Tby lecturers and research students or challenging the norms of the societies ‘Manson is an artist who is notoriously from the Media and Communication from which they arise (cf. Foucault). diffi cult to pin down’ and as such is subject group at Glasgow Caledonian perhaps succeeding as an ‘authentic University. They all teach on one of the Hugh O’Donnell’s paper, ‘Girl Meets World’, voice of counter-hegemony’, who at once longest established media degrees in the examines the Ugly Betty phenomenon, challenges society’s dominant discourses UK, which has recently been reviewed the Colombian telenovela Yo soy Betty la and elides the positions in which these and updated to refl ect developments in fea (I am Ugly Betty) that has appeared discourses aim to place him. The paper the media industries and bring it fi rmly in various different guises in various provides an interesting parallel to both into the twenty-fi rst century. The Media countries around the world. The meanings O’Donnell’s and Bryce’s: art and life & Communication degree strikes a good with which the text is invested in each overlap in the news media ‘blaming’ balance between the practical and the case, and the extent to which the socio- Manson for the Columbine shootings, analytical: in every semester from when political ‘life’ of the country in which evidence for which seems to come, they fi rst join us, students are engaged it appears overlaps with the ‘art’ of the ironically, as much from other cultural in hands-on training in media skills such television programme, invites us to re- texts as from material reality. as radio and video production, public examine globalised media from angles relations, advertising and web media; other than that of cultural imperialism: Carrie Maclennan’s paper explores more alongside this they study modules that what we have here is more complex than localised music media, specifi cally three analyse the messages in various genres top-down cultural transmission from the female performers based in Glasgow, a of media, thus enabling them to develop more to the less powerful, albeit with the city that is continually repositioned as a into refl ective practitioners who display caveat that cultural indigenisation cannot ‘hotbed’ of musical creativity. Discourse creativity and responsibility in the media override economic imbalances. is central once again, and the paper they produce. complements its consideration of the In contrast to the creativity of societies discourses arising from the women’s The media subject group forms part of the representing themselves that we see in musical performance and other related Division of Cultural Business. The division Hugh O’Donnell’s paper, is the replaying activities with those arising from their brings together lecturers and researchers of traditional images, and the power own refl ection on what it is they do in the areas of media, journalism, leisure imbalances that go along with these, in and what it means. The fact that these and tourism whose work can be framed British news media portrayals of another two elements link, but also contrast, in by the concepts ‘culture as business’ (or indeed, an ‘other’) society, in Derek interesting ways, particularly as regards and ‘business as culture’: on the one Bryce’s paper. It tracks coverage of the feminist and post-feminist positions, hand, cultural events and artefacts capture of Royal navy personnel for reminds us again of the necessity to are increasingly commodifi ed (hence allegedly sailing illegally in Iranian waters, view meaning and identity not as static the regularity with which we hear the and their subsequent release, and does so elements but as complex intersections of ‘cultural economy’ and ‘cultural industries’ through the lens of ‘Orientalism’ (cf. Said). discourse. referred to) and as such are now more By highlighting the presence of specifi c than ever a key area of analysis when tropes and tableaux, Bryce illustrates considering identity and power within that literature and art are drawn upon as Bibliography (and between) societies; on the other much as eye-witness or other accounts in Foucault, M. (2002). The Archaeology hand, this cultural turn demands that this coverage, and thus reminds us of the of Knowledge, London, Routledge. First business and the economy be seen as need to question the reality effect of news French edition 1969. not simply transactional, but as a text to media. Said, E.W. (1978). Orientalism, London: be ‘read’ like any other. The four papers Penguin. included here between them explore both The next two papers deal with music strands of ‘cultural business’, and running media. The fi rst of these, by Catriona throughout them is a theme of ‘discourse’, Miller, reads the work of Marilyn Manson or to be more precise ‘discourses’ plural, against the context of the Middle America
media education journal 42 9
Girl Meets World: Ugly Betty and the internationalisation of the telenovela
Hugh O’Donnell
The Latin American telenovela lasts around six months, and not only does soap operas. There are telenovelas on When Yo soy Betty la fea (I am Ugly everyone involved know that it will come historical topics set in the eighteenth or Betty) was produced and aired by the to an end, as the climax approaches the nineteenth centuries, others might be set Columbian network RCN in 1999 it joined level of hysteria in the popular press can in remote regions of the Amazon, there a list of Latin American telenovelas going be quite astonishing for someone used are whodunit and cops-and-robbers style back to the nineteen-fi fties and so vast to the more sedate narrative pace of a telenovelas, there are comic telenovelas in scale that it would be impossible to soap-based culture. Recently UK soaps and others based on literary adaptations, provide even an approximation of the have also tried to produce such climactic there are even telenovelas dealing with total number. While the dominant form moments – a good example would be vampires (such as O Beijo do Vampiro of seriality on British television has Coronation Street’s’s 2003 ‘Killer Corrie’ – The Vampire’s Kiss)! They can also be always been the soap opera (O’Donnell, storyline in which serial killer Richard extremely political, much more so than 1999), throughout Latin American it has Hillman murdered several members of any British soap opera has ever been. been the telenovela, a phenomenon of the cast before crashing his car, with his Globo’s 1996 production O Rei do Gado such magnitude that it totally eclipses family inside, into a canal (this scene was (The Cattle King) dealt with the diffi cult cinema as the primary source of the Latin watched by nineteen million viewers) subject of land reform in Brazil. When American star system. Telenovela stars – but once they are over things calm the leader of the workers’ movement are household names throughout the down again as the characters we have was murdered by the landowners in the continent, the main centres of production known for years get back to their more narrative, real-life senators from the being based in Brazil, Venezuela, Mexico mundane lives. Once a telenovela ends the Brazilian parliament attended his funeral and to a lesser extent Argentina. With same actors will reappear in subsequent in the telenovela. Events such as these the growth of the Spanish-speaking productions, playing quite different speak volumes of the different relationship population in the United States, the characters in quite different narratives. between serial and audience (or indeed Univisión station, whose production art and life) in Latin America, since it facilities are based in Miami, has also Latin American telenovelas are often is virtually impossible to imagine any become an important producer. thought of as falling into two broad European politician actually appearing in a groups: a more realist product emanating soap opera in similar fashion. Just as the television soap is the successor from Brazil (where they are, in fact, to the radio soap (in both the United usually referred to simply as novelas), and The telenovela in Europe Kingdom and the United States), so a more melodramatic product coming Though still relatively unknown in the the telenovela is the successor to the primarily from Mexico and Venezuela. UK, telenovelas have been exported to radionovela, a form which fi rst emerged This is in a very general sense correct, Western Europe since the mid-nineteen- in Cuba in the 1940s. Though both are but in fact the situation is somewhat seventies. The fi rst country to show them forms of seriality, the difference between a more complex than that. In Brazil, for was Portugal. The tremendous shake-up soap opera and a telenovela is quite clear.clear. example, with the exception of the news of Portuguese television following the While a soap opera is a narrative format the entirety of prime time television on 1974 revolution opened up spaces for which allows an (at least potentially) the Globo channel (Globo is the biggest experimentation which would have been unlimited number of overlapping stories to producer of telenovelas in the world) unimaginable before, and this resulted be told without any structural expectation consists of novelas aimed at different in the broadcasting in 1975 of the Globo of an ending – the oldest soap in the market segments: products aimed at a production Gabriela, Cravo e Canela world, The Guiding Light, was launched younger audience in the earlier slots, (Gabriela, Carnation and Cinnamon), on radio in the United States in 1937 novelas designed for general family adapted from the novel by Jorge Amado. and continues on television there to this viewing in the middle, and more adult Such was its popularity that no-one day, seventy years later – a telenovela, as novelas later on. In addition, the sheer dared phone anyone else while it was on the name suggest (it means “television number of telenovelas produced means air and – or at least so legend has it – a novel”), is a story, with a beginning, that they are characterised by a much cabinet meeting had to be cancelled on middle and end. The average telenovela greater variety of topics and styles than the day of the last episode since none of media education journal 42 10
the ministers wanted to miss the end of The second country to produce its own Laberint d’ombres (Labyrinth of Shadows) the story. Spain’s fi rst encounter with the telenovelas was Spain, but with the running for 469. It current production, El Latin American telenovela took place in additional clarifi cation that these were cor de la ciutat (The Heart of the City), has 1986 with the Mexican production Los originally a Catalan phenomenon rather now run interruptedly since 2000, and ricos también lloran (The Rich Also Cry), than one which affected the country as a has in fact become a soap opera with well featuring one of the greatest telenovela whole. In 1994 the Catalan public-service over one thousand episodes. stars of all time, Verónica Castro. As we channel TV3 launched Poble Nou (the title move into the nineties telenovelas would means “New People”, though it is also Elsewhere in Spain the situation is more also conquer Italy – where for many years based on a district of Barcelona called patchy. The pattern in Andalusia to they were the staple output of Mediaset’s Poblenou, where the production was set). some extent mirrors that of Catalonia, Retequattro – Greece and Russia. Such TV3 took a deliberate decision to avoid the with shortish 45-episode Vidas cruzadas was their success in this last-named melodramatic aesthetic associated with (Crossed Lives) being followed by the 435- country that they had to be moved from many of the Latin American productions episode Plaza Alta (Top Square), it in turn their afternoon slot to an evening one, which had been shown in Spain prior to being followed by Arrayán (the title is the due to the high levels of absenteeism they this point, preferring instead to adopt name of a hotel) which began in 2000 were causing from work. a more “British” social-realist approach and is still on air, slowly approaching one – Poble Nou took over the slot on TV3’sTV3’s thousand episodes. Given that the Basque The history of the European-produced schedule which was occupied before Country opted for the soap opera format telenovela is a more complex one, and it by EastEnders, shown dubbed into from the beginning – its Basque-language for the fi rst twenty years – apart from Catalan as Gent del barri (People from the production Goenkale (Hill Street) fi rstrst rather desultory experiments in Italy and District). Though originally scheduled to went on air in 1994 and is still running Greece which did not lead to any kind run for only 120 episodes, Poble Nou was now, thirteen years later, with over 2000 of stable output – was, no doubt for such a success that the original ending episodes under its belt – the pull of the reasons of shared languages and “endless” soap-opera format over the greater cultural proximity, limited short-run telenovela appears to be to Spain and Portugal. Portuguese irresistible, as it has also proved to television was in fact the fi rst to be in Portugal. The only exception is experiment with this format with Spanish central television where the a few rather hesitant productions public-service broadcaster TVE has, in the 1980s, beginning in 1982. since 2001 screened one telenovela However, production on anything per year. But even there things approaching an “industrial” scale appear to be changing: its most did not begin until 1993 when the recent offering, Amor en tiempos company Nicolau Breyner Produções revueltos (Love in Troubled Times) (NBP) began turning out one novela – itself loosely based on the earlier per year for the public-service Catalan production Temps de silenci broadcaster RTP. This situation (Time of Silence) – began in 2006 and continued until the end of the is now entering its second season. nineties, when one of Portugal’s two private terrestrial channels, TVI, Since the arrival of Gabriela in which at that point was languishing Portugal in 1975 it had seemed that at the bottom of the ratings league – with the exception of one-off table, decided to gamble on the experiments such as Channel 4’s production of telenovelas in a broadcasting of A Escrava Isaura major way. This operation – which (Isaura the Slave Girl) in 1985 – the involved “stealing” NBP from RTP telenovela would remain a uniquely – has proved to be a huge success. southern European phenomenon. Since then it has commissioned and However things were to change screened around twenty telenovelas, America Ferrara is ‘Ugly Betty’ dramatically in Germany when, in some of which (like their Catalan 2004, the second public-service counterparts which I mention below) was scrapped and a further seventy new channel ZDF (in a very general sense the have stretched the limits of the format by episodes were written, meaning that it German equivalent of BBC2) screened running for several years. We are in fact came to an end on Christmas Eve 1994. Bianca – Wege zum Glück (Bianca – Roads witnessing the emergence of a new hybrid Its fi nal episode was watched by over one to Happiness). Explicitly billed as a form, part telenovela, part soap. When and a half million people, the greatest telenovela – its website offered Germans Anjo Selvagem (Wild Angel) came to an audience ever achieved by Catalan unfamiliar with this format a potted end in 2003 it had clocked up over 600 television fi ction at that time. Since then history of the Latin American product – it episodes and its last episode had a 44.5 TV3 has gone on to produce a further six ran for 224 episodes: a shade long by Latin share: almost half the viewing population telenovelas, but – initiating a process American standards, but still recognisably had tuned in. It successor, Morangos com which would be repeated in Portugal a a telenovela. Since then ZDF, the fi rst Açúcar (Strawberries with Cream) is still few years later – these quickly broke the public-service channel Das Erste and the running to this day, and is about to enter bounds of the traditional Latin American commercial channels Sat1 and Pro Sieben its fourth season. format with Nissaga de poder (Dynasty have now screened over ten telenovelas, of Power) running for 476 episodes and though again they have strained the
media education journal 42 11 boundaries of the original Latin American Without You) (2005-) glamorous in the Russian version than format to and beyond breaking point. • The Netherlands: Lotte (2006-) elsewhere, and in general terms the While some of them such as Lotta in Love • Russia: Не родись красивой1 (2006-) Columbian version is rather more cruel (sic) with 130 episodes or Tessa – Leben • Spain: Yo soy Bea (I am Bea) (2006-) in its treatment of the heroine than the für die Liebe (Tessa – Living for Love) with • Mexico: La fea más bella (The Most European versions, at least in the early 125 are very much in the Latin American Beautiful Ugly Woman) (2006-) episodes. But more importantly as the mould, others such as Julia: Wege zum • United States: Ugly Betty (2006-) European versions have rolled on they Glück (Julia – Roads to Love) with over • Greece: Maria, i Asximi (Ugly Maria) have inevitably left the closed story of the 500 or Sturm der Liebe (Storm of Love) (2007-) Columbian original behind and are now with over 700 have already moved into As can be seen from this list, not only creating their own Ugly Betty storylines soap-opera territory. The longest-running is the heroine given different names in bringing in topics and angles more of all so far is Verliebt in Berlin (In Love in different countries (Jassi, Esti, Lotte, immediately relevant to their national Berlin) which began in audiences. early 2005 and is now approaching its eight- Cultural Imperialism or hundredth episode. This Indigenisation? brings us back to our The vexed question of starting point, since cultural imperialism has Verliebt in Berlin is the been much debated in name of the German media and cultural theory version of Yo soy Betty la over the last fi fty or so fea, or Ugly Betty. years (Tomlinson, 1991), and indeed continues to The Ugly Betty be a topic which can be Phenomenon mobilised by governments Although Latin American or pressure groups when telenovelas have known they feel that their society enormous export is being “inundated” by success in the past “foreign” – which almost – the Cuban writer Delia always means American” Fiallo once claimed, – cultural products. probably not without Though by no means all some justifi cation, that Yo soy Bea (I am Bea) academics accept that her productions were the indigenous culture of the most viewed television programmes in Bea, Maria – in the German version she other societies is simply being replaced the world, with a worldwide audience of is known as Lisa and in the Russian one by that brought in by foreign products over 1600 million people – Yo soy Betty la as Ekaterina) – but in each case the – in fact most research suggests that fea broke new ground in that its success story has lasted longer than the original viewers in all countries “read” imported was not due primarily to straightforward 169-episode Columbian production: in products in quite different ways from export, but to the way in which the fact versions such as Verliebt in Berlin how they are read in their country of narrative lent itself to adaptation by in Germany and Не родись красивой in origin, sometimes investing them with television channels in a wide range of Russia have now strayed so far from the entirely different meanings – cases like countries who wanted to tell the story in original format that they have actually the Ugly Betty phenomenon give us a slightly different way in order to appeal become soaps. As anyone who has seen additional resources for thinking through more directly to their domestic audience. the American version Ugly Betty will know, this issue. Since not only is Ugly Betty a It’s not that export success was missing. it is neither a telenovela nor a soap, but case of what is known as “reverse fl ow” In fact the product’s fi rst foray outside a dramedy – that curious combination – in other words not from the United Latin America was when it was shown in of drama and comedy which has now States or other advanced societies to its original Columbian version – and to become a staple on American TV. other less well-developed societies, great success – in 2001-2 by the Spanish but precisely in the other direction commercial channel Antena 3. However, My own direct acquaintance with these – it also lends weight to the arguments this was quickly followed by domestically adaptations of the Columbian original is of theorists such as Arjun Appadurai produced adaptations of the original story limited to the German, Dutch, Russian, (1996) or Milly Buonanno (2007) who developed in a number of countries, a Spanish and American versions. While they argue that rather than processes of process which is still underway. These can clearly have certain things in common imperialism what we are dealing with be summarised as follows: – the techniques used to make the heroine are processes of indigenisation whereby seem “ugly” are the same in each case the product is adapted, either directly • India: Jassi Jaissi Koi Nahin (There is (basically braces, large glasses and frumpy by the local broadcasters or indirectly 2 no-one like Jassi) (2003-6) clothes ) – and in each case she works as by the domestic audience (in terms of • Israel: Esti Ha’mechoeret (Ugly Esti) a secretary for a fashion house, but the their interpretations), within frameworks (2003-6) differences are also striking. The Dutch built around domestic expectations. • Germany: Verliebt in Berlin (In Love in Lotte is noticeably less “ugly” than any While such a process can be diffi cult Berlin) (2005-) of her counterparts, the environment of to ascertain when it is carried out by • Turkey: Sensiz Olmuyor (Won’t Work the fashion house is more overstatedly viewers in relation to imported products media education journal 42 12
– in fact large-scale ethnographic work is which were at the centre of cultural international one. But each manifestation required to establish the existence of such imperialism theory no longer exist. is different from the others in ways which a process in such cases – once the local Columbia continues to be a signifi cantly the producers believe will make better broadcasters enter the fi eld in the form poorer country than the United States sense to their domestic audience. of reversioning operations the process or the European societies which are of indigenisation becomes clear for all “indigenising” its product, and their ability Some Useful Reading to see. Indigenisation means not only to do is predicated absolutely on the fact Appadurai, A. (1996). Modernity at Large: relocating the action and replacing the that they have the economic resources Cultural Dimensions of Globalization, language, fashions, architecture and so on required. But it does suggest that the Minneapolis, University of Minnesota of the original by their domestic versions, picture is more complex than was perhaps Press. it means above all using the original at one time thought. In her various guises Buonanno, M. (2007). The Age of format as a vehicle for the reproduction of Ugly Betty is now, perhaps not quite a Television, Bristol, Intellect. discourses circulating in the host society,society, worldwide phenomenon, but certainly an Foucault, M. (2002). The Archaeology discourses with which the audience will be of Knowledge, London, Routledge. First more immediately familiar. I use the term French edition 1969. “discourse” here is the sense given to it by O’Donnell, H. (1999). Good Times, Bad French theorist Michel Foucault (2002) for Times: Soap Operas and Society in Western whom a discourse – or more accurately Europe, London, Leicester University Press. discursive formation – has no single Tomlinson, J. (1991). Cultural Imperialism, identifi able source or author, but consists Baltimore, the John Hopkins University of an uncountable number of what he Press. calls “statements”, which can be linguistic, visual, plastic, kinetic or indeed take any (Footnotes) kind of expressive form, and which work 1 The Russian title is the fi rst half of a to (re)defi ne a wide range of concepts we proverb which translates literally as “don’t come to take for granted: gender, age, be born beautiful, be born happy”. race, family, or, as in the case of Ugly 2 Images of all the international Betty, beauty.beauty. variants on the original Betty can be found at the following website: http: Indigenisation on its own does not, //tonylagarto.tripod.com/betty/ of course, mean that the imbalances internacional.html
media education journal 42 13
The 2007 Iranian ‘Hostage Crisis’: an Orientalist Captivity Narrative
Derek Bryce
Introduction Call me old-fashioned but I think it On 23rd March, 2007, whilst on patrol is wholly wrong to separate a young Now, as it has become clear that the in the Persian Gulf, fi fteen Royal Navy mother from her child, put a gun in softly-softly approach has brought personnel based on HMS Cornwall were her hands and send her off to the no rewards, Tony Blair declares that seized by Iranian Revolutionary Guards Gulf. it is time to ‘ratchet up’ diplomatic on the grounds that they had allegedly pressure. entered Iran’s territorial waters. This was Also apparent was anxiety about Britain’s Though it is uncertain what this denied by the British government which perceived military and diplomatic entails, the Iranians will hardly be maintained that the vessel had been impotence during the crisis, articulated quaking in their boots. patrolling in Iraqi waters under the terms by comparing then Foreign Secretary, of a UN mandate. The British personnel Margaret Beckett with her nineteenth Doubts concerning the quality of the were fl own to Tehran and, after several century predecessors of the imperial personnel’s conduct whilst in captivity days’ diplomatic stand off during which heyday. On 29th March, Stephen Glover were also raised by, for example, Mathew they appeared on Iranian television to wrote in the Daily Mail: Hickey in the Daily Mail on 6th April: offer apparently coerced confessions and apologies for trespassing into Iran’s Even if the British Government was There was growing concern last night waters, they were released on 4th April and wrong in asserting that our sailors over the conduct of the prisoners and returned to the UK (BBC News, 2007). were 1.7 nautical miles inside Iraqi the extent to which they cooperated The episode initiated something of a waters, and the Iranians were right, with and even praised their captors. British media sensation with a thematic this would offer them no defence. and narrative content that transcended This is uncivilised behaviour that Unlike past generations, today’s the essential outline of the events amply confi rms the description of servicemen and women are trained to themselves. Prominent amongst these Iran as part of an ‘axis of evil’. By its cooperate and present a human face were the question of women (mothers in actions, Iran condemns itself. if they are taken prisoner. particular), performing frontline roles in the armed forces, with Paul Routledge The response of the Foreign Offi ce But former senior commanders are writing in The Mirror on 30th March: to the television footage and Ms asking if the shift has gone too far, Turney’s ‘confession’ was pathetically and saying the hostages should have Iran captive Faye Turney’s fate inadequate. The words it used were been more dignifi ed. One called their remains in the balance, putting even ‘completely unacceptable’. behaviour ‘a bloody shambles’. more strain on husband Adam and her little girl Molly. Can’t those clever and supposedly Tehran TV showed the sailors and well-educated mandarins do better Marines laughing and joking after I have to wonder what was she doing than to adopt the feeble cliché of a ‘ confessing’ to invading Iranian there, risking not just her own life but football manager criticising his team waters, and later shaking President the motherhood of an infant child. for a below par performance? Ahmadinejad by the hand and thanking him enthusiastically for his Amid the relief that we will feel From the moment the sailors and ‘forgiveness’. when she eventually returns, it still Marines were illegally captured, the has to be asked why we are sending response of the Government has Their behaviour let the Iranians milk young mothers to a war zone of our been remarkably relaxed. Margaret every ounce of political capital out of own creation. Britain cannot be so Beckett – the successor of Palmerston humiliating Britain and still end up short of military personnel that such and Curzon – has looked about as appearing magnanimous. women should be permitted – nay, formidable as the foreign minister encouraged – to go gadding around of Liechtenstein. The Revolutionary Finally the ethical appropriateness of the world’s most dangerous and Guards who seized our sailors are the post-release sale of some individual volatile waterway. unlikely to have asked themselves accounts to the media was debated. The whether they had perhaps behaved a manner in which this particular debate little too hastily. was conducted by The Sun and the Daily media education journal 42 14
Mail was perhaps infl uenceduenced byby thethe factfact The Unquestioned Rightness of represented acting there, in what can be that their opposing positions on the issue Being (There) loosely termed the postcolonial world corresponded to their respective status Said’s analysis is epic in scope (at times (e.g. Said, 1993). The necessary second as successful and failed bidders for Faye problematically so), stretching back strand to that agenda is, of course, the Turney’s account. The Guardian offered a to classical antiquity and so its full urgently problematic way that acts of third party account of this dispute on 13th exposition need not detain us here. A resistance to Western hegemony and April: subsequent study by Said applied many the assertion of non-Western states’ of his arguments within the specifi c interests are represented. Often, these The strongest critics of the navy’s context of contemporary news coverage are placed in opposition to what are decision to allow the 15 sailors of the Middle East and Islam. Whilst it assumed to be universal norms of rational detained by Iran to sell their stories focused principally on the US context behaviour, or of ‘Reason’ itself (the latter include newspapers which themselves (such as American reporting of the Iranian notions stripped, conveniently, of their put in hefty bids. Revolution of 1978-79), Said’s (1997: 28) own culturally specifi c origins). Within following assessment also seems apposite Western metropolitan cultures, such as The Daily Mail is understood to have when considering some UK coverage of Britain’s, the geographer Derek Gregory emailed an offer of “a very substantial the 2007 events: has identifi ed what appears initially to be sum”, but rounded on the hostages, the paradoxical convergence of colonial and Des Browne, the defence It is only a slight overstatement amnesia and colonial nostalgia. By cross- secretary, after its bid was rejected. to say that Muslims and Arabs are cutting these with culture and power, Its front page headline yesterday essentially covered, discussed, and Gregory identifi es a mechanism for the – They won’t be selling their story, apprehended either as oil suppliers production of what he calls the colonial minister – ran over pictures of coffi ns or as potential terrorists. Very little present (Gregory,(Gregory, 2004: 9-19-10).0). On the of four soldiers killed in Iraq last week of the detail, the human density, side of amnesia, he argues, metropolitan . . . the passion of Arab-Muslim life cultures’ historical degradation and has entered the awareness of even predatory appropriation of other cultures . . . The extent of the involvement of those people whose profession it is in order to render them as other is the Ministry of Defence, which passed to report the Islamic world. What matched with a commensurate forgetting on the bids to the sailors, remains we have instead is a limited series of the ‘terrible violence of colonialism unclear. Guidance in 2004 stated of crude, essentialised caricatures of . . . the exactions, suppressions, and that authorisation to speak to the the Islamic world presented in such a complicities that colonialism forced upon media “on national issues” should be way as, among other things, to make the peoples it subjugated, and the way in obtained from the MoD. that world vulnerable to military which it withdrew from them the right to aggression. make their own history’. On the other side, The preceding can be characterised Gregory continues, there is a nostalgia as being reactive to events as they Much of the British coverage of the 2007 fi rst for the encounter with other cultures unfolded and principally concerned with ‘Hostage Crisis’ offers a rich seam for frozen at the point of their subordination the robustness of a British self-image potential analysis at both ‘macro’ and to colonial interests, ‘as a series of embodied by the effectiveness of its ‘micro’ levels. One area that presents fetishes . . . brought back to life through armed forces. What I wish to suggest itself immediately is the regularly, and metropolitan circuits of consumption’, is that the geographical and cultural largely unquestioned, deployment of and second ‘for the aggrandising swagger context in which the events unfolded the word ‘hostage’, despite that its of colonialism itself, for its privileges and allowed elements of the news media to appropriateness in a situation involving powers’ (emphasis added). Disruptions deploy representative grid, or discursive a dispute between two sovereign states to this equation, even in a supposedly formation, (following Foucault: 1969: on a point of international law seems postcolonial world, and by a state, Iran, 121) that is deeply embedded, diffusely doubtful. The association of the terms that was never subject to formal colonial articulated and therefore recognisable ‘Hostage’ and ‘Iran’ enhanced the rule (although a virtual dependency of a in a largely unproblematic sense, within meaning of both because of their existing Western metropolitan cultures, notably (and therefore recognisable) discursive those of Britain and the United States. relationship. By way of reinforcement, Edward Said (1978: 3) has most famously frequent reference to the 1979 American defi ned this discourse as Orientalism: embassy Hostage Crisis in Tehran appeared the corporate institution for dealing with across UK coverage of the 2007 events. the Orient – dealing with it by making Such an analysis might ask questions statements about it, authorising views of about the extent to which British popular it, describing it, by teaching it, settling consciousness has internalised elements it, ruling over it: in short, Orientalism of that of the United States, in this case as a Western style for dominating, where the perception and representation restructuring and having authority over of particular third countries are concerned. the Orient. Another avenue might examine this I want to make some suggestions about particular episode within the existing the extent to which the events in the research agenda that asks questions about Gulf and Iran in Spring 2007 were made the unproblematic ways in which the available to readers’ understanding after states and interests of the metropolitan being fi ltered through this discourse. West have been, and continue to be,
media education journal 42 15 nexus of Western fi nancial and industrial service personnel, illegally seized goes similarly unacknowledged. Nor do interests during much of the nineteenth by the Iranians, held prisoner and the facts that, for the past two and a and twentieth centuries) require the threatened with a show trial. half centuries, Iran has not engaged in deployment, or reassertion, of certain aggressive or expansionist warfare whilst discourses of hegemonic ‘common sense’. The U.S. and Britain deploy hundreds the imperial powers of Europe and the The news media play a signifi cant role of thousands of men, hundreds United States extended their hegemony by in this reinforcement of this hegemony of combat aircraft and the most conquest or proxy over much of the globe, (Allan, 2004: 80-81). powerful fl eet in the world in Iraq seriously disrupt the essential message and its surrounding waters. Yet all that we, our presence and intentions, A double forgetting of history was this might can contribute nothing to are ultimately benign, whilst they are an apparent in much coverage of this specifi c retrieving the hostages – for hostages urgent and menacing threat. Even where incident and the way that Iran is ‘handled’ are, of course, what the British acknowledgment is made of Iran’sIran’s regional more generally. What I mean by this is prisoners have become. status and interests, such as in the excerpt that both the implications for Iranian below by Bronwen Maddox in The Times sensibilities of Britain’s engagement with It is a truism that historical events should on 5th April, the accent is on explaining it over the past century or so and Iran’s not be judged exclusively in terms of Iranian perceptions of what these might own sense of place within its region and current moral and ethical standards be. Corresponding caveats concerning cultural milieu are disavowed in discourses since, so the aphorism goes, the past subjective perceptions are not attached to that assert, unrefl exively, the ‘normality’ is a foreign country and they do things British and American interests; they are of the metropolitan culture’s global differently there. It would be unproductive simply assumed to exist. projection of power. Max Hastings, writing to evaluate nineteenth century British in the Daily Mail on 3131st March provides foreign policy from the perspective That is the key to the question of an interesting case in point when he of twenty-fi rst century distaste for what Iran wanted: respect and a contrasts the incidence of a British sailor’s imperialism, and then simply leave it there. recognition of its power. It is hard arrest by Greek authorities in 1848 with However, it may be observed that Hastings to overstate its profound belief in its the 2007 Iranian ‘hostage’ crisis: inverts that presumption by projecting right to be involved in the running the standards of 1848 gunboat diplomacy of Iraq and the region, by virtue One day in 1848, the Royal Navy onto events in 2007. The assumptions of of its size and its long history as a warship HMS Fantome dropped that period (in which the robust assertion nation state, in a region of countries anchor off the Greek port of Patras, of the interests of countries like Britain, partitioned in the last century by lines and dispatched a boat to the shore to France, the Netherlands and the United in the sand. To many Iranians, the take on water. States wherever their navies could episode will look like an affi rmation Greek relations with Britain were then take them was an unquestioned right), of that status, even if in Britain it poor, following several incidents in survive quite intact in Hastings’s account. may look like a climbdown. which British subjects had allegedly Just as in 1848, metropolitan interests been mistreated. simply exist in a relatively value-free For all that the episode has ended state of innocence. Just as in 1848, the smoothly, it marks a long step Local police in Patras detained the recalcitrance of Orientals, Greeks then backwards in Iran’s relations with midshipman in command of the boat. and Iranians now, and the assertion of the world. The regime’s refl exes tend He was held overnight before being their interests, articulated let us remind towards confrontation much more grudgingly released. ourselves, locally and not globally, are quickly than those who try to wrestle dismissed as simple presumption. What with it, over Iraq and over its nuclear Palmerston, Britain’s Foreign is problematic, outlandish even, is that in ambitions, have hoped. We can’t Secretary of the day, professed 2007 they are being permitted by us to get expect Iran to hand over its nuclear outrage. It was he who invented away with it. centrifuges so easily as a second what became known as ‘gunboat “gift” to the cause of harmony. diplomacy’. At fi rst, the Greek The fact that Britain was directly government refused either redress complicit fi rst, along with Tsarist Russia, The ‘cause of harmony’ is invoked as if to the British subjects – a pretty in thwarting the Iranian constitutional it is a metaphysical essence, divorced disreputable lot, as it happened – or revolution of 1905 and then, along from the cultural, historical and political an apology for the insult to Fantome’s with the US, supporting the 1953 coup location in which it was formulated, which midshipman. overthrowing the democratically elected we may safely assume was situated, in A powerful British fl eet was cruising government of Mohammed Mosaddeq are material and discursive terms, nowhere off the Dardanelles. Palmerston rarely permitted to intrude into righteous near Tehran. dispatched the Royal Navy to proclamations of the purity of British blockade fi rst Piraeus, then every motives in the face of fanatical Persian The preceding are ‘macro’ levels of analysis Greek port, and to seize any ship intransigence. That Iran, a culturally invited by the events in Iran, concerning as which attempted passage. After a self-referential society that has been an they do the construction and occupation few weeks under siege, the Greeks identifi able political power in its region of culturally contingent subject positions caved in. The injured British subjects for some two and a half millennia (no in history. What I want to do now is to received handsome compensation. Iraq-style postcolonial amalgamation, proceed towards the ‘micro’ insofar as The little midshipman got his apology. this) might consider the presence of it examines the way in which aspects of the navies of the United Kingdom and the personal were handled by the news Compare and contrast that episode the United States off of its coast as the media. Not that these can be separated with the experience of 15 British provocative intrusion of two parvenus from the ‘larger’ issues above; indeed they
media education journal 42 16
should be added self-consciously, from this wellspring of images. She invokes the cartoonish sadism of Faye Turney’s captors; her blonde hair, the signifi er of Western female purity (and the object of Asiatic male lust) imprisoned within the very symbol (we are relentlessly told) of oppressed Muslim womanhood, the headscarf or hijab.
Some images of battle are so horrifi c that they are etched into our national psyche. And now we have a new one, the image of Leading Seaman Faye Turney, paraded like a trophy by her gloating Iranian captors.
Looking at those pictures, we don’t see the face of a brave sailor. All we see is a terrifi ed young mother, her blonde hair covered with a Muslim Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres, ‘Odalisque and Slave’ (1839) scarf, dragging heavily on a cigarette, hands shaking with fear. It is a proceed directly from them, as we shall on of the Harem or Seraglio (Grosrichard, profoundly unsettling image. see. In observing the mediated unfolding 1994; 141-146; Yeğenoğlu: 1998: 73). A of events, it seemed to me that in the frisson of self-regarding horror was added And why? Principally, because she midst of what was being presented as to the salacious with the notion of the is a woman. Beneath our veneer of ostensibly novel, a series of quite familiar abduction and imprisonment within the political correctness and our pride fi gures and scenarios seemed to assert Seraglio of white, Christian women, ’forced that nearly one in ten of our Forces themselves, or rather, be asserted. Whilst into submission by their lustful captors’ personnel are female, we still feel not wishing to minimise or doubt the and inducted into the ‘infi del’ faith of deeply uneasy about women in battle. real distress experienced by the British Islam (Rodinson, 1988: 59). Nor was this personnel, or indeed to present the terror of captivity, in which violence, sex The Iranians perfectly understand motives and actions of the Iranian regime and forced religious conversion were our queasiness and that’s why they as sadly misunderstood altruism, I do want intertwined, confi ned exclusively to paraded Faye, bent her to their will, to highlight the news media recourse women. The practises of sodomy and male forced her to write grovelling letters to two discursive tropes made available rape were also exteriorised from European of apology, and used her ruthlessly by Orientalism to construct a narrative culture by associating both with the against the West as the splendid liberally laced with melodrama and high ‘lustful Turk’ and sundry menacing Islamic propaganda weapon she is. camp. ‘others’ (Wheatcroft, 1993: 220). Within the genre of the ‘captivity narrative’ Watching Faye effectively pleading Inside the Despot’s Seraglio these images became familiar to Western for mercy, we inwardly ask ourselves Familiar and venerable narratives and audiences in cultural products ranging how the hell we ever let her get characters from the Western cultural from Mozart’s opera Die Entführung there in the fi rst place. We feel a archive of Orientalism were drawn aus dem Serail (The Abduction from the kind of collective guilt at her fate, a upon, principally by elements of the Seraglio), to the erotic images produced knowledge we were all complicit in tabloid press, which as Allan (2004: 105) by Orientalist painters like Delacroix and her capture. And we are. argues, ‘can often be shown to anchor, in Ingres and tales of European and American hegemonic terms, an array of prejudices sailors (real and imagined) enslaved by The Sun on 9th April covered similar (sexist, racist, homophobic, xenophobic the pirates of North Africa’s Barbary Coast territory, albeit less refl exively, in these and so forth) as being synonymous with (Majid, 2004: 82-104). Indeed as Lewis excerpts from the account Turney sold to “public opinion” or “what our readers (2004: 12) has stated: that newspaper: think”’. Perhaps the most prominent of these was the curious, but potent, mixture There is no denying it – as a topic, FREED British hostage Faye Turney of racial, sexual and religious anxiety the harem sold books. From the told last night how she feared she that accompanies the idea of a young eighteenth century on, whether you was being measured for her COFFIN European woman being held captive wrote about living in one, visiting by her evil Iranian captors. in an Islamic land; personifi ed in this one, or escaping from one, any instance by LSM Faye Turney. There is a book that had anything to do with STRIPPED to her knickers – with the longstanding fascination evident within the harem sold. Publishers knew it, rest of her clothes and belongings Western culture, going back to at least booksellers knew it, readers knew it taken away – and caged in a tiny the eighteenth century, with unveiling the and authors knew it. freezing cell. sexually mysterious Muslim woman as well as speculation about, and longed for Amanda Platell, writing in the Daily A few hours later, Faye was ordered access to, the reputedly wanton goings- Mail on 3131st March, drew deeply, and it to wrap a black Islamic cape around
media education journal 42 17 her before being shown to an offi ce generally to other ‘Asiatic’ rulers such as Ahmadinejad’s henchmen was to to meet the offi cer in charge. the Persian Shah and Chinese Emperor. separate Faye from her 14 male The fi gure of the despot is one of an comrades and tell her they had all On the same date, The Mirror related the all-powerful solitude in the midst of a been sent home. account of Arthur Batchelor, the youngest multitude of fanatically obedient courtiers of the group, in which potent fears of and soldier-slaves who exist only to enact Here, the Iranian president is conjured violence and sexual coercion were again their master’s every savage decree. That it up as the despot and adorned with the invoked: was, as Turner (1994: 34-35) and Lockman trappings of ‘Oriental’ cruelty and duplicity (2004: 45-48) explain, an abstraction that the discourse has to offer. Added Hostage Arthur Batchelor told developed by European thinkers to to the scene is a coterie of ‘henchmen’ yesterday of his nightmare at the conceptualise, and symbolically externalise implementing their master’s malign will hands of cruel Iranian bully-boys (from Europe), an extreme notion of upon a vulnerable European woman. – as he was stripped, blindfolded, arbitrary power and that it had limited tormented and dumped in solitary utility in accounting for actual conditions However, the televised meeting between confi nement for days on end. in Oriental societies, did not (and still the naval personnel and the president The 20-year-old sailor – youngest of does not) limit its traction as a powerful on the date of their release allowed the the 15 Brits snatched by the Iranians discursive trope. Certainly it survived into tableau vivant of the despotic court to – bravely battled to retain his the nineteenth century, given extravagant be laid out in its full panoply: the all- composure but eventually broke down display in the Orientalist paintings of powerful Oriental despot enthroned, and sobbed like a baby in his tiny cell the period, as the fi gure of the despot surrounded by his fawning courtiers, because he was sure execution was was depicted, enthroned and impassive, receiving the submission of his helpless imminent. surveying scenes of wanton cruelty and captives and, after the application of eroticism – or both (Sardar, 1999: 46). exquisite torment, dispensing the arbitrary He also revealed that colleague From the late twentieth century it has mercy that is his alone to bestow. The and close friend Faye Turney was been present in the fi gure of the cunning Daily Express, on 5th April, stated: convinced she was going to be raped Arab oil Sheik or terrorist mastermind in after the fanatical Revolutionary popular fi lm (Semmerling, 2006). In news They were paraded one by one, Guard thugs suddenly became reporting, we can see the very essence of wearing shiny Iranian suits, in front agitated on discovering they had despotic menace distilled and personifi ed of their beaming captor yesterday captured a woman. in fi gures like Saddam Hussein and Osama – and forced to “thank” him for their bin Laden (e.g. Said, 1978; 1997; Poole freedom. Arthur told of a bizarre incident in and Richardson, eds, 2006), and as we which the guards gently caressed shall see from the following analysis, Iran’s As the 15 Royal Marines and sailors Felix’s (Lieutenant Felix Carman) hair President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. trooped before the world’s cameras, as the 15 captives sat blindfolded in towering above Iran’s hardline a row – then doused him with sweet- Within the narrative of Oriental despotism, President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, smelling aftershave. all political power must be seen to be their 13-day ordeal edged towards vested in one individual. Any evidence to a peaceful end. But Britain’s Felix then asked if one of us was the contrary, such as the reality of limiting humiliation was complete. stroking his hair and we all said no. and competing sites of power within the He was then sprayed with aftershave. Oriental society, is elided. Accordingly, Whilst the more immediately recognisable He let out a really nervous laugh. during what might be called despotism’s manifestations of this narrative were We all thought he was about to be discursive high-point in eighteenth largely confi ned to the tabloid press, it sexually abused.” century Europe, the all-powerful fi gure of was not entirely absent from even liberal the Sultan survived the reality that central broadsheet titles, as The Independent From the torments (real, imagined and authority was very limited during this demonstrated on 5th April, painting anticipated) endured by the fi guregure ofof thethe period in Ottoman history. That this would a picture that might be the envy of European innocent imprisoned within have been directly observable by the Delacroix: the Oriental Seraglio, I now turn to many European diplomats and merchants the personifi cation of their despair. For who traveled within the Ottoman lands Mahmoud Ahmadinejad sat on the another character, the Oriental Despot was at this time was, in effect, besides the podium, a satisfi ed smile hovering summoned forth from the West’s archive point (Quataert, 2007). So, even before around the corners of his mouth, of images of the otherness of Islam and the British personnel’s encounter with clearly savouring the enormous the East. As Grosrichard (1998: 3) explains, President Ahmadinejad on the day of surprise he was about to spring on ‘from the end of the seventeenth century their release, and despite power and the world. One minute sermonising, and all through the eighteenth, a spectre decision making in Iran’s political and the next pinning a medal on a was haunting Europe: the spectre of judicial system being distributed amongst grizzled revolutionary guardsman, despotism’, conceived of as the ‘absolute often competing religious and state this was, from the very beginning, Mr. levelling’ of a society to a state of slavery authorities (Keddy, 2003: 263-284), he Ahmadinejad’s day. under the absolute and capricious will of was personifi ed as the source and arbiter the ruler in which no countervailing sites of their plight, as The Sun illustrated on Even the weather was on the of power were permitted to exist. Whilst 9th April: President’s side: as he stepped principally associated with representations forward for the last act, to meet of the Sultan of the Ottoman Empire, the But the most cruel trick played the 15 captives at the centre of this notion of Oriental Despotism was applied by Iranian president Mahmoud saga, the sky was lit up by a fl ash of
media education journal 42 18
lightning and a rumble of thunder. Orientalism. In this case, the universality Said, E.W. (1978). Orientalism. London: After taking so little part in the of our interests and the normality of Penguin. events of the past 13 days, his return their global assertion coupled with long Said, E.W. (1997). Covering Islam: how the to the world stage was timed to near held anxieties about virtuous Europeans media and the experts determine how we perfection. being held captive within an Islamic see the rest of the world. London: Vintage. society, subjected to real or imagined Said, E.W. (1993). Culture and Imperialism. If the fi gure of the Oriental Despot might violent and sexual torments, and at London: Vintage. be imagined as a fi gure straight out of the mercy of the all-powerful Oriental Sardar, Z. (1999). Orientalism: concepts Central Casting, then on 5th April The Sun despot. That in the latter instances in the Social Sciences. London: Open surely retained his services in magnifi cent, the discourse was articulated in what University Press. scenery chewing style (the denial of neck was surely a pantomimic style veering Semmerling, T.J. (2006). ‘Evil’ Arabs in ties a new refi nement of Oriental cruelty): towards the comic does not, I suggest, American Popular Film: Orientalist Fear. detract from the observation that it was Austin: University of Texas Press. The 15 Navy hostages held by Iran deployed because it was available and Turner, B.S. (1994). Orientalism, were made to grovel before being recognisable. To reinforce my suggestion Postmodernism and Globalism. London: given their freedom last night. that specifi c discursive devices available Routledge. within Western culture were deployed to Wheatcroft, A. (1993). The Ottomans: Conniving President Mahmoud represent the cultural, geographical and dissolving images. London: Viking. Ahmadinejad bragged to the world religious context in which the personnel Yeğenoğlu, M. (1998). Colonial Fantasies: that he ordered their release as an found themselves, consider briefl y the towards a feminist reading of Orientalism. Easter gift to the British people. West’s previous existential crisis: the Cold Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. War. If I might be forgiven for indulging Then he insisted on taunting the in some retrospective conjecture, it seems Newspaper Sources group one by one in a sickening line- diffi cult to conceive of an appeal to a Author Unattributed (2007). ‘Hostage up at his palace in Tehran, for which similarly potent, almost atavistic, mixture shame’. The Sun, Editorial, 5th April. p.1. they were kitted out in brand new of racial, sexual and cultural anxieties had BBC News (2007), ‘UK-Iran stand-off’, suits -with no ties. the British personnel been held captive 3 April
media education journal 42 19
Frock Off: Reinterpreting the position of women in the Glasgow music scene . . . and other refl ections
Carrie Maclennan
Glasgow music: Creative clout & success of Glasgow-based acts seemed The three female musicians recruited for credibility by association to pose questions and challenges to the the study were Rosalind Davies (Roz), The city of Glasgow crops up regularly as young musician about their ambitions lead vocalist and bassist with pop- a site of interest and activity in discussion and goals. On one level, the commercial punk band Miss The Occupier; Amanda of popular music. The indie ‘cool’ of The success of local acts was to be celebrated MacKinnon (Manda Rin), keyboardist, Jesus and Mary Chain, Teenage Fan Club and maintained but on the other, a need occasional bassist and vocalist with and Primal Scream justifi ed the whirr to protect Glasgow’s indie territories and electro-pop bands Bis and Data Panik; of interest surrounding Glasgow and underground musical activity became a and Natasha Noramly (Nashii), lead its vibrant music scene in decades past priority for those working and socialising vocalist and bassist with lo-fi indie rock and the art poetry of Arab Strap, The in the scene. I was ready to consider the band FO Machete. Roz, Amanda and Delgados and Belle & Sebastian became ways in which the mediated reputation Natasha are in their early thirties and synonymous with the Glasgow locale of Glasgow-based acts, Glasgow venues have each been performing in bands during the 1990s. Angular, art school and the mediated notion of a musical around Glasgow for a similar length of pop-punk has recently been reinvented by community spirit might differ from the time. All three women, whether originally Glasgow acts, infl uencing fashion trends real lived experiences of the scene’s from the Glasgow area or not, have been across the country equally as much as members. Placing an emphasis on the active participants in Glasgow music musical ones. Arguably, contemporary role of women within the city’s music for a decade or more and now view mainstream pop acts like Snow Patrol community, the project looked to provide themselves as fully fl edged members of somehow regain edginess and spark when an initial insight into Glasgow music and the Glasgow music community. The bands they are positioned under the ‘Glasgow the opportunities (or indeed the barriers) in which they perform (and those in which music’ umbrella and reconsidered in it presents for the female musician or they have performed in the past) have terms of their Glasgow-based biographies. musically inclined female entrepreneur. reached varying degrees of success. The Regardless of whether or not members style of music each band delivers differs of a band are indigenous to Glasgow – or Girl spotting in the Glasgow music signifi cantly. indigenous even to Scotland, the ‘Glasgow community music’ label and the connotations that From the observer’s vantage point, From initial interactions with the women, come with it are powerful, and are the music scene in Glasgow seems a I quickly established that music was regularly applied to or appropriated by welcoming habitat for women musicians integral to who they are and who they musicians and performers as a means to and for women in the music business want to be. They showed themselves to carve out a specifi c musical identity. generally. As a participant in local music be devoted, hard-working, strong and management and consumer of Glasgow savvy members of the Glasgow music In recent years, media commotion music – and the social scene bound up community. The centrality of music in surrounding fi rst Franz Ferdinand and then with it – it is easy to identify numerous their lives was clear and their creative The Fratellis has repositioned Glasgow (on female musicians and performers who obsessions immediately discernible: “I love paper at least) as the veritable hotbed of have gained relative success on the local, music. I DO love music. I am obsessive musical talent for the umpteenth time. alternative live circuits. Also operating about music. Before I started to play . . . it As a result of this revitalised enthusiasm, successfully are numerous acclaimed defi nitely – the idea of being able to make Glasgow music, and indeed Scottish music girl-run clubs, promotion companies and something that you love is a big draw. more broadly, has received increased artist management teams. On the surface, You know?” (Natasha). Although working academic, government and media women are present, visible and appear to in the same environment and looking to attention of late. The data drawn upon hold signifi cant roles in the Glasgow music achieve similar goals, Amanda, Roz and here originates from research conducted scene; roles which much of the literature Natasha each presented different pictures in Glasgow during Summer 2006. The I engaged with testify have historically of Glasgow music and their experiences climate at that time seemed to encourage been fi lled almost exclusively by men within the scene. Stories of self-doubt, debate over the very defi nition of the (McRobbie, 1978 , Whiteley, 2000, Bayton, self-consciousness and fear emerged Glasgow music ‘scene’ and the commercial 1998). from the interview data to present an media education journal 42 20
unexpected, alternative discourse of and challenges described by the events in alternative venues; and thirdly, their identities as performers and further participants were not isolated and were in that they are granted the freedom and analysis helped identify a number of keeping with reports of previous studies by respect to contribute fully to the creative other, often competing discourses at work. the likes of Bayton (1998) Davies (2001) music making process when dealing with According to Fairclough, we must view and Cooper (1996). However, of particular trusted local professionals (e.g. studio language as social practice and must interest was the emerging impression networks and engineers). They also note accept that as such, it is determined by that female musicians were much more a marked defi cit in the number of female social structures (2001:14). Drawing from positively received and supported in the musicians in more commercial scenes ideas developed by Foucault, Fairclough more underground or ‘subcultural’ pockets and in the standard of the female acts places an emphasis on the ‘dimensions of the Glasgow music community: “People or the decorative nature of the roles of the relations of power and language’ just involved in music – and who go to women inhabit in mainstream, “big bucks”, (2001:36). He recognises discourse like, Sleazy’s and Mono . . . and Tut’s to popular music (Girls Aloud are mentioned as ‘a place where relations of power a degree, are much more accepting and frequently as a disgraceful example of are…exercised and enacted’ (2001:36) and you get loads of female bands playing, but ‘women in music’). notes that this power play Established can take place literature has, in both micro in the past, and macro recognised scenarios. subculture Power and the relations can subcultural as be exercised a male domain in person to (McRobbie & person spoken Garber 1975, discourse McRobbie & and in the Frith 1978 and establishment Cohen, 1991). or protection Histories of rock of conventions and popular of particular Roz, Amanda and Natasha music have ‘discourse marked guitar types’ (2001:36). In the context of the then you’ll go to the rock gigs, and em . . . music as male territory too (Whitely 2000, paper, these might include feminist and nothing” (Amanda). Examination of media McRobbie & Frith 1978, Clawson 1999). post-feminist discourse, male-centric clippings relating to FO Machete, Bis/Data We might tentatively suggest then that ideologies of rock and riot grrl inspired Panik and Miss the Occupier revealed that even a ripple of change is afoot. We might rock politics. the higher the profi le of the publication propose that these women are not only (whether it be online or in print), the playing a more active role in subculture Realities from the Glasgow scene higher the tendency for their reviews to and in the production of alternative I: Girls producing alternative focus on non-music related aspects of culture, but that a change is occurring, or culture? the bands’ identity. For instance Bis, Data beginning to occur on the part of the male Although the participants documented Panik and Amanda’s onstage persona, contingent who might previously have a positive change in music generally, ‘Manda Rin’, receive an abundance of been read to exclude women and girls whereby women musicians were praise in underground e-zines and in blogs from the subcultural sphere. seen more, heard more and given an etc. In an interview on music and pop opportunity to play more, they also noted culture website, www.audiojunkies.net, Realities from the Glasgow scene that, in the last ten years, there had been Amanda answers a number of questions II: Making music and alternative little change in how they were treated associated with her time in bis, about discourses of musicianship by their male peers: “When guys say, ‘Aw, Data Panik’s upcoming album and about Of the small group, Roz is the only person do you know where to plug your bass her views on the music industry (accessed to have studied music in a formal capacity. in?’ you have to think, ‘would you have 11.09.07). The coverage they receive in An accomplished oboe player and fl autist, said that to a guy?’ He wouldn’t’ve you more mainstream sources i.e. NME and the Roz began her musical life at school. She know?” (Roz). Quoting the main barriers tabloid press, is in direct contrast. Amanda tells me: “I always, always, always made they faced as unfair or inappropriate press tells me: “One day, a whole page of the noises out of things. At eight I started representation, exclusion from technical NME letters page was all criticisms about recorder. At nine I sat a music test and environments (sound booth, recording us. It was just fat/ugly, fat/ugly…It was I got 100% in the test so I got to play studio) and hostile reactions from horrible.” fl ute. Em, at thirteen I swapped to oboe, audiences and colleagues, the image of a at fourteen I started guitar…I wanted to truly ‘inclusive’ music scene was rejected In further support of this idea, the be a classical musician.” Although Roz early on in the project. In turn, my own participants themselves imply that: describes a period early on in her band preconceived notion of dramatic change fi rstly, they are received with more career where she was a little uncertain and improvement in the acceptance of and respect by audiences in local alternative of her capability to ‘jam’, to improvise respect for women in the music industry music venues; secondly, that they are with a group of fellow instrumentalists, was challenged. The negative experiences more confi dent in organising their own she presents herself now as a self-
media education journal 42 21 assured musical performer, secure in her tracks have a tendency to be a bit off beat women each engaged in discussions about own talents. Amanda and Nashii have – quite literally – they always incorporate punk and the punk ethos, but yet did not both been largely self-taught. Amanda a little syncopation! Nashii has taken place their own experiences under the continually made disparaging comments a supposed ‘problem’ and successfully same banner. Although classically trained, about her own aptitude and adopted integrated it into her musical identity and Roz has rather rebelliously embarked a rather girlish, child-like discourse the identity of FO Machete. upon a musical career as a front woman when talking about music making. in a punk-pop band. Despite accusations Positioning herself amongst her fellow Traditional ‘male-centric’ perceptions of amateurishness, Amanda manages to band members as the “least talented of women in music might fi rstly, and write, perform and play in a successful out of them all” she seems to create a perhaps unfairly, characterise Amanda as band, and aims to encourage other girls binary opposition between the classically the archetypal ‘token female keyboard like her to do the same. In a slightly trained musician and the self-taught player’, unfamiliar with the jargon similar vein, Natasha has rejected the musician whereby the person who can of music making and limited in her notion that without training she cannot read music, understand chord structures musicianship (Whiteley, 2000). Roz might be a musician. She has instead reworked and improvise in a manner informed be positioned as ‘typical’ too, in the sense standard musical rules, thus creating a by the rudiments of music is placed as that, as a girl, her route into writing and whole new sound and approach to playing the greater talent. She is noticeably performance has stemmed from more bass. uncomfortable or perhaps ill-equipped to traditionally ‘feminine’ classical roots and engage with musical terminology. This is dainty woodwind instruments (Bayton, Realities from the Glasgow scene not to suggest that in practice she does 1998). Natasha may well be seen as III: Reclaiming competence not offer valuable creative Amanda, Roz and Natasha contribution. Conversely, Glasgow Music Venues described sets of additional Natasha appears to embrace tasks they perform as band the fact she is a self-taught ‘Sleazy's' – Sleazy's is the name given locally to music bar members: diary management, bassist / songwriter and is Nice 'n Sleazy situated on Sauchiehall Street in Glasgow. press and promotion work, not embarrassed in admitting, A staple in the Glasgow music diet for around 15 years, event co-ordination, online albeit humorously, that Sleazy's is well known as a hub for musicians and artists information maintenance, she is ‘musically illiterate’. alike. Glasgow indie bands such The Delgados and Arab Strap artwork design and so Interestingly though, played shows here early in their careers and the bar is still on. They each involve she is articulate in her seen as a space where indie musicans congregate. themselves in tasks that explanations and musical might automatically be descriptions, referring ‘Tut's' – Tut's is the abbreviated name of popular music venue, associated with a traditional to classical conventions King Tut's Wah Wah Hut on St. Vincent Street in Glasgow. A positioning of women in and demonstrating time slightly more mainstream venue in comarison to the likes of the musical environment signatures and so forth. In Nice 'n sleazy and Mono etc., King Tut's plays host to a vast that is continually critiqued describing her song writing array of local bands and international touring bands. The by, for instance, Cohen process, she says plainly, ‘I venue is probably most famous for being awarded the title of (1991), Bayton (1998), will play around until I fi nd the ‘UK's best live venue' by Radio 1 in 2000 and for allegedly McRobbie (1978) and something that I like. I will being the venue in which Alan McGee discovered Oasis. Cooper (1996). Arguably play all the wrong notes these extra duties require until I fi nd the right ones.” Mono is a vegan cafe/music bar situated near the Merchant considerable knowledge, skill Natasha explained that she City area of Glasgow. Independently run, Mono has established and creativity and are of the is really rather liberated by itself in the last few years as a creative hub for Glasgow's utmost importance in the this unawareness of the rules indie community. Housing the city's popular Monorail record prospective success or failure of music making. She puts store, Mono is popular social spot for Glasgow musicians of the band. This should raise chords together because she and music lovers. Specialising in offering an eclectic mix of questions over whether these likes the sound of them and musical styles and particualrly embracing more experimental roles ought to be bracketed she creates musical patterns music, Mono is a key alt. space on the Glasgow music as ‘negative’, restricting because she’s moved by them landscape. and second rate at all. – not because they work to While all three participants a traditional chord structure express little annoyance or progression. Indeed if she someone who experiments with sound or dissatisfaction with the arrives at a point in her creative process and instrumentation in an entirely unique additional managerial or promotional where things are not coming together way. However, the possibility remains that work they undertake as a band member/ as she would like, Nashii will change the that interpretation might be reduced quite leader, Amanda hints that she can feel tuning of her guitar altogether to suit. simply, to a lack of technical competence under pressure to act as the responsible, Her technical style swerves convention (Whiteley, 2000). organised person. She does not always too. By using a capo and by playing appreciate being expected to take care of chords, she stands out from other bassists. There are a number of alternative positions practicalities under the premise that she Natasha doesn’t understand why it should from which to analyse the behaviour of is the ‘capable woman’ or mother fi gure of be presumed that she would play in a the participants. However, for now, we the Data Panik team. standard fi nger picking style. In addition, might place a banner of punk sensibility since she has some diffi culty in following above these approaches to musicianship In the same way that charges of musical standard time signatures, FO Machete and creativity. It is interesting that the incompetence might be reinterpreted as media education journal 42 22
brave, artistic statements on the part of She campaigns for women musicians to be popular music in the making. Oxford: the performer, so too can the impertinence recognised as such and hopes one day for Clarendon. regarding women working in managerial groupings like ‘women in music’, ‘female Cooper, S. (ed.) (1996). Girls! Girls! Girls! or ‘administrative’ roles in the music fronted bands’ etc. to be irrelevant and Essays on women in music. New York: New industry. The ownership of these roles by declared defunct. Roz inhabits a curious York University Press. female fi gures could be read as a political middle ground. She appears very conscious Davies, H. (2001). ‘All rock and roll is statement informed by a punk-orientated of her position as a woman working in a homosocial: the representation of women DIY ethic. By fi lling these positions women male dominated environment and treads in the British rock press’. Popular Music, are in greater control of the press they carefully while marking out her own vol 20, no 3, pp301-319. Cambridge approach, the areas of industry they want territory. Despite possessing the creativity University Press. to be affi liated with and the image of their and the musical ability to protect her Driscoll, C. (1999). ‘Girl Culture, Revenge band that they want to be advertised. niche in the musical environment, Roz and Global Capitalism: Cybergirls, Riot Taking the Riot Grrl aesthetic as a recent works painstakingly to cultivate the Grrls, Spice Girls’. Australian Feminist example, we often hear of ‘reclaiming perfect image or persona. It seems that Studies, vol 14, no 29, pp173-193. Carpax the dress’. Driscoll explains: “Riot Grrls… this particular notion of perfection is Publishing. inspired… ‘little girl’ looks or ‘hypersexy’ one that satisfi es traditional stereotypes Fairclough, N. (2001). Language and Power, looks as part of a resistance to what was enough to placate her male audience and 2nd edn. Harlow: Longman. often perceived as the desexualisation of her male colleagues but simultaneously McRobbie, A. (2004). ‘Post-feminism and girls among feminists” (1999:181). When inspire and/or shock. An interesting Popular Culture’. Feminist Media Studies, we talk about reclaiming the dress, we talk contradiction and an interesting tactic. vol 4, no 3 pp255-264. about reclaiming a symbol of femininity. McRobbie, A. (2000). Feminism and youth Whether this reclaiming is symbolic or Refl ecting on the research culture. 2nd edn. Basingstoke: Macmillan. material, the reference embodies the outcomes McRobbie, A. and Frith, S. (1978). ‘Rock idea that a girl can engage with feminist Although the research project raised and Sexuality’. Screen Education, no29, politics and construct and retain her a number of questions which are pp3-19. own story of femininity. In this instance worthy of further investigation, it was McRobbie, A. and Garber, J. (1975). ‘Girls however, we might refer to ‘reclaiming undeniably disappointing and more and Subcultures’. In Hall, S. and Jefferson, competence’. than a little disheartening to discover T. (eds.) Resistance Through Rituals: Youth that the environment with which I had Subcultures in Post-war Britain. London: Carving out musical identities: been engaging for some time was not Routledge. Gender, image and the ‘f’ word necessarily as hospitable to women Whiteley, S. (2000). Women and popular There are striking differences between as it had seemed. Self examination music : sexuality, identity, and subjectivity. the individual images the women have and refl exivity was inherent to the New York: Routledge. constructed for themselves aesthetically. project overall, but it was both startling It is also clear from the interview data that and fascinating to fi nd my own role Internet Sources each performer perceives the importance – as researcher, as member of the music ‘Shepherd’s Pi: An Interview with Manda of image differently. Each musician community and as a woman – under equal Rin (Jed)’ manages her sexuality in a different way scrutiny to that of the participants. Having http://www.audiojunkies.net/ and each has a unique approach to her spent a considerable amount of time index.php?option=com_content&task=vie ‘political’ status as a woman. Amanda working to reinterpret existing theory, w&id=367&Itemid=63 (accessed 11.09.07) and Roz both spoke freely and explicitly other people’s view points and common about feminism and feminist ideals, misconceptions, I came to realise that often instigating discussions; Natasha to reinterpret my own musical identity, did not. Exuding a professionalism and my own role and preconceived ideas was musical passion that is immediately equally as important and constructive identifi able and potentially challenging to to the research task. The fi ndings of the traditional gender stereotypes of women study and my reactions to them confi rm, in music, Natasha presents herself as however reluctantly, existing feminist a knowledgeable, business orientated, work in cultural theory and sociology creatively talented woman. Seemingly that strongly suggests issues relating to unconcerned with how she is perceived in gender inequality have not been resolved, terms of gender and femininity, Nashii’s regardless of what the alleged arrival of priorities lie in how she is received as an ‘post-feminism’ might imply (McRobbie, artist – not with how she is viewed as a 2004). woman. Natasha has a knack of poking fun at her own sex appeal, (and fl icking it Bibliography back at her audience with an aggressive Bayton, M. (1998). Frock rock: women lunge!) without tainting her professional performing popular music. Oxford: Oxford reputation or undermining her musical University Press. capability. Almost conversely, Amanda is Clawson, M.A. (1999). ‘When women play vocal in her defense of the wider feminist the bass: Instrument specialisation and cause and is comfortable talking about gender interpretation in alternative rock her overtly feminist opinions in terms of music.’ Gender & Society 13: 193-210. punk, Riot Grrl and feminist zine culture. Cohen, S. (1991) Rock culture in Liverpool:
media education journal 42 23
Eat Me, Drink Me: A Marilyn Manson Discourse?
Catriona Miller
Introduction others. They booby trapped themselves Manson spoke articulately and with some For the last ten years, Marilyn Manson has and the school, and eventually committed compassion about the tragedy. been one of rock and popular music’s most suicide. The suburban community of controversial characters. We know that Littleton was shocked and simply could not So, perhaps it was all a case of mistaken Brian Warner was born in 1969 in Canton, understand why the boys had committed identity and Marilyn Manson should be Ohio and Marilyn Manson was created such pre-meditated and well-planned, cold considered solely as a misunderstood sometime in the early 1990s in Florida. We blooded murder. When it was suggested artist, unfairly blamed for something he can be fairly sure that the two are related that the boys were Manson fans, the had nothing to do with. It is impossible, to each other in some way. media went into overdrive. Even the British however, to avoid the suggestion that there newspapers linked Manson with the crime was something about Manson and his Manson is one of Vivendi Universal’s best and within hours “Manson’s notoriety work that meant that he was an easy, even sellers (Milner 2003), while MTV has argued went nuclear (as) Manson unfairly reaped obvious, target for such accusations. He that he’s “the only major performer today the blame for ‘inspiring’ them.” (Observer said at the time of Columbine: “I defi nitely who can justifi ably call himself an artist.” 2003). can see why they would pick me. Because (Weiderhorn 2003). For others, however, I think it’s easy to throw my face on the he’s a more diffi cult fi gure. According to Fairly typical of the kind of statement TV, because in the end, I’m a poster boy for one newspaper columnist Marilyn Manson made by the media was the Independent fear. Because I represent what everyone is set new standards for rock outrage. on April 22nd 1999, which said: “The two afraid of, because I say and do whatever I (McCormick 2007). Others (mainly right boys were members of an on-campus want.” (Manson in Moore 2002). Manson’s wing Christian groups) have made it plain group called the Trenchcoat Mafi a, a work is controversial, and in order to that they think Marilyn Manson is evil withdrawn clique fascinated by the dark, explore this it is worth making use of the (
media education journal 42 24
coercion, i.e. the use of military force or Commenting on the name, Manson said “I thrown-away kids, and America is afraid police. However, this persuasion is a non was writing a lot of lyrics . . . and the name to reap what is sown” (Daily Record 1999). stop process and constant, albeit often Marilyn Manson, I thought, really describes He also said “As a performer, I wanted to unspoken, negotiations take place. Through everything I had to say. You know, male and be the loudest, most persistent alarm clock tactical alliances with other groups, and a female, beauty and ugliness, and it was just I could be, because there didn’t seem like willingness to make concessions, dominant very American. It was a statement on the any other way to snap society out of the groups must work to win broad consent for American culture, the power that we give Christianity and media enduced coma” their own political, economic, intellectual to icons like Marilyn Monroe and Charles (Weiner 2000:16). and cultural leadership, in other words, hegemony.1 Portrait of an American Family and Smells Like Children Putting Marilyn Manson into suggested a world fi lled with this context of discourse, nightmarish fi gures culled ideology and hegemony from children’s literature is an interesting exercise and entertainment such as because the extremity of the cartoon Scooby Doo, the the reaction to Manson children’s book The Cat in in the wake of Columbine the Hat, and the fi lmlm Willy leads to the question: what Wonka & the Chocolate dominant ideology does Factory (dir: Mel Stuart, Manson risk destabilising, or 1971), all of whom get name more properly what dominant checks of some description ideologies do people fear or are visually referenced. that he is destabilising? This For example, the album title, subtly shifts the focus from Smells Like Children, is a the fi gure of Manson to the direct quote from the evil established discourses of child-catcher of Chitty Chitty society that he intersects Bang Bang (dir: KenKen Hughes, with. 1968). These two albums Manson and since, that’s where it’s always seemed to have an aesthetic of twisted To take a brief example, even Manson’s gone from there. It’s about the paradox. nursery rhymes and toxic candy; a long chosen stage name is provocative, Diametrically opposed archetypes.” way from suburban dreams of white picket coined as it is from two of America’s (Manson in Baddeley 2000:21). Manson fences and Mom’s apple pie. most famous icons: Marilyn Monroe, sex thus throws the full spotlight of his fame kitten, screen goddess, tragic heroine, and on the ‘diametrically opposed archetypes’ Manson has often spoken of himself and Charles Manson, celebrity killer, psychotic at the heart of American culture. his work as an evolution, and the next responsible for an orgy of torture and stage of that evolution came in 1996 with slaughter in the Hollywood hills in 1969, To be sure, Manson does not offer a the provocatively entitled album Antichrist and drug addict. So Manson just by his clearly thought out and rationally argued Superstar. name is drawing attention to two major counter-hegemony discourse where all the elements of American culture which sit elements fi t together and makes logical Antichrist Superstar (1996) somewhat uncomfortably beside one sense. He is, arguably, an artist and artists This was/is Manson’s most apparently another but which are undoubtedly related. do not, as a rule, make rational arguments anti-Christian period to date. In this The culture of celebrity has certainly grown about the things that concern them. album, Manson seems to have deliberately exponentially in the last twenty years as Manson’s statements through song lyrics, planned to disrupt the religious discourse actors, actresses, musicians, indeed anyone performance, visual imagery and interviews, of America, which can be a perilous on television becomes famous, a celebrity. may be fragmentary, contradictory and undertaking. America and Europe may However the American media in particular even incoherent, but it is possible to draw no longer burn witches but the religious has also been responsible for raising serial some themes from what Manson does, discourse is emotional rather than logical killers to the status of celebrities. Serial for Manson sets himself up to interrogate and can give rise to intense responses. killers have been reinvented as mythical some of America’s dearly held ideals Some would argue that, in a post-modern monsters and attention is lavished on about itself. The remainder of the article era, the religious metanarrative has come them: the meticulous recounting of will trace some of these themes through to an end. It does not dominate public their crimes, the building of ‘fan clubs’, Manson’s seven albums to date. life in Britain in the way it used to, but the constant recasting of them as evil there are areas of America where it most geniuses in TV series and fi lms that are Portrait of an American Family certainly does. The choice therefore to based on their lives and crimes. Up until (1994) & Smells Like Children (1995) title an album Antichrist Superstar was 2001 serial killer related memorabilia In his fi rst two albums, it can be argued, a provocative challenge to that world could be auctioned on E-Bay, although Manson was a ‘shock jock’, an angry young perspective. the company eventually banned this trade man, a rebellious teenager amongst other after mounting criticism. Charles Manson rebellious teenagers, but he seems to have Manson’s avowed distrust and dislike of is perhaps the most notorious serial killer had a clearer than average understanding mainstream Christianity probably has its of them all. of what he was out to achieve. He said: roots in his education at a private Christian “I wanted to become what adults feared school in Ohio, where, if his biography Long most. Marilyn Manson is the harvest of Hard Road Out of Hell is to be believed,
media education journal 42 25 the children were regularly subjected to However, in typical Manson style, he of Fascism, a problematic aesthetic to explicit seminars on the impending arrival decided to use this to his advantage: raise under any circumstances. Manson of the Antichrist, and the effects they could Mechanical Animals was an album about deliberately employs what could be called subsequently expect. Manson says he still a decadent rock star so anaesthetised by an ‘iconography of outrage’ to make his has nightmares about it. Additionally, in drugs and obsessive fan adulation that points because there can be little doubt 1994, Manson met and was impressed he’s almost entirely lost contact with that it is outrageous to reference so by Anton LaVey, dubbed the ‘Black Pope’ reality. Perhaps in reference to Nic Roeg’s blatantly in a popular music context the who was head of the Church of Satan. 1976 fi lm Man Who Fell to Earth, (starring imagery of the Third Reich which killed (LaVey died in 1997.) However, Manson David Bowie) he is also an alien, and an 5 million Jews in its ‘fi nal solution’, but has consistently avoided defi nitively androgynous alien at that. Manson is prepared to argue the point. stating one way or another whether he is a practising Satanist or not. Even his This album certainly discusses gender He says over and over in different ways biography says “I’m not and never have identity, both visually and lyrically, but “It’s essential to be extreme in order for been a spokesperson for Satanism. It’s drugs are clearly the pre-eminent concern the reaction to be extreme. I provoke simply a part of what I believe in, along of the album, with songs titles including people because art’s meant to be a with Dr Seuss, Dr Hook, Nietzsche and the ‘The Dope Show’, ‘I Don’t Like the Drugs question mark.” (Observer 2003). Speaking Bible” (Manson and Strauss 1998:164). A But the Drugs Like Me’, and ‘Coma White’, in 1997, Manson said, “We perform the typically baroque collection of infl uences. and the sleeve work heavily featuring pills song Antichrist Superstar on a podium, and hypodermics. In ‘Long Hard Road Out with banners and it’s a kind of sarcastic As this quote suggests, Manson’s use of of Hell’, Manson, playfully, includes a list Nuremberg/TV evangelist thing. We’re Antichrist imagery in his lyrics, which of rules to help the reader decide whether trying to say, it’s all stupidity. In the way is extensive on the album Antichrist they are an addict, adding that although he people react, there’s not much difference Superstar owes far more to the philosopher uses drugs, he is not an addict. Then again, between the Marilyn Manson audience, Nietzsche and his idea of the übermensch with typical irony, Manson goes on to point a Nazi rally and a Christian revivalist or superman, than to LaVey, though out how many of his own rules he’s broken! meeting” (Weiner 2000:35). In the same perhaps the two are not unrelated. There The impression from more recent interviews interview he said, “The Fascist theme’s a is undoubtedly a Nietzschean perspective is that his ‘drug’ of choice is absinthe and very complicated part of the performance,” in much of Manson’s work, one which has just launched his own brand called says Manson. “I’m satirising the fascism of seeks to valorise ‘authenticity’ and ‘Mansinthe’. politics, of religion, and most importantly individual thought, rather than learned the fascism of rock and roll. Whether conventionality. In this scheme, the Manson talks about drugs with a frankness people realise that, or simply buzzing (sic) übermensch is a person “not bound by that is frankly alarming to conservative off the spectacle isn’t my concern . . . we’re convention, (but rather) responsible for the America, (and Britain) where drugs are the polar opposite of Nazism, we would be creation of his own character, beliefs and more usually depicted as the enemy, the fi rst to be destroyed by it, and we’re values” (Robinson 1999). leading otherwise ‘normal’ people into a using the imagery against itself. Words spiralling hell of addiction and inevitable and symbolism are only as powerful as you Manson speaks against the kind of death. This view of drugs is backed up with make them.” (Weiner 2000:35-36). evangelical fervour favoured by certain a fi rm ‘just say no’ message in the media. sectors of Christianity, partly because Manson upsets this discourse of prohibition Manson is treading in delicate territory he sees it as pure hypocrisy, but, at the and self control by discussing drug use and here for if audiences do not detect the same time, he has suggested on more openly admitting the highs as well as the post-modern ‘quoting’ and irony which is than one occasion that he is not opposed lows. apparently his intention, then such imagery to Christianity. One website suggests can look very much like glorifi cation. Stuart that although this album may sound So in his albums up till 1998, Manson Hall’s encoding/decoding model is useful anti-Christian, Manson does not hate managed to upset ‘white picket fence’ in this context for communication is rarely Christianity, rather he “frequently questions America and outrage evangelical Christian a linear, straight-forward transaction and common Christian beliefs and practices to America by openly talking about the however much Manson might insist that help us make our own decisions in regard Antichrist, glorifi ed gender bending and irony is his preferred meaning here, it is to our beliefs” (www.mansonusa.com). The drug use, but this was far from the end of no guarantee that it will be read as such. lyrics of the title song ‘Antichrist Superstar’ his controversial musical statement. The However, Manson, from his Nietzschean are interesting in this respect: “I can’t next album Holywood (2000) seemed to perspective, where the individual is believe in the things that don’t believe in have many references, however oblique, responsible for themselves and not to me. Now it’s your turn to see misanthropy. to the Columbine shootings in songs like convention or ‘herd morality’, is not Anti people now you’ve gone too far. Here’s Disposable Teens, The Nobodies, Count to prepared to take the blame for how fans (or your Antichrist Superstar.” Thus suggesting Six and Die, but there was another strong critics) might read his work. An interesting that ‘the crowd’ of believers, or fans, gets theme running through both Holywood and and possibly dubious moral distinction in what it demands and should thus bear any The Golden Age of the Grotesque (2003), this particularly context. responsibility. his sixth album, which makes it worth discussing the two together. The Golden Age of the Grotesque seemed Mechanical Animals (1998) to take a little step back from the imagery By the end of the Antichrist Superstar Holywood (2000) & The Golden Age of Nazism itself and explore the art of pre- tour, Manson admitted that he was at the of the Grotesque (2003) war Berlin, the Weimar period in Germany limits of his strength. His drug use appears In these two albums, Manson brings to the as it’s usually called, which was both a to have been getting out of hand, and he fore an element that had already appeared period of extreme economic hardship (as was emotionally and physically exhausted. in Antichrist Superstar – the aesthetic Germany struggled with the reparations media education journal 42 26
imposed by Allies at the end of the First (www.mansonusa.com). However, in Manson has been a musician, performer, World War), and, ironically, a period of defending the subject choice for Eat Me, socio-political commentator, painter, fi lm intense artistic and cultural output. When Drink Me, Manson said “My life became director, and also a human being with a speaking about his inspiration for this more of an inspiration to me than the rest personal life. For now, his audience can album, Manson commented: “The art that of the world. I don’t have any concern only wait, with interest, or dread, to see was created during the political upheaval about politics or religion. I don’t even need what comes next. Perhaps it is safest to transformed the spirit of what I was to comment on it anymore. I don’t need leave the last word to Manson himself. On attempting with my record. It’s not about to feel that I have a better explanation the track ‘Mutilation is the Most Sincere going back in time, it’s about bringing back for who I am or what I did on this record” Form of Flattery’ from Eat Me, Drink Me the attitude.” (Observer 2003). The videos (www.mansonusa.com/redcarpetgrave). he sings “The young get less bolder, the for this album certainly seem to visually legends get older, but I stay the same.” reference 1930s Berlin, perhaps by way of However, it should be noted that even Time will tell. Bob Fosse’s 1972 musical Cabaret. this more intimate incarnation of Manson has not been entirely uncontroversial. A Bibliography As always, however, it is a little diffi cult publicly painful divorce from burlesque Baddeley, G. (2000). Dissecting Marilyn to quantify exactly what Manson is trying superstar Dita von Teese and a subsequent Manson. London, Plexus Publishing Ltd to achieve with his music here because he affair with nineteen year old actress Evan Bell, A. & Garrett, P. (eds.) (1999). Approaches seems equally happy to outrage left wing Rachel Wood has ensured that those who to Media Discourse. Oxford, Blackwell. liberals as he is right wing conservatives. expect to be outraged by Manson can still Haralambos, M. (2000). Sociology: Themes The song ‘Use Your Fist and Not Your fi nd something to worry about. The video and Perspectives. London, Harper Collins. Mouth’, from The Golden Age of the for the fi rst single from the album ‘Heart Manson, M. with N. Strauss (1998). Long Grotesque would seem to be the very Shaped Glasses’ (an explicit reference to Hard Road Out of Hell. London, Plexus opposite of the philosophy espoused by the Kubrick’s controversial 1962 fi lm Lolita) Publishing Ltd Liberal Left. To quote from the lyrics – “My features Manson in explicitly erotic scenes Robinson, D. (1999). Nietzsche and hate-pop won’t ever stop. I’m fucking glad with Evan Rachel Wood, as blood rains Postmodernism. Cambridge, Icon Books we’re different. This is my hate-American down upon them. There were rumours Weiner, C. (2000). Marilyn Manson... In His style Hit. This is a black collar song. Put it that the crew working on the video were Own Words. London, Omnibus Press in your middle fi nger and sing along. Use uncomfortable during fi lming and television your fi st and not your mouth” It is probably companies were certainly not happy with Newspaper Sources safest to assume that in 2003, Manson is the video, insisting that these scenes Dingwall, J. (1999). ‘Sick lyrics of Marilyn unable to stand any poorly thought out, be in black and white for TV broadcast. Manson’. The Daily Record, 22nd April 1999. ‘namby pamby’, ‘wishy washy’ stance that Manson commented: “You’re okay with me Ellen, B. (2003). ‘I was kind of a disturbed kid’. doesn’t have the courage of its convictions. driving a car off the cliff and fornicating, The Observer Magazine, 4th May, p.17. but the raining blood is bad? It’s always Gumbel, A. (1999). ‘The misfi ts who killed for In the four years after The Golden Age a new experience learning what people kicks’. The Independent, 22nd April. of the Grotesque, Manson seemed to be hate and love.” (www.mansonusa.com/ McCormick, N. (2007). ‘The lunatic, the lover concentrating on the visual arts through redcarpetgrave). and the vampire’. The Daily Telegraph, 2nd painting and fi lm projects (Phantasmagoria: June. The Visions of Lewis Carroll is currently in Conclusion Milner, M. (2003). ‘US revenue fall punctures principle photography), rather than being Manson is an interesting artist who may be Vivendi’s $14bn sale hopes’. The Guardian, 1st interested in music, but in June 2007 came an authentic voice of counter-hegemony. August. his seventh album, Eat Me, Drink Me. He can hardly be considered the devil incarnate however much he might upset Online Sources Eat Me, Drink Me (2007) the discourses of American society: the Author unattributed (fan posting) (2007). True to form, Eat Me, Drink Me, seems to family, religion, drugs, gender identity, www.rollingstone.com, accessed 30th April have created outrage amongst some critics political extremism, racism, decadence Harris, C. (2007). ‘Marilyn Manson reveals and fans, but for thoroughly different – Manson’s own discourse has intersected he came close to suicide’, www.mtv.com, reasons to his previous work. An article with them all. Ultimately, however, it is accessed 28th August. from MTV.com stated: “For the fi rst time diffi cult to sum up what Manson might Weiderhorn, J. (2003). ‘The Argument’, in Manson’s career, he has written songs be about, but perhaps that is the point. www.mtv.com, accessed 8th July. not about ideas, issues or his own beliefs, In 2003 he said “… if America represents www.mansonusa.com, accessed 28th August but about himself – a personal diary, if freedom and democracy, then, as an artist, 2007 you will, spread out across eleven tracks” I can stand up and be dangerous and Interview transcript, www.mansonusa.com/ (Harris 2007). However, according to outspoken. I can create art that tests that redcarpetgrave, accessed 16th August 2007. one disappointed fan posting on Rolling democracy is working properly.” (Observer Stone’s website, “No political criticisms, 2003). In 2007 he said: “I had always Filmography no Satanism, no sadism, no . . . Manson.” used music, in a strange way, to defi ne Bowling for Columbine (2002). Dir. Michael (www.rollingstone.com). Ironically, this myself as a person, but I had done it as Moore, Alliance Atlantis Communications. time around, people were outraged by an armour or barrier. This record really the fact that they had not been outraged defi nes me as a person because I had just Notes by Manson’s album! Even in 1997, let things out that normally I didn’t know 1 For more on these ideas see Bell, A. & however, Manson had been aware of were supposed to go into song-writing.” Garrett, P. (eds.) (1999). Approaches to this possibility, saying in one interview, (www.mansonusa.com/redcarpetgrave). Media Discourse. Oxford, Blackwell and “sometimes I think the most shocking thing Haralambos, M. (2000). Sociology: Themes I could do would be to behave politely.” and Perspectives. London, Harper Collins.
media education journal 42 27
Gillo Pontecorvo and Film Studies Concepts
Keith Withall
illo Pontecorvo, the Italian fi lm a member of the Italian Communist Movement in the city of Algiers in the Gdirector, died on October 12th 2006. Party. After the war he returned to late 1950s, as they struggled to drive the He was famous for a number of political photojournalism. He also was struck by French colonialist from their land. fi lms, most notably the classic 1966 The the rise of the cinematic movement known Battle of Algiers. This dramatisation of as Neorealism. The key fi lm infl uence was Queimada is set on an imaginary events from the War of Liberation waged Rossellini’s Paisà. He started fi lmmaking Portuguese Island in the mid-C19th. in Algeria against the French occupation with a 16-mm camera, shooting short However, the story is developed from has remained a key fi lm for both admirers documentaries. He then worked as an actual historical characters. There is and critics. In the late 1960s French assistant director on several fi lms. In the Toussaint L’Ouverture, the leader of the fi lmmakers like Louis Malle campaigned mid-1950s he left the Communist Party, great successful slave rebellion on San to overturn a French government ban part of a fairly large exodus occasioned Domingo (now Haiti) at the turn of the on the fi lm. In the 1970s the radical by the public debates over Stalin and the 18th and 19th centuries. And William Black Panthers in their struggle against actions of the then current leadership Walker, a US adventurer, closely tied to the reactionary US administrations saw the in Eastern Europe. Pontecorvo directed US capitalist Vanderbilt, who invaded and fi lm as an inspiration and a lesson. In his fi rst feature in 1957, La Grande ruled Nicaragua in the 1850s. 2003 it was screened by the Pentagon in Strada Azzura (The Wide Blue Road). He order to learn lesson in how to combat the then made a series of fi lms scripted by Ogro deals with the campaign by ETA perceived enemies of US ‘freedoms’. the Italian writer Franco Solinas: Kapó against the Franco regime in the 1970s (1959), The Battle of Algiers, (1966), and and the assassination of Luis Carrero Pontecorvo is a key fi lmmaker of the Queimada (Burn, 1968). Subsequently he Blanco, the Prime Minister, in 1973. second half of the 20th century, one made one last feature Ogro (Operation However, in Italy it became caught up whose infl uence has been acknowledged Ogro 1979) and then two short in the arguments and confl icts about by directors in the Art Film world like documentary fi lms. From 1992 he was terrorist activities in that country, Malle; by mainstream directors like director of the Venice Film Festival. including the activities of the Red Brigade Oliver Stone; and by fi lmmakers in anti- and the death of Aldo Moro. A new ending colonial struggles. Rather than add to the The Wide Blue Road, stars YvesYves Montand was inserted. numerous obituaries and appreciation I who plays a poor fi sherman who illicitly thought it would be interesting to apply uses dynamite to catch fi sh. His activities Political fi lm some key and commonly used concepts dramatise a confl ict between his This is one of the most common adjectives from Film Studies to Pontecorvo and his individualist actions and the organised used to describe Pontecorvo’s fi lms. In fi lms. Interesting, that is, to see what light fi sherman who attempt to use collective Politics and Film (Furhammar and Isaksson, they shed on the fi lmmaker and the fi lms: action to improve their lot. Franco Solinas 1971) the authors note that “cinema does and interesting to see what light is shed developed the story from his own novel. not exist in a sublime state, untouched by on the concepts themselves. the world: it also has a political content, Kapó is set in a Nazi concentration camp, whether conscious or unconscious, hidden Biographical context one of the earliest features on this topic. or overt.” (Preface). They then focus on Pontecorvo was born into a bourgeois It stars the Hollywood actress Susan ‘movies that have a clear political purpose’. Jewish family on November 19th 1919. Strasberg, but the fi lm was shot in black Pontecorvo’s fi lms are clearly political in After University he became a tennis and white and had a documentary feel in this latter sense. All his main features deal player on European circuits and then many sequences. with issues relating to the state and/or took up photojournalism. However, in the social confl icts. They all offer a defi nite 1930s he became involved in anti-fascist The Battle of Algiers reconstructs from the stance on the characters and their actions, activities. During World War II he fought memories of a participant, Saadi Yacef, and this stance falls in the political in the partisan movement and became the actions by the Algerian Independence area usually described as ‘leftist’. These media education journal 42 28
characteristics are most clearly discernible women, the role of Islam or the different the use of documentary techniques, non- in The Battle of Algiers where the confl ictict tendencies within the FLN. professional actors and the importance is between the forces of the occupying of music. In both The Battle of Algiers and state France, and the embryonic Queimada the key protagonist is a state of the movement for Algerian non-professional. And the musical Independence. There are many themes that accompany them are an ways in which the fi lm signals it important component in the impact support for the forces of liberation, of the fi lms. but notably in the end sequence, where the seemingly spontaneous However, using ‘auteur’ overlooks the demonstrations by Algerians signal contributions of other fi lmmakers. the arrival of a new order. Pontecorvo’s main features have all been scripted by Franco Solinas. There are a number of fi lms that He shares a left-wing political deal with the events in North stance with Pontecorvo. And in the Africa during this period. The Lost case of The Battle of Algiers both Command (Columbia 1966) follows were infl uenced and bought to the French paratroopers in action in Pontecorvo (sitting right) on the set of Queimada production ideas from Franz Fanon. Algeria. Whilst it has a vague anti- And the fi lms made with Pontecorvo war sentiment, there is no sense of the Pontecorvo’s next fi lm Queimada is have themes which appear in the scripts politics of either French colonialism or closer to analytical propaganda. The fi lm of Solinas for other fi lmmakers. This Algerian resistance. The Battle of Algiers is structured so that William Walker is particularly apparent in the central focuses closely on both, offering key (played by Marlon Brando) has key opposition in both The Battle of Algiers scenes where the participants analyse scenes where the politics of the different and Queimada between two main their values and their actions. forces are explored. In a memorable protagonists – Ali La Pointe and Colonel scene set in a brothel Walker uses the Mathieu, Jose Dolores and William Walker. Jean-Luc Godard offered a rather different idea of prostitution versus marriage as a A number of Pontecorvo’s fi lms have had defi nition for this type of fi lm, ‘making metaphor for the change from colonialism music composed by Ennio Morricone. The fi lms politically’. Pontecorvo’s production to neo-colonialism. Battle of Algiers and Queimada have what work has varied, using both Hollywood are probably Morricone’s best fi lm scores, stars and fi nance for some fi lms, like Kapó The common feature of these two fi lms which powerfully support the overall and Queimada. But both those fi lms also is the tendency to a dispassionate stance of the fi lms. developed out of research into historical stance. Whilst both fi lms clearly endorse events. And The Battle of Algiers stands the liberation struggle, they are not The Battle of Algiers, in particular, raises out in this way, with the fi lm coming out dramatised in the heroic mode common another question. The fi lm’s story is extensive research involving both Algerian in war fi lms. Pontecorvo allows both sides actually taken from a memoir by Saadi and French participants. One aspect that in the confl ict a clear voice; and both Yacef, who was also co-producer. The makes it Pontecorvo’s most powerful fi lm sides are involved in positive and negative script was developed out of interviews is the sense of an Algerian voice that is actions. with participants, on both sides. dramatised in the fi lm. Pontecorvo had originally intended to Auteur make a fi lm with a central European Propaganda. A number of critics have explicitly character, a photojournalist. It would seem Politics and Film comments on ‘the cinema labelled Pontecorvo an auteur. The term the process of development was important as a weapon of propaganda’. The defi nition was bought into fi lm studies by critics’ in the form and meaning of the fi nal fi lm. suggests a common use of the phrase, to associated with the Nouvelle Vague. It has describe artwork that present a particular had various meanings, but centrally refers Stardom point of view. Such a description tends to to fi lmmakers in whose work thematic and Pontecorvo frequently uses non- cast critics and audiences in the role of stylistic patterns can be identifi ed. Picked professional actors in his fi lms, but he either supporter or opponent. In Soviet Art up by the Industry, it has acquired an also uses stars, including major Hollywood propaganda had a different sense, being another sense as a ‘star fi lmmaker’. Thus fi gures. Pontecorvo’s wants to be different contrasted with agitation: the former the term is often applied to the fi rst-time from the mainstream fi lm, but at the offering analysis, the latter emotional director, where clearly no patterns can be same time to capture its audience. "It engagement observed. (also) seems to me that to renounce fi lms that are made for the normal market in This distinction is useful for Pontecorvo’s The star sense applies to Pontecorvo in the normal way – narrative, dramatic, fi lms; they tend to have both an agitation the discourse of Art Cinema. He is clearly etc – to consider them not useful is a and propaganda function. The Battle of something of a star director, with frequent luxury of the rich, of people probably not Algiers is predominantly agitation. Whilst references in writings, and with his major really interested in political results . . ." the values of the participants are clearly fi lm frequently revived. A number have (Pontecorvo, 1984). The only one of his presented, the underlying social and won prestigious awards. Auteur would also fi lms not to feature a major star is The political strands are not developed in to appear to apply in a pattern of themes; Battle of Algiers. The Wide Blue Road stars the same degree. Thus critics have pointed the political themes are clearly present in Yves Montand: Kapó Susan Strasberg from out how the fi lm does not explore aspects all of Pontecorvo’s fi lms. And stylistically Hollywood: Queimada Marlon Brando: and of the struggle – including the position of there are also recurring features, including Ogro Gian Maria Volonte, a major Italian
media education journal 42 29 star. It should be added though that the all of the characteristics. This also applies graphic construction within the mise- stars tend to be people with an interest in to Pontecorvo’s fi lms. His work, like that en-scene and framing to draw attention politics, true of both Montand and Brando, of other Neorealist fi lmmakers, retains to character traits. In both The Battle who have also featured in other political certain key elements of style and structure of Algiers and Queimada the watching fi lms and made public political statements. from the typical mainstream fi lm, but colonialists’ viewpoint is emphasised with And Volonte is distinguished by the many creates a very different sense of character the characters seen through a monocular political roles he has played, especially in and place, which fi ts with the focus on or binocular frame. the fi lms of Francesco Rosi. classes and individuals usually found on only at the periphery of the entertainment Joan Mellon in her Filmguide to the Battle The star presence has been important in fi lm. of Algiers draws attention to another gaining the interest and fi nancial input aspect of this style, ‘graphic confl ict’, from major players in the fi lm industry. Wood later adds that Neorealist fi lms also as we see the French soldiers converge They provide some sort of guarantor for use the conventions of melodrama. In its on the Casbah to fi nally capture Ali La the investment. The one fi lm where stars original sense of music and drama this is Pointe. The Battle of Algiers has a number are a absent, The Battle of Algiers, was certainly applicable to Pontecorvo. Music of sequences which emphasize the visual supported by an indigenous North African is central to his fi lms and in fact he was organization of forces, both French and fi lm company, and involved Pontecorvo in always involved in the composition of Algerian. This develops a set of rhythms strenuous fund raising efforts. the scores. In both The Battle of Algiers that reinforce the functions and situation The stars have affected the production and Queimada recurring musical motifs of characters for the audience. style of Pontecorvo. The most notable are associated both with key characters problems were during the fi lming of and the masses. The emotional and Another aspect of visual style favored by Queimada, where the initially sympathetic agitational effect in these fi lms relies on both Soviet fi lmmakers and Pontecorvo Brando fell out fairly publicly with the contribution of this music. is ‘typage’, the use of visual types for Pontecorvo. The stars also seem to representation. In The Battle of Algiers effect the fi lm’s content. Kapó features one character who fi tted Pontecorvo’s a somewhat anachronistic love plot. image, the Algerian informant, victim of It also, like The Wide Blue Road and torture, in the opening sequence, had to Queimada, closes with the death of the be allowed out of jail so as to appear in star protagonist. Ogro has a changed front of the camera. In Queimada Evaristo ending with the death of a hard-line ETA Marques, who had never acted before, member and the suggestion of an ending was selected by Pontecorvo to embody the for violent tactics. Such closure is missing The three women who enter the French conceived character of Jose Dolores. from The Battle of Algiers, where the fi lm quarter to plant bombs in Battle of ends on the people as hero, and with a Algiers There are strong parallels in content fairly open resolution. between Pontecorvo’s fi lms and the Soviet fi lmmakers. And it is clear that he found Neorealism Montage a number of techniques in their work that Pontecorvo has stated the impact that The Italian Neorealists were infl uenced enabled him to point and present the Rossellini's Paisa had on him. And he by Soviet Montage, and this can also content in his own fi lms. started fi lmmaking in the period when be seen in the work of Pontecorvo. This the Neorealist movement was at its not primarily the fast and discontinuous Third Cinema most successful and infl uential. Mary editing associated with fi lms like The term appeared in a Manifesto Wood (1996) quotes “ ‘Ten Points of Battleship Potemkin. In fact, in certain written by Fernando Solanas and Neorealism’ – (1) a message; (2) topical sequences Pontecorvo does uses fast Octavio Getino entitled ‘Towards a Third script inspired by concrete events – great cutting, often with unconventional cuts, Cinema’. Summarising their argument: historical and social issues are tackled even jump cuts. This is probably less we have First Cinema…”aimed at selling from the point of view of the ‘common noticeable today when the commercial movie-life, reality as it is conceived by people’; (3) a sense of detail as a means of fi lm shot has become considerably shorter the ruling class”. Second cinema is “so- authentication; (4) a sense of the masses than in classic Hollywood. Pontecorvo called ‘author’s cinema’ “ . . . where “the and the ability to manipulate them in also uses cuts that work rather like fi lm-maker be free to express himself.” front of the camera; (5) realism; (6) the Kuleshov’s famous experiment, though And Third Cinema is “making fi lms that truth of actors, often non-professional: strictly speaking they do not introduce directly and explicitly set out to fi ght the (7) the truth of lighting; (8) the truth of material from outside the established System.” One of the strongest infl uences décor and the refusal of the studio; (9) narrative. A notable example would be in on this Manifesto is Frantz Fanon, who photography, reminiscent of the reportage The Battle of Algiers, after the explosions was involved in the Algerian War of style stressing the impression of truth: (10) in the European City set off by the FLN. Independence and the wider liberation an extremely free camera, its unrestricted As the bodies are removed from the struggles of the period. Fanon described movements resulting from the use of wreckage to the strains of ‘sacred’ music a series of phases which characterised postsynchronization.” (Wood, 1996). a sudden edit shows us the arrival of artistic and intellectual work, and the the Paratroopers and their rapturous ‘third phase’ was the ‘fi ghting phase’, These are all characteristics that can be welcome by the European settlers. which offered ‘a fi ghting literature, a seen in Pontecorvo’s fi lms, most especially Pontecorvo is clearly establishing a social revolutionary literature, and a national The Battle of Algiers. Wood makes the relationship in the manner developed by literature.” (For literature read art and/or point that few Neorealist fi lms showed Eisenstein. Like Eisenstein he also uses culture). media education journal 42 30
At least two of Pontecorvo’s fi lms would other writers) have also stressed the the bloody contest, and when mainstream appear to aim at the ‘fi ghting’ function, importance of such national culture giving fi lm industry was still turning out The Battle of Algiers and Queimada. ‘voice’ to those oppressed people. This is travesties like The Lost Command or The However, both are problematic. Whilst, as something that The Battle of Algiers does Green Berets: Queimada deals with slavery suggested above, Pontecorvo’s work does only partially, and which Queimada only long before Roots, and explicitly addresses not simply fi t into the auteur category, addresses indirectly. the economics of that industry: and Ogro his fi lms do posses a number of ‘authorial’ deals with a topic, the use of political characteristics. In particular Pontecorvo’s I would suggest that Pontecorvo’s most violence within western Europe, which control over the fi lm is consistent with radical fi lm, The Battle of Algiers, is in fact even now is rarely addressed. what Solanas and Getino terms ‘’author’s a transitional fi lm, falling in the spaces cinema’ i.e. Second Cinema. between the second and third cinema. In So Gillo Pontecorvo, with his collaborators, 1966 Third Cinema was still a category made a small but immensely rich and There are other criticisms. Mike Wayne being forged among radical fi lmmakers challenging portfolio of fi lms. They offer (2001) has an extensive critique of The in oppressed countries, the fi lms mainly not just recreated history, but political Battle of Algiers. He appears to accept the came later. In fact, the Algerians saw the comment. Moreover, they offer this within judgements of some liberal critics that the production not just as a way of recording the highest quality of fi lm form and style. fi lm treats the Algerian and the French their struggle but as an opportunity I have watched The Battle of Algiers and forces even-handedly. This is something to develop indigenous cinematic skills. Queimada on a number of occasions. I still that I fi nd to be a serious misreading of Algerian personnel were trained in the fi nd them intellectually and emotionally the fi lm. More substantially he argues that craft of fi lm on Pontecorvo’s production. stimulating. Pontecorvo also won a the fi lm offers only a limited refl ection Thus a step towards an indigenous fi lm number of awards for his fi lms, but his of the ideas of Fanon on the Liberation culture ‘that could fi ght the system’. meaningful legacy is these few great Struggle. He also argues that the fi lm fails movies. to offer serious analysis on the historical, Conclusion political and class aspects of the Algerian Another critical point made by Mike References struggle. These are valid criticisms. He Wayne refers to a quote by a Virginia Celli, Carlo (2005) Gillo Pontecorvo From does not refer to propaganda or agitation, Horwell, “I know an Army offi cer who Resistance to Terrorism, Scarecrow Press. but would seem (correctly) to be criticising screened a video of The Battle of Algiers Furhammer, Leif + Isaksson, Folke 1971. the fi lm for being merely agitational. to his lads in Northern Ireland almost as Politics and Film, Studio Vista. Whether that devalues it as Third Cinema a training fi lm:” Wayne comments on ‘an McArthur, Colin (1976) ‘Days of Hope’, is debatable. Agitation has its place: unhelpful ambiguity or loss of analytical Screen Vol. 16, No 4. notably in Soviet Cinema, where Montage power.” But this comment ignores the Mellon, Joan (1973) Filmguide to The followed on from the early ‘agitki’, context of the screening. Sergei Eisenstein Battle of Algiers, Indiana University Press predominantly agitational fi lms. And wrote tellingly, in his comments on Bloomington and London . Out of print, indeed, where such agitational material Battleship Potemkin, regarding the however there are copies in the British continued during the period of Montage importance of the class context for Library and the BFI Library. masterpieces. viewing his fi lm. Colin McArthur made a Wayne, Mike (2001) Political Film The parallel point in an article defending Ken Dialectics of Third Cinema, Pluto. There is another aspect to this issue. Loach’s Days of Hope from the attacks Wood, Mary 1996. ‘Bicycle Thieves – a Wayne includes in Third Cinema fi lms in the pages of Screen. It seems to be Neorealist fi lm?’ in itp Film Reader I, in the from both the colonising states and that the context of Pontecorvo’s fi lms is picture 1996. the colonised, as long as they ‘fi ght the extremely important. The categories that I The Wide Blue Road, The Battle of Algiers system’. This is certainly one reading found have used and discussed are all related to and Queimada are all available on DVD via in the Manifesto. However, Solanas and reception, to people as viewers, audiences the Internet. Getino state clearly at the opening their and critics. Thus the responses of the interest in ‘fi lms of de-colonisation’. And squaddies in northern Ireland, of the Black There are Study Notes on The Battle of both Fanon, and Mao Tse Tung another Panthers or the Pentagon suits in the USA, Algiers by the author from in the picture important infl uence on the Manifesto, probably tell us more about their situation (www.itpmag.demon.co.uk/Publications/ make a clear distinction between the anti- than they tell us about Pontecorvo’s most fi lmnotes.html) colonial struggle among oppressed peoples famous fi lm. I encountered two reviews and the class struggle within colonising where the critic had not registered that states. This is not a geographic distinction it is the French who fi rst use bombs to (as Wayne suggests) but a distinction target civilians, the actual course of the between the fundamental situation in historical events. which people fi nd themselves. The western capitalist states exploit their own working If we consider Pontecorvo’s feature fi lms classes: the states colonised by the west in relation to their contemporary cultures: are both exploited and oppressed. Hence The Wide Blue Road has an unusually Fanon’s insistence on ‘national culture’ overt political message for a Neorealist in the anti-colonial struggle, whereas at fi lm: Kapó deals with the Nazi holocaust home in the states involved in colonial and at a time when cinema, and the other neo-colonial exploitation and oppression popular media, treated this as a no go internationalist rather than nationalist area: The Battle of Algiers is a paean to the political culture is required. Fanon (and Liberation struggle only a few years after
media education journal 42 31
media education journal 42 32
Teaching Empire of the Sun
Liz Roberts
ome twenty years ago I chose Empire extracts for study and additional material Defeated and subjugated by the Japanese, Sof the Sun (1984), a newly published on suggested approaches to audience they are also treated as a close-to- novel by J G Ballard, as a study text for and institution for those offering the SQA slave populace by the Europeans in the my Higher English students. It was a “set National Qualifi cations in Media Studies. protected territory. text” (a feature of the examination at the time) selected by the then Scottish The four minute opening sequence begins Behind the imposing waterfront is a Examinations Board, and my group of with a black screen. Scrolling up over it pock-marked, rain soaked street of low, relatively mature further education are the words: “In 1941 China and Japan drab houses with, at its end, the twin students seemed to enjoy and benefi t from had been in a state of undeclared war spires of the Anglican Cathedral. The close study of a contemporary novel. Then, for 4 years . . . ” A sombre but neutral RP camera follows the path of an equally just as we were completing the course, the male voice (note English not American) incongruous gleaming limousine along Spielberg fi lm was released. Excuse for a reads aloud the words on the screen. the street taking us to the cathedral, class visit to the cinema! On the whole, As the words, in white script over the while on the soundtrack the solo voice the class enjoyed the fi lm but, immersed black screen, move upwards some dark continues the mysterious, haunting song, as they were in the novel and the world red letters emerge behind them from the joined occasionally by the choir. Now the it had created in their imagination, it was black, gradually revealing the much larger camera is at the top of the spires tilting often more a case of identifying changes, lettering of Empire of the Sun, which downwards to a medium close-up shot omissions and disappointments than goes from dark red to gold. Beneath the of the limousine, the winged emblem of appreciating the fi lm for itself. title is an underlining of barbed wire. a Packard on its bonnet, as a uniformed Light travels along the title from left to Chinese chauffeur polishes its already But the fi lm stayed in my mind, not right, gradually illuminating the word immaculate bodywork. Others, similarly because I was a student or teacher of fi lm, ‘Sun’ while the unseen speaker intones employed, form the backdrop. Then the both of which came later, but because of “ . . . Pearl Harbor.” As the title fades, it camera does a similar tilt from within – its emotional impact and resonance. resembles the opening of the World at the gloom of the cathedral illuminated by War television documentary series, the light from the vast stained glass window, In the intervening years fi lm supplanted atmosphere that of a documentary. On down which our gaze travels to rest on literature as my main area of teaching and the soundtrack we hear a bell, possibly the large religious painting at its base, the academic interest, but neither Spielberg a tramcar, and lapping water. The screen body of the dead Christ. The choir stalls nor Empire of the Sun featured in my returns to black and then we have an are fi lled with young boys, essentially modest repertoire. This was rectifi ed by extreme close-up shot on grey water English schoolboys in blazers, clean, well- my return to Empire of the Sun, both novel with white garlands fl oating from right groomed and all but identical. On their and fi lm, in preparation for recent sessions to left. On the soundtrack is a chorister’s maroon blazers is their school badge with for teachers preparing candidates for the pure voice singing in a foreign language. its Union Jack motif. One boy, the soloist, Film and TV Drama section of the Critical A broken box fl oats after the fl owers, now commands the screen. He loses eye Essay paper in Higher English. Close revealing in an open coffi n a barely visible contact with the choirmaster, his mind analysis of scenes from the fi lm confi rmed corpse. We connect the fl owers with the evidently elsewhere as the choir takes Spielberg in my mind as a suitable case coffi n – these are funeral wreathes, and over and he stops signing. In the opposite for study – a director whose artistically the river is carrying the dead to the sea. stalls the drably uniform Chinese amahs valid fi lms are the result of meticulous An overhead long shot reveals many more watch their charges. The soloist’s amah preparation and whose personal such coffi ns and then the prow of a boat, looks approving, then reproving, sensing immersion in cinema (“Spielberg’s fi lms grey like the water, nudges the coffi ns her charge’s inattention. At the last are ‘about’ cinema before . . . anything aside as a uniformed sailor is coiling ropes moment, the boy (by now identifi ed by the else,” John Baxter, 1996) deepens and on deck. Suddenly, the screen is fi lled with cineliterate audience as a key character) extends the representation of the cinema- a fl ag – a huge, blood-red sun dominates leaves his daydream and comes in on cue. obsessed hero of the novel and fi lm. the screen and then reveals the Shanghai waterfront, the Bund, its tall Western- His voice continues on the soundtrack While the handout appended to this paper style commercial buildings and sampans but it is now non-diegetic as the Packard covers all the bases for the hard-pressed on the river. This rising sun represents travels homeward through streets lined teacher to adapt as appropriate for Japan and the contrast between this with vast European mansions and only particular groups of students, what follows ascendant power and the impoverished a rickshaw to remind us that this is is an opening up of some of the suggested doubly conquered Chinese is establishes. Shanghai. The expressionless amah
media education journal 42 33 and chauffeur sit in front with the boy and the model aircraft which escapes fi lms) – its full reality has still to alone in the back, engrossed in a lurid out of sight. Following it, Jamie’s double confront him American comic book with a uniformed fantasy fi gure (part Thief of Baghdad, part • the irony of a Chinese populace aviator wearing dark glasses on the cover fi ghter ace) is confronted by terrifying viewing a long gone American war as – prefi guring Jamie’s fi rst meeting with reality – a trench full of silent waiting escapism from the real thing Basie and his fl eeting resemblance to this Japanese soldiers. A whistling wind, his • the coincidence of one war victim, hero. As they turn into the driveway of crunching footsteps, the murmurs and Scarlett, being rescued by one All- his opulent home, Jamie sees from the laughter of the soldiers and a threatening American hero, while Jamie’s would- security of the car the Chinese beggar at non-diegetic drumbeat presage danger, be saviour Basie is another opportunist his gate. On the soundtrack, as the car as he walks along the rim of the trench. (like him, Rhett Butler was a war approaches the house, the song fades Ludicrous in his double disguise (aviator profi teer) on a less heroic scale out to be replaced by piano music. The glasses and pantaloons), Jamie comes face • the homage paid to a late-20th servants are lined up at the door, while to face with real danger in the form a fully century director, Spielberg, to the work inside Jamie’s elegant mother is revealed armed Japanese soldier. They confront of a director half a century before. as the pianist, the grand piano covered each other at either extreme of a wide with silver framed photographs, the room angle shot, which accentuates the clash The other extracts for close analysis itself an epitome of the chintzy comfort of the two cultures they represent – the suggested in the notes highlight particular of a wealthy ex-patriate’s home, the decadent post-imperialist Europeans and aspects of Spielberg’s fi lmic technique photographs on the piano now revealed as the ascendant power of Imperial Japan. and teachers may wish to select other younger images of the boy we have just From this predicament Jamie is rescued by sequences. But the approach suggested met. his father in pirate costume and a family by the above close analyses should friend, Mr Maxstead, whose urbanity be followed as an effective way of In this entire sequence there is no is accentuated by his cool English style establishing students’ awareness of the dialogue at all. The only words we hear (immaculate grey suit, eschewing fancy accessible complexity of fi lm language. are those of the beggar and are essentially dress), which he maintains in ragged meaningless to our ears. The words of dignity until the very end. The fi nal scene of the fi lm, The the song are, in fact, in Welsh (although Reunion, also merits close analysis (as this is never explained) but this Cradle The third extract, Jamie/Jim alone and the canny teachers preparing students for Song – “Suo Gan” – becomes increasingly Chinese boy, comes after the Japanese examinations know, opening and closing poignant as the fi lm progresses and hear seizure of the International Settlement scenes are favoured by examiners). This it in different circumstances. This is a and Jamie’s separation from his parents. serves as a kind of coda. We already know mother’s reassurance to her child that Having survived for some time in his that Jim, a boy far removed from the there is nothing to fear, that no harm deserted house, he has decided to try Jamie of the fi lm’s beginning, has survived can come while mother and “holy angels to surrender to the Japanese. Still in his against the odds. But what of the parents, guard your rest.” Indeed, this early Jamie school uniform and pushing his bicycle, whose faces he can no longer remember? is protected, by his race, his status, his he fi nds his offer met by derision and parents and their wealth from the harsh hostility. As he moves from the onscreen The scene opens with a crane shot that realities of life. But this is, as the prologue reality of war-torn Shanghai, we see him zooms in on a vast, bomb-damaged has warned us, the eve of Pearl Harbor, dwarfed by a giant fi lm poster for Gone glasshouse, many of its panes shattered and all will soon change. with the Wind with Chinese text – Atlanta or missing. The camera moves in slowly, not Shanghai is burning here and the enabling us to see through the missing Already established are visual motifs fl eeing fi gures are from the Old South, panes to a scene of children milling about. which will return: the coffi ns on the another civilisation built on slavery and It is reminiscent of the shot in Citizen river will be followed by Jamie’s wooden oppression about to end. Dominating Kane when the camera closes in on the suitcase; the rising sun of the Japanese the refugees is a huge depiction of Clark skylight of the cheap cabaret where Kane’s will become increasingly visible and Gable as Rhett Butler rescuing Scarlett second wife is performing and we see her dominant; life, already established as in his strong arms. The smoke of burning through the skylight. Then the camera is fragile, will be increasingly threatened; Shanghai merges with the pictorial outside the wrought-iron gates leading to while mirrors, wings (angels/planes) smoke and fl ames as Jamie (about to be the ramshackle building and we follow a and other religious iconography will be renamed Jim by Basie) is confronted by a procession of formally dressed Europeans recurrent motifs. Chinese boy in his own version of uniform, led by an army offi cer. Inside the children shabby jeans and aviator jacket. Sensing are marshalled by nurses and the adults We already focalise frequently through danger, but still instinctively polite, Jamie face the children, scanning their ranks for Jamie’s gaze, which extends our asserts his Englishness – “I’m waiting for a familiar face. All the faces are solemn; engagement with him. His point of view my chauffeur”, declining the invitation we hear murmurs of “mum”. Gradually is often ours and we, like him, are as yet to go with the Chinese boy. His survival we recognise Jamie’s parents, plainly ignorant of what is to be his fate. instinct fi nally kicking in, he tries to dressed now in pale neutral clothes, and a escape. His mise en scène established of reverse shot reveals a still near catatonic In the second extract, Dr Lockwood’s Jamie dwarfed by the vast billboard poster Jamie gazing fi xedly ahead. Unaware, Christmas Party, Jamie dressed as the can be analysed to explore a number of his father pushes forward and Jamie half Thief of Baghdad follows the fl ight of his connections: turns, unsure, and then turns away. On model plane and encounters a crashed the soundtrack we hear the voice of the fi ghter. Lowering himself into the cockpit, • an allusion to Jamie’s obsession with innocent chorister of the opening scene, he playacts a dogfi ght between himself war as a form of fi ction (comics and singing the Welsh cradle song, coinciding media education journal 42 34
with his mother’s look in his direction. She novel lacked “a dramatic shape” and “had bomb is a far off light in the sky and their says his name, moves closer, but he stares no satisfactory ending” and withdrew, shining cylinders of food dropped from out of the frame, at nothing. Can this leaving Spielberg to direct the project. planes contain bounty so rich that the possibly he him, can this scarecrow fi gure His choice for to write the screenplay was starving Jim throws it up. be her beautiful boy? His father moves in, Tom Stoppard, whose own father had been solemn, questioning. The camera reveals killed when the ship on which he was Perhaps the deepest and most sentimental Jamie’s face, its sores and shadows, his travelling was torpedoed by the Japanese. belief that the movie audience maintains fi lthy camp clothes. He is hesitant, then is that, despite everything, when the lost reaches out a grimy hand for his mother’s. It was fi lmed in Shanghai in three weeks child fi nds its way home, it is unmarked There are no smiles, no words, as he then of location shooting in Red China, at by what has intervened. Dorothy in The touches her lips and, removing her hat, her Elstree and on location in the UK and in Wizard of Oz has been over the rainbow hair. Her mouth forms “Jamie” soundlessly southern Spain for the camp sequences. only to fi nd “there’s no place like home.” as he reaches out to her, pulling her But the haunted gaze of Jim at the end towards him. They embrace and she rocks Casting involved testing four thousand of the fi lm is that of a child who has lost to and fro, a mother with her baby. The possibles for the part of Jamie/Jim his innocence for ever and for whom there last shot is an extreme close-up of his before deciding on Christian Bale for the may be no safe home. eyes, still wide open, his pupils refl ecting challenging role of a boy who has to age the glass. Then slowly, slowly his eyes four years and change in looks, character Thus the American audience was denied close while the Welsh cradle song plays and personality. Well known faces from its affi rmation of the supremacy of on, now over an extreme long shot of an British fi lm – Leslie Phillips, Nigel Havers, American values and of its deepest exuberant liberated Shanghai, veiled in Miranda Richardson – played the Brits, sentimental beliefs. Their protoganists in smoke from fi recrackers not bombs. Now while John Malkovich and Joe Pantoliano the fi lm are grubby opportunists, while the we are back where began on the Yangtse were the American freebooters, Basie Japanese are not uniformly villainous, and and a boat chugs past a wooden box, and Frank, their characters altered from the viewpoint from which the audience not a coffi n this time but the suitcase Ballard’s originals to give them more see the war is the fl awed, unreliable gaze containing all the memories of Jamie’s lost audience appeal. of a boy. childhood, his blazer, his comics, his Latin primer, on its way to the sea. The screen For commercial reasons, this main In Adventures in the Screen Trade, William fades to black as the last notes of the song audience for the fi lm had to be the mass Goldman asserts that the only reliable die away. American home audience, attracted by truth about the fi lm industry is that Spielberg and by Malkovich’s starring “nobody knows anything” in terms of This is not the ‘happy ever after’ reunion role, and addressed more subtly though which fi lms are going to appeal to the of the sentimental movie but an overt the fi lm’s ideology. While Spielberg paying public. That said, it is the mighty recognition of the terrible price of such had frequently been accused by critics American home market that is the main survival, made more poignant by the of sentimentality, oversimplifi cation, target for Hollywood fi lm makers, and voice of the child long gone. Spielberg’s superfi ciality and those “uplifting, the fi lm’s failure to appeal to that market lack of dialogue in this scene, as in the hopeful conclusions that are a betrayal could well be the main reason for its cool fi rst, affi rms his mastery of the visual of the truth,” perhaps it was the very reception, despite the fact that it grossed techniques of cinema. lack of these that contributed to the $67 million on its initial release. fi lm’s commercial failure. The story of Critics have berated Spielberg for his Jamie/Jim’s survival is not edifying. It is, What follows is a handout issued at “uplifting hopeful conclusions” that are “a in fact, his shedding of the niceties of his sessions for teachers in Aberdeen and at betrayal of the truth”. While there is the cast – sharing, fair play, unselfi shness, the AMES conference in 2007. anticipated reunion at the end of Empire unquestioning patriotism and faith of the Sun, it is a muted and sombre that enable him to survive. Indeed, it is Empire of the Sun resolution to the hero’s quest and perhaps his espousal of the dubious American too close to the truth for comfort. values of Basie and Frank, amoral in their 1. Historical Background exploitation of anyone and anything to By 1937 the Japanese, in their quest to Audience and Institution remain on top, that allows him to become establish an empire, had begun to conquer After The Color Purple (1985), his an honorary American and survive in the the Pacifi c, invading and occupying China, fi rst excursion into the dramatisation camp. Not perhaps the message America including Shanghai, a great international of a literary novel, Spielberg turned wanted to receive! trading city. Shanghai, “the Paris of the his attention to Empire of the Sun. East” or “Ancient Rome with Neon”, had Signifi cantly perhaps, the success until There is also a deep ambiguity in Jamie’s been largely created by people from the then of both director and author had and, indeed, the fi lm’s attitude to the West and, even after its occupation by been in the realm of science fi ction, but Japanese. Since the spectator’s gaze is the Japanese, the wealthy foreigners, Ballard had waited forty years to write his aligned with Jamie’s in his fascination American and European, had diplomatic autobiographical novel and this converged with their rituals, aircraft and heroism security and 35,000 of them lived in the with Spielberg’s desire to make a war in the face of defeat, there is none of International Settlement, isolated from movie. He had initially hoped that David the simple good versus evil dichotomy of the dangers of war behind barbed-wire Lean, director of Bridge on the River Kwai, many war fi lms. If America won the war is barricades. another epic about clashing cultutal the message, then it is a not unmixed one. values (British and Japanese), would direct American aircraft destroy the surrogate In December 1941 the Japanese attacked but Lean eventually decided that the home established in the camp, the atomic the US Pacifi c base of Pearl Harbor and
media education journal 42 35 also seized the International Settlement To accommodate the fi lm’s major him stay alive and be reunited with his in Shanghai, imprisoning its inhabitants in audience, the American domestic market, parents. some thirteen internment camps in which certain changes are made: Basie’s role is many died. emphasised and some of the more dubious (e) The new equilibrium: Jim’s reunion with and sinister aspects of his character in the his parents is in a Shanghai that seems In August 1945 the US Airforce dropped novel are airbrushed out of the picture. almost unaltered – but he, and they, are atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, This allows John Malkovich star billing, an altered. The status quo cannot be restored Japan surrendered and withdrew from important factor in the fi lm’s marketing. and, while the fi nal equilibrium invites China and the international concessions in the audience to share the characters’ Shanghai were restored. 5. The Narrative Structure (Todorov) happiness vicariously, the price is high (a) The fi lm’s opening sequence establishes – Jim’s haunted gaze is that of a boy 2. Setting the equilibrium, the state of balance, who has seen and experienced too much Shanghai, a city dedicated to capitalism, in which the way of life of the wealthy and his suitcase fl oating in the Yangtse was a city of contrasts, a city of 400 night foreigners in Shanghai seems insulated symbolises the loss of his childhood. clubs and a city of beggars, a Chinese city both from the war in Europe and the overlaid with the culture of the wealthy patient Japanese. This is a fragile state The narrative shares characteristics with foreigners who lived there, particularly – it’s the eve of Pearl Harbor – as is 19th and 20th century novels which feature the British and Americans. So Shanghai’s further illustrated by Jim’s brush with the child alone in a hostile or potentially skyline was – and still is – a Western danger at Dr Lockwood’s party. hostile environment, such as Kidnapped, skyline, American movies fi lled the fi lm Treasure Island (whose young hero is screens, American cars – Buicks and (b) Disruption occurs, and the also called Jim), Oliver Twist, Jane Eyre, Packards – pushed their way through the disequilibrium is established, not with Peter Pan (the Lost Boys), Lord of the Flies rickshaws, and the British and American the attack on Pearl Harbor hundreds and even Harry Potter. In each the child/ ex-pats lived in large houses with of miles away but with the Japanese children must navigate without parental swimming pools, optimistic that their way assault on British and American gunboats, guidance. of life would survive. the invasion by Japanese troops and Jim’s separation from his parents in the 6. Characters 3. The Novel (1984) resulting chaos. (a) The British J G Ballard, the Jim/Jamie of the novel, (i) Jim (Jamie) – the indulged only child, waited almost forty years before writing embodiment of the values of a country a fi ctionalised account of his experiences he has never visited, whose combination – “Twenty years to forget, twenty years to of intelligence and naivety, enthusiasm remember.” His biggest decision in writing and curiosity, adaptability and instinct the novel was to isolate the fi ctional Jim for survival allow him to endure and even from his parents: in reality, Ballard and his enjoy his life in the camp. parents were interned in the same camp. Written in the third person but from Jim’s His physical representation is the outward point of view, this is not a grim “survival sign of his changing character and against the odds” novel but is full of situation: unexpected humour and ironies. 1. the immaculate English schoolboy, clean and shining in his uniform of 4. The Film (1987) cap, blazer, school tie and badge with Steven Spielberg’s obsession with World the Union Jack. War II began in his boyhood, when his 2. the dishevelled but still uniformed Jim father, newly returned from the war, fed at large in Shanghai, who loses a shoe his imagination with stories based on his to the Chinese boy and replaces his experiences. school cap with a woollen hat. 3. Jim in the camp three years on, very Empire of the Sun, like Schindler’s List, is dirty, dressed in plundered adult from the point of view of civilians and, Christian Bale as Jim. garments – too big shorts, golf shoes, unlike some of his more sentimental fi lms US fl ying jacket – his white teeth (like ET), is not a celebration of childhood (c) The recognition that a disruption has brown, his skin pitted with sores and but a childhood journey marked by the occurred: Jim walks home and lives in the his hair fi lthy and matted. death of innocence. deserted house. When food runs out he returns to the city, accepting the fact that (ii) Jim’s parents – archetypal English ex- The fi lm is true to the young Jim’s his parents will not now return, and tries pats, glamorous mother/handsome father; love of all things American, from the to surrender to the Japanese. we never see their prison camp selves. gleaming limousine he rides in and the comics he reads in his life before the (d) The disequilibrium (or attempt to (iii) Mr Maxted – raffi sh Englishman Japanese invasion to his liaison with repair the disruption) occupies all but the abroad; even in the camp he wears an Basie, the American merchant seaman, his fi nal minutes of the fi lm – Jim’s efforts approximation of his civilian clothes. fascination with both the Americans in the to survive alone, his realisation that the camp and the American planes dropping “name of the game” is survival and his (iv) Dr Rawlins – the camp’s medical supplies – the B29s, the Superfortresses. association with anyone he hopes will help offi cer, embodiment of the best Boys’ media education journal 42 36
Own Paper characteristics, defender and Jim’s adversary when the latter is alone in (e) The Kamikaze pilots (1.44.32 – 1.47.49) educator of Jim, testing his Latin verbs to Shanghai. The visual metaphor of the red sun rising keep Jim sane. is ironic – this is the end of the war and 7. Key Scenes for Analysis (timings based Japan’s defeat is imminent (the dawn (v) Mr and Mrs Victor – faded, defeated on DVD) sky = the Japanese fl ag). The montage English couple, Jim’s reluctant room- (a) Opening sequence (0.00.00 – 0.04.00) sequence, cutting between Jim and the mates in the camp, who make no effort This four minute sequence begins, after other camp residents, emphasises the gulf to step into the parental role but are the prologue, with a visual representation between their adult realisation of the indifferent to him. of the fi rst paragraph of the novel: “Wars situation and his limited perception and came early to Shanghai, overtaking each identifi cation with the young pilots. Music The representation of the British in the other like the tides that raced up the from the opening sequence is used as an camp is of a group clinging to the vestiges Yangtse and returned to this gaudy city effective leitmotif. of their old lives but generally dispirited all the coffi ns cast adrift from the funeral and passive. piers of the Chinese Bund.” Without (f) The long march (1.59.20 – 1.59.55) dialogue, but with effective use of diegetic In his fi rst adult act Jim abandons his (b) The Americans music, setting and character and situation suitcase containing the relics of his school (i) Basie – US merchant seaman, a are established (through the interaction days (his blazer, Latin primer, war comics). consummate survivor who exploits Jim for of the codes) and the equilibrium of the It’s the symbolic end both of his childhood his own ends. His energy, absence of moral narrative is created. and the security of the camp. Rendered scruples and entrepreneurial zeal fascinate in silhouette, his tattered profi le stark Jim, who aids him in running his business against the glittering water, this is a Jim empire – a trading network in the camp. to whom life doesn’t mean much any more. Music echoes ripples on water. Basie is quite prepared to send Jim into a potential minefi eld to set traps for (g) The Olympic Stadium (2.01.42 never-seen pheasants, but his fi nal act is – 2.01.55) to throw Jim a Hershey bar – a symbolic This is the end of the long march and gesture of generosity, a sort of kindness. the extreme long shot shows the stadium like a medieval fortress. Inside are the (ii) Frank – Basie’s sinister sidekick, looted possessions of the prisoners surviving on his wits like Basie, for whom (b) Dr Lockwood’s Christmas party (0.17.11 – cars, chandeliers, statuary, ornate Jim is a kind of currency. – 0.18.41) furniture, pianos. The camera tracks Jim The absurd excesses of the British ex- as he moves through, until his gaze fi nds The representation of the Americans in the pats are accentuated by the fancy dress, the once gleaming bird emblem on the camp is of a group who have style, energy and the collision of the two cultures is bonnet of his family’s Packard. The scene and an easy camaraderie. They fascinate demonstrated in the wide-angle shot of is reminiscent of the end of Citizen Kane Jim, as do - Jim (as the thief of Baghdad) and the in the cellar full of Kane’s possessions, Japanese soldier. The sound codes build up where the camera moves in, drawing our (c) The Japanese the tension. The motif of the ball before gaze to an old sledge (“Rosebud”) – the Small boys fi nd heroes where they can, the battle/party before the war is not signifi cant, the poignant amongst the and Jim identifi es with the bravery of unusual (War and Peace and Brussels on detritus of human acquisitiveness. Diegetic the Japanese; while accepting of their the eve of Waterloo). music (piano), also poignant, becomes brutality, he also negotiates with them, non-diegetic. imitating their rituals. (c)Jamie/Jim alone and the Chinese boy (0.36.16 – 0.37.55) (h) Liberation (2.14.42 – 2.16.18) (i) Private Kimura – a boy like Jim, forced The vast poster for Gone with the Wind This sequence is notable for the change to leave his childhood behind by the war. (featuring a previous war) with the school in lighting, which presents the now uniformed Jim in front of it creates an deserted camp quite differently from (ii) Camp Commandant (Nagata) – who effective mise-en-scene. The response before; and for the music, “Laudamus becomes increasingly agitated and of a nervous Jim to the Chinese boy’s te”, a choral piece linking us (and Jim) unpredictable as the war nears its end. challenge – “I’m waiting for my chauffeur” to his past incarnation as a choirboy and – accentuates the gulf between them. to his Latin lessons with Dr Rawlins, and (iii) The Kamikaze pilots – portrayed transmitting his joyful relief musically through Jim’s fascinated gaze as heroic (d)Transition – from building the runway as well as visually. The moving camera and mystical. to Jim in the camp (1.04.08 – 1.06.08) creates a sense of freedom and vitality. Jim is starving and near death, and his Jim’s surrender to the reassuring American (d) The Chinese situation is conveyed by the magic realism soldier is reminiscent of Ralph’s collapse The surging masses of a Shanghai where in this sequence with the Japanese planes. at the feet of the British naval offi cer at life is cheap, but from whom emerges Editing to compress time (in this case the end of Lord of the Flies. the beggar boy – with his cry of “no two and a half years) is used effectively, Mama! No Papa! No whisky soda!”, whose with the planes as link motif. Again music (i) Reunion (2.18.12 – 2.20.12) precarious existence, also living on his is used to accentuate the dreamlike Again no dialogue but the close ups reveal wits, foreshadows Jim’s but who becomes unreality. an altered Jim, able at last to shut his eyes but unable to retrieve his lost childhood.
media education journal 42 37 Shanghai may seem to have survived Part 2 (d) Jim in the camp – the war (c) the long march to the Olympic stadium but the fi nal sequence – the wooden nearing its end. suitcase, instead of the coffi ns of the along with the personal story of Jim. opening sequence, fl oating on the Yangtse (e) The long march to the stadium. – confi rms that the old Jim has gone for This is not just another war epic as the ever. (f) Liberation and jubilation. point of view is evidently Jim’s and that of the other civilians caught up in the 8. Themes Coda (g) The sombre reunion between confl ict, and there is no crude division (a) The loss of innocence, an Jim and his parents. between the ‘us’ of the fi lm and the ‘them’ unsentimental education, the journey from in terms of good and evil. childhood to adulthood, gain and loss, 10. Representation change. It was obviously impossible to have the child actor playing Jim age over three (b) War and death, but war without clearly years in the course of the fi lm, and so the defi ned heroes and villains, largely as change both in him and his circumstances background. is displayed physically in terms of clothes, appearance and performance: (c) The combination of (a) and (b) in Spielberg’s phrase – “innocence versus (a) the perfect English schoolboy in extreme jeopardy.” Shanghai
(d) The sense of a journey – a literal search (b) the fancy-dressed Thief of Baghdad but also a search for one’s self. (c) the dishevelled schoolboy in the (e) The end of Empire – fi rst the colonial, occupied city imperialist world of the British and Americans in Shanghai, then of the (d) the dirty scarecrow Jim in the camp, in Japanese “Empire of the Sun”. cut-off shorts, leather fl ying jacket, dog- tags (and golf shoes). (f) Disintegration (the falling apart of a way of life) and transformation through a His metamorphosis from spoiled brat, series of changes. indulged only child, to battered survivor is conveyed physically. (g) Survival and its cost. 11. Genre (h) The attitude towards “conquerors” Large scale epic production began in – the Chinese at the start of the fi lm to America with D W Griffi th’s Birth of a the British and the British in the camp to Nation (1915), which combined epic the Japanese. historical spectacle and family melodrama. The formula of combining great epic 9. Plot themes from history and civilisation with The plot organises the story into two human stories has formed the basis for parts, with the central part of the story subsequent Hollywood epics, exploiting omitted (from Jim’s arrival in the camp in cinema’s capacity for large scale spectacle early 1942 to where it is taken up again to advantage, along with the narrative in 1945) and with a closing coda – the essential of individual characters caught reunion. up in these events.
The plot can be divided into sections for Within this genre there are Biblical epics, convenience: classical epics, war epics, space epics . . .
Part 1 (a) The eve of war: the opening Clearly Empire of the Sun belongs within sequence and the fancy dress party. the war epic tradition and there are the great set pieces, with the hundreds (b) Jim surviving alone in Shanghai of extras and multiple camera units (Gone with the Wind) and meeting associated with this particular genre: Basie. (a) the Japanese invasion of Shanghai (c) The journey to the camp, building the runway and the planes. (b) the American planes attacking the camp Transition to Part 2
media education journal 42 38
A Tale of Two Olivers
Margaret Hubbard
hen Charles Dickens wrote Oliver The Opening Scenes of the Two to emerge and through it categories are WTwist in 1837, he did so for the Films introduced. Press. In 1948 David Lean made a fi lm David Lean’s version opens with wild version of it, with strong gothic elements, weather, a tree, a shadow and a small Who is the audience? Certainly adults and, twenty years later, Oliver was re- fi gure on the landscape. The storm mirrors through the pleasure of understanding the worked as a musical. the woman’s pain. She is pregnant, iconography. There are also the literary and on her way to the workhouse. The buffs who are familiar with the novel, and While all three versions work from the representation of both the weather, and wish to see how it is played out in fi lm. same baseline story, the end products are then the workhouse is grim. The gothic But for the children being taught, who are very different. Each is constructed within horror motifs are clear in the gates, and not the primary audience, it is important its own medium and genre. Dickens wrote the bell she rings. Lighting is used to for them to grasp how different sectors of his novel for Bentley’s Miscellany in 24 illuminate the words ‘Parish Workhouse’. an audience is drawn in, and how the key monthly instalments, and it is this which The storm passes, and a baby is born. aspects combine to do this. has given it its very specifi c episodic However there is no happy ending structure. Lean used gothic iconography here. The grimness of the workhouse is The musical version of the opening of to deliver the suffering and violence in reinforced by the candles, the shadows, the fi lm is entirely different. It begins Dickens’story, while the musical adheres to the old crones drinking and the noises with a song, ‘Food, Glorious Food’. The the conventions of its genre and reaches off, which have all the echoes of prison. children are fi ling into the dining room resolution through song and dance. The iconography of the representation is in a regimented way, but the grimness is explicit. The narrative enigmas are clear: diffused by the singing. These children are As a consequence of this, the who is she?; why is she here?; why does very different. The casting is responsible Representation and Narrative in the a woman in her situation own such a for this. The children are clean, well fed, two fi lms are very different, and, in locket? A narrative is then introduced and have teeth in excellent condition. turn, different from the source material. through the theft of the locket. ‘Lean’s’ children looked much less well Comparing one story across two fi lms (and cared for. This refl ects an Institutional in this case also a novel), is a valuable way The representation of class is also very issue – it is actually diffi cult to fi nd of working with the key aspects of media evident in the opening section through the undernourished, (white) children today. studies. Examining Representation and juxtaposition of the starving children and The narrative of the fi lm begins at the Narrative leads to a close look at how they the adults in the dining room. The children workhouse. Oliver’s birth and the locket, are tied to the other key aspects. watch the adults eating, and the despair so vital to the fi rst fi lm, (and the novel), and hunger of the children is emphasised are simply not there. It is in the nature of What follows is a comparison of a number by the wider shots on the children, and musical to begin with a song. There are of sections of the two fi lms: the intensity of the point-of-view shots, in exceptions, but they are few. ‘Oliver’ is not close-up, on the adults’ faces and food. one of them. • the opening to the point when Oliver asks for more Twelve minutes into the fi lm, straws are Almost nine minutes into the fi lm, it • Oliver reaching London and the drawn in silence, and Oliver is tracked borrows from its predecessor a scene, introduction of Fagin along the tables through the point-of- which does not appear in the novel i.e. • the construction of Bill Sykes and view shots of the other characters. The the children looking in on the masters of Nancy close-up of the whip emphasises the the workhouse eating. The representation • the ending. cruelty of the place, and Oliver asking of class is introduced here, but it is not more is followed by reaction shots. developed. It is simply there as a narrative A suggested way of teaching the two device. In the dining room the close-up texts would be to show the Lean version Thus the representation of class and on Oliver has none of Dickens’ words, in full, and then the parallel scenes in the the narrative are set up in the opening ‘desperate with hunger, and reckless with musical. At the end the whole musical sections. The varied use of the camera, misery,’ to describe Oliver at this moment. would be viewed. It would also be useful the sounds and the use of black and to link in with some of the appropriate white reinforce the despair of the whole Again the straws are used, (although in scenes in the novel. situation much more effectively than the novel it reads ‘again the lots were could colour. The idea of genre begins cast’), and again Oliver is tracked to Mr.
media education journal 42 39
Ron Moody as Fagin with Jack Wild (left) and Alec Guinness with John Howard Davies (right) Bumble. The tension is in the sound, the Lean’s version, being multi-stranded in its possessions is a clever visual device to add long build-up as Oliver walks the length of narrative, is much more of a drama. The sympathy. the room and in the point-of -view shot. pathetic fallacy of the weather links the The cruelty of the situation is diminished gothic to literary devices. When he reaches London, he is as the scene is resolved in a song, in which overwhelmed. This is emphasised by the Oliver is chased, almost as if it were a It is of course vital to explore with pupils use of the close-up. When the Dodger game. It would certainly be worth, at this the effect of black and white compared appears, he is clearly not a friendly point, reading to the class the paragraph with the colour. While the children may character. The sound level on London in the novel, as Oliver goes forward to ask initially be put off by the black and white, is increased to such a pitch that the for more. The similarities and differences they quickly see it to be more suitable audience is uncomfortable, thereby lead to lengthy discussion, which in turn to the nature of the story. Lean’s use of echoing Oliver’s terror. could also be used as a lesson on how to sound, in contrast with the singing in turn text into fi lm. the musical, likewise affects the text. The approach to Fagin’s den is classic The montage of Lean’s fi rst sequence gothic. Close-ups of seemingly unending By comparing the opening in this way, it constructs the representation and the stairs, with no knowledge of what will be will be clear to pupils how material can narrative in a much more sophisticated at the top, build the terror of the child. En be used and altered. In the earlier fi lm, way than is the case in the musical. route Oliver and the Dodger step over a the opening is longer, and there are more This is the result of the different genres comatose drunk- the misery of London’s enigmas. In the musical the narrative and languages, and attracts different poor is referenced, albeit minimally. At the is linear. Its songs are used to shift the audiences as a consequence. top of the stairs they cross a bridge, with mood. Ideas, not originally in Dickens’ the dome of St. Paul’s in the background, novel, are introduced because they work Going to London and they reach Fagin’s den. as a shorthand route to representation Our sympathy for Oliver is because of his of class, and /or because audiences, situation. This is constructed differently In contrast, in the musical, our sympathy familiar with the fi rst fi lm, expect to see in both fi lms. In Lean’s version Oliver is for Oliver at the undertakers is predicated them. Certainly the children watching the forced to sleep amidst the coffi ns at the largely on the song, ‘Where is Love?’ workhouse masters eating are very strong undertakers where he has been sent to Here the narrative of Oliver’s mother is images. Presumably Dickens did not have work. Oliver is bullied by everyone, most introduced – where is she?- and along the children doing this, as his audience explicitly by Noah Claypole, and then with this, his longing to be loved. One shot would know that this level of proximity of fl ogged for standing up for himself. Just of this is behind bars to provide a visual children and masters just did not happen. before the half hour point of the fi lm, link for a twentieth century audience of The credibility of his story would have he decides he is leaving. Unlike in the the idea of the workhouse as a prison. By been undermined in a way that it is not musical, where he fi nds his way out by luck, Oliver is able to leave, and he makes to us. luck, Lean’s Oliver is pro-active and forces his way to London. In the musical version, his way out using a crowbar. The montage we see details of the diffi culties of the of the detailed shots of his tiny amount of journey. The weather is bad. Furthermore, media education journal 42 40
Oliver is covered in mud, and ignored is more ingratiating than threatening. and the Bill is shot off the roof, as he tries by the coach. However he does use his Once again the musical genre is used to to escape. This is as it is in the novel. The ingenuity, and gets on the back of a cart, introduce another major character. The remainder of the fi lm adapts the story, to arrive in London on a bright sunny song makes the scene funny. Moreover it which is cut to reduce the complexity, morning. Here he emerges from a basket is comfortable, despite Oliver apparently and the length, of the narrative in the of cabbages, in which he has been hiding. not realising that ‘Pick a Pocket’ is not novel. It turns out that Oliver’s mother is just for his entertainment, but is what he Mr. Brownlow’s daughter, and Oliver goes This London, far from threatening, is will be expected to do. Oliver is genuinely off to a very comfortable middle class exciting. We see this through all the enjoying Fagin, who is presented as a kind life with his grandfather. For Dickens the point-of-view shots. Oliver is very small of eccentric Dr. Barnardo at this point in solution was never revolutionary politics! against the buildings, but he has space. In the text. David Lean’s version, the crowded, callous In the musical version, the murder of nature of the city is constructed through The introduction of Fagin’s den Nancy takes place at London Bridge, the tight close-ups on Oliver, as he is makes explicit the difference in the allowing for a visually more dramatic ignored and jostled. representation and the categories of the scene, than in a tenement hovel. The shots two genres. Close study of the content and of Oliver on the roof, as Sykes is trying to We even get a child’s sense of wonder at the fi lm languages exemplifi es this. escape, are directly informed by the earlier a toy train – this time an elevated London version. The Fagin story differs however. In monorail! Bill Sykes and Nancy the musical, Fagin and the Dodger go off In Lean’s version, having constructed to pastures new – with, of course, a song When the Dodger appears he is very Fagin as a terrifying fi gure, Bill Sykes and a dance. friendly, and segues easily into the song, appears, and we see a shift in the power ‘Consider Yourself One of Us’. The song relations. Fagin is afraid of Sykes, and by There remains the question of the anti- is picked up to become a huge chorus building the narrative up in layers, Lean semitism in the text. Teachers would number by using vignettes of London: is able to work with the complexity of need to assess how far they were going a wedding, chimney sweeps, the meat Dickens’ narrative. Nancy, in turn, is a hard to explore this, and that would depend market etc. The result is the construction character, as indeed she would be just to on the racial awareness and the maturity of a community far removed from the survive, but underneath the harshness we of the class. Certainly the 1948 fi lm harsh world of Lean’s fi lm. glimpse the pain of her life, which is what was very heavily criticised for it. Fagin drives her to save Oliver. has no redeeming features at all, and The route to Fagin’s den is exciting. Again visually teeters on the edge of caricature. the stairs, and again the bridge and St. The construction of Nancy and Bill Sykes Ron Moody’s Fagin is much less of a Paul’s, but the mood provided by the in the musical is interesting. stereotype. How much this is to do with music is entirely different. This ‘Oliver’is an the time of production, and how much to adventure. The representation of London In the pub scene, when she sings ‘It’s a do with the genres, is arguable. contributes to this. The musical is pleasant Fine Life’, the ideology of community, and fun: the Lean version, and the novel, and her position in society, are explicit. To sum up, teaching the fi lm through much darker. This has no equivalent in the Lean comparison makes explicit its constructed version, which is concentrating on the nature. Once the pupils have understood Fagin’s Den tragedy of her life, in preparation for the how the story has been adapted to suit Can anyone who has seen the appearance violence of her murder, in a society where the different genres, it becomes clear how of Alec Guinness as Fagin ever forget it? all the indices of poverty and despair this affects the narratives, representations He turns into the shot in tight close-up, are commonplace, and in turn lead to and languages differently. From here it and is simply terrifying both to us, and brutality. is short step to move on to the different to Oliver. Into the silence the Dodger audiences, and the pleasures they derive, throws the line, ‘Do you want him?’ The In musicals major characters all sing, from the different elements of the texts. camera picks up the individual reactions usually fairly soon after they appear for Film comparison of this nature is an of the other children. No music softens the fi rst time. In the musical version for approach teachers may wish to use to this sinister place. However, after Fagin the stage Sykes sings one of the strongest teach the key aspects of Media Studies at has threatened the children, music is used pieces in the show, ‘My Name’, but this lower secondary level. It could also suit to show the hollowness of his pretence does not happen in the fi lm. The casting upper primary, where it could easily fi t at kindness. There is nothing in Fagin’s of Oliver Reed was crucial to this. Thus an into a themed approach for example on den but cruelty and distrust, and all the institutional decision drove the content the Victorians. languages of fi lm are used to construct in the musical adaptation differently for this. stage and fi lm. Lastly, of course, this teaching approach could be used as a model comparative Fagin’s den in the musical is very The Resolution study for any two fi lms using the same different. It is not far off a boys’ camp The resolution of the Lean version is as story- see issue No.41 of the MEJ for a gone a little awry, but there is no sense follows: Nancy is murdered, Lean using comparative study of the two versions of of pervading pain and exploitation. Fagin the camera very creatively to convey the Greyfriars Bobby. (Ron Moody) is making the tea for the violence within the permitted limits of children, and emerges through the smoke the time. Bill Sykes realises what he has of the cooking. While he has control done, but nevertheless has to be brought over the children, we get a sense that it to justice for his crime. Fagin is arrested ,
media education journal 42 41
media education journal 42 42 reviews
The authors still see the materials beside them, with performance and ethics, book as “a toolbox – of further information available illustrated by case studies concepts, histories, debates, in the Glossary or 12-page of Direct Cinema, Michael guides to production and so resource fi le. Moore, Jamie Oliver and Big on.” (p.4) One of the sharpest This fi nal Reference Brother. Little nuggets of tools is the one used by the section is the fourth of the information that grabbed my authors to make complex book’s four parts. Part I ‘Key attention from the margin terminology simple, where as Concepts’ is the bulkiest, included the fact that the well as margin defi nitions, with chapters on Interpreting 250,000 applicants for the all terms are gathered in media, Narratives (with 2004 US The Apprentice a 20-page glossary in the case study CSI: Miami were reduced to sixteen end reference section. This and crime fi ction), Genres by a casting agency, who fulfi ls the authors’ aim and other classifi cations effectively trained the to be appropriate for all (with case study Japanese candidates in a series of The Media Student’s students from A-level to horror and the Ring cycle), mock shows to develop their Book, GillGill BranstonBranston and undergraduate, on a ‘dip in’ Institutions, Questions of ‘performance’. Roy Stafford, 4th edn, basis rather than following representaion, Ideologies An underlying political Routledge 2006, £19.99, any specifi c syllabus. and power (with case study theme running throughout 576 pp ISBN 0415371430 So what is different of the news), Industries, the book will satisfy those Those of us of a certain age about this 4th edition? Audiences, Advertising and who fear that media studies who have been teaching The authors have gone for branding (with case study can so easily lose its cutting media studies for more a “complete rethink”, as on celebrities). Part II ‘Media edge. Especially strong is years than we care to they put it, driven not least Practices’ covers Research, the chapter on Ideology remember will recall the by changing technologies Production organisation, and power where m-words surge of pleasure when which place us now fi rmly Production techniques, and c-words proliferate Branston & Stafford came in the digital age. Gone is Distribution (with case study – Marxism, class and to call in the mid-1990s. the separate Technologies on contemporary British capitalism – with a case The Media Student’s Book chapter, with relevant cinema). The briefest section, study of how news values seemed to be the answer material now incorporated Part III ‘Media Debates’ emerge. This follows on from to our prayers, gathering into separate appropriate covers Documentary a strong previous chapter together all the media chapters. In come new topics and reality TV, Whose on representations which wisdom of the day in one and case studies to keep globalisation? and ‘Free focuses on images of world accessible volume, making things as fresh as possible choices’ in a ‘free market’. migration, refugees and theory straightforward and – CSI: Miami, Japanese So, leaving aside what’s asylum seekers. exercises practical. horror movies, Jamie Oliver, old and what’s new for a If Channel 4 were to run Now in its 4th edition, Big Brother, Michael Moore, minute, what’s the quality a programme on ‘Fifty Media it arrives like an old friend blogging, mobile phones like? Dipping into some Studies Books to Try or Buy reappearing after a few and celebrities. A number of the chapters where I before You Die’ (as voted years, all scrubbed up and of previously favoured am most familiar with the for by you the users), this trendifi ed but without any terms, say the authors, are topics, I was impressed by one by Branston & Stafford hint of the emperor’s new now interrogated rather the case study of British would be a very strong clothes. Branston & Stafford than taken for granted cinema in the Distribution contender for the top spot. deal well with the curse of – stereotype, representation, chapter. It shows a breadth Douglas Allen, Motherwell media studies – the instant postmodernism, of the research that has been College plunge into obsolescence globalisation, free market. well compressed into a very as soon as you have set Organisationally the same informative and coherent Liv Tyler : Star in pen to paper – or rather three structural elements package of key information Ascendance: Her First keyboard to screen. And remain – main chapters, on the economic and Decade in Film, Thomas indeed inevitably the fi rst backed up by case studies institutional determinants Christie, 2007, Crescent points in their introduction (both small embedded shaping the strange beast Moon Publishing, , 269pp, are a survey of the changing and longer end of chapter known as ‘British cinema’. ISBN 1-86171-131-X technology which dominates ones) and with boxed-off The Documentary and How many Liv Tyler fi lms media and media studies, suggestions for activities. In reality TV chapter does a can you name? (Clue: outlining the advantages addition, marginal inserts good job in reducing an There are at least 17*) In brought by technological give instant defi nitions, impossibly wide fi eld into any pub fi lm quiz, that change against the asides, questions and a compact space, with question would have disadvantages. illustrations of the main debates about realism, truth, brought me down at the
media education journal 42 43 study, full of often dense this is the ideal volume director, I had never actually abstract jargon; on the for them, with its fi rm taught any of his fi lms in other the cut and paste of commitment to solid fact the classroom – although the lazy journalist reheating and well-informed opinion. I did fi nd Jaws useful as the old, cold and probably It is a work of immaculate an example of Todorov’s only half-true stories from detail, concluded by a equilibrium-disequilibrium- the cuttings fi les. Thomas 15-page comprehensive equilibrium pattern of Christie’s volume does a fi lmography of Tyler’s work, narrative. I have since made skillful job of steering a 17 pages of notes/references, amends by analysing Empire fresh path between these and a 13-page bibliography. of the Sun – see elsewhere in two, relying on original The only thing missing is this edition. research of international an index – the publisher’s Was I suffering from the proportions, as befi ts a rather idiosyncratic choice, misapprehension that his subject new to biographical I gather – but the work movies did not merit critical study such as Liv Tyler. is so clearly and tightly attention, that he was not As Christie emphasises in organised that it should be to be taken seriously as a fi rst hurdle – until this book his Introduction, however, easy enough for the reader director? Was I prejudiced came along and fi lled in a strictly speaking it is not to navigate round the work against crowd pleasers? previously empty corner of a biography, “rather an or dip into it. After all, E.T. was recently my consciousness. Anyone analytical survey of Tyler’s The book is a model of its voted “Greatest Tear Jerker with a similar blind spot is evolving fi lm career.” kind to commend to students of All Time in Channel 4’s guaranteed to come away (p.24) In other words it is (and anyone thinking of Top Hundred Films series. from it knowing a heck of a study of her fi lms rather entering a pub fi lm quiz). The answer is a shamefaced a lot more about one of the than her private life; and Douglas Allen, “probably, yes!” My change most intriguing and modest Christie clearly directs Motherwell College of mind is in no small stars of Hollywood. anyone seeking the behind- *Liv Tyler’s fi lms are : way due to Nigel Morris’s Straight away I’ll declare the-scenes story of her Silent Fall, Heavy, Empire excellent study of Spielberg’s an interest. Author Thomas early days – as a model Records, Stealing Beauty, cinema. Christie was an Open and young actor daughter That Thing You Do!, Wallfl ower Press has University student of mine of Aerosmith’s Steven Inventing the Abbotts, an extensive range of fi lm who produced an excellent Tyler – to Rebel Heart, Armageddon, Plunkett makers in its Director’s Cuts masters dissertation on the autobiography of her and Macleane, Cookie’s series – from Ken Loach (Art changing geo-politics of celebrity mother Bebe Buell. Fortune, Onegin, Dr. T and in the Service of the People) the John Glen directed What follows is a fi lm by the Women, One Night at to Roman Polanski (Dark James Bond fi lms. I was fi lm account of her work, McCool’s, The Lord of the Places of the World). With subsequently surprised covering the plot of the Rings Trilogy, Jersey Girl, the focus on Spielberg’s when a manuscript dropped fi lm, assessing Tyler’s Lonesome Jim “Empire of Light” Morris’s through my door – a book role in the widest possible introduction identifi es his that Christie had been frame of reference, and principal critical trajectory writing in his spare time and usually ending with a well as Spielberg’s use of lighting which I was invited to read documented guide to further as symbolism. In support and write a Foreword for reading. A fi nal chapter, of this approach he quotes if I felt it was worthwhile. ‘Liv Tyler in Modern Film from Christopher Metz’s ‘The Within a couple of years, and Popular Culture : The Imaginary Signifi er’ (1975) that manuscript has turned Story So Far’, offers an where he asserts that “the into the volume under overview of her work in the cinematic institution is not review, with Christie’s efforts context of contemporary just the cinema industry…it to fi nd a publisher coming American cinema. Christie is also the mental machinery up trumps with Crescent emphasises the range of – another industry – which Moon, a specialist arts her genre work from indie spectators ‘accustomed and culture publisher from to blockbuster, and her to the cinema’ have Maidstone, Kent. My opinion directors from American internalised historically and of it has not changed – it veterans like Robert Altman which had adapted them to is a marvellous labour of to off-the-wall indies like the consumption of fi lms.” love that has turned into Steve Buscemi and Kevin The Cinema of Steven Thus Spielberg’s a professional work that Smith, via European auteurs Spielberg: Empire of Light, audiences identify “desire should act as a model like Bernardo Bertolucci. Nigel Morris, Director’s Cuts associated with light” in combination of enterprise This chapter is the nearest series, Wallfl ower Press the recurrent theme of and fi lm writing for that Christie gets to theory 2007, vii + 434 pp, ISBN the reconstitution of the ourselves and our students. as he attempts to analyse 1904764886 “broken family” and its Any biographical study the appeal of Tyler; so Throughout many years of accompanying pleasures for of a star treads a dangerous those with an aversion to teaching fi lm, even though the spectator. path – on one side is the the mysteries of heavy fi lm my students frequently cited That this is not a self- theoretical world of star theory can be advised that Spielberg as their favourite limiting focus is amply media education journal 42 44
demonstrated in the fi lm Morris’s analysis maintains of movies” – as Morris is was a timely antidote to with which Morris begins his the light/dark perspective prepared to concede. such negative circumstances. analysis, Close Encounters but is deeper and more Jaws, the defi nitive Morris also illustrates his of the Third Kind – in fact, satisfactory than that of modern blockbuster, that theme of light with examples Spielberg’s fourth theatrical Close Encounters and it triumph of marketing, from this fi lm – light shafts release. Particularly made me keen to re-view the multi-million dollar in the jungle, warriors satisfying is his analysis of the fi lm, as it brought out earner and Academy Award blocking the light, Jones’s the opening in which he the binary oppositions of winner that was Spielberg’s escape in a seaplane into the examines the signifi cance male and female worlds, the breakthrough movie, is sun and the Ark itself as a of the initial darkness fi lm’s homage to Welles’ War revealed by Morris as more “dazzling light source.” (30 seconds long) pierced of the Worlds (“the banality complex, more disturbing For teachers wishing to by headlamps mirroring within which the upcoming than might be supposed. use E.T. as a focus for fi lm “the spectator’s projective struggle occurs”) as well as He links its themes to study, Morris’s chapter on gaze” and heightening to Hitchcock and its use of the external political is required reading, with its anticipation of spectator mirrors. And all this with scene of 1970’s America attention to promotion and pleasure.” Morris extends a structure infl uenced by – youthful unrest related publicity, the ideology of the signifi cance of such television’s commercial to Vietnam, the draft and Reaganite America, audience an opening by comparison breaks and in a sixteen day the savage crushing of address, narrative and binary with Ford’s The Searchers shoot! protest. Amity’s red, white oppositions. (1956), where the opening But, back to the theme of and blue Independence The Color Purple, places the spectator in the light as Morris identifi es a Day decorations identify Spielberg’s fi lm version “dark domestic space of crucial difference between it as a microcosm of the of Alice Walker’s novel, the fi rst shot”, allowing the the respective openings USA; its Mayor Vaughn signalled his move into audience to share the screen of the original television is a Nixon-like fi gure, more adult themes, but it character’s point of view. If and later cinema versions. citing “public interest” as is the second of his novel cinema is a medium of light Instead of beginning on the a pretext for keeping the adaptations, Empire of the and sound, then Spielberg highway, he writes: beach open for commercial Sun, that engaged me more. celebrates the cinematic motives. In terms of As it is a fi lm I know very in Close Encounters “The start, one of the audience positioning, the well, and have recently – elsewhere commenting four added scenes, is in spectator is placed “in taught, I was eager to read that “light is a magnet” – a effect a reverse angle the rapacious monster’s Morris’s view of the fi lm, fi lm in which “characters of the beginning and position”, presented with particularly his theme of repeatedly are attracted end of The Searchers. “no alternative to allegiance light. His comment that to light, awestruck, their Darkness, shared with a destructive force”, “Jamie’s aircraft fascination faces illuminated by their by the auditorium, permitted and encouraged explicitly equates light and projected vision”, such light represents domesticity to take visceral pleasure aspiration, a convention having links with religious from which a frame (underscored by the Jaws within religious iconography, iconography. opens – spreading theme music) in gruesome as well as a distinct In a non-cinematic over the screen and and violent death. Spielberg characteristic” fl ashback, Morris then encompassing the Since this monograph is a illuminated aspects of the considers Duel, Spielberg’s spectator into the comprehensive examination fi lm for me, as did his breakthrough movie, albeit panoramic West: a of Spielberg’s cinema, each contention that “Spielberg made-for-television in landscape of intense of his fi lms to date has its unreels a solipsistic vision an amazingly short time, light where desperate own chapter, ending with of war, involving projection which eschewed televisual men engage in one-to- Munich (2005). This enables into different positions, exposition in favour of one struggles.” the reader to home in on rather than any attempt at visual storytelling, although signifi cant fi lms, although objective realism.” “nervous executives” insisted The Sugarland Express, reading chronologically does In relation to the theme on some dialogue and Duel’s successor and, in bring out the developmental of light, in this case linked voiceovers – so much for the effect, Spielberg’s fi rst arc of Spielberg’s career, set to Jamie’s idyllic pre-war director’s vision! The fi lm’s direct-to-cinema release, against the background of home life, Morris cites “the favourable commercial and was a commercial failure. Hollywood and America. glow from the refrigerator, critical reception led to its Paradoxically, according Thus 1941could be read as packed with luxuries soon cinematic release, on the to Morris, its failure “satirising Hollywood itself” to be denied”, comparing it back of the success of E.T. lies “in its richness, and Raiders of the Lost Ark, with the “headboard shaped ten years later, with some variation, restlessness and which appeared during a like a broken sun” adorning additional material. The man inventiveness that ultimately recession, as a beleaguered the prison camp bed of the versus machine duel – or, lead to contradiction, Hollywood’s attempt to Victors, “Jamie’s unwilling more properly, David Mann confusion and tonal shifts.” counter opposition from new surrogate parents”, whereas (Dennis Weaver) versus the Nonetheless, in The New outlets. The quintessentially Basie, Jamie’s unlikely and sinister tanker – pitches Yorker no less a critic than American hero, Indiana unscrupulous “guardian” the law-abiding, peaceful Pauline Kael considered it Jones, embodying as he is fi rst shown before a and harmless against “one of the phenomenal does the pioneering spirit focused beam of light from mechanical malevolence. debut fi lms in the history and rugged individualism, a porthole. This is Jamie’s
media education journal 42 45 projection, his recognition of the fi lms, referring en be sited within the article, overall, this provides of Basie as a source of route to a basic fi lmography industry. There is some a lot of ideas and materials salvation, and it allows the for these, and puzzled as good discussion of the for teachers. Also, with a cinema audience to share his to why the chapters were characteristics of what is little input the ideas in each subjective view. “illustrated” with such termed ‘independent fi lm’ article can be applied across It is enormously woefully inadequate black in the USA, and this is to the other fi lm, or to Carey satisfying to fi nd one’s own and white (or shades of then applied to the Carey and his star status. identifi cation of a homage grey) stills – the best of fi lm. The analysis includes On Board and Online: to Welles’s Citizen Kane which, from Saving Private the changing character of The Snakes on a Plane echoed by Morris, who Ryan, at least allows one ‘Indies’ like Miramax. The Phenomenon is a somewhat links the looted property to distinguish the mise-en- writer, Pauline Reay, also bizarre read by comparison. – statues, furniture, scene, while the worst has constantly checks the reader This is because of the paintings – stacked in the to be a tie between Jurassic to consider and evaluate this content. Apparently the football stadium to Xanadu. Park (a lump of black material. There is a shorter fi lm’s title became reduced To me, however, it resembled plasticine wrapped in tissue section on the narrative, to the acronym SoaP, more the detritus of Kane’s or a terrifying dinosaur?) which discusses ideas about (logical but odd). Even property (including Rosebud, and Jaws (a black blob ‘classical’ and ‘independent’ odder to my mind is the fan the sledge) about to be against shades of grey or fi lm story telling. The behaviour that is related. incinerated at the very end a spectator obstructing the shortest section is on As a fi lm buff I realise of the fi lm – but, hey, it’s audience’s gaze?). Thank fi lm form, including brief I am sometimes a little always good to be up there, goodness for Morris’s vivid comments on the style of the obsessive, but this is a world briefl y, with Nigel Morris! prose reconstructions of fi lm, but these are not very far beyond my experience. The reader will be able crucial scenes. developed. However Lance Bradley gives to select his own fi lms No fi lm library The Truman Show and clearly presented detail and from the Spielberg oeuvre – personal, school, college Its Narrative is an extended relates this to the industry – Jurassic Park perhaps or or university – should be and sometimes complex operations. So the article Schindler’s List, with its without this book. discussion of how the story is a very useful discussions essential Spielberg theme Liz Roberts and plot of that fi lm can of modern aspects of of families separated and be analysed. Given some of marketing and fandom. re-united, or from Saving Splice: Studying the theories and analysis Bradley also adds some Private Ryan to Munich by Contemporary Cinema vol available on narrative the discussion of what makes way of Minority Report. 1 no 2 Spring 2007, Auteur complexity is not surprising. a cult fi lm. However, this Which prompts one to ask, Publishing, 102 pp A5, ISSN: But the writer, Michael does not really explain what is it possibly Spielberg’s 1751 7516 Massey, is careful to spell drives this phenomenon, an amazing productivity that I think the second issue of out his understandings of explanation that I have yet has prompted so much this periodical for ‘educators’ these ideas, and to provide to fi nd in any writings. hostile criticism? is stronger than the fi rst. In detailed commentary on The regular section If Morris postscripts the particular, the handling of the fi lm. The article makes There is One Film you Use, book with a chapter on concepts in the area of fi lm particular use of the theory Make it….deals with the “Audiences, subjectivity and media studies is clearly of Vladimir Propp, so it 2005 Belgium winner at and pleasure”, which raises presented and care is taken is very helpful if you fi nd Cannes, The Child. John amongst others the question over defi ning these and that model stimulating. But Fitzgerald deals in some of Spielberg’s wide appeal providing clear expositions. the article also brings out detail with the characters, linked to his “favouring of It generally a little denser other aspects of narrative; story and setting, but the subjective shots, aligning than issue one. I mention one is style, which again major part of the article is spectatorial vision with this because I am inclined is fairly brief. The other is comparisons. The primary protagonists’”, thus to think that, whilst aimed ideology, where I had some comparison is with the facilitating identifi cation at teachers, it is likely to be misgivings. The argument UK 2004 fi lmA Way of and creating emotional used or provided to students. uses the term ‘America’ Life. But Fitzgerald also impact. So some sections will be for the particular state, the brings in Neorealism, The All in all, The Cinema of a little challenging, for USA. And whilst it does Bicycle Thief (1948) and the Steven Spielberg is an epic example, to AS students. deal with the US’s ‘cultural Brazilian Central Station production in its own right. There are two central imperialism’, it treats this (1998). This could provide Like an epic, it is impressive concerns, the independent as a set of ideas, rather a whole extended study in its scope – Spielberg’s strand in the commercial than manifestations of a period, but I think there is entire cinematic output. But industry and narrative. Both set of social relations. My also suffi cient there for a each chapter could stand the main articles deal with other problem was with the teacher who wants to have a alone for the occasional fi lms starring Jim Carey, so Narrative Structure Table close discussion of this very reader or researcher. For there is also material suitable in which the numbers refer powerful fi lm. me, it was a fascinating, for star study. to a ‘dialogue-only version There is also a book engrossing and illuminating Independent Spirit in of the screenplay. Whilst review section, including read. I was frustrated, Eternal Sunshine of the they are intimately related, several volumes on French however, by the arbitrary Spotless Mind concentrates scripts and fi lms are not the fi lms and one volume on omission of dates for any on where the fi lm can same thing! But, like the fi rst the UK, Lester Friedman’s media education journal 42 46
volume about British Chapman has put together script editors. Even falling basics of the series changing. Cinema and Thatcherism. a fascinating picture of the audience numbers are linked A sympathetic discussion So, a lot to commend in workings of the BBC in the to these variations, which of the reasons behind the this second issue. The three dawn of the television era. can make the argument seem fi rst regeneration is also major fi lms discussed all Its analysis of audience rather simplistic. included. seem to me both excellent fi gures and representational One of the most Overall, this is a book movies and fertile ground choices is often like peering interesting areas of that complements study in for discussion: SoaP will down a dimly lit corridor of discussion is the discussion early television broadcasting also make good discussion, time. of the story changes and and it is pleasure to see a and the phenomenon is just It is the more recent lack of science elements in British programme discussed very amusing. analysis that provides the Doctor Who. It was most in such depth. The excellent Keith Withall weaker parts of the book. enlightening to realise research and fresh way of The discussion of the that a programme that is examining the old warhorse cancelling and reviving about monsters and heroes defi nitely outweigh the of the series seems rather originally addressed much book’s failings. For serious shallow and surface, which wider science fi ction tropes. fans and those interested in could be excused by the The subsequent decision the early days of television lack of availability of to set many more stories programming in this documentation and also the in the past as opposed country, it is an interesting wish not to repeat a frequent to in the future is also and informative read. It and common modern- explored and the resulting must be said, however, that day argument amongst budgetary benefi ts. In it is not the most accessible fans. On the other hand, addition to this, the rather of reads and it would be after such a detailed and odd copyright situation of diffi cult to pick a chapter fascinating glimpse behind the daleks, Doctor Who’s or excerpt to use in the the shutters of Television main (and for me, most classroom. Centre during the 1960s, it recognisable) enemy, is also Wendy Elrick seems disappointing that the explored at some length. discussion of an era where The representation choices Inside the Tardis: The many of the participants in the early years of the Worlds of Doctor Who, would be available for programme also provide a James Chapman, I B Tauris interview is so superfi cial. fascinating insight into the 2006, £12.99, 232 pp, ISBN: More positively, this book programme, with a rather 9781845111632 could also be said to appeal forward looking view that Part of the problem with to non-fans as only a basic the Doctor’s companions the BFI’s recent series of awareness of the series, be balanced amongst the TV Classics books has for example, what a dalek sexes and without fulfi lling been that they presume no is, is all that is required to stereotypical gender roles. foreknowledge of the text fully understand the book. Indeed, the original remit on the part of the reader. It is clear that the author appears to be as education Great if you’ve never is something of a fan, but in nature as Blue Peter. The seen an episode, rather even he acknowledges the subsequent assignment of repetitive if even a passing diffi culties of accessing the companion to pretty young knowledge of the text is programme from the very girl who screams frequently accessible. The inclusion start due to missing episodes. seems to be one of the less of many glossy stills also His analysis of why these welcome inheritances of makes them something of archives were destroyed is later BBC doctrine. an expensive purchase. also interesting, if a little The changes in Doctor This rather weightier tome tangential. I would speculate Who seem mainly to be from I B Tarus decides not that the BBC is wishing it accredited to a changing to head down the episode/ had a time machine to save climate within the BBC series guide route at all, but these episodes in these days although it is obvious instead chooses to focus of DVD releases. that these changes took mainly on the institutional Another unusual element place in a wider context. infl uences that shaped of the text is that Chapman There is some attempt Britain’ longest running makes little attempt to given to exploring this science fi ction programme. comment of the actual wider context, but rather The discussion of the programmes themselves. more attention is given to BBC’s various requirements There is the odd mention of pointing out the fl exibility and regulations is one of wobbly sets and quotations in the programme, especially the most satisfying aspects from reviews of the times after the establishment of of this book. Drawing on but these are used as regeneration, where the internal memos stored for evidence for budget cuts and actor playing the Doctor years in warehouses, James changes of producer and can be replaced without the
media education journal 42 47
media education journal 42 mejmej
Extra copies of the current journal and issue 40 are available at £8.00 per copy. We also have back copies of earlier issues at £2.00 per copy. The complete set covers more than 20 years of debate, theory and practice. See page 2 for contact address.