Night of the Living dead

Let me preface this entry by saying that this movie was phenomenal. I know this is not meant to be a review but I would be remiss if I didn’t address that point. Moving on to the analysis I would like to focus on representation through language and discourse. Foucault defines discourse as more than just the “linguistic concept” he goes further to state that discourse “is about the production of knowledge through language. … All practices have a discursive aspect”. This really resonated with me while I was watching the film because clearly the movies have a strong discursive element that helps to define characters. I was specifically stricken with the representation of women in the film. Noticeable from the first few scenes, women were depicted as weak and merely secondary. Just as the first attack begins Barbra runs away after the “ghoul” takes down her brother, she then makes her way to the house where she slowly falls into hysteria. It was up to the man to try and save her. As we meet the other characters in the house it becomes evident that this is not an isolated theme. Each of the women in the movie was in some manner fragile or delicate in need of protection and direction from the male characters.

Interestingly this goes along with a similar theme that I discussed in my blog about the exorcist. Last week I wrote how representation is controlled by the historical time. In that sense I wrote about how the idea of horror movies have changed and what was scary once does not necessarily hold the same resonance today. In this case a similar argument could be made about the role of women in film. Although we still see the “damsel in distress” in modern cinema, the flat female complacent characters that were represented in Night of the Living Dead are no longer the prevalent portrayals. The discourse that defined women as scared and helpless in the late 60’s have changed. This has the effect of making the lack of woman character development somewhat antiquated.

The Exorcist

Let me start this post by saying that I have never before this assignment seen the “The Exorcist”. With that being said I have grown up under the impression that the movie was the quintessential horror flick in American cinema. I was told time and time again about how scary it is from my parents and countless television countdowns for the scariest movies. Although I tried to dull my expectations and let the film speak above the all the hype I know that somewhere in my head all this information was there. So when I actually sat down and watched the film I was surprised about how little I was scared. If anything I appreciated the movie for what it was, a great piece of American cinema. I enjoyed the movie but was in no way chilled to my core as I have heard others from my parents’ generation say they were.

Spinning head scene

This got me thinking about what we read in Halls writings on representation, specifically in reference to the section on Foucault’s ideas of historicizing discourse. Here he writes, “Things meant something and were ‘true’, he argued, only within a specific historical context”. As he describes how mental heath was not an objective fact that remained the same in every time period. I believe that the same can be said as far as horror movies. When The Exorcist came out in 1973 it was radically different from what had been captured on film. Although not the first horror film, it set a new standard. For those going to see the movie for the first time when it came out, they hadn’t seen anything like it before. Since then there have been major advances in special effects making some of the images shown to be dated. As well I believe the fact that it was as popular as it was and images from the film have been disseminated through popular culture, has played a role in desensitizing me from being afraid. I think that as time goes on films need to build on what has been done in the past and adjust for a new and ever changing audience.

Wathing the News

the news This week I decided to look at three local news networks late night news at 11pm. The three networks I watched were 22 News, 7 News, and Newscenter 5 Late. If I were to say I was overwhelmingly surprised at my results I would be lying. After watching I tallied up the amount of stories that were told in each broadcast, minus weather and sports, and then I tallied up the amount of those stories that were either violent or were fearful in some way or another.

22 News- out of 17 stories 6 were either violent or fear inducing

7 News- out of 13 stories 7 were either violent or fear inducing

Newscenter 5- out of 16 stories 12 either violent or fear inducing

Side note- watching these programs made me remember why stopped watching local news or news on television in general. I walked away from the television feeling in dismay. Story after story of houses on fire, child pornographers working in elementary schools and as little league coaches, theft, missing children made concerned momentarily that there was little good in the world. This was especially shocking considering that I have studied this phenomenon for four years now and it still resonates this strong.

Now the reason I wasn’t shocked at these results was that this is something that we as an American culture have been conditioned to expect. As Hall describes culture can be defined by shared conceptual maps “shared language systems and the codes which govern the relationships between of translation between them”. To put this in context of the news we look at our expectation of seeing stories that scares and induces fear or has violent imagery. It has become our shared conceptual map that we are to be scared when we watch the news. This is only given meaning because for our whole lives, if you have lived in the US, we have been bombarded with this type of imagery. The sign in this case is the news, the language is the images shown and story told, and the code to interpret it is fear.