Week 9 - Ideology and Representation

This topic is one of the larger topics when it comes to how film can have a certain effect on its audience and establish itself in a social and cultural capacity — ideology. Film and ideology have an important relationship with one another. An ideological approach to cinema suggests that the elements of film language, form and narrative, create representations of society and culture and engage with social and cultural values. Much like genre’s syntactic elements reflecting historical values, as we looked at with film noir and post-war gender relationships in topic 4, ideological beliefs and values in film make themselves known through story, character, and particularly through various elements of form such as cinematography.

As audience members, we may be challenged in our way of thinking about our own ideological beliefs when we watch a film. We may be prompted to consider how certain races are treated in society through their representation in film; the same with gender or the certain classes. There are many ideologies we could look at in cinema, however, for this topic, we are going to look at examples of how film represents and engages with social and dominant ideologies, specifically gender, race, class, and capitalism. We are not always aware of how film is representing a particular ideology, but consider as we go along if you have ever had discussions with friends after watching a film and made any comments about its male or female characters or a character who starts off poor and ends up rich by the film’s conclusion. These comments relate to ideology.

By the end of this topic, you should be able to:

• Describe the relationship between ideology and film

• Understand how film produces various representations relating to ideology

• Be aware of some of the key theories that have informed an ideological approach to film

• Analyse representations of class, race and gender in film and their ability to reaffirm or challenge dominant ideologies

Defining ideology

Broadly speaking, ideology is defined as “a system of beliefs that are characteristic of a particular class or group” (Williams, 1977). Originally, ideology was a term used in political and economic debate to describe a set of beliefs or principles, for example, socialism or capitalism. Its meaning has gradually been extended to other academic fields and it is a concept increasingly called upon in media and film studies. Ideology refers to the values/viewpoints and meanings/messages that a media text such as film might be able to communicate to the viewer.

It may be helpful to think of these values or beliefs in two ways:

a) Explicit — What a character in a film or a director/producer/writer themselves declare to be the subject of the film (the author’s ideological intent).

b) Implicit — The more debatable meanings of a film, possibly beyond the conscious intentions of the filmmaker, that require analysis and a reasoned argument.

Ideological beliefs are contingent on a couple of things that we will look at in this topic:

• differences in culture (e.g. Eastern or Western cultures)

• historical era (values can change over time)

In film, ideological beliefs or values are established through representation. As Gil Branston (2000, pg. 156) in this topic’s reading states: “[representation] signals that filmed images, like all kinds of language work, are constructions, ‘re-presentations’ of an apparently ‘real’ world, not simple presentations or transparent windows on to it.” In this sense, film takes ideas from the world around us and reconstructs it into stories. As a result, film has the ability to engage with issues through representing aspects of our world like family, race, class, gender, sexual difference, and the gamut of other kinds of representations evident in society.

What can also occur through representation in film, however, is the establishment of dominant social ideologies. As we have defined ideology as the beliefs of particular social groups, the notion of dominant ideology refers to the beliefs of a dominant class or group; for example, white men are the dominant group in a patriarchal society. This is where we can investigate films to see if its representations suggest that its value system is aligned with the dominant ideology, reaffirming it, or if it aims to challenge and question the dominant ideology. So as we work through examples in this topic, consider what you are being asked to “think about” and how. Does the film reaffirm a dominant ideology (i.e. capitalist, white, middle class, patriarchal)? Let’s start by looking at specific ideological theories, their historical development and how they are evident in film.

Marxism and class

We can trace the study of class in film to specific critical frameworks and historical moments. In particular, the work of German philosopher Karl Marx and the student and worker-led protests in May 1968 around France. These latter events began with students protesting the deterioration of universities, however, their cause picked up momentum when they were faced with police brutality. The student protests challenged not only the French government but French society more generally, which was picked up by other sectors of the community. Around 10 million workers across France began striking and joining the protest, with the more fundamentalist left-wing workers and organisations attempting to push the De Gaulle government out of office and bring in a socialist government instead.

Overall, the events of May ’68 created a need to critically question and re-examine everything — culture, social structures, daily life — and generally played into the Western world’s challenging of social norms more broadly. For example, the challenges to racial oppression in the Civil Rights movement in the USA and the pre-empting of second-wave feminism, which was in full swing by the early to mid-1970s. This is also the time where ideological analysis of film became a subject of academic inquiry.

What is also important in this history is the influence of Marxism as the ideology underpinning the student-worker protests. Before looking at Marxism’s influence on film and culture, let’s quickly look at who Karl Marx was and the main tenets of his social ideological framework.

Karl Marx was a philosopher, economist and socialist whose ideas on communism gained attention around the 1840s with the publication of The Communist Manifesto (1848), which he wrote with Friedrich Engels. From his studies into capitalism, capitalist societies and their financial/economic structures, Marx argued that society is divided by classes and that there is always one class that attempts to exploit another. In this sense, one class is always dominant over another until there is a revolution and a new class emerges to dominate and rule society. This is all centred around modes of production; for example, in modern society, we could argue that the ruling class is the bourgeoisie (capitalist) and the other is the proletariat (or working class). In this model, the social agenda is set by the dominant class to serve the interests of the dominant class and the rest of society accepts this (unconsciously) through a process of normalisation. So, to summarise classical Marxism — it is the propagation of false ideas by the capitalist (dominant) class, producing a ‘false consciousness’ or false identity in the masses (generally the working class), which can then be countered by revolutionary ideas (such as communism and further ideologies to do with gender and race as we will soon look at).

What does all this have to do with film? The use of Marxism in film studies is two-fold.

The first proposition refers to the relationship between the film as a text and the spectator (audience). In this idea, spectators become historical subjects with social attributes of gender, race, class, age, nationality, sexuality, etc. Our backgrounds and experiences inform how we interpret films, whether this is on a conscious or unconscious level. Here is where you can reflect on your own opinions or start to recognise your own belief systems in relation to the films you watch.

The second proposition refers to the use of Marxist ideas concerning social power relationships and revolution to analyse film representations. Here we are asked to question how dominant ideologies make themselves apparent or are reinforced in films texts — whether they are challenging or reaffirming the dominant ideology. Marxist ideology is combined with analysing gender, race, post­-colonialism and other socio-political issues to provide a richer way of understanding and deconstructing films.

Capitalism and consumerism

As Marx spoke about social structures and class exploitation, we could look at the ideology of capitalism and how it has been represented in film through a related framework. As Marx argued, western society is considered a capitalist society, this is the dominant economic and social structure based around modes of production of goods. Capitalism creates a producer-consumer binary, whereby producers sell their products to consumers. However, they need to make their products attractive in order to sell them, make money, and keep the economy going, thus creating competition within the production sector. For example, the Hollywood film industry is a producer of the film product and we become its consumers when we go and see a Hollywood film. At its simplest level, the film trailer sells this product to us, making the film look attractive so we will buy a ticket. If this product is sold en masse, then the Hollywood producers will make a profit — this is the aim. However, in order to make a profit, producers like Hollywood have to create a need or a desire within the consumer to make a purchase and will utilise various techniques in which to manipulate us into doing so — to make us think “we have to get this product” or “we really need to see this film”. We may not necessarily be aware of this, because this is just how society works, right?

Some films have engaged with this ideology within their narratives, as a means of uncovering how our actions as consumers are manipulated and motivated by big producers, like Hollywood studios or other massive global enterprises. Let’s take a look at a couple of examples:

Josie and the Pussycats (2001)

Fight Club (1999) stills:

This is a really interesting film for an ideological analysis. It combines a number of representations (masculinity, consumerist, femininity, class) to perhaps challenge the dominant ideologies. In these stills, however, we can see how Edward Norton’s character begins as the ultimate consumer, believing that his purchasing of Ikea furniture is going to somehow solve his problems. He is a slave to capitalism.

Race

In a similar approach, the notion of racial representation in film considers power relationships between different races, as well as how film informs racial identities. Once again we need to reflect on which ethnic groups in society appear to have the most power and which are considered minorities. In Australia, the dominant group in this context would be white Australians. So to analyse the representation of race, we need to consider what the film is telling us about the dominant group and the minority group/s.

The work of media theorist Stuart Hall is useful in looking at how power and race in film are encoded into narratives and visual representation. Hall became one of the main proponents of reception theory, and developed ‘Hall’s theory of encoding and decoding’. This approach to textual analysis focuses on the scope for negotiation and opposition on the part of the audience. This means that the audience does not simply passively accept a text-social control. Rather, audiences can actively engage with what they see on screen by decoding the visual representations. For example, consider what racial stereotypes get perpetuated in popular cinemas, like Hollywood. Do we just see the same characteristics of a certain race that play upon stereotypes? A character’s physical appearance, their clothing, their hairstyle, their interests and behaviours. In the following clip from Rush Hour 2 (2001), what stereotypes are being played with, both in the representation of African Americans and Chinese people? Make a list of them perhaps.

Hall’s work, such as studies showing the link between racial prejudice and media, have a reputation as influential and serve as important foundational texts for contemporary cultural studies. He also widely discussed notions of cultural identity, race and ethnicity, particularly in the creation of the politics of Black diasporic (large ethnic groups having to migrate) identities. Hall believed identity to be an ongoing product of history and culture, rather than a finished product, therefore our understanding of racial representation can change over time depending on what the dominant ideology is. For example, up until the 1960s, African Americans were socially segregated from their white counterparts (on buses and in movies theatres, for instance). Through a confluence of events, such as Rosa Parks refusing to give up her seat for standing white passengers on a segregated bus in 1955, American society and culture began to change through the inspiring Civil Rights movement. While racism still exists today, this moment in American history challenged the dominant suppressive ideology of white superiority and brought about the Civil Rights Act of 1968, an act that made discrimination based on race (religion, gender, etc.) illegal. This challenging of ideology shows that our idea of race, in this case, African American identity, is not cemented and fixed. For various reasons and the way race is discussed through different media, it can change. What we need to consider in this respect is how film enters this discourse — does it reaffirm or challenge dominant ideologies to do with race? We will look at an example in a moment.

Race and post-colonialism

Postcolonial theory examines the ways in which colonial or imperialist conceptions of the world are portrayed in literature and media texts. It focuses on the fact that much of the media represents the third world or previously colonialised parts of the world as the “other”-as “non-Western”, essentially meaning they are “backwards,” “uncivilised”, “mysterious,” “undeveloped,” “primitive,” and “dangerous.” These perceptions stem from 19th and early 20th century conceptions of the world in which Western powers still controlled much of the globe.

In his 1978 study of ‘Orientalism’, Edward Said (pronounced say-eed) demonstrated how Orientalism was a racist and sexist discourse for a superior European perception of the Orient as exotic, mysterious, erotic, different, and non­ white or other. Asians, Middle-Easterns, Africans, or Muslims in Hollywood films continue to be portrayed in ways that reflect European/American stereotypes of these regions and their cultural practices. Can you think of any examples? Perhaps consider how Indigenous Australians have been represented in our cinema.

Challenging of racial (and other) stereotypes — 25th Hour (2002).

What is Spike Lee trying to say in this clip? Yes, Monty (Edward Norton) is taking a roundabout way of realising that his own troubles were brought on by his actions — he is going to jail — yet Lee has included this aggressive social monologue in the film. What does this suggest to you about class and race in Lee’s New York and how does the clip utilise racial and class stereotypes?

Gender representation

The focus on gender representation in film, specifically the representation of women, became of intense scholarly interest in the 1970s. Key British film theorist, Laura Mulvey, published an article entitled “Visual pleasure and narrative cinema” (1975) that ignited debate regarding how women in cinema are portrayed through certain choices of film language. In this article, Mulvey draws from theories such as Freudian and Lacanian psychoanalysis, and spectatorship theory. These theories are quite large and going into them in any depth is not possible here, however, it is hoped that the explanations below will be enough to understand their interrelatedness.

Mulvey’s work focused on the representation of the female image on screen and how this image is used as a tool for identifying sexual difference in spectatorship. She argues that ‘patriarchal society has structured the film form’ meaning that the structure of films is centred on patriarchal definitions of both masculinity and femininity and, as a result, the image of woman has been relegated to a representation of her as a castrated subject. The problem that Mulvey believed existed in film as a form of patriarchy (the dominant ideology to do with gender) is that the woman is only existent in relation to the man, that is, the woman is the other sex; the sex that is not a man.

In terms of the spectator’s identification with film, Mulvey discusses a concept she calls ‘narcissistic scopophilia’ (the psychological pleasure in looking). Here the film spectator finds pleasure in both looking and identifying with the image on screen. This concept is founded in Lacanian psychoanalysis and Jacques Lacan’s notion of the infant recognising or misrecognising themselves in a mirror, which is an important event for the infant, as this is what begins the development of its ego and its subjectivity. At this moment the infant sees its mirror image as more complete than itself. Before this time, the infant does realise that its hand or arm belongs to the rest of its body. So the infant misrecognises itself as complete and unflawed, not realising its weaknesses, and idealising its own image. Lacan calls this the ego ideal.

A parallel can be made between the mirror and the cinema screen. The spectator gets lost in the fantasy of the film, which can produce a loss of the outside world as the ego has recognised it (perhaps you have watched a film and got so involved that you forgot where you were or even your own subjectivity). This is reminiscent of the infant’s mirror moment. The infant’s ego (sense of self) does not exist in its complete form yet, and similarly, the spectator’s ego is lost in the fantasy world of the film through processes of misidentification and the production of ego ideals.

The male gaze

It is important to note that Mulvey’s spectator is gendered. She believes that the spectatorship position is strictly a masculine one and therefore uses the term the male spectator. The male spectator is not only the audience member but also the main male protagonist of a film. The spectator’s look is essentially through that of the main male protagonist, or what Mulvey calls the spectator’s surrogate look, which gives the feeling of control over the female image and a sense of satisfaction. So these two positions of looking are working simultaneously throughout the film through the lens of the camera. In short, there are three cinematic gazes:

1. Camera (lens, POV)

2. Character (usually male)

3. Spectator (any gender, but aligning with an active masculine position)

Mulvey sets two avenues of pleasure that the male spectator aims his desire at in Hollywood narratives. The first of these pleasures that the cinema provides is scopophilia, and the second is voyeurism. Concentrating specifically on scopophilia, for Mulvey this idea sees the active subject (the man) deriving erotic pleasure in looking at a passive object (the woman). This active/passive binary, first evident in Freud’s work on sexual difference, sees activity being aligned with masculinity and passivity attributed to femininity. Mulvey’s appropriation of this binary produced the coining of the term ‘the male gaze’, which sees the bearer of the gaze as a masculine subject and therefore its recipient as the opposite — the female object. For her, the ‘male gaze’ is a problem in cinema.

As an example, think about how Lisa appears to both Jefferies and to the spectator for the first time in a scene from Hitchcock’s Rear Window (1954). This is the shot that we see from Jefferies perspective as he wakes up.

What kind of woman does she represent and how does Jefferies (and the camera) look at her? Therefore, how are we as spectators being asked to look and understand her character?

In this sense, the images of women become the spectacle for male fantasy and desire. Female characters are overly feminised in their appearance to act as objects of male sexual fantasy, or as Mulvey states, ‘coded for strong visual and erotic impact’.

The oeuvre of Megan Fox presents an interesting case study of the male gaze to end on. Early in her career Fox was cast in roles that placed her as the stereotypical subject of the male gaze. In the Chuck Lorre sitcom vehicle for Charlie Sheen, Two and a Half Men (2003--2015), Fox's character is presented as "jailbait"; a sexually precocious teenager the middle-aged male characters must struggle to resist:

Similarly, in this (alegedly) iconic scene from Michael Bay's Transformers (2007), Fox is the hyper-sexualised love interest for Shia LaBeouf's everyboy main character. Here LaBeouf stands in as a surrogate for the imagined audience member:

Conclusion

This topic has presented only a few of the many ideologies approached in film. We could also look at things like sexuality (i.e. queer cinema) or age (youth right through to older age groups) as well. Through the examples we can see that it is not only a certain kind of film or genre that engages with ideology, it can be any film of any genre.

What these representations and examples suggest is that film is a central art form that has the power to challenge oppressive dominant ideologies, but they can also reaffirm them without us being aware of them. As filmmakers then, how can an understanding of ideology and representation assist our practice? This is something you will hopefully consider when you write and film your stories. Are you intentionally trying to challenge the status quo when it comes to race, class, gender or any other aspect of society in order to encourage your audiences to think about its problems and issues? If not, hopefully, you will now be aware of the potential impact your creative choices may have on your audiences’ values and subsequent engagement with your work.

References

An Idiot’s Guide to Film Theory. (2013). uglybecky1. Retrieved from https://anidiotsguidetofilmtheory.wordpress.com/2013/01/26/psychoanalysis-and-lost-highway/

Branston, G. (2000). “Identifying a critical politics of representation”. Cinema and Cultural Modernity. Buckingham, Philidelphia: Open University Press. pp. 155–176.

Mulvey, Laura (1975). “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema” in Contemporary Film theory. Anthony Easthope (ed.). Essex: Longman

Williams, R. (1977). Marxism and Literature. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press. Pgs. 55–71.