Paper Presentation: Media Industries

Paper Presentation

Media Industries

Literature Review

Frankfurt School of critical thought

• Marxism: power and the means of production influence ideology and mass persuasion; capitalism as profit making amoral enterprise
• Horkheimer & Adorno: "culture industry" as production of popular culture items (film) are used to manipulate the masses into passivity. What is acceptable and desirable as an ideology

By Chance Lachowitzer

Context of NC-17 Rating

Introduced in 1990 amidst controversy and a call for a ratings reform

Kevin S. Sandler states, “Like previous rating revisions, the NC-17 was a ploy, a means of preserving the economic and political interests of the MPAA…NC-17 was merely a face-lift of the X, a category no less stigmatized than its predecessor and one that the MPAA never intended to use in the first place.”

Sandler, Kevin S. The Naked Truth: Why Hollywood Doesn't Make X-rated Movies. New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press (2007: 85–86).

Marketability of a film guarantees its success or failure

NC-17 ratings are a form of economic coercion and censorship because these ratings are by and large denied exhibition by theaters, advertisers, and axillary markets.

In " Culture Industry Reconsidered," Adorno states, “The culture industry misuses its concern for the masses in order to duplicate, reinforce and strengthen their mentality, which it presumes is given and unchangeable…the masses are not the measure but the ideology of the culture industry” (Adorno 1975: 12).

Vaughn, Stephen. Freedom and Entertainment: Rating the Movies In an Age of New Media. New York: Cambridge University Press (2006: 194–95).

Stuart Hall "Encoding, Decoding" (1977)

• production carries a complex structure of domination

"Representation and Ideology in the NC-17 Movie Rating"

Application

Case Study

Sexual Bias: Appropriate Content According to the Dominant Ideology

Blue Valentine (2010, Weinstein Company) and Black Swan (2010, Twentieth Century Fox)

"One new movie [Black Swan] generating Oscar buzz shows a woman engaged in a steamy sex act with another woman in a scene that lasts just over a minute without any nudity. Another new movie [Blue Valentine] also piquing the attention of Academy Awards voters shows a man performing an identical act on a woman in a scene that lasts just over a minute without any nudity."

• Ideology at work in internal bias of acceptable sexual content
• Ideology at work systematically in the bias major studios over independents

Representation: the public and administrative face of the MPAA and CARA

• context: representation in transition
• background: relationship between the MPAA and CARA in relation to movie ratings

Ideology: an unstated yet effective influence in the rating system

• perpetuation of privilege and bias
• film content and film production

Zeitchik, Steven. "Two Films, Two Sex Scenes, Two Different Ratings." Los Angeles Times. December 4, 2010. Accessed December 4, 2014.

The NC-17 rating "marginalize any content or voice that could challenge potentially the hegemony of the film industry or its dominant ideology" (16).

"You have to question a cinematic culture which preaches artistic expression, and yet would support a decision that is clearly a product of a patriarchy-dominant society, which tries to control how women are depicted on screen. The MPAA is okay supporting scenes that portray women in scenarios of sexual torture and violence for entertainment purposes, but they are trying to force us to look away from a scene that shows a woman in a sexual scenario, which is both complicit and complex. It's misogynistic in nature to try and control a woman's sexual presentation of self. I consider this an issue that is bigger than this film."

The NC-17 rating perpetuates dominant and corporate ideology as a mechanism for domination and control

S.T. Vanairsdale’s "Ryan Gosling Tees Off on 'Misogynistic' MPAA Over Blue Valentine Rating." Movieline. November 18, 2010. Accessed December 6, 2014.

Application Continued

Systematic Bias: Majors over Independents

Who produced and distributed the film?

• Weinstein Company
• Twentieth Century Fox Film Corp.

Framing the Argument

Representation: “to advance the business and art of filmmaking, to protect the creative and artistic freedoms of filmmakers, and to ensure the satisfaction of audiences worldwide." -- mpaa.org

"The voluntary rating system was designed in part to allow film-makers to make informed decisions as to what sort of product they would like to deliver and what sort of audience they might like to reach. But the necessity these days to produce a product that can move freely through all the various theatrical and ancillary markets has made it impossible for even the most powerful and popular auteurs to make movies independent of economically motivated corporate prohibitions on X- and NC-17 –rated films."

Jon Lewis’ Hollywood v. Hard Core: How the Struggle over Censorship Saved the Modern Film Industry. New York: New York University, 2000.

"In theory, the ratings system is supposed to be an innocuous guide to help parents choose movies for their kids. In reality, it's grown into a formidable Hollywood institution, influencing virtually every aspect of a movie's life span, from distribution to advertising, from which theaters show it to which video stores rent it, from which scenes end up in the final cut to who ends up sitting in the audience."

-- Svetkey, Benjamin, and Richard Natale. "Why Movie Ratings Don't Work." Entertainment Weekly 25 Nov. 1994: n. pg. Web. 14 Nov. 2014.

Representation: Corporate and Conglomerate

Ideology: reflects corporate and conglomerate interest