Applied theories Flashcards
The male gaze
Laura Mulvey + Van Zoonen
The Microphone lady’s performance, for example, collapses into victimhood as the video progresses, her initial confidence replaced by a mascara-streaked performance that suggests the presence of an unknown threat.
We are also presented with several scenes where women are included for the voyeuristic pleasures of the video’s male characters, and, by extension, are similarly offered up to us the audience as erotic spectacle.
The beach scene, for example, traces the camera’s perspective to that of a male performer watching an unsuspecting female subject. Here, Laura Mulvey’s male gaze theory is writ large in the scene - a scene that underlines the media’s tendency to present women for the pleasure of male characters and a male audience.
Ultimately, van Zoonen would assert that these routine depictions of women as erotic spectacle help to reinforce patriarchal power.
Depictions of masculinity in Riptide
Van Zoonen
Riptide’s representation of masculinity conforms to van Zoonen’s assertion that male representations in the media are wholly different to the way that women are depicted.
Where the video presents women as victims or as erotic spectacle using conventional beauty ideals, Riptide grants men the power to look and to act.
The video’s male characters, for example, point guns and drive sports cars. Riptide’s men are active, conversely, the female depictions are restricted, restrained or subject to the actions of unknown forces. In this sense, we can argue that the video wholly reinforces van Zoonen’s notion that the media routinely encodes men as powerful and women as weak.
Absent representations in Riptide
Bell Hooks
Riptide’s playful use of intertextuality points an accusatory finger at the media for its routine objectification of women. Certainly, the microphone lady scene suggests something of the degrading effects that conventional female stardom can construct.
However, the video’s complete absence of non-white characters is hugely problematic, potentially reinforcing Western beauty standards as white-centric.
Bell hooks might argue that the exclusion of non-white women from the video helps to nurture feminism as a white centric issue, marginalising the problematic treatment of black and Asian women in the media and in wider society.
Semiotics - Roland Barthes
'’oh all my friends are turning green’’
- Barthes idea that constructed meanings can come to seem self-evident as the green symbolises money and envy .
this could be said to to have achieved Barthes status of myth through a process of naturalisation which might allow for complicated readings of the image.
example of a polysemy - are his friends envious of his success or did his friends have ‘sold out’ by giving into money?
Genre Theory - Steve Neale
idea that genre is dominated by repetition, but also marked by difference, variation and change.
the artisitic nature of the riptide video fits in well with the target audience as the indie- subculture is also characterised as having a strong interest in art, literature and expressive albeit the calming and relaxed music.
indie folk music is male dominated as it focuses on voyeurism.
it is an illustrative music video as it has strong images to transfer an obvious motif throughout the generally upbeat song - it does not follow a narrative but it is a story about a relationship
artistic while seeming to be on a small budget.
theories of identity - David Gauntlett
Gauntlet focuses on the way in which magazines and advertisements attract and represent audiences. His suggestion is that audiences are sophisticated and use texts to satisfy their needs. They pick the bits of the text that are appropriate to them and their lives and ignore others.
In an interview he said that it is biographical - being scared of pretty girls was true as he was a shy kid.
The video rejects singular, straightforward messages and instead invites a variety of different responses and interpretations.
polysemy lyrics - allows the audience to interpret the meanings as suited to them.
