The Hunger Games – Gender Representations

The Hunger Games universe is a dystopia set in “Panem“, a country consisting of the wealthy Capitol and twelve districts in varying states of poverty. Every year,the ruthless Capitol randomly selects one boy and one girl, each between the ages of 12 and 18 from each of the twelve districts, pitting them against each other in a game of survival where they are forced to fight one another to the death. The victor then wins a new house for themselves and their families in their district, along with food, fame, and wealth.children are chosen to participate in a compulsory annual televised                    

death match called The Hunger Games.

The Hunger Games was directed by Gary Ross, produced by Nina Jacobson,and Jon Kilik, and it was written by Gary Ross, Suzanne Collins, and Billy Ray.  As I was going through the 3 guidelines I noticed that this movie also passes the Bechdel Test.  As far as the statistics for women being the main role in a movie and also for being producers my movie has both so the odds of that are pretty low.  However when talking about the binary oppositions my film does seem to have some of these.  When reading Mulvey’s article I noticed a good section on this, “we live in a world ordered by sexual imbalance, pleasure in looking good has been split between active/male and passive/female.  The determining male gaze projects its phantasy on to the female fire which is styled accordingly.  In their traditional exhibitionist role women are simultaneously looked at and displayed, with their appearance coded for stuning visual and erotic impact so that they can be said to connote to-be-looked-at-ness.” For the most part I feel as though my movie puts Katniss the main actress) in an active female role, however there are some scenes in the movie where it does try and portray her being in the passive female role for show.

Hunger Games Scene

References

Mulvey, Laura. “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema.” Film Theory and Criticism : Introductory Readings. Eds. Leo Braudy and Marshall Cohen. New York: Oxford UP, 1999: 833-44.

http://bechdeltest.com

Top 6 Media Conglomerates

General Electric 

A conglomerate is a number of different things or parts that are grouped together to form a whole but remain distinct entities.  With that being said 6 corporations control 90% of the mainstream media within the United States.  And what’s more, the amount of revenues from the tightly controlled mainstream media machine are enough to buy every NFL team 12 times.  General Electric (GE) is chief among these (with 2010 revenues standing at $157 billion). GE media-related holdings include a minority share in television networks NBC, Telemundo, Universal Pictures, Focus Features, and 26 television stations.  Just in the U.S.  to name a few,  including cable networks MSNBC, Bravo and the SyFy Channel.  Apart from consumer appliances market, it is also characterized by huge involvement in banking, insurance, and defense industries.  However as I was reading through many sites, they all stated that this is just a way for these companies to make more and more money.  This is shown to be very true in the picture below, it shows that in the 1980’s 90% of the media was owned by 50 companies, while now only 6 companies own 90%.  In the 1980s, as a means of increasing profits, many large corporations sought out to

 expand their business portfolios by diversifying into new business enterprises. One strategy used by some large organizations who sought such diversification was to expand into media outlets. (Haggard & Lapoint, 2013)

CBS

After spinning off into its own company from Viacom in 2006, CBS has mainly controlled the network television and radio broadcasting side of the business. With the most watched network under its name, CBS of course, the corporation has been able to generate over $14 billion in revenue and $1.3 billion in profit. CBS owns a 50% stake in the CW network, which it shares with Time Warner, while it fully owns Showtime, CBS Radio and Simon & Schuster, one of the big four of print publishers. CBS also owns its own sports network. (CBS Network.com)

 

References

Haggard, C. R., & Lapoint, P. A. (2013). ZBN NEWS: AN EXAMINATION OF ISSUES RELATED TO THE CORPORATE OWNERSHIP OF MEDIA. (). Arden: Jordan Whitney Enterprises, Inc.

Pragmatic Analysis – Part 3

Promoting Diversity

There are now many regulations involved with an end role of trying to promote diversity in media industries, in a way to introduce a sense of equality in the media world. This is all due to the fact that the wealthy and privileged social groups have the upper hand when it comes to media industries, therefore these regulations insure that the minority viewpoints and perspectives are still known and heard on the television and radio. Ott and Mack discuss two very important and well-known rules that had came into the media industry to help make it fairer to everyone. The first being the “Fairness Doctrine”, it was established in 1949 and it was an FCC policy that strongly advocated broadcasting stations to promote both sides of controversial issues and fairly represent both sides of the issue to viewers. However this was said to promote the fact that both sides are good, when in all actuality sometimes that is not at all true. Therefore the FCC decided to revoke the policy in 1987 as a consequence of “free-market” logic and deregulation. The Second example that they talked about was the “equal                                                    time rule,” in which is still in use to this day. This rule clearly outlines how stations must handle the broadcast of political parties and their advertisements. Television and radio stations may not refuse airtime to paying political parties and they also must charge them the lowest rate as they would charge other advertisers. They also must charge all candidates equally; if a station should choose to give free advertising to one candidate they must do so for all of the others as well. For example when Arnold Schwarzenegger was in the 2003 race for Governor, broadcast televisions were prohibited from showing any of his movies under the equal time rule. If they did show one of his films then they risked having to give the same amount of time to the other 134 candidates.

Managing Morality

There are three key types of regulated media content that Ott and Mack talk about, obscenity, profanity, and indecency. Obscenity has always been a difficult word to define, however we know it to be content that is sexually explicit in nature,  strongly based on the culture that is watching the material. In the 1973 court case, Miller vs California it was determined that content is considered to be obscene when; it meets the following three standards. 1) The average person, applying contemporary community standards, would find that the work, taken as a whole, appeals to prurient interest; 2) the work depicts or describes, in a patently offensive way, sexual conduct specifically defined by applicable

state law; and 3) the work, taken as a whole, lacks serious literary, artistic, political, or scientific value. Profanity on the other hand is simply defined as any language spoken in a vulgar manner. Which goes along with indecency, any material that is morally unfit for general distribution or broadcast, in which it most usually depicts some form of sexual behavior as well.  The book talks about South Park and how it is rated very high for all three regulations such as, extreme for violence, strong for language, and strong for sexual situations.  Therefore it is forced to be shown only on certain channels.

Ensuring Accuracy

Regulations intended at ensuring accuracy tend to deal primarily with news broadcast and print industries. Basically these regulations are used to insure that people are being told the truth about what is going on in our country. The most important regulations are the two twin legal concepts, slander, and libel. Slander is to make false and damaging statements about someone. Libel is when someone publishes false statements that is damaging to a person’s reputation, a written defamation. Neither is protected under the freedom of speech. However looking at these both from a pragmatic outlook they are very helpful and effective.

Chapter 5 – Part 3

The Many Meanings Of Violence

One can make the obvious conclusions about a persons drive to conduct violent acts (poor childhood, poor lessons taught, and/or mental conditions). However, what could drive a person who wasn’t exposed to real world events, that ultimately makes them commit acts of violence? Some say, growing up in a world propelled by the media and interactive entertainment, can have the obvious effects on ones cognitive ability to separate the “reality” with “fantasy”. When a child becomes exposed to such a great deal of violence through the media (movies, video games ETC); when and how can a child develop the sense to separate the real world from what they believe the “real” world to actually be. There is evidence and case studies to show that violent media exposure to children at a young age may cause a child to develop violent habits. However, this article supports the theory that you cannot assume that just because of today’s violent media it will cause a child to become violent in nature, and not be able to separate fantasy from reality. Due to the fact that violent media effects everyone differently, one person/child may think of it as no big deal while the next may feel completely opposite about the situation.   But you cannot suspect that it will not cause some mental correlation with fantasy violence with real world violence. The author states that even though one may become accustom to watching violent movies to such an extent that the person has no real emotional effect anymore, however that is not to say that the person wouldn’t have an emotional effect if they were to witness a crime happen in person. I was reading an article, The Influence of Media Violence on Children, in which is stated that media violence is universal, there are many cultural differences, and yet the basic patterns of the media violence implications are similar around the world, individual movies are not the problem, however, the extent and omnipresence of media violence contributes to the development of a global aggressive culture. (Dogutas 2013)