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Introduction
Module 2 continues to introduce you to sociology and the sociology of popular culture, and does so with
a specific directional path in place designed to encourage you to (a) continue to familiarize yourself with
core sociological concepts such as social conflict theory and structural functionalism, (b) begin actively
applying theoretical perspectives to your own analysis of popular culture, (c) familiarize yourself with this
module’s introduction of cultural studies and critical theory as a companion to sociology, and finally, (d)
engage in various critical thinking exercises while examining a series of media images, television clips
and film screenings. Additionally, Module 2 centres media images, television and cinema as its three
central areas of exploration, and does so in that each both predate the post-2000s internet age, while
also continuing to thrive within the structures of 21st century popular culture.

Topics and Learning Objectives

Topics
This module will include the following topics:

Cultural Studies
Encoding and Decoding
HBO as “high class” television
Cultural Capital and Taste
Ideology and Spectatorship

Learning Objectives
By the end of this module, you will be able to:

Organize a sociological argument while using introductory concepts, theories, and ideas
Analyze popular culture in terms of cultural studies and class. For example, examining mainstream
television in regards to how network television genres are marketed to consumers
Prioritize issues regarding class, gender, race and sexuality when examining popular culture
Recognize language use and the organization of language as a key area of study in that
individuals are addressed through language in numerous different ways

Readings

Required Readings

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Haslam, J. (2016). “Disciplining cultural studies” in J. Haslam (Ed.), Thinking Popular

Culture. Pearson.

Cultural Theory and Cultural Studies

Drawing on hegemony, the theory developed by Antonio Gramsci and other theories introduced in
Module 1, cultural studies sets ideology, meaning, and power at the middle of its theoretical ambition,
while reiterating “the importance of popular culture for the formation of (and the analysis of the formation
of) social subjectivity” (Berube, 2005, 6).

Key Point
A key element of cultural studies is the studying of issues surrounding popular culture and its
relationship with representation, cultural production and consumption or identity construction.

Academic interest in popular culture has become fundamental within contemporary cultural studies as
“an interdisciplinary or post disciplinary field of enquiry that explores the production and inculcation of
maps of meaning” and “popular culture” is a key notion for work in cultural studies: “cultural studies
understands popular culture to be an arena of consent and resistance in the struggle over cultural
meaning” (Barker, 2004, 148).

In the context of the enduring debates surrounding the high culture versus low culture binary opposition,
there remains little doubt that popular culture possesses an antagonistic element that continues to spark
often fervent and constructive debate while also having come to acquire a pronounced socio-political
dimension evidenced by similar debates often occurring between advocates of left wing and right wing
politics. As such, and as cultural studies insists, the study of popular culture is an essential labour in the
process of coming to comprehend contemporary culture itself.

For Raymond Williams, the “popular” is identified through four characteristics or uses, including:

1. That which is liked by many people

2. That which is deemed unworthy or inferior
3. Work deliberately seeking to win favour with people
4. Forms of culture made by people for themselves

(Williams, 1983)

As Williams' list reveals, popular culture is argued about, debated, valued and devalued, and as such the
popular “is a site of power and the struggle over meaning. The popular transgresses the boundaries of

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cultural power and exposes the arbitrary nature of cultural classification through challenging notions of
high/low” (Barker, 2003, 445).

Example

For example, and as Module 1 explored, the categories of high and low are largely bound up in
subjective arguments in terms of value, originality and authenticity; however, as Barker reveals,
the categories themselves are “arbitrary” and as Williams confirms, popular culture’s value is
largely determined by elements outside the source of examination itself.

As John Storey explains, cultural studies as an academic field draws on communications, media theory,
feminist and queer theory, and critical race theory in offering an interdisciplinary study of culture, and
popular culture, while also borrowing from other disciplines such as sociology, anthropology and
criminology, while producing the interdisciplinary dialogue that characterizes the field of cultural studies
(Storey, 2006, 10).

For example, cultural studies may engage in a study of youth culture wherein theoretical perspectives
from sociology and criminology intermingle with gender-based critical theories centring youth culture as
a defined space within which various counter-hegemonic subcultures – goth, punk, emo, for example –
intersect in challenging dominant gendered codes of presentation and representation through music, art,
clothing and social beliefs.

Cultural studies links subjectivity and popular culture in relation to individual lives and experiences – with
engagement (social connection) to the text, an approach to addressing social issues often obscured
within popular culture and fundamental to this form of analysis is recalling from Module 1 the role of
ideology in culture itself, but popular culture, specifically.

That is, ideology, in reflecting a body of ideas that are articulated and communicated by a specific group,
is understood here in terms of power and power relations. For example, feminist theories examining
popular culture have revealed ways in which representations of gender arrive on the viewer’s screen
from predominantly patriarchal points of view. Additionally, if those representations come to be
understood as normal, common sense, and thus ideological, it bears out accurately that problematic
representations of gender are disrupted and challenged by feminism and feminist theory.

Cultural studies encourages:

1. Scrutinizing cultural texts – tv show, film, advertisement, social media page – and consider
how they are not restricted to holding and communicating only one meaning. For example,
advertisements often include both an image and text, and the combination of the two allows
for the possibility of different people interpreting the same advertisement’s motive
differently.

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2. Recognizing the act of interpretation of cultural texts as socially and politically engaged. For
example, a viewer may identify as “in opposition” to dominant codes or models reflected in
dominant culture such as Hollywood, Nike, or Instagram, while articulating the reasons as
to why.
3. Challenging the binary opposition positioning so-called high and low culture in opposition to
each other based on subjective valuation systems. For example, Module 1 demonstrated
this in collapsing the boundary between hip-hop and jazz while revealing the intimate
relationship between the two genres.

Intersection of Sociology and Cultural Studies

While sociology and cultural studies are separate disciplines, they also often intersect in ways that
encourage examining popular culture in diverse and illuminating ways. For example, while cultural
studies pays particular attention to representations of social groups in popular culture and the social
world itself, sociology’s long-term examination of the social structures and structuring practices that the
representations portrayed in popular culture are often reflective of in terms of gender, race, sexuality and
class, for example.

Sociology’s study of the social institutions and structures that govern the social world at large is
instructive for cultural studies in its text and image based examinations of representation.

The Encoding/Decoding Model

Conceived of by Stuart Hall – students will notice the regular use of specific theorists, and Hall will
become a familiar name – the Encoding/Decoding model pairs the interacting concepts in an effort to
integrate textual analysis and audience studies. For Hall, scrutinizing a cultural text – whether a
television show, film or advertisement – must include an examination of both the production of the text
and the reception of the text.

Example

For example, the encoding of a cultural text is done by those such as producers, directors and
editors, and the decoding of a cultural text is the task those in the audience, the viewer, reader or
listener, take on in consuming and negotiating with the cultural text in front of them.

More specifically, television shows are structured in ways that reflect particular points of view, attempt to
elicit specific responses from the audience, and privilege or prioritize representations of characters or
social groups. As such, Hall encourages the active participation of the audience in order to examine “the
degree of ‘understanding’ and ‘misunderstanding’” taking place between the arrival of the text and the

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receiving audience member’s reception of that text, or in Hall’s terms, “the encoder/producer and
decoder/receiver” (Hall, 1980, 131).

It is clear then that Hall does not see the space between producer and receiver as unbothered; instead
Hall sees this space as where “distortion” can occur; the message itself not traveling on an uninterrupted
and linear path to the receiver. Moreover, Hall asserts that any meaning the message may contain is
only activated and thus to be able to “have an effect” it must be first decoded by the receiver (Hall, 1980,
130). Understanding the importance of the receiver of the message then, Hall contends that what is most
interesting in the sender/receiver relationship is the way in which different audiences and different
individuals in those audiences generate meaning rather than discover meaning upon their reception of
the message.

The central idea Hall proposes is that the text cannot fully be in charge of its final meaning or
interpretation as each individual receiver’s experiences, beliefs and social and cultural perspectives
contribute to the interpretation and meaning making of the text for that receiver.

Hall theorized that these varied interpretations of the same cultural text were able to be categorized in
three ways:

1. Dominant (Hegemonic) Reading: the viewer’s interpretation of the text is in agreement with the
dominant or obvious meaning system operating within the cultural text. Simply, you agree with the
obvious message. A romantic comedy and “happily ever after,” for example.
2. Oppositional Reading: the viewer rejects the dominant (mainstream, “normal”) message and
meaning in their interpretation of the text. This oppositional reading may create a new meaning for
the specific text, a point Hall makes in maintaining receivers generate meaning rather than
passively accept it as a receiver.
3. Negotiated Reading: a compromise is drawn between the dominant and oppositional readings in
which a viewer accepts part of the dominant meaning, but rejects certain elements of it as well.

For Hall, this model reveals the active participation of the receiver as opposed to a simple passive
acceptance of the text. That text is then decoded by spectators in various or myriad ways and perhaps
not in the way the producer intended.

Video

Watch the video below for a discussion of Stuart Halls' ideas about representation, including
hegemony, stereotypes and re-presentation.

Video: Stuart Hall's Representation Theory Explained! [7:00]

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Discourse
Discourse addresses our relationship to knowledge, subject matter, behaviour and events as they are
represented and constituted in our language use, declarations and statements, as well as through
shared ideas as they exist socially. For Michel Foucault, discourse constitutes the world by shaping the
way knowledge is produced (Foucault, 1980, 131).

An ideal way to begin an exploration of the term discourse is understanding its role in providing a
framework through which to see, negotiate and interpret the social world around us. More specifically,
“discourse refers to the entire range of signifying practices in a society, composed not only of language
but also of the codes that structure our daily practice, production, use, and interpretation of media”
(Haslam, 2016, 125). For example, typically, dominant media institutions give rise to discourses
surrounding social issues, current affairs or history, and the ways in which narratives surrounding those
topics are structured then take root in larger social contexts through news media or popular culture, and
as such discourse then frames and shapes our knowledge of the issue.

In recognizing the role discourse plays in the social world and our place within it then, discourse is
examined in a wider social and political context as a reflection of its existence within the entirety of our
social lives and living conditions. For example, sociology sees discourse as a characteristic of power as
those controlling institutions such media, politics and education are also those producing discourse. As
such, discourse, power and knowledge are intimately bound up together.

In examining discourses and their role within language and symbol-based communication systems,
questions about discourse include:

1. How and why was a particular text articulated?

2. To whom is it addressed, and for what purpose?
3. What are the assumptions or surmises that are concealed in a text?
4. How do texts “organize in” and “organize out” certain interests and values?
5. In what ways, if any, are texts complicit with dominant and oppressive power structures?

(Scott, 2006, 57)

These five characteristics empower students of sociology in their critical examinations of popular culture
as, for example, popular culture texts are structured through language, appeal to some while not to
others, privilege some yet marginalize others, rely on common sense assumptions the consumer holds,
emphasize issues while dismissing others, and finally, as Adorno and Horkheimer examined in Module 1,
and as Hall examines here in Module 2, discourses are able to circulate in and around and in aid of
dominant culture.

In connecting discourse analysis to Hall, discourse, as inextricably linked to cultural texts such as an
advertisement, cannot be fully and entirely in charge of determining the meaning or interpretation of any
given text. Instead, discourse “is too multifaceted for its meanings to be completely determined by the
culture producer… To put it simply, clearly different readings, some often counter to the producer’s
intent, do occur” (Haslam, 2016, 126).

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What Haslem asserts is that the people, those receivers of the popular culture sent into our lives, are not
a monolith, and while dominant culture may attempt to transmit and legitimize specific discourses
reflecting its interests, dominant culture, like discourse, cannot possibly succeed in gaining the
agreement of us all.

In again referencing Hall, it is evident that the space between the producer of a text and the receiver of
the text is not always traveled smoothly. More specifically, any act of mass communication “must be
made within discourse, or more generally within ‘language’” (Haslem, 2016, 126) and it is ultimately
“within the slippery realm of language that meaning is created. This makes it difficult, if not impossible, to
control the meaning from the ‘production’ end of culture” (Haslem, 2016, 126).

Activity: Hall’s Encoding/Decoding Model

Look at the picture of the two basketball players below. The image was posted to [Link] in
February, 2012 and it shows Taiwanese-American basketball player Jeremy Lin, at the time a
member of the NBA’s Hornets. Immediately beneath Lin is a headline reading “Chink in the
Armour.” This image was posted to [Link] late in the evening, shortly before midnight, and
was only up for approximately three hours. However, when scrutinized in terms of Hall’s
encoding/decoding model, polysemy, and discourse’s relationship to power and language with
reference to the five characteristics listed above, it was “too late,” to use common, everyday
language.

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Chink In The Armour ([Link], 2012)

Source: Wikimedia Commons

With this in mind, consider how this image of Lin alongside the headline reflects each of those
characteristics.

“It’s Not TV. It’s HBO”

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The Sopranos (HBO, 1999–2007)

Source: Internet Movie Database

The Wire (HBO, 2002–2008)

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Source: Internet Movie Database

Question: What Is “Quality” Television?

As Module 1 explored, there are numerous difficulties in empirically distinguishing between high and low
culture, and many of the efforts to do so are often revealed as bound up in personal and social
subjectivities based on perceived value and status more so than any division that is naturally produced.
That is, the decision making process determining that a particular television show is high culture is
rooted in subjective characteristics, not objective determinants. A simple binary exploring this conundrum
is found in classical ways in which television has been categorized as low culture.

In noting the seemingly out of date ideology positioning television programming as automatically low
culture, Catherine Johnson addresses the possibility of “quality” television and in doing so regards
“quality” television as those shows with “sophisticated scripts, complex multi-layered narratives, and
visually expressive cinematography, combined with its exploration of contemporary anxieties” (Johnson,
2005, 61).

Jane Feuer, Paul Kerr, and Tise Vahimagi lso stress the importance of quality, but in their exploration it is
the audience members themselves that are tasked with elevating the quality of television, and they state
such an audience:

“is able to enjoy a form of television which is seen as more literate, more stylistically complex,
and more psychologically ‘deep’ than ordinary TV fare. The quality audience gets to separate
itself from the mass audience and can watch TV without guilt, and without realising that the
double-edged discourse they are getting is also ordinary TV. While the concept of quality
television has increasingly emphasised other dimensions, this image of the more critical
audience has remained important” (Feuer, Kerr and Vahimagi, 1984, 56).

Answer: HBO is “Quality” Television

In many ways, the 1990s is looked back upon as a defining decade in terms of popular culture. For
example, the mainstreaming of economically accessible cable television, the arrival of DVD collections of
full television series, the rapidly expanding use of the internet, as well as the rising prominence HBO, a
highly successful American cable network whose early ’90s comedy The Larry Sanders Show would
endure for nearly the entire decade while also becoming a widely and critically celebrated “cult classic.”

Sex in the City (1998) and The Sopranos (1999) would help solidify the popularity of HBO as it entered
the 2000s, and when two more critical successes, Six Feet Under (2001) and The Wire (2002)
became the unofficial fourth and fifth cult classics HBO could herald as its own. Soon after, viewers
welcomed Boardwalk Empire (2010), Game of Thrones (2011) and True Detective (2014), three
more in an impressive list of shows critically acclaimed, and perhaps equally important, immensely
popular!

HBO Branding

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Similar to any corporation – Nike, Starbucks, Disney – HBO was savvy in not only its programming itself,
but also in its branding.

For example, while NBC throughout the 1990s was known for its “Must See TV” promotional campaigns
reminding viewers to not miss that week’s episode of Seinfeld, Friends, Cheers or ER, HBO’s 1996
advertising logo explaining that “It’s Not TV. It’s HBO” was both a subtle shot at NBC, but also a bold
statement in claiming that its shows surpassed the quality of mainstream television and instead were to
be understood as elevated, elite and importantly, “originals,” another critique of mainstream sitcoms,
police crime dramas and hospital dramas.

Widely regarded as the premiere pay-television, specialty network, HBO has a proven track record in
producing what it calls “original programming.” More specifically, HBO’s production of popular cultural
and critically acclaimed television shows further question that increasingly vulnerable high-low binary
opposition as shows such as The Sopranos and The Wire are regarded as those which encourage an
active audience to indulge the formally and narratively challenging nature they present rather than the
repetitive, formulaic, yet pleasurable, nature of mainstream popular culture such as romantic comedies,
crime dramas, or sit-coms.

Much as an individual may “curate” or edit their social media page’s content to reflect a particular point of
view, aesthetic, identity or life goals, HBO similarly curates its content to reflect a programming ideology
supporting the network’s position against other television networks as an influential site of cultural
legitimization.

That is, HBO’s programming is meant to uphold the high culture versus low culture binary opposition
with the goal being that its shows be defined as better quality, smarter, more sophisticated than the
repetitive and formulaic programming offered by mainstream networks such as NBC, CBS or ABC. By
way of it’s subscription service model – much like Netflix or Crave, in 2021 – HBO, from its debut in
1985, sought to foster an identity as a network that was exclusive, its customers recognizing the monthly
subscription rate as a portal to original programming for those with critical, intellectual and discriminating
taste in television.

Pierre Bourdieu: Cultural Capital and Taste

The so-called “quality television” that both HBO and The Sopranos reflect when considered within the
framework established above is also explored through Pierre Bourdieu’s concepts of cultural capital
and taste.

While individual interpretations and valuations of popular culture are generally based on interests,
preferences and general taste in entertainment, popular culture is also structured in ways that reveal
presumptive differences in social class. For example, as was addressed above, HBO is considered a
“premium subscription” channel and the network has worked to establish a reputation for “quality”
programming reflective of its exclusive subscribers.

According to Bourdieu, one’s cultural capital is determined by the value that an individual holds in
relation to culture. More specifically, cultural capital produces a value system that permits “maintaining
different, and even antagonistic, relations to culture” depending on the social group or class to which an
individual belongs (Bourdieu, 1984, 12). For example, HBO may thrive as a result of its “quality”

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television programming and in rejecting “program standards that appeal to the mass audience, and
[thus] succeed by exploiting the limited access as a means of acceptance as high (or at least higher)
elite art” (Lotz, 2007, 56).

That is, a subscriber to HBO may do so as a result of dissatisfaction with the repetitive nature of
standard network programming such as sit-coms, police dramas and soap operas that may have
different titles but are remarkably similar in numerous other ways. Instead, that viewer chooses the
“original” programming of HBO’s The Sopranos or Game of Thrones while also increasing their own
cultural capital.

Additionally, Bourdieu argues that our preferred texts and objects, or our television shows, can reflect
our good taste in culture and act as an expression of social power on the basis of cultural distinction.
For example, the concept of “taste” is useful in understanding how and why some cultural texts – a
television show – are interpreted as more valuable than others and distinguishable by the social
meaning(s) affixed to them.

More specifically, “taste classifies, and it classifies the classifier” and taste “is what brings together things
and people that go together” (Bourdieu, 1984, 241). Lastly then, individual taste(s) are “the practical
affirmation of an inevitable difference” (Bourdieu, 1984, 56) as it separates the social world as much as it
harmonizes, and one’s purported good taste is reflected in their interest in the sophisticated nature of
HBO’s “quality television” as opposed to the repetitive mass culture of romantic comedies or sit-coms,
for example.

Bourdieu: Elitism and Education

According to Bourdieu, there was a very close correlation between the level of educational attainment
and the propensity to engage in traditional and highly regarded cultural practices such as visiting an art
gallery. Formal education was said by Bourdieu to play the decisive role in developing not only the habit
of cultural practice, but also the disposition towards cultural practice (Rigby, 1991, 96).

What has become apparent is that Bourdieu’s research and work on cultural capital and taste seems
littered with condescension and elitism and “he has been accused of assuming that the superiority of a
particular high bourgeois culture was more enduring than it has turned out to be. The highly pluralistic
cultural industries of the early twenty-first century compete in a relatively open marketplace, and taste is
often intentionally socially ambiguous, allowing people – particularly the young – to play and experiment
with a variety of cultural identities” (Scott, 2006, 46).

It’s Not HBO, It’s TLC: Class, Elitism and Bad Taste
Here Comes Honey Boo Boo (2012), a short-lived and controversial reality television show (TLC),
was subjected to continued mocking throughout its tenure capturing the real lives of a lower working
class family of five from America’s deep south, Georgia. Purposely or otherwise, the Thompson family
was a source of humour for many viewers as the stereotypically outrageous “white trash” family’s
mannerisms, slang, behaviour and culture were consumed as comedy, a “circus act” to look in on and
laugh at as a site of humour. Moreover, and as Scott explained in reference to Bourdieu and elitism,
“the cultural industries of the early twenty-first century compete in a relatively open marketplace, and
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taste is often intentionally socially ambiguous” (Scott, 2006, 46); indeed, the show raises interesting
questions surrounding Scott’s claim about 21st-century culture industries like the reality television
genre, as well as interesting questions related to power, representation, and exploitation.

Here Comes Honey Boo Boo(TLC, 2012)

Source: Internet Movie Database

For example, the network airing the show, TLC, has been accused of being a co-conspirator in what
many have argued is a mean-spirited mockery of a lower working class family. More specifically, TLC
was suspected of surely being aware of the show’s veering from reality television to exploitive reality
television as the social characteristics typically associated with so-called “white trash” were strategized
and articulated as cheap, but highly profitable labour, the family too uniformed to realize they are the
source of the humour, the butt of the joke.

From Bourdieu’s perspective, Here Comes Honey Boo Boo succeeds in fulfilling its primary function:
putting on display and legitimizing social differences by way of differences in economic status and social
class while reaffirming the belief that the more capital one has, the more powerful a position they hold in
the social world. That is, for the comfortably middle class viewer, the humour provided by this family also
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confirmed for that viewer their occupying a higher position in the social world, and it is this manner that
the criticism directed towards TLC surrounding exploitation is realized.

As Bourdieu explains, one’s perceived level of cultural capital typically ensures one’s ability to
distinguish between themselves and others in terms of their own credentials regarding education,
knowledge and culture. This distinguishability is also often only realized by the one concerning
themselves with it; in effect, it is a one-sided relationship.

Activity: Bourdieu’s Cultural Capital

Watch the video “Cooking with June Recipes,” which is a sequence from Here Comes Honey
Boo Boo. As you watch, keep in mind Bourdieu’s ideas on cultural capital, taste, and elitism
while looking for areas of the family’s lives that you could point to in constructing your own
identity in opposition to theirs.

Video: Cooking with June Recipes [4:37]

Now answer the following two questions:

How may a viewer of this show construct their own identity in opposition to the Thompson
family’s identity? For example, how might language, language use and dominant ideas and
stereotypes surrounding education and class be elements to consider?
How can a viewer identify the presumed lack of cultural capital and status the Thompson
family holds in an effort to construct their own identity as socially and culturally superior?
For example, where can you see the show shift from representing the family to mocking
the family? That is, does the show construct the family as inferior, as a source of humour
and contempt, and if yes, how so?

After having screened the sequence above, it’s apparent that closely scrutinizing
popular culture in a critical and sociological manner is:

Valuable: representations of poverty are not sources of humour

Helpful but it is still “just popular culture” and not to be taken entirely seriously

Not helpful: humour has always poked fun at people, it doesn’t mean it’s mean spirited

Another example of taking the fun out of everything

Submit

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An Introduction to Film Studies and Popular Cinema

The final section of this module introduces you to various strategies and theories addressing members of
the audience and investigates and reveals to students the varied ways in which popular cinema may
influence viewers, including in terms of how they consume and interpret images, as well as in ways the
images themselves structure the viewer’s consumption of what appears on the screen.

In many ways when considering the “meaning makers” of a particular film, spectators often default to the
director or the screenwriter, or perhaps the actors or the cinematographer, and while each is certainly a
central element of the overall meaning of a film, the viewer, or spectator, is also a major collaborator in
the production of a film’s meaning (Gianetti and Leach, 2005, 19). For example, in order to understand
the unfolding of the story structuring a film, the viewer must actively participate in an interplay with the
images and the story (Gianetti and Leach, 2005, 19), a laborious act that viewers often come to
understand as simply “watching a movie.”

One way that popular cinema and its viewers may be understood as having tension exist between them
is through the film’s possible dominance over viewers. That is, the director of a film is free to take
advantage of the limitations of the medium of cinema itself. For example, the film an audience watches
on the screen in a movie theatre is two-dimensional, the viewers see only what they are permitted to see
within the confining frame of the screen itself, and time and space are both manipulated so as to tell a
story in a compacted manner, one’s entire life for example, represented within a film’s 90 or 100 minute
running time.

This realization is an important one for students of popular culture as it reflects the value of the viewer as
a collaborator in the production of a film’s meaning, yet it also emphasizes the importance of the viewer
to the overall film itself, and in this manner, popular cinema is regarded as democratic, meaning is up for
interpretation, debate, consensus and speculation. This final point is an important one in that it illustrates
many of the concepts this module has explored, including encoding/decoding, “quality,” taste and
spectatorship.

The 1960s
The 1960s is understood as a decade of discord and protest in which troubling issues surrounding war,
race, gender and sexuality most prominently were debated and fought for in terms of rights, access,
safety and equality. As Williams, Hall and Bourdieu have all addressed, the relationship between popular
culture and the so-called “culture wars” that these issues reflected is a compelling one as it is evident to
the student of sociology that those issues existing in the “real world” often continue to exist in the
representational worlds the culture industry produces through the popular culture of advertising,
television and cinema. While the first two have been explored throughout this module, this final section
focuses on popular cinema specifically, and explores the contention that viewers are central players in
the generating of meaning in popular cinema (Hall, 1980).

Ideology and the Spectator

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According to Louis Althusser, ideologies are not just a group of ideas normalized as common sense to a
population through the dominant culture, but ideology “works beneath the level of the conscious mind
and persuades us to accept the values of our culture as if they were produced by nature” (Gianetti and
Leach, 2005, 380). For example, the military and police, capitalism and consumerism, and democracy
and voting are normalized institutions understood as structuring a stable and orderly society. At the same
time, while a general consensus may support these structures, ideas and beliefs in opposition to this
consensus are also recognizable, a conflict Module 1 introduces in setting up hegemony as a process
that operates in protecting the dominant ideas – ideologies – that come to be understood as common
sense and “normal.”

In keeping this framework in mind, Gianetti and Leach explain that much like government, political
parties and education are capable of producing ideologies that produce “subject positions through which
we view the world and construct our identities” (Gianetti and Leach, 2005, 380); popular culture has the
capacity to structure our views of the world as well. In referencing Althusser, popular culture, and more
specifically, popular cinema, can “‘interpellate’ or ‘hail’ us and by responding, we accept our assigned
subject positions and the ‘dominant ideology’ on which the existing social order depends” (Gianetti and
Leach, 2005, 380).

Prominent within the history of studying film has been the argument that historically popular fiction films,
more formally referred to as “classical narrative cinema,” have prioritized creating the illusion of reality
while encouraging and guiding viewers towards identifying with the main character(s). For example,
while watching a romantic comedy, viewers may gravitate towards identifying with the male or female
lead (and here we acknowledge the typically heterosexual nature of romantic comedies in terms of
relationships, love and the ideology of “happily ever after”) and in doing so may sympathize accordingly
while drawing one their own experiences or beliefs surrounding romance and relationships.

This is a basic idea but also a relatable idea for many while also reconfirming the ideological nature of
popular cinema genres such as the romantic comedy. For example, it is Althusser who stresses the need
to make visible the invisible nature of ideology, and in terms of the romantic comedy genre, Althusser is
suspicious of its motives in arguing that the illusion of reality further naturalizes the ideology structuring
the genre: the normal and natural search for happily ever after is inevitable as film spectators are
“passive victims of the imaginary illusions conjured up by mainstream cinema” (Gianetti and Leach,
2005, 381).

While Althusser’s arguments on classical narrative cinema are compelling in revealing the slippery
nature of ideology, we are also reminded of Stuart Hall. For example, Hall, and cultural studies,
“challenged the idea that audiences are ‘cultural dopes’ at the mercy of an all-powerful ideological
apparatus” (Gianetti and Leach, 2005, 381) such as Hollywood and its classical narrative cinema.

Key Point

In empowering the spectator, Hall, as he has previously stressed, argues that the labour
hegemony must engage in to maintain and protect dominant ideologies renders it vulnerable to
challenge as opposed to defining ideology itself as unquestioned and impervious to challenge.
More specifically, Hall, among others, prioritizes the value of “what people do with texts rather
than on what texts do to people” and within the process of protection and challenge Hall also

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maintains that “audiences are neither completely controlled by the film industry nor completely
free to make their own choices and construct their own meanings” (Gianetti and Leach, 2005,
381).

Popular culture is often criticized in terms of its representations of marginalized groups with regard to
race, class, religion or sexuality, for example, and as we’ve learned, as viewers we are not automatically
positioned as passive acceptors of these representations and instead we are active in the meaning-
making process.

Activity: Independent Critical Thought

In reflecting on the Key Point box above, consider 2–3 seemingly normalized and repetitive
representations of marginality that circulate through popular cinema, specifically that:

1. reflect hegemony in their maintaining dominant ideas of specific groups, and

2. provide an opportunity to apply Hall’s encoding/decoding model in privileging each viewer
as an individual experiencing and interpreting those representations in a personal manner
and offering a challenge to the hegemonic process itself as a result.

For example, how do HBO, Honey Boo Boo and the Jeremy Lin image and headline reflect the
importance of audience studies, meaning making and interpretation?

Summary
This module began with a list of key terms.

Video

As a summary, watch the business cards scene from American Psycho (Mary Harron, 2001)
three or four times, and apply those terms to generate different interpretations of the scene.

Video: American Psycho [2:58]

These instructions are purposely general; however, please be sure to apply the key terms listed,
including encoding/decoding, taste, cultural capital and discourse. For example, in the same manner as
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outlined immediately above, how can you identify representations of language, language use, class,
identity, power and status in the following screening as further illustrating the value of audience studies,
meaning making and interpretation?

Assignments
Module 2 entry due by Friday at 11:59 p.m.

References
Barker, C. (2003). Cultural Studies: Theory and practice (2nd edition). Sage.
Barker, C. (2004). The SAGE Dictionary of Cultural Studies. Sage.
Bérubé, M. (2005). “Introduction: Engaging the aesthetic” in M. Bérubé (Ed.), The Aesthetics of
Cultural Studies (pp. 1–27). Blackwell.
Bourdieu, P. (1986). Distinction: A social critique of the judgement of taste. Harvard
University Press.
Buttle, F. (1991). “What do people do with advertising?” International Journal of Advertising,
10, 95–110.
Eagleton, T. (2000). The Idea of Culture. Blackwell.
Foucault, M. (1980). Power/Knowledge: Selected interviews and other writings 1972–1977.
Pantheon.
Gianetti, L. & Leach, J. (2005). Understanding Movies (3rd Canadian Edition). Pearson.

Hall, S. (1980). “Encoding/decoding” in S. Hall, D. Hobson, A. Lowe, & P. Willis (Eds.), Culture,
Media, Language. Hutchinson.
Hall, S. (1997). “The work of representation” in S. Hall (Ed.), Representation: Cultural
representations and signifying practices (pp. 13–74). Sage/The Open University.
Jensen, K. B. (1995). The Social Semiotics of Mass Communication. Sage.
Johnson, C. (2005). “Quality/cult television: The X-Files and television history” in M. Hammond & L.
Mazdon (Eds.), The Contemporary Television Series. Edinburgh University Press.

Feuer, J., Kerr, P., & Vahimagi, T. (1984). Quality Television. BFI.
Lotz, A. D. (2007). The Television Will Be Revolutionized. NYU Press.
Rigby, B. (1991). Popular Culture in Modern France: A study of cultural discourse.
Routledge.
Williams, R. (1983). Keywords. Fontana.

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