Media, Culture and Language

The article problematises the relationship between the production model and the ‘truth-telling’ filmmaker, and in turn that between the documentarian and the subject. Style is seen as a way in which the tension between the supposedly contradictory formal conceptions of documentary style and relinquished representation of quotidian life can be momentarily reconciled.

Published in: The Philosophy of Documentary Film: Image, Sound, Fiction, Truth, David La Rocca, ed., 2016, Lanham, Maryland: Lexington Books, 325-343

As a filmmaker who frequently enjoyed unusual artistic control over his output, Alfred Hitchcock was known for appearing not only in his films but also in their trailers. But while the studios understood that Hitchcock’s appeal was a key part of his films’ selling points, his role in such content was, for the most part, a corollary to the task of having to sell a motion picture. As the director’s influence began to grow and his own sense of authorship began concomitantly to develop, in these trailers (filmic paratexts), Hitchcock, as the author argues, increasingly makes the case for his artistic intentions, mirroring the ambiguous and excessive style of his contemporaneous filmmaking in such promotional material. In so doing, Hitchcock promotes ostensibly ‘closed texts’ not open to interpretation while offering the potential for polysemantic renderings of such texts – opening the paratext. In this way, the trailer serves as both promotional product and critical (self-)appraisal, suggesting in the textual and paratextual construction of the Hitchcock trailer an intersection of the materialism of the commercial package and the abstraction of artistic ambition.

Opening the Paratext: the Hitchcock trailer as assertion of authorship As a filmmaker who frequently enjoyed unusual artistic control over his output, Alfred Hitchcock was known for appearances not merely in his films but also in their trailers. But while the studios understood that Hitchcock's appeal was a key part of his films' selling points, his role in such content was, for the most part, a corollary to the task of having to sell a motion picture. As the director's influence began to grow and his own sense of authorship began concomitantly to develop, in these trailers (filmic paratexts), Hitchcock, as this article argues, increasingly makes the case for his artistic intentions, mirroring the ambiguous and excessive style of his contemporaneous filmmaking in such promotional material. In so doing, Hitchcock promotes ostensibly 'closed texts' not open to interpretation while offering the potential for polysemantic renderings of such texts-opening the paratext. In this way, the trailer serves as both promotional product and critical (self-)appraisal, suggesting in the textual and paratextual construction of the Hitchcock trailer an intersection of the materialism of the commercial package and the abstraction of artistic ambition.

The Genre Mask discusses the use of genre and generic tropes as a mask for hidden or subversive meaning held beneath the familiar aesthetic of genre-observant film productions. This idea is approached from the perspective of genre classification and identification, and for the purposes of this study the Investigation Film genre, which includes detective films, films noir and police procedurals, comes under scrutiny largely because of its links with social realist cinema. Using several films in the corpus for close reading, the study charts the progression of the genre as films navigate its resistance and malleability to social preoccupations, before using this tension to describe how genre can be used to construct horizontality between film and viewer.

This article draws on psycho-social theories of emotional labour and the sociological concept of ‘emotion work’ in order to interrogate the affective communicative performances of celebrities, their deployment of a ready language of emotion and the broader therapeutic discourses from which this language is derived. It takes as its focus the emotional work undertaken by celebrities in order to limit or repair reputations damaged by scandal and to overcome a perceived betrayal of public trust. Starting from the premise that an ‘ideology of intimacy’ has formed the conditions in which the celebrity now labours as an emotional subject in the public arena, and that social relationships are considered to be ‘authentic’ or ‘real’ mainly through their commitment to the ‘inner psychological concerns of each person’, we explore the affective demands made upon the celebrity subject in contemporary media culture to be both intimate and ‘real’. In so doing we draw attention to the range of cultural spaces in which celebrity emotion work takes place, the conventions which enable this work and the only partially articulated contract of on-going public intimacy upon which this work is predicated. The article concludes with a consideration of how the public–celebrity contract intersects with a broader cultural imperative to perform emotion in the media, evident in the expectation that public figures should convey authentic feeling and convey it convincingly, in order to manage an on-going relationship of trust with their publics and thereby sustain a successful career in the public realm.

This paper considers the negotiation of femininity and new economies of the
gaze within the context of British television detective drama. Since the inception
of television women have been frequently and voyeuristically presented as
either the sexualised victims or perpetrators of crime. Indeed, the very first
episode of the innovative British police series Z Cars (BBC), broadcast in 1962,
featured a constable encountering two women leaving a city nightclub. He takes
the opportunity to warn the younger one, who is new to the city, away from the
“influence” of her more experienced friend. Both women are clearly out of place,
unaccompanied in the public sphere—depicted as either vulnerable or manipulative—caught in a male gaze. They are regarded as sexually transgressive—
criminalised by their presence on the street instead of in the home. This series
was “ground-breaking” for its streetwise realism, “new town” locations, and
insight into the fraught domestic lives of its all-male police team.

This article considers the relationship between media culture, surveillance, and the law. It argues that scopic technologies such as closed circuit television (CCTV), together with nonfiction “reality” television and reportage, are helping to produce new intersections between media and social space. This article maps some of these intersections. It also unpacks some of the important ethical and political questions raised by these new formations and their inhabitation. How do these new technologies and genres inform and shape the public’s real and imaginary relationship with the law and its executives? What stories do they tell about crime, fear, and social order? How do they affect the previously established divisions between public and private space?

This paper represents the first steps in a new project: a jointly authored book on the relationship between realism and reality television. Cultural critics have noted how mass forms of popular culture can provide ways of confronting and managing the basic psychic tensions of contemporary urban life . These tensions are arguably produced as older forms of authority and security -the law, democratic government, community, judiciary, religion and so on -have been critiqued, eroded and displaced by an increasing public political cynicism and a turn to the self as the only possible marker of integrity . Modern discursive technological forms such as the television, the video camera and the Internet participate in new convergences such as so-called reality entertainment, producing intersubjective media spaces within which the individual subject -interviewee, witness or protagonist -is looked to as a primary guarantor of experience and knowledge; new spaces in which the self takes centre stage as victim, hero or witness. It could be argued that as these technologies mediate 'real' actions and events within the non-tangible digital realm the individual subject, who is central to the story, becomes a crucial coproducer of the new economies of realism (see Dovey 2001). This paper examines the hybrid genre of reality or 'true' crime television in order to explore tensions between cultural anxiety, media spectacle, the economy of the gaze and the individual subject.

This article examines Our Father the Serial Killer (Court TV/Everyman, 2002) as one example of a
growing number of 'true crime' documentaries that focus on the
'fallout' of crime, attending to its victims, bystanders or witnesses as the victims not simply of crime but of the traumatic event in the heart of the community.The phrase 'true crime' is usually
used quite broadly to include any true accounts or case studies of
real crime and its aftermath. It often refers to documentaries
using an investigative mode either to 'solve' or to recall the
details of notorious murders or other atrocities. In this context,
however, I am referring to a far smaller band of films and
programmes that explore the aftermath or 'fallout' of the crime
and its status as traumatic event. The latter type would include
films by Errol Morris such as The
Killer Inside Me (2000) and Joan
Dougherty, Crime Scene Cleaner
(2000), Nick Broomfield's Aileen:
the Life and Death of a Serial
Killer (2003) and, most recently,
Andrew Jarecki's Capturing the
Friedmans.

"How does culture articulate, frame, organise and produce stories about social class and class difference? What do these stories tell us about contemporary models of success, failure, struggle and aspiration? How have class-based labels been revived or newly-minted to categorise the insiders and outsiders of the new 'age of austerity'? Drawing on examples from the 1980s to the present day this book investigates the changing landscape of class and reveals how it has become populated by a host of classed figures including Essex Man and Essex Girl, the 'squeezed middle', the 'sharp-elbowed middle class', the 'feral underclass', the 'white working class', the 'undeserving poor', 'selfish baby boomers' and others. Overall, the book argues that social class, although complicated and highly contested, remains a valid and fruitful route into understanding how contemporary British culture articulates social distinction and social difference and the significant costs and investments at stake for all involved.
"

"Reality Television" has little to do with reality and everything to do with television form and content. "Reality TV" takes the reality television phenomenon to be a significant movement within documentary and factual programming. This book analyses new and hybrid genres including observational documentaries, talk shows, game shows, docu-soaps, dramatic reconstructions, law and order programming and twenty-four/seven formats such as "Big Brother" and "Survivor," These programs, both popular with audiences and heavily debated in the media; are at the center of heated debates. These discussions focus on tabloidization, media ethics, voyeurism and the representation of the real. Through detailed case studies, this book breaks new ground by linking two major themes together: the production of realism and its relationship to revelation. It addresses 'truth' telling, confession and the production of knowledge about the self and its place in the world within forms that produce new configurations of social and media space.

"What is tabloid culture?
How do tabloid media prompt debates about values and ethics?
Can we respond positively to the `tabloidization' of culture?
What is so appealing about the rhetoric, attitude and posture of tabloid culture?
Which theories and concepts can help us analyse and understand tabloid media?
This wide-ranging and accessible Reader provides a useful introduction to the historical and contemporary debates about the values, ethics and pleasures of tabloid news, entertainment and culture.

Arranged thematically, the book addresses definitions and debates, values and ethics, carnival and excess, celebrity, gender and sexuality, production and the audience. With specially written introductions to the volume and to each section, the Reader features key writings from leading scholars in the field. Essays explore the history and origins of tabloid culture and concepts such as the press, magazines, shock-jocks, the public sphere, reality and talk show television, photojournalism and voyeurism, and examples used include:
heat magazine
Loaded and men's lifestyle publications
Jackass
The tabloid life of O.J. Simpson
Big Brother's Jade Goody
Each section is followed by recommendations for further reading.

"

Anita Biressi examines the historical origins and development of true crime and its evolution into distinctive contemporary forms. Embracing a range of non-fiction accounts including true crime books and magazines, law and order television, and popular journalism, Biressi traces how they harness and explore current concerns about law and order, crime and punishment, and personal vulnerability.

Preface
Acknowledgements
PART ONE: TRUE CRIME: ISSUES, HISTORIES, CONTEXTS
Introduction
'True Stories Only'
Histories of True Crime Discourses of Law and Order in Modern Britain
PART TWO: TRUE CRIME: STORIES, BODIES, CRIMINALS
Crime Magazine Stories: From American Idiom to an English Vernacular
Period True Crime: History from Below?
Daring to Know: Looking at the Body in the New True Crime Magazine
Figure in a Landscape: The Dangerous Individual in Criminal Biography
Bibliography
Index

This article highlights the distinctive turn in public discourse towards historical resources, analogies and stories to help citizens make sense of the current era of austerity through a selective analysis of the media coverage of the London 2012 Olympic Games. It argues that in straitened times British citizens are being asked to make do, to accept the rolling back of state provision and to modify their expectations of a civil society on the basis of historical myths as well as current realities. Having noted this, the article asks where on television are the counter-discourses that may also wish to lay a claim to a national history and to tell national stories and even to contest the dismantling of the welfare state? How might these spaces work to resist the prevalent criticism of public services, organized labour and popular protest and to defend the class (and other) politics and values with which these have been historically associated? In answer to these questions this article offers a brief consideration of the ways in which the 2012 London Olympics Opening Ceremony deployed history and historical reference.

This essay explores key political and popular discursive features of the so-called ‘underclass’ since Thatcherism. In doing so it offers a consideration of ‘underclass’ positioning as morally dissolute, ‘shameless’ and socially corrosive. It explores its location as marginal to the social but also symbolically central and its  importance as a focus of collective fascination as well as of concern and even anxiety.  We begin by unpacking the vocabulary of the ‘underclass’ and its cognate terms in relation to a considered understanding of class hierarchies and the changing model of social and class relations under Thatcher, Major and Blair. We then go on to highlight various exemplary depictions of the ‘underclass’ since the 1990s such as the British ‘underclass’ film cycles, the drama documentaries of Penny Woolcock and the TV series Shameless.

Feminist academic Catharine Lumby (2011:95) recently recalled that, when attending an intergenerational debate entitled ‘Is Feminism Dead?’, the audience willingly self-identified as feminists. She went on to observe with some bemusement that she had been asked to speak on the same topic no less than fourteen times during the past decade. As her anecdote implies, this repetitious scenario signals both the endurance and the redundancy of the question ‘Is Feminism Dead?’  It also implies that there are, perhaps, more useful positions from which to begin a discussion of the relevance and route forward for feminism as theory and practice today.  So, instead, we would like to take the opportunity in this chapter to enquire more productively about feminism’s current status inside and beyond the academy. Which feminist practices and certainties are firmly in place and which are endangered or under erasure? Which are newly emergent and how do they or how might they engage with social change (see also Walby 2011:1-2)? Clearly the answers to these questions are dependent on context. But it’s apparent to all involved in feminist scholarship that time spent debating the existence of feminism (at least within the academy and political activism) is time lost on its necessary practice, whether in terms of research, debate or action in the field. And for those of us working in cultural or media studies the need for feminist interventions has never been more pressing with plentiful evidence of the persistence of sexism in old and new guises (See Gill 2011).

As Anna McCarthy (2007:19) observes, rather than being dismissed as a ‘debased piece of mass cultural detritus’  reality television should, in fact, be viewed as a privileged site working across the three discursive apparatuses of family, state and cultural text [read ‘media’] to ‘annotate’ already dominant current transformations of the individual. This essay focuses on one such transformation-in-progress; that is the transformation of the British welfare ‘dependent’ into a self-reliant, self-supporting ‘citizen’ and the ways in which reality TV and especially the makeover show annotates this ideal by interpreting and glossing the neoliberal project and its enterprises in accessible and entertaining ways. It also aims to explore how programming works at the material level and in pragmatic ways to reinforce dominant political ideologies of entrepreneurship through its links to mainstream political communication and policy.  Finally, it considers the ways in which the format of the reality makeover sometimes struggles to maintain the integrity of the transformation it aims to show and in doing so reveals the precariousness of self-reliance and social enterprise as the motor of social progress and security.