MEDIA THEORIES

Media Theories.

When it comes to Media there are many media theory's created  by media theorist which are being used today. So these include Barthes with his Enigma Code, Levi Strauss who created the Binary Opposites, the Traditional Hollywood Narrative Structures with the 3 Acts linear, Todorov creating the Narrative theories, Propp creating the character types and lastly Laura Mulvey creating the Male Gaze. 

Roland Barthness came up with this Enigma (mystery) when it comes to movies, he called it the 'Enigma Codes'. The Enigma Codes are either open which means that they have not been resolved at the end, so for example in the film the Birds the story was left unresolved as we never found out why the Birds reacted in that way. Then we have an closed Enigma which is when the story does get resolved at the end leaving the audience feeling satisfied. Or we can get a Polysemic Enigma which means that the story has a number of different meanings.

And Levi Strauss came up with 'Binary opposites' this includes Heroes and Villains. He said narratives can be organised through a binary opposition. So two things will oppose each other, this is often dominant vs subordinate e.g male/female, hero/villain. 

There is another theory which which made up by Todorov. In 1969 Todorov produces a theory which he believed to be able to be applied to films. 

Todorov believed that all films followed the dames narrative patterns through various stages.

The 5 stages that Torodov came up with were:

1. A state of equilibrium (All is as it should be)

2. A distribution of that order by an event

3. A recognition that the disorder occurred 

4. An attempt to repair the damage of the disruption

5. A rerun of restoration of a new equilibrium 

An example of this is from the movie Taken written by Luc Besson.

The equilibrium of this movie is when the daughter is getting ready to go on holiday with her friends after her dad finally allowing her to go. 

Then the disruption of that order of event was when his daughter gets kidnapped and he makes a threat to the kidnappers, that when he finds them he is going to kill them. 

The next stage which is the recognition that the disorder, in the movie this occurred when the father (Liam Neeson) finds out that his daughter had been kidnapped by a Albanian human-trafficking ring which has been abducting female tourists. 

With the 4th stage, the attempt to repair the order of events occurs when he goes to find his daughter in Paris and then he begins to hunt the men who kidnapped his daughter and finds out who the guy who killed the girl was. 

And lastly the return of restoration he is then reunited with his daughter after killing a lot of guys, and he meets his wife and now they are all together.

Laura Muvley's: The Male Gaze

Laura Muvleys "Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema" 1975 said that in cinema the camera has the same view point as a man.

Women are viewed as the object of male erotic desire in the film and also in the audience. Men are active and the women are passive. they don't have n agency, they are not usually known to move the plot forward in a story.

The audience are therefore forced to identify  the male gaze, and us also are forced to view them as sex objects. Cinema usually reflects patriarchal (male dominated) society.
Patriarchy and Phallocentrism linked Phallus (penis) a symbol of power e.g cinema guns. So basically Phallus = Power.

Lastly Vladimir Propp:
He analysed traditional folk stories and discovered that there are usually 8 character types:

• Hero
• Villain
• Helper
• Donor (Provider
• Father
• Dispatched
• Princess
• False Hero