Encoding and Decoding Work

Tyree

Task 3.1

Encoding and Decoding

Stuart Hall's Theory

'Scarface'

Uses and gratification theory

This theory is based around the psychology of the audience members and how they react to certain media text, especially when it comes to film. If a film or television programme expresses a negative emotion, the audience would get a negative emotion and it would distract them from watching the film itself. This also works with something like this; if somebody is in a good mood, they would be more interested in watching something or reading a book, as opposed to being in a bad mood. Another way of saying this is that people use different types of media at certain times in order to satisfy their own needs.

Hypodermic Needle Theory
This interesting, but outdated theory tries to prove that an intended audience believes whatever they hear or see in different types of mediums. A good example of this is; in 1991, two boys were prosecuted for the murder of James Bulger, it has been said by the two boys that they were influenced by the horror film 'Child's Play 3' and the films' villain, Chucky to carry out this killing. They were said to have seen the death scenes within the film in a positive way and therefore were inspired to do the same. The actual theory itself was created and developed by Germans during the 1930's with the use of Nazi propaganda, to get people to fear the Nazi's during war time.

Reception study
This theory means when a group of readers/audience members interpret the authors' text in a similar way, and it also helps when the group share the same cultured background as each other. Something like this could be considered immensley difficult if one reader has a less shared heritage to the artist, the more unlikely it is that they would understand what the artist was trying to achieve.   

Passive/active consumption

This theory means two things; passive consumption means that we see the media text shown before us, whether it is fiction of real- life, and we view it and accept it. Active consumption means that once you view the media text you will critically address it and analyse it before ultimately accepting what it is, whilst also keeping your own personal views on it. When it comes to violence in film, and the 1983 film 'Scarface', we can see what the audience's separate reactions are.

For audience reactions to the film's violent content, we can assume that back then there were a lot of people who were not entirely favourable to the bloody mess the film turned out to be, and so those people decided to negatively pick apart what they would believe to be a bad aspect of the film. The director, Brian de Palma actually had to cut the film a total of 3 times in order to make the Studio executives and test audiences happy with the final film. When asking which version of the movie De Palma was allowed to release, the executives at the Studio couldn't tell the difference between the 3 cuts, so De Palma smartly tricked them into releasing the more violeent second cut of the movie, and this is the cut that many people have been having mixed opinions over ever since.

The film recieved a lot of criticism for it's excessive violence when it was originally released, splitting audiences inbetween, the reason for the negative backlash from certain audience members could be due to a personal incident that caused psychological harm that is somehow represented in the film and thus, when viewing this film, triggers bad memories. Overtime, though, the active side of the audience learnt to accept the films' overly violent content and themes, and although they may still not agree with it and how it was dealt with or shown on screen, they respect it for making the film one of the most iconic and recognisable of the genre.

When it comes to passive audiences, they are much easier to deal with. These are the sort of audience members that have no problem with the violence of 'Scarface' or violence in any film for that matter. This could be because they are dissensitised from the hardcore violence they see and don't see anything to worry about. What I mean by 'dissensitised' is that if you have watched gruesome horror films from an early age or violent action films and you have groen up with them, you will be mentally unfazed by recent violent material that you see, hence the desensitization. Although there are some film fans out there that will find the one moment of film that they don't particularly want to watch, they watch it anyway because even though it can look very realistic, they know it's fiction and are psychologically unharmed.

With 'Scarface' and the violent scenes it features, it is well known that part of the film's later success is from the heavy violence, a giant number of cinems goers to enjoy watching violence for entertainment value, and that is still common today, recent films like 'Saw' and 'The Expendables' movies show that violence is no problem to a lot of people, and they accept what they see because, to them, it is a part of the film and fits in perfectly with the tone.