The Episodic Sitcom

One virtually universal aspect of all sitcoms is their episodic nature. This refers to the tendency for each installment of a sitcom to comprise a self-contained story that is introduced and resolved in the same broadcast. Each episode of a sitcom is constructed so that whatever may have happened in the last episode is almost always irrelevant to the current narrative, allowing any viewer to understand who the characters are and what is happening even if they have never seen another episode. At the end of each episode everything returns to the status quo so that the next week's episode can unfold with the premise and context unchanged. Although many sitcoms habitually include some kind of lesson or "moral of the story" in most episodes, in order for the episodic structure to persist individual characters cannot undergo any significant development, something that would upset the ability for for the show to begin from the same point each week.



Examples of this episodic structure can be found in one of my favourite shows, the British sitcom Black Books which ran from 2000 to 2004. The show was co-created by and stars Irish comedian Dylan Moran as Bernard Black, owner of Black Books, a small bookshop in London. Over the course of the series there are some small changes in the context, like Bernard’s best friend Fran becoming unemployed when her nicknack shop goes out of business, but for the most part each episode ends with any changes that may have happened reverting back to normal, sometimes without much explanation. At the end of the episode “The Big Lock-Out”, where Bernard is locked out of his shop (and thus his flat) overnight by a new security door that is paradoxically difficult to open from the inside and impossible to open from the outside, the problematic door is miraculously gone by morning with only the explanation that it seems to have been stolen.

The Security Door

Shots in Harold and Maude

Harold and Maude, the 1971 black comedy directed by Hal Ashby, often uses wide, long shots to emphasize the feeling of the characters being alone in their own world. Good examples of this are during the sequence after Maude has helped Harold convince his uncle that he is unfit for military service. The two are driving across the countryside with no signs of human life for miles, and the wide shots with them barely visible at the bottom of the frame symbolize how they could be all alone in the world for all they care.

Close ups are fairly rare in the film, which uses mostly wider establishing shots or medium shots to show action. Following the sequence of distant hillside shots, when Harold and Maude are sitting together by the bay, there is a brief zooming close up of Maude’s arm when Harold notices a serial number tattooed on her inner forearm - clearly the type given by the Nazis to prisoners at Auschwitz. The close up is used here to show a key detail that places the film in time and remind the audience what it meant to to be Maude’s age in the 1960s and '70s. The detail revealed by the close up is made more poignant by the fact that it is almost immediately replaced with a wider shot in which Maude points out the seagulls visible from where they are sitting, exemplifying the contrast between what she has been through and how she is able to appreciate life now

The final sequence in the film shows Harold driving from the hospital to the side of a cliff and uses a series of shots ranging from close ups of his face, to very far shots where he can barely be seen on the edge of the cliff, to the final medium shot of him walking away from the camera. This progression (from very specific to very broad to somewhere in between) symbolizes how Harold is moving through his grief; first he is very focused on what has just happened and how he is feeling in that moment, then it zooms way out to show his car going over the cliff then show that he is still alive but very lonely and isolated, then the medium shot where he walks slowly from the camera with his banjo shows that he has found a balance and is moving on with his life.

The Studio System: B-Movies

One key aspect of the type of vertical integration utilized in the studio system involved film studios being in control of distribution of their movies, through the running of theaters. The five major studios, Paramount, Loews/MGM, Warner Brothers, Fox, and RKO all had the power to show films where and when they pleased, and reap the profits.

By owning the local cinema a studio was able to ensure that only films it produced were shown there, and to this end were produced low-cost "B-movies". B-movies were generally of lower quality, since their low budget precluded use of big-name actors and directors, but had a predictable profit and could be used to fill up screens when more expensive, "block buster" type pictures weren't showing.

Out of the five major studios, RKO can be noted for being the most invested in the B-movie industry. Films like "I Walked With a Zombie" (1943) and "Cat People" (1942), both directed by Val Lewton, were vaguely supernatural horror movies which were incredibly successful without great cost to the studio. The nature of these films was such that the studio did not take much notice of their production, which left the directors and writers and B-movies to their own devices, allowing them to include aspects not normally featured in bigger budget pictures, such as more complex and non-stereotyped black characters.

Video Games and Violence

Priming and social learning, theories which essentially point to a link between what we observe in media (violence is often a key example) and how we act in real life, can both be used in the argument that violent video games promote violence. Proponents of this argument highlight the consequences-free environment video games provide for players to perform acts of violence usually far more extreme than would ever be seen in real life. This environment, the argument goes, desensitizes those people who play video games regularly and leads them to subconsciously dissociate violence from reality.

As a gamer myself, I have always found this argument ridiculous when applied to cases like school shootings where, in a desperate attempt to find someone to blame (somehow overlooking the shooters as targets), people almost invariably turn to violent video games, overlooking the fact that out of the millions of people who play video games only a small fraction go on to actually shoot up a school. However, a video I saw a couple of months ago did make me stop to reconsider my opinons.

In April of this year the anonymous watchdog organization WikiLeaks released terrifying footage from the gunsight camera of a US apache helicopter over New Baghdad from July, 2007. The footage shows the view from the helicopter of some airstrikes it carried out which resulted in the deaths of at least eighteen people, two of whom were journalists, and includes audio of the radio communications going on at the time. The airstrikes represented yet more in a long line of miscalculated attacks resulting in civilian casualties, but most disturbing was the insight into the minds of the soldiers carrying out the attacks, as the shooters can be heard being glibly encouraged to "Keep shootin'", and laughing when a target is hit.

The exchange that can be heard sounds frighteningly like what might be heard from a group of people playing one of the many video games that simulate war. With games getting more and more realistic, the view from the reach apache helicopter looks very similar to what would be seen on screen, and while I don't believe that the trained soldiers that can be heard in the video didn't understand the difference between a game and real life, their general tone and reaction to the situation resembled to an unsettling degree what could be found in reaction to a realistic video game.

Hegemony (9/12/10)

The concept of hegemony, and more specifically the quality of it as a means for the ruling social classes to control the assumptions and ideologies presented to the public, helps reveal the economic and social assumptions typically made in commercials for weight-loss products, such as in this advertisement for Nutrisystem:


In examples like this, hegemony manifests itself as the basic underlying principles that allow ads like this to affect consumers on a gut level (no pun intended) while actually saying very little. People with the power to control advertising are able to frame certain ideas as inherently true consistently enough that those at whom advertising is directed have little choice but to agree. Once certain principles are established in popular culture and media, advertisers can rely on common thought processes produced by these principles to make advertising very easy.

In the case of this particular ad, the advertisers are expecting consumers to associate the pictured woman's apparent happiness with her (supposedly) newfound slim figure and conclude that weight loss like hers is the key to such happiness. More telling are the references to Nutrisystem's low price. The phrase "for as low as" carries the subtextual message that such a price means that a limited budget is not an excuse not to be slim, even though obesity as an epidemic affects more people in lower socioeconomic classes, due in large part to the relative prices of healthy vs. unhealthy food.

First post

My reason for taking this class, probably many people's reason, is that it is required for the higher level media studies classes, and media studies classes are probably the best academic application of my near-obsession with movies, television, radio, and the internet. Being required to go to screenings of movies and TV shows in what would otherwise be my free time is so far from an inconvenience as to be more like an unexpected bonus. I don't know that I could explain why I am as interested in media and the way it affects and is influenced by society, but it is a fascination of mine. That is why I am taking this class.

A favoured blog of mine: http://motherjones.com/rights-stuff