Week 4 Reflection

I thought this week’s class exercise was really interesting and eye-opening. I have always paid attention to symbols in shows but never as in-depth as the analysis we did in class. I have been thinking a lot about the show WandaVision and how everything is a symbol. Sometimes I feel like it’s better to analyze symbols after you watch a show or movie. When you try to analyze while watching you lose an overall insight into the show. I started rewatching some of the beginning episodes and I began to notice more and more symbols than before. From the cicada on the wall to the meaning on the commercials. Every part of the show is being used to tell Wanda’s story and what is happening in Westville. The show also made me wonder about the difference between easter eggs and symbols and whether the two terms can be used interchangeably. Could easter eggs be used to create motifs or themes in shows?

I also found our discussion about social movements and the media very intriguing. I read Lisa Hebert and Dwight Brooks’ Gender, Race, & Media Representation. They talked about the critical race theory which is basically talking about the framework in jurisprudence that looks at a society based on the categorizations of race, law, and power in the US. It is basically a view that large legal institutions and companies are inherently racist. I feel like this is a large reason why Black Lives Matter and a lot of other Social Movements are gaining more traction than they did before. Through the use of social media, people are starting to realize that these large institutions are inherently racist and starting to speak up about it. However, there really hasn’t been any large institutional change in response to these movements. Large institutions are claiming they support these movements but in reality, there is no way to change a company overnight. One example of this is a story from the NYT’s podcast the Daily’s episode Protesting Her Own Employer. In this episode, Julia Bond, an assistant apparel designer at Adidas started leading daily protests against Adidas handling of racism. On the outside, the sportswear giant is in support of Black Lives Matter. But, on the inside, there are people who are inherently racist and when someone speaks out about it, they get shut down and told they are overreacting. So now we are at a crossroads, how can we hold large corporations accountable for the actions of individual employees. Will that ever be possible or will they just try to gloss over it and shut people down? I think the media will keep uncovering these stories, but how many people will it take for a large change to happen. I think Hebert and Brooks’ article is a great explanation of this. They discuss how the media is what determines what is important. They discuss how the media is central to represent our social realities. So, in order to really create change, the media needs to continue to produce commodified texts to help bring society together instead of segment them based on the social constructs of gender and race. How can we use the media to change the culture of our industries to stop commodifying things?

Furthermore, I think our discussion of Stuart Hall and his ways of categorizing how audiences respond to texts is really important. I was wondering how these categories could be used to discuss shows like Black Mirror where every episode is different. Can an audience member have a dominant reading to one episode and an oppositional reading to another? Does it have to categorize the show as a whole or can it be segmented? Furthermore, how do these theories relate to texts versus shows versus movies? Do the categorizations change or are they the same across all mediums?

Lastly, I want to talk about myths. In class, we discussed how myths are foundational things that societies and cultures are built on. Myths create a story that people can believe in, but is there any way that we can increase beliefs in a certain idea, but not erase another one? We talked about the American Dream and how people from countries think that America is the greatest country in the world. People strive to get here, but then when they do they are confronted with the realities that we all face here. I found this clip from The Newsroom, that really puts into perspective this myth. He answers the question “What makes America the greatest country in the world?” and the answer is it really isn’t.