Films and their ideology

In his latest book, One Summer: America 1927, Bill Bryson writes about the U.S. film industry (among many other things). He states that the dominance of Hollywood in world film market meant that everywhere else people were watching U.S. films. This, on the other hand, meant that people got accustomed to U.S. sense of humour, way of speaking, way of seeing the world.

This is probably the case, but how uniform would the world view of mainstream Hollywood films actually be? Griffith's classic Birth of a Nation (1915) is very pro-KKK. Many films produced during the New Deal were almost pro-socialist (see Watson's book The Modern Mind).

Luckily, we can study this question in the light of The Pervert's Guide to Ideology. There, the philosopher Slavoj Žižek inspects a couple of dozen (mainly U.S.) films from the point of view of their contents as ideology. Can it be taken seriously? I'm not sure.

Let's take a look at the most obvious thing about films: they have to please the audience to make money. Thus, these films certainly did. But what kind of ideology or message do they actually convey? Avatar (and Star Wars, and maybe Lord of the Rings) tell us that a group of fanatic spiritualists with old-fashioned weapons and a lot of faith (or supernatural support) can wage a war successfully against a vast, technically superior army. Emm, that sounds familiar. Moreover, really many of the highest grossing films* have an element of a heroic journey in them. Harry Potter, Alice in Wonderland and many Disney films are probably about being different but finding one's self-esteem. All of that sounds like fun, but a bit generic, too: there might not be anything thoroughly American about it.

Maybe one could find more ideological content in bad or mediocre low budged films. Lately I have been thinking of a forgotten Finnish film called "Meiltahan tama kay" ("We ace it" or "This is our game") that I saw around 1980. I would recommend it to cultural anthropologists.  The content is .. random. The main character is a happy-go-lucky workman with wit and a good sense of humour. The opponents are sleazy, uptight or greedy. It seems to be important that the main character is rural and the opponents are from big cities (in this context: a big city is a town of 100 000+ inhabitants). There's some romance and music. In the end of course the good guys win.


* I have not watched Transformers nor Avengers nor Skyfall and probably won't watch them so I don't know about their contents.

Socrates' nonsense

Was Plato actually close to finding some principles of modern semiotics, like theory of predication or the so-called semiotic triangle? Umm, possibly, or then I just over-interpret his Cratylus dialogue.

But let's check this out just for the sake of argument. Plato's theory of forms or ideas is so well-known that the reader will find a good explanation of it anywhere, especially Wikipedia. Cratylus does not deal with this theory, rather it is a lengthy and often strange exploration into naming and language. Some of  Cratylus is pure genius, like the idea that natural languages can refer to objects by "imitation" in the same way as a deaf person would imitate the movement of an animal to refer to the animal. But Plato (Socrates in the dialogue) still does not blindly follow this principle, but sanely allows naming to be a matter of convention, too. Peirce much later spoke about iconic and indexical signs etc [I've only read commentaries]. Some of Cratylus is less interesting for a modern reader. Plato for instance talks about names given/used by gods compared to names given by humans.

Still, let's follow this idea. Some names correctly stand for a person and symbolize a concept (terminology here is not Plato's). Some do it incorrectly: "But if i can assign names as well as pictures to objects, the right assignment of them we can call truth, and the wrong assignment of them falsehood". Great! But in our modern view truth/falsehood are about statements. Correctly/incorrectly applying a name is something else. But Plato comes really close to the modern view in the following part: Socrates asks Cratylus what he would think if someone addressed him as "Athenian stranger, Hermogenes, son of Smicrion".."these words would have no application to you but only to our friend Hermogenes, or perhaps to nobody at all". Cratylus replies: In my opinion, Socrates, the speaker would only be speaking nonsense.

Socrates' motorbike

"Zen and the Art of Motorbike Maintenance" is an influential cult book with some philosophical elements. It was published in 1974. People in the 20's (I was when I read it) may find it interesting, but "Godel, Escher, Bach" by D. Hofstadter may give them more ideas.

Anyway, "Zen" cannot be bad since I still remember a fair deal about it. The narrator was quite disappointed with classical philosophy and wanted to introduce a new one, focused on the idea of "quality".

However, does this sound familiar: "the life according to knowledge is not that which makes men act rightly and be happy, not even if knowledge include all the sciences, but one science only, that of good and evil. For, let me ask you, Critias, whether, if you take away this, medicine will not equally give health, and shoemaking equally produce shoes, and the art of the weaver clothes?-whether the art of the pilot will not equally save our lives at sea, and the art of the general in war?" (Plato: Charmides)

So, for Plato "quality" that allows one to create good things is the "knowledge of good and evil" or "wisdom" (as said later in the dialogue).

Charmides is actually a "messy" discussion where many ideas are introduced and then renounced. It has quite explicit references to homosexuality, too.