PAGE IN PROGRESS What you see here is a page of my hypertext book POWER of meanings // MEANINGS of power. Initially empty, this page will slowly be filled with thoughts, notes, and quotes. One day, I will use them to write a coherent entry, similar to these completed pages. See this post to better understand my creative process. Thank you for your interest and patience!
Media texts can be mined in order to get to cultural subconsciousness Rather than just expressing ideas of their authors (see Barthes, Death of the Author), they reveal points of view, assumptions and values of the culture that produced them
We can see what media texts (in the broadest sense, for example fairy tales of the oral tradition will be included) tells us what people think about people; how they understand it and misunderstand it.
One example: money. Media texts from time immemorial supported the meaning of money as something that brings power and therefore something desirable. Think about the amount of fairy tales that end up with the protagonist becoming rich (e.g., getting half of a kingdom)
More modern media texts reveal many important and interesting things about power.
Example 1: Encanto. Not all characters with gifts have what can be really described as power. E.g., Dolores can hear everything, but is this a power or a curse? Because of this inconsistency, we have theories about Encanto claiming that Dolores is the villain (because she is cursed by her gift, she wants to break the magic of the house): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xz2oowy5JxY&ab_channel=TheFilmTheorists
Example 2: Tar "Tar" implies that we do not have to care about circumstances behind abusive behaviour of people in power. As long as they what's coming, it does not matter where their behavior comes from. This is a mistake because this view ignore how macropower works. An abusive person in power is shaped by circumstances same as everybody else. We can punish the person, but if we do not reveal and challenge the circumstances, the problem will keep existing even as the perpetrator is long gone. https://www.thenation.com/article/culture/todd-field-tar/ "the film hews to its central character’s perspective while denying its audience the information requisite for empathetic identification." "By withholding memory and any substantive evocation of Tár’s childhood, Field avoids the rationale of a backstory. Her abhorrent behavior is never given a legible motivation and therefore partial absolution. The few scraps of her biography divulge no formative trauma beyond the usual class shame: In her escape from a cramped home in the suburbs of Staten Island, her birth name (Linda) gained a syllable and her accent a Mid-Atlantic cadence. "
https://www.yahoo.com/entertainment/cate-blanchett-oscar-hopeful-tar-cancel-culture-150144499.html "We live in a world where 'cancel culture' is on everyone's tongue," she says. "So when you make a movie now, that's part of the texture of any movie that's made. I think it's much more a meditation on power itself and who is culpable in maintaining those systems of power and what happens to the human beings when they come very close to the flame of power and how complicated that is.