Page 26 - Critical Theories of Mass Media

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Introduction 11
productive assimilation of the audience. Thus a dispersed view
of power is articulated in which celebrity is examined as a
developing field of intertextual representation in which mean-
ing is variously assembled. Variation derives from the different
constructions and inflections vested in the celebrity by the
participants in the field, including agents, press officers, gossip
columnists, producers and friends.
(Rojek 2001: 44)
Cultural populism tends to underplay the extent to which nominally
independent readings are inevitably shaped, a priori, by the perva-
sively manufactured nature of the content being interpreted. Rojek’s
(2001) notion of a dispersed view of power, for example, while seeking
to assert audience agency actually concedes a significant degree of
circularity: variations in the interpretation of celebrity are con-
structed by various participants, but they are all still intrinsically part
of the industry that produced the celebrity they are interpreting.
When the content itself is looked at for evidence of material that can
be used to undermine the dominant meaning system, the effort can
seem forced, producing extremely tenuous results. Hermes, for
example, sees radical potential in The Sound of Music: ‘At its most
abstract, The Sound of Music is about the dialectic between freedom
and order. Andrews embodies the two in her singing and her acting:
while her singing is unparalleled, her acting is stilted’ (Hermes, in
Alasuutari 1999). Similarly, in their paper exploring the behaviour of
Judge Dredd fans, Barker and Brooks claim that: ‘In giving scope for
imaging the future, even a dark and fearful one, the comic made a
space within which they could keep social and political hopes alive’
5
(Barker and Brooks, in Dickinson et al. 1998: 229). This tendency
to find grounds for optimism in otherwise dispiriting examples of
commodified culture has continued with the rise of Reality TV.
Brundson et al. point out that the trade magazine Broadcast has
three prize categories for Reality TV programming – documentary
programme, documentary series, and popular factual. They recognize the
growing conflation of entertainment and documentary modes but
choose to see it as an opportunity for fresh interpretations rather
than a worrying sign of dumbing down:
distinctions between such categories have become increasingly
difficult to ascertain. Factual is no longer synonymous with
‘serious’, issue-based programming, but now forms a strong and
central part of the entertainment schedules. What these pro-
grammes invite, therefore, is a reconsideration of the terms
under which we evaluate both ‘entertainment’ and ‘documen-
tary’, rather than being dismissed out of hand as examples of
the debasement of factual television.
(Brundson et al. 2001: 44)

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