CHAPTER 2

Concepts of ideology

Ideology is a basic starting point for almost all contemporary cultural theory.
Ideology refers to the basic ideas and assumptions that help shape a given culture,
the preconceived notions and beliefs that structure a given society (as well as
its individual members). Ideological beliefs are usually taken as naturally and
inherently true by the people, groups, and institutions that hold them. As such,
ideology is inherent in all cultural artifacts, or texts, but it is also something of
a free-floating structure that pervades all aspects of culture. If culture can be said
to consist of the material goods, products, and behaviors of any group of people,
ideology is the invisible glue that binds those various objects and behaviors into a
coherent and meaningful system of shared relatable experiences. Cultural artifacts
always convey ideologies, whether they are consciously encoded into them by their
producers or not, and whether their consumers are aware of them or not. Thus,
one of the main goals of ideological analysis is to learn to recognize and be able
to identify the various ideologies that cultural artifacts convey. And as complex
amalgamations of sound and vision, film and television texts can and do convey
ideologies in complex and multiple ways. Ideologies are expressed in the ways
that stories are told (narrative design), how sets are constructed and lit, how roles
are embodied by actors, and how lighting, sound, music, and camera work are
deployed. The ideological analysis of a film or TV show therefore often begins
with its formal properties, even as it might also encompass a consideration of its
means of production (i.e. who made it, for what reasons, and within what socio-
historical and industrial contexts).
Ideological analysis immediately asserts that art and culture—indeed all cultural
artifacts—have a political dimension. As such, film and television contribute to our
understandings of the world around us and the issues we face: film and television
texts are part of larger cultural struggles for meaning and understanding. To
give one basic historical example, if film and television texts only depict African
Americans as butlers and maids (as they mostly did for many decades), those images
are going to contribute to a very limited and limiting understanding of African
Americans. White viewers might think (either consciously or unconsciously) that
those images represent the totality of African American experience, while African
American viewers may internalize such messages (consciously or unconsciously)
and limit their own lives accordingly. As this one example postulates, the
cumulative effects of media images can and do shape how the “real world”
understands itself. And those understandings have “real world” consequences in the
way that laws are written and passed, and in the basic ways that human beings treat
the world around them, including other human beings.
In the mainstream press, ideology is sometimes used to refer to one’s political
20 FILM AND TELEVISION ANALYSIS

leanings—conservative Republican, liberal Democrat, etc. Furthermore, the

popular press likes to pretend that some people and things are free of ideology,
while others are biased. However, that understanding of ideology is simplistic and
not very nuanced. In fact, people and/or texts that profess to be free of ideology
are being naïve if not outright duplicitous. For example, the Fox News Channel’s
slogan “Fair and Balanced” suggests that they are the only news source free of
ideological bias, when by most accounts Fox News is decidedly conservative in
its ideology. The slogan is thus itself an ideological message that attempts to
mask Fox News’s conservative agenda. If and when audiences believe the slogan
is true, then they are agreeing—consciously or otherwise—with the idea that Fox
News’s conservative way of seeing the world is actually the one “true” way, when
in fact there are infinite ways to see and understand the world around us. While
many other (if not most) news channels purport to be objective and free of bias,
contemporary ideological theory would insist that none of them really can be so.
All news sources—like all cultural artifacts—come with some form of ideological
positioning. There is no such thing as being “outside of ” ideology. (MSNBC
at least hints at its leftist ideological biases: its “lean forward” slogan suggests its
“progressive” stance on many social issues.)
As such, any given society is awash in multiple ideologies—some in support
of one another, others clashing fairly directly. Texts and people—and we might
think of people as complex ever-changing texts in their own right—and the
ideologies they contain constantly ebb and flow, interacting and interweaving
with one another. Nonetheless, in different cultures and in different historical
eras, some ideologies are invariably more prominent or prevalent than others. We
call such ideologies dominant ideologies: the set of ideas and assumptions that
are most prevalent within any given culture at any point in time. In the Western
world today, some of our dominant ideologies have been prevalent for many
decades if not centuries. The dominant ideology of the Western world is often
described as white supremacist, patriarchal, Judeo-Christian, and capitalist.
This means, respectively, that being racially white or lighter-skinned is usually
privileged over belonging to some other race, and that being male tends to afford
one extra privilege than does being female. (Patriarchy literally means rule by
the father.) Our dominant religious ideologies tend to favor those expressed
within Judeo-Christian traditions as opposed to Muslim, Shinto, or Hindu. And
for several centuries the centrality of capitalism as an economic system and its
inherent ideological beliefs—the necessity of unfettered markets, the desirability
of amassing wealth, a preference for economic competition rather than economic
cooperation—have remained dominant (even as capitalism itself has evolved in
various ways).
As noted above, any given society is made up of a huge diversity of ideological
positions—in people, in texts, in governing bodies—that necessarily interact with
one another in multiple ways. (Scholars call this process hegemonic negotiation,
discussed more fully below.) This interaction can and does lead to social change.
For example, compared to one hundred years ago, women and non-white people
have risen to positions of power and prestige within Western cultures, and an
African American man has been elected President of the United States. But by
most quantitative measures—or by simply examining the ideologies expressed
in popular culture—it is apparent that the ideologies of white supremacy (or at
least white centrality), patriarchy, Judeo-Christianity, and capitalism continue to
2: Concepts of ideology 21

structure and dominate most aspects of Western culture. Film and television in the
Western world is overwhelmingly produced by white Judeo-Christian men for
profit; and many if not most of the texts they produce also express the centrality,
importance, and agency of white Judeo-Christian men. Because of this, the
intertwining ideologies of white patriarchal capitalism often become naturalized,
and remain dominant. (When similar ideological goals are shared and endorsed by
multiple texts and social institutions, they are said to be overdetermined.) They
are taken for granted as “the” way to understand the world. Thus it is one goal of
ideological analysis to expose and explore how that happens.

Marx and ideology

Most basic concepts of ideology derive from Marxism, a broad set of interrelated
ideas that have historically been used to examine and critique capitalism. Marxism
takes it name from the ideas and writings of Karl Marx, a German intellectual
living in Great Britain during the mid-nineteenth century. Marx’s thinking was
often collaborative, influenced by that of many others, including his colleague and
later editor Friedrich Engels. All of these thinkers shared concerns for the state of
the urban working classes who were increasingly living under worse and worse
conditions as the Industrial Revolution progressed throughout Europe and the
Americas. Marx and Engels, sometimes referred to as the fathers of Marxism,
expressed their ideas in works such as The German Ideology (1845), The Condition
of the Working Class in England (1845), The Communist Manifesto (1848), and Das
Kapital (1867). Since then, hundreds if not thousands of books and treatises have
been written on Marx and Marxism, and Marxist thinking has led to various
reforms and revolutionary movements throughout the twentieth century. Along
with Darwin (evolution) and Freud (psychoanalysis), Marx is often considered to
be one of the most influential thinkers of the modern era. However, Marxist ideals
(and the concepts that derive from them) remain highly charged and frequently
misunderstood subjects. Some commentators are willing to “blame” Marx and
Marxism for the Russian Revolution of 1917, and the murderous excesses of
Stalinist Russia. Nonetheless, other more nuanced cultural critics continue to find
use in the ideas and concepts first theorized by Marx and Engels. What follows
will necessarily be highly condensed and rudimentary, an introduction to the ways
that basic concepts of Marxism have impacted upon the study of film and television
vis-à-vis ideology.
Broadly, Marxism is a system of thought, a philosophy, and/or a critique of
economic domination wherein one class—the ruling class—controls all aspects of
a society at the expense of all others, most significantly the working class or the
proletariat. The middle class or bourgeoisie is usually figured as complacent and
in league with the ruling class. Importantly—its detractors to the side—Marxism is
not the same thing as communism. Marxism is a philosophical critique of capitalism
that has been used by some nations to justify communism, an economic system in
which the state owns and operates all industries and businesses, with the proposed
goal of distributing profits fairly across the board to all of its citizens. However, as
the history of the twentieth century has shown, nations that attempted to structure
themselves along communist economic policies (such as the USSR, Red China,
and Cuba) often fell into totalitarianism fairly quickly under the guise of being
“Peoples’ Republics” or “Democracies.” Despite the failure of outright communism
22 FILM AND TELEVISION ANALYSIS

per se as an economic and/or political system, much Marxist thought still remains
relevant to contemporary cultural studies. Basic Marxist principles continue to be
useful in the critique of corporate capitalist excesses, as the Occupy Wall Street
movement in the twenty-first century has shown. Marxism also offers us a way to
understand how cultures and subcultures relate to their economies, and how social
changes may and do occur within those cultures and economies.
During the twentieth century, much of the Western world (the so-called First
World, see Chapter 12) was vocally opposed to communism as both a philosophy
and an economic system. In certain eras, such as the 1950s, communism was
literally demonized as godless and Satanic by many Judeo-Christian capitalist
leaders. This was perhaps inevitable, as many Western nations have generally
operated under various forms of capitalism, championing free markets in which
everyone has the right to “get ahead” by whatever means they can. However,
even in the Western world, capitalism has always been checked or restricted by
various laws that limit just how money can be earned, and at whose expense. For
example, in the nineteenth century the use of slave labor was outlawed throughout
the United States, despite the fact that slavery made good economic sense and
created great wealth for those who owned the slaves. Similarly, during the era
of Prohibition, the United States government decided that selling alcohol was
no longer a legal way to make money; however, those laws only created a huge
black market trade for illegal booze and were soon repealed. When the Great
Depression occurred after the Stock Market Crash of 1929, many people began
to wonder if Marxist ideas might be relevant to American economic policies, and
they read books or joined organizations that explored those options. However, after
World War II those same people were often ostracized or persecuted during the
era of the Red Scare, the so-called “communist witch hunts” led by American
business owners and politicians like Senator Joseph McCarthy. The anti-communist
hysteria of that era had a dramatic impact on the film and television industries:
many creative artists lost their jobs and/or were blacklisted, while the texts
the industries produced were carefully monitored for so called “un-American”
ideologies. Others that were produced—such as My Son John (1952) and Big Jim
McLain (1952)—almost verged on propaganda, pitting God, family, country and
even John Wayne against cunning communist subversives. This Cold War backlash
to communism (and its real or imagined threat to the security of the United States)
lasted for many decades, curbing the legitimacy of Marxist thinking in many
circles.
In fact, capitalism in the Western World has often been usefully and necessarily
regulated via restrictions on the use of slavery and indentured servitude, child
labor laws, minimum wage laws, and laws meant to check the despoiling of the
environment in the name of profit. The United States, like many European nations,
has increasingly used checks and balances on unfettered capitalism in order to
protect basic human rights. And while the term socialism is almost as demonized
as communism in some quarters—witness the recent hysteria and name calling
surrounding President Barack Obama’s federal health care initiatives—socialism as
defined in the West these days represents for many the “happy medium” between
capitalism and communism. As practiced in many contemporary cultures, socialism
allows for free market capitalism and individual ownership of businesses while also
regulating important human services like education, health care, and environmental
protections.
2: Concepts of ideology 23

As might already be apparent, basic or so-called vulgar Marxism is a theory

of economic determinism—a theory that argues that any given society’s
economic structure is ultimately the determining factor in shaping, controlling,
and governing that particular society. One of the central tenets of Marxism is
its base-superstructure model, wherein base refers to a society’s economic
system, and superstructure refers to the entirety of a society’s institutions and
beliefs. A short list of superstructural elements might include any given society’s
political parties and forms of governments, its educational system, its religions, its
media, and its institutions devoted to entertainment and leisure, including film,
television, and sport (see Diagram 2.1). According to this model, everything in the
superstructure arises from the economic base, and exists to support, consolidate,
and replicate the economic base. If the economic base is capitalism, then everything
in the superstructure will be determined by its subservient and/or supportive
relationship to capitalism. To take a relevant example, the contemporary corporate
film and television industry has a capitalist base; thus it exists to produce profit and
secure the acceptance if not outright desirability of capitalism through its many
products that circulate throughout the superstructures of Western and indeed
global cultures. According to basic (or “vulgar”) Marxism, the only way to change
the various elements of the superstructure is to change the economic base that
determines it. Thus, twentieth-century revolutionaries who followed basic Marxist
thinking often stressed the need to overthrow capitalism altogether, to wrest the
means of production from the ruling classes and (allegedly) distribute it among the
masses. Later, more nuanced Marxist theories (discussed below) have focused on
how some social change is possible without the need for a complete overthrow of
the economic base.
As noted above, Marxism arose when it did (the mid-to-late nineteenth century)
because of the Industrial Revolution. The machine age created factory jobs in
urban areas, and people who may have formerly been artisans or farmers were
increasingly employed at assembly lines, working long hours for little pay. They
had no sick leave, maternity care, nor life insurance, and if they became ill or
died they could immediately be replaced by another worker. (Marx philosophized
that workers became alienated from their work and from one another, and were
increasingly reified into cogs in a giant industrial machine, losing their humanity.)
Meanwhile, the ruling class of wealthy factory owners continued to get richer
and richer. While the working class had few options, they were also compelled to
participate in industrial capitalism because of the way it was promoted ideologically.

schools religion law Dia 2.1

The economic base
(capitalism, communism,
socialism, etc.) shapes
super-structure journalism film TV and overdetermines
the various elements of
the superstructure (the
spheres of culture and
politics family military sports ideology), a theory of
economic determinism.
In turn, the superstructure
Base economic system helps maintain the base by
expressing its ideologies.
24 FILM AND TELEVISION ANALYSIS

Among the era’s more in/famous tracts that unabashedly promoted capitalism
were novels by a man named Horatio Alger. His books promoted the idea that
young white men could rise to positions of wealth and power through hard work
(and often a little help from the benign ruling class itself). These “rags to riches”
narratives have been popular throughout Hollywood history and have helped to
promote capitalism throughout the twentieth century, as have multiple TV shows
like Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous (1984–95) or MTV Cribs (2000–11). To a
certain extent, many film and television texts (and not just advertisements) celebrate
wealth and possession; many are designed to create consumer envy and the desire
for material goods. Marx used the term commodity fetishism to describe the
way that material goods produced under capitalism take on an almost religious
or magical aura; their use-value (what they do) is often transcended by their
exchange-value (the price that people will pay for them). To take a contemporary
example, one can buy a shirt to clothe oneself (the shirt’s use-value) or one can
buy an expensive designer shirt to clothe oneself and make a social statement about
one’s own wealth and prestige. People often pay more for expensive designer goods
not because their use-value is different from less expensive products, but because
they have a higher exchange-value.
It was within these frameworks that Marx formulated his ideas about ideology.
Basic Marxism understands ideology to be a form of “false consciousness” that can
be unlearned, or somehow shrugged off. In this formulation, alienated workers just
need to understand the actual conditions of their exploitation, and then they will
(allegedly) become free of the ruling class’s ideological dominance. This was one
goal of the Soviet formalist filmmakers of the 1920s—men like Sergei Eisenstein,
Dziga Vertov, and Alexander Dovzhenko—who theorized film in Marxist terms
and attempted to use it as a way to educate, inform, and arouse the proletariat. (In
another era, as many commentators have noted, the science fiction hit The Matrix
[1999] also invokes this notion of Marxist ideology, wherein people are deceived
about the actual conditions of their everyday existence.) However, this version
of ideology is far less nuanced than the ones we use today, in that contemporary
theorists of ideology reject the notion that we can ever “step outside” of ideology.
We can become aware of the ideological messages that surround us—permeating
all aspects of our culture—but doing so does not exactly make us free from them.
Ideologies are pre-existing social and political structures that surround us from the
moment we are born to the moment we die. They shape our lives and how we
think about the world around us whether we are aware of them or not.

The Frankfurt School: Marxism and the media

The next important step in the theorization of ideology—and specifically how

ideology intersects with cultural artifacts like radio and film—came from a group
of thinkers who are collectively known as the Frankfurt School. The term refers
to a group of (mostly) ex-German intellectuals, including Theodor Adorno, Max
Horkheimer, Erich Fromm, and Herbert Marcuse, living and writing in the West
before and after World War II. Their thinking was shaped by what they understood
to be the hijacking of classical Marxist theory by communist despots such as Joseph
Stalin, as well as the role mass media had played in the rise of European fascism.
Some of them had seen first hand how the Nazis had nationalized German media
industries and used them successfully to promote their ideologies. Ultimately, the
2: Concepts of ideology 25

Frankfurt School desired to create a more nuanced critique of capitalism as it was

being practiced in the West by the mid-twentieth century. They were especially
interested in the role mass media played in politics, and stressed the importance
of knowing who controlled the means of production vis-à-vis the mass media.
Extrapolating from basic Marxist principles, they argued that popular “art” forms
like radio and film—as part of the capitalist base’s superstructure—were dangerous
ideological instruments in the service of capitalist interests. Perhaps most famously,
the Frankfurt School coined the term “culture industry” to refer to the
institutions that mass produced cultural artifacts like film and popular music. Those
institutions included the Hollywood studios, radio networks like NBC and CBS, as
well as the Wall Street corporations (AT&T, RCA) that backed them. And just as
Marx had applied his critique of capitalism to a factory system that mass produced
material goods, the Frankfurt School endeavored to theorize how culture itself was
mass produced in the twentieth century, and more importantly what the ideological
effects of such mass produced culture were on those who consumed it.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, most of the Frankfurt School theorists were quite
pessimistic about the culture industry, arguing that mass produced culture could
only inculcate ideologies of sameness, conformity, and passivity among its
consumers. The Frankfurt School argued that even though there might appear to
be a variety of pop songs available on the radio (or different types of Hollywood
films available at the local cinema), they were all basically just minor variations
on one another that promoted the same ideological messages. Under this model,
mass culture is figured as a distraction from actual reality. Similar ideas had been
sounded during preceding centuries—at least as far back as the Roman Empire,
from whence the phrase “bread and circuses” arose. The phrase refers to the
way that control over a given society can be maintained by supplying the populace
with basic physical needs (“bread”) and ample distraction from the actual means of
governance (“circuses”). Likewise, the Frankfurt School theorists noted that the
standard of living in most mid-twentieth-century Western democracies allowed
people to meet most of their physical needs, and that the culture industries
produced a great many opportunities for diversion or entertainment. As per the
Frankfurt School’s critique, rather than potentially creating some form of critical
or aesthetic awareness, the culture industries only encourage passive people to
consume the same ideological messages over and over again. Some of the Frankfurt
School theorists also used Freudian or psychoanalytical ideas to theorize these
processes, concluding that twentieth-century Westerners masochistically desired to
be dominated by strong authoritarian rulers who controlled the means of cultural
production, thus explaining the rise of Fascism in Europe and populist demagogues
elsewhere.
As later critics have pointed out, the Frankfurt School’s critique of the culture
industry is fairly essentialist. Their critique is sometimes referred to colloquially
as the “hypodermic needle” model, a term meant to suggest passive audience
members being shot up with dominant ideologies. (Later critics have argued that
audiences need not be so passive in the consumption of popular art; see Chapters
10 and 11.) The Frankfurt School also fell back into ongoing debates about (good)
high art versus (bad) low art, arguing that only the former could awaken the people
from their mass-media-induced slumber. In that respect the Frankfurt School
shared ideas espoused by one of their contemporaries: German playwright and
Marxist Bertolt Brecht. Similarly to the Frankfurt School, Brecht saw dominant
 26 FILM AND TELEVISION ANALYSIS

forms of theatrical (and by extension cinematic) realism as being complicit with

dominant ideologies. Theatergoers confronted with such works might laugh or
cry at the comedy or drama being presented, but because of what might be called
classical realist style, they are never invited to question the means of production
involved, or more broadly, the political issues that might be raised by the work.
Instead, Brecht argued for a form of “epic theater” that would make use of
self-reflexive distanciation devices—commonly called alienation effects—such
as direct address to the audience (breaking the imaginary “fourth wall”), breaking
character altogether, and/or the insertion of songs or comedy routines that might
comment upon the production and its political ramifications. Such devices were
meant to break up the realist flow of a production, and invite audiences to think
about the work’s ideological meanings and political underpinnings.
While Brecht wrote his own plays in that style, later filmmakers associated
with the rise of the postwar international art cinema (1950s–1970s) would make
films according to similar principles. (In fact, there were films made according
to Brechtian principles in earlier decades, but they usually screened only within
avant-garde and experimental venues.) In response to the so-called “invisible style”
of Hollywood filmmaking—with its continuity editing meant to hide (literally)
the means of its own production—filmmakers like Jean-Luc Godard, Ingmar
Bergman, Federico Fellini, Rainer Werner Fassbinder, and Pedro Almodovar
made films that revealed their means of production, and challenged audiences to
think more directly about politics. For example, Godard’s Weekend (1967) includes
absurdist characters (some of whom actually read political manifestos directly at the
camera), as well as political slogans printed on inter-titles. Other directors explicitly
and/or implicitly referenced the act of film production, as in Bergman’s Persona
(1966) and Hour of the Wolf (1968). And although Fellini began his career within
the Italian Neo-Realist movement, his later films became increasingly formalist
and self-reflexive as with 8 ½ (1963), Satyricon (1969), and Casanova (1976); this
tendency arguably culminates in a shot that pans around the film studio revealing
the (already apparent) artifice of a diegetic ocean liner in And the Ship Sails On
(1983) (see Figure 2.1). Likewise, filmmakers like Fassbinder and Almodovar
pushed the conventions of cinematic melodrama to their breaking points,

Fig 2.1
A self-reflexive gesture
at the end of Federico
Fellini’s And the Ship
Sails On (1983) ; one
camera pulls back from
the diegetic ocean liner
to reveal another camera
filming the set of the ship.
2: Concepts of ideology 27

accentuating bombastic musical cues, rigid formal compositions, and outlandish,

over-the-top characterizations.
Luis Valdez’s play Zoot Suit (and the film made from it in 1981) also make
excellent use of Brechtian alienation effects, allowing the spectator the chance
to examine the ethnic and economic exploitation of Mexican Americans that
occurred in Los Angeles during Word War II. Through songs, sketches, an
unreliable narrator, and multiple endings, Zoot Suit exposes the means of its own
production and invites viewers to think about the issues at hand, both historically
and perhaps as they still exist in contemporary America. However, both historically
and today, most mainstream Western film and television texts still remain invested
in some form of diegetic realism, and usually eschew Brechtian devices meant to
alienate or challenge viewers. In some cases—such as within the broad category
of reality television—direct address, actors breaking character, sketch comedy
and musical performances, and even shots of the studio audience function not
to distance viewers from the text, but instead create a new reality effect: that of
televisual performance. Far from deconstructing the experience of a text, such
devices within many television shows authenticate them as “live,” or at least “shot
before a live audience.” In this way they capture another sense of reality, one that
is highly constructed but rarely questioned or challenged by most viewers. In
many cases, reality TV game shows forthrightly celebrate the capitalist values of
individuality, competition, and consumerism.
Are the ideas of the Frankfurt School still relevant today? As unidirectional,
outdated, and/or essentialist as their critiques might be, their ideas are also still
fairly persuasive (and perhaps even prescient), especially when looking at the
contemporary consumption of “entertainment” products in many developed
nations. If anything, we live in an era of proliferating media and increasing
distraction, a culture where many see voting for an American Idol (2002–) contestant
as more important (or interesting) than voting for a President or a Senator. New
media technologies have also increased this “potential to distract” exponentially,
with many people unable to unplug from simulated worlds that bear little to no
relevance to the larger political issues that surround them (not to mention the
living and working conditions of the Third World workers who in many cases
labor to produce those devices in the first place). Many new media technologies
actively teach their users how to be good consumers and, in the case of many
video games, good workers and/or soldiers. New media has the potential to unite
and inform, as demonstrated by the democratic uprisings during the so-called Arab
Spring of 2011, but new media can also distract and isolate human beings from one
another. And as many political theorists, including most of the Frankfurt School
have pointed out, democratic or representational governments are dependent upon
informed and involved populations. When the populace unplugs from politics and
retreats into mediated worlds of ideological distraction—whether it be spectator
sports, blockbuster movies, or Internet gossip—those in power see little need to
change the way things work. The interests of the ruling classes and the culture
industries remain aligned, and firmly in place. As the science fiction film The
Final Progamme (aka The Last Days of Man on Earth [1973]), based on the work of
acclaimed British novelist Michael Moorcock once put it: “It’s much easier to run
a hospital with all the patients sleeping.” Ideological analysis would urge us to wake
up and pay attention, not just to media, but to all cultural texts and the ideological
assumptions they promulgate.
28 FILM AND TELEVISION ANALYSIS

Althusser and Gramsci: Hope for social change without revolution?

The next important developments in thinking about culture and ideology arose
from the works of Louis Althusser and Antonio Gramsci. Althusser was a
French Marxist who theorized how Marxism might be applied and/or modified
in order to critique twentieth-century Western democracies, not Imperialist
Russia or Europe during the Industrial Revolution. The idea that one had to
overthrow a society’s economic base in order to make any meaningful change in
its superstructure (a central tenet of basic Marxism) seemed less and less relevant.
Most of the revolutionary movements that had tried that tactic had failed or were
failing, having turned into communist dystopias. Written in the political and
countercultural foment of the 1960s and 1970s, Althusser’s work is pivotal in the
development of contemporary cultural criticism in that it addressed ideology by
synthesizing ideas from linguistics, structuralism, and psychoanalysis. In so doing, it
sought to explain how people in Western nations learned to “submit to the rules of
the established order,” acquiesce to the dominant ideologies surrounding them, and
reproduce those ideologies for future generations.
One of the more important ideas Althusser introduced into the study of
ideology was the idea of the subject rather than the individual. This idea—drawn
from psychoanalysis and other spheres of social psychology and philosophy—was a
shift in how we understand the nature of human identity, how we define what it
means to be a person. For centuries, Western models of human identity had tended
to be somewhat essentialist, asserting that identity is stable and determined chiefly
by birth or biology. If one was born a serf or a nobleman, one would remain so
based upon inherent inherited qualities. One the other hand, the subject is a model
of identity that is constantly in flux. Whereas the individual is mostly static and
unchanging, the subject is continually being constructed by all of the experiences
in his or her life. (Many psychoanalytic concepts of the subject will place special
emphasis on one’s early childhood experiences—see Chapter 6.) Within Althusser’s
reformulation of identity, human beings are both subject to and subjects of the
cultures into which they are born and live. On one level, this seems fairly obvious,
but Western notions of individualism tend to stress the opposite: that we are
self-determining, that we make our own destinies, and that anyone can grow up
to be President of the United States. According to those ideological beliefs, the
failure to do so is a personal failure and not a failure of the system. The idea of the
subject, on the other hand, suggests that who we are and how our lives transpire is
determined to a great extent by the social forces and ideologies within which we
circulate.
Furthering this model of the subject is Althusser’s concept of interpellation,
which suggests that ideological structures automatically construct us as subjects
with or without our knowledge or consent. Interpellation suggests that there is no
“outside” of ideology, that human beings are “always-already” in ideology from the
moment we are addressed by it. For example, the minute many Western children
are born they are placed into a pink or blue blanket—pre-existing symbolic
structures that define and determine gender—and from that moment on the subject
will be treated differently as either a girl or a boy. Another way to understand
interpellation is to understand that ideology is carried by and/or conveyed through
structures that constantly surround us. For example, if you enter a classroom
and sit down in a chair or desk facing the front of the room, you have just been
2: Concepts of ideology 29

interpellated into an ideological structure that constructs you as “student,” with

all of the concomitant ideological meanings that might accrue to such a subject
position. In this way, we move through space and time. We are constantly passing
into and through various ideological structures that interpellate us as subjects in
various ways. How we behave (or who we are) within the structure of a fraternity
party is perhaps very different from how we might behave in church or at a family
gathering.
Althusser named the various structures that constantly interpellate subjects
ideological state apparatuses (or ISAs). In contrast to repressive state
apparatuses (RSAs), which maintain social control though violence or the threat
of violence (forces that would include armed conflicts, war, assassinations, terrorism,
the death penalty, etc.), Althusser proposed that social order in most Western
nations was actually maintained by ideological state apparatuses—those elements
of the superstructure that act by way of example and education rather than force.
(In the West, repressive state apparatuses are usually only called into use when the
ideological ones fail: witness the police abuses—and the rioting—that welled up
in the aftermath of the shooting death of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri
during the summer of 2014.) Ideological state apparatuses include religions,
educational systems, social organizations and political parties, family structures, and
perhaps most importantly the mass media, including film and television. Each of
these ideological state apparatuses works in different ways to maintain and recreate
the status quo. Sometimes they work in opposition to one another, but more often
they work in tandem to create a unified sense of national or regional culture: in
this way dominant ideology is sometimes said to be overdetermined, that is to say
constructed by various different-but-similar ideologies working at different times
and places. In so doing the contradicting elements of each ideological structure
may be downplayed (or in psychoanalytic terms repressed) in order to create or
maintain a unified consensus. For example, if you are a Christian who lives in a
state that executes prisoners for major crimes, a contradiction might occur between
that aspect of local governance and the Christian mandate that “Thou shalt not
kill.” One solution to this paradox might be to downplay or repress the meaning of
“Thou shalt not kill” in favor of some other Christian tenet, such as the belief that
the punishment should fit the crime, the so-called “eye for an eye” doctrine. In this
way, the ideological state apparatuses of government and religion work to justify and
maintain a belief in the necessity and justice of the death penalty.
Two other important concepts of neo-Marxist theory are often associated
with Althusser: relative autonomy and uneven development, both of which
challenge the unidirectional economic determinism of basic Marxist thinking.
Relative autonomy suggests that even though the economic base is still the final
arbiter of the nature and form of a society’s superstructural elements (its culture),
various institutions and ideologies within the superstructure can and do potentially
influence one another. In other words, elements in the superstructure have relative
autonomy from the base (and from one another). This means that one text can
influence another text, a given subject can create something that critiques or
subverts the dominant ideology, or that organized political campaigns can and
do impact on the nature of culture and society. To take one historical example,
Frederick Wiseman’s famous 1967 documentary Titicut Follies exposed the cruel
and barbaric conditions in a Massachusetts State correctional institution for the
criminally insane. Lawsuits that surrounded the film for years eventually gave rise to
30 FILM AND TELEVISION ANALYSIS

new standards for prisoner safety and privacy. Many people feel that the film played
an important part in humanizing the way state institutions offer mental health care
(not to mention basic human rights) to patients and inmates. In this way, change in
the superstructure can occur even though the economic base remains the same.
Similarly, uneven development suggests that the various elements of the
superstructure can and do exist in uneven relationships to the economic base; that
is to say, some are more closely determined by the economic base while others are
less so. For an example, compare network television and independent filmmaking
in America. One could safely say that network television programming, highly
dependent on advertisers and the right kind of audiences (i.e. those with money
to spend), is more closely tied to the economic base of capitalism than is a small
independent or even artisanal avant-garde film made on the remote edges of the
media industry. According to this logic, superstructural elements that are closer
to the economic base will be more likely to promote the ideological agendas that
support and uphold that base, much more so than those superstructural elements
distanced from the base. Many decades ago President Dwight D. Eisenhower spoke
of the developing “military industrial complex” to refer to the close collusion
between U.S. military forces and the broader economy. We might note that those
two apparatuses have grown even closer together in recent decades: the Armed
Forces remain very close to the economic (capitalist) base. Military spending
helps fuel the American economy in ever-increasing ways, and the ideologies of
God, nation, and patriotism are thus linked to capitalism and corporate profits in
overdetermined ways that most Americans never question. (On the other hand,
critics further from the economic base of American capitalism have critiqued
this state of affairs, among them novelist, playwright, and essayist Gore Vidal
whose book Perpetual War for Perpetual Peace hypothesizes that the United States
actively seeks out military skirmishes in order to maintain the health of its military
industrial complex.) One might argue that the idea of the military industrial
complex has become so thoroughly ingrained in American capitalism that it is
rarely even spoken of anymore.
In more recent years, the term “military entertainment complex” has also
been introduced into the lexicon, and that term is suggestive of the ways that
Hollywood’s economic interests and technologies continue to overlap with those of
the U.S. military, and vice versa. Since at least the 1980s, the Armed Services have
offered their resources to Hollywood producers whose films promote the military
in a positive light, while withholding those same resources from filmmakers who
might be critical of military or foreign policy. Similarly, cinematic advertisements
to join the Armed Services have appeared in movie theaters throughout the United
States, many of which suggest that joining the Marines is not that different from
playing a fantasy video game or starring in a heroic Hollywood war film. (Indeed,
the technologies used to produce blockbuster special effects and digital gaming
systems are also used to train military personnel.) The point of all this is that many
large national institutions, both private and public, have many shared goals, and are
situated very close to the nation’s economic base, capitalism. As such they share
ideologies which tend to promote not only the dominant values of capitalism,
but also those of whiteness, patriarchy, and American exceptionalism. All of these
ideologies are overdetermined because they are expressed in many intertwining
ways by many different cultural structures, apparatuses, and individual texts.
One final set of ideas about ideology is necessary at this point, and these are
2: Concepts of ideology 31

drawn from the writings of Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci. Gramsci wrote
most of his cultural theory while a prisoner under the fascist regime of Benito
Mussolini during the 1920s and 1930s, but his works were not translated into
English until decades later. Most importantly, Gramsci theorized the concept
of cultural hegemony. Before Gramsci, hegemony simply meant “rule,” but
Gramsci developed a more nuanced model of how rule is maintained in Western
nations through cultural institutions and ideologies (a position not dissimilar to
Althusser’s theorizing several decades later). According to the model of cultural
hegemony, rule over any nation or population is not assured or static, but must
be won and re-won in an ongoing struggle, one that occurs by constantly
negotiating with subcultural artifacts, ideas, and/or social movements that may
be in opposition to dominant ideologies. One way to picture cultural hegemony
might be to think of it as a constantly evolving and fluctuating dominant
ideology. To take another historical example, American patriarchy is not the
same thing as it was one hundred years ago: even though it remains a dominant
ideology in culture, it has also had to negotiate with and adapt to social changes
such as women earning the right to vote and the changes to gender and sexuality
brought about by the sexual revolution. Western culture may still be patriarchal,
but not in the same way as it was one hundred years ago, or even the same way
that it was yesterday.
Later thinkers have tended to be either more optimistic or pessimistic about the
concept of cultural hegemony. While on one level it means that social change is
possible as dominant ideologies are challenged or opposed (the optimistic position),
it also means that dominant ideologies—albeit somewhat tweaked—nevertheless
remain firmly in place (the pessimistic position). Critics point out that when
oppositional ideals and concepts are allowed to enter the mainstream (i.e. achieve
cultural hegemony), they often do so through processes of incorporation and
commodification. Incorporation refers to the ways that oppositional ideas might
be “allowed” to appear as mainstream, as long as they are situated within larger
structures of dominance. In the 1970s for example, African American actors were
finally allowed to appear in leading roles in Hollywood films. While that might be
thought to be a good thing for racial equality, most of those roles also promoted
dominant ideologies of aggressive masculinity, and of course those films were
made primarily to fill the coffers of white Hollywood, not uplift the black race.
That is what commodification means: literally turning an oppositional ideology
into a product that can then be sold for profit. Through incorporation and
commodification, alternative or opposing ideologies are often “watered down” or
“de-clawed” for consumption by the wider population. Alternative or oppositional
political points become reduced to a style or a fad. For example, many African
American cultural artifacts—from jazz to hip hop to gangsta rap—have repeatedly
passed through these processes throughout the twentieth century.
Yet, whether the glass is half full or half empty, the process of hegemonic
negotiation does allow us to theorize cultural change without revolution and
without violence. Cultural change (however small or great) can occur because of
a film or television text, a poem or a petition. The world and the ideas we use to
express our understanding of it are constantly changing, and some contemporary
cultural critics see great potential in how media might shape a better future for us
all. As Judith Halberstam writes in her book The Queer Art of Failure—a work that
explores the cultural ramifications of Dude, Where’s My Car? (2000), Chicken Run
32 FILM AND TELEVISION ANALYSIS

(2000), and Finding Nemo (2003)—among many other cultural artifacts both high
and low:

The dream of an alternative way of being is often confused with utopian

thinking and then dismissed as naïve, simplistic, or a blatant misunderstanding
of the nature of power in modernity. And yet the possibility of other forms
of being, other forms of knowing, a world with different sites for justice
and injustice, a mode of being where the emphasis falls less on money and
work and competition and more on cooperation, trade, and sharing animates
all kinds of knowledge projects and should not be dismissed as irrelevant or
naïve.

For those film and television students wishing to address social issues and/or change
the world with their work, contemporary theories of hegemonic negotiation allow
for such possibilities. For the contemporary media critic, hegemonic negotiation
allows us to follow the ebb and flow of cultural change, how film and television
(amid a plethora of other social apparatuses) impacts upon the real world, and vice
versa.

Where to “find” ideology in film and television texts

Because ideology is pervasive and structural, it can be located at every level of the
film and television industries, from federal and corporate policy to the smallest
camera angle, sound cue, or lighting design. In the Western world today, six huge
global corporate entities—Time Warner, the Walt Disney Company, Rupert
Murdoch’s News Corporation, Sony Corporation, Viacom/Paramount, and NBC
Universal—control almost the entire film and television industry, not to mention
the music and publishing industries as well. The ideological agendas of these
conglomerate entities are situated directly on the economic base: these global
corporations exist to make money, and in so doing they embody the dominant
ideologies of capitalism. Furthermore, they rarely challenge other aspects of
dominant ideology, such as white centrality or patriarchy, as those ideologies have
historically been closely associated with capitalism (and commercial success). It is
true that more specialized niche television channels like HBO, Oxygen, or Logo
seem designed to express alternative ideologies, but these companies are themselves
part of one (or more) of the six larger corporate entities that structure and control
the entertainment industry. Some thinkers, including those of the Frankfurt School,
have observed how the culture industry only pretends to offer significant choices
to consumers, when in fact the products it sells are all basically the same. (This
process is sometimes referred to as pseudo-individuation.) Even independent
films have come increasingly under the control of the six major corporations;
since the 1990s, each of the six corporate conglomerates has produced and/or
distributed “independent” films under boutique subsidiary labels (either acquired
or created) such as Fox Searchlight Pictures, Focus Features (part of Universal),
and Miramax (currently owned by Disney). More “truly” independent films not
made by divisions of these corporate giants do get made and may be able to express
ideological viewpoints further from the dominant ones, but then they also have the
problem of being seen—i.e. getting distributed very far within the global corporate
media scape.
2: Concepts of ideology 33

As Chapter 5 will explore, ideology also inheres within textual structures like
film genres (westerns, musicals, gangster films) or television formats (game
shows, the sitcom, etc.). It is a central tenet of genre theory that different genres
attempt to negotiate or express a specific set of cultural concerns, for example
what is normal versus monstrous in the horror film, or the meaning of civilization
versus the wilderness in the western. As such, genre structures express ideologies
related to those concerns, and both the horror film and the western have been
critiqued for upholding the centrality of white masculinity at the expense of racial
and gendered minorities. Similarly, the very shape of certain television formats
might be understood as ideological, regardless of their content. Many of the
classic sitcoms of the late 1950s and early 1960s, for instance, rarely tackled the
serious political issues of that era, instead they expressed a worldview of happy
white suburban stasis where nothing ever changed. Serial television formats like
soap operas on the other hand, have often been more able to express differing
ideological perspectives, partly because of their larger casts and ongoing weekly
(or daily) structures that have the potential to explore things in greater depth. On
the other hand, most game shows are all about capitalism and competition, in
which contestants vie with one another to win cash or other valued prizes. The
Price is Right (1972–) explicitly rewards its players (and by extension its viewers)
for their detailed knowledge of what consumer goods are worth in the free
market.
Ideology can also be located at the level of individual films or TV episodes,
often through the stories they tell and the ways that those stories are represented
and resolved. The average Hollywood blockbuster centers on a white protagonist
with some form of special power as he defeats the villain and wins the girl. Yes,
Hollywood protagonists in the last few decades are sometimes non-white and
even female, but those are exceptions that prove the rule. Television—because of
its more diffuse and ubiquitous structure—as well as the variety of diverse formats
and genres it can encompass—can arguably present a larger range of ideologies
than do Hollywood films. As noted above, ongoing serial narratives can explore
more complicated issues than can a two-hour Hollywood blockbuster, while
more specialized channels like HBO, Showtime, and AMC have been able to
offer provocative shows that challenge (or at least tweak or question) some aspects
of dominant ideologies. Sex and the City (1998–2004) may or may not be an
empowering image of women compared to the usual depiction of women in film
and television, but shows like Queer as Folk (2000–5) or The L Word (2004–9) did
break new ground in representing more diverse images of gay and lesbian people
onscreen. The Netflix original series Orange is the New Black (2013–) does similar
cultural work, bringing multiple “silenced voices” to the screen: telling until now
rarely told stories about women, people of color, and the abuses of the industrial
prison system. Similarly, Six Feet Under (2001–5) featured a story line about an
interracial gay couple raising several children. A few years later, a similar storyline—
albeit played for laughs and with a less challenging racial angle—would be central
to a popular network hit, ABC’s Modern Family (2009–). Such media images
have played a part in changing the meaning of homosexuality in contemporary
Western cultures, and those changes ultimately play out in the “real world” of state
legislatures and Supreme Court decisions.
Ideology also can be read not only in narrative patterns and story resolutions,
but it might be expressed through specific formal properties such as costume,
34 FILM AND TELEVISION ANALYSIS

make up, lighting, editing, etc. Many of these representational codes predate and/
or extend beyond film and television, but others have become “shorthand” in
visual storytelling. For example, drawing upon cultural and cinematic codes about
the meanings of light and dark, consistently dressing a character in black and/or
shooting him or her in shadowy spaces, is a very easy way to arouse suspicions in
the audience’s mind about the character’s potential villainy. In a famous example
from the history of broadcast television, the producers of Sixty Minutes (1968–)—a
magazine show that often investigated possible criminal and ethical violations
among businessmen and politicians—routinely placed their cameras closer to the
person being investigated (closer than to the segment’s host, for example), in order
to capture every bead of sweat, nervous tick, or sideways glance. In this way, the
show suggested that the person being grilled was possibly guilty, even if he or she
were not.
Since ideological analysis is dependent upon reading—that is to say decoding
the sounds and images of film and television texts to see what meanings and
effects they create in the mind of the audience member—it is highly dependent
on who is doing that reading. As the cultural studies “Encoding/Decoding”
model introduced in the last chapter suggests, it is rare that there is one dominant
meaning that any given text gives out to all of its viewers. Individuals approach
any given text from within their own ideological and historical subject positions,
to some extent taking from the text what they want to see in it. This facet of
media studies opens into the arena of reception studies (discussed more fully
in Chapters 10 and 11), but it does complicate ideological analysis. For example,
is The Sopranos (1999–2007) a critique of the violent patriarchal and capitalist
ideologies embodied by its gangster anti-hero Tony, or a celebration thereof?
Actual viewers and fans of the show have expressed both opinions. Similarly,
the AMC period drama Mad Men (2007–15) is often read as a critique of the
sexist and racist parameters of the Madison Avenue world of 1960s commercial
advertising. However, a few critics in the popular press have also written nostalgic
elegies about the show, expressing a longing for the allegedly kinder and gentler
world the show depicts (before the advent of feminism and the civil rights
movement), when sleeping with the secretary was a perk of a man’s profession, and
not sexual harassment.
As these examples illustrate, some texts are more open to a variety of
interpretations than are others, a state of affairs explored in greater detail in later
chapters. That is because all texts are made up of a variety of images, sounds,
and messages ordered in certain ways; media theorists use the term structured
polysemy to refer to this aspect of a text. The term means that all film and
television texts are made up of many signs (“poly” meaning “many” and “seme”
meaning “sign”), and that those signs are ordered or structured in a certain
way during the processes of textual creation (encoding). As such, some texts
are structured to give off explicit meanings, while others are more diffuse. In
performing ideological analysis, it is thus perhaps more accurate to say that the
critic’s job is to express the range of meanings that any single text might express,
and how those meanings either derive from or deviate from dominant ideologies.
In many cases, ideological analysis will reveal texts that do both: uphold dominant
ideologies in multiple ways, while perhaps negotiating with non-dominant
ideologies. In this way, cultural hegemony is usually maintained.
2: Concepts of ideology 35

Case study 1: Revisiting Ballet Mécanique, The Flying Mouse, and Aqua Teen
Hunger Force

Let us return to the three short texts we examined in the previous chapter: the modernist
art film Ballet Mécanique (1924), the Disney “Silly Symphony” The Flying Mouse (1934),
and an episode from the TV show Aqua Teen Hunger Force (2000–). Those three texts
were discussed as examples of (respectively) “high” art, “low” or “mass” art, and a
niche artifact that complicated the presumptions of high versus low art. But what
can ideological analysis tell us about these texts? Of the three, the episode of Aqua
Teen Hunger Force seems the most diffuse in its ideological meanings. Its incomplete
and almost surreal narrative resists closure and thus lacks a lesson or moral (as with
The Flying Mouse). As a pop culture text, it appears to be “about” little more than pop
culture itself, with its multiple references to TV, Dracula, Elvis, as well as science fiction
themes popularized by movies like Alien (1979) and The Fly (1986) (see Figure 2.2). One
might argue that it rewards its viewers for being good media consumers, as catching
the pop culture references is part of the pleasure of the show. One might also note the
complete absence of female characters from the episode, and its racial ambiguity: the
show’s theme song and its wrap-around bumpers suggest urban ethnicities, even as its
non-human characters are not given racial markers per se. (Some viewers think Frylock
“sounds black,” i.e. is voiced by an African American actor.) Aqua Teen Hunger Force seems
almost ideologically incoherent, even as one might note certain specific ideological
inflections (such as those around gender, race, and pop culture). In this case, one might
argue that Aqua Teen Hunger Force has less of an explicit ideological message and more
of an ideological problematic. Unlike the former term, which is more precise, the term
ideological problematic refers to a range of ideas and ideologies a text may contain or
activate, often in an unclear or even contradictory way.
Ballet Mécanique might seem equally diffuse ideologically upon first viewing. Some
parts of the film—such as the horse collar coupled with the placard “Someone has
stolen a pearl necklace worth 5 million”—might just appear surreal, or nonsensical (one
goal of the dadaist movement with which the film is often associated). However, on

Fig 2.2
Random pop culture
references in Aqua Teen
Hunger Force (2000–) : a
billboard to see Dracula’s
grave in Memphis(?),
here somehow improbably
advertised with a vampiric
Elvis Presley.
 36 FILM AND TELEVISION ANALYSIS

Fig 2.3 Fig 2.4

In Ballet Mécanique (1924), living things—in this case a parrot—are A washer woman carries a heavy burden up a long flight of steps in Ballet
refigured by the modern technology of cinema, literally refracted by the Mécanique (1924) ; in Marxist terms one might say she has become reified
camera’s distorting and mechanizing lenses. into a machine-like part, her physical labor (and being) reduced to a cog in
the wheel of a larger capitalist enterprise.

repeated viewings Ballet Mécanique can be shown to convey an ideological critique of

early twentieth-century European modernity. In its images of organic beings (birds and
humans) refracted through distorting lenses, and its emphasis on automata and human
beings made up to look like automata, Ballet Mécanique depicts an overly mechanized
world that reduces human beings to cogs in a machine (see Figure 2.3). The famous
“loop” sequence of the old worker-woman ascending a long staircase while carrying a
heavy burden suggests the never-ending drudgery of the life she lives; to use Marxist
terms, she has become reified into a mechanism in the capitalist machine (see Figure
2.4). Perhaps the most disturbing shot in Ballet Mécanique is a shot of precisely marching
feet stomping down (what one may presume to be) a Parisian boulevard. The shot not
only suggests the machine-like nature of military units as they functioned throughout
World War I, but also foreshadows the industrialization of murder that would occur
during the Holocaust two decades later (not to mention the Nazi invasion of France) (see
Figure 2.5). The age of modernity may have given rise to the mass media and other mass
produced goods and services, but it also laid the groundwork for the assembly line-like
mass murders of the Nazi death camps.

Fig 2.5
In Ballet Mécanique
(1924), the feet of
marching soldiers suggests
a mechanized approach
to warfare, recalling the
devastating effects of
military technology in
World War I, as well as
eerily foreshadowing
the mechanized death
chambers of Nazi Germany.
2: Concepts of ideology 37

Of the three films, The Flying Mouse is probably the most explicit in its ideological
message. Based as it is on a classic fable, the film seems to dramatize its own moral
lesson: be careful what you wish for because (chances are) you are better off being who
and what you are already—or as the wish-granting-fairy puts it, “Be yourself.” Under
some circumstances, the message to “Be yourself” might be thought to be a good one,
encouraging someone to be true to their own desires and sense of self. However, this
moral lesson becomes especially conservative when read in conjunction with the film’s
other ideological messages. For example, the mouse and his family are clearly poor and
rural in their class standing. They wear patched clothing and the single mother works
hard to take care of her many children (see Figure 2.6). On the other hand, the birds that
the protagonist wants to emulate are given more middle (or even upper) class signifiers
such as top hats, canes, and bonnets. Furthermore, the bird community is literally higher
than the mouse’s family: the birds occupy the upper branches of a tree while the mice
live on the ground (see Figure 2.7). These are two separate worlds that the short cartoon
suggests should not or will not mix. Everywhere the newly winged mouse goes—to the
birds, to the bats, even back to his family—he is rejected as a strange hybrid. Rather
than celebrate the flying mouse as a unique individual, the film suggests he is better off
staying in his original status, as part of a poor (wingless) rural family. The attempt to mix
social classes (or species) produces only heartache.
The Flying Mouse is also filled with elements that promote white patriarchy, as it can
be assumed that the flying mouse is both male and whatever is racially normative, which
in the Western world of the 1930s, is whiteness. The most powerful figure in the film—
the fairy—is female but she embodies an almost Aryan ideal of pale skin, blond hair, and
blue eyes (see Figure 2.8). She also appears as a delicate butterfly who needs to be saved
by the mouse from a rapacious black spider, a situation that suggests a veiled threat of
miscegenation (or racial mixing), a very prominent racist fear in 1930s America. Aside
from the mouse’s mother and several of the birds, the only other significant female in
the film is the flying mouse’s sister, who appears onscreen for one sight gag and then
disappears from the film altogether! (During the family reunion of mice at the end, she
is nowhere to be seen) (see Figure 2.9). Likewise, the bats who later berate the flying
mouse as “nothin’ but a nothin’” are associated with darker visuals and a jazz-inspired

Fig 2.6 Fig 2.7

The mouse’s family in Walt Disney’s The Flying Mouse (1934) are poor and The birds in The Flying Mouse (1934) are drawn with middle or upper class
rural, and generally happy, although one mouse longs to fly. signifiers such as top hats, canes, fancy bonnets, and nicer clothing than
that worn by the mice.
 38 FILM AND TELEVISION ANALYSIS

Fig 2.8 Fig 2.9

The fairy who grants the mouse’s wish for wings in The Flying Mouse In The Flying Mouse (1934) the family of mice apparently does contain a
(1934) seems modeled on a blonde-haired, blue-eyed, 1930s-era woman in a daughter, although she is only onscreen for one sight gag ; by the happy
sleekly elegant gown. ending she has disappeared from the film altogether. (Refer back to
Figure 1.6.)

performance as they taunt the mouse for thinking he could be like them (refer back to
Figure 1.5). Thus, while one ideological message of the film could be that “there’s no
place like home” (as a more famous 1939 Hollywood fantasy film would have it), the film
also expresses subtle ideological messages about gender, race, and class. Namely: that
women are somewhat peripheral to masculine quests, and that attempts to mix class or
race will probably result in heartache, and thus they should not be attempted in the first
place.

Case study 2: Never Let Me Go (2010)

Film scholars often agree that every British film is in some way about class, as class is
an issue deeply embedded in the history and culture of Great Britain. The film Never Let
Me Go, based on the acclaimed novel by Kazuo Ishiguro (also the author of Remains of
the Day, published in 1989 and filmed in 1993) and directed by Mark Romanek (One Hour
Photo [2002]) is no exception to that assertion. Deeply symbolic, poetic, and ultimately
powerfully moving, the film centers on a love triangle between Tommy (Andrew Garfield),
Kathy (Carey Mulligan), and Ruth (Keira Knightley), three young adults who were raised
together in what appears initially to be a British boarding school called Hailsham.
However, as the tale progresses, the story shifts into science fiction territory: Tommy,
Kathy, and Ruth are being raised by the Hailsham school to be living human organ
donors, expected to submit to their roles as such, even when they “complete” their lives
at a young adult age. The film offers a range of interpretations and contains multiple
ideological assertions about the importance of love and the preciousness of our time
on earth. It also functions quite nicely as a metaphor or allegory for the ways in which
ideology works to create subjects who are willing to submit to the dominant order, and
accept their place within a socio-economic structure that literally feeds off their lives as a
means of sustaining itself.
The first half of the film focuses on the three protagonists at Hailsham in 1978. Here
the institutional structure, ideology, and limitations of the boarding school are stressed:
the clever scholar might note the very name “Hailsham” seems to allude to Althusser’s
2: Concepts of ideology 39

notion of the subject being interpellated (“hailed”) into some sort of false belief (“sham”).
At Hailsham, the individuality of the students is downplayed: they wear drab gray school
uniforms and only have last initials, not last names. They are kept inside the school
grounds at all times, monitored by electronic bracelets but also dissuaded from leaving
by terrible horror stories of what has supposedly happened to other children who
attempted to leave the school—a good example of how stories (the media, ideology)
influence behavior and understanding. The students are kept busy with what appear to
be lessons in geography, art, and sport, and they seem relatively happy as they are told
they are special, consume identical meals, ingest pills, and are entertained by old black
and white movies—in this case a British musical called Let George Do It (1938) in which
popular crooner George Formby sings—quite pointedly—a song entitled “Count Your
Blessings and Smile.” The song recalls the 1980s pop song “Don’t Worry, Be Happy” by
Bobby McFerrin, and both contain similar ideological exhortations to accept blithely one’s
place within the social structures in which one might find oneself. However, whereas the
Bobby McFerrin song is a good example of how the culture industries ideologically create
passive and conformist subjects (a la the Frankfurt School), in Never Let Me Go, that
same process is being exposed for what it is: an ode to passivity and conformity via the
ideological indoctrination of the media.
The students at Hailsham are also trained in the ways of capitalism as they compete
to have their artworks featured in “The Gallery,” and earn tokens that they then may
spend on toys and other sundries. (The title of the film refers to a music cassette that
Tommy buys for Kathy at such a sale, a recording of an old love song of the same name.)
The children are even taught—via playacting—how to go into a tea shop and order
something to eat and drink. Most remarkably, when renegade teacher Miss Lucy finds
it within her conscience to try to explain to the children exactly what their fates will be,
they respond almost without emotion (see Figure 2.10). They have already been trained
to accede to and never question their spot within the structure of things. In Althusserian Fig 2.10
When the children in
terms, they have been interpellated as subjects destined to be organ donors, and even Never Let Me Go (2010)
take pride in that role. hear about their ultimate
When Tommy, Kathy, and Ruth turn eighteen, they leave Hailsham for a rural working fate as organ donors, they
remain unmoved, having
class abode known as The Cottages. Here they meet other young adults similar to already learned not to
themselves, experiment with sexuality, and learn proper codes of gendered behavior question their lot in life.
 40 FILM AND TELEVISION ANALYSIS

from an inane sitcom they apparently watch all the time, to the point where they begin
to mimic the characters on TV (see Figure 2.11). (Again, a better visualization of the
Frankfurt School’s theories of ideological indoctrination by the mass media would be
hard to find.) Tommy seems to be the most naïve of the three, and allows himself to
be drawn into a sexual relationship with Ruth, even though a greater (and “truer”) love
seems to be shared between Tommy and Kathy. This romantic entanglement fills their
lives and gives some sense of hope for the future, especially when they learn of a rumor
that donors who are truly in love may receive a “deferral”—extra years of life before their
donations must start. Tommy especially clings to that hope, and begins to create art as
did the children at Hailsham. Tommy believes that such art was encouraged at Hailsham
as a way of fathoming the children’s souls, and could thus be used to “prove” his true love
for Kathy, earning them both a deferral.
When the story shifts to 1994, Kathy has become a “carer,” someone who helps donors
through their last years of life before she herself returns to her status as a donor. The
three protagonists briefly reunite, even though Tommy and Ruth are suffering the effects
of multiple organ donations. Ruth, realizing she has kept Tommy and Kathy from sharing
their love, gives them the address of Madame, the woman who was in charge of The
Gallery all those years ago at Hailsham. Then, in a cold and stark medical scene we see
Ruth’s last viable organ removed from her as she “completes” her destiny. Tommy and
Kathy do locate Madame, but she tells them there never was such a thing as deferral,
that the artworks the children created for The Gallery were not used to gauge “true love,”
but whether or not the children even had souls at all. Shocked but acquiescent, Tommy
leaves and eventually “completes,” and Kathy is left alone to ponder—along with the
Fig 2.11 audience—the meanings of life, death, mortality, love, and our place within the social
Children and young
adults in Never Let
order.
Me Go (2010) are Never Let Me Go is part of a long line of thoughtful and imaginative British science
socialized partially by fiction texts. Its focus on ideological manipulation, surveillance, and dystopia suggests
the ideological state
apparatuses of film
George Orwell’s seminal novel 1984 (published in 1948) and its subsequent film
and television ; at “The adaptations (1956, 1984), while the children’s uniforms and narrative predicaments also
Cottages” they literally recall These are the Damned (1963) and Children of the Damned (1963), two other classic
mimic the behavior and
speech of an inane TV
British science fiction films centered on extraordinary children. Although Never Let Me
sitcom. Go, like these other films, is easily classified as science fiction, it is an everyday, realist
2: Concepts of ideology 41

science fiction film rather than a futuristic or otherworldly one. Partly this is expressed
via the film’s remarkable production design, which suggests an almost untimely and
uncanny feel. Although its scenes are allegedly set in 1978, 1985, and 1994, the film’s
visual design suggests an even older era, one that suggests post-World War II Britain,
and even earlier. Indeed, it is partly this visual design that gives the film so much of its
broad emotional resonance: this story might be an allegory of Cold War communism (as
was 1984), or even more readily a critique of the British class system in the years before
and after World War II. Indeed, the children and young adults they become are resolutely
poor, relegated to (literally) second class citizenship, a point movingly dramatized when
the “bumper crop” of toys they are allowed to purchase with their tokens is revealed
to be a collection of incomplete game sets, broken dolls, and other detritus that most
second-hand shops would reject (see Figure 2.12).
Perhaps the film also suggests a dystopian present in which medical science—
as in Frankenstein—has run amok, thus relating it to contemporary concerns over
abortion, euthanasia, in vitro fertilization, stem cell research, prosthetic limb design,
and cloning itself (which the film suggests is the origin of its donors but never
makes explicit). Perhaps the film can be read as a critique of socialized medicine and
Britain’s National Health Service in particular: the film’s “National Donor Program”
is depicted as a cold and socialist bureaucracy literally providing extra years for the
rich and powerful while sacrificing the bodies of the poor. (In this way the film might
also appeal to those who think President Obama’s Affordable Care Act will inevitably
lead the way to state sanctioned “death panels.”) Ultimately, Never Let Me Go suggests
that whatever allegorical reading one might make of it, it is love, compassion, and
connection that matters the most in our short times here on earth. We are all going to
“complete”—what matters most is what we do while we are still alive. Of course “love,” Fig 2.12
“compassion,” and “connection” are themselves ideologically loaded terms, and can In Never Let Me Go
themselves be used to limit or oppress subjects in yet various other ways. Nonetheless, (2010), the children
clamor over the chance
as presented within the film, they seem to be one possibly hopeful response to the to purchase broken and
cold dehumanizing ideological structures that surround us, whether at the fictional ill-used toys ; they have
Hailsham or in the real world. Never Let Me Go invites us to see and understand those been conditioned to think
that this is a rare treat
ideological structures, and to free ourselves as best we can from their limiting and even and not a pitiful display
abusive ends. of junk.
42 FILM AND TELEVISION ANALYSIS

Questions for discussion

1 What is your own positioning vis-à-vis dominant ideologies? In what ways does your
identity accord with dominant ideologies, and in what ways does it perhaps clash or
contradict with dominant ideologies? How aware are you of how film and television
transmits normative ideas about race, class, gender, sexuality, etc.?
2 Can you think of other fantasy, science fiction, or horror films that “dramatize”
certain concepts of ideology (as do The Matrix and Never Let Me Go)? Do they uphold
or critique other aspects of dominant ideologies such as patriarchy, capitalism, and
white supremacy?
3 How do sports—both spectator sports and participant sports—intersect with
dominant ideologies? Would you say—in general—that sports or film and TV is more
likely to uphold dominant ideologies? If so, why and how?

References and further reading

Althusser, Louis. Lenin and Philosophy, and Other Essays. Trans. Ben Brewster. New
York: Monthly Review Press, 1972 (1971).
Althusser, Louis. On the Reproduction of Capitalism: Ideology and Ideological State
Apparatuses. Trans. G. M. Goshgarian. London and New York: Verso, 2014
(1971).
Cantor, Paul A. The Invisible Hand in Popular Culture: Liberty vs. Authority in
American Film and TV. Lexington, KY: University of Kentucky Press, 2012.
Eagleton, Terry. Ideology: An Introduction. London and New York: Verso, 2007
(1991).
Engels, Friedrich. The Condition of the Working Class in England. Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2009 (1845).
Gebhardt, Eike and Andrew Arato, eds. The Essential Frankfurt School Reader.
London: Bloomsbury Academic, 1982.
Gramsci, Antonio. Selections from Cultural Writings. Trans. William Boelhower.
Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1985.
Gramsci, Antonio. Prison Notebooks. New York: Columbia University Press, 1992.
Halberstam, Judith. The Queer Art of Failure. Durham and London: Duke
University Press, 2011.
Heywood, Andrew. Political Ideologies: An Introduction. London: Palgrave Macmillan,
2012.
Marx, Karl and Friedrich Engels. The German Ideology. New York: International
Publishers, 1970 (1845).
Marx, Karl and Friedrich Engels. The Communist Manifesto. Printed by Createspace,
2010 (1888, 1848).
Marx, Karl. Das Kapital. Printed by Createspace, 2011 (1867).
Nichols, Bill. Ideology and the Image: Social Representation in the Cinema and Other
Media. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1981.
Ryan, Michael and Douglas Kellner. Camera Politica: The Politics and Ideology of
Contemporary Hollywood Film. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1988.
Vidal, Gore. Perpetual War for Perpetual Peace: How We Got to Be So Hated. New
York: Nation Books, 2002.