EVALUATE: HALL (RECEPTION THEORY)

Reception Theory posits that producers encode preferred meaning into texts, but the lived experience of audiences influences how they decode those meanings in three ways. The preferred reading aligns with both the ideological position and messaging in a text; a negotiated reading aligns with the ideological position but disagrees (on some level) with the messaging; and an oppositional reading rejects both.

Hall points out that genre conventions are used by producers to construct preferred meanings. For example, D83 uses genre conventions to encode a sympathetic representation of its protagonist. Tropes like the sick mother and sequences like the training montage encode a preferred reading of Martin as a devoted son on a hero’s journey. This subverts the conventional narrative of a NATO hero, and applying Hall allows us to predict that the audience’s situated logics will impact the reading, accepting, rejecting, or modifying their response, perhaps based on their national identity, or lived experience of the period. Stranger Things is more conventional, using familiar sci-fi tropes to encode a representation of the U.S. government as irresponsible in scientific experiments and conspiratorial in its cover up. However, unlike D83, which is grounded in a realistic representation of the period, Stranger Things is less likely to invite a range of readings because its diegesis is so obviously fictional. So, audiences may choose to decode the show within its generic framework, without necessarily applying their socio-political perspective to its reading. This foregrounds the significance of genre within Hall’s theoretical framework.

A potential weakness of Hall’s theory is that it focuses on a singular preferred reading. This seems ineffective when analysing the ambiguity of encoded messaging, especially in Deutschland 83. Take Lenora: is she a villain for working against NATO, a hero for serving her country? If we have no clear preferred reading surely Hall is ineffective. But what if the encoded messaging is that the Cold War was a time of great ambiguity? In that case, applying Hall may be very revealing. The German release of the show was unsuccessful, perhaps because the lived experience of audiences may have prompted uncomfortably oppositional socio-political readings. However, it was well received by U.S. and U.K. audiences, whose distance from the nation of origin may have allowed more dispassionate negotiated readings of the text. So, applying Hall proves very useful as a window to understanding critical and economic success in relation to national identity.

400 WORDS – UP TO THIS POINT IS WORTH ABOUT 7 OR 8 OUT OF 10.

Reception Theory encourages us to analyse the way that media texts naturalise hegemony. Stranger Things arguably encodes a preferred reading that naturalises the normativity of the nuclear family by presenting the stable Wheeler household as the social norm and implying that Will is kidnapped due to his vulnerability as the child of a single working mother. Hall points out that the ‘situated logics’ of audience members could lead to a negotiated reading, which accepts the conservative ideology of the nuclear family, but rejects the messaging around Will’s kidnapping, or takes an oppositional position regarding both. However, it is also possible that this is a fundamental misreading of the messaging of the text, which later presents Joyce as a dogged and devoted mother and the Wheeler parents as oblivious to the goings on in their town. This highlights a potential weakness in Hall’s theory as it directs us to seek out hegemony where they are not intended.

550 WORDS – BY THE END, THIS IS NOW CLOSER TO 9 OR 10 OUT OF 10.