PAST PAPER 2019

2019 - ‘The differences in the codes and conventions of long form television dramas reflect the different values, attitudes and beliefs of the audiences that consume them.’ How far do you agree with this statement?

 Media producers intentionally create content that appeals to the values of their target audience. Stranger Things is likely to feature genre conventions that appeal to the social and cultural values of a relatively young, centre left audience that tends to consume Netflix content; Deutschland 83 (D83) is likely to tread a more complicated line between appealing to an educated international audience (it was part funded by Sundance TV), who enjoy challenging content, whilst also appealing to its national audience as a German language programme.  By considering a range of different contexts, we can see just how much audience values influence and are influenced by the use of codes and conventions.

Both shows are set in 1983, which allows us to compare the encoding of the historic setting with the way that they appeal to the socio-cultural values of their modern target audiences. If codes and conventions reflect the values of their audiences, we might expect a tension between the historical diegesis and the representation of women, whose role in society has significantly changed over the last thirty years.

Let’s start with Stranger Things. Episode one introduces the audiences to a trio of strong female characters who are arguably placed at odds with the patriarchal values of the 1980s American diegesis. All three of them reflect the values of the modern, post-feminist audience by challenging the chauvinistic, male dominated world in which they find themselves. However, Neale might point to another way to interpret this use of genre conventions. He suggests that familiar tropes are often used as shorthand and that generic codes are shared between producers and audiences through repetition. Perhaps these empowered women are not reflecting modern values; instead they are just repetitions of genre tropes that have existed for decades. For example, Joyce is a devoted and determined single mother, who pushes against the chauvinistic sheriff; but strong mothers go back at least as far as Terminator’s Sarah Connor. We might assume that Eleven is intended to reflect 21^st century attitudes to female empowerment, but Buffy the Vampire Slayer was every bit as empowered and challenging twenty years ago. We could even suggest that Eleven is not a Sci Fi trope, but that she is explicitly an intertextual reference to Carrie, Firestarter and indeed E.T. These intertextual references may be an attempt to create tension by casting doubt on whether she will emerge as a villain or a hero. If this is the case, then Eleven is not a convention intended to appeal to the values and beliefs of the 2016 audience, but rather an interesting plot device, using intertextuality in an artistic way.

But what about Nancy? She manages to reflect the values of modern audiences by subverting socio-cultural norms of 1983. The Duffer brothers achieve this by encoding her representation using contradictory generic codes and conventions; she is a countertypical representation of 1980s girls because she excels at science, but she also embraces the stereotypes of teenaged girls in 1980s TV dramas (she is pretty, fashionable and her boyfriend is the most popular boy in school). If we apply Gauntlett here, we might see positive confirmation of the statement as these contradictory messages reflect the increasingly open attitude to gender identity that is valued by the relatively young, progressive Netflix audiences.

In episode one of D83, the most significant female representation is Lenora. Just as we did with the representation of Joyce and Eleven in Stranger Things, we might wish to apply Neale and assume that Lenora is a generic convention being used as narrative shorthand by establishing her as a strong female character. Strong female characters are certainly a familiar convention of the spy genre, but Van-Zoonen would point out that they are often objectified to make them palatable to the male gaze. Lenora is definitely not a generic ‘bond girl’ type spy, but she may be a repetition of the convention established by Judy Dench’s M. Like M, she is clever, competent and ruthless, but unlike M, who is a modern woman in a modern world, Lenora lives in 1983, a time of patriarchal ideas about women, especially in West Germany, where representations of women are limited to secretaries and housewives. Applying historical context may reveal that Lenora provides a commentary on the social contradictions in divided 1980s Germany and on the tension between capitalist and communist ideologies at the time. Communist regimes were much more likely to promote women to positions of power, hence the unwavering respect and obedience that Lenora is shown by the male members of the HVA. This challenging take on cultural, historical, and political context may be intended to reflect the values of its media literate British and American audience and its comparative success supports this. However, it is notable that D83 failed to achieve ratings success in its native Germany. Which brings me to address the importance of economic contexts.

D83 may be a German production, but it was jointly funded by AMC’s Sundance TV. The series premiered on 17 June 2015 on the Sundance TV channel in the United States, becoming the first German-language series to air on a US network. Sundance has a reputation for commissioning prestige drama and seeks quality programming to maintain the brand. Modern, media literate US audiences have come to expect more challenging content, especially from dramas produced through international cooperation and premiere foreign-language programming, hence its unconventional approach to the genre. Hall points out that genre conventions are used by producers to construct preferred meanings. So, 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. It employs codes and conventions of spy narratives, which have global cultural resonance, but unconventionally positions a communist protagonist, encouraging values, attitudes and beliefs to be scrutinised. Hall allows us to predict that the audience’s situated logics will impact the reading, accepting, rejecting, or modifying their response. The German release of the show may have been unsuccessful because the lived experience of audiences may have prompted uncomfortably oppositional socio-political readings of the ambiguous narrative. However, its positive reception by U.S. and U.K. audiences, may have been due to their distance from the nation of origin allowing more dispassionate negotiated readings of the text.

The economic context around the production of Stranger Things also reveals some interesting features about the way that codes and conventions reflect the values and beliefs of consumers. It is very tempting to assume that attitudes, values and beliefs are limited to socio-cultural and/or political ideologies, but audiences also consume based on their attitude to production values. The estimated $6million dollar budget per episode of Season 1, reflects the continuing success of streaming services such as Netflix, who need to maintain brand identity with innovative and original programming that integrates high end production values. The trailer for Season 1, established the shows credentials as a high quality, high budget production, even culminating in the now famous telekinetic truck flip scene. In addition, the use of generic conventions for intertextual effect drew comparison to other famous cultural and media texts, in particular it is an homage to Speilberg’s late 20th-century classics like Goonies, E.T. etc (the programme even uses Leica Summilux-C lenses to capture Speilberg’s visual style).  We might therefore be forgiven for concluding that business managers at Netflix commissioned a series explicitly designed to ‘cash in’ on the 1980s nostalgia present since the turn of the 21st century and demanded an approach that emphasised their brand’s commitment to producing TV drama that could rival the production values of mainstream cinema. However, Hesmondhalgh points out that symbol creators (in this case the Duffer brothers) are often given enough freedom by industry controllers to excite audience interest. So, we have to consider the tension between trusting the creativity of showrunners and ensuring economic success. Of course, the success of Stranger Things is due in large part to constructed codes and conventions that appeal to the values, attitudes and beliefs of its audience, but is this deliberate, or is it an observable side effect of affording artistic freedom to symbol creators steeped in 1980s cinema?

To conclude, I wholeheartedly agree that codes and conventions of LFTVDs reflect the audiences that consume them, but to assume that this is the only force, or even the most significant force at work is to ignore a range of different social, cultural, historic, economic and indeed artistic contexts.