Task 1: Make a post that outlines this film
As a way of linking some of the ideas that we covered in terms of Feminist Critical Thinking towards the 4th KEY CONCEPTUAL AREA OF A LEVEL MEDIA STUDIES: INSTITUTION, let’s look at Bombshell (2019, Dir. Jay Roach) a story based upon the accounts of the women at Fox News who set out to expose CEO Roger Ailes for sexual harassment. Follow this link for a brief summary of the plot.
Bombshell | 2019 | R |
Why is “Bombshell” rated R? The MPAA rating has been assigned for “sexual material and language throughout.” The Kids-In-Mind.com evaluation includes a couple of implied sex scenes between a husband and his wife, between two women, many references to sexual assault and harassment in the workplace and descriptions of the types of harassment that occurred over many years, and many women wear low-cut and tight-fitting dresses throughout the movie that reveal cleavage and legs to the mid-thighs; many arguments in a work environment, threats of violence, and descriptions of a toxic work environment; and at least 40 F-words and other strong language
LINKING WITH PREVIOUS THEORIES:
You can understand misogyny (the poor representation of women in the media) in the same way you can understand racism, homophobia, ultra-nationalism and other forms of casual stereotyping, bias and prejudice, that is, through TEXTUAL ANALYSIS and the notion of REPRESENTATION.
We ave also looked at the work Jean Kilborne from the Media Education Foundation. As well as the idea of the ‘Male Gaze’ articulated originally by Laura Mulvey, but developed later by others, such as Feminist Frequency.
However, prejudice may also occur beyond the level of text and can be identified as operating at a systemic INSTITUTIONAL intersection of race/class/gender <> power. Such ideas are proposed by Sut Jhally in his work for the Media Education Foundation – ‘Dreamworlds’ which looks at the role of MTV and music videos as a form of institutional / corporate sexism and misogyny
As such, this film provides a narrative of INSTITUTIONAL SEXISM, in the same way that we could look at other stories that are concerned with other institutional prejudices – racism, homophobia, Islamaphobia etc. In other words, this film presents a version of the story of INSTITUTIONAL SEXISM and MISOGYNY. It suggests a link between the presentation / representation of the female form and the ideas of a ruling patriarchy (Fox News, specifically Roger Ailes) and perhaps explains why we are presented with the stories we are presented with and how those stories are presented to us.
In other words, it helps to explain the ideas of Louis Althusser in that the ruling ideas emerge from elements of the Ideological State Apparatus (look at the connection between Roger Ailes, Rupert Murdoch, Donald Trump etc) and those ideas shape who we are, what we could be, want to be etc by a mechanism that he calls INTERPELLATION. For a visual representation of this watch the sequence in Bombshell where we see how the presenters are encouraged to dress and the way in which the choice of camera angles are used to reinforce this particular dress code.
Again you can see a visual representation of this in Bombshell, for example, Roger Ailes talks about the media as ‘the most competitive industry in the world’, which means consent to a number of suspect practices – ranging from sexual favours (Roger Ailes and others at Fox News) to eating liberal food or wearing a hoodie (Mrs Ailes working practices as a publisher)! And don’t forget the opening sequence which clearly places Ailes at the centre of corporate and government power – Murdoch, Trump, Reagan, Bush etc.
Arguments presented against sexism and misogyny (ie the hegemonic struggle re: Gramsci) are raised through Feminist Critical Thinking and we have looked at early feminist movements as well as 2nd, 3rd and 4th wave feminist critics. We have even looked at theories of gender representation that look beyond binary gender values (male/female), which can termed as intersectionality, which first emerged as Queer Theory.