A subliminal set of structural rules inform myth production.

All stories told across the globe and throughout history employ a remarkably simple but stable formula.

Character oppositions: audience expect villains to battle heroes. Might centre on secondary characters, such as youth or maturity, strength or intelligence, masculinity or femininity. Can be found in real life too such as on newspapers to deploy stories in which criminals exploit victims.

Narrative oppositions: Transforming failure into success.

Stylist oppositions: They use juxtaposed stylist presentations.

Binary means 2 different things completely that can be used for comparison. This theory suggests that narratives (=myths) are structured around binary options eg: good v evil; human v alien; young v old etc etc. As such, it encourages students to understand narrative as a structure of key (oppositional) themes that underpin action and dialogue to develop a set of messages that the audience are able to decode and understand.

Claude Lévi-Strauss was a French anthropologist and ethnologist whose work was key in the development of the theories of structuralism and structural anthropology.

This theory suggests that NARRATIVES (=myths) are STRUCTURED around BINARY OPPOSITIONS eg: good v evil; human v alien; young v old etc etc. As such, it encourages students to understand narrative as a structure of key (oppositional) themes that underpin action and dialogue to develop a set of messages that the audience are able to decode and understand.

Binary Thinking in Ghost Town

Binary Opposites:
– We simplify the world around us using a age old bias towards binary thinking.

Character opposites:
Audiences expect the hero to battle the villain,
Narrative Oppositions:
Media stories are organised to construct moments of opposition.

Levi-Strauss talks about binary opposition theory, whereby its where there are two people who are very opposite to each other (eg. strong female vampire and the opposition would be a weak male human) creating conflict. This creates an ideology within a piece of media, audiences are encouraged to make a judgment about characters, groups, places etc.

This theory suggests that NARRATIVES (=myths) are STRUCTURED around BINARY OPPOSITIONS eg: good v evil; human v alien; young v old etc etc. As such, it encourages students to understand narrative as a structure of key (oppositional) themes that underpin action and dialogue to develop a set of messages that the audience are able to decode and understand. The use of BINARY OPPOSITIONS also creates an idea of conflict between the two sides for the audience to support who they want.

It therefore creates a dominant message (ideology) of a film, TV programme, advert, music video, animation etc. So in this way audiences are encouraged to make a judgements about characters, groups, places, history, society etc. In this way, texts can be seen to either support the dominant ideologies of a society, which would make it a reactionary text ,or to challenge, question or undermines the dominant ideologies of society, in which case it could be seen as a radical text.