Week Two

The article by Yar gives examples of three theories sociologists use to explain and analyze crime in movies. The first is content analysis which from my understanding dissects movies into quantitative parts and analyzes occurrences of certain words, phrases, and images. The example my group used was making a list of the victims in shows like criminal minds and analyzing them. The next is the Marxist theory which says that media conveys a set of truths and values to reinforce the beliefs of the ruling class. My groups example was cop shows portraying the cop as the good guy who can never be wrong such as in Law and Order SVU. The last theory is postmodernism which to the best of my understanding means that nothing in media is symbolic of anything and there are multiple meanings to every word and image used in media. I find content analysis useful for quantitative research but what I really agree with is the Marxist theory. While I think some elements of media have no meaning other than entertainment I can see a lot of belief reinforcement in many forms of media. I think Law and Order SVU is a great example of this. In every case the bad guy is this horrendous person who commits a crime that we have been programmed to believe is "the most heinous" and the cops are the good guys who are never wrong and are there for the good of the people. Often times also the perpetrators are stereotyped, a black man mugs someone, a white guy commits incest, a crazy white lady kidnaps a kid.

In Young's article she focuses on two main concepts- affect and a scenographic method. She describes affect using a quote from Massumi who says affect is  the ways in which the body can connect with itself and with the world. She goes on to say that crime connects people through images that interrupt our sense of proper, reinforce ideas about the "state of society", or exhilarate. Her next concept is the scenographic method in which she deconstructs key scenes and discusses details of their construction. For this she deconstructed rape scenes form Kill Bill and The Accused and compared the use of actual and implied rape. She says both methods get the desired effect using action, character, music, cinematography, editing, sound, etc. Using these elements both scenes affect us by binding our beliefs about sexual violence, justice, and crime. For me reading about this article and watching the actual scene were two totally different things. I personally have never scene Kill Bill and reading this article I couldn't really grasp the effect she was describing. Once we viewed it in class I saw how all the elements were used to convey acts not necessarily shown and also disturb viewers in a strong way.