Son of Rambow and tropes of media effects

 
Garth Jennings’ 2007 film Son of Rambow sets the stage for a spectacular clash of cultures.  Will Proudfoot and his sheltered upbringing rigidly proscribed by the Plymouth Brethren, to which his family belongs, are set immediately on a collision course with Lee Carter and his feral lack of supervision.  Lee bootlegging the same film that Will’s sect opens the film by protesting creates a drastic and immediate comparison.  The Plymouth Brethren’s protectionist insistence that such worldly influences as the cinema will corrupt those who indulge in them is put to the test as Will engages in Lee Carter’s world, and ultimately fails to come to fruition.

There are multiple characters and scenarios throughout the film that seem to embody classifications of the media effects discipline.  Interestingly, although Media Effects leans toward a protectionist stance regarding media consumption, the film, using the character arc of Will Proudfoot and the traction of his unlikely relationship with Lee Carter, seems determined to make a case for a freer and more optimistic paradigm for media encounters.

The Plymouth Brethren sect is depicted as a somber, tense, and pessimistic congregation. Their protest in front of the theater where First Blood is screening is illustrative of concerns that mirror many of the questions addressed by the Charter Motion Pictures and Youth Study.[1]  “What sort of scenes do children see when they attend theaters?  How do the mores depicted in these scenes compare with those of the community? What effect does what they witness have upon [children’s] ideals an attitudes? Do they affect the conduct of children? Are they related to delinquency or crime?”  The Plymouth Brethren are clearly concerned with media having an effect on viewers, and they are deeply suspicious of aberrant, corrupting influences.

Under such a culture, Will is sheltered from nearly the entirety of pop culture, and it renders him socially handicap.  Only once a series of unlikely events leads to his viewing of First Blood does he have a common reference point with his peers.  Lasswell[2] pointed out that the formation of Attention Aggregates relies upon common symbols of reference, and only once Will Proudfoot becomes acquainted with the world of Rambo does he have the common symbols of reference to become the center of the social project that “Son of Rambow” will become. 

Likely because it was his first encounter with any such text, Will’s response to it was far less conditioned than that of any of the other children in the film.  As a symbol specialist (Lasswell) he is the only child engaging with the text as a manipulator/controller rather than a mere handler.  His conception of the concept of Rambo as plastic and manipulatable contrasts with Lee’s conception of First Blood as just another movie – something to consume and discard – and he has consumed enough films that he has “cultivated”[3] a conception of films as a consumable good, and less of a text that he can engage in .  His surprise at Will’s pronouncement that he is the “Son of Rambow” shows that he had not thought to engage with or manipulate the text in this way.

If, as Gerbner defines, cultivation is “the independent contributions television (or media) makes to viewer conceptions of social reality,” then viewing “First Blood” clearly cultivated some conceptions in Will’s character.  However, viewing of the film does not itself account for the zeal and ambition that follows.  The film seems to counter or complicate this definition by suggesting that the text could only catalyze beliefs, interests, and convictions that were already in place in Will’s personality and imagination.  Will’s overactive imagination and his apathy toward the Plymouth Brethren’s imperatives had already been clearly illustrated through his whimsical drawings in his Bible.  His wholehearted embracing of the narrative world of Rambo may have been a surprise, but it was not a shock.

The manner in which Will manipulated the Rambo narrative speaks to Gerbner’s concept of “resonance.”  Having lost his own father to a brain aneurism, Will created an opportunity to save a figurative father figure.  Gerbner said that media will resonate with an audience when “everyday reality and television provide a double dose of messages that resonate and amplify cultivation.”  The lack of a patriarch in Will’s home is depicted as a point of angst throughout the film, and for Will to act as a media manipulator involved in creating a narrative that resonates with his personal life shows an inversion or reversal of Gerber’s unidirectional parameters of resonance.

Lee Carter also proved an interesting foil to Gerbner’s “Mean World Syndrome”.  Claiming that exposure to violence in media would “cultivate an image of a relatively mean and dangerous world in [one’s] conception of reality,” Gerbner proposed that heavy exposure to the world of television cultivates “exaggerated perceptions of the number of people involved in violence in any given week.”  Lee is certainly introduced in the film as a character inundated with violent media, and with a marked pessimism about the people he interacts with and their intentions toward him.  However, the film clearly illustrates that a factor outside of media (in this case his friendship with Will, and their joint project of creating the “Son of Rambow” movie) have a marked influence on his outlook, which within the scope of the film seem to have the opposite effect and in a much more pronounced fashion than Gerbner’s description.

While the film explores the expectation that exposure to a film as violent as “First Blood” could lead to problematic behavior, it definitely depicts both Lee and Will as being enriched by their encounter with that text and with one another.  It depicts interpersonal relationships as being a more important factor than media influence in determining the effect of media (not altogether incongruent with Katz and Lazarsfeld’s[4] discussion of small groups and a 2-step process of media effects.)  It also depicts Will’s experience with the text as being so full of joy as to be transcendent.  This type of engagement is conspicuously absent in the media effects texts we have explored, and Jennings’ film frames this omission as the most important thing about engaging with a film text.

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[1] Charters, W. W. 1935. Motion Pictures and Youth: A Summary. New York: Macmillan.

[2] Lasswell, Harold (1948). Bryson, L., ed. The Structure and Function of Communication in Society. The Communication of Ideas. New York: Institute for Religious and Social Studies.

[3] Gerbner, G. (1998). "Cultivation analysis: An overview".Mass Communication and Society, 3/4, 175-194.

[4] Katz & Lazarsfeld (1955). "Personal Influence". New York: Free Press.

Ace in the Hole (1951); the circus and the truth

“Like one, that on a lonesome road
Doth walk in fear and dread,
And having once turned round walks on,
And turns no more his head;
Because he knows, a frightful fiend
Doth close behind him tread.” 
― Samuel Taylor Coleridge, The Rime of the Ancient Mariner

By definition, an “Ace in the Hole” is a hidden, or unfair advantage, kept back until the perfect opportunity presents itself (referring to a face-down Ace in stud poker).  In the 1951 Billy Wilder Film, loosely informed by the true story of Floyd Collins, Chuck Tatum (Kirk Douglas) is a thwarted, ambitious journalist who is unabashedly on the prowl for an opportunity to regain his big city career.  Before he even stumbles upon the story he is able to use toward that end, it has already become relatively evident how he is scheming for events to pan out.

While Chuck Tatum claims that he “doesn’t make things happen, [he] just writes about them,” the film makes it very clear that Tatum’s actions intentionally and unintentionally alter every conceivable course of events in the story of Leo Minosa.  Dewey claimed that “what actually happens (action) is dependent on the presence or absence of perception and communication.”  Tatum appears utterly anomic as his drive to craft a “perfect story” overpowers any morality, honesty, civility or integrity that his character may have had claim to.  He willfully crafts a distorted perception of reality, knowing full-well how it would affect public opinion, all while creating such a loathsome actual reality (at least as perceived by the apparent omniscience of the camera), that his “ace in the hole” devolves into an albatross around his neck.  

As Dewey also purported that “the ultimate harm is that the understanding by man of his own affairs and his ability to direct them are sapped at their root when knowledge of nature is disconnected from its human function.”  Tatum grasps hold of and maximizes that disconnect toward what he believes is his own advantage.  He capitalizes on corrupt individuals, bargaining with them to keep Leo Minosa trapped in a cave longer, thus allowing him to craft a more elaborate, more profitable story.  When Leo ultimately dies of pneumonia, Tatum’s perfect story crumbles beneath him.  He must deal with having murdered a man he had exploited unconscionably, who had genuinely believed in his friendship.  This complicated grief, coupled with a probably punctured spleen, lead to his collapse at the end of the film, as he is finally, frantically, trying to “tell the truth.”

Describing the public’s habit of hero worship, Walter Lippmann pointed out that in times of security “symbols of public opinion are subject to check, comparison, argument…” and that a fluidity of inquiry helps to maintain a certain objectivity of truth.  But that in less certain times (emergencies, wars) there are a greater range of feelings aroused, and that men are more likely to respond emotionally than objectively.   Since, as Lippmann also maintained “men respond as powerfully to fictions as they do to realities,” and fictions are not necessarily equivalent to lies, but “rather a representation of the environment made by man himself.”  It is not surprising that the public and the press ate up Tatum’s constructed story just as he had hoped.  It was based enough in reality to be a fiction, and not a lie.  (As Tatum points out to the newspapermen, he did make sure there was a man trapped down there, even if everything else was altered or constructed).

Around the few concrete facts Tatum did use, he also constructed an elaborate, rather deceptive pseudo-environment.  He mediated for the public their relationship with the reality of Leo Minosa’s situation.  He lied abjectly about the nature of Leo’s relationship with his wife, but had no need to embellish the grief of Leo’s parents.  He artificially painted the sheriff and himself as protagonists, but Leo’s own background as a soldier was factual and easily used to increase “human interest.” The most devastating altering of reality, however, occurs in Tatum manipulating the rescue operation, encouraging blackmail of the contractors to make them choose a longer option for the rescue, in hopes of having time to build his story to a nationwide fever pitch.  Ultimately, is appears that Tatum’s interference altered everything about this “story.”  And as we watch Leo’s bereft father, facing the mountain that held his dead son, with acres of litter from “the public” before him, we are led to infer that everything could and should have transpired much differently without the interference of “journalism.”

Lippmann, admitting to flaws in journalism, listed factors that inhibit access to “facts.”  Several of these are painfully present in Tatum’s interference.  He constructs artificial censorships and limits social contact, primarily through his corrupt pact with the Sheriff and with Lorraine Minosa.  Nobody but Tatum is allowed to speak directly to Leo, and Lorraine is threatened when she speaks to other reporters.  Tatum also takes advantage of the distortion created “when events are compressed into short messages.”  His intense interest in the commercial success of his story not only destroys the integrity of his journalism, but is alters action, choices, and events with varying degrees of devastation for different people.

The treatment of “the public” or the masses in this piece is more in keeping with Lippman’s assertions than with Dewey’s, though the concerns of both writers about how the public deals with misinformation are realized.  The public, especially as embodied by “Mr. and Mrs. America,” the Federbers, are terribly gullible, and their interest and perceived investment in the story of Leo Minosa are easily crafted and led by Tatum.  Despite the artificial nature of their “relationship” with Leo, their grief at his passing is viable, even if it is neither immediate nor over a real relationship or even the "real" Leo.  It appears that this “public” is inevitably led by the crafting of public opinion, and so in keeping with Lippmann’s argument, what is needed is better, more inquisitive journalism by an elect breed of incorruptible journalists.  This type of integrity is represented in the film by Mr. Boot, the owner of the Albuquerque newspaper, with multiple needlepointed “Tell the Truth”s adorning his office.

At some point between when Leo innocently asks Tatum, “You wouldn’t be lying to me now, would you Chuck?” and when Tatum disgustedly proclaims over the loudspeaker to the crowd, “The circus is over.” Tatum appears to have internalized the gravity of what he has done.  Before his character collapses, possibly dead, back in the Albuquerque newspaper office, he has a short-lived new directive of voicing the story of what actually happened, and how a crazed reporter could string so many people along to such a devastating end.  Whether the exposé of this corruption ever surfaced in the reality of the film is unresolved, but the film itself is the actual exposé, and invites viewers to examine the critical thinking that goes into their own news consumption, and to recognize that their relationship with reality is always mediated, and often mediated imperfectly.