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The second episode of the Beverly Hillbillies highlights the very first steps the Clampett family takes to enter a new environment. The family arrives in Beverly Hills and is introduced to its new home, neighbors, and everyday routine (CBGP Television, 2013). The audience is faced with an abundance of moments where the family does not understand the local culture. Thus, this gives plenty of space for the audience to use the reactions of newcomers Hillbillies and Beverly Hills residents to encode meaning.
The episode of the show was aired in 1962 before the Internet and the era of the free press. Therefore, it is a perfect example of ideology or meaning encoding/decoding postulated by Stuart Hall. He believed that meaning is a message combined with the position of the author (Hall, 2017). Specifically, the creators of a media product have to encode an idea within a TV show in this case so that the audience could decode it based on their beliefs, culture, and identity. Therefore, television was bound to be influenced by ideology since it was created by a group of individuals with a purpose. In my opinion, the central idea of the TV show is that Hillbillies and the Beverly Hills society are very distinct but suffer from similar flaws. Both consider themselves to be right, hate each other because they are isolated, and are not willing to evolve and integrate within the society.
In this particular work, most of the meaning is translated via acting in body language and the text spoken by the actors. It is possible to consider the example of a stove when Daisy May Moses is introduced to the object (CBGP Television, 2013). She immediately disregards it as something inferior and impractical. She does not adapt to the changes and wants to cook food by putting wood inside the oven. Quickly, the audience sees that Clampetts are different from the Beverly Hills community. Furthermore, in many families, grandparents are often the people who do not adapt to technological progress and have to be taught to use a computer or a phone on a basic level. This is why this particular image is so powerful as Daisy May Moses is an exaggerated caricature of a typical grandmother. The role of the audience is to agree, partially agree, or disagree with the idea/ideology proposed by the director.
The documentary Hillbilly further highlights the ideas proposed by Stuart Hall. The movie describes the way media influenced public perception of the region of Appalachia (Rubin & York, 2018). Naturally, it is a location that not many people visit. As a result, the only information known about Appalachia and its citizens is the data portrayed in the news or on television. Hall (2017) described television as an object that creates myth or ideology, as people are exposed to things or ideas that they have not necessarily interacted with. At the same time, the ideas have to be encoded, which makes them biased, distorted, or preferred.
Hence, the semiotic tools used in the documentary are different from those used in the TV show. The modern interpretation of hillbillies is focused on symbolic codes, where images are colorful, provocative, attention-grabbing, and change continues to present meaning. Furthermore, the use of cultural and action codes is consistent, as residents of the Appalachian region share their stories. Thus, the documentary uses images rather than words to give meaning to objects, events, or emotions. At the same time, the similarity between the documentary and the TV-show episode is that both are selective about their signs. These media products carefully select these signs to create consistency, super connotation, and, eventually, myths about hillbillies. They both impose their views on society instead of encouraging the audience to reject the understood concepts and create their own interpretations through independent research or personal experience.
The Greatest Movies Ever Sold is quite different from both Hillbilly’s shows. It does not use cultural codes and is not that reliant on symbolic codes. Instead, it uses semantic cues to explain the central idea of the work (Spurlock, 2011). Similar to the Hillbillies documentary, the main goal of the director is to explain the role of media in forming images, ideas, and ideologies. However, it does so through narration and explanation rather than the use of music or flashy and dramatic pictures. Roland Barthes’ idea of myth containing ideology is one of the primary concepts of the work (Rylance, 2016). Iron Man is an example of the ideology, as he is a mythological creature that resembles the apex of the American dream. Therefore, brands such as Audi want to connect with the myth of Iron Man to make people think of the car manufacturer as their dream of status, wealth, and success.
Various codes are transmitted through semiotic markers, which can be verbal or visual, which is especially crucial for television shows. According to Hall’s theory, the messages received by the audience from television and other media are interpreted by it in different ways (Hall, 2017). It depends on the person’s cultural background, economic status, social space he or she occupies, and personal experience. Thus, the audience plays an active role in decoding information. In this way, codes are based on conveying certain stereotypes, but with new connotations that people can perceive and interpret to decode the show’s authors’ message. Likewise, the perception of new meanings makes the viewer consider the already known information from a new angle. Thus, from the exercise, I learned that the viewer takes an active part in decoding information and interprets it based on their knowledge and experience, analyzing new information presented by authors through visual signs.
References
CBGP Television. (2013). The Beverly Hillbillies – Season 1, episode 2 (1962) – Getting settled – Paul Henning [Video]. YouTube. Web.
Hall, S. (2017). Encoding/decoding. In M. G. Durham & D. M. Kellner (Eds.), Media and culture studies: Keyworks (2nd ed., pp. 137–144). John Wiley & Sons.
Rubin, S., & York, A. (2018). Hillbilly [Film]. Drama production company.
Rylance, R. (2016). Roland Barthes. Routledge.
Spurlock, M. (2011). Pom Wonderful presents: The greatest movie ever sold [Film]. Sony Pictures.
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