Week 9: Cinema & Television: 1) Name your favourite television show and film. Explain how the film or television show could shape a person’s identity.

Both film and television shows are powerful mediums that have become and grown excessively familiar to the audience particularly. The influential impact they have to the audience may either give positive or negative impact, and it all significantly relies on the subject and setting being presented and shown, thus directly or indirectly shaping an individual’s identity. A person’s identity is mainly formed by the people and institutions in one’s point of life, such as family, friends, educational institutions and workplace. These relationships exist to assist and control an individual interests and repulsions. However, one of the most dominant factors that can shape one’s identity today is media, television show and film in particular. Currie (1997) suggests, “By imagining ourselves in the situation of a character with destructive, immoral desires, and thereby coming to have, in imagination, the desires of the character…”. Its impact surely shapes a person’s idea of who he/she is, what is important, and how to live his/her life.

Figure 1

“How I Me Your Mother” (Figure 1) is undoubtedly my favourite television show of all time. It is a comedy series consists of six young people namely Ted Mosby, Barney Stinson, Robin Scherbatsky, Marshal Erikssen and his wife Lily Aldrine.  The setting of the comedy series is in New York. Although its genre fundamentally focuses on comedy, this series can also be categorised under romance. Their genuine comical aspect and casting are remarkably brilliant, where despite the obvious distinctions or differences among each character; they are able to perfectly blend in together. The series has indisputably made a substantial cultural impact, which still remains until today.

The likelihood of a person’s identity is formed and shaped can be associated with media in general. According to Foucault (1981), “In every society, the production of discourse is at once controlled, selected, organized, and redistributed by a certain number of procedures whose role is to ward off its powers and dangers, to gain mastery over its chance events, to evade its ponderous, formidable materiality”. This reflects the concept of how a film or television show can shape an individual’s identity with or without one’s knowledge. How I Met Your Mother (HIMYM) could undeniably shape a person’s identity in so many aspects.

The roles played by actors will have a vital aspect in convincing and persuading the audience’s view or perception. For example, Neil Patrick Harris role as Barney Stinson in How I Met Your Mother, after admitting that he was gay in 2006, there was hardly any lasting shock, scorn, or embarrassment of any kind. This despite the fact that for a couple years prior to coming out, he had already been in the process of reviving his career by playing a straighter-than-straight cooz hound by the name of Barney Stinson on How I Met Your Mother.

Rather than being discredited, Neil Patrick Harris has grown vigorously since coming out of the closet. His Barney Stinson character is so popular that people have no problem forgetting he’s gay, and have sort of combined the character and the actual man into pop culture’s most benign and beloved fake ladies man. In the series, if you’re a straight guy and watch HIMYM, there’s about a 90% chance Barney Stinson (and by extension, Neil Patrick Harris) has become your personal hero by now. Barney’s a serial womanizer who prefers to prey on women with transparent self-esteem issues is now the new hero.

According to Jensen Brauhn “ A good film is not an advertisement for the newest fashion” (Jensen, 2012).One of my favourite is “Saving Private Ryan”, starring Tom Hanks. It is a war film whicha group of US soldiers go behind enemy lines to retrieve a paratrooper whose brothers have been killed in action.

It is one the films heartfelt films and is deeply moving. This film is able to shape a person’s identity especially soldiers and as well as individuals  It depicts how an individual can be a great leader in war.

Reference:

Currie, G. (1997). Image and Mind: Film, Philosophy and Cognitive Science. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Jensen, Brahn Klaus (2012): A Handbook of Media and Communication Research, Qualitative and Quantitative Methodologies (2^nd. Ed). London and New York: Routledge Taylor and Francis Group.

Foucault, M. (1981). The Order of Discourse. In R. Young (Ed) (1981), Untying the text: a post-structural anthology (pp. 48-78). Boston: Routledge.

Smith, M. (1995). Engaging Characters: Fiction, Emotion, and the Cinema. Clarendon: Oxford University Press.