First, the new feminist television research theory
The new feminist TV research theory is different from the traditional feminist TV research. It focuses on the narrative mode of TV text, takes the production mechanism and broadcasting mechanism system of TV as the research object, and pays more attention to the communication characteristics of TV as a new media from the ontological characteristics of TV mechanism, so as to reveal the ideology or potential ideology contained in the production mode and acceptance mode. American feminist scholar Yi? Ann? Ann Kaplan made a systematic description of the new feminist TV research. She said: "This kind of research is not an attempt to study gender roles in TV programs, but to examine the way in which TV works as a mechanism. This mechanism involves some complicated factors, including the TV equipment itself (its technical characteristics-the way of making and shaping images); Its various "texts"-advertisements, comments and performances; The main relationship between TV program production and sponsors, sponsors' own texts-advertisements-are the real arguable TV texts; There are also various receiving places now, from the living room to the bathroom. " (1) Kaplan said: "Scholars who use this research method will focus on elaboration, that is, whoever tells the text will be told to whom; The role of TV in family life; Or the ideology contained in the mode of production and acceptance. " ② This theory is developed from the Hollywood film research theory, which turns the perspective of Hollywood film research to television and studies the relationship between television and women. The research fields mainly focus on soap operas, MTV and TV advertisements. From the perspective of neo-feminist TV research theory, this paper discusses what kind of program Angels Love Beauty is, what kind of ideology it conveys to the audience and what kind of influence it brings to the audience.
Second, text interpretation: the collusion between business logic and male desire.
First of all, let's take a look at the nature of the program "Angels Love Beauty". Judging from the form, content and operation mechanism of this program, this program belongs to reality show. Reality show is a TV competitive game program in which ordinary people participate in and complete the corresponding tasks according to the game rules formulated by the producers, and the whole game process is truly reproduced. This kind of program is popular with the audience because it is a real person's interpretation of real events, which is very exciting and suspenseful. The contestants of the "Angels Love Beauty" program are 14 women selected from nearly 1,000 applicants. They signed a contract with the program group to strictly abide by the program rules, otherwise they will be eliminated and accompanied by huge fines. If the player is not allowed to look in the mirror and touch any reflective objects within three months after the operation, the offender can be fined up to 1 000 yuan. Participants are not allowed to withdraw from the competition unless they are eliminated. Otherwise, the production unit has the right not to refund the deposit of 5,000 yuan, and has the right to ask them to pay twice the liquidated damages to cover all expenses such as plastic surgery and nursing. The whole program consists of five parts: free plastic surgery, live surgery, live recording, player PK and final competition. The last four parts are similar to the general reality show, which reproduces the real scene of the players in the game in the form of a record. In the final PK section, the winner will receive huge bonuses and re-education scholarships. So "Angels Love Beauty" is a veritable reality show.
Let's discuss the essence of the program "Angels Love Beauty". The slogan of the "Angels Love Beauty" program is "Women love beauty, and angels are on earth". Through this activity, all women who are frustrated by their looks and feel inferior are given a chance to be reborn, helping them get out of the shadow of life and re-establish women's self-confidence. Is that really the case? From the above analysis, we can see that the program "Angels Love Beauty" is an entertainment program after all, and its ultimate goal is to let the public revel in order to achieve the goal of high ratings. Angels Love Beauty focuses on women, aiming at consuming women and women's consumption, taking the real record of the whole process of female plastic surgery as a gimmick and selling point, and hanging the audience's appetite to the extreme through the ultimate PK form to achieve the purpose of mass carnival. In the whole process of the program, what we see is not the concern for women, but the provision of women as objects and playthings to the audience. In the live broadcast of the operation, the program showed the bloody scenes of the contestants when they were naked for plastic surgery. This purpose is nothing more than trying to grab the eye by stimulating the lens. When broadcasting this part of the program, the privacy of the contestants was completely ignored, and the media as a social tool should be more humanistic and less indifferent. Under the rules of business logic, the media take women's bodies as selling points and put them in front of cold cameras for people to examine. The media ignored the inner pain and struggle of the players during the operation and the feelings of their relatives when they saw these bloody scenes. In the real recording, the program group has made stricter regulations. Players are not allowed to look in the mirror and touch any reflective objects, otherwise they will be severely punished. To some extent, this rule is for players to recover better after surgery, but does the media have other purposes? I think there is another important reason why the program group won't let the contestants look in the mirror, that is, to maintain high ratings, attract attention and obtain high commercial profits. First, the media hung the audience's appetite, making them addicted to plastic surgery and seeing the live broadcast of players' plastic surgery. However, the media did not immediately tell the audience the result of plastic surgery, but kept the audience waiting for more than two months. During the period, they only revealed some sporadic information about the contestants after the operation, so as to keep the audience in suspense and pay attention to the progress of the program. The program only tells the audience the answer to plastic surgery in the last link PK stage, uncovers the true face of Lushan Mountain and pushes the program to a climax. It can be said that the rule that contestants are not allowed to look in the mirror is a good way to improve the ratings of the program. Therefore, the program "Angels Love Beauty" is not so much to help some women who feel inferior because of their looks get rid of the shadow of life, but rather to make high profits by selling women. In this game, TV stations and advertising sponsors are the biggest beneficiaries. The broadcast of this program has promoted the plastic surgery industry and started the brand of "Astor" plastic surgery institution.
In addition, in the setting of the whole link of the program "Angels Love Beauty", we can see that women always appear as the objects to be watched, and women once again become the objects of desire in the eyes of the audience. Feminist film researcher Laura? In her article Visual Pleasure and Narrative Movies, laura mulvey shows the relationship between the patriarchy of Hollywood movies and the narrative techniques used in traditional movies. He believes that the role of female characters in the narrative of Hollywood movies is to provide the audience with visual pleasure, which is mainly based on the three basic "looks" that constitute a series. One is to look at the camera; Although film shooting techniques are gender-neutral, filmmakers are generally male. The second is the male role in the film narrative; In this fancy, the female role is set as the gaze object of the male role in the film narrative. The third is the audience's view. The audience imitates or agrees with the psychological mechanism of the first two kinds of watching, thus finally completing the process of shaping the identity of the watched women. We can use Marvi's theory of visual pleasure to analyze the meaning behind the program "Angels Love Beauty". The protagonist of "Angels Love Beauty" is female on the surface, but male in essence, which is male-dominated. From beginning to end, it is men who decide the beauty of women. Women shape their bodies according to men's eyes and requirements, change their faces, and make themselves the object of watching and desire in the eyes of the audience. In the stage of free surgery and postoperative recovery, cosmetic experts are mostly men, such as Li Fannian, Lin Hongzhe, Chen Jianye and Lu Lixin. They remould the beauty of women with men's aesthetic requirements for women, carry out plastic surgery on women's bodies and faces, cultivate women's temperament, and make the players look petite, sexy and ladylike. These are all male culture's recognition of female beauty, which strengthens women's being. " The two stages of PK and the ultimate beauty pageant become beauty pageants. Women become the object of men's gaze and appreciation, and men have the right to judge. They decide who will enter the finals and win the championship. In the jury, we can also see the fact that most judges are composed of men. In the final, Wang Feng, Kong Xiangdong and Jackie Lui served as judges. In this viewing/being watched mode, women are directly set as the object of male gaze. At the same time, the program has set up some contents to encourage players to show and expose their bodies in extreme events, such as holding cheongsam show competitions and beauty swimsuit competitions. The contestants show their graceful body curves through sexy costumes, stimulate the nerves of the audience with their body movements, and make women become playthings to be seen again. Under the stage, in addition to the eyes of male judges and audience staring at women's bodies, there are cameras aimed at women, which act as men's eyes, and use close-ups to freeze the sexiest parts of women in one picture, such as delicate skin, plump breasts, sexy buttocks and curvy figure. The appearance of these close-ups is the expression of men's subconscious desires. Through the focus of the lens, the male audience in front of the TV can see the female body more clearly, arouse the male inner desire, and make women the projection object of male desire. Under the scrutiny of men's eyes, women are no longer complete individuals, but only "parts" that have been cut. Like Hollywood movies, the reality show Angels Love Beauty is good at narrating movies with visual pleasure. It puts women in the mode of watching/being watched, and women become the code of desire object. Feminist scholars believe that "in a world arranged by gender imbalance, the pleasure of seeing is divided into active/male and passive/female." A decisive man's eyes project his fantasy onto a stylized female image. Women are seen and displayed at the same time with their traditional nude roles. Their appearance is encoded into a strong visual and erotic attraction and organized into the dominant patriarchal order language. " The program "Angels Love Beauty" is an entertainment program after all. Its purpose is to gain high commercial profits while entertaining the public, but women have become the object of entertainment. The mass media presents and codes women as the objects of desire in entertainment, and becomes the objects of men's watching, and once again reaffirms and strengthens the tradition of gender role differences and gender inequality, so that the audience can subtly accept gender stereotypes in the process of carnival and complete the shaping of women's perceived identity. Behind this program, what we see is the plot expressed by the logic of commercial capital and the password of male desire.
Third, enlightenment:
At present, the reality show like "Angels Love Beauty" is very popular on the screen of our country, which has to arouse our attention and thinking. As a powerful media, TV occupies more than half of people's leisure time every day. Some people even say that modern people are TV people, and TV has become one of the main channels for people to understand the outside world, so as to guide their behavior. It can be said that in the world dominated by TV culture, many moments and events in our lives are no longer guided by tradition or self-choice, but by the world schema and value coordinates constructed by TV. ⑤ Television is permeating people's daily life in all directions and constructing an "image reality". Watching TV is not only a simple audio-visual experience process, but also a powerful construction process for people's daily life, behavior patterns, cognitive styles, survival experiences, aesthetic experiences and even unconscious fields. TV has a great influence on people's life style and values. While transmitting information, it also carries the function of education, guiding people to establish a correct outlook on life and aesthetics, and establishing a harmonious society with equality between men and women. However, at present, the media in China is moving towards the road of marketization, and there are still many unreasonable phenomena in the initial stage of marketization, and the commercialization of the media is too strong. Reality shows such as "Angels Love Beauty" are surging, which is essentially the result of money stimulation. In the face of money, the media lost its balance between social benefits and economic benefits, and gradually moved closer to economic benefits. They take women as their selling point, use their appearance, physical and sexual characteristics to attract the attention of the audience, and create a beauty economy to obtain high commercial profits. Behind this profit-seeking, women's rights and interests are sacrificed, gender stereotypes are strengthened, women are materialized, commercialized and instrumentalized, and women are regarded as vases and playthings for men to watch, which is not conducive to the media to promote gender equality and establish a harmonious society. Secondly, the essence of beauty economy is a kind of soft violence, which is a kind of harm to women's body and spirit. Women create themselves in the beauty of male cultural identity, forming an image anxiety, which makes women lose their independent personality and creative spirit. Beauty economy will enlarge the gender difference as never before, which is not conducive to women's pursuit of equal social status with men. In addition, the broadcast of such programs as "Angels Love Beauty" conveys such a wrong value to women. A woman's appearance can change her fate, make her have a beautiful love and career, make her pay too much attention to the shaping of external beauty, while ignoring the pursuit of internal beauty and the improvement of her self-cultivation, and make her superficial and superficial. This single value of denying the diversity of women's lives by body image or becoming a weight to increase women's value deserves our questioning.
Promoting gender equality and building a harmonious society has become one of the main goals of China in the 2 1 century. The media will be duty-bound to shoulder this responsibility and create a good media environment for gender equality, which requires the media to find a good balance between social benefits and economic benefits and generate economic income without violating social benefits.
Precautions:
① ② ③ Zheng Daqun, Introduction to New Feminist TV Research, (Cultural Research Network)
④ Li Hengji, Selected Works of Foreign Film Theory, Shanghai Literature and Art Publishing House, 1995.
⑤ Nicholas? Abercromby, Television and Society, Nanjing University Press, 200 1 edition.
⑥ Zhang He, Who is truer than who: TV, Yunnan People's Publishing House, 2004.