I have this belief that most of the people who helped popularize the literalist interpretation of media were otherwise acaemically successful people (STEM bros and adjacent self important chuds), who were made to feel inadequate or stupid on a basic literature or media analysis course because it showed them that they didn’t have the tools to gain anything more than a surface level understanding of a piece of art, and that the humanities can actually be hard to do well.
I mostly fit this description, and was very much a “the curtains are blue” loser when I was in middle/high school and now media analysis is literally my favorite hobby and basically the only thing that brings me joy, so I also think part of it is the way media analysis is taught, and something about that method not clicking with a large portion of people
I really remember that the way my teachers wanted us to interpret and analyze things just felt… fake? It felt like when they were explaining certain “deeper meanings” they were just making shit up that wasn’t in the text and wasn’t even in the context surrounding the text.
I think the “the curtains are blue” meme actually does touch on this in a way. “The blue curtains in the scene represent the character’s sadness” is a very crude and oversimplified level of analysis.
In my classes it always felt like they were wanted us to examine the text alone looking for metaphor and symbolism. They never looked at the creators and what was going on in their lives at the time (unless they had fled the USSR), they didn’t look at the material conditions surrounding the creation past maybe “it was during the Great Depression,” they deliberately avoided so much context that makes analyzing media worth doing at all. And I think the anger at the very concept of media analysis was largely backlash against that.
Media literacy only seems to be taught on a textual level mostly, except for poetry. I remember learning about character arcs, symbolism and the cultural context of a story, but stuff like author intention and bias never made it into the classroom.
For example, I studied Some Like it Hot as my movie assignment in school. We learned about how the film portrayed the attitudes towards gender and money in the 20s, but never spent any time about what the point of that is. Our teacher told us that it pointed out sexism, but not that the movie itself was a criticism of gender norms.
Obviously there’s value in analysing the text of a story, but I think if you don’t analyse the intention and biases of the author as well, you’re not fully analysing anything. The Shrinking Shack podcast are really good at picking up on JK Rowling’s intentions, for example, not just politically, but also just in recognising what she thinks is cool. She clearly wanted to write a political spy story but was saddled with Harry Potter and didn’t want to continue writing children’s fantasy stories, so she pivoted to the spy storys in book five. That’s the kind of analysis and criticism that I was never taught
This is because real analysis of literary works always requires a political angle – even “aesthetic” art is political in its anti-politics.
The denial of the political at the secondary level (can’t indoctrinate kids!) is why media analysis and literary analysis is so truncated. Students essentially learn symbols without the context or political valence of those symbols (or in the most cursory way). So students are taught to look for symbols, but lack the political/literary/historical context as to why those symbols are meaningful.
After all, to do so involves immersing yourself in the world the text was made, so that you can recognize the ideological, historical, and political contexts that the author brings to bear on the work (and come out as symbols or other textual-rhetorical choices and effects).
This isn’t to say a student can’t also bring their own political context to bear – the classic example is understanding the racism of Shakespeare’s Shylock after the holocaust in a new way. But to truly recognize what’s going on in a text, you need a lot of context that the secondary environment (large class, quick timeframe, standardized tests) can’t provide. So students learn a kind of bastardized analysis that lacks the depth that you really need for this kind of thing.
I didn’t really understand how wrong “the curtains are blue” was until I started creating my own art, and then I started to feel real silly I ever thought the curtains were just blue
Even then, there is an answer to that question that is more elaborate than ‘they are blue just because’ - the author chose to describe them at least in order to make the scene more detailed.
seriously. I struggled with art appreciation of most kinds until I understood that everything that there is -and isn’t- in a piece of art was a deliberate action by the author, and that those choices happen for a reason, and are based in a context. It really changed my perspective.
“The curtains are blue” is a meme that has ruined a generation’s ability to do any sort of media analysis
I have this belief that most of the people who helped popularize the literalist interpretation of media were otherwise acaemically successful people (STEM bros and adjacent self important chuds), who were made to feel inadequate or stupid on a basic literature or media analysis course because it showed them that they didn’t have the tools to gain anything more than a surface level understanding of a piece of art, and that the humanities can actually be hard to do well.
I mostly fit this description, and was very much a “the curtains are blue” loser when I was in middle/high school and now media analysis is literally my favorite hobby and basically the only thing that brings me joy, so I also think part of it is the way media analysis is taught, and something about that method not clicking with a large portion of people
I really remember that the way my teachers wanted us to interpret and analyze things just felt… fake? It felt like when they were explaining certain “deeper meanings” they were just making shit up that wasn’t in the text and wasn’t even in the context surrounding the text.
I think the “the curtains are blue” meme actually does touch on this in a way. “The blue curtains in the scene represent the character’s sadness” is a very crude and oversimplified level of analysis.
In my classes it always felt like they were wanted us to examine the text alone looking for metaphor and symbolism. They never looked at the creators and what was going on in their lives at the time (unless they had fled the USSR), they didn’t look at the material conditions surrounding the creation past maybe “it was during the Great Depression,” they deliberately avoided so much context that makes analyzing media worth doing at all. And I think the anger at the very concept of media analysis was largely backlash against that.
Media literacy only seems to be taught on a textual level mostly, except for poetry. I remember learning about character arcs, symbolism and the cultural context of a story, but stuff like author intention and bias never made it into the classroom.
For example, I studied Some Like it Hot as my movie assignment in school. We learned about how the film portrayed the attitudes towards gender and money in the 20s, but never spent any time about what the point of that is. Our teacher told us that it pointed out sexism, but not that the movie itself was a criticism of gender norms.
Obviously there’s value in analysing the text of a story, but I think if you don’t analyse the intention and biases of the author as well, you’re not fully analysing anything. The Shrinking Shack podcast are really good at picking up on JK Rowling’s intentions, for example, not just politically, but also just in recognising what she thinks is cool. She clearly wanted to write a political spy story but was saddled with Harry Potter and didn’t want to continue writing children’s fantasy stories, so she pivoted to the spy storys in book five. That’s the kind of analysis and criticism that I was never taught
This is because real analysis of literary works always requires a political angle – even “aesthetic” art is political in its anti-politics.
The denial of the political at the secondary level (can’t indoctrinate kids!) is why media analysis and literary analysis is so truncated. Students essentially learn symbols without the context or political valence of those symbols (or in the most cursory way). So students are taught to look for symbols, but lack the political/literary/historical context as to why those symbols are meaningful.
After all, to do so involves immersing yourself in the world the text was made, so that you can recognize the ideological, historical, and political contexts that the author brings to bear on the work (and come out as symbols or other textual-rhetorical choices and effects).
This isn’t to say a student can’t also bring their own political context to bear – the classic example is understanding the racism of Shakespeare’s Shylock after the holocaust in a new way. But to truly recognize what’s going on in a text, you need a lot of context that the secondary environment (large class, quick timeframe, standardized tests) can’t provide. So students learn a kind of bastardized analysis that lacks the depth that you really need for this kind of thing.
We’re all
I didn’t really understand how wrong “the curtains are blue” was until I started creating my own art, and then I started to feel real silly I ever thought the curtains were just blue
Even then, there is an answer to that question that is more elaborate than ‘they are blue just because’ - the author chose to describe them at least in order to make the scene more detailed.
seriously. I struggled with art appreciation of most kinds until I understood that everything that there is -and isn’t- in a piece of art was a deliberate action by the author, and that those choices happen for a reason, and are based in a context. It really changed my perspective.