Helen Fulton with Rosemary Huisman, Julian Murphet and Anne Dunn, Narrative and Media. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005. £17.99.329 pp

摘要

There is an instalment of the syndicated cartoon strip, The Pitchers, by Berger and Wyse, in which the two film scriptwriters tell an awed partygoer that you have to have a sense of humour if you work in Hollywood. When they are then confronted by the partygoer with a comic conundrum about lightbulbs and producers, presumably intended to appeal to their prejudices about corporate executives and make them laugh, they fail to take the comic bait. Their sense of humour entirely evaporates as they angrily denounce Hollywood producers for changing everything at the last minute. This neat twist-about of attitude and mood reveals the intense frustration sometimes felt by scriptwriters in multi-million dollar film factories. Whether film narratives are driven by box-office sales, advertising revenue, product promotion or franchise arrangements, they are inextricably entwined with the economics of commodity capitalism. Things get changed, from the first to the last minute, because of the need to construct a virtual audience through the discourse of the narrative in such a way as to maximize sales, increase market share or direct consumers to specified products. Approaching contemporary media narratives in this way, the authors of this book analyse how narrative techniques shape media texts and subject positions among audiences/consumers, across the general range from print journalism to feature film. They are concerned with how processes of cultural production and representation in media narratives may be theorized.