Week One – “Are you the Alice?”

In one scene of ‘Alice in Wonderland’:

And several other scenes:

    

These scenes thus result in Alice saying:

    

And in one scene, Absolem says to Alice:

A question rises – what makes Alice the Alice? To search for the answer, I am then led to the terms coined by the communication specialists as ‘discourse’ and ‘ideology’.

Discourse, in short, is ‘a written or spoken communication of a certain topic’ and ideology is what could be found within a discourse. According to Branston and Stafford (2007), ideology is 'the way in which such values and meanings are usually posed as natural and obvious rather than socially aligned, in other words, working with or against particular sets of power’ (page 174). In short, ideology could be said as ‘commonsense’. Together, both discourse and ideology make up the so-called ‘unspoken truth’.

Let’s take…a classroom as an example. On the thought of classroom, most would think of desks, chairs, writing board, stationeries, books, students, a teacher and etcetera. The ‘classroom’ is a discourse, and what could be found within the classroom as listed before are ideologies.

In term of Alice being a discourse, the ideologies are that she is a curly-haired female Caucasian and that she is the prophesized saviour of the Wonderland. The ideology of being a female would be that Alice would never says that she is in fact a male and the ideology of being a Caucasian would mean that Alice is fair-skinned and lives at temperate-climate areas. The ideology of curly hair would mean that Alice does not have the straight hair that most shampoo and conditioner advertisers would love to have as their model; in fact, her curly hair is distinct enough to be separated from any other curly-haired people and probably, would have trouble of combing her hair. The ideology of being a heroine would mean that she is brave, determined, justice-driven and intelligent, just like any other typical heroes and heroines.

Most of the time, people – and even animals, plants and non-living things – follows the discourse that is set upon them, and this could be easily seen in Disney’s movies. For example, the heroes of Disney have always been a young man whose strength, bravery and intelligence would win him any evil anytime. They have always been depicted as a fair-looking man and usually of a high-ranked status and at the end of their story, they would usually manage to win the heart and hand of their desired fair maiden.

       

However, not all heroes follow the set discourse. Such as in the recent Disney’s movie ‘Up’, the hero is an old man who could even barely walk without the aid of his four-legged walking stick and his so-called sidekick(s)…  Let’s just say that they would not make a convincing rescue team AT ALL, let alone to assume that they would be the ones who would triumph over evil. Yet, the old unlikely hero manages to ‘save’ the day with the help of his so-called sidekick(s) and this event could be called as a counter-discourse or sets of counter-ideologies, the exact opposites of discourse and ideologies.

And the hero of ‘Up’ is not the only one who is not following his set discourse; in fact, recently, there are a lot of heroes out there who are just not the ‘ideal’ hero that the term ‘anti-hero’ is created to describe these kind of heroes.

All in all, life can be seen as following sets of discourses and ideologies. However, life is not exactly fixed; any of its components could change which then creates the counter-discourses and counter-ideologies. After all, life that is fixed could be proven very dull; a little bit of deviants here and there could spice up our life to the fullest.

Now, before I end this, a question enters my mind that I think ought to be shared; if discourses and ideologies are the assumed way of behaviour of things, is not it stereotyping? What are the differences between these terms?

Until then, I end my observation here.

References:

§  Richard D. Zanuck (producer), Tim Burton (director). (2010). Alice in Wonderland (motion picture). United States:

§  Jonas Rivera (producer), Pete Docter (director). (2010). Up (motion picture). United States: Disney.

§  Branston, G & Stafford, R. (2007). The Media Student’s Book. New York, United States of America: Routledge.