Week 9 - CULTURAL LITERACY- TELEVISION AND CINEMA

For week 9, our lecture topic Cultural Literacy and the Media has brought us to another world of understanding the media and how it works. We were taught how to understand cultural literacy that exist within film and television. For this week’s journal, I would like to argue to about the importance of cultural literacy in order to understand a film. The reason is because I am a big fan of Korean movies and I have always wondered why almost all of the Korean movies I have watched focuses mainly on plastic surgery. Perhaps my question lies in the lack of cultural literacy that i have towards the Korean culture.

Television is a tele-technical system for transmission of sound and images, as well as motion pictures in both black and white and colour
(Petterson, p.334). Film Noir was a cultural product of the past.  It shows the cultural and social pattern in Europe in the past, especially in gender relations as well as the class. In order for cultural literacy to take place, we must have familiarity, ability, determining factor and a nuance understanding of language.

Cultural literacy can be defined as both a knowledge of meaning systems and an ability to negotiate those systems within different cultural contexts. It is virtually impossible to describe and analyse what is happening in any communication context or practice without using the concept of cultural literacy (Shirato and Yell, 2000, p. 1).

 In order to understand a particular movie it is important for us to understand the cultural literacy if not we will not be able to understand the message hidden within the movie. The movie that I will analyse is based on a Korean movie titled ”200 pound Beauty”. This movie focuses on the structure and the narrative of the story. It also follows the traditional folktale narrative by Vladamir Propp (1988, p.25), Morphology of the Folktale. This story reflects the Korean culture where beauty is a priority and is not in the eyes of the beholder which makes plastic surgery a trend in Korea.



Kang Hanna



Below is the video of the 200 pound Beauty, where a girl named Kang Hannah has a very beautiful voice but a very obese body.  Her voice is her asset where she use it to have phone sex conversation with men. In the mean time she is a lip sync singer for Amy, a famous Korean pop singer. This movie has discourses of beauty, heterosexuality, jealousy ,love and obesity.  This movie is very controversial because it discriminates fat or obese women in the society. Kang Hannah has always hid behind the stage where Amy sings infront using Kang Hannah’s voice. Kang Hannah does not have the opportunity to sing front stage because of her appearance. This movie shapes the ideology that men likes beautiful women and in order to have a boyfriend, you need to match that perfect hour glass shape body. However, this is not true in all cultures. Different people have different perception of beauty. 

Video Clip of 200 Pound Beauty

As a Bruneian, in my culture, plastic surgery is not accepted because of the religious values which prohibits any alteration of the body which includes the changing of hair colour. . Here, coming from a different perspective I view plastic surgery only acceptional if there is a need to do so for example if there is any disability or deformed body parts. However, in the movie, Kang Hannah undertake plastic surgery for the purpose of looking beautiful. For people who doesn’t have any cultural literacy of Korea, they will think that all women in Korea does plastic surgery. However, with the knowledge of cultural literacy, the people will understand that not all women do plastic surgery. According to Hirsch ( 1988 ) , “children in the U.S. are being deprived of the basic knowledge that would enable them to function in contemporary society”. Hence here it is important that we know about cultural literacy in order to function and communicate well in the society.

Here, this film could shape a person’s identity in a sense that it changes a woman’s perception towards size. For example, to a young lady who is obese, it can cause depression which can lead to aneroxia and bulimia. These are not a good way to portray movies because this shows that the community does not favour women who are big. This will have a psychological effect on women.  The politics in this film are the politics of jealousy, love within beauty, love within heterosexuality, jealousy and many more. 



200 Pound Beauty



Overall, it is important for us to understand cultural literacy to work within communication industries. Without cultural literacy, we will not be able to understand and communicate within any society.  The importance of cinema and television is to understand the cultural literacy because in television and the media is where the cultures of one’s society is being portrayed and it is through the films and television that we get to learn and understand the culture of different societies.

REFERENCES

Hirsch. E.D, (1988) Cultural Literacy, What Every Americans Need to know. Vintage Book

Propp, V. (1927). Morphology of the Folktale. Trans., Laurence Scott. 2nd ed. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1968s.

Hartley, J. (1999). Knowledge, television and the 'textual tradition'. Uses of Television. London and New York : Routledge. Retrieved September 17, 2010 from UBD Ebrary Website.