The Reception Issue Regarding Hollywood Blockbusters

As far as the reception of Hollywood blockbusters is concerned, I believe that these movies are not simply products of the audience. No matter what is said about interpretation of the audience, a blockbuster has some fixed patterns and explicit ideologies encoded by the producers, which is essentially the white patriarchal capitalism. In this regard I believe that reception of an avant-garde movie and a conventionalized Hollywood movie is rather different by the audience.

First of all, a classical Hollywood movie’s objective is to be consumed by as many audiences as there can be. To achieve this goal, there are some certain standardization of style and structure applied by the producers:

1)      A classical Hollywood movie has an invisible style, because it contains no distinctive style which calls attention to it. In that way, the viewer stays emotionally trapped in a film’s story, and all aspects of mise-en-scene consistently help the audience remain in the domain of the film.

2)      All information about movie is explicit waiting to be taken by the audience without an effort.

3)      Stereotyping makes the reception easier. The stock characterization of a villain and a good guy draws upon pre-existing social and cultural stereotypes. In that way, the audience does not put much effort in distinguishing the good and the bad.

4)      All classical Hollywood movies have a beginning, middle and an ending.  A closure must tie up all of the story’s loose ends, which affirms that all problems are solved and the audience does not need to think about it further.

Regarding all of the traits of a classical movie, it can be said that they are not made for an interpretation but for consumption. In such movies, the audience just takes what s/he anticipates to take, no more no less. An interpretation of such movies would only draw attention to the same dominant ideologies since they are designed not to raise questions or explore social issues but to maintain the ideological status quo.

Thus, while interpreting a blockbuster movie, I do not think that there will be a clash between decoder and encoder since in such cases encoder tries to eliminate all the possible factors which can lead to misinterpretation of the film. Therefore, a Hollywood blockbuster has an apparent meaning in all social and cultural contexts as John Ellis states: “meaning in cinema is obvious: the average cinema film appears straightforward and can be understood immediately (with subtitles) by virtually everyone on the planet”. This is simply because they aim not to get the audience to participate in meaning making process but make them take always-already made meanings. In that way, the audience, who does not expect something more, will be satisfied with what they have seen.

To conclude, Hollywood blockbusters can give an idea about the historical context they are shot, they can highlight the dominant ideologies of the time, (which, in fact, have not been so diverse in America over the time) but the message they convey is unchallenging, meaning is evident in various contexts so you do not have to be a wise person to interpret and absorb it.

Merve Ersoy