HUMA 2740

Lecture 20

- At times, classical ending is not all that structurally decisive, being a

more or less arbitrary readjustment of that world knocked awry in the
previous eighty minutes
- Parker Tyler suggests that Hollywood regards all endings as "purely
conventional, formal, and often, like the charade, of an infantile logic."
- Extrinsic norm, the need to resolve the plot in a way that provides
"poetic justice," becomes a structural constant, inserted with more or
less motivation into its proper slot, the epilogue
- When the syuzhet's end is strongly precast by convention, the
compositional attention falls on the retardation of outcome
accomplished by the middle portions; the text will then "account for
the necessary retardation in quasi-mimetic terms by placing the
causes for delay within the fictive world itself and turning the middle
into the bulk of the represented action"
- At times, motivation is constructed to be inadequate, and a
discordance between preceding causality and
happy denouement becomes noticeable as an ideological difficulty
- Even if the ending resolves the two principal causal lines, some
comparatively minor issues may still be left dangling
- Not only does the epilogue reinforce the tendency toward a happy
ending; it also repeats connotative motivs that have run throughout
the film
- His Girl Friday example
- At the level of extrinsic norms the most coherent possible epilogue
remains the standard to be aimed at
 - Commonplaces like "transparency" and "invisibility" are on the whole
unhelpful in specifying the narrational properties of the classical film
- Classical narration tends to be omniscient, highly communicative, and
only moderately self-conscious
o Narration knows more than any or all characters, it conceals
relatively little (chiefly "what will happen next"), and it seldom
acknowledges its own address to the audience

Competition and Control

- Media corporations compete to control audience share

- Also compete to control use of TV shows (e.g. merchandising,
spinoff)
- Compete to control means of producing TV shows and means of
distributing them
Ownership Concentration and Convergence

- Corporate competition to maximize control of TV audiences,

copyrights, and production and distribution systems lead to media
concentrations
- At present, US culture industry controlled by a few vertically and
horizontally integrated (converged) US based transnational media
corporations (TNMCs)

- Canada’s culture industry ruled by converged media firms

- Due to convergence, culture industry developing a new vision of TV
built on faith in modern version of synergy
 - Media corps distribute TV shows they own through all of the media
platforms they control and exploit cross-promotional opp
- Convergence supports the culture industry’s new vision of TV well
Market Structure

- Classical network structure of TV has 4 principle actors: (1) TV

production studios (make TV shows), (2) TV networks (buy rights to
distribute TV shows), (3) TV advertisers (buy time and space from TV
networks), (4) Nielsen (sells ratings info to TV networks abt number
of ppl watching what show and when