Class #2: The Screen Cultures

White Lotus
 Rewind: navigating – and studying – identity/ies
• If The White Lotus examines how the dynamics of power and
privilige operate in life/a Hawaiian resort, then we will ask both:
– how that dynamic is represented by the show (i.e. how the show
creates meaning through form and narrative);
– how the show’s representation aligns with a theoretical
understanding of the identity/ies scrutinized (e.g. in the reviews
we read or by Richard Dyer)
– how to discuss issues of power and privilege,
inclusion/exclusion, and identity in a (Media Studies) classroom,
and how The White Lotus represents a negative blueprint for
having those discussions.
Form/narrative: encoding Whiteness in the opening credits
 “White” (Dyer)
• Parse the opening sentence of Dyer’s article; what does it reveal about the
(traditional) meanings of Whiteness – as well as the study of Whiteness as a
racial category?
• Why, according to Dyer, is it important to study the representation of a
dominant social category (i.e. Whiteness) in addition to the representation of
non-dominant/marginalized groups?
• Dyer deploys the metaphor of “black” and “white” as colors to expose how Black
and White function as racial categories – what is the point he tries to advance?
• After establishing that Whiteness is both naturalized and unmarked in and
through discourse, Dyer argues that “the invisibility of whiteness colonises the
definition of other norms – class, gender, heterosexuality, nationality and so on”
(46).
– What does he mean by this act of “colonization” and what does it point up
about the difficulty of studying “whiteness qua whiteness” (44)?
– How is Whiteness’s ability to hide behind other identities illustrated in The
White Lotus (TWL)?
– How do/can we separate out TWL’s examination of Whiteness from its
treatment of “gender, class, heterosexuality, nationality and so on”?
 “White” (Dyer)
• Which are the cinematic narratives in which Whiteness does become
visible, according to Dyer? What do they have in common?
• Dyer’s aim, in the remainder of the article, is to analyze three films for the
express purpose of mining and cataloguing the “typical” visual and
narrative strategies by which Whiteness is given meaning.
– How, broadly speaking, do the three films in question understand
Whiteness vs. Blackness?
– How do these films try to resolve the paradox that haunts the
proximity of Whiteness to Blackness?
 “White” (Dyer)
• In Simba, the representation of Whiteness and Blackness is visually or formally
controlled through “a rigid binarism … reproduced in every detail of the film’s mise-
en-scène” (49). These binaries are established:
– in order to mark racialized boundaries;
– through the visual representation of the land/environment – and the (changing)
position of the White male hero in it, which is effected through editing
– with the ultimate aim of providing “a narrative space for the realisation of
manhood … and white male virtues” (52)
• In Jezebel, Whiteness (and White characters) act in and through Blackness (and
Black characters) in order to claim and appropriate the vitality that ostensibly
characterizes Blackness.
– How is this narratively and visually communicated in the film?
– Where is the supposed “vitality” of Blackness localized – and how does it
complicate normative definitions of Whiteness?
• How does The Night of the Living Dead represent the terminal/turning point in the
meaning of Whiteness?
– If White people are the living dead, then what does it mean to be Black in a
dystopian world?
Scene analysis