Awkward Decodings

Because of the fact that I had some trouble articulating my thoughts in class on Wednesday and because I haven’t posted anything yet because the site got my two emails confused and then I got confused (sorry, I won’t go off on a “Sami fails at technology” tangent…), I am going to write a blog out of turn.

After watching Flight of the Conchords on Wednesday, I made a connection between Jemaine and Mr. Collins from Pride and Prejudice. Besides the obvious—the awkwardness, the ridiculous complements, and the obliviousness—they have something more subtle in common, the inability to transfer the meaning of their messages to the receiver. The language they have encoded with a particular message has been decoded according to the dominant connotations of the day, rather than with the meaning originally encoded.

For example, at dinner Mr. Collins (and I’ll go off the recent movie, since I’m not sure if everyone has read the book and I don’t have a copy of it handy anyway) complements the Bennet’s cooking and asks which one of the sisters prepared the dish. Although to Mr. Collins this was meant to be a complement, Mrs. Bennet was insulted by the implication that they could not afford a cook. In the episode we watched in class, Jemaine makes similarly inelegant complements to the “most beautiful girl in the room.”

Both characters, in trying to articulate their idea of talent, beauty, etc, unwittingly pass on a message coded with a negative connotation. The connotations or implications are determined by the “dominant cultural order” according to Stuart Hall. However, as Hall points out, “[…] it is always possible to order, classify, assign and decode an event within more than one mapping”(169).

This is where the confusion lies for Mr. Collins and Jemaine. Although neither one may necessarily pick-up on the misinterpretation, we as spectators can, as Hall suggests, “[…] refer, through the codes, to the orders of social life, of economic and political power and of ideology” in order to “clarify the misunderstanding” (169). We have the advantage of knowing (or being able to find out) that in 19th century England, to suggest that one is not in a position to keep a servant is to suggest that they are of a low class, a terrible insult in a very class-conscious society. Although Mr. Collins lives in this time, he is not necessarily aware of the “dominant cultural order” that pervades his own society (which further examples of his mishaps would demonstrate). Jemaine also seems unaware of the dominant cultural connotations of todays language. To him, a high-class prostitute is beautiful (anyone seen “Secret Diary of a Call Girl"?). However the dominant cultural order would says a high-class prostitute is still a prostitute, someone contemptible with few morals.

What is most interesting is what these misunderstandings say about a particular culture and I would like to explore this further as we get farther along in class.