COURSEWORK PRIMARY TEXT: Codes and Signs

In the opening 2 minutes of Made in Chelsea series 5, episode 11, signs include a man stood outside St. Pancreas station in London, on his phone, waiting for someone. He looks excited, and so the connotations which we get from this are that he is meeting a woman which he is looking forward to. The denotations and connotations class as semiotics. This also relates to the theory by Gestalt who says that when we watch a sequence of actions, we fill in the gaps. Barthes suggested that our understanding of many media texts rests not merely upon what the texts portray but on the texts’ relationship to frequently told stories or myths in our culture. We can relate this to this scene in Made in Chelsea because it is starting to tell the frequently told love story which plays a big part in our culture. In terms of the Cinderella myth the cultural meanings or rather the ideologies and values conveyed are that men are active and women are passive, then men are economically powerful providers and a women’s key role is to be sexually alluring. This is definitely portrayed in this scene, because the male is the one waiting for her, on the phone. She is the one coming to see him, and she is the one who, through the mise-en-scene, is represented to be sexually alluring. This means that she is passive and he is passive, and according to the male gaze, she is represented to be gazed at and he is the “gazer”.