Analysis of The Office's ''Diversity Day'' by Diego Cano Gómez
What kind of ideological reading can be done? How does coding-decoding work in this cultural product?
In this episode Michael Scott, in order to portray a image of cultural diversity, tries to perform several ideological discourses about race to presumably show his acceptance towards the different ethnicities that exist in his workplace.
The characte Steve Carrell plays in the show is the one of a white man who is the manager of Dunder Mifflin, a paper company. In the first season of the show, the character of Michael Scott was made to be despicable and insufferable, making it akward to watch his actions and behaviours even from behind a screen, later on the show this changes as the directors wanted to give Michael a more ''wholesome'' personality by showing he has a nice heart although he has somw big quirks that can make it hard to mantain a relationship with him.
During this ''despicable era'' I was talking about, Michael has a quite racist ideological background due to his ignorance and childishness to deal with serious situations.
In the episode, Michael has recieved complains about his jokes with xenophobic commentaries so he must listen to a small talk about diversity by a human resources worker form the main headquarters; Michael, beigng childish adn egocentric can't manage to listen to the actual solutions so he decides to organize some activities himself to promote diversity, the problem comes when his xenophobic background does not allow him to see any further from stereotypes and ends up creating an activity in which the workers are forced to use this clichés in order to participate in a ''race guessing game''.
Michael tries to create a message of acceptance and tolerance but he's frameworks of knowledge lead him to create a message that ends up being decoded into non intended ways by some of the workers.
What coding strategy do the creators follow? How do you think different audiences could decode its message?
In the diegetic context, Michael's message of cultural acceptance is recieved in different ways by the workers, and each reaction perfectly represents a type of decoded reading from Hall's theory.
For the hegemonic reading we have Dwight, who accepts Michael's ideas and values like if he was following the hypodermic needle theory and understands his original intention without questioning the methods.
In the negotiated reading spectrum we would have charcters like Jim, Pam, Angela or Kevin, who understand Michael's intiative for cultural diversity and don't mind participating but also question Michael's methods and do not agree with some of his ideas. They understand Michael's initiative as a way of excusing his previous behaviours but not as an act of kindness and acceptation.
Lastly, for the oppositional reading we have all the characters that feel personally ofended by Michael's commentaries because of their ethnic nature. This characters are Oscar, Stanley and specially Kelly. This characters decode Michael's ''pro-diversity'' discourse as a way to hide his questionable ideas about other ethnicities, interpreting the message as an egotistical statetment to show his ''good morality''. To the point that during Michael's cultural workshop, Kelly ends up hiting him in the face for mocking her race through stereotypical behaviours.
In the extradiegetic context, the hegemonical reading taken by the audience would be to see the show as a parody and as a critique to the childlike behaviours of Michael and the akwardness of the character discourse. But someone that does not read the show as intended may take offense of the situation as they could interpret the content as a way to lighten the seriousness of racial issues and take the chance of making fun about ethnicities by mocking them with clichés.
How does it relate to the idea of TV as a cultural forum?
Just like TV, we could see this show as a detonant for debate, proof of this can be this essay itself.
TV and other forms of media that have a certain sense of collectiveness that allow for a big range of backgrounds to consume it, turn into an agora for debate and for the creation of different interpretations and points of view, the decoding of the episode by different publics can create oppositional readings that are likely to cause controversy, creating a debate between points of view, in this case placing the issue of racial stereotypes on the foreground for the audience to discuss.
Comments