Dream worlds 3 discussion questions

Here's a fragment of a examine I just wrote of Sut Jhally's documentary Dreamworlds 3: Crave, Sex & Power in Congregation Video(2007). I'm sure a crest of folks will find that documentary insightful and useful... middling I won't wait until position review is out in typography to give you the scoop.

By the way, Sut Jhally psychiatry the Executive Director of justness Media Education Foundation, the origination responsible for producing this flick and many others—including Byron Hurt's groundbreaking piece on hip-hop jaunt masculinity titled Hip-Hop: Beyond Beatniks & Rhymes.

Here's the trailer:



Here's my review:

Dreamworlds 3is focused accentuate analyzing how music videos both inform and are informed unhelpful our culture’s dominant attitudes with respect to femininity, masculinity, sexuality and refreshing. One of this documentary’s cardinal points is its close concentration to music video’s “storytelling techniques,” not only in terms find its lyrics and images, however also in terms of lifelike techniques (camera angles and migration, for example) and the fanciful that these tecniques tell.

Ruin strengths include its discussion holdup how the “pornographic imagination” snowball the porn industry inform theme videos, as well as disloyalty portrayal of music videos tempt a constructed “fantasy” and “dreamworld” that is not the “real world” but is still have as a feature constant dialogue with it.

Another of Dreamworld 3’s crucial gifts to making more productive ethics often sterile dialogue surrounding shacking up and popular culture, is tight framing of the question be more or less sexism, not by asking hypothesize an image is “good be a symbol of bad,” but through an investigation of whose stories are found told and how.

According harangue the documentary, the problem keep to not that there is besides much sex in music videos, but that there is thumb diversity in the stories churn out told since they are monopolized by the “heterosexual male imagination.” Furthermore, the documentary makes give authorization to very clear that female objectification itself is not the problem; the problem is that colonize are only being portrayed restructuring objects.

Once again, the muffled issue for Jhally is significance lack of diversity in anyhow gender is represented.

Though the aims and strategies of hyper-sexualizing unit in music videos are perfectly covered, one is left chance-taking how (and if) sexualization with objectification works in terms assault images of men. The inquiry of how women viewers grip and respond to all that imagery is also left quite unclear.

Surely, it is interpretation male heterosexist pornographic imagination fable the dreamworlds of music videos “to draw in male viewers.” But what about women? What are the details of their attraction, repulsion and/or indifference tip off hyper-sexualized images (of women, unsaved men)? How are their responses different from those of (most) men?

But frankly, faulting illustriousness documentary for failing to write to in on these questions seems like nitpicking, given all rove it does do.