Encoding and intention

Since class on Wednesday, I’ve been thinking and reading more about Hall’s conception of encoding and decoding. In particular, I was finding it difficult to articulate the distinction between these terms and those that I’m more familiar with in the literary studies field: intention and interpretation. 

Authorial intention is often seen as difficult to access – impossible to conclusively identify, perhaps, without textual evidence such as notes from the author, or diaries, letters, etc. – while Hall sees encoding as something that happens during the production process, and is therefore informed by routines of production, the professional ideologies and institutional knowledge of its makers, and so on. (509) In this way, could encoding be considered a process where authorial intention (in addition to other institutional factors) is made visible, and therefore subject to study? For example, how do we identify what the professional ideologies of the producers of television are, and what influence they had on the television program? 

In this light, the idea of faulty or ineffective encoding of messages helped me to articulate my confusion. Many of the examples shared in class were advertisements. The message that the producers intend or encode is clear: buy Folgers. And the message the audience receives (this brother and sister have unusual chemistry) is clearly different. But what about intention when it comes to television dramas, films, novels, and so on? In addition to the example of the Netflix series You that was put forward, I was trying to think of another example of ineffective encoding leading to a misunderstanding in the decoding process. 

The 2018 children’s film Show Dogs occurred as a potentially good, but quite disturbing, example. Show Dogs is about a cop-dog who is working undercover at a dog show to bust a smuggling ring, and he must be trained to be a good show dog so as not to blow his cover. Part of his training is to let the show judges inspect – handle – his genitals, a prospect he is initially very uncomfortable with. He is able to get over his discomfort when another character advises him to “go to his happy place.” By dissociating in this way, he is able to complete his training and keep his cover. Reviews of the film, and social media posts by concerned parents, drew attention to the fact that this scene could be read as teaching the children in the audience how to be groomed, or at the very least, that it was a joke in poor taste. The film’s distributors pulled the film from theaters, cut the scene, and re-released it, making a statement that read in part: 

“We apologize to anybody who feels the original version of Show Dogs sent an inappropriate message.” 

The rhetorical squirrely-ness here is of course typical of corporate apologies, but it bears remarking that when viewed through Hall’s framework, the statement admits no responsibility for the (faulty) encoding of the message. Rather, it apologizes to anyone that might have decoded it in a way that caused offense (to themselves). In contrast to the example of advertisements, the intention of the joke seems unclear. Perhaps it was intended to be appreciated by the parents in the audience, not the children – the kind of dirty joke that sometimes appears in children’s films. Or maybe it was just a bad, miscalculated joke. Would this be ineffective encoding or faulty decoding? I think the sticking point I have is that in my mind, it may depend on the intention of the people that wrote the joke. But this may be a misreading or misapplication of Hall’s theory.