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What is central about Rambo? shooting North Vietnamese soldiers or shooting American computers (and threatening to shoot the head of the local CIA operation)?
As Fiske writes on page 57 relevance and functionality of a text require that the "social experience of the individual...an individual's internal or external behavior" be contained in the meanings produced by that text. He cites an example that an aboriginal tribe in central Australia derived pleasure from Rambo, in other words that Rambo conveyed meaning that was relevant to their experience. After watching Rambo First Blood II, for the first time, it is clear that Rambo oppositional hegemonic messages that would be identifiable in the politics of control and resistance. This, as examplified by the two scenes mentioned above, is conveyed despite the larger geopolitical context of the film. After all, Rambo is in jail at the beginning of the film. Resitance is central.
What is the role of the text (in its structure) in limiting interpretation as well as in opening the way to certain other interpretations.
I would argue that the context of the movie, colonial, militaristic, self-rightiouss, and patriarchal limit interpretation of the text. The meanings that aboriginees found in the text show that "its meanings exceed its own power to discipline them" (104), and that the preferred meanings of the dominant ideology are vulnerable, limited and debilitated enough that its producerly quality lends a popular meaning to the text. To borrow Fiske's jeans metaphor, the text can be tattered or worn as cut-offs to communicate new social meaning. Rambo is not a very good movie and although the movie questions authority (US international policy) by discrediting the CIA officer it does not question the ideology and the constructs that created the Vietnam War or the subsequent normalization with Vietnam, it's criticism is limited to personalities. We can only determine meaning that a text conveys through the subsequent behavior that people demonstrate with it, and under this analysis I believe that reflections of the dominant context (adjectives like those I listed above) were most often associated with the text.
What is the role of the "dominant" (hegemonic) interpretations of particular text (e.g. the "American" interpretation of Rambo as a 'right wing' movie)?
How would you justify any of these answers?
This is a [1] map of the world "According to President Reagan". Clearly this map does not represent the dominant ideology of US foreign policy, its not even an accurate or complete map. However, such artifacts as this map justify interpretations that dominant discourses have variable meanings and that there is a competing popular ideology that mantains an opposition sway of accepted thought. As Fiske writes, this could be one example of ongoing guerilla tactics in the battle of ideas, though unfortunately, we don't have Rambo on our side, or do we.
Using a recent controversy in what some call the "culture wars" (e.g. the brouhaha around the recent exhibition at the Brooklyn museum), sort out who might be resisting whom or what.
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