RECODING SOCIAL IMAGES THROUGH HELP OF FILM

A computer goes haywire; it is reprogrammed. Phone lines that crisscross are summarily rewired. A contract that has outlived its usefulness may need to be renegotiated. Certainly an idea that is out of date is subject to reconsideration.

Yale University’s James Arthur Snead contends that social messages--or “codes,” as he prefers to call them--are no different. Out of date and anachronistic, stereotypes of racial, sexual, generational or ethnic patterning may no longer squeeze into the tight, tidy box to which they have long been assigned. The solution? Recoding.

Codes, Snead explains, set up societal ranking. They are external signs, a kind of shorthand by which social differences are assigned. Codes are vital, Snead says: “It’s impossible to do without them.” And they are not necessarily bad. “In fact, they’re good,” he says, “ if they change.”

These days, Snead maintains, film offers some of the most fertile fields for recoding. Specifically, Snead finds himself focusing on independent film, on how smaller film makers are reworking America’s cultural self-image.

“In every corner of the independent film movement, you’re finding what I call recoding,” Snead says. “Feminist film makers are recoding stereotypes about women. Regional films are recoding the so-called country film.” For blacks, Snead’s special area of interest, expertise and personal experience: “What needed to be done was a recoding of blackness.” Which is to say, “What is the difference between black exploitation, as you see so much in film and on the screen, and what is going on in the ghetto, and in black life in general?”

One highly profitable and widely viewed example that leaps to mind is “Beverly Hills Cop.” Snead breathes fire. “I hated it! It’s a complete abortion, extremely violent, filled with caricatures.” Then, just slightly more mildly: “It was a Marx Brothers film.”

Blacks are pigeonholed, Snead argues: “With whites in film and on TV, you have all kinds of roles and personae to choose from. You have the complete spectrum. Not so with blacks.”

Not that whites are entirely without coding of their own. But “the white stereotype is more free, less coded,” Snead says. “That is because the whites make the stereotypes.”

Though perhaps mildly surprising when applied to a popular medium such as film, Snead’s academic qualifications for his theories are impeccable. Prep-school educated at Phillips Exeter, Snead, 31, did undergraduate work at Yale, earning his doctorate at Cambridge University. The author of a scholarly tome on the novels of Faulkner, Snead since 1981 has taught comparative literature as an assistant professor at Yale. A lecture series on Thomas Mann took him to Germany and France this summer, but it was his work, with theologian Cornell West, on “Seeing Black: A Semiotic Analysis of Black Culture in America,” that prompted the Whitney Museum of American Art here to include Snead in its ongoing “New American Filmmakers” lecture series.

“Recoding blackness,” Snead said in explaining the title of his Whitney lecture last month, “means revising visual codes surrounding black skin on screen and in the public realm.” Particularly in Hollywood’s early films, Snead found movies populated with “a lot of black porters, shoeshine boys and”--a symptom he says persists today--”very few black executives.” In early Hollywood, black skin “signified subhuman, simple-minded, superstitious and submissive.” The films depicted “powerlessness,” Snead said, his voice more even than angry, “the real consequence of being black.”

But somewhere, Snead worries, somewhere “those descriptions become prescriptions.” The code, he suggests, becomes both a representation of reality and an expectation of how that reality should be. “Are we saying ‘Superfly’ is the way things are in the ghetto, or is that the prescription for how things should be?” Snead asks. “Are we saying the absence of black skin in films, in the media, is a reflection of the status quo, or is it an expectation of the way things should be?”

In short, Snead wonders, “Does coding create expectations which then influence the nature of reality?”

It is not a question Snead poses lightly. As a scholar of comparative literature and, as a consequence, of comparative cultures, “I only got into all this stuff because of my studies of the Weimar Republic. Those guys were really the first media experts of our time. Today,” he concedes, “I am hypersensitive to certain manifestations of American culture, yes, because I see the way an entire race, namely the German Jews, was seduced into a sense of complacency by the manipulations of Goebbels, the subtle and not-so-subtle alterations of the images of Jews in Germany.”

Translated into an equally chilling contemporary message what Snead is saying is this: “Social oppression is fostered by the coding of any minority group. Choices are limited--coded out.” As he observes, “A black man might teach at Yale, but not be chosen to run it.”

Among independent film makers, Snead does see distinct change. Dating back to films of the early ‘70s, his examination of “maybe 100 such film makers,” shows blacks and women, among other minorities, presented in roles that are so ordinary as to seem extraordinary. Recoding is definitely at work. Whereas normally, in mainstream films, for example, “it is ‘natural’ that there are no biracial couples,” Snead points to “A Silent Rap” (1973), in which the proverbial love triangle is also quite comfortably integrated. “I Be Done Was Is” (1983) examines the careers of four contemporary black comediennes, while “Sarah” (1981) is a woman, quite incidentally black, suffering from a mid-life crisis.

“These films encourage disruption of expectations,” Snead said in his Whitney lecture, “puzzling and challenging the viewer because the characters are not frozen in place. What is expected is undermined.” Another element is at work as well, because, Snead holds, “what film allows you to do is to make your own history.”

Certainly, for Snead, not all is bleak on the cinematic front. He fairly trumpets the appearance of a film like “A Soldier’s Story,” portraying blacks in an array of non-static, non-stereotyped roles, and he looks forward to the arrival of Steven Spielberg’s film version of Alice Walker’s novel “The Color Purple.” And “The Cosby Show,” he pronounces, “is absolutely wonderful.”

As for the future, “I’d like to think there is hope,” Snead says. “I’d like to think that ideology can be reversed, that recoding ultimately will work, that blacks and women in high and diverse places will be portrayed in a context of normality.”

He thumbs through a catalogue of independent films, those he believes are waging a quiet recoding revolution. “If I could take these films and put them on TV and have them shown once a week,” Snead said, “I’d be perfectly happy.”

Contributing to this story was Times researcher Siobhan Flynn.