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Run Lola Run Essay Response

Decent Essays

Question: Explain how media producers communicate a preferred reading to the audience and why alternative readings might be made.

Response: Media producers create texts with an audience in mind, and while they try to remain entertaining and original in most of their films they also need to ensure that the audience is able to understand and engage with the text, and thus with the preferred meaning, by using conventions and generally accepted techniques. Tom Tykwer’s independent, and unmistakably avant-garde film, Run Lola Run in many ways, defies Hollywood cinematic convention, but must also conform with audience expectations in order to convey its intended themes. Tykver conveys a preferred reading to his target audience that …show more content…

It is for this reason that the producer of a text targets a specific audience demographic and tailors the text in order to position this specific audience to accept the preferred meaning. For this reason, audiences from other contexts may read the text in a wildly different manner. For example, in Run Lola Run, viewers from a feminist subculture might look beyond the codes that Tykwer has used to position them to see Lola as a representative of feminine power, and feel that she is a poor role model for contemporary females. This alternative reading could be formed because of Lola’s subservience to Manni, and her unquestioning loyalty to him from the very beginning of the movie, despite little effort on his part to save himself. Furthermore, in all three of the film’s realities, Lola’s first source that she seeks for help is a patriarchal figure, her father, in this way demonstrating her overall helplessness despite her appearance of having power. In this way, audience members may form an extreme feminist reading of the text, and thus resist the reading that Tykwer is positioning them to accept. Another alternative reading that may be formed of the text, is that it is offering a misandristic portrayal of the male characters within the film. The audience is positioned to see Manni, Lola’s father and the security guard from the bank, the three males with the

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