HOLLYWOODIAN CINEMA AND MASS CULTURE – AMONG READERS, VIEWERS AND EXPECTATIONS

Abstract

In my previous papers I studied the contemporary Brazilian readers and their connection with the bestsellers, in order to understand the reasons, in discursive terms, which led them to appreciate these mass culture products. This reader profile, constituted in verbal texts, led me to reflect on the impact of mass culture in the syncretic texts, materialized on the screens of Hollywood motion pictures. The enunciatee’s expectations must be explained through the discursive constitution of the movies and through the discursive image projected on it. Thereby, the film productions assemble themes and figures, appropriate the symbols, myths, clichés, giving them new meanings, according to the nature of viewer they want to please. The theoretical-methodological support applied is the discursive-based greimasian Semiotics. The components of the generative process of meaning and the exam of the categories of expression will be useful resources to investigate two Hollywood movies, "X-men 3" and "Twilight", in order to understand how they organize the same symbol from Christian iconography: the guardian angel. It will be presented, as well, how this symbol appears in other texts and which other resources movies use to disseminate specific ideologies.