All TV series and movies have a message they try to demonstrate, through music, characters, lighting, and plot. However, it depends if the audience interprets the message as the same or completely different than what the producers and directors were hoping for. Stuart Hall’s theory of encoding and decoding provides us with the insight into understanding how television communicates meaning and why viewers elucidate the same show differently. As Stuart Hall states in his book ‘Encoding and Decoding in the Television Discourse’ (1973), “communication between the production elites in broadcasting and their audiences is necessarily a form of ‘systematically distorted communication” (p. 1).
He argues that producers encode different messages into media texts, but audiences do not simply absorb these meanings passively; they decode the texts according to their background, for example, their social and cultural standpoint, like if the person was Buddhist, their view on a series on The Big C (which I will further talk about), a show about a woman suffering with cancer, they believe ‘rather than denying or avoiding pain,’ there is ‘a path to meet it with clarity, wisdom, and compassion,’ which aligns to the show’s message. Therefore, applying this model to The Big C illustrates how meaning is both constructed and interpreted.
Encoding refers to “the production of a media message,” where encoding a message, “the sender… must appreciate how their audience understands the world.” In the Big C, narrative, character development, tone and visual cues are cautiously delivered to present transformation, companionship, humour, resilience, and a realistic experience of terminal illness. At the start, as Cathy (the main character) finds out she has melanoma, she starts being rebellious; she takes risks, has an affair, and is no longer her ‘boring’ old self. No one else knows about her illness, except for her unruly neighbour, and this creates confusion among everyone. Her husband, Paul, struggles to recognise the woman he married, and Adam, her son, becomes frustrated as he thinks she’s acting strange, doing activities that she would have said no to in the past. She also gets closer to her outlandish brother, who jokingly comments she is “starting to get her weird back.” Her secrecy surrounding her cancer can encode that people who have terminal illnesses can be invisible, and the fact that she has cancer shouldn’t be the reason to encourage you to live your life freely and happily.
As the series progresses, Cathy notices visible signs of her melanoma, such as a mole, and begins to stop her affair, and tries to fix her relationships, taking her diagnosis seriously. By Season 2, everyone knows she has cancer, and she tries going to new doctors to help her, with her family by her side. She starts chemotherapy, but decides to not finish it, as she starts forgetting who people are, and sudden anger at times, and chooses to live authentically to the end of her life. By the final season, she comes to terms with her impending death, experiencing peace as she leaves, knowing everyone will be okay, and she achieved her final wish: seeing her son graduate.
Hall defines decoding as “the process where an audience member understands and interprets the originally encoded message.” He describes this through the three theories of participation: Dominant, Negotiated, and Oppositional. A Dominant reading may interpret Cathy’s journey as an empowering story of self-determination, appreciating her humour and her eventual reconciliation with mortality. A Negotiated reading might recognise the intended message, but questions if they show is realistic in portraying in terminal illness and the struggles that goes with it. An Oppositional reading could reject the portrayal entirely, seeing the show as an awful representation. This exemplifies Hall’s ideas that the audience will not have one singular viewpoint.
To further understand how meaning is encoded and decoded, Chandler’s book ‘Semiotics: The Basics’ (2022), introduced semiotics, which is “one way to study meaning-making and communication.” Semiotics place emphasis on how important ‘signs’ are, like in Big C, these are evident when Cathy has interactions with her family, her physical signs of her illness, and her bold actions, which audiences interpret these signs as her journey.
Today, with social media being easily accessible, various conversations are sparked between people online, and many different perspectives are seen on movies and series; therefore, Hall’s ideas are clear, and people interpret everything in various ways.
References:
Your Spiritual Revolution. (2025). What Does Buddhism Say About Suffering? [online] Available at: https://yourspiritualrevolution.org/blog/what-does-buddhism-say-about-suffering/
Hall, S. (1973). Encoding and Decoding in the television discourse – ePapers Repository. Bham.ac.uk. [online] doi: http://epapers.bham.ac.uk//id/eprint/2962/1/Hall%2C_1973%2C_Encoding_and_Decoding_in_the_Television_Discourse.pdf
The Big C (2010) Showtime, 16 August.
Chandler, D. (2022) Semiotics: The Basics (Routledge)
