Binary Opposition

Binary opposition :- opposites! easy right?

wrong!

however here are a few examples to get you going

GIRL - BOY
BLACK - WHITE
LIFE - DEATH
HAPPY - SAD
GOOD - EVIL

there you go, binary opposites.

So in most media we have these things, for instance in an action film we often have good and evil fighting it out.

in a romance, we have happiness and sadness, pre-empted obviously by love and no love.

So binary opposition is important in narratives to help the audience understand the plot or characters or the setting or anything really. Its basically another device used to help the audience decode the message, like intertextuality or semiotics.

So then the difference between the two opposites helps us understand the characters in a film for instance, if a character is bad then, and we introduce another character its the differences between the two that allow us to distinguish the latter as good.

the theory was penned by levi-strauss and barthes, two geezers that came up ALOT in my media A level.

and basically in laymens terms its a model to show that understanding one thing allows us to understand its opposite.

so then an example ive recently seen is (500) Days Of Summer




its calls itself "not a love film" but essentially it is.

Boy (tom) meets girl (summer)falls in love, they get together, things are good till she dumps him, she finds someone else, he is lonely, at the end he meets a new girl (autumn)

its a bit more complex than that, but im not gonna sit here and type out the entire plot.

Anyway then, the binary opposites in this are

LOVE - LONELINESS
GIRL - BOY
HAPPINESS - SADNESS
GOOD - EVIL

they are all pretty self explanatory, happiness and sadness are dependant on love and loneliness, and the girl is supposedly evil for dumping him, and the film follows him, so we empathise and see it from his point of view..

anyway these oppositions help us understand the narrative and the characters, but what happens if the film maker messes around with them..

in (500) days of summer, although feeling empathy for tom in some scenes we do see things from summers point of view, this confuses the audience and makes the film on a whole alot deeper experience, allowing for more of an emotional response from the viewer.

This kind of technique is put to really good use in certain films, take the villain in Terminator 2 a cold ruthless bad guy, we are terrified of him, because he is just that bad.. simply bad. And this works really well, however when compared to the dark knight, a film in which in some scenes the roles are reversed and we almost see batman becoming the bad guy and the joker becoming the good guy in some cases. The audience begins to doubt themselves, and in my opinion this is more frightening.





Nolan does this again with the good and bad in Inception, we see the main character throughout the film, slowly becoming more scary as we discover nasty secrets about his past, and the villain we see become more frail and actually we feel quite sorry for him by the end. Its a strange technique but it works really well and adds alot more depth to the film.

Not to mention the potential to plant twists and the such, if you can get the audience to think the understand a character using binary opposites, then suddenly shatter that understand, it leaves a pretty shocking twist.

Most recently the twist using this exact same technique at the end of Predators worked well I think..



I wont spoil it, but basically at the end one of the human characters goes ape shit, and it turns out to be a bad guy, then a predator actually helps the good human escape the planet.. shit I just ruined it!

BUT what a role reversal, a complete switch in binary opposites, mental!!

although I will admit, it was pretty cringe worthy in this film when they were all banging on about how they actually were bad in their real lives, yet they were the good guys in the film, basically using binary opposition alone to make a character complex doesnt work, needs a bit more than that! ho har!

(I didnt understand what I meant in that last paragraph either, its just rambling though, so forget it!)

anyway. So binary opposition, is a very useful tool indeed, and indeed we couldnt live without it much like semiotics and intertextuality.