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men) will be attractive to seductive, beautiful women like the one on display. As this example illustrates, semiotics is especially useful in analyzing popular cul‑ ture. Other examples of the kinds of pop-culture sign systems semioticians often examine might include pictorial ads in magazines, popular dances, Disneyland, roller derby, Barbie dolls, automobiles, and, to use two examples analyzed by the famous semiotician Roland Barthes, professional wrestling and the striptease. Here’s a simplified summary of Barthes’ semiotic analysis of professional wres‑ tling. He argues that professional wrestling (the brand of wrestling in which the contestants use pseudonyms like Gorgeous George or Haystacks Calhoun, dress in costume, and orchestrate the match in advance) can be viewed as a sign system. It can be interpreted as a language with a very specific purpose: to provide the audience with the cathartic satisfaction of watching justice triumph in a situation that (unlike life) makes it very clear who is good and who is evil. This purpose is revealed in the structural similarities of the matches, regardless of who the contestants are: for example, (1) each wrestler is a clear type (cleancut All-American, mean-tempered slob, barbarous evildoer, and so on); (2) each match contains contestants who—by their type, their behavior during a par‑ ticular match, or both—can be clearly identified as the “good guy” and the “bad guy”; and (3) each match ends with the triumph of goodness over evil. The match, Barthes further observes, greatly resembles the spectacle of ancient Greek theatre, as the wrestlers act out their pain, despair, or triumph with exag‑ gerated gestures and grimaces. The exhibition of suffering, defeat, and justice is thus the purpose of the spectacle. The signs we read in order to come to this conclusion include the names, physiques, and costumes of the contestants; their body language in the ring (strutting, cowering, swaggering, menacing, placat‑ ing, and the like); and their facial expressions (smug, outraged, proud, horrified, triumphant, defeated, and so on). It doesn’t matter that the contest is rigged because its purpose is not to determine who is the better wrestler but to enact the kind of spectacle different versions of which have for centuries provided the public with the vicarious release of anger, fear, and frustration. Now let’s take a look at some of the theoretical concepts underlying semiotic analyses like the one just summarized. Semiotics recognizes language as the most fundamental and important sign system. As we saw in our discussion of structural linguistics, a linguistic sign is defined as a union of signifier (soundimage) and signified (concept to which the signifier refers). For semiotics, too, sign = signifier + signified. However, as we just saw, semiotics expands the signi‑ fier to include objects, gestures, activities, sounds, images—in short, anything that can be perceived by the senses. Clearly, semiotics gives the signifier a wide range of possibilities. However, of the three recognized classes of signs—index,
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