Online Film Review: McDull‧ Me & My Mum

McDull‧ Me & My Mum is a film which was released on 1 October 2014. It was written and directed by Brian Tse. The story is mainly describing the family love between McDull’s mum and McDull.

The disparity between the characteristics of real Hong Kong people and the characters of McDull is obvious. However, McDull is considered as one of the local cultural symbols and the criticism of the current environment by many Hong Kong people. McDull is the pleasure of urban people, who is not smart, rich or any other element which Hong Kong people are now striving every day. He is simple and innocent as always.

To understand the powerful influence of McDull to the Hong Kong people, the theory of articulation is useful. Articulation is indicating that a form of the connection making a unity of two different elements, under certain conditions (Cheung, 2015). Simply put, the articulation of a text cannot guarantee the effect to the audiences. These are all depending on the viewing practices and activities which have been affected by cultural contexts wherein the viewers live though (Cheung, 2015).

McDull is always complying with the others and the changes. It is not difficult to notice the pictures of Hong Kong in all McDull’s films: Hong Kong is ever changing and developing. From the first film McDull as My Life in 2001 to the latest film McDull‧ Me & My Mum in 2014, the audiences would always find many busy-working cranes all over the city. As same as McDull, Hong Kong people get used to compromising to the ever-changing living environment. They would just accept it. There are three hypothetical positions of decodings, including dominant-hegemonic position (viewers are operating in the dominant code), negotiated position (operate through situated logics) and oppositional position (operate within some alternative framework of reference) (Hall, 2010). Hong Kong people consider McDull’s reaction to the changing environment is making sense because this is what the mass is really doing. The code is within the dominant-hegemonic position. Thus, Hong Kong people believe that the film is presenting the truth and their daily life. This is a case showing a effective decoding process of the audience of a message.

But sometimes the messages the sender sending to the receiver would have gaps between sender’s intention and receiver’s understanding. It is mainly because of the cultural context. The environment is not absolute all the time, the recent incident can also be considered as one of the variations which alters the receiver’s understanding, such as the living or political environment. The place where McDull and his mum lives in the film is the representation of old Hong Kong. The film just indicated that it is a small town which has small population and is located near the sea. The life of the people living there is simple: rush to buy Mark Six, bargain with food seller in the market, work hard and harder… These are all the descriptions of the old generation’s living environment. Thus audiences with different cultural context, such as age, would have different ways in decoding the film’s messages. Young people may hardly understand the helplessness and sadness of the old generation who had really experienced the speed that the old Hong Kong is disappearing. Young people may only notice the funny scenes in the film.

Reference:

Hall, S. (2010). Encoding, Decoding 1. Social Theory: Power and identity in the global era, 2, 569-599.

Cheung, F. (2015). Cultural production and consumption in global context: TV dramas as examples [PowerPoint Slide].

Student Name: Ho Pui Lam
Student Number: 21423119