Global Hollywood, Narrative Transparency, and Chinese Media Poachers: Narrating Cross-Cultural Negotiations of Friends in South China

Abstract

This paper offers a case study of the cross-cultural consumption of Friends (1994-2004, USA) in South China. It focused on media poachers, or people who use the sitcom in unauthorised or nonlegal ways, and strove for an interdisciplinary and internationalist understanding of global Hollywood. It deployed the qualitative method of in-depth and focus group interviews, both face-to-face and online, and critically surveyed media reception theories, from the effects tradition to the active reader paradigm. Scott Olsen’s theory of narrative transparency (1999) grounded the study’s theoretical premise; central to which is Olsen’s notion of ‘mythotypes’— that which render foreign media texts transparent for indigenous decoding and recoding and which in correspondingly throwing affective hooks at foreign audiences, kept them engaged. The case study revealed that the affective impact was neither uniform nor even: varying degrees of transparency and opacity indeed existed. This finding challenged Olsen’s assertion that affects were universal and therefore escaped culturally coded constraints.