A Comparison Of Media Images Between The Old And The New Versions Of House Of Cards From The Perspective Of Semiotics

The self-made TV-series House of cards, produced by American video website Netflix, has been quite popular since its broadcasting. In fact, it was adapted from the BBC TV-series of the same name which was produced in the year 1990. Though Netflix’s House of Cards followed lots of plots and shooting techniques of the BBC version, these two television works of more than 20 years apart without any doubt differentiated from each other in many aspects, in which, the differences in the narration of media story and media image building stand out.The tons of research in remaking phenomenon in the past years mostly focused on the problems of "why it becomes popular" or "what communication effects does it brings", lacking the study of the specific content between the two versions. Although media belongs to the highest exposure list on the screen, there aren’t abundant literature of the research on the media image on the screen. Most of which are more like film review or self-examination articles, other than research paper in professional angle. This paper tries to combine the foresaid two aspects, focusing on finding out the differences of the media story between the remake version and the original one of House of Cards.In the first season of both the two versions, the media story part mainly followed a narrative clue of a female reporter. By telling the story of the reporter herself as well as what happened between she and the other characters, the two dramas showed different kinds of media environment to the audience. So, what exactly are the differences between the images of the female reporters in the two dramas? What are the differences of the whole media environment related to the images presented in the two dramas? How did those differences reflect themselves? And what are the reasons causing these differences? These are the questions this paper aims to answer.The main body of the thesis consists of four chapters. The first of which "The introduction of the story and the choosing of study text" aims at introducing the whole continent of two versions of House of Cards, then extracting the "media" clue for special analysis in the following part. This part of the thesis firstly introduces the general continent and background of the two dramas, then analyzes the narrators and narratees of the two dramas respectively. After which, by using Grey Maas’s semiotic approach, it tries to find out the core connotation and inside meaning of House of Cards and the exact position in the meaning square of each main roles. Based on the analysis of narration about the media part, it then extracts the this part of story, and chooses the narrative clue of the female journalists, who are the core characters of media part in both the two dramas, for following specific analysis. The time of this complete clue begins at the character’s first appearance and ends at her final death. And the continent of this clue contains the story about female reporter herself, her workmates, the media organization and environment she worked in and the interactive relationship between her and the politician.The second chapter is the semiotic analysis of the female reporter clue extracted in the last part of the above chapter. Using the narrative semiotics theory for reference, this chapter puts its hand to three aspects, the story plot, the "people" in the story and the space in the story, comparing the narrative differences between two kinds of text on the part of the media.The analysis in the second chapter is mainly based on the plots and the dialog in the story. However, films and television works, differentiating with writing art such as novel, belong to some kind of multimodal discourse art. They have so many more methods to portray characters and express meanings. Therefore, the third chapter picks three couples of similar scenes from the two dramas, trying to find out how does the dramas express their own meanings by using all kinds of methods including frames and sounds.The fourth chapter is an abstract and summary based on the specific analysis in the above two parts. It separates the media differences related to the narration of the chosen clue into four parts, media technology, media organization, media practitioners and the the interactive relationship between media and politics. Following these four aspects it summarizes the differences of media images between the two dramas. Then it tries to solve the problem of "How come". Through analysis, three aspects of reasons may attributes to the above differences--the development of media technology, the trans-cultural narration, the director’s personal preferences and the text length.