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Singin' in the Rain:
greimas
A.J. Greimas' 'semiotic square' (Greimas, 1977) is a structuralist explanation of meaning construction in narrative. Simply, and rather schematically, it suggests that a narrative will be organised around a pair terms whose relation will, in the first instance, be oppositional, and in the second negational. These units are labelled 'semes' by Greimas.
Derived from Greimas, 1977.
The work of the narrative will be to describe, or perform, the movement between these terms and these terms provide the basic structure of any particular narrative, or narrative episode. As Hawkes glosses:
The differences we discern between these basic 'semes' involve, at an elementary level, four terms, seen as two opposed pairs, which our 'structuring' perception requires us to recognize in the following form: A is opposed to B as -A is to -B. In short, the 'elementary structure' involves recognition and distinction of two aspects of an entity: its opposite and its negation. We see B as the opposite of A and -B as the opposite of -A, but we also see -A as the negation of A and -B as the negation of B. (Hawkes, 88.)
Rimmon-Kenan, on Greimas, writes:
Greimas puts into play two kinds of opposed semes (the 'seme' being the minimal unit of sense): contradictories and contraries. Contradictories (A v. not-A) are created when one seme (or - in logic - one proposition) negates the other, so that they cannot both be true and they cannot both be false. They are mutually exclusive and exhaustive (e.g. 'white' v. 'non-white'). Contraries, on the other hand (A v. B) are mutually exclusive but not exhaustive (e.g. 'white' v. 'black'). They cannot both be true, though they might both be false . . . Replacing 'A' and 'B' by 'S1' and 'S2' (the 'S' standing for 'seme'), Greimas presents the 'semiotic square' thus:
In Singin' in the Rain the general structure of the film can be understood in relation to the opposition of silent to singing cinema, while the "You Were Meant for Me" sequence revolves around an opposition of illegitimate and legitimate love.
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