Director : Ben Palmer 2011
Representation of the Inbetweeners
The representation of:
- Age
- They are teenagers and therefore going through lots of different problems and issues
- The language that they use is typical for boys their age
- The type of holiday they are about to go on represents their ages
- The way that there parents talk to them is very different
- The subjects that they talk about are quite explicit
- They have just left school which represents their age
- Ethnicity
- Mainly white British
- Gender
- The way that they speak represents their gender because they refer to women as sexual objects and they talk about alcohol
- The way they speak about the other sex is very vulgar
- The subjects that they talk about represent their gender
- The way that there parents talk about the other sex embarrasses them
- Social Class & Status
- There middle class and therefore they do not live rough or in a rough place this then represents the way that they behave
- Where they live and go to school it does not represent violence and they seem more respectful towards other people
- They way that they talk and their accent shows that they are middle class
- The target audience is also of a similar class
- The fact they are even going on holiday reflects that they must have a decent amount of money
- They depend on their parents for money
- The fact that Neil has a job reflects social class
- Will even states that the places where he lives is very safe, suburban and secure
Social class ; Reinforcing Cultural Hegemony/Dominant Ideologies
- Working class British youths are generally presented as being violent, brutal, unapologetic, criminals, addictive personalities - Harry Brown. Kidulthood, Quadrophenia, Eden Lake
Vs
- Middle class British youths are generally presented as being more law abiding, conscience citizens - The Inbetweeners
- On top of this the antagonists are always the working class youths and middle class adults are positioned to be the protagonists
Director : Andrea Arnold
Representation of Fish Tank
How are the characters represented into the film?
-Social class
-Hoodies
-Rough estate
-Bad language
-Violence
-Bad parenting
-You see her more as the victim
-Similar filming technique to Harry Brown
-Shows a 'Broken Britain'
-Female protagonist
-The environment has forced her to behave like this
-Working class
Media effects
- Hypodermic model : The media injecting their ideas into our society
- Cultivation theory : The more you see the negative side to youths through the media, the more you believe it is realistic
- Copy cat theory : You are so influenced by what you see in films, you then copy that
- Moral Panic : What you see in the media then scares you because you then think that this will actually happen, youths are seen as the antagonists and the older citizens as the protagonists
Comtempory British Social Realism
- Social realist films attempt to portray issues facing ordinary people in their social situations
- Social realist films try to show that society and the capitalist system leads to the exploitation of the poor
- These groups are shown as victims, rather than being totally responsible for their own bad behaviour
Audience
- Social realist films which address social problems in this country offer a very different vision of 'collective identity' than British films which are also aimed at an American audience
- Social realist films are aimed at a predominantly British audience
- If many more people see more commerical films, consider which vision of our collective identity is the more powerful or has the most impact.
Analysing Representation of Collective Identity
Questions you should consider when comparing how our Britishness and our collective identity is represented in films:
- Who is being represented?
- Who is representing them?
- How are they represented?
- What seems to be the intentions of the representations?
- What is the dominant discourse?
- What range of readings are there?
- Look for alternative discourses
Collective Identity
- The media contributes to our sense of 'collective identity; but there are many different versions that change over time
- Representations can cause problems for the groups being represented because marginalised groups have little control over their representation / stereotyping
- The social context in film/TV programme is made influences the messages/values/dominant discourse of the film
Encoding - Decoding (Stuart Hall, 1980)
Active Audience Theory
- Encoding - Decoding is an active audience theory developed by Stuart Hall which examines the relationship between a text and its audience
- Encoding is the process by which a text is constructed by its producers
- Decoding is the process by which the audience reads, understands and interprets a text
- Hall states that texts are polysemic, meaning they may be read differently by different people, depending on their identity, cultural knowledge and opinions
Preferred Reading/ Dominant Hegemic
Negotiated Reading
Oppositional Reading/ 'Counter-hegemonic'
A representation is a mixture of :
1. The thing itself
2. The opinions of the people doing the representation
3. The reaction of the individual to the rerpesentation
4. The context of the society in which the representation is taking place
Stereotyping
- Why do we sterotype?
- We can put people into voxes and label them as certain characters
- The fact that we naturally see the world in this kind of shorthand way, with conenctions between different characters traits, allows the media to creat esimplistic representations which we find believable. Implicit personality theory explains this process...
- As soon as we meet someone we are making quick judgements of the person
- We categorise people into types, to simplify the task of person perception
- If we encounter someones in reality or in the media who seems to fit neatly into the prototype, we feel reassured. It confirms our stereotyped veiw - we do not need to think further
- It is almost as if we conspire with the media to misunderstand the world
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