My Thriller Production Buried Evaluation Question 2 - How does your media product represent particular social groups?

BY THOMAS CUTMORE

How Gender is represented in our media product.

In our production, we attempted to represent our characters in stereotypical ways. We presented the male gender with Michael (Connor) in the male archetypical villain, such as John Doe out of Se7en. We did this by representing him in the male genre as the more powerful, controlling, dominant male in the film, using his height as a weapon to make others seem small and weak against him such as the girlfriend Jess. We have used inspiration from other films such as Comedown, even though this film is classed as a horror, it represents the male killer in the same way as Michael. Our other male character however, Mason, is represented in a different way in gender. Our character Mason is represented as a smaller, more vulnerable character, challenging the gender stereotypes of tall, strong men. We represented Mason in this way as we wanted to challenge the stereotype convention of a male gender to show that not all men are strong and that they may not be able to defend the ones they love. In representing our female character we developed some of the stereotypical conventions of thriller films with women, in this we mean that in thrillers where women are the victims, such as Marion Crane in Psycho who are very vulnerable to the killers. We used this to show how valuable females can be in these situations.

Representation of those who live in the margins

We represented Michael as a character living in the margins as he is seen as a misfit in society and also a shadow of someone else, making him seem that he was always beaten by someone else in his life at everything. We represented Michael in this way as we tried to show that murders and stalkers possibly operate in the activities they do because of rivalry and how they may feel that theyre a shadow of another person. We have also represented hoodies as people living in the margins as they are seen to be the folk devil, the person who is seen that people have a fear around because of how the media portrays them. We tried to reinforce this negative attitudes towards this specific social group as we wanted to reinforce the fear that people feel towards hoodies and show the reality of what could happen in situations such as ours in our film.

How Ethnicity is represented in our thriller product.

Our film represents the ethnicity as a non multi cultural as all our characters are all portraying white British. We chose to portray this as we wanted to show the danger of our race in modern day Britain and reinforce the danger of who lurks within the streets.

Representation of British Youth

We represented British youth as dangerous and a paranoid way. In this we represented the couple as victims of Michael, showing that the youth can be vulnerable victims to others, showing how easily young couples can be targeted by murders. We represented the British youth as a paranoia. We displayed this through the predatory instinct of the youth is vulnerable to, for example; - we used this in the city as Michael is a predator to Jess, he stalks her and follows her, lurking until he has his chance to kill her. We portrayed also portrayed modern British youth as a corrupt age. We displayed this through Michael as we portrayed him as a mysterious and enigmatic character, referencing to the stereotypical murders you see and hear about in youth crimes today. We also portrayed the British youth as corrupt as we show how teenagers/young adults commit such crimes that would be expected older generations to commit. We have taken some conventions from thrillers to help us show this corruption in British youth, we used/researched from films such as This is England and Fish Tank (to show how the teenagers take hold of life so quickly into adult life and also showing the corruptions that people have because of this transformation.)