How does your media product represent particular social

groups?

Tom Carstairs

• The main character Dan is male. He is portrayed in our project through a mixture of emergent and dominant ideology. At first he is shown laughing on the sofa and proposing to his girlfriend, an ordinary set of events (i.e. a dominant ideology). He is also shown later as being emotionally cold (exhibited when Laura asks how he is and he asks to ‘cut to the chase’), a more traditionally ‘masculine’ role, although he is shown mourning his fiancé when laying a flower at her grave, and is visually affected when Laura claims that his father was involved in Suzie’s death.

Gender Representation

Firstly we used a dominant ideology of the girlfriend character Suzie who is proposed to and exhibits traditionally ‘feminine’ characteristics. While this could be seen as a residual ideology (due to her being relatively ‘passive’ within the relationship and not necessarily exhibiting some feminist qualities), it is generally the truth that men propose to women and isn’t an outdated view on women.

• Aside from the main character Dan, the three other characters were female, leading to different representations of women

throughout.

• For the female assassin character I believe that we had an alternative representation of women, at least in film. She is seen as remorseless and her occupation makes her quite different from the norm of the ‘Princess’ character (as noted by Propp), similarly to films such as Sin City and Girlfight which eschew traditionally female roles and put them in often violent or less feminine roles.

• The character Laura is also shown as an alternative representation of women, who are primarily portrayed as innocent secondary characters, instead here shown as the manipulative antagonist, not traditionally female in a film.

Age Representation• All of the characters

portrayed are teenagers (16 years old) and therefore representation of these characters is extremely important to the film. The two characters at the beginning (Dan and Suzie) are both shown as happy, fun individuals by laughing and participating in activities such as karaoke. However, a tipping point comes at Suzie’s death because, from then on, the characters are all represented as being more mature and focused on her death.

• However, it could still be seen that Dan is quite immature because he has become a vigilante carrying out an investigation in to his girlfriend’s death, something which, although grounded in reality, is still an

unusual thing to do, and perhaps this reflects on his age, connoting that he is not as mature as he would like to be.