Analyse media representation in one of your coursework productions

Representation

Analyse media representation in one of your coursework productions

Representations are a way in which media show audiences messages and values without them being aware they are. There are many different representations within media texts. I am going to analyse some theorists against my AS thriller opening.

David Chandler’s theory looks into the idea that “everything is a representation” whether we realise it or not. When creating our thriller all our ideas would have been representations that we have taken from real events that have been happing around us or that we have seen through the media. This means that that our idea would not have been completely original and our own idea instead would just be based around other images. If everything were a representation of everything then our thriller would be the same, as another thriller film except for they would be styled differently.

Bathes ‘myth’ suggests that audiences will look at the hyper real and see it as still being real. In our thriller opening even though we set the scenes as being realistic we still set them and dressed them to look a certain way meaning that actually its hyper real. This also links into Baudrillard’s ideas of how we live in a hyper real society and we are just simulations. This also links back to the thriller opening as our actors were portraying characters by what we told them to do, they portrayed ideas of people that we created. This means that even though opening was made to look realistic it was still all-hyper real none of it was real.

Berger’s theory states that “men act and women appear” which fits in well to our thriller opening as in our thriller opening we see more of the male characters then we do with the only female character. In the opening we only see the female for a few short moments, once when she is being kidnapped and again when she greets her husband returning from duty. We only see the character within the opening and do not know anything about her other than her relationship with her husband although this is not yet fully established more the audience has an idea of their relationship to one another. In the opening the men do definitely act more than the female and they are the two characters that push the story forward, however there would not be a story without the female character.

Lippmann’s theory looks at the idea of stereotypes. He states that “to have one yu need the other”. In my thriller opening we used the stereotypes of good vs evil and men being stronger than women.  In our opening we have a strong sense of good vs evil as we can see that the husband is trying to find out what has happened to his innocent wife and the audience can see he is the good character as he has not given up trying to find out what happened to her, where as with the kidnapper character we can tell he is the evil character as he is the one causing the disruption in the story. Our opening also played on the idea that men are stronger than women as we used the stereotypical storyline of a female being kidnapped by a male character as the males tend to be more dominant and powerful then females. 

Our thriller opening portrayed the stereotypical ideas of males being the more dominant than the females and that woman are in films to be seen as men act.