MEDIA QUESTION 1B: REPRESENTATION AND IDENTITY

INTRODUCTION: For A2 Media I was part of a group who created

a surreal, arthouse-thriller film entitled Reflection which represented
the negative effect the media have on women, particularly young
girls.
LAURA MULVEY: MALE GAZE THEORY
Laura Mulvey states that we view films from a
males perspective (whether we are male or not)
leading to the female character becoming an
object of visual pleasure rather that an
important subject within the film. Within
Reflection we both challenge and abide by this
theory: Our film is viewed from a female
perspective which challenges the typical
alignment of Hollywood films as our film breaks
the fourth wall allowing the audience to place
themselves in a similar way to the doll/young
girl views herself. However, the young girl
judges herself from the perspective of a male
looking at her (through male gaze) sticking to
the concept of the theory and therefore
portraying her as more of an object.
JEAN KILBOURNE: BODY IMAGE IN THE MEDIA
When planning how we intended to represent females in our film we
read an article by Jean Kilbourne about body image in the media and
found how in one of her surveys nearly half of 9-12 year old girls said
they wanted to be thinner and had either been on a diet or were
aware of them. We included this shocking finding in our film by
including the line How to lose weight, dont eat! to represent how
effected young girls have become due to the pressure from the media
to look a certain way and to portray a common insecurity for most
females, whatever age. Although representing females as insecure
could be seen as negative, we use the shock factor (and the deeper
messages out arthouse audience will look for) to align the audience
with our female characters through sympathy, therefore allowing
negativity to be directed towards the media industry.
FEMALES IN THE FILM INDUSTRY:
From research, I found that female characters only accounted for 15%
of protagonists in the 100 highest grossing films of 2013 and as our
film aims to challenge the typical representations (particularly of
women) in media/film, we made our characters, including our main
character, female. Our protagonist could be seen as the voice of the
little girl who taunts the doll: creating her negative emotions and
overall controlling how she responds. However, our characters goals
are based on beauty and are therefore less major leading to her
weaker personality, stopping her from becoming a leader figure which
could stop her from being a protagonist and becoming more of an
antagonist. As we play on the typical way which media represents
women and with the knowledge of media our active arthouse
audience will already have, this similarity to a more Hollywood
representation of women could be seen as ironic and metaphorical for
the more empowering roles of women needed within the industry.
CULTIVATATION THEORY:
Cultivation theory argues that images which
portray women who match the socio-cultural
idea of beauty are more prevalent in the media
and that repetitive exposure to such images
influences womens ability to understand that
such standards are unrealistic. To represent this
perfect image which females have become
accustomed to we included the character of the
doll as an arthouse audience will be able to
decode meanings from this: a fake, plastic body
which if often described as perfect despite
how completely impossible it is for a woman to
match up. The doll itself represents women as
popular media does they are skinny, pretty and
have no identifiable goals. The doll in our film
does not even have her own mind as she is
controlled by the voices in her head telling her
who she should be (as women in reality are
controlled by the media). We represent the
repetitive messages (a part of the cultivation
theory) through the TV screen displaying words
such as skinny, pretty and the more
aggressive be pretty, be pretty, be pretty!.
THE USE OF MIRRORS/TV SET:
Through the use of mirrors we play with Barthes cultural codes to
represent women as vanity objects and create a connection between
females and an obsessive desire to be pretty. Mirrors can be decoded
by an arthouse audience to represent an object designed to show
beauty with no other purpose, metaphorically and negatively
representing women. We also included TV sets to bring attention to
how the media impacts and causes this desire among women to
directly maintain an alignment against the media industry and
therefore with the young girl. We drew on the TV with lipstick to
include connotations of how edited and photo shopped the images
which normally represent how a woman should be and the images
they often judge themselves on.
CONCLUSION:
Overall, our film aims to ironically represent
women in a similar way to popular media as well
as challenge it, leading to them being portrayed
in both negative and positive ways.