AS Media Q2

How does your media product represent particular social groups?

 My film is a film that features middle class people such as the doctor and his partner, and a lower class person (Mr Jones). This may mean that the film appeals to a wider range of audiences but it is not a given. My film represents middle class people as very helpful and respectable people who may have a dark side and lower class people as unable and in need of assistance. My film represents males as uncontrollable with animalistic characteristics. Within the first few minutes, there are only three main characters, two of which are males, and they both either plot the murder or carry it out. As for the female, she is murdered and seems to be helpless in preventing the travesty. As is the case in the majority of thrillers the woman is killed first and is portrayed as incredibly weak and powerless, meaning that my film conforms to this general unwritten rule. As for the age of my characters, the hypnotist is a middle-aged man, the patient is a young man in his early twenties, and the victim is a middle-aged woman also. Generally, the people in society with the most power are those who are middle-class, middle-aged, white males; a very specific category that the hypnotist very clearly falls under. This means that my film conforms with hegemony in the sense that the idea of the doctor who happens to fit all the categories which classes someone as powerful and more dominant, is the doctor who is more in control over people and can decide between life and death. The characters all seem to be heterosexual meaning that once again, they will be more powerful and this agrees with hegemony which states that heterosexual people are more powerful than bisexuals or homosexuals. The doctor and the patient are both Caucasian which is the dominant ethnicity and are the two powerful and dangerous people in the film.
 Within my film, I have very much portrayed the most dominant group in terms of hegemony to be the most powerful people in my film. This is because I wanted to conform to hegemony in my film so that the audience would be given a very subtle clue as to who would be the hero and villain before actually finding out for themselves. I would say that I have been extremely stereotypical in my film because I have carefully tried to use hegemony to hint at what was going to happen as the film went on. This is very deliberately stereotyped as I thought people would find it easier to follow if the story had the general similarities to other thrillers that had the obvious villains and heroes.