Sunday, 28 April 2013

Nasir Ahmad Evaluation Question 2

How does your media product represent particular social groups?

Our protagonist is the typical smart, fit and innocent looking “hitman”. We typically stereotyped him because our film is aimed at a mainstream audience, so keeping in line with the conventions of typical action and thrillers we thought it was necessary to have a typical “hitman”.
The protagonist is typically stereotyped because most action thrillers have a similar protagonist to ours. For example:



 

Our film opening represents men as hardworking and challenges the ideology of “the women taking care of the house”. This is because our film is about a man who is an employed by an undercover agency as an assassin. However, this assassin wants to leave his current employment because he knows his job involves a high risk of being killed and he knows he is the only one who provides for his disabled wife and unborn baby, so if anything was to happen to him his family will suffer. For this reason I believe that this protagonist is challenging the typical ideology of “women taking care of the house”. Firstly the protagonist is ready to sacrifice his experienced and wealthy career for the sake of his family, and partially because theoretically he looks after the house anyway. He looks after his disabled wife who is pregnant, provides for her, himself and the unborn baby. For this reason, the protagonist is seen as “taking care of the house” rather than women.
Other social groups which have been represented are: the group of criminals that cannot be recognised and the group of criminals that are typically stereotyped. For example:
















These are all people found guilty of some sort of crime, making them criminals. However one cannot recognise them as criminals from the way the dress and present themselves. Unlike this social group which is most commonly stereotyped as criminals but actually are not:


They look like criminals because of the ideology of how criminals have a similar dress code to this lot.


He is stereotyped as a criminal because of his body posture, his facial expressions and the chain around his neck.










To sum up, our typical stereotype protagonist is presented as a typical protagonist in a thriller movie because our movie is aimed at a mainstream audience and therefore we made sure he matched the typical conventions of a typical thriller protagonist. However our protagonist does challenge the ideology of “women taking care of the house”. This is not very obvious in the 21st century, but if this media was produced in an earlier century it would have been more noticeable.

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