All media is constructed...
At the heart of all media studies is the idea that nothing that we consume as a text is completely ‘real’ – even documentaries and news have an element of being shaped and packaged to attempt to communicate certain messages. To put it crudely, media producers re-present information from its original form in order to pass it to an audience.
For us as media students, we concentrate on who has produced a text, what the text is saying and how it is saying it. Many different elements can be deconstructed and examined for us to form an opinion of the representations in a text - and part of understanding this process is understanding that a variety of interpretations can be held about every text.
Character Typing
Although the concept of representation applies to everything we see on the screen, the principle focus for our studies is the representation of people - examine how a viewer could read them.
Walter Lippman - Character typing - using shortcuts in the construction of characters to make meaning. Such as:
Archetype - a familiar character that has emerged from hundreds of years of story telling (hero, villain, trickster)
Stereotype - a very shallow representation of a type of person or social group, based on behaviours or appearance
A generic type - a character that is common in a genre (e.g. tired old detective in thrillers) This is often seen as negative or shallow, but there can also be a lot of creativity in subverting and playing with types.
Think of a film you’ve watched recently. Can you categorise the characters from that film using this theory? Find a scene and categorise the characters using this theory.
-Archetype
hero=Shrek
princess= Princess Fiona
guide/trusted companion = donkey
villain= Lord Farquaad/ the Fairy Godmother
Stereotype
Shrek doesn't stick to the stereotypes of a hero (people usually want money or whatever for rescuing princesses but he just wants his swamp back, hes not pretty- hes an ogre but he challenges this and you see how hes nice.
No time to die - 2021:
Archetype - James Bond is the hero.
Stereotype - Spy stereotype - handsome, debonair womaniser, drinks a lot
Generic Type - Jet setting spy with no remorse or attachments - subverted by creating a romantic attachment
Laura Mulvey - Objectification of women
Laura Mulvey (1975) – Objectification of women in the media. Mulvey suggested that women are presented as sex objects in all media texts, but she focused her research on film in particular.
She believed that women are positioned so that the female body is objectified in order to provide erotic pleasure for heterosexual men and this is known as the ‘male gaze’. Mulvey suggested that women also accept the male gaze owing to the fact that it is constantly reinforced across media texts.
Comparison on the representation of women and how its changing:
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