Evaluation Question 2

How does your media product represent particular social groups?

Although our film is targeted at those aged fifteen and above, the film itself represents young adult/ couples around the age of twenty. We purposely chose actors that are quite mature looking, and as audience feedback from friends out of school shows, they look much older than seventeen years.

Female Status

We chose the main character to be female in order to reflect the change in women’s social status in Britain today. The female today is given much more importance than ever in the past and likewise, our sequence represents a young woman who is assertive and overpowering with the upper hand in the relationship between herself and her boyfriend. This is reflected in the telephone conversation where she says ‘you’re two minutes late!’ in her strong tone of voice where she seems extremely stern and demanding.

Looks
We chose our actress very carefully so that her striking looks including the bold brown eyes and curly dark brown hair, complements her strong personality. This was extremely important as a blue-eyed blonde actress for example, would not have represented this personality with the same effect as she is stereotypically seen to be the vulnerable victim. However, even then our protagonist is primarily represented as a passive object of the male through the nude shower scene where she is quite exposed.

Personality
The woman is also presented to be quite a sophisticated and feminine character and this is evident from the mis-en-scene:

- Largely lit by candles
- Elegant dress with red roses
- Carefully applied make-up
- Red nails

Here she represents a typical victim who is home alone and about to be murdered. On her dressing table however, everything is arranged in height order, which represents this young female adult as overly organised as well. This hints a slight strangeness in her personality which is emphasised when she says ‘you’re two minutes late’. Here we are representing those in society who suffer from psychological problems, which cause them to be extremely paranoid and in the long-run, lead to acts of violence. This is an underlining theme of our film, very much inspired by Psycho (Hitchcock, 1960) where character Norman Bates is represented to be an ordinary man but in fact turns out to be a complete psycho. Another character that inspired us to use a female was Alex Forrest played by Glenn Close in Fatal Attraction (Adrian Lyne, 1987) who seems like an ordinary woman at first but actually suffers from a form of obsessive condition. Likewise, our protagonist suffers from a similar mental illness, which is revealed at the start, and therefore the rest of the film gives an insight to such a woman’s life.

On the other-hand, the male character represents:

To break conventions we have represented the boyfriend with the virtues of a female.
Here we have represented the binary opposite of good versus evil through both characters and their contrasting intentions: Love and Murder

Being a British film, our film also represents people of Greek background as our actress is of this ethnicity. This goes to reflect the British society as being more and more multicultural. It also shows that it is not only the white woman that has equal status to that of a man, but women in general, despite their ethnicities have increased importance. The rest of the film would perhaps address elements of Greek culture more directly through more traditional mis-en-scene and the character’s lifestyle. This links in with our company name ‘Perspective Films’ which makes films to represent the perspective of people from a range of ethnicities and minority groups.