Question 2: Representations

For out final media text we used a variety of stereotypes and also countertypes shown in our characters.

Main Character from PiP.

Our main character was an outsider. To demonstrate this we purposely chose someone with ginger hair, as this is normally a hair colour associated with a social outsider. An example of how this has been used in existing media texts is Pretty in Pink (Deutch, 1986). The main character, Andie Walsh, has ginger hair and her friendship group only consists of two other people. She is also seen to be teased by a blonde bully, also similar to our character.

Lauren in her costume

The character wore a long flowing cardigan, something that's not very fashionable. We chose to use this as part of her character's costume as it was a article of clothing that hasn't been very popular since last decade, we wanted to use this as it would contrast nicely with the relative 'trendy-ness' of her rival and her love interest.

The NASA T-Shirt

We decided to make the romantic interest wear something that was quite plain. He wore mostly dark colours, which made us worry in case, as stuart hall suggests, there was an oppositional reading towards his character and he was seen as recluse. We decided to try and steer the audience away from this reading by using his hat, a bowler hat, which is not associated with recluse people as it was quite quirky. We also added a poster in his room, of a slogan from a NASA t-shirt we found online. By using this we help to signify that he is somewhat nerdy and also quirky. We also anchored the preferred reading of him being a nerd by having him wear glasses.

The Poster

However, we were now worried that he would now have an oppositional reading of being unpopular and so we added in the parts where he high fived the teachers, solved their equations and passed someone in a corridor, with the person they passed looking back at him.


Our third main character was popular and somewhat bullied our main character. By introducing her with the shock of the main character slamming into the lockers, we made it clear that she was a bully. We made sure to tell the actress to continue walking, without looking back, to help anchor how she was a bully. We wanted this character to wear clothes that somewhat contrasted with out main character, so we had her wear a skirt along with leggings, to contrast with the trousers worn by the main character. We also had her wear a jacket/cardigan. The jacket doesn't quite contrast with the main character, as it could be seen as a cardigan. This is because we wanted to signify that there was some similarities between the two.  She was also blonde, which helped to signify that she was popular, something that would obviously be anchored at a point later in the movie, and more socially accepted than her ginger counterpart.

Comparing the two character's (the main character and the love interest's girlfriend) outfits, you can see that the main character is wearing bright, colourful clothes, whereas the 'bully' is wearing dark clothes. We used the colourfulness of each of the characters clothes to help signify that they were enemies. With the colourful clothes showing the main character's goodness, and the dark showing the badness.

As well as countertypes and stereotypes of gender, hair colour and social class, points that can be drawn from our movie opening is the lack of ethnic minorities, with our cast being 100% caucasian some critics may see it as subtle racism, like they did with Richard Curtis' Rom-Coms. The choice for an entirely caucasian cast was one we were stuck with, as a result of the area in which we live having so few non-caucasians, we had to mostly cast caucasian people.

Another point is that all our characters in the opening are heterosexual. We made this choice as a reflection of normative representation. Because, but increeasingly less so in our modern day society, the very large majority of people are heterosexual people and in our consuming of media texts we see mostly heterosexual people, it made sense to make it a heterosexual couple, this would make the situations in the film far more relatable to the major target audience, heterosexual teen/young adult girls.

The comic that started the bechdel test

We tried to avoid falling into the trap that is the male gaze theory, where the women we show in our movie are merely objects and not developed people. One example from our movie in which we could be percieved as objectifying women was the shot through Lauren's legs, this would be seen as showing them off and creating her into an object there for the attraction of men. As our movie stands, the opening on it's own, we have failed the Bechdel Test, a form of feminine critique that tests for gender bias.
As my group was mixed gender, we were very consious about conforming to what is called the 'patriarchal' viewpoint, that is to say, we were careful to avoid the inclusion of objectifying women, just having them there for their looks and general exploiting of them for commercial gain. However, with us all being fortunate enough to have not encountered much extreme sexism, it was hard for us to consider what might upset people who may have been victims to such sexism, which is why we played it safe and only included a minimal amount of shots where we could be seen as objectifying the women in our film opening.