Question 2 draft

How does your media product represent particular social groups?

We challenge the gender stereotypes of the men being dominant and the women being the passive gender. We do this as although we do not get to see the killer we do however get to see that she is a woman. It is also shown by the woman killer holds a heavy rock above her head before smacking Donald over the head with it, which woman stereotypically do not lift heavy objects. Although the characters Rex and Donald followed the conventions of the men being dominant as they were arguing and being all boisterous and aggressive. Stereotypically both genders used to smoke heavily and everyone did it, in our film because not a single person smoked so we did not have anyone smoking in our film which went against conventions and stereotypes.

This links to the target audience of middle aged to elderly men as they can remember the olden days when men were the more dominant and how they grew up watching film noirs as a child and more generally when they were younger. The target audience will be able to relate to the film as they have seen and experienced how the people in the film act and their personality as that is what the audience would have been like or the people they knew would have been like.

We did not show the representation of race due to us only knowing white people who were willing to act. All of our characters are represented as middle class due to the costumes of them being shirts and ties and we find out that one of the characters is a detective which is regarded to be quite a middle class and respectable job. Although we went against stereotypes that the middle class are well spoken and well mannered as in one of the scenes we had some of the characters arguing and shouting, the character Rex then swore which is a lower class manner of speech.

We represented sexuality with the use of heterosexual relationships which also links into gender as stereotypically the men are the more dominant partner and this is shown with the use of narrative as we learn Donald was an abuse man who beat and abused his fiancee Kathy, and the woman partner tend to be the more passive partner and would let this abuse happen. Although the tables turn and Kathy becomes the dominant character and murders Donald.