Inbetweeners

Ben Palmer 2011

Representation

AGE

• Immature
• Wants sex
• Social awkward
• Elders are mean to younger in banter
• Education

ETHNICITY

• English orientated
• Friendly locals abroad
• No black/Asian people in film

GENDER

• Males talk a lot about sex
• Mothers caring
• Women objectified
• Dominated by men

SOCIAL CLASS

• Drinking tea in big house
• Posh accent
• Civilised
• Traditional parenting

Social Class: Reinforcing cultural hegemony/dominant ideologies

Fish Tank (Andrea Arnold 2009)

HOW ARE WE INTRODUCED TO MAIN CHARACTER?

SIMILARITIES AND DIFFERENCES BETWEEN FISH TANK AND HARRY BROWN?



MEDIA EFFECTS

Do media representations of young people effect how they are perceived?

If so how does this effect occur?

• Hypodermic model - people believe everything they read or hear
• Cultivation theory - if you see enough violence amongst British youth the more likely you are to believe its happening.
• Copy Cat Theory - copy what you see in the media
• Moral Panic - Creates a panic within the society

Contemporary British Social Realism:

• Attempt to portray issues facing ordinary people in their social situations
• Try to show that society and the capitalist system leads to the exploitation of the poor or dispossessed.
• Groups shown as victims of the system rather than being totally responsible for their own bad behaviour.

Audience

• Aimed at a predominantly British audience

Questions to answer when analysis

• Who is being represented?
• Who is representing them
• How are they represented
• What are the intentions of it
• What is the dominant discourse
• What rang of readings are there?
• Look for alternative discourses

Collective Identity

• Media contributes to our sense of  'collective identity' but many different versions change over time
• Representations cause problems for the groups being represented

Stuart Hall 1980 (Active Audience Theory)

• Encoding and decoding is an active audience theory developed by Stuart Hall which examines the relationship between a text and its audience
• Encoding is the process by which a text is constructed by its producers
• Decoding is the process by which the audience reads, understands and interprets a text.

Any representation is a mixture of:

• The thing itself
• The opinions of others
• The reaction of an individual
• The context of the society in which the representation is taking place

Why do we stereotype?

• Media creates simplistic represenations which we find believable.