Question 2 - How does your media product represent particular social groups?

Representation in film is the description or portrayal of someone or something in a particular way or as being of a certain nature. Stereotypes present incomplete, subjective and sometimes false images of reality.

Elliot Aronson, an American psychologist, says that stereotypes are used to attribute the identical features to each member of a certain group without taking the existing differences among the members into consideration (1972)

•Gender – females can sometimes stereotypically be presented as insecure, gossipy, jealous, and emotional…

•Age – Youth, bullying, outcast, peer pressure, Friendship groups, isolation, inexperienced in life

•Disability – Mental illness, unstable, abnormal, the ‘other’, paranoid, weird, avoidable, psycho

I think I have represented gender and age quite stereotypically in my film opening, in some ways this is a good thing because the media use stereotypes to drive a plot or an idea forward and make things clear to the audience. It is not necessarily that these stereotypes are true, however they make it more clear to the audience about what and who the themes and characters are. In the case of ‘Karma’ these stereotypes, along with the age stereotype are not represented very positively however as our film is a psychological thriller and is meant to be dark and hard hitting, this is quite a useful and important representation for our film. Age stereotypes also allowed us to show when the characters are in the flashback scenes as their younger selves, and when it is the present.

Disability however is represented not very stereotypically, and this idea is what my group and I used to our advantage to confuse the audience of who the mentally unstable character is. Through heavy, dark and creepy make-up for costume on the character Ivory, this leads the audience to think she is the mentally unstable character, also through her being the outcast and the ‘other’ as she is being bullied, however the audience find out later in the film that Mercy is the psychologically ill character and is imagining Ivory to look like this. We confuse the audience of this because she is the ring leader of the bullies and is the popular character in childhood. But later we discover she is mentally unstable, imagining people who aren’t there and being very paranoid. Another aspect of this is that we decided to indirectly represent Mercy as mentally unstable, so the audience have to decide for themselves what they believe, if she really is seeing these people and if Ivory really is out to get revenge on her, this is all a key aspect for my group to making ‘Karma’ a successful psychological thriller.