G325: SECTION A Theoretical Evaluation of Production

Question 1(b) requires candidates to select one production and evaluate it in relation to a media concept. The list of concepts to which questions will relate is as follows:
 Genre  Narrative  Representation  Audience     Media language 

In the examination, questions will be set using one of these concepts only.

  

 Representation

At AS, I made Zest, a comic film in the style of Bridget Jones, Angus Thongs and Perfect Snogging and PS I Love You. All these films have two things in common: they are 'rites of passage' films about young people struggling with various degrees of success to fit into the adult world and they are diary-like in their narrative form.

 

In our film, an Australian gap year student comes to work in Britain at a restaurant called Zest in the affluent and leafy Surrey suburbs where she is infuriated by the obstreperous customers and the eccentric, obsessive chef who models himself on Heston Blumenthal.

  

I have chosen to analyse Zest as it offers many excellent examples of stereotypes as well as the protagonist who represents a Australian teenager and gap year student. Comic stereotyping is the key to understanding representation in our AS film because it uses stereotypes almost as a sitcom does to short cut to audience understanding: we sympathise with the young Australian Dani because of the customers that she has to handle. 

 

For example, our representations include two loutish, ill-mannered, heavy-metal biker boys who behave as if they are Ozzy Osborne and who scorn etiquette. They sneer at the menu ("Why are there are no bats on the menu?") as if they are prepared to show off doing outrageous things like their heavy metal super hero Ozzy, who reputedly bit the head off a live bat on stage. They put their feet up on the table, ignoring polite manners. For Dick Hebdige, clothing and music codes signal membership of specific subcultures (such as the Mods and Rockers); our two biker boys wear specific clothing codes such black leather jackets, heavy square-toed boots and neck tattoos with Chinese symbols.The tattoos are supposed to be threatening: they are intended to evoke gangland membership such as the criminal underworld of Chinese gangs, just the sort of decoration that these two boys would have wanted in order to seem more aggressive and hard than they actually are. 

 

They are represented as rather star-struck when they comment " Well, Freddie Star ate a hamster", an intertextual reference to the singer and comedian who made the headlines when he reputedly teased his shocked girlfriend. This incident conferred life-long notoriety on Freddie Starr. We use it to support our representation of two boys who embody Andy Warhol's prediction about society's obsession with celebrity culture that "in the future everyone will be famous for 15 minutes."