INTRODUCTION: For A2 Media I was part of a group who created
a surreal, arthouse-thriller film entitled Reflection which represented the negative effect the media have on women, particularly young girls. LAURA MULVEY: MALE GAZE THEORY Laura Mulvey states that we view films from a males perspective (whether we are male or not) leading to the female character becoming an object of visual pleasure rather that an important subject within the film. Within Reflection we both challenge and abide by this theory: Our film is viewed from a female perspective which challenges the typical alignment of Hollywood films as our film breaks the fourth wall allowing the audience to place themselves in a similar way to the doll/young girl views herself. However, the young girl judges herself from the perspective of a male looking at her (through male gaze) sticking to the concept of the theory and therefore portraying her as more of an object. JEAN KILBOURNE: BODY IMAGE IN THE MEDIA When planning how we intended to represent females in our film we read an article by Jean Kilbourne about body image in the media and found how in one of her surveys nearly half of 9-12 year old girls said they wanted to be thinner and had either been on a diet or were aware of them. We included this shocking finding in our film by including the line How to lose weight, dont eat! to represent how effected young girls have become due to the pressure from the media to look a certain way and to portray a common insecurity for most females, whatever age. Although representing females as insecure could be seen as negative, we use the shock factor (and the deeper messages out arthouse audience will look for) to align the audience with our female characters through sympathy, therefore allowing negativity to be directed towards the media industry. FEMALES IN THE FILM INDUSTRY: From research, I found that female characters only accounted for 15% of protagonists in the 100 highest grossing films of 2013 and as our film aims to challenge the typical representations (particularly of women) in media/film, we made our characters, including our main character, female. Our protagonist could be seen as the voice of the little girl who taunts the doll: creating her negative emotions and overall controlling how she responds. However, our characters goals are based on beauty and are therefore less major leading to her weaker personality, stopping her from becoming a leader figure which could stop her from being a protagonist and becoming more of an antagonist. As we play on the typical way which media represents women and with the knowledge of media our active arthouse audience will already have, this similarity to a more Hollywood representation of women could be seen as ironic and metaphorical for the more empowering roles of women needed within the industry. CULTIVATATION THEORY: Cultivation theory argues that images which portray women who match the socio-cultural idea of beauty are more prevalent in the media and that repetitive exposure to such images influences womens ability to understand that such standards are unrealistic. To represent this perfect image which females have become accustomed to we included the character of the doll as an arthouse audience will be able to decode meanings from this: a fake, plastic body which if often described as perfect despite how completely impossible it is for a woman to match up. The doll itself represents women as popular media does they are skinny, pretty and have no identifiable goals. The doll in our film does not even have her own mind as she is controlled by the voices in her head telling her who she should be (as women in reality are controlled by the media). We represent the repetitive messages (a part of the cultivation theory) through the TV screen displaying words such as skinny, pretty and the more aggressive be pretty, be pretty, be pretty!. THE USE OF MIRRORS/TV SET: Through the use of mirrors we play with Barthes cultural codes to represent women as vanity objects and create a connection between females and an obsessive desire to be pretty. Mirrors can be decoded by an arthouse audience to represent an object designed to show beauty with no other purpose, metaphorically and negatively representing women. We also included TV sets to bring attention to how the media impacts and causes this desire among women to directly maintain an alignment against the media industry and therefore with the young girl. We drew on the TV with lipstick to include connotations of how edited and photo shopped the images which normally represent how a woman should be and the images they often judge themselves on. CONCLUSION: Overall, our film aims to ironically represent women in a similar way to popular media as well as challenge it, leading to them being portrayed in both negative and positive ways.