Representation: essay.

Analyse media representation in one of your coursework productions.

Representations have ideologies behind them and are a way of how the media shows us things about our society. There are different aspects to it and different view points such as Marxism, Feminism, Postmodernism and Stereotypes. I am going to analyse my music video using feminist, post modern and stereotype approaches in representation in my product.

In my project, we focused on a certain social group, which was young, sociable adults who were struggling in a complicated relationship. We've put a lot of emphasis through the camera work and how the story sets out on how similar both characters and their friend groups are and how they like to spend their time, yet how different their personalities are. We used what Michel Maffesoli calls an "ubran tribe", which is where members of a small social group dress similarly, have similar if not the same beliefs and enjoy the same entertainment. In our music video it was a small group of friends from the same environment and the same age group who were all dressed similarly, about to go out on a night out and enjoying drinking, love, lust and drugs all in similar manner as each other. This leads to decline of individualism, which happens in society today. It represents the reality of teenagers and young adults that do all those things on daily or weekly basis and think it is okay but do not see the bigger picture. However, teenagers (aged 16-20), which was our target audience, enjoyed the video even though some of them are a part of this society, which only means they love to watch themselves and they adore the life they live...but in a hyper-real, simulated world created by a camera and an editing software.

Baudrillard described how the representations of the society in the media are hyper-real and simulated versions of the reality, mostly improved or dramatised to give a better show to the viewer. This is a post-modernist view, which my music video fits into as it is promoting an unhealthy lifestyle by showing how good of a time the characters are having whiles high on drugs and drunk on alcohol. The truth is not so pretty when it comes to clubs and drugs but in the simulated world, we can create anything and make it look very appealing, especially to younger generation, and make it desirable, whereas the real picture is not so colourful and we are being fooled by false ideas about the world, fed to us through camera, just like we did in our music video.

Also, the feminist view would find my music video offensive as I promote the woman as the sex object. There is a shot in our video, which is a classic male gaze, point of view shot that defines the idea of a woman in a man's eyes as detailed by Laura Mulvey in her theory. She talks about the voyeurism and how our view of a woman (even for female magazines) is totally dominated by male gaze. However, I achieved the male gaze on purpose as it was a part of the story and of building a strong character. John Berger said: "Men act, Women appear". This is exactly what happens in my music video. The woman cheats on the man but gets away with it at the end when she comes over and apologies and those two spend the night together. She only appears in those scenes as a seductive, manipulative tool to gain the man's trust, whilst the man is fighting for her with another man and with his own feelings because he is entirely controlled by her voyeuristic appearance in the music video.

In my music video however, we are breaking the conventional boundaries of the stereotypes, which also a part of postmodern theory, mainly popularised and favoured by Lyotard. The stereotypes are there in my music video but they have been swapped around. The woman who is the sexual object and "the one who should appear, not act" is in fact controlling the whole situation and the whole storyline, even though the stereotype would go against it. Following stereotypes we would have the man in control and the woman running after him, whereas it is actually the other way around in my music video. The stereotype about women defines them as vulnerable and emotional, whereas in my music video, the man is going through the emotional stage of anger, sadness, happiness and despair and he is quite vulnerable and appears to be helpless as the woman is in control of what happens and how the storyline continues.