Representation

Representation in Media

Representation in media is to represent or depict something that may have already been presented, for instance, things like class, age, gender, sexuality, disability, and ethnicity. Often these stand in for stereotypes which are represented throughout. Stereotypes help the audience know more about a character as soon as they have been introduced, make predictions about the character, and understand the character and who they are and what their opinions may be.

Although the media can be useful for helping us understand more about characters and their opinions, it's also a very negative medium and can spread negativity quickly. For instance, celebrities like Amy Winehouse, Amanda Bynes, and Lindsay Lohan have all been depicted in the media as negative role models due to drug use, alcohol, and mental health issues. This, in turn, creates a bad image for people going through these problems. For instance, people complained that the media representation of Amanda Bynes provided a negative stigma for mental health problems.

Directors use stereotypes to get across a personality of a character almost immediately, it helps the audience understand what kind of person they are and how their story will go. This is useful for a director because it helps them to not have to introduce the character as much. Along with costume, props, and setting, stereotypes are a useful way of the director giving the audience a little back story and personality without having to go into an excess amount of detail.

The media in different places reports things in different ways. This shows that people in different groups will react differently depending on who is witnessing the events in the media. For instance, in places of war, the media may spread propaganda to their people, whereas if the media reporting in this country told us about events in that country, there would be more liberal coverage of the situations.

Media is our understanding of the world, as the media control what we see and what we think; it shapes our opinions and beliefs on the world, however corrupted these beliefs and opinions may be. Representation may be a negative thing, as it leads people to believe whatever they cover.

 In TED, directors and writers broke the stereotype of a nice teddy bear by making him a foul mouthed, drinking, drug abusive individual. Although he looks like your standard issue child's teddy, the disruption of the stereotype not only make a hilarious film to watch, but also helped build TED's character more and more. The more we saw, the more we thought about him, making this film almost limitless in possibilities for all the things and situations TED could get himself into. By breaking this stereotype, the director was able to open the audiences minds, and therefore come up with more and more outrageous things that could happen.

In my film, representation will be used to display stereotypes and issues in both positive and negative ways. For example, I want the two female characters to break their stereotypes and not conform to gender norms. I think that women are usually portrayed as weak and useless, or usually used as a sex symbol. I think by breaking these norms, the film will become even more developed and the characters will become more well rounded. I feel like this will also help the story to become more interesting and will surprise audiences as the female roles won't be generic and boring, this also stops sexism in the film as it shows the women as heroes, as in most horror films, women are rarely seen as the hero.
For the male characters, I wanted generic, but in no way boring characters. I wanted the male characters to be like real people, with confidence issues and underwhelming and overbearing personalities. For example, one character may be quiet and have low self esteem, while another might have a totally overbearing personality. Although this does conform to some genre conventions, I feel like a lot of characters in horror are very two dimension and written poorly, whereas I wanted three dimensional characters with actual layers of personality who were written well into their story.