Ealuation Question 2

2. How does your media product represent particular social groups?

‘Remembrance’ represents adult males and females living in North London today through the two characters – the killer and his mother.

REPRESENTATION OF MALES

-The protagonist, the villain

-Caucasian male in his mid-twenties; an ex-soldier in the Iraq war

-Still war-obsessed -- dresses in army clothes, photos, refers to the war during phone conversation

-Mentally unstable

-Challenge the stereotypical view of an ex-soldier - we would consider this man to be a hero in society However, we have played on this idea and it could be interpreted that in fact, the pressure of this so-called ‘heroism’ is the cause of his psychotic unbalance; thus leading him to become the villain.

-Breaking conventions - exposing the darker side of the war and witnessing the negative effects it may have on one’s mental health

We compared Thriller villains such as Dr. Hannibal Lecter from The Silence of the Lambs (Harris, 1991) and Patrick Bateman, in American Psycho (Harron, 2000). By doing this, we noticed a few common factors amongst them:

-Both appear to be normal at first

-Respectable jobs, such as a banker or psychiatrist.

-This trust and value that society puts on them that makes the fact that they are cold-blooded killers so terrifying. Likewise, we tried to create our main character in the same way; he was a soldier, therefore is perceived as a hero, but when the audience realise he is a killer, we hoped it would evoke the same feeling of shock and terror.

Mise-en-scene

House in the suburbs of North London; the fact that it is completely standard and not overly-furnished just reinforces the image of a single, middle-class man, appealing to the well-known surroundings that the audience are used to seeing on an every day basis

REPRESENTATION OF FEMALES

The role of the mother is also represented in a specific way. We do not know what she looks like; we have to draw conclusions about her character from the responses he gives when on the phone to her. Her cause for concern over the deaths of ex-soldiers reinforces the ‘overly-cautious’ nature of an older mother, perhaps looking after her only son as if he were still a child. We chose to contrast her anxiety with the killer’s lack of, to emphasise the fact that secrets are kept from close family members all the time