Q2. How does your media product represent particular social groups?

Our media product represents a post modern view of gender, for example our genre is thriller and our murder victim is male and our killer is female. This represents the idea of women being equal to or more powerful than men as they are now the killer, not the victim unlike fifty years ago which is conveyed in Psycho (Alfred Hitchcock, 1960). 

The man is represented as being powerless to the woman perhaps as they feel to their female partners in modern day relationships, which subverts the stereotypes of the typical man woman relationship. One of the messages being put across in our opening sequence is that woman are just as powerful as men and that they too can cause havoc and that they are not just the damsels in distress, they are the offenders and can create as much mess as a stereotypical male hero does.

If women aren’t the victim in films then they generally are there for their sex appeal, for example in Transformers (Michael Bay, 2007) Megan Fox is purely there for her sex appeal and her good looks. We didn’t want a ditzy female character that would just go with whatever the male hero said, we wanted a female with character and feistiness. However, the film noir genre has been an influence to us because although the women do seduce other man into doing the dirty work for them, they are still powerful and in control which is what we wanted for our main female character.

We wanted a strong female character that would kill our male character but I don’t think we wanted a trained assassin like in Nikita (Luc Besson, 1990) or Salt (Phillip Noyce, 2010).

I feel that what we were going for is someone like Roxie Hart in Chicago (Rob Marshall, 2002). For example she killed her lover in the heat of an argument and although she used a generic weapon (a gun), we feel that this links to our storyline.

Male victims are slightly unusual too, due to the fact that even after the feminism revolution in the seventies men are still stereotypically seen as being in more power. This is the stereotypical ideology in Hollywood and is usually shown in big blockbuster films. Male victims are unconventional just like female agressors like in the film noir genre. What I mean by this is that they are the victim to the woman's sex appeal and are therefore powerless to the woman as she is manipulating them to do the things she doesn't want to.