Introduction to Critical Investigation essay

This should clearly introduce your primary text, the media issue or debate you are addressing and what angle your essay will use to approach the question. It needs to engage the reader, pose some questions and give a clear indication of what direction the essay will take. The word count will vary but you want to aim for around 200-250 words.

You may find this brief Powerpoint guide to academic writing useful in approaching this task and can certainly refer to it for the rest of your first draft over Christmas.

Do recent Hollywood films such as the Wolf of Wall Street suggest that audiences are still being influenced by negative gender stereotypes?

Despite the gains made by feminism over the last 30 years, Hollywood films still offer too many negative gender stereotypes. This is particularly clear in Martin Scorsese’s highly successful biopic of Jordan Belfort, The Wolf of Wall Street (2012). In Scorsese’s film, women are presented as sex objects, prostitutes or housewives and there for the pleasure of the male characters (and arguably male audience). It is evident that negative gender stereotypes are still present in modern Hollywood films and it is hard to argue that audiences are not influenced by these representations. We can also see this in historical, successful Hollywood films such as Scarface, the original Wall Street and Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps. Despite the fact that the gender gap between males and females has started to close – more so recently with respected activists such as Emma Watson speaking out publicly on behalf of the UN gender campaign – negative gender stereotypes in film show that the gap is still an issue in society. Hollywood films that are based around the idea of 'power' often portray negative stereotypes of women. The idea of power and riches appeals to a mass audience as Richard Havis explores in an interview with Scorsese about The Wolf Of Wall Street: "Look at young people and what the American Dream means to them. It's all about accumulating more, and doing what is best for you, in spite of how it affects anyone else.”  This essay will explore the negative gender stereotypes in Hollywood productions and the influence such films have on the audience.

"Blondes make the best victims. They're like virgin snow that shows up the bloody footprints."

"To what extent are gender roles in horror remakes like 'Bates Motel' adapted for contemporary audiences?"

Throughout history, the horror genre has reflected the zeitgeist, this undeniably includes the way men and women are represented. In particular, we have seen a strong focus on gender roles. Gender roles are defined as a set of behaviours a person is associated with as appropriate to their gender; They are determined by the prevailing cultural norms of the zeitgeist. In Hollywood, many successful horror films adhere strongly to typical gender roles in order to carry their narrative. One brazen example of this, is seen in the almost 60 year old, "sensational slasher film", 'Psycho'. Hitchcock's 1960s masterpiece remains “one of the key works of our age” and inevitably has been subject to incessant debate and commentary on its female and male character portrayals. However, it appears Hollywood has been trying to challenge these fixed, prototypical gender roles. This reversal or deviation of gender roles arguably began due to Hitchcockian influence and can be seen in the recent, innovative television series 'Bates Motel'. This show is a contemporary prequel to Hitchcock's 'Psycho', continuing “the legacy of a beloved classic”, yet has “challenged the notions of exactly what a reboot can be”, by having their own approach to how gender roles are used, demonstrating the very changes in society. This contemporary text provides an ideal way of investigating how changes in society have impacted the way gender roles are used in Hollywood, because of the side by side comparisons its origin text - 'Psycho'.

Critical Investigation Plan

"To what extent are gender roles in horror remakes like 'Bates Motel' adapted for contemporary audiences?" (exploited to create narrative)

Essay Summary:

• Introduction: gender roles/horror + introduce texts
• About Bates Motel & Gender Roles in it
• About Psycho & Gender Roles in it
• Evolution of Gender Roles in history
• Difference between BM + Psycho
• Conclusion 
• 
  

1. Introduction

• Define horror 
• Define gender 
• Introduce Bates Motel (using Psycho)

Quotes

• sensational slasher film 
• one of the key works of our age
• challenged the notions of exactly what a reboot can be
• the legacy of a beloved classic of the macabre with impressive aplomb

2. Bates Motel reinforcing Gender Roles 

• thorough, in-depth introduction to Bates Motel
• the typical use of gender and reinforcing of them
• textual analysis proving the positioning of characters

Quotes

• It was developed by Carlton Cuse, Kerry Ehrin, and Anthony Cipriano, and is produced by Universal Television and American Genre for the cable network A&E
• Wife, mother, daughter, virgin wore, career woman, femme fatale - these are the most popular stereotypes of woman that have been addressed by feminist theorists in their writing on popular cinema. Very little has been written on woman as monster. As with the more critically popular images of woman, those which present woman as monstrous also define her primarily in relation to her sexuality, specifically the abject nature of her maternal and reproductive functions. 
• A woman must continually watch herself. She is almost continually accompanied by her own image of herself. Whilst she is walking across a room or whilst she is weeping at the death of her father, she can scarcely avoid envisaging herself walking or weeping. From earliest childhood she has been taught and persuaded to survey herself continually. And so she comes to consider the surveyor and the surveyed within her as the two constituent yet always distinct elements of her identity as a woman. She has to survey everything she is and everything she does because how she appears to men, is of crucial importance for what is normally thought of as the success of her life.

• The character’s background will remain similar, stealing money from her boss so she can be with her boyfriend, but her story will be more fleshed out.
• Rihanna takes on the role of Marion Crane in the new series of Bates Motel
• “We’re taking threads of that story and definitely using them so it’s recognisable, it’s just where we go with it is very different,” executive producer Kerry Ehrin said 
• “It’s tough to be in a situation where you’re in love with a guy, and for whatever reason, he keeps stalling. You still have all this hot sex with him, and he’s saying he loves you, but he’s stalling. The internal story of that, for a woman, is a really interesting one.” (Kerry Ehrin)

3. Psycho

Historical text - Psycho

quotes

• Hitchcock often represented sex on the screen, by employing such procedures as metaphor or fragmentation 
• Sex is indeed the object of suspense 
• The auteur theory of Hitchcock has taught us to pay attention to this continuum of motifs, visual and others, which persist from one film to another irrespective of the changed narrative context - 'the woman who knows too much'; 'the person who is suspended from another's hand'; 'the glass full of white drink', etc. The first motif - that of an intellectually superior, but sexually unattractive bespectacled woman who has insight into what remains hidden to others - runs through a series of Hitchcock's film from Spellbound to Psycho.

• Psycho is one of the key works of our age (Robin Wood)

4.The evolution of gender in horror

TV SHOW RATHER THAN FILM - POWER OF TELEVISON NOW IS PRACTICALLY EQUAL TO THE POWER OF FILM.

Quotes

5. Differences in Bates Motel from it's original source: psycho

• 
  

Quotes

6. Conclusion

Quotes

• 
  

Media Magazine conference

Nik Powell: Nik Powell is a British businessman and one of the co-founders of the Virgin Group with Richard Branson. After operating a mail-order company, a small record shop, and a recording studio, the partners established Virgin Records in 1972.

• Don't choose a house, choose the neighbours (life is always about people)
• One head is a head, Two heads are gold
• Importance of taste
• Leadership - being boss + responsibility 
• Being In charge = easiest position
• Have no shame
• Importance of script and patience 
• Importance of good  m a n n e r s  & respect 
• "Even the biggest room in the world has room for improvement"

Samira Ahmed: Samira Ahmed is a British freelance journalist, writer and broadcaster at the BBC, where she has presented Radio 4's PM, The World Tonight, Sunday and Front Row. She also presented two Proms for BBC Four in 2011.

• The Media can be self-absorbed
• Media is being used and abused by mediocre white people who want to talk about their own issues
• "They shut down the only woman in the panel"
• Women marginalised in the Media 
• New and digital media allows for more to be reported

Leslie Manning: Lesley Manning, Director: Leila. Lesley Manning is a director and editor, known for Leila (2011), The Agent (2008) and Extrasensory.

• One of the main event of horror is the unknown 
• Fear from the camera man - creates fear in audiences
• Television with its formidable power
• The ones who are shouting, are the one's who are usually heard
• "Won't believe he's free until I see it on TV"
• "What have I created"
• "It was a concern that some can't tell the difference
• Social media now has the same power as TV in the 80s 
• Audiences manipulate how TV is constructed but TV manipulates the audience

Tom Ford: Thomas Carlyle "Tom" Ford is an American fashion designer, film director, screenwriter, and film producer. He launched his eponymous luxury brand in 2006, having previously served as the creative director at Gucci and Yves Saint Laurent.

• Audiences need the truth
• If you don't write an idea down, it's like you've never had it

Adam Buxton: Adam Offord Buxton (born 7 June 1969) is an English comedian, writer and actor. He forms one half of the duo Adam and Joe, with filmmaker Joe Cornish. The pair presented Adam and Joe on BBC Radio 6 Music, whilst Buxton also presented his own show on 6 Music on Sundays, called Adam Buxton's Big Mix Tape.

• Sometimes leaving work to the last minute is the best option
• Work with people more talented than you

Critical Investigation: Task #4 UNF

We have the last 30 issues of Media Magazine in pdf format and also in the archive is a Word document with the contents for each issue. 

Media Magazine 46: Gothic

• Throughout history, horror films have reflected both the times in which they were made and the anxieties of contemporary audiences.
• Psycho (Hitchcock 1960 USA). This film prompted a group of films known as the ‘mini-Hitchcocks’
• A Feminist reading of such roles may interpret them as a reflection of the fact that women within society are still perceived (or preferred) to be oppressed, weak and in need of a man to protect or validate them.This suggests that little has changed over the centuries; in a male dominated world, where directors are conventionally and overwhelmingly male, women are supporting characters or victims.

Media Magazine 43: Independence

• Alfred Hitchcock worked in the UK film industry from 1919 until 1939 when he moved permanently to Hollywood. By his peak period in the 1950s, Hitchcock was the master of his own productions as an independent director and producer – highly unusual for Hollywood.

Media Magazine 34: The Change Issue

• In the early 1970s the cultural critic John Berger summarised the way in which gender was represented in the media through visual images:Men act and women appear. Men look at women. Women watch themselves being looked at. Berger 1972

mediaedu:

Username: greenford
P/W: MUB1/wh

https://media.edusites.co.uk/article/horror-genre-codes-conventions/

• Split into sub genres (see below), often hybridised

• Primary target audience – male, 16-24, Mainstreamers

• 15 or 18 Certification (promises of pleasure) – debates on passive consumption

• Uses and Gratifications (active audiences) theory can apply

• Extensive use of Narrative enigmas

• Exploration of Narrative Themes

• Slow pace of Editing, builds tension. Long takes

• Three act narrative structure

• Predictable narrative content (follows format)

• Clear binary oppositions e.g. good v evil

• Use of low key lighting

• Use of CGI, FX

• High production values but many low budget horror films

• Dominant, hegemomic representation of gender: The Female Victim

• Extensive use of close up

• Incidental non-diegetic sound

• Distorted diegetic sound

• Extensive use of narrative off-screen space

• Young/teenage characters

• Use of hand-held camera: audience identification/realism

• Point of view shots

• Low angle shots

Horror can be split into sub genres:

• The Monster Scare
• Psychological Thrillers
• Slasher Pics
• Zombie Films

• https://media.edusites.co.uk/article/media-and-collective-identity-representation-of-young-women-exemplar/

It is important to remember exactly this – that representations change

 In 2014, audiences could and should expect to see distinct moves away from old fashioned, traditional patriarchal culture and the embracing of a much more pluralistic understanding of gender representation but as David Gauntlett states: “identity is complicated, everyone’s got one”. Young women are sometimes empowered but often subject to stereotyping which I hope to illustrate using two primary media – Television and in Women’s Lifestyle Magazines but also cross referencing my points with other media.

Gender representation is affected by genre, cultural factors and in terms of media representations on audience and up to a point, audience expectations. Media producers encode dominant preferred meanings into texts but mainstream audiences that consume or decode mass media arguably have as much responsibility in terms of the representation of how women are represented – this means that meaning is put in but also taken out whether on television, looking at gender in advertising, sports journalism, gender in situation comedy, video games and one of my case studies, Women’s Lifestyle Magazines for example. 

Both producers and audiences dictate representations but using Stuart Hall as a framework, audiences also decode dominant and oppositional readings – in Hollyoaks, a long running British soap opera broadcast on E4 the programme is known for its sexualised narratives and young male and female characters who are framed for the female and male gaze; women are obsessed with their interpersonal relationships are seen to be so. Hollyoaks reflects an evolution in the soap opera genre to deliberately attract, and maintain young audiences through upbeat,...

• https://media.edusites.co.uk/article/understanding-regulation-and-censorship/

• The Media Effects theory has achieved widespread acceptance by society.  This theory suggests that those who are exposed to violence in the media are influenced to behave in a violent manner.  Although it is extremely difficult to “prove” this theory, a number of high-profile cases have been used to support the theoretical link between media and actual violence.
• Moral panics, (first identified by Cohen in the 1960s), where the repetitive reporting of incidents in the media creates a (possibly inflated) fear.

Jump Cut is an online contemporary Media journal - the current issue is available here and the archive can be found here.

• http://www.ejumpcut.org/archive/onlinessays/JC14folder/MassacreWomen.html

At this point, the CHAINSAW MASSACRE shifts from being a film about violence in the United States in general to a film which, for the most part, concerns itself with the varieties of violence men perpetrate against women.

• http://www.ejumpcut.org/archive/onlinessays/JC14folder/Carrie.htm

From its beginnings, classical Hollywood cinema has relied on and reinforced the “natural” characteristics of women (reproductive or destructive) in order to motivate and propel its closed narrative structures. Certain coded behavior on screen could represent a woman as ideal mother or as lustful vamp.