How does your media product represent particular social groups?
All media products represent some kind of social group excluding wildlife programs. This is because most media products have storylines based around representations of real life social groups ranging from anything between typical teenagers to the elderly. Media producers must be careful when representing certain social groups, making sure that the way that act in the media text is accurate to how they would behave in real life. If this is not done then the media product would not be taken seriously.
Because our opening sequence only really follows one man through the last day of his life we are only really representing one social group. The character is in his early/mid-twenties and is a heterosexual male. This is a fairly wide social group, but from his clothes, attitude or behaviour we cannot really narrow down any other interests due to the fact that he is in a state of extreme depression and therefore doesn’t really care about anything. We know that he is heterosexual due to the focus on his ex- girlfriend being identified as the source of this extreme depression. In some ways his reliance on drugs could put him into the social group of drug addict.
The way he is represented as a drug addict is reasonably stereotypical, in more of a realistic way. By this I mean that he falls into the more realistic drug addict stereotype rather than the more glamorous one that is also shown in the media in programmes such as Skins. This will most probably help us to get a less restrictive age classification from the BBFC because we make the drug addicts life extremely miserable and in no way glamorize it. From simply watching the sequence it is probable that the character started using drugs because of his ex-girlfriend, however we do not know this for sure, but either way the audience associates drug use with unhappiness. This is evident in many aspects of the characters everyday life.
A more realistic drug user stereotype. A herion addict injecting with her arm on a crate in a back room somewhere.
Glamourized Drug addict stereotype shown in TV shows such as skins.
He wakes up on his own looking considerably rough then walks through his house which is trashed with wrappers, cans and general waste littering the floors. The first thing he does when he wakes up is have a cigarette and start taking drugs, then as soon as he leaves his house he walks to a very grim looking area and visits his drug dealer. Originally he would have been shown shown trying to steal from a shop showing that he has very little money and the money he spends goes on drugs. As he injects heroin he becomes unconscious and is then kicked out. He ends the day by killing himself in probably one of the slowest ways possible. His live is very miserable and in some ways pathetic, emphasising his depression. This is a very stereotypical representation of a drug addict and in some ways reasonably realistic. In the US 25% of all suicides are committed by Drug abusers and people with alcohol issues, and in the UK the suicide rate is significantly higher for drug addicts. This proves that our representation is both accurate to real life and the stereotype.
Willheart 