Coursework so far, plus notes...

`To what extent are women objectified and misrepresented in the media by fashion magazines such as 'Vogue' and 'Look'?

Within this essay, my intention is to focus on the representation (or misrepresentation) of females through media texts of today. I will be specifically focusing on Vogue [1] and Look [2], both of which are aimed at women’s fashion within the UK and were published in October of 2013. My investigation will delve into if the exaggeration of representation in females is necessary to gratify it’s audience members, how truthful and accurate the representation of body image is, and finally I will analyse several articles taken from both magazines to identify any ideologies, whether they are making stereotypical assumptions that women are purely interested in fashion, or whether these ideologies are more contemporary.  

I will take into consideration the works of reputable theorists such as Laura Mulvey and her work on the Male Gaze, Jacques Lacan and his Mirror Stage, John Burger and ‘Ways of looking’, Post Feminism, the theory of Uses and Gratifications that the audience may acquire and many more.

Laura Mulvey’s theory offers an insight into how the cinema offers pleasures for it’s audience members, one being scopophilia. Despite this being based on film, we can relate the theory to any media text, whether this be in the form of television, film or print.  In section III ‘Women as Image, Man as Bearer of the Look’ of Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema (1975) [3], Mulvey defines the Male Gaze as ‘In their traditional exhibitionist role women are simultaneously looked at and displayed, with their appearance coded for strong visual and erotic impact so that they can be said to connote to-be-looked-at-ness. Woman displayed as sexual object is the leit-motif of erotic spectacle: from pin-ups to striptease, from Ziegfeld to Busby Berkeley, she holds the look, plays to and signifies male desire’.[3a]  There is a tendency to apply the Male Gaze to other forms of media, such a print, however this is more closely related to the cinematic gaze, rather than that found in print.

NEED TO FINISH – REFER TO A SPECIFIC ARTICLE

As mentioned previously, I will firstly talk about the exaggeration of representation of women, and whether this is necessary in order to gratify its audience’s needs. Whilst researching, I came across an article written by the Daily Mail around the topic of clothes size. It stated that a UK Size 16 is ‘Britain's most common dress size’ [4]. Articles like this contradict the stereotypical ideology that a slimmer size 8 is the average size (or the desired size) that is ‘advertised’ in magazines. There is however, a huge difference between what the average size is and what the desired average size is. The average size has been found in the UK at a 16, however magazines such as Vogue and Look do not advertise brands or products using models of this size, in fact I can’t remember the last time that I saw a model of this size in either of these magazines. 

(REFERENCE TO A SPECIFIC ARTICLE FROM EITHER MAGAZINE)

This representation of women can be exaggerated in several ways, examples including clothes size, airbrushing, the use of celebrities or icons rather than day-to-day women,

A content analysis of the latest edition of both Vogue and Look magazines found than an astonishing amount of advertisements contain female models no larger than a clothes size 6. 132 in Vogue compared to a mere 37 advertisements in Look contained female models of this size [1] [2]. I also found there to be approximately 8 size 8 models in Vogue, in comparison to 23 in Look. Taking into consideration that Vogue contains more than four times the amount of pages than look does, and contains more advertisements as a whole (rather than articles etc.), Vogue is still showing more size 6 models in proportion to it's other advertisements than Look are. Over all, the number of models found in these editions that were found at and larger size than an 8 were astoundingly small. 6 were found in Vogue, and 3 in Look (both of which only showed models no larger than a British clothes size 12). This will no doubt convince the magazine's audience that this is the way that they are meant to look, if naturally sized women are not represented at all in these magazines, then why would women think that it is something to strive for? They wouldn't. Vogue as a magazine contains a larger amount of advertisements rather than articles and stories, in comparison to Look, which has just been proved by the statistics given. Because of this, Vogue's intentions and motives may be seen to differ compared to those of Look Magazine, which contains articles on the latest celebrity relationships, gossip articles and affordable fashion.  These sorts of articles tend to gratify the needs of it's audience members by giving them an insight into the latest celebrity news and gossip. By doing this, Look (as a magazine) is in a way advertising the celebrity as a lifestyle choice, in comparison to Vogue, which I have found to be advertising a specific product, name or brand. Therefore, Vogue is seen to be directly advertising a specific product, whereas Look are advertising a certain style, and showing the audience how to achieve this style through the brands directly advertised in Vogue (or similar products at a much more affordable price).

By exaggerating and therefore misrepresenting the number of size six to eight women in the UK, these statistics place an emphasis on the ideologies that have been created by the media. 

A study published on the 15th of August of 2013 showed an audit of all UK-based magazines and their circulation within the first half of this year [5]. This showed Look to be fifty nine magazines away from the highest circulating magazine of the first half-year, compared to Vogues' standing at sixty two. This may prove (in conjunction with the number of size 6-8 models in the October edition of both magazines) that magazines containing larger-sized women may be found more appealing to audience members. And not any audience members, the target audience for both magazines is of the female gender, proving that the exaggeration of representation (in respect to clothes size, anyway) is not necessary. The reason for Look being higher in circulation than Vogue may come down to several other contributive factors however, including a lower price of £1.80 [2] in comparison to Vogue’s £3.99 [1] and local, more affordable and easily accessible brands being advertised. As mentioned previously, the target audience for both magazines has been found to be females, and this can be supported by journalism columns from opinion-based sources such a Journalism students studying at the University of Winchester, and factual-based sources such as The Guardian. The producer of the column written about Vogue magazine stated that; ‘Vogue’s target audience is females in their late twenties to thirties.’ and that ‘Since joining Vogue in the late 1980’s, Editor Anna Wintour has worked to protect the magazine's status and reputation among fashion publications. Wintour changed the focus of the magazine in order to do so. She focused on more accessible ideas of "fashion" to suit a wider audience. This allowed Wintour to keep a high circulation while discovering new trends that a broader audience could afford. Wintour also departed from her predecessors' tendency to portray a woman’s face alone on the front cover. This, according to the Times', gave "greater importance to both her clothing and her body.’ Both of these comments allow us to understand that as a female editor, Anna Wintour’s initial aim was ne ver to objectify the female models used in her magazine, but to allow people to look at the model as a whole (body included) rather than just a face, whether this lead to the objectification of women or not, is however another story. [6]

Bibliography

[1]

Vogue Magazine, October Edition (A monthly magazine)

[2]

Look Magazine, October Edition (Published 7^th October: A weekly magazine)

[3]

http://imlportfolio.usc.edu/ctcs505/mulveyVisualPleasureNarrativeCinema.pdf

[4]

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/health/article-2342207/Is-size-16-normal--danger-These-women-Britains-common-dress-size-youd-expect-healthy-battery-medical-tests-came-surprising-worrying-results.html

[5]

http://www.pressgazette.co.uk/magazine-abcs-full-circulation-round-first-half-2013

Published 15th August 013

[6]

http://journalism.winchester.ac.uk/?page=254

THEORISTS:

Laura Mulvey

Jacques Lacan

Hyper reality

Uses and Gratification

Post Feminism

John Burger: Ways of Seeing

Aim 1: Does female representation have to be exaggerated in order to gratify the needs of it’s audience.

Aim 2: How truthful is the representation of body image?

Aim 3: Article analysis, looking into ideologies.

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/health/article-2342207/Is-size-16-normal--danger-These-women-Britains-common-dress-size-youd-expect-healthy-battery-medical-tests-came-surprising-worrying-results.html

Size 16 is ‘normal’ and now our average, in comparison to 195 where the average was 7 inches slimmer and a stone lighter.

http://eprints.ru.ac.za/2303/1/NDZAMELA-MJourn-TR02-129.pdf

University dissertation research 

http://www.pressgazette.co.uk/magazine-abcs-full-circulation-round-first-half-2013

Published 15th August 013

Magazine Circulation stats: First half of 2013

Here is a full breakdown for UK magazine sales in the first half of 2013 as measured by ABC.

Name of magazine

% paid for

avg sale

change y/y

Look

90%

200265

-19.9%

No.59

Vogue

94%

193007

-5.9%

No. 62

Out of a possible

http://journalism.winchester.ac.uk/?page=254

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-20554942

5 criticisms of women’s portrayal in magazines

http://www.beautyredefined.net/photoshopping-altering-images-and-our-minds/

Beauty Redefined Blog

AIM 2

Is the representation of women’s body image truthful?

-         Clothes size: using unrealistic models, or photo shopping realistic models to make them look unrealistic, or copying their head onto another, slimmer body.

-         Face: airbrushing (make-up, hair extensions)

-         Clothing (sense of style, shoes, objectification: short skirts/dresses etc.)

AIM 3

Article Analysis: ideologies (of what?)

-         Real women?

-         Affordable/Not affordable clothing?

Coursework Research: Notes

Laura Mulvey: The Male Gaze
Sigmund Freud: Scopophilia

Jacques Lacan: The Mirror and The Gaze

Lacan introduces the mirror stage, a developmental stage that he observed in infants from 6 to about 18 months.  In this stage, the infant recognises him or herself in the mirror as a whole entity instead of the fragmented movements and undefined boundaries between self and other (baby and mom especially) that have constituted his or her world up to that point. Lacan says this shows that the infant has desires to see him or herself as an "I." The vision in the mirror, which comes at a time when the infant doesn't have control over his or her own body yet, gives that image of the "I" as a "mirage" of control and "perfect self" or imago. Conversely, this imago has "the effect in man of an organic insufficiency in his natural reality"; it creates a permanent sense of being imperfect, but looking forward to perfection.

http://web.utk.edu/~misty/486lacan.html

This quote refers to the use of a mirror by a child, leading them to see the mirrored image of themselves as the 'ideal', and therefore pushing them to strive for an ideal which in a way, has already been achieved. This 'perfect self' mentioned in the quote above is similar to the ideal that children strive to achieve after first seeing their own reflection in the mirror, however at such an age, they are in no place to control their own body and it's developments yet anyway, leaving them unable to change their appearances. This takes place between he ages of approximately 6 and 18 months.

Jacques Lacan: ' The split between the eye and the gaze" (1964) In the Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalogy.

Jacques Lacan derives the concept of the split by recasting central Freudian concepts such as unconsciousness and the compulsion to repeat.
The gaze alienates subjects from themselves by causing the subject to identify with itself as the objet a , the object of the drives, thus desiring scopic satisfaction. Yet, in constructing the human subject as this objet a , the gaze denies the subject its full subjectivity. The subject is reduced to being the object of desire and, in identifying with this object, it becomes alienated from itself.

http://csmt.uchicago.edu/annotations/lacansplit.htm

Here, Jacque Lacan's theory explains how 'the gaze alienates a subject from themselves by causing the subject to identify with itself as the object...thus desiring scopic satisfaction.' This is easily relatable to the two magazines that I have analysed (or any magazine) in which female models are used to advertise a product. In using females to present a product in an attractive and desirable manner, the models will become...

Coursework Research: Links and Quotes

Laura Mulvey's Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema (1975)

http://imlportfolio.usc.edu/ctcs505/mulveyVisualPleasureNarrativeCinema.pdf

'The cinema offers a number of possible pleasures. One is scopophilia. There are circumstances in which looking itself is a source of pleasure, just as, in the reverse formation, there is pleasure in being looked at. Originally. in his Three Essays on Sexuality, Freud isolated scopophilia as one of the component instincts of sexuality which exist as drives quite independently of the erotogenic zones.'
'At this point he associated scopophilia with taking other people as objects, subjecting them to a controlling and curious gaze.'


III. Woman as Image, Man as Bearer of the Look

A. In a world ordered by sexual imbalance, pleasure in looking has been split between active/male and passive/female. The determining male gaze projects its phantasy on to the female form which is styled accordingly. In their traditional exhibitionist role women are simultaneously looked at and displayed, with their appearance coded for strong visual and erotic impact so that they can be said to connote to-be-looked-at-ness. Woman displayed as sexual object is the leit-motif of erotic spectacle: from pin-ups to striptease, from Ziegfeld to Busby Berkeley, she holds the look, plays to and signifies male desire. Mainstream film neatly combined spectacle and narrative. (Note, however, how the musical song-and-dance numbers break the flow of the diegesis.) The presence of woman is an indispensable element of spectacle in normal narrative film, , yet her visual presence tends to work against the development of a story line, to freeze the flow of action in moments of erotic contemplation. This alien presence then has to be integrated into cohesion with the narrative. As Budd Boetticher has put it:

"What counts is what the heroine provokes, or rather what she represents. She is the one, or rather the love or fear she inspires in the hero, or else the concern he feels for her, who makes him act the way he does. In herself the woman has not the slightest importance."
(A recent tendency in narrative film has been to dispense with this problem altogether; hence the development of what Molly Haskell has called the ' buddy movie,' in which the active homosexual eroticism of the central male figures can carry the story without distraction.) Traditionally, the woman displayed has functioned on two levels: as erotic object for the characters within the screen story, and as erotic object for the spectator within the auditorium, with a shifting tension between the looks on either side of the screen. For instance, the device of the show- girl allows the two looks to be unified technically without any apparent break in the diegesis. A woman performs within the narrative, the gaze of the spectator and that of the male characters in the film are neatly combined without breaking narrative verisimilitude. For a moment the sexual impact of the performing woman takes the film into a no-man's-land outside its own time and space. Thus Marilyn Monroe's first appearance in The River of No Return and Lauren Bacall's songs in To Have or Have Not. Similarly, conventional close-ups of legs (Dietrich, for instance) or a face (Garbo) integrate into the narrative a different mode of eroticism. One part of a fragmented body destroys the Renaissance space, the illusion of depth demanded by the narrative, it gives flatness, the quality of a cut-out or icon rather than verisimiIitude to the screen.
 B. An active/passive heterosexual division of labor has similarly controlled narrative structure. According to the principles of the ruling ideology and the psychical structures that back it up, the male figure cannot bear the burden of sexual objectification. Man is reluctant to gaze at his exhibitionist like. Hence the split between spectacle and narrative supports the man's role as the active one of forwarding the story, making things happen. The man controls the film phantasy and also emerges as the representative of power in a further sense: as the bearer of the look of the spectator, transferring it behind the screen to neutralise the extra- diegetic tendencies represented by woman as spectacle. This is made possible through the processes set in motion by structuring the film around a main controlling figure with whom the spectator can identify. As the spectator identifies with the main male protagonist, he projects his look on to that of his like, his screen surrogate, so that the power of the male protagonist as he controls events coincides with the active power of the erotic look, both giving a satisfying sense of omnipotence. A male movie star's glamorous characteristics are thus not those of the erotic object of the gaze, but those of the more perfect, more complete, more powerful ideal ego conceived in the original moment of recognition in front of the mirror. The character in the story can make things happen and control events better than the subject/spectator, just as the image in the mirror was more in control of motor coordination. In contrast to woman as icon, the active male figure (the ego ideal of the identification process) demands a three-dimensional space corresponding to that of the mirror-recognition in which the alienated subject internalised his own representation of this imaginary existence. He is a figure in a landscape. Here the function of film is to reproduce as accurately as possible the so-called natural conditions of human perception. Camera technology (as exempified by deep focus in particular) and camera movements (determined by the action of the protagonist), combined with invisible editing (demanded by realism) all tend to blur the limits of screen space. The male protagonist is free to command the stage, a stage of spatial illusion in which he articulates the look and creates the action.
C.1 Sections III, A and B have set out a tension between a mode of representation of woman in film and conventions surrounding the diegesis. Each is associated with a look: that of the spectator in direct scopophilic contact with the female form displayed for his enjoyment (connoting male phantasy) and that of the spectator fascinated with the image of his like set in an illusion of natural space, and through him gaining control and possession of the woman within the diegesis. (This tension and the shift from one pole to the other can structure a single text. Thus both in Only Angels Have Wings and in To Have and Have Not, the film opens with the woman as object the combined gaze of spectator and all the male protagonists in the film. She is isolated, glamorous, on display, sexualised. But as the narrative progresses she falls in love with the main male protagonist and becomes his property, losing her outward glamorous characteristics, her generalised sexuaIity, her show-girl connotations; her eroticism is subjected to the male star alone. By means of identification with him, through participation in his power, the spectator can indirectly possess her too.)

But in psychoanalytic terms, the female figure poses a deeper problem. She also connotes something that the look continually circles around but disavows: her lack of a penis, implying a threat of castration and hence unpleasure. Ultimately, the meaning of woman is sexual difference, the absence of the penis as visually ascertainable, the material evidence on which is based the castration complex essential for the organisation of entrance to the symbolic order and the law of the father. Thus the woman as icon, displayed for the gaze and enjoyment of men, the active controllers of the look, always threatens to evoke the anxiety it originally signified. The male unconscious has two avenues of escape from this castration anxiety: preoccupation with the re-enactment of the original trauma (investigating the woman, demystifying her mystery), counterbalanced by the devaluation, punishment or saving of the guilty object (an avenue typified by the concerns of the film noir); or else complete disavowal of castration by the substitution of a fetish object or turning the represented figure itself into a fetish so that it becomes reassuring rather than dangerous (hence over-valuation, the cult of the female star). This second avenue, fetishistic scopophilia, builds up the physical beauty of the object, transforming it into something satisfying in itself. The first avenue, voyeurism, on the contrary, has associations with sadism: pleasure lies in ascertaining guilt (immediately assodated with castration), asserting control and subjecting the guilty person through punishment or forgiveness. This sadistic side fits in well with narrative. Sadism demands a story, depends on making something happen, forcing a change in another person, a battle of will and strength, victory/defeat, all occuring in a linear time with a beginning and an end. Fetishistic scopophilia, on the other hand, can exist outside linear time as the erotic instinct is focussed on the look alone. These contradictions and ambiguities can be illustrated more simpIy by using works by Hitchcock and Sternberg, both of whom take the look

almost as the content or subiect matter of many of their films. Hitchcock is the more complex, as he uses both mechanisms. Sternberg's work, on the other hand, provides many pure examples of fetishistic scopophilia.
C.2 It is well known that Sternberg once said he would welcome his films being projected upside down so that story and character involvement would not interfere with the spectator's undiluted appreciation of the screen image. This statement is revealing but ingenuous. Ingenuous in that his films do demand that the figure of the woman (Dietrich, in the cycle of films with her, as the ultimate example) should be identifiable. But revealing in that it emphasises the fact that for him the pictorial space enclosed by the frame is paramount rather than narrative or identification processes. While Hitchcock goes into the investigative side of voyeurism, Sternberg produces the ultimate fetish, taking it to the point where the powerful look of the male protagonist (characteristic of traditional narrative film) is broken in favour of the image in direct erotic rapport with the spectator. The beauty of the woman as object and the screen space coalesce; she is no longer the bearer of guilt but a perfect product, whose body, stylised and fragmented by close-ups, is the content of the film and the direct recipient of the spectator's look. Sternberg pIays down the illusion of screen depth; his screen tends to be one-dimensional, as light and shade, lace, steam, foliage, net, streamers, etc, reduce the visual field. There is little or no mediation of the look through the eyes of the main male protagonist. On the contrary, shadowy presences like La Bessiere in Morocco act as surrogates for the director, detached as they are from audience identification. Despite Sternberg's insistence that his stories are irrelevant, it is significant that they are concerned with situation, not suspense, and cyclical rather than linear time, while plot complications revolve around misunderstanding rather than conflict. The most important absence is that of the controlling male gaze within the screen scene. The high point of emotional drama in the most typical Dietrich films, her supreme moments of erotic meaning, take place in the absence of the man she loves in the fiction. There are other witnesses, other spectators watching her on the screen, but their gaze is one with, not standing in for, that of the audience. At the end of Morocco, Tom Brown has already disappeared into the desert when Amy Jolly kicks off her gold sandals and walks after him. At the end of Dishonoured, Kranau is indifferent to the fate of Magda. In both cases, the erotic impact, sanctified by death, is displayed as a spectacle for the audience. The male hero misunderstands and, above all, does not see.
In Hitchcock, by contrast, the male hero does see precisely what the audience sees. However, in the films I shall discuss here, he takes fascination with an image through scopophilic eroticism as the subject of the film. Moreover, in these cases the hero portrays the contradictions and tensions experienced by the spectator. In Vertigo in particular, but also in Marnie and Rear Window, the look is central to the plot, oscillating between voyeurism and fetishistic fascination. As a twist, a further manipulation of the normal viewing process which in some sense reveals it, Hitchcock uses the process of identification normally associated with ideological correctness and the recognition of established morality and shows up its perverted side. Hitchcock has never concealed his interest in voyeurism, cinematic and non- cinematic. His heroes are exemplary of the symbolic order and the law-- a policeman (Vertigo), a dominant male possessing money and power (Marnie)--but their erotic drives lead them into comprimised situations. The power to subject another person to the will sadistically or to the gaze voyeuristically is turned on to the woman as the object of both. Power is backed by a certainty of legal right and the established guilt of the woman (evoking castration, psychoanaiytically speaking). True perversion is barely concealed under a shallow mask of ideological correctness--the man is on the right side of the law, the woman on the wrong. Hitchcock's skilful use of identification processes and liberal use of subjective camera from the point of view of the male protagonist draw the spectators deeply into his position, making them share his uneasy gaze. The audience is absorbed into a voyeuristic situation within the screen scene and diegesis which parodies his own in the cinema. In his analysis of Rear Window, Douchet takes the film as a metaphor for the cinema. Jeffries is the audience, the events in the apartment block opposite correspond to the screen. As he watches, an erotic dimension is added to his look, a central image to the drama. His girlfriend Lisa had been of little sexual interest to him, more or less a drag, so Iong as she remained on the spectator side. When she crosses the barrier between his room and the block opposite, their reationship is re-born erotically. He does not merely watch her through his lens, as a distant meaningful image, he also sees her as a guilty intruder exposed by a dangerous man threatening her with punishment, and thus finally saves her. Lisa's exhibitionism has already been established by her obsessive interest in dress and style, in being a passive image of visual perfection; Jeffries'voyeurism and activity have also been established through his work as a photo-journalist, a maker of stories and captor of images. However, his enforced inactivity, binding him to his seat as a spectator, puts him squarely in the phantasy position of the cinema audience.

In Vertigo, subjective camera predominates. Apart from flash-back from Judy's point of view, the narrative is woven around what Scottie sees or fails to see. The audience follows the growth of his erotic obsession and subsequent despair precisely from his point of view. Scottie's voyeurism is blatant: he falls in love with a woman he follows and spies on without speaking to. Its sadistic side is equally blatant: he has chosen (and freely chosen, for he had been a successful lawyer) to be a policeman, with all the attendant possibilities of pursuit and investigation. As a result. he follows, watches and falls in love with a perfect image of female beauty and mystery. Once he actually confronts her, his erotic drive is to break her down and force her to tell by persistent cross-questioning. Then, in the second part of the fiIm, he re-enacts his obsessive involvement with the image he loved to watch secretly. He reconstructs Judy as Madeleine, forces her to conform in every detail to the actual physical appearance of his fetish. Her exhibitionism, her masochism, make her an ideal passive counterpart to Scottie's active sadistic voyeurism. She knows her part is to perform, and only by playing it through and then replaying it can she keep Scottie's erotic interest. But in the repetition he does break her down and succeeds in exposing her guilt. His curiosity wins through and she is punished. In Vertigo, erotic involvement with the look is disorienting: the spectator's fascination is turned against him as the narrative carries him through and entwines him with the processes that he is himself exercising. The Hitchcock hero here is firmly placed within the symbolic order, in narrative terms. He has all the attributes of the patriarchal super-ego. Hence the spectator, lulled into a faIse sense of security by the apparent legality of his surrogate, sees through his look and finds himself exposed as complicit, caught in the moral ambiguity of looking.
Far from being simply an aside on the perversion of the police, Vertigo focuses on the implications of the active/looking, passive/looked-at split in terms of sexual difference and the power of the male symbolic encapsulated in the hero. Marnie, too, performs for Mark RutIand's gaze and masquerades as the perfect to-be-looked-at image. He, too, is on the side of the law until, drawn in by obsession with her guilt,

her secret, he longs to see her in the act of committing a crime, make her confess and thus save her. So he, too, becomes complicit as he acts out the implications of his power. He controls money and words, he can have his cake and eat it.

Cultivation Theory
http://www.aber.ac.uk/media/Documents/short/cultiv.html

• Cultivation theory (sometimes referred to as the cultivation hypothesis or cultivation analysis) was an approach developed by Professor George Gerbner, dean of the Annenberg School of Communications at the University of Pennsylvania.

• Cultivation theorists argue that television has long-term effects which are small, gradual, indirect but cumulative and significant.

• Cultivation research looks at the mass media as a socializing agent and investigates whether television viewers come to believe the television version of reality the more they watch it. Gerbner and his colleagues contend that television drama has a small but significant influence on the attitudes, beliefs and judgements of viewers concerning the social world. The focus is on ‘heavy viewers’. People who watch a lot of television are likely to be more influenced by the ways in which the world is framed by television programmes than are individuals who watch less, especially regarding topics of which the viewer has little first-hand experience. 

• Audience research by cultivation theorists involves asking large-scale public opinion poll organizations to include in their national surveys questions regarding such issues as the amount of violence in everyday life. Answers are interpreted as reflecting either the world of television or that of everyday life. Respondents are asked such questions as: ‘What percentage of all males who have jobs work in law enforcement or crime detection? Is it 1 percent or 10 percent?’. On American TV, about 12 percent of all male characters hold such jobs, and about 1 percent of males are employed in the USA in these jobs, so 10 percent would be the ‘TV answer’ and 1 percent would be the ‘real-world answer’ (Dominick 1990, p. 512).

• In a survey of about 450 New Jersey schoolchildren, 73 percent of heavy viewers compared to 62 percent of light viewers gave the TV answer to a question asking them to estimate the number of people involved in violence in a typical week. The same survey showed that children who were heavy viewers were more fearful about walking alone in a city at night. They also overestimated the number of people who commit serious crimes (Dominick 1990, p. 512). One controlled experiment addressed the issue of cause and effect, manipulating the viewing of American college students to create heavy- and light-viewing groups. After 6 weeks of controlled viewing, heavy viewers of action-adventure programmes were indeed found to be more fearful of life in the everyday world than were light viewers (ibid., p. 513).

Jacques Lacan's 'The Gaze'
http://keca2media.blogspot.co.uk/2012/10/the-gaze-jacques-lacan.html

Lacan and Karen Coats
http://literarytheoryumf.wordpress.com/category/lacan/

Question A2: How typical of their genres are your chosen texts?

The film Sin City proves extremely typical of their genre(s), being Film Noir and Comic Book style. This is proven in several uses, such as the use of Propp's narrative character roles, with the protagonists' all being the typical 'hero', however with a significant weakness, all of which are exaggerated, adding a Film Noir twist. These weaknesses include heart problems (in Hartigan, the first Protagonist we meet in the film), physical appearance (in Marv, the second protagonist), and guilt/paranoia (in Dwight, the last protagonist that we meet). All of these weaknesses present them with an extremely fatalistic approach to life (another typical convention of the genre). Other narrative character roles found in this film include the role of the Femme Fatale, in characters such as Gail (a hooker who at one point is captured and too weak to fight, until the help of one of the protagonists comes along). Other female characters (such as Nancy) also rely on a male character for support, for example 'Please, let me stay close, nothing can happen when I'm close to you', proving their independence, and their need for men at the same time. These character roles are extremely common conventions of the Film Noir genre.
Other conventions, other than the character types from the film include extremely low-lighting (of half of a character's face) for example during a shot of Dwight, half of his face is light, and the other in shadow, representing him as half pure and good, and the other half being dark and mysterious, being Film Noir. This incorporates the other genre of Comic Book style. This style is presented in the black and white filming, which is used throughout the whole film, and incorporating a flash of colour (mostly red and yellow in this film, red representing lust, blood and passion, and yellow -which mostly presents hair- representing the extravagance and exaggeration of the film, making it more than what reality may show in this situation). The use of black and white throughout the whole film, and the pops of colour, exaggerates every situation presented here, keeping the audience in the understanding that this is based on a comic book, and is there for extremely unrealistic and exaggerated, which is what Comic Books are all about.

Scene Analysis of Fish Tank

The first scene which I will be analysing consists of Mia taking Keira (Connor's daughter) from their street and chasing her to the water's edge of a large patch of greenery near Connor's house.
This scene supports and upholds the traditional conventions of a social realist genre. Plenty of drama, for example the scene where Keira is pushed into the Sea by Mia, and takes a significant amount of time to return to the surface, reinforce these conventions. This part of the scene is made extremely realistic due to the hand-held camera techniques used (also an extremely common convention of this genre) which leads the audience the believe that this situation could potentially be a realistic occurrence. Other conventions supporting this genre (which are evident in this scene) include diegetic sound, plenty of which is used in this scene. Examples of this sort of sound include the crashing of the waves of the sea (which also becomes a substantial part of the scene), the sound of the wind (which is a traditionally found in the location of this film, making the scene even more relatable and realistic) and the words spoken by the characters.

Propp's Narrative theory comes into play with this scene, with the small child (Keira) dressed in a princess outfit (a pale dress; representing the innocence and naivety of the child due to her age), with an extremely sparkly shawl and hair clip. This automatically presents her as the princess, and Mia as the villain, due to the circumstances of this particular scene, in which she is taking her from her father. By wearing black, Mia is automatically assumed to be the villain in this situation. Although this is how Mia is represented in this particular scene, it may not be the case in relation to the film as a whole. Traditionally, the Princess is supposed to be saved by the hero, however in Fish Tank, this is not the case. The princess is put into danger by, and saved by the villain.

In most situations, the villain is very commonly represented as a strong male, however this scene represents this character role as a female, with the same qualities and features of a male. Examples of these features include a strong accent, deep voice, the clothes worn by Mia (tracksuit and trainers) and her lack of make-up and hair scraped back: lack of effort, often associated with male traits.