Groups Q2

How does your media product represent particular social groups?




Our thriller opening sequence represents different social groups, we planned to represent these social groups quite stereotypically, this way we thought it would be easy for the audience to relate to our thriller. We represented the Russian Father, Ilya Brodski`s and his family (brother Dimitri and family background) as a wealthy, corrupt, and a serious Russian family. This is a stereotype of many wealthy families in Russia, that the family is large and that those wealthy families our quite corrupt,many mafia gangs etc. It represents the middle class negatively, that they are rich, flashy and corrupt.


We also represented the little girl in two ways,first of all, as a stereotypical teenager who is demanding to “go outside “ on her own but then the father shows his authority and makes her seem vulnerable, who stereotypically needs a man or a nanny to protect her.


The nanny typically acts as Sophia`s carer (because the Father is wealthy/corrupt businessman and doesn’t have that much time to act as a full time guardian) . Our group thought that this combination of the father being in charge of the nanny,he works and the nanny acts as the mothers role,this would help to represent the Fathers serious character quite well and make him seems as a stereotypical bredwinner who carries out an instrumental role. I think we portrayed this successfully.


Lastly the nanny seems to get away with being in on the kidnapping with Dimitri so this is also representing her in a stereotypical way because it is a stereotype that girls can get away with more and that we don’t expect the nanny to be “bad”.Although you could also argue that we are challenging the stereotype because she is an evil character who cares about money rather than being the stereotypical and kind female which the audience at first expect.


Our research of these negative representations of various stereotypes helped us to easily portray the thriller genre well because they are very typical representations and are therefore easy to manipulate, for example using russian characters helps the audience relate to the fact that the father has a corrupt background because often Russians are stereotypically associated with dodgey mafia gangs (even though this isnt correct,it happens)

We also use Mise-en-scene to represent all these stereotypes. For instance, the setting of the Father,Ilya`s office,its very modern(the modern phone),bar in a background and it looks expensive which relates to the stereotype of wealthy “flashy” Russians. The father is also wearing a suit and looks like a Russian , serious businessman. The little girl, Sophia is wearing a girly, simple and quite conservative dress, with blonde hair (stereotypically blonde hair is seen as quite idealistic).


Overall, i think we have created a negative representation of Russian middle class families,often and stereotypically the Russian middle class are very wealthy and we have portrayed these characters as corrupt mafia buisnessmen getting involved with the wrong people.I think we are very successful in entertaining the audience because there are various social groups and different characters which makes it very interesting.