How do the contemporary media represent British youth and youth culture in different ways?

Harry Brown
2009
Daniel Barber




How does Harry Brown represent young people?
Iconic images
hoodies symbol associated with b.y.
dogs, pitbull staffs...
iconic symbols of violence
knifes guns
activities smashuing up cars
drugs is a theme
location, dodgy area hidden away
sexism male dominated film the boys are the gangsters/criminals
her character challenges gender stereotypes but the society ideologises women having less status than men being less intelligent...
revenge, friendship, fighting territory.
dialect is very colloquial
binary oppositions harry b vs gangs
police harry b vs gangs
all represent different age groups
young vs older
social class
enviroment territory is survival staying alive is a fight every day
children grow up surrounding by bad behaviour will make them think it is acceptable
genre horror/thriller
low key lighting lots of dark shadows
connotations of negativity suspense

Hoodies strike fear in British cinema

The Guardian

suggests teens as unemotional, enept to feelings, thugs

reflected as monsters reference to jaws terrifying characters or oposicions that challenge society/ equillibrim norms

fear of the unknown. vampires supernatural zombies aliens murderers

teens are now the monsters in the horror films and we are real. so what is more scary fiction or non fiction?

social class: reacting to the enviroment they are living in. No hope representation no oppportunitys to look to the future as survival is too difficult.

Binary opposotions: upper vs lower class

Hegemony : power of the ruling class, they want us to believe a certain thing ab0out other class as they are worried that their views will be wrong, distinction between different class systems.

Asbos would have never been accepted by british society if the media had no made b.y. out to be so bad. overexaggeration.

we were all made to believe that youth was out of control and asbos were the only way to control them, police were seen as heros...

fear creates>moral panic

self affiling provicy

if you give a dog a bad name it will start to behave like that.

Eden Lake

2008

James watkins

personal fears, night time, trapped,

• How are Jenny and steve (the main couple) represented?

Happily in love, normal, innocent holiday goers,mature, unrebelious, middle class, unaware, Defenseless, scared, injured,

• How is this contrasted with the representation of other characters?

Playful, unreasonable, badly behaved, lower class as carries knife which he progbably has uses for which upper class would not have, their clothing, gives them a chavy representation, they are there because they have nothing else to do so they just hang around and cause trouble, 'gang culture'.The other characters (the youths) think they know it all and can do whatever they want because they are better than the couple and outnumber them so they can use this to scare the couple.

• How important is the issue of social class?

• How are young people represented?

As bullies, children who dont know how to cope with a bad situation, immature, petty,




Theorist: Robin wood argues that te basic formula of a horror film is 'normality is threatened by the monster' I use 'normality' here to mean simply conformity to the dominant social norms.
Dominant ideologies.                       /\
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Todorov equilibrium theory ______/     \_______




what is more scary than reality?


Attack the block
2011
Joe Cornish

• How are the main characters introduced?

stereotypical hoodie

• How does this representation change?

They change from being the baddies to being the heros