Representation in The Inbetweeners

By James Perkins

The Representation of

AgeAge is a factor because the show revolves around four 17-18 year olds and highlights some of the stereotypes which are often associated with teenagers, however this group of boys are different and strive to become stereotypes to fit in. Also, since they are 17 they are nearly adults and still trying new things which creates humor throughout the series when they are posed with adult situations.

The Representation of

EthnicityAll four of the main characters are white and represents the stereotypical English town where there are very few other races, however race is played on throughout the series and is used to create humor but also to show how the boys are perceived by other races when they venture out from their home town.

How does this compare to other youth representations we have seen?

The Representation of

GenderAll of the four main characters are male and this shows the male race as being very dominant, throughout the series we see how the boys see females as sex objects (conforming to Laura Mulley's male gaze theory) and this is a main theme which runs throughout the series which often creates humor.

The Representation of Social Class and

StatusAll of the characters are verging on middle-class or higher, however will has come from an upper-class school and his journey to fit in with unfamiliar surroundings and people creates humor.

The program is set in a suburb outside London and is stereotypical of the middle-class.

The InbetweenersMain points:• Age – same age being represented in

most of the films we have looked at• Gender – tends to be dominated by

male teen representations• Social class – how does the

Inbetweeners teen representation change due to the social class?

• Race – what used to be a predominantly black representations are now no more; Caucasian representations are dominating

Social Class: Reinforcing Cultural Hegemony/Dominant Ideologies

• Working class British youths are generally represented as being violent, brutal, unapologetic, criminals, addictive personalities – Harry Brown, Kidulthood, Quadrophenia, Eden Lake

• Vs

• Middle class British Youths are generally represented as being more law abiding, conscience citizens – The Inbetweeners

• On-top of this the antagonists are always the working class youths and middle class adults are positioned to be the protagonists

Fish Tank

•Watch the trailer for ‘Fish Tank’.

•What ideas are used to introduce the main character?

•What are the similarities and differences between the opening sequences of Fish Tank and Harry Brown?

Fish Tank

•‘Fish Tank’ represents young people in a similar ‘broken Britain’ context, but is more sympathetic to them.

•The behaviour of the characters is less extreme/exaggerated – no torturing and general mayhem.

•Issue of genre/audience.

•Female protagonist…

•Mia is seen more as a victim.

• Almost all teenage characters in representations are clearly working class.

• Main adult characters tend to be middle class.

• Representations may be said to reflect middle class anxiety at threat of working class to their hegemonic dominance.

• Is one of the functions of these representations to maintain hegemony?

• Who produces this representations? Why?

Media Effects - What are the social implications of different media

representations of British youth and youth culture?

What effect do these media representations have?

Media Effects

Media Effects

Media Effects

•Do media representations of young people effect how they are perceived?

•If so how does this effect occur?

•Hypodermic model

•Cultivation theory

•Copy Cat theory

•Moral Panic

• As Charlie Brooker noted in his astute and acerbic How TV Ruined Your Life, one of the most fundamental jobs of the box in the corner is to scare us. Or, to put it in Brooker-speak, shout: "'Boo!' in your mind." Not only is that the function of a large amount of primetime entertainment, it has also been the reliable aim of public information films – sort of health and safety porn – designed to reform our behaviour. That explains why, if we're to believe the treasure trove of paranoid PIFs that Brooker's researchers unearthed, you no longer see schoolboys swinging fishing rods beneath low-lying electricity pylons.

• Although, leaving absurdity aside, repeated images over a long period may inhibit our actions, it's rare that television manages to shock or scare us. We've seen too much, and most of it on TV, to be jolted by what we see on TV. But, once in a while, along comes a film that is so powerful and haunting that it seems to stop the world as you watch, leaving you struggling to re-enter the reality of unfolding life.

Analysis

•Whose perspective is dominant in each of the texts?

•What do the representations have in common?

•How are the representations different?

•How are parental figures represented?

•How important is social class?

Contemporary British Social Realism

• What do you understand by Contemporary British social realism?

• Social realist films attempt to portray issues facing ordinary people in their social situations.

• Social realist films try to show that society and the capitalist system leads to the exploitation of the poor or dispossessed.

• These groups are shown as victims of the system rather than being totally responsible for their own bad behaviour.

• ‘These places represent an everywhere of Britain, where relationships are broken down and where people have become isolated and disconnected. Their Britishness is their culturally specific address to audiences at home’. (Murray, 2008)

Audience

• Social realist films which address social problems in this country offer a very different version of ‘collective identity’ than British films which are also aimed at an American audience. Films like Notting Hill and Love Actually reach a much bigger audience than the lower budget social realist films.

• Social realist films are aimed at a predominantly British audience.

• If many more people see the more commercial films, consider which version of our collective identity is the more powerful or has the most impact.

Analysing Representation of Collective Identity

• When comparing how Britishness and our collective identity is represented in films consider the following questions:

• Who is being represented?

• Who is representing them?

• How are they represented?

• What seems to be the intentions of the representations?

• What is the dominant discourse? (World view offered by the film).

• What range of readings are there?

• Look for alternative discourses

Collective Identity

• The Media contributes to our sense of ‘collective identity’ but there are many different versions that change over time.

• Representations can cause problems for the groups being represented because marginalized groups have little control over their representation / stereotyping.

• The social context in which the film / TV programme is made influences the messages / values/ dominant discourse of the film.

British Social Realism

• Explain social realism and apply to Quadrophenia.

• Relate to a contemporary example – Fish Tank/Harry Brown/Attack the Block/Eden Lake.

• Compare to more commercial products and explain the difference. Use Love Actually/NottingHill

• Consider what representation is most powerful in constructing a collective identity for Britishness in view of audience size.

Society, the individual and representation

• Of course it is too simple to talk just about the media mediating reality and creating representations; we need a more subtle understanding of the process.

• Theorist Stuart Hall and Reading the media…..

• Encoding-Decoding is an active audience theory developed by Stuart Hall which examines the relationship between a text and its audience.

• Encoding is the process by which a text is constructed by its producers.

• Decoding is the process by which the audience reads, understands and interprets a text.

• Hall states that texts are polysemic, meaning they may be read differently by different people, depending on their identity, cultural knowledge and opinions.

Encoding – Decoding (Stuart Hall, 1980):

Active Audience Theory

Preferred Reading/Dominant

Hegemonic • When an audience interprets the message as it was

meant to be understood, they are operating in the dominant code. The position of professional broadcasters and media producers is that messages are already signified within the hegemonic manner to which they are accustomed. Professional codes for media organizations serve to contribute to this type of industrial psychology. The producers and the audience are in harmony, understanding, communicating, and sharing mediated signs in the established mindset of framing.

Negotiated Reading

• Not all audiences may understand what media producers take for granted. There may be some acknowledgement of differences in understanding:

• Decoding within the negotiated version contains a mixture of adaptive and oppositional elements: it acknowledges the legitimacy of the hegemonic definitions to make the grand significations (abstract), while, at a more restricted, situational (situated) level, it makes its own ground rules - it operates with exceptions to the rule.

• While the hegemonic view and dominant definitions will tie events to "grand totalizations" as Hall calls them, negotiated positions are the result of the audience struggling to understand the dominant position or experiencing dissonance (conflict) with those views.

Oppositional

Reading/'counter-hegemonic'

• When media consumers understand the contextual and literary inflections of a text yet decode the message by a completely oppositional means, this is the globally contrary position/oppositional reading.

• The de-totalization of that text enables them to rework it to their preferred meaning. This requires operating with an oppositional code which can understand dominant hegemonic positions while finding frameworks to refute them. Hall feels that this position is necessary to begin a struggle in discourse or the "politics of signification.“. (communication, the way in which meaning is given through signs and signifiers)

Any representation is a mixture of:

1. The thing itself.

2. The opinions of the people doing the representation

3. The reaction of the individual to the representation

4. The context of the society in which the representation is taking place.

For Example

If you’ve seen the film Independence Day, you may have been amused or annoyed at the way that British People were represented as upper class idiots. If you consider the different parts of the Constructionist approach to representation, they would work like this:

1.There must be some British people who the producers either encountered in reality or in other media texts.

2. They formed an opinion of them that they were stuck up idiots which they used as the basis of their representation.

3. As an individual watching this, you chose whether to believe the representation was valid or not.

4. In doing this, you were influenced by the fact that you are yourself British — an American watching the film would probably have come to a different conclusion.

Stereotyping

•Why do we stereotype?

The fact that we naturally see the world in this kind of shorthand way, with connections between different character traits, allows the media to create simplistic representations which we find believable. Implicit personality theory explains this process…

• As humans we use our own unique storehouse of knowledge about people when wejudge them.

• Our past experience is more important than the true features of the actual personalitythat we are judging — traits exist more in the eye of the beholder than in reality.

• We have each a system of rules that tells us which characteristics go with other characteristics.

• We categorise people into types (e.g. workaholic, feminist etc.) to simplify the task ofperson perception.

• Once we have in our minds a set of linked traits which seem to us to go together, theyform a pattern of connections that can be called a prototype. In other words the mix oftraits that we may consider “typical” of feminists are a prototype of what a feminist islike to us.

• If we encounter someone in reality or in the media who seems to fit neatly into a prototype, we feel reassured. It confirms our stereotyped view — we do not need to think further.

• Also once a few of the traits seem to fit our prototype, we will immediately bundleonto the person the rest of the traits from the prototype even if we do not know if theyfit them in reality.

• Research has shown that if we find people who do not fit into our prototypes, we willform very strong often impressions of them — it is surprising to us and disconcerting— it forces us to think more deeply.

• On the other hand, if it is at all possible, we will try to twist the truth to fit in with ourprototype, often ignoring traits which do not fit into our neatly imagined pattern ofcharacteristics. This will particularly happen as time passes and we have time to forgetthings that do not fit in. This can lead to enormous differences between our perceptionsof people and the reality.

• All of this distortion happens naturally in our minds before the media have had theirchance to simplify and distort. We do a lot of the business of stereotyping ourselves. Itis almost as if we conspire with the media to misunderstand the world

= identity?

•Is this then what helps us to create our own identity?

•Do we judge people in the same was as we categorise films into genres?

•How do we create our own identity….?!