Task 2- Representation of social group

Dayana is playing a female agent who is a professional, serial killer and who rescues the second agent, who is played by Maks. You don’t usually see female agents rescuing and helping males so the idea of our female agent rescuing the male agent subverts the stereotypical representations of such movies. Moreover it is also a positive representation of females; because females are usually the victims and are much weaker in most of the movies.  There are several movies that are similar to our movie in terms of the positive representation of women. One of such movies is Salt. So basically it is about a CIA agent who goes on the run after a defector accuses her of being a Russian spy. The movie if full of action and we see how the Russian spy is being chased by the negative characters and how she fights against them. She is the main actor in the movie and therefore this is a clearly positive representation of women. Our movies are similar, because both of them have female as the main actor and both of the actresses are action characters. Another movie which is also similar is the Long Kiss Goodnight. It is about a women suffering from amnesia begins to recover her memories after trouble from her past finds her again. During the whole movie she is trying to survive and fight the negative characters with her male partner. She fights, kills, escapes and do all sorts of other action things during the movie. This is also a positive representation of women, because even there is male actor who is seen mostly in every bit of the movie, she is still the one who is the main character of the movie. It is similar to our movie because it also has female and male actors who are acting together and fighting against negative characters; moreover in both movies the main action character is the female. Another good example is the movie called “The Brave One”. It is bout a woman struggles to recover from a brutal attack by setting out on a mission for revenge. Same concept again, the whole movie she kills and seeks for revenge. This is also a positive representation of women, because we see her having most of the power over other people. She is the main actor and the storyline is about her life.. The social group Dayana represents are females aged 17 to 25. Moreover Dayana will attract male audience, because of her appearance (good looking blond woman).

                                                       

                                                   BINARY OPPOSITION

Men:                                                                                                                              Women:

Strong                                                                                                                Weak

Heroes                                                                                                                Minor 

Leader in a household                                                                                          The listener

Instrumental role                                                                                                 Expressive role

Breadwinner                                                                                                       Home-maker

Tough and thick-skinned                                                                                     Too emotional

Multi tasks                                                                                                          Single tasks

In our movie this idea of men being dominant over women doesn’t exactly work. In our case we have the male agent being caught and controlled by the other characters and the female agent who actually rescues him. There is a positive representation of women, as she is the one who saves the male agent. While in our movie the idea of men being dominant over women is subverted. There is a negative representation of men, because we see the male agent being controlled and tortured.

Maksym was playing the male agent who betrayed the USA agent (played Mike Timpson) and therefore was meant to be killed but actually was rescued by the female agent Dayana. In such movies (action/thriller), u don’t see a male actor being rescued by female. So this subverts stereotypical representation of male actors, as they are the ones who are the main heroes. There are some news articles about female spies and agents which influenced us about having the female agent. Probably the best example would be the Russian spy Anna Chapman who was recently caught by the FBI counter-intelligence Chief Frank Figliuzzi. Miss Chapman was close to seducing a sitting member of the Obama administration spurred agents to swoop on the 10-strong spy ring of which she was a part. The idea of us having a female spy/ agent is similar to this article as it is telling about a Russian spy being caught. Another news article which has some similarities with our film is about Israel's fearsome secret service which has developed a new breed of super-spy - seductive young women.  The article is about new female spies and they have been developed in Israel. This is similar to our movie, because we also got a female spy.

Deadly: Israel is deploying female spies to seduce the enemy into handing over secret information

  

The bad agent who was meant to kill Maksym was played by Mike Timpson. Mike Timpson was playing a tall, well-dressed agent who actually was killed by Dayana. Social group that Mike represents are 40-50 years old people. Mike is the oldest character from other characters playing negative roles. This means that he is the most respected one, who also has the most power. Mike’s target audience are again 40-50 years old people and possibly some teenagers (as Mike could become their idol). Nowadays most of the people sitting in the government, owners of industrial/big companies with significant profit and other enterprises are owned by people aged 45-65. Old people have got most of the power. They are experienced, hardworking and clever. They have lived longer than younger people, they have already faced most of the problems and got through them, they are much more intelligent than younger ones and that’s one of the reasons why we took Mike to be the main negative character. He had also the power over the younger agent. 

The data illustrates the income of families by age and proves that families which have older male as the head of the family have more profit.

  

This graph indicates the average income earned by different people with different age and actually proves that older people have bigger income than younger

The two guards who carried and brought Maksym to the main agent were played by Anri and Mikael. Both of them have darker skin than other’s which signifies them being a negative character, as in most of the movies people with darker skin have negative roles, so this is a stereotypical representation of middle east people. Social group that Anri and Mikael represent are teenagers aged 16-25. The target audience could be both females and males as both of them could attract some of the female audience as well as some male teenagers who could like the personality and behaviour of both Anri and Mikael.  

In early stages of movies made by Hollywood the main actors were Russians. This is mainly because of the cold war and Russian post revolution. In most of the movies the negative actors were Russians. Some of the examples of such films are: From Russia With Love; Rocky Balboa 4; Top Gun and others.

However nowadays the idea of Russians being negative has changed into Middle Eastern being negative. The main reason for that is the recent terrorist acts made by Arabs, the explosions and the September 11 attacks which were made by  a series coordinated terrorist attacks launched by the Islamist terrorist group al-Qaeda upon the United States in New York City and the Washington, D.C. areas. So in modern society the stereotypical enemy mainly of USA are Arabs and some of the Middle Eastern countries.