Key Assessment One
What is…
Ideology
The beliefs
and values of a media text
Intertexuality
Relationship
between texts
Positioning
Where and
how people are placed within an ad/poster
Lexis
The choice
of words used
Diametric
Opposition
Being the
complete opposites of one another
Paradigmatic
feature
A typical
example of a stereotype etc
Tide Ad
The
ideology of this advert is that the producers believes that all women work in
the kitchen and that is enforced by how many times the “house wife” is shown on
the poster. This poster came out in the 1950’s, a time when woman didn’t get as
much equal rights as they did today, forced to stay in the house and work.
Examples of this hegemonic stereotype include her apron, poke dot blue shirt,
hair pulled back by a bandana, heavy amounts of makeup such as heavy red
lipstick, significant mascara and fluffed up cheeks.
This is what’s known as a paradigmatic feature
of society back in the 1950’s, when women were seen as not as powerful as men,
additionally her pursed lips is a proairetic code that signifies she is in a
relationship, has a husband, therefore further enforcing that she is less
powerful. This ad additionally was made by a group of men, yet even more distancing
women as people and more as workers.
With men
creating the ad, their mode of address towards the target audience, using such
language as informal and colloquial. Some examples include “no wonder you women
buy more tide” The use of the pronoun, “you” directly points towards women and
not men, that it is a woman’s duty to buy tide and use in, also the lexis used
in “no wonder you women” highlights that women are naïve and dumb, that they
buy tide just because they know exactly what’s in it further invokes the
stereotype that women know everything about washing as they live it.
The
positioning of the ‘housewife’ furthermore reinforces the fact that the female
gender loves doing the house work, The way the housewife hugs the Tide box
present her as if she is deeply in love with it, moreover her pursed lips also
presents her as if she is about to kiss the box. What the producer is trying to
say is that his ideology is that all women like cleaning.
Wateraid ad
One key
component about the advert is that it deliberately went away from the
stereotypical archetype that all Africans are miserable and are very poor with
a lack of clean water; this all juxtaposes the representation of African adverts.
In the ad we have a young girl named Claudia walking into a small stereotypical
African village in the middle of the day to collect water, she also sings
throughout the ad with people joining in as she enters the village, the ad
finishes off with the ad saying that millions of people don’t have access to
clean water and asks us to help contribute. Claudia is a working class/
young/black female, but what’s interesting is that its non-stereotypical
representation of a black teenager, it is rather positive for a girl like her
living in a poor nation in Africa. This is further brought out by the
colourful, bright colours, the many happy children and how peaceful everything
seems. Although their town is in a very poor situation, it is polysemic, being
uplifting as well.
The
producer here is subverting what society in the UK believes Africa is like buy
making sure everything and everyone is uplifting. The producer may have done
this to make sure the target audience isn’t unhappy because usual charity
adverts shows disturbing videos of poor children with diseases or in poverty,
here though, wateraid producers leaves a resolutely positive ideology to its
target audience.
Additionally Claudia sings,
an upbeat, catchy, positive song. As she reaches the village, all the people
join in the song, this symbolizes community, friendship and cooperation. Which is
what the producers want the target audience to do, to help by cooperating with
wateraid to make people’s lives as happy as Claudia’s in poor nations. This
diametric opposition helps assist that children’s lives can be so much better.
Representation
When we think of sci-fi
movies, we would think of star trek, star wars etc, all this movies have one
key component, that men such as Piccard or Luke Skywalker are the main protagonists,
but in the Movie poster for Annihilation, this doesn’t seem to be the case, we
have an all women lead with Natalie Portman and etc. The mise en scene here is
that they are all positioned like they would be in a star wars poster, but none
of them are princess to be rescued. The costumes help subvert the stereotype
that women are weak by having them wear army like clothing with heavy weaponry
and leather green coats. The massive gun that the figure in front is holding
also reinforces that women have the power to wield a gun and are super tuff as
we associate guns with being muscular and buff.
The scenery in the
background seems to be hermeneutic, with all the different colours, texture and
creatures within the background creates mystery about what their voyage is
going to be. We associate this with scary movies where the stereotype is that
woman are usually the ones that have to be saved or rather die in a very sexualized
way (especially in old horror movies). But here it’s different, with the women
leading the charge. Such examples emphasizing my point include .
Nicolas Cage in this movie was sent to prison because he killed a man, that might be oppositional reading because they would think he's a bad man but the movie suggests to be comedic and the preferred reading is that killing the really bad prisoners is a good thing.
