Key assessment 1

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 .