TV Drama Project

The way different genders are represented

The clips that I have gathered and will be commenting on are from the recent Netflix series ‘Stranger Things’.

Scene 1 – 

In this scene, the mother of the missing child is presented to the audience as mentally weak and unstable, shown by her tattered, creased clothes and messy hair, connoting the fact that she is distraught by the disappearance of her youngest son, which relates to her motherly figure and how she can’t cope without knowing her son is safe, suggesting the female gender is weaker by her not acting calm and composed. The setting of this scene shows that the mother is panicking and is doing as much as possible to find her son, as the setting involves a cluttered table that is covered with flyers/posters of her son, which indicates that she is trying to do as much as possible at once, relating to how her female gender is presented, again, as very weak. The mother’s oldest son is made to seem the more dominant figure, because he is positioned so that he is standing over her in the 2-shot, to look like a dominant figure as he is staying strong and comforting his mother in a time of horror for them both, which shows that his male gender is represented more stable and supporting than the female. Soothing and calming sounds are played when the mother and son are having a conversation, to show that the son’s male role is trying to calm her down and support her when her female role is getting out of control (mentally). The cigarette that is also used is a factor of mise-en-scene, as a prop, which shows that the mother is stressed and is resorting to smoking to help her through the stress of her son going missing. This scene is important as it makes the audience recognise how the mother is represented at the start of the story, after the youngest son goes missing, where her oldest son steps into a fatherly figure’s shoes and acts like a man to comfort his mother and calm her down so she does not overly stress and go crazy.

Scene 2 –

In this scene, a girl (Eleven) is being tested in a secret facility to identify the limits of her powers by her loving yet evil father, presenting her as scared, weak and afraid. A close-up shot of her is used to show her emotions and expressions of how terrified she is, of what they are making her do, which shows how her female role is presented to the audience, as weak and delicate.

The scene solely focuses on her breathing and sobbing, by using no other sounds, so that they stand out to the audience and understand how afraid she is, with the intensity of the sound increasing as she starts screaming whilst being dragged down the empty corridor to a cell, after refusing to kill an animal with her mind.

Eleven gets dragged down a corridor to a cell, which uses a long shot/over the shoulder shot to show the setting of the scene and how her father is cruelly watching it happen, then shortly changing to a close-up of her father with no emotion, to give the indication to the audience that her father is a horrible yet powerful man, representing his gender as a dominant role, with his suit also suggesting he is powerful and serious in what he does.

Following an impressive scene when Eleven knocks a guard unconscious and breaks the others neck due to her being unstable and scared, her father is amazed and comforts her, showing how his male role is being represented. Even though he wants to use her powers as a weapon, this final scene shows the father being represented as a strong male figure by carrying her daughter to a safe place that is out of all the action.

The audience is made to understand how frightened she is of what she is being made to do by her evil father, with her emotions expressing to the audience how she is feeling, therefore representing that her female character is also displayed as weak and unstable.

Summer Research Task