Media Theorist - Dyer

Due to our piece being part of the social realism genre, it it important to consider how we represent the collective group we are trying to shed light on. Media theorist Richard Dyer (1983) suggested that when analysing media representations we ought to pose the following questions:

What sense of the world is it making?

The sense of the world we created from a negative perspective – we wanted to depict the internal struggle of our protagonist. We included a time-lapse shot of our protagonist in a busy shopping street with him standing still with people moving around him. In post-production we sped this up to indicate the length of time he was standing there, making the world around him seem more isolating. His ordeal becomes decentralised as his story is silenced by society – this is poignant in the quick cut edited mid-shots jumping from him being with his friends in a café to a match-on-action of him being alone, suggesting that although there are friends around him, he cannot reach out and feels alone. Despite companionship, the world is made sense of as a lonely place for the protagonist. Our narrative is absent of a villain because we were attempting to highlight how the society surrounding the protagonist is the villain: as our piece is a social representation on the treatment of men in modern culture.

“Who is it speaking to? For whom? To whom?”

 Our piece is speaking to society to make a change on the attitudes towards men in regards to mental health issues, but also speaking to the women themselves who’ve experienced this ordeal, this message is portrayed from the voice of the victims themselves. Provoking compassion to their voices was then achieved through our use of shooting footage that depicted our protagonist as both vulnerable and isolated. We achieved this through the use of graphic match of a bird’s-eye shot of our protagonist in the foetal position, highlighting her fragility and suffering, as she appears almost child like. The use of two settings one being her domestic bedroom, the other being the woodland, where the rape happened, demonstrates that even when she is in the safe environment of her bed epitomised in the white colour palette and softer haven like setting, she cannot escape her trauma. This extremely emotive, and in some aspects disturbing, footage was how we supported this theory since this is how we was able to visually represent the voices of the victims.