Michael Lehman's Heathers and Steve Jodrell's Shame
Throughout time the concept of gender and the corruption of power associated with it has been a very evident problem within society. Many texts have been designed to expose these issues and in particular the feature films’ Heathers, directed by Michael Lehman and Shame, by Steve Jodrell. Both these films have been heavily constructed in order to position us as the audience to take a very negative response towards the concepts of power and gender and further an ‘anti-conform’ attitude. Techniques such as narrative elements and codes and conventions have been used to mould these ideas and attitudes within the texts.
Both the films Heathers and Shame can be deemed to be modern day Westerns however are quite subverted. They both develop the idea that conformity leads to tragic consequences. Heathers is set in an American high school, Westerburg, in 1988 and attacks the idea of a high school hierarchy, where four girls particularly one, Heather Chandler, has the power within the school. On the arrival of a new student, Jason Dean, Veronica, one of the four girls breaks away and conforms to Jason. As a result she is led to kill Heather Chandler and later the ‘footy jocks’ to make their school a better place. Shame on the other hand is set in a small outback, Western Australian country town, Ginobrak, in 1987. It deals with the issues of a small town mentality and that ‘boys will be boys’. As result of these concepts and issues, many young girls were raped and the town accepted this. As Asta, an outsider coming into town, stumbles across these rappings’, she helps and encourages a young girl, Lizzie to face the boys and lay legal charges. In both texts it takes and outsider the ‘hero’ figure to expose the corruption and help in acting as a catalyst to change.
Gender relationships are a very explored issue within these texts. In a majority, anyone no matter if they are male or female who do not fit in or do not conform to stereotypes to an extent, can be cast out by that group. Whether it is, their looks, their behaviour, the way they dress, or the way they think and feel, they are judged as different. This ‘outcast’ idea is portrayed in both the films. In the two feature films, the most obvious ‘outcasts’ would be the two ‘hero figures’ the intruders into the created microcosm.
The exact mechanism that leads to post-ERCP pancreatitis (PEP) is not fully established;however, , but it is suggested that, once the inflammatory cascade is initiated, it promotes intraluminal activation of proteolytic enzymes, autodigestion of the pancreas, impaired acinar secretion and synthesis of chemokines and proinflammatory cytokines, augmenting the inflammatory process. Given the severity of pancreatitis, attempts to interrupt one or more of these critical steps were made in order to prevent this complication (4). Therefore, more than 35 pharmacological agents have been studied, but to date no medication is being constantly used in wide clinical practice.
It may seem that the male characters in classical cinema are given power and control over female characters, but the relationships between characters in Billy Wilder’s 1944 noir Double Indemnity and Michael Curtiz’s 1945 drama Mildred Pierce are complex and do not conform to specific gender roles. Rather, both of these films feature female characters that are both controllers and the controlled. The characters Mildred Pierce and Phyllis Dietrichson hold both of these roles in their respective films but are inverses of each other: Mildred acts strongly and independently but is actually controlled emotionally and financially by others, while Phyllis is presented as submissive but is the grand manipulator. As such, these two films present different images of the “independent woman,” both of which are destined for failure.
Power, especially in the hands of females, can be a force for immense societal changes. Director Sciamma plays with the role of power in the lives of the four girls, predominantly in the character of Lady. Lady’s sense of control, stems from winning hand on hand fights, but the opinion of the men around her lays the foundation of this empowerment. The more fights Lady wins, the more the men appear to respect her, yet as feminist Simone de Beauvoir explains “[n]o matter how kindly, how equally men treated me when I tried to participate in politics, when it came right down to it, they had more rights, so they had more power than I did (Simone de Beauvoir - The Second Sex- ix),” the “power” Lady obtained was provisional. Lady’s power was directly tied to the opinion of the men around her, in this scene, a portion of the boys sits on stairs physically higher than Lady, invoking a sense of power hierarchy and control. The boys only valued Lady when she successfully participated in the their world of violence, but this participation came with boundaries as “[w]omen can never become fully socialized into patriarchy- which in turn causes man to fear women and leads then, on the one hand, to establish very strict boundaries between their own sex and the female sex (Feminist theory 142).” The men had never truly incorporated Lady into their group, she had just
...hetypes of these primary characters, both of these novels make a parallel statement on feminism. The expectations of both themselves and society greatly determine the way that these women function in their families and in other relationships. Looking at the time periods in which these novels were written and take place, it is clear that these gender roles greatly influence whether a female character displays independence or dependence. From a contemporary viewpoint, readers can see how these women either fit or push the boundaries of these expected gender roles.
The play Blackrock, written by Nick Enright that was inspired by the murder of Leigh Leigh, which took place in Stockton in 1989. During this essay the following questions will be analysed, what stereotypes of women are depicted in the text, how do the male characters treat the female characters and how do the male characters talk about the female characters. These questions are all taken from the feminist perspective.
While the film focuses mainly on the theme of media responsibility and covers US’s politics in the early 1950s, it also encircles around other crucial themes such as sexism. This essay discusses about how this film is used as a tool for objectivity, agenda setting, stereotyping within gender, and how these has impacted the characters in the movie and viewers.
Gender and the portrayal of gender roles in a film is an intriguing topic. It is interesting to uncover the way women have been idealized in our films, which mirrors the sentiments of the society of that period in time. Consequently, the thesis of this essay is a feminist approach that seeks to compare and contrast the gender roles of two films. The selected films are A few Good Men and Some Like it Hot.
...the female and male gender across cultures. This role can cause problems when mistaking a male for a female much like Gallimard did in the play. Everyone from children, to the media, creates stereotypes. Stereotypes corrupt members of society, compelling them to view cultures and gender unfairly. Societies must eliminate the amount of stereotypes that are being distributed to various cultural around the world. Stereotypes are powerful, limiting, and discriminatory, and they prevent people from understanding other cultures fully. Without the demolition of stereotypical ideas, cultures that stereotype others will not see the differences between the stereotypical ideas and the real ideas of a culture.
The most important events of this film all revolve around the female characters. While there are some male charac...
Margaret Atwood’s speech ‘Spotty-Handed Villainesses’ is an epideictic text, which explores the significance of having a multi-faceted depiction of female characters within literature as a means of achieving gender equity, centring on the fictional presentation of women as either virtuous or villainess. The title of the speech
In the following essay I will seek to establish the construction of feminine gender roles in ‘Game of Thrones’, the HBO television adaptation of George R. R. Martin’s series of novels ‘A Song of Ice and Fire’, which is played out in the fictional kingdom of Westeros. Consequently I will analyse these feminine gender roles from a materialistic viewpoint and discuss how a number of characters, principally female (since we will see how patriarchy is the favoured practice in Westeros), both conform to and reject preconceived ideas of gender performance and representation. To begin with it is necessary to establish an understanding of what ‘gender’ is. “Gender is the range of physical, biological, mental and behavioral characteristics pertaining to, and differentiating between, masculinity and femininity. Depending on the context, the term may refer to biological sex (i.e. the state of being male, female or intersex), sex-based social structures (including gender roles and other social roles), or gender identity” (Urdy 1994). Martin himself acknowledges De Beauvoir’s (1973) suggestion that gender is unnatural, ‘a social construction’, “I regard men and women as all human- yes there are differences, but many of those differences are created by the culture that we live in, whether it is the medieval culture of Westeros, or 21st century western culture” (Salter 2013). The characters portrayed and developed in ‘Game of Thrones’ are no different in that they too are subject to the culture that has been created around them and the experiences by which they progress “as De Beauvoir puts it, consciousness exists one’s body, which, in the context of ...
Human nature is a conglomerate perception which is the dominant liable expressed in the short story of “A Tell-Tale Heart”. Directly related, Edgar Allan Poe displays the ramifications of guilt and how it can consume oneself, as well as disclosing the nature of human defense mechanisms, all the while continuing on with displaying the labyrinth of passion and fears of humans which make a blind appearance throughout the story. A guilty conscience of one’s self is a pertinent facet of human nature that Edgar Allan Poe continually stresses throughout the story. The emotion that causes a person to choose right from wrong, good over bad is guilt, which consequently is one of the most ethically moral and methodically powerful emotion known to human nature. Throughout the story, Edgar Allan Poe displays the narrator to be rather complacent and pompous, however, the narrator establishes what one could define as apprehension and remorse after committing murder of an innocent man. It is to believe that the narrator will never confess but as his heightened senses blur the lines between real and ...
The representation of violence exacted upon women in cinema is inextricable from being projected upon all women. To provide a scene that objectifies the female is to reduce the feminine form to its non-dual state, e.g., a sexual object providing a vessel for male gratification (hubris and sexual) rather then being defined by its duality of sentient and physical forms. Those who construct scenes of violence against women are bound to a moral responsibility to subjectify the woman’s perspective, thus reestablishing the female as a victim rather then an object and rendering the act of violence intelligible (deplorable, open to interpretation).
The role of women has changed significantly throughout history, driven by women who took risks in setting examples for others to follow. Henrik Isben, author of A Doll's House, said “ A woman cannot be herself in society of the present day, which is an exclusively masculine society, with laws framed by men and with a judicial system that judges feminine conduct from a masculine point of view” (Innes 147). This proves that Isben was aware of male dominance in society during that time period. In his drama, “A Doll's House,” it deals with gender favoritism and male dominance.
...their community because of the disapproval of their lifestyles. The misogynistic tone is meant to give the reader the feeling of alienation. Joe Christmas’s hatred towards women adds to his alienated character. While the use of negative female roles, adds to the theme of alienation.