Intro

The medium is the message- Marshall McLuhan, this statement in itself infers just how the Media dominates how we receive information.

Pieces on Body Image

http://www.media-awareness.ca/english/issues/stereotyping/women_and_girls/women_beauty.cfm

http://www.usatoday.com/news/health/2006-09-25-thin-models_x.htm

http://www.guardian.co.uk/tv-and-radio/tvandradioblog/2010/jan/19/gok-wan-disabled-women

Audience Theories

Cultivation Theory – I believe that the target audience, pretty much females, rather young ones, spend most of their time consumed in the media. Looking at what’s in and what’s out. What they see in the media is what is ‘true’ in some sense. And with so many shows about body image, who wouldn’t be body conscious? From watching shows that repeatedly portrayed slimmer women, from movies, to adverts, to soaps, women have always to be skinny to be accepted, taken seriously and considered to be sexy/beautiful. Shows like How to look good naked, America’s next top model and 10 years younger are all based on the narrative of body image. America’s next top model, being a monopoly of all modelling programs, has had a domino effect, and resulted in other countries also producing their version of the show. Resulting people being affected about body image on an international scale. Also with society turning to the media for almost everything now, we depend on the media to construct our opinions.

Copycat theory – By consuming so many medium on a daily basis, people cannot help but reflect on what they see and imitate it. When people see women being represented in a certain way almost everywhere, they accept that this is the right way, and follow it.

Points to include

Tyra Banks – From size zero, typical model look to a plus size model, and how it has become acceptable on the catwalk to be plus size.

Websites that sell clothes specifically for women sizes 12 – 32. www.simplybe.co.uk and www.marisota.co.uk

Healthy eating at schools, and the government’s ways of keeping people fit and healthy.

Five Issues/Debates/Theories relevant to my Investigation.

Ownership & Control – Who the texts are coming from is always very important to consider what sort of ideologies they are trying to represent. Such as America’s next top Model, which is hosted by Tyra Banks who herself was once a model, but now has become a plus size model and therefore to reflect her ideologies on body image she has chosen to portray that plus size ( real life ) people can be models.

Gender – Gender is also key, as I am looking at the body image of women in specific and how the male gender also has an input in to how body image is being constructed on TV. Recent surveys suggest that men are looking for curvy women not stick thin women.

Reality TV – The texts I will be looking at are America’s Next Top Model, How to look good naked and supersize vs. super skinny. All three are reality TV programs.

Media Effects – the media is very important, as it consumes so much of the public’s lives, so the shifts in how people perceive body image has also been changed dominantly by the media and Reality TV programs that accept real life people as beautiful.

Moral Panics – Repeatedly we see in the media, overweight people and how we should eat healthily, and even children have been included. However shows like Supersize VS Super skinny present the unhealthy extent that dieting can have on people.

Issues and Debates

Representation: how the media present people, places and even events through words, images and sounds. Representations allow audiences to have certain opinions on gender, beliefs etc.

Stereotyping: generalised view on a group of people in society. Stereotypes are made when there is a repeated characteristic in people and therefore the media summarily categorise them.

Media Effects: Theory to see if the media can infect influence the audiences and suggest that audiences are passive.

Reality TV: when members of the public are filmed without any sort of script or directions to show “real life” for entertainment value.

News Values: The criteria that broadcasters use to select news. To see what is worth to be in the news.

Moral Panics:By Jock young and developed by Stan Cohen, suggesting to the public that a certain situation is out of control, and people start to panic. This is done by repeatedly showing the issue in the media and use of the same stereotypes.

Post 9/11:the representation of certain races/religions in the media since the 9/11, in specific the representation of the Muslim society in the media.

Ownership and control:Who owns the institution that the media texts are coming from and who has control in what is included in the texts.

Regulation and Censorship:monitoring and controlling media content, and getting rid of anything that is not suitable for a certain group of people such as religious groups, political groups etc. Regulation is when the elite people in control make sure that all is well and that things which are not suitable for people is not shown.

Globalisation: When companies merge and work on an international basis.

Texts I have looked at.

Article from the BBC News website (Wednesday 17th Feburary 2010)
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/health/8510160.stm

"Men do not experience - and have to live with - the same degree of bodily scrutiny, analysis, competition and comparison that women do."
"In our modern society the relentless promotion of the idealisation of thinness has put women of all ages under intense pressure to strive after the attainment of body perfection."

Glamour magazine website "Real Size Models On The Runway In London".
http://www.glamour.com/fashion/blogs/slaves-to-fashion/2009/09/real-size-models-on-the-runway.html

"The girls were so skinny!" and "Someone get those poor girls cheeseburgers stat!" were just a few of the murmurs we heard about the mannequins last week"
"Just three normal women, making his clothes look gorgeous, walking randomly in between the size 2s we've come to expect on the catwalk."
"Stylist Fast hired refused to work with the size-10-and-up models, which only sheds a brighter light on fashion's weight bias and further cements why we need designers like Fast in the first place."

Another BBC Article "Size zero girls 'less attractive'"
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/scotland/edinburgh_and_east/8327750.stm

"The study found that girls with an average weight and build were ranked as being the most attractive and healthy"

"Researchers said the findings sent out a strong message to young women who believe being underweight is considered to be attractive."

How to look good naked

M – Different locations around the UK – to target more people, suggest that women who are of a larger size are everywhere, and that is what we call normal, not size sero.

I – E4

G – Reality TV

R – Represents women to be shy people who come out confident of their size. Portrays real size women to be beautiful.

A – Shown on E4 which is a channel known for its youthful programs. Also shows programs which CW produce such as 90210, One Tree Hill and Smallville, therefore the audiences may be the same too. Largely females, however more elder women, such as the ones who take part in the show.

I – The message sent across to viewers is that women should embrace the way they look and not try to perfect themselves.

N – linear, and us the viewers follow the subjects journey in each program, seeing them come out of their shells.

First draft of introduction

Women have always been treated as an object of desire. They are there to look perfect, but what is perfection? for years women have tried to achieve the size zero image, repeatedly shown in the media. Diets, exercising and even starving themselves, females have gone to extreme lengths to cope with these ideologies. However recently we have seen a rise in women being "real women", and the media has supported this with shows that promote larger sizes to be normal, sexy and accepted, but why has there been such a shift in the ideologies?

America's next top model.

M - Infromal, we even see some of the models arguing. Fly on the wall type of shots.

I - CW television network, also known for programs such as One tree hill, 90210 and Smallville. Shown on Living TV in Britain.

G - Reality TV ( sending off messages that being as skinny as a model is what is accepted in 'reality'.

R- "survival of the fittest" well in this case, It's as if the one who fits in with all the model conventions wins. The larger model who participate are commonly represented as the outcast.

A - considering other programs that CW air, the audience are a mass female audience. Escapists, mainstreamers and aspirers.

I - The idea that such a show is even popular, we can see that the ideologies are also accepted by the sudiences. We are given the sense that we need to look a certain type, and possibly even that looks can get you somewhere in life. Also that you need to fit in and become a mainstreamer.

N - Linear. There have been 15 cycles up till now, and each cycle, the audiences follow the episodes to see who finally wins.

Final Critical Investigation Title.

How does advertising construct ideologies of body image, and why has there been a shift/ change in these ideologies from size zero to size 16?

Work to do !

In the Media A-Z (There are spare copies of this in DF05 on the desk near the front on the left side of the room) read/highlight the following:

Issues/Debates

Representation and stereotyping
Media effects
Reality TV
News Values
Moral Panics
Post 9/11 and the media
Ownership and control
Regulation and censorship
Media technology and the digital revolution – changing technologies in the 21st century
The effect of globalisation on the media
Theories

Semiotics
Structuralism and post-structuralism
Postmodernism and its critiques
Gender and ethnicity
Marxism and hegemony
Liberal Pluralism
Colonialism and Post-colonialism
Audience theories
Genre theories
Use the internet to research these issues/debates and theories if you need further clarification or if you don't have a Media A - Z to hand.

Choose the five issues/debates/theories which apply most to your critical investigation question.

On your blog carefully define each of these five issues/debates/theories.

Then carefully explain how each of these 5 issues/debates/theories applies to your critical investigation.

For Homework (Due 10/11/10) - visit the blogs of four other students in the class. Look at their critical investigation research and question (you should all have posted this information on your blog by now!). Then in the comments section suggest one new issue/debate/theory that you think is relevant to each four students' areas of study. Explain why this issue/debate/theory can be applied to their critical investigation question.




If you have not already done so, apply MIGRAIN and SHEP to the two media texts which will form the main focus of your critical investigation. Post this to your blog by 20/10/10.

By 23/10/10 add to your blog a list of the first 5 texts you have read as research for your critical investigation. Quote all sections of the texts which are relevant to your question and comment on their relevance. Remember to update your bibliography with all the books and websites you have used in your research so far.

Over half term - continue with your research. Use the internet (remember to use the Media Magazine website!!) and text books to find at least 5 more texts (10 in total so far) which are relevant to your question. Post relevant quotations to your blog and comment on their connection to your question. Update your bibliography. Be ready to present all you research on 3/11/10.

Remember to take notes on all the Media Theorists at the media magazine conference on Thursday - much of this may be relevant to your area of study.

Ideas

Music is the world's entertainer, because we give it our ears, our mind, body, and soul. Every song has a story; Therefore touching us in someway if it relates to us. We have songs that we call "Female Anthems." This touches a woman heart because it has a comparison to some part of their life, of which they can relate to its lyrics perfectly. The parts of them that hurt lends music their ears, hoping that it will someway be of comfort to the woman.

http://www.associatedcontent.com/article/650549/how_music_affects_contemporary_society.html?cat=9

Love songs are powerful, regardless if some of them are condeired cliché or corny. They have certain effects on people that can either be beneficial or harmful.

Gloomy Demeanor – Harsh love songs like “Cannonball” by Damien Rice or “The Scientist” by Coldplay can easily trigger the sensitive spots of romantically bitter people. If those people do not breakdown, they will be in an indifferent state. You can mistake them for being sick since they will not respond to your stories nor will they produce good outputs in school or at the office.

http://lifehackery.com/2008/09/09/life-11/

The Guardian review

The star TV talk-show hostess Oprah Winfrey has been involved over the years in three significant movies based on celebrated novels by black authors. In 1985, she appeared as a natural rebel alongside Whoopi Goldberg in Steven Spielberg's skilful, soft-centred adaptation of Alice Walker's The Color Purple about the oppression of black women in the Deep South, the need for sisterhood and the romance of Africa.

Precious: Based on the Novel Push By Sapphire
Production year: 2009Country: USACert (UK): 15Runtime: 109 minsDirectors: Lee DanielsCast: Gabourey 'Gabby' Sidibe, Gabourey Sidibe, Lenny Kravitz, Mariah Carey, Mo'Nique, Paula PattonMore on this filmIn 1998, she produced and starred in Jonathan Demme's film of Toni Morrison's Beloved. In this ambitious failure, Winfrey played the runaway slave who kills her baby rather than see her recaptured by white pursuers and, a decade after the Civil War, is haunted by the child's ghost. Now she is the ­co-producer of Lee Daniels's Precious, adapted by Geoffrey Fletcher from Push, the bestselling 1996 novel by Ramona Lofton, the writer and performance poet who styles herself "Sapphire".

Made on a much smaller budget, Precious is a simpler, tougher work than the two preceding films and altogether more effective. The setting is Harlem in 1987, the central character the obese 16-year-old black girl Claireece Jones, known as "Precious", unforgettably played in her first professional role by the vast, imposing Gabourey Sidibe, daughter of a New York gospel singer and a Senegalese father. Precious is illiterate, aggressive, constantly tormented by fellow high-school pupils and abused, both physically and verbally by her alcoholic mother and father. She has a daughter with Down's syndrome by her father, who constantly rapes her with the mother's connivance and is pregnant again by him. Later, it's revealed that the father has died of Aids.

You might well ask who is in the market for such a film and one thinks of Eliot's smug statement: "Humankind cannot bear much reality" and those newsreaders who preface horrendous reports from Haiti with the warning: "There are scenes some viewers may find disturbing." But over the years there have been a number of highly acclaimed pictures of this kind. Just after the Second World War, for instance, there was a widely shown Danish picture called Ditte, Child of Man, about the unremittingly miserable life of an illegitimate, working-class girl with a drunken mother, a brutal stepfather who was raised in poverty, seduced and abandoned.

The following year, in 1947, Rossellini's Germany, Year Zero, the most despairing of neorealist movies, charted the destruction of a 13-year-old orphan in the ruins of Berlin. More recently, there's Robert Bresson's religious allegory Mouchette (1967), about the endless humiliations heaped upon a teenage country girl in a remote French community that ends with her suicide. But these were art-house productions aimed at middle-class audiences, not from Hollywood and targeting mainstream viewers.

Precious certainly is unflinching in the presentation of its heroine's life and prospects. The brief impressionistic scenes in which she's raped are horrendous and the confrontations with her mother Mary (a performance of extraordinary courage by the stand-up comedienne Mo'Nique) tear at one's guts through their language and their violence.

But from very early on, Precious invites our sympathy, her first aggressive act being an attack on two boys who disrespect a white teacher she admires. She has an inner life in which she imagines herself a star. Worthy of a love she can't find, she's struggling to find meaning in her life.

An understanding principal arranges for her to go to a special school that offers remedial education through a programme called Each One/Teach One, where she encounters an sympathetic teacher and some fellow outsiders. The teacher, Ms Rain (Paula Patton), helps her come to terms with her life through writing about it and to learn she is capable of being loved. The girls in her new class are all bruised and scarred in different ways and involve her in volatile exchanges that are sometimes violent, but also roughly comic. A lot of the film is, indeed, edgily funny, as in a moment where the other girls laugh when Precious says "insect" instead of "incest" and she comes back: "Are you a scientist now?"

Another practitioner of tough love (or what we used to call being cruel only to be kind) is a perceptive social worker, Mrs Weiss (Mariah Carey), whose ethnic identity and social background intrigue Precious. Weiss presides over a final confrontation in her office between Precious and her mother. Earlier, we've seen Mary deceive an easily convinced welfare inspector into believing she's a loving mother. Now, the mother is drawn into a confessional breakdown, explaining how she came to persecute her daughter; Mo'Nique's handling of the moment is a tour de force.

There are other revealing and moving scenes. Precious, for instance, is introduced to the notion of organic food (though it doesn't take) by a thoughtful male nurse. His job is as much a revelation to her as the discovery that Ms Rain is in a stable lesbian relationship. More than incidentally, there is on the wall of the gay couple's apartment a poster for the surprise 1976 Broadway hit, For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide When the Rainbow Is Enuf, Ntozake Shange's landmark "choreo poem" about the social and moral empowerment of African-American women. The show no doubt influenced Sapphire as a writer.

Precious ends on an affirmative note that is sufficiently hopeful to let the audience leave the cinema without rushing to find a strong drink or a lethal dose of arsenic, but is yet consistent with its heroine's situation. The film does not, however, address itself to any larger social context. We have experienced a story, not read a case history.

The excellent cinematography, mostly raw but on occasion appropriately romantic, is the work of the British cameraman, Andrew Dunn, whose films include Gosford Park and the original BBC series Edge of Darkness.

By Phillip French

Ebony Front Cover

Leading Star Gabby Sidibe, poses for Ebony magazine. (Ebony is one of the most and oldest African American Magazines)

Reviews

Reviews:
The Telegraph (January 28th 2010) By Sukhdev Sandhu.“Mariah Carey (don’t laugh!) as a counsellor, Lenny Kravitz (okay, laugh!) as a male nurse — are less than dark-skinned. Blackness is ugliness, a social pathology. Hmm, hardly an 'empowering’ vision, is it?”
“There’s no 'real’ here”

www.Rottentomatoes.com Gives Precious 91% on the Tomato Meter, with 185 Fresh Comments and only 18 rotten ones. Leading to an average of 7.8/10

The guardian By Peter Bradshaw.
“It isn't the transcendent ­masterpiece that some admirers would have you believe: more like a black-comic nightmare that isn't exactly ­supposed to be funny. It's certainly ­arresting, though.”

Research

Media Representations:
A Black teenage female named Precious, she is represented as a stereotypical black female teenager, due to the fact that she is pregnant and has been the rebel girl in school. She is pregnant with her second child and struggles to keep up with both home and school life. I think the representation is showing how people stereotypically see people like Precious, however after watching the movie fully, we are shown how hard her life is and that she never had a control over how her life would turn out to be. The representation is neither fair nor accurate because it is solely based upon one person’s life. Towards the end of the movie, Precious get’s a chance to change her life, as soon as she decides to take care of her own children and actually devote herself not only to her children but also her education.

Media Languages and Forms:
Throughout the movie there is great use of both denotative and connotative meanings. Connotations are used through the representation of Precious. The use of connotations is very important, because if shows how the audience change their opinion on precious from the beginning of the movie to the end of the movie. The mise en scene helps us as viewers understand Precious’s story better, as we see how she lives we can see how hard it is for her at home. There are many shots of the streets to show the rough areas where she lives and contribute to her stereotype. There is a constant use of juxtaposition used throughout the movie, where we see shots of Precious in a glamorous set singing and signing, which shows the viewers just how different her life is from her dream.
Repetitive shots of the boiling pan of food, to reinforce the idea of how repetitive her life is (Going school, coming back home, making food and so on) and also to prominently contrast the difference between her reality and her dreams.

Iconographies consist of:
Big hoop earrings
Flat’s
Rough streets
Dialect of the actors and actresses

Narrative:
The viewers follow the story of Precious from scratch and are told about her story through her own voiceover, which allows the viewers to feel how she makes them to. As the movie has shots of real sets, and the costumes are not as glamorous, ‘real people’ can gain personal identification, as they to may be living in a state like her, or have an abusive household. I think Ideologies such as ’never judge a book by its cover’ are conveyed from the movie.

Genre:
Can be placed under the Teenage drama genre. The text does conform to the genre as it has little to no humour in it at all, and is based upon a forever contemporary issue of teenage pregnancy.

Values and ideologies:
‘Life is hard. Life is short. Life is painful. Life is rich. Life is....Precious.’

New Movie.

After doing some more research I have decided to do my summer project on ‘Precious’ the movie which has had many different reviews and was released in January of this year.

Seven Pounds research.

Released on January 16th 2009

Protagonist: Will Smith (Also known for his lead role in the television series, ‘Fresh Prince of Bel Air’ and movies such as ‘The pursuit of happyness’, ‘I am Legend’ and ‘I Robot’)

Director- Gabriele Muccino (also the director of ‘The Pursuit of Happyness’)

Seven Pounds is about a man named Ben Thomas seeking redemption from the accidental death of his wife and 6 other people by donating his organs to 7 strangers.

4.6/10 rating on Rotten Tomatoes. Mostly criticized for not being ‘Hollywood’ enough because of its unexpected storyline.