Female Characters in Desperate Living

Peggy Gravel
Grizelda Brown
Mole McHenry
Muffy St. Jacques
Queen Carlotta
Princess Coo-Coo

Film, #1.

Over the halfterm I watched Desperate Living and made notes on the female characters.

Desperate Living (1997)
Plot: A rich housewife murders her husband with the help of her overweight maid, and the two go on the run, ending up in Mortville, a town providing refuge for criminals.

Take a look at this trailer, throughout the woman are just... neurotic, insecure, paranoid, thickle, bipolar, depressed, annoying, loud, mental, stupid, delusional, vuglar, dirty, horny, disgusting, lonely, suburban, housewife, killer, confused, messed-up,

Right from the beginning of the film, we are introduced to a woman, well the hands of a woman.



So early into the film, a stereotypical representation of an American woman can be found: red nails, what looks like a sleeve of a smart/blazer thingy.

Female Representations in Film/Television.

Fact: Men are still represented as TV drama characters up to 3 times more frequently than women, and tend to be the predominant focus of news stories.

Representations of women across all media tend to highlight the following: beauty, size/physique, sexuality, emotional dealings and relationships.

Women are often represented as being part of a context (family, friends, colleagues) and working/thinking as part of a team. In drama, they tend to take the role of helper or object, passive rather than active. Often their passivity extends to victimhood. The representations of women that do make it onto page and screen do tend to be stereotypical, in terms of conforming to societal expectations, and characters who do not fit into the mould tend to be seen as dangerous and deviant. And they get their comeuppance, particularly in the movies.

Housekeeping and raising a family were considered ideal female roles during the 1950s, although that standard was less rigid than in previous decades. With marriage and birthrates booming, women were becoming wives and mothers at unprecedented levels. But more women were entering the work-place as well. During World War II women by the millions took factory jobs to make up for the domestic manpower shortage. After the war the number of working women dropped, but by 1950 it was climbing again, at the rate of a million a year. By 1956, 35 percent of all adult women were members of the labor force, and nearly a quarter of all married women were working.

Discussions of women's representation in the media tend to revolve around the focus on physical beauty to the near-exclusion of other values, the lack of powerful female role models, and the extremely artificial nature of such portrayals, which bear little relation to the reality experience by women across the planet.

rep·re·sen·ta·tion

noun
1. The act of representing or the state of being represented.
2. Something that represents, as:
a. An image or likeness of something.
b. An account or statement, as of facts, allegations, or arguments.
c. An expostulation; a protest.
d. A presentation or production, as of a play.

Many thanks to Mrs Raji

And that year 12 media class Friday, I saw them using this site.

Blog Number 6

Year thirteen now,
This blog will be for my Small scale research project I will be undertaking next year. The plan is to build up a bank of new knowledge via researching and ideally create a presentation that will blow you all awayyyyy! There is some fun steps on the way too, like creating a focus group and digging out oodles of information.

Step by step:
- Choose a focus film
- Choose a topic
- Develop links between focus film and two/three other films
- Develop a hypothesis which will become the catalyst for the subsequent research and presentation - based upon one of the given topics and which links between chosen films.

From the moment we were introduced to this project I knew straight away I wanted to focus on John Waters. I find him fascinating, and I felt he would make an interesting topic as he has been around for quite some time now and people will always have an opinion of him. So really my hypothesis was born out of my interest in a director.

I started off by listing common themes that run through his films:

- Run down, rough, suburban parts of America.
- Alcoholism
- Adultury
- Divorce
- Unfulfilled suburban housewifes.

& so on.

I am now torn between female representations and suburban values.
I shall be watching my focus films again and start to take note on.