Evaluation - Question 2

How does your media product represent particular social groups?

From the outset of the film we have deliberately left the identities of the pursuer and the pursued open to interpretation. The only real clue is the young man being pursued is dressed in a middle class way. He might look ‘street’ to the untrained eye but the brown canvas trousers – red shoes – haircut and jacket all point to him being more than just a street kid even though he might be trying to appear cool. He is still conspicuous. The older guy following him is dressed neutrally so he could be anyone. We are playing here, in this opening sequence, with stereotypes about gender, age and class. When we realise the young man being pursued is middle class our first thought might be we assume he has been up to no good although not necessarily in a violent way. As we see him being further chased we might start to ask ourselves if he is in fact in trouble. In fact this sequence depicts Laurence about to be kidnapped. This is unexpected. The audience’s perceptions are altered. If we had cast Laurence as a young black man this would have subverted the stereotype even further.

In TV soaps and detective film or TV series such as Lewis or Frost - when we see a young man being pursued by an older man it is invariably true that the younger man has committed the crime and the older man is the cop or victim chasing him. In our film it is a detective who is indeed pursuing Laurence but it is he who is doing the kidnapping hence our title Legal Deception. In the case of our film I think it would be fair to say that we have created neither a positive nor negative representation of class as the film’s theme deals with the deception and corruption of members of the police. In our instance the victim is middle class – but that is neither a praiseworthy or blameworthy fact – they merely have more access to money for a ransom than a working class family and that is why they were chosen. In Legal Deception we are looking at the philosophical questions of what causes corruption and how someone can stray so far from their vocation rather than setting out to portray class distinctions.