Today we begin the process of exploring some media products that may well have passed some of you by. These are products that open up areas rich in discussion as to their intentions and to their receptions by audiences.
We are going to begin with a film that challenges your values, your attitudes towards a variety of issues. It will shock you, create debate amongst you and provide a very memorable start to our work for A2 – the ‘WHY’ question that will preoccupy so much of our work this year.
This text is very much linked to the new AQA topic area of ‘Identities’ and may also serve as a base text for those of you who are considering the option of the WJEC AS Film Studies next summer.
WHOSE TRUTH?
We may feel that we know the difference between fact and fiction, between a news story and a creative fiction, a documentary and a fictional story. However, even our news is constructed - who to film; where to film them; how to edit the interview - and programmes such as TOWIE and Benefits Street have blurred the lines between the idea of a strictly factual objective documentary and fictionalised narrative. We need to keep in mind that each media product we are going to examine is the result of a number of decisions [choices] made by the production team and that these are what shape the finished product and how audiences decode and understand them. In this sense, there is no objective truth, simply versions of an event.
The film Monster is based on a true story but we must always keep in mind that this, like any other true story, is situated from the perspective of one person: Aileen Wuornos. With this in mind, the details of the meeting, her state of mind, issues around how she sees those around her and, more specifically, the events leading up to and provoking the first murder, are hers alone. For some things we may have other sources of evidence – her school records detail her expulsions; her welfare etc – but the murder is purely based on Aileen’s account of events.
The director [Patty Jenkins] also has a perspective on this. She has a story to tell but she also has a purpose [a set of values/ideologies] that drive the narrative of that story [how the story is told to us]. Her agenda was to tell Aileen’s story and to examine why Aileen came to be the Monster of the title. The agenda is clearly also feminist. she is telling the story of a woman who saw herself as the victim of a male dominated world [a patriarchy; a misogynistic culture].
Here, then, we might see a use for McComb’s theory of agenda setting, that the manner in which an event is presented can actually shape how audiences understand that event and subsequently come to believe that point of view, that representation. The story telling – the narrative presentation – becomes the version that people take to be a universal ‘truth’ of those events, that person.
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