Essay 1st draft

The purpose of this essay is explore the representations of British males in film, specifically in the films Kingsman: The Secret Service (2014), Grimsby (2016) and Legend (2015 . Representations are how people, places and things are shown in the media. More often than not representations are based upon stereotypes, stereotypes are a commonly held belief of a particular type of person, place or thing with at least a grain of truth to them. 

British males are often portrayed in the media as football hooligans, football hooliganism is everywhere in the world however when we think about football hooligans a typical English male is instantly thought of. This is because the media influences our beliefs on a certain type of person, this is present in the film Grimsby where the main character is a football hooligan along with the main character the rest of the town is also found to be football hooligans. The main character ‘nobby’ has the word England tattooed on his back showing the extremes he is willing to go to for the England team, he also has the England crest tattooed on his arms. During a scene in the pub an England game is playing and the town decides to celebrate the goal by acting like hooligans drinking letting off fireworks inside the club and throwing things around this is an example of English football hooliganism.    Nobby also has England flags across his house along with football shirts. Another example of football hooliganism is the scene where the town Grimsby are watching a live England game and start making a commotion taking their shirts off and pitch invading whereas the other team is completely calm and normal making it the English fans look much worse. Nobby chants ‘come and have a go if you think your hard enough!’ during a fight showing that football has taken over his life and it’s in everything he does.

Another way British males are represented in film is the upper class, well brought up type of British male, these types of British males are often portrayed as stuck up, usually think they are better than everyone else almost as if they have a disgust for anyone in a lower class than them.  This is demonstrated in the film Kingsman: The Secret Service where the main character ‘Egsy’ is being trialled along with other contesters to see who will become the next agent. Egsy is the odd one out as everyone else there are from an upper class with rich families where as Egsy has been brought up in a normal household in a poorer area. The upper-class contenders approach him and try to attack him sating remark like ‘where did they dig you up’ because of the way he is dressed compared to them. They ask him if he’s ‘Oxford or Cambridge’ then proceed to mock him by implying he doesn’t have an education therefore he must have served them in McDonalds once. The scene where Egsy’s first trial occurs the team is saved by Egsy when egsy smashes a two-way mirror to save them a remark is made ‘must have seen a lot of them’. From these scenes, we clearly see that the upper-class snob type characters think they are better than everyone lower than them because they have money and fancy suits. When Egsy and his mentor are having a drink, things start to get heated and Egsy immediately says ‘snobs like you judging people like me from your Ivory towers with no thought about why we do what we do' showing he is also aware of the fact upper-class think they are stuck up and snobby.

paragraph on green street instead of legend

'The concept of representation embodies the theme that the media construct meanings about the world - they representation, and in doing so, help audiences to make sense of it.' (PAGE 113 Timo'sulivan Brian Dutton Philip Rayner). The media uses stereotypes to help the audience make sense of a character and helps them to understand the character.