Wednesday, 15 October 2014

How Does V Represent Typical Gender Roles to Communicate Messages?

Throughout the film V for Vendetta, it brings out some of the stereotypical gender roles between characters. They way it presents the gender roles at the beginning is quite sexist. It doesn't show the femininity of the characters until later on in the film. Once into the film you can clearly see that they then start to promote the fact of being feminine, masculine men, such as Chancellor Sutler,  loses there masculinity towards the end and then the film starts applying it to there actions and behaviour.

There is a sense of the father and mother figures towards some of the characters towards each other. If we take V for example he would be a mother figure at the beginning of the film towards Evey. He takes her in and looks after her by doing actions that we would categorised with feminine traits. Traits such as cooking which most people would class mainly as a feminine characteristic. Also when V is alone he likes to dance which is more popular with woman. Although V does a lot of these feminine actions, he still has a hype of masculinity by the actions he does towards Government and the scientist that experiments on him by killing them all. Going back to V being a mother figure, he is also a fatherly figure. When we think of fatherly figures we get the approach that they need to be strong, caring and someone they can trust. Evey up to this point trusted V but then that changes when she is put into a mock prison camp set up by V to try and get Evey to over come her fear. This is then giving her the sense of freedom that she's wanted and she is then reborn in a way.

At first, Evey is show to us as a typical women. Long hair, make-up and getting dressed up to go out. When she does go out her fear starts to come out more with the way she acts when she is attempted to be raped. This whole conception of fear is that there is always a source. In Evey's case it would be when her mother is kidnapped and black bagged out of her life. After that she has been living in fear all her and she has been needing a father figure to look up to. Dietrich would be the most suited in a way because being Evey's boss and them being close, Evey has someone to look up to. The scene where Evey can over come her fear is when she has just come out of the prison and has just realised that V set it up. She walks onto the balcony and raises her arms up to give the sense of freedom in her life. It then juxtapose with the scene when V is doing that in the fire, but his isn't for freedom, but for vengeance.

Chancellor Sutler possibly has the biggest impact of a fatherly figure. He has the most power over anyone in the film due to his stature. As a fatherly figure Sutler controls most of the nation, much like a father that has to control his family. He creates the rules, he tells people what they can and cannot do. When Sutler is first introduces it's him on the big screen talking down to three inspectors who are talking about the problem with the destruction of the Old Bailey. As the dictator Sutler has to tell everyone what to do and then they make up an excuse for why the Old Bailey was blown up. Sutler has a lot of the masculine traits that you would think that a dictator would have, he has the power, and most of all he has the voice of the people. His gender does change right at the end when he is killed by V. V makes him act all innocent, has him on his knees begging for his life. At this point Sutler knows what he has done wrong and he is crying and grovelling, this brings his high level of power and masculinity right down to low level of femininity. Now that Sutler's fatherly position has just been destroyed from his actions towards the people and towards V, he has now been removed from the family in a way and now killed. This could link in to reality due to the fact that if you are using power over family, you can be forgotten, you can be left by the people that helped you get to where you are.

Men act, women appear. This is challenged in V due the gender change with Evey. At the beginning where we have Natalie Portman as the typical girly girl with her hair and make up, change to where she loses her femininity. By having her change to a male gender role, she is now changing the perception of the men act and women appear. Originally, Natalie Portman would be there to feature, to be looked at, she is the Male Gaze in this film, but when she gets taken to the mock prison camp and has her head shaved, her femininity gets more and more shorter. The way she is made to look in the second part of film is to make her look man, to create a Female Gaze if you will. This is then there to try and get us to understand that there is more to woman in a film, other to just be looked at by males.

The destruction of Old Bailey probably gave V a hypermasculinity rush, meaning that it gave him more masculinity in his actions. The explosion made him look more powerful and the way that they have shot it, the use of the different angles, gave him the hype of masculinity that defined the gender of V. When if you look at the Old Bailey, it has a point top that can give it phallic imagery. The Old Bailey is a court, it represents can represent the justice of people, meaning if it destroyed, all meaning lost. When V destroys it, he uses it as a symbol. It symbolises the Government, Government not giving justice to innocent people. With the Old Bailey being a phallic object, when destroyed, it can get rid of all the power in that it has, it makes it weak and it makes it feminine.

V for Vendetta represents typical stereotypes of gender roles throughout the film. By doing this it gets communicates messages to the audience. This can be for showing the viewer to bring out the feminine traits. V helps promote the ideas of feminine traits in many ways seen throughout the film. Such as the phallic imagery and the use of the mother and father roles between characters.











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