Evaluation - How does your media product represent particular social groups?

Our opeing represents teenagers as emotionally unstable. This is shown throughout the opening sequence as the Stalker, Daniel, starts to create collages and pictures of his love interests. This reinforces the stereotype that teenagers don't understand what love really is, so they take it to extremes and express their attraction in ways that an undeveloped mind would do (stalk). We see this in Pretty Little Liars (a teen tv drama) where a teenager stalks four of her friends and organises the buliding a destruction of their relationship.  This relates to the idea of a teen being immature in terms of how they conduct themselves in the real world, and how the media or their fantasy of how society should be has shaped the way they act in everyday life.

The mental health issue we represented in our opening was aspergers syndrome. The common symptoms of aspergers are things like difficulty making friends or partners, sufferers can have one or two obsessions and find it difficult to empathize & understand how people feel.
We see these symptoms during our opening sequence in moments such as the man in the picture shot, a dolls hair being brushed, pictures of Rachel, etc. These reinforce the stereotype that people with aspergers are incapable of understanding that what they are doing may not be socially acceptable, a
nd the fact that what they think they're doing is normal adds to creepy tone of the film.

However, you can argue that because we included the idea of the stalker not being mentally well, it can shine a light on the subject of mental health and get people talking about it. Therefore, this represents people with mental health issues positively as it makes you sympathise with the character. An example of where this could be true is where he strokes the picture of Rachel. How this could be interpreted is that the stalker wants affection from her but the way his brain works and from what he's seen people do to their partners, he's unsure of how to express that properly which causes him to act in an odd way.