Media Writing Lab

By Griffin Spurgin The Hunger Games is an action-packed fiction book that was also turned into a movie. Throughout the series, main characters, Katniss Everdeen and Peeta Mellark are fighting for their lives in a tournament where they battle to the death of all but one tribute. They don't have much to lose as they are from District 12, the poorest district of Panem. The winners of the game get showered in riches from the Capitol and live the rest of their lives as if they were kings. A constant theme throughout the film is how the wealthy don't have to work as hard as the lower class to maintain their status. The upper and middle class are more prepared for the games just like their respected classes are in life. Class representation in film is a popular category among filmmakers. The Hunger Games portrays class in a way that resembles a lot of social systems in the world. The Hunger Games was published in 2008, at the very moment that the financial crisis was p...

By Georges Azouri Breaking Bad was a critically acclaimed television series that aired from 2008-2013. It was show that was based around the life of Walter White, a high school chemistry teacher turned methamphetamine producer. Walter turns to a life of violence and crime due to a cancer diagnosis and the desire to provide for his family. While the show touches on masculinity and similar perspectives of family and providing, it also makes an interesting choice with setting, making Albuquerque, New Mexico and the class representation of the community a central role of the show. Class representation, or rather misrepresentation is a common characteristic of American television and cinema, Breaking Bad is no exception to this. Albuquerque is a city riddled with social problems and struggles with poverty and unemployment, along with crime and drug issues (Cook & Ashutosh, 2018). The real city of Albuquerque is one that struggles from these very real issues. Breaking Bad , ...

By Colleen Kelly Over the course of this week, a variety of both normative and non-normative sexual identities have been explored. While my focus on transgender identity in contemporary television is the last post in this series, this discussion is no way complete. It is vital that conversations about representation of gender and sexual identity continue beyond these five posts. Historically, transgender representation on television has been virtually non-existent. The few transgender characters we did see were typically episodic or peripheral characters (Capuzza & Spencer, 2017, p. 214). Having a transgender lead character was unthinkable until the premiere of All That Glitters in 1977 (Capuzza & Spencer, 2017, p. 215). I find it worth noting that All That Glitters only lasted a single season, likely because people were ambivalent about seeing a transgender person on television. Within the past decade, there has been a rather radical shift in the representation of transgend...

By Tess Weigel This year Netflix released a reboot of the Bravo series Queer Eye for the Straight Guy with a new cast of five gay men. The 2018 Queer Eye casts consists of Antoni Porowski, Tan France, Kamaro Brown, Bobby Berk, and Jonathan Van Ness. Each member of the Fab Five has a specialty of food, fashion, culture, design, and grooming, respectively. This reboot of Queer Eye is designed to deconstruct the negative and outdated stereotypes of gay men. In each episode, the Fab Five addresses topics such as homosexual relationships, homosexuality in religion, and minorities within the gay community.  Before 2018’s Queer Eye , only 3.6% of gay males have been portrayed in television against the 94.9% of heterosexual males (Kidd, 2014). While the frequency of the presence of gay men in the media has increased, the negative stereotype of how a gay man is portrayed amongst the plot line in television needs to be reconstructed to represent all different types of gay men. Fo...

By Pia Ocvirk Historically, lesbian characters have been virtually non-existent on American television. Ellen DeGeneres’s televised coming out on her popular show Ellen in 1997 paved the way for lesbian characters in primetime television. Despite the gains made for lesbian characters, they were and still are, more often than not, portrayed in heterosexual narratives and tailored almost solely for a heterosexual audience (Lee & Meyer, 2010). When The L Word premiered on Showtime in 2004, the show became the first ever to feature the main cast of exclusively queer women, most of whom were lesbians. Written, created and directed by women for women, the show told stories that had never before been seen on television (Bendix, 2017). The L Word touched on subjects such as same-sex parenting, “don’t ask, don’t tell,” addiction, cancer, disability, coming out and, most importantly, the heterosexual male gaze. The L Word made the male gaze a central issue in its first two season...