Narrative Theories Analysis

For my AS Media Production task we created a film opening to a thriller called "Behind Closed Doors." The synopsis, in simple terms, is that the protagonist is still in love with her ex boyfriend and the break up causes her to become greatly obsessed with him and plans on getting revenge by crushing pills and walking out the room. By doing so, we wanted to create an enigmatic effect right from the start to keep the audience engaged at all times. The unawareness of why Beth (protagonist) was crying as she was first introduced created suspense and anticipation for the viewers. The crying portrays a typical female character as they are stereotypically known to be quite weak and emotional, and this conformed to that assumption. Gaye Tuchman's theory can relate as Tuchman found that men were always portrayed in a dominant and superior position to women and our film opening shows she is upset about a male which supports that women are weaker and emotional because of the male figure.
Roland Barthes' enigma code can relate to this as our thriller opening includes enigmas/mysteries as the film develops. In this theory, it is solved usually at the end of the film, or continued in a sequel, but as we didn’t need to produce an ending, this didn’t matter so much.
Our film opening holds many codes and conventions towards other theorists such as Levi Strauss's binary opposition theory. In regards to the love/hate and control/panic relationship, it is obvious to see that this is presented in our product when we see that the protagonist is upset with the given situation but her feelings soon changes into hatred as she switches from a calm mood to an angry one as she starts tearing down the photos. We used the blurry effect at this stage to help signify a distorted and unclear mind of mixed emotions.
With regards to Propps theory, we subverted to this as his states that the hero is usually the protagonist, but ours clearly shows the 'victim' turning into the 'villain' thus opposing to his theory and making her the protagonist and perhaps the 'hero' the antagonist. (We are unclear as to who the antagonist is as we only see one character within the film opening)
In comparison to the other products we studied such as Prom Night, we aimed to stick similarly to the common codes and conventions of the film genre. Mise-en-scene (such as the use of the colour pink and messy room) automatically stereotypes a teenage girl’s room which suggested that the target audience would be towards a feminist approach, but aimed to appeal to both sexes with the thriller/drama hybrid.
With regards to lighting, it was hard to conform to the typical conventions into making it gloomy for the sad and upsetting scenes and vice versa. It was difficult to block out the light from outside and control the natural light into creating the perfect setting due to our limited budget, creating a constraint. We instead used the aspect of looking back into the past colliding with present events and differentiating the two with the use of black and white to represent events from the past.

In conclusion my film opening mostly conformed to the stereotypical conventions required in a thriller opening as it followed similar patterns and trends as opposed to subverting from it. Due to the lack of time, I think it limited us from exploring contents of a thriller opening in which we could subvert to.




"Analyse one of your products against narrative theories"
Roland Barthes - The enigma code
Going against Propps theory - victim turns into villain - is the protagonist
Levi Strauss - love/hate - binary oppositions

1) What product did you make and when?
2) What is the synopsis and a brief idea of what your intentions were.
3) Key questions that arrised for the production in terms of the specific construction: narrative, genre, audience, representation, etc.
4) Codes and conventions that relate to the specific theory - subvert/conform, pos/negative?
5) Analyse against theories and explain why.
6) Evaluate the codes and conventions against theories and explain why.
7) Conclude how it conformed or subverted conventions and explain why...