Laura Mulvey would have a lot to say about my film trailer; I have chosen, although not by fault to use a male as the antagonist and the female as the protagonist. The male in my trailer is older than the female of my movie and very much holds the authority of the trailer. On the other hand the female character is of 17 years old and appears to be some what naïve. When researching ideas for my trailer it came to my attention that the majority of the driving instructors are men, at least in my area they all seem to be men. I felt that the best way to get that quirky and undefined identity of a wacky driving instructor was to put his persona across in the image of a male. I don’t think a female ‘wacky’ driving instructor would have created the image I had most desired. The female of my trailer acts very innocently and comes across as the weaker of the characters, which repels the feminist film theory. However despite the fact my female actress is weak and naïve it doesn’t support the male gaze theory; I haven’t chosen to make the female of my trailer a symbol of sex and seductiveness, she’s simply naïve and clueless towards the situation.
My trailer in a sense is a boost to the male ego, it portrays men to be strong minded, dominant and somewhat different whereas it portrays females to be weak and easily lead astray, some may argue that my trailer is sexist towards women and their rights, but to me it was the best way to portray my film plot, without the egotistic, sexist approach it would become dull and unbelievable to an audience.
Sigmund Freud once said: “Women are mutilated and must learn to accept their lack of a penis” – a very sexist and crude statement made by Freud, but then is this how all men look at the ways of women? Truth be told, the majority of people in today’s culture will at some point in their lives ponder on this very thought, because of the way generations before us treated women. Nowadays we have feminists and strong willed women that support the welfare of women around the world. – However this will never change the opinion and characteristics of every man. Could this be the reason that I and many others still choose to portray men as the dominant stronger character? As a female it would have been generally guessable that I would have chosen to support Laura Mulvey and the feminist theories by changing the conventions of my film trailer and choosing to role reverse my characters portraying the female as the strong and more dominant character, but as I stated before I didn’t feel it fitted to my plot.
So therefore, I feel the way I have portrayed my characters is well suited to my plot.
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