Women are represented in many different ways in films, some might
be represented as a victim/ weak character, and some might be represented as
the 'scary, villain' element of a movie.
In the movie 'The
Exorcism of Emily Rose' the girl is represented as a scary/possessed person.
She has had an exorcism performed on her by a priest which adds the religious
element. Emily Rose is a young girl, and often to make movies more scary
and more sinister filmmakers use young girls or boys to be the villain, to be
the possessed person, or to be the person with a mental illness. Emily Rose is
a child so she has that sense of innocence about her, and as you see the link
between her and ghosts/spirits in the movie, the viewer feels more emotion
towards the character than if the role was played by an older women. In a way
the film is made frightening by the fact that the child is a young girl because
young girls are stereotypically nice, sweet, and innocent but none of these qualities
are shown in film so the viewers would be more interested.
In the movie ‘Psycho’ (1960) there are two main women represented,
the first women is the typical women who works as a secretary. She steals money
from her employer’s client and runs away with it, subsequently she gets
murdered, and she is shown to be the victim in this. This is the stereotypical
role we would expect to see from a ‘blonde women’ as they are usually
considered to be the weaker characters or even the ‘damsels in distress’. The
second woman is an older woman who is quite the opposite to the first women. She
is first shown as a motherly, old character who lives with her son, and they
both own a motel. Later on in the movie she ends up being shown as the murderer,
as she kills any people who do stay at their motel, we never actually see her
face so we don’t know what she looks like but from the way she is described we
can tell that she has always been like this. In this film there are two very
different women who might seem similar to us at first but as the movie
progresses we get to know what they are like, and they contradict each other
massively.
To conclude i think that there are many different ways in which
women might be represented in films, like victim, villain etc, and sometimes
the viewer can predict what the characters role might be or how they are going
to end up in movie, for example blonde, dumb characters are usually the ones
who get killed off first or the victims. But other times , it might not be so
easy to guess what a certain character is going to be like in a movie as it
might be that the way the character is shown to us at first is not actually how
the character ends up to be in the end, for example the mother in Psycho.
