Tuesday 23 September 2014

Video Analysis: Life with Uzi - Scene Girl

Analysis in terms of representation, gender, and race representation.
In Laura Mulvey's 'Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema' Mulvey writes of the "objectification of women as representation/signification of male desire." In this video the women filmed are being shown in an unattractive light, smoking, drinking, and overall carrying themselves poorly on camera - which is the point Life with Uzi are trying to make. These are the types of girls people want to stay clear of, hence the subtitling 'never trust a scene girl', 'scene girl' according to Mike of Life with Uzi is "a scene girl or guy is someone who presents themselves online as something more than they are." In plain English that translates as some one who is 'fake'.


In terms of race representation, we see Life with Uzi here in front of Taco Bell (a popular Mexican-ised American fast food chain). It's a typical spot for teenagers and all Americans alike to cure their hunger issues, here Uzi is just 'hanging out' with his friends in the suburbs, a typical teenaged American thing to do. The fact that they filmed the entire video in a Wal Mart and in the suburbs of St.Paul,Ohio really plays on the fact that they may possibly want teenagers watching the video to easily relate to them - they're perceived as fairly normal guys yet all these girls are all over them. This leads to emphasise the fact that these girls are 'easy' to get, there aren't and flashy cars in the video or massive house with swimming pools being shown - just bundles of $100 bills. This could also imply that money is all it takes to get these types of girls to notice them.  

Subculture and The Meaning of Style, Dick Hebdidge said that a subculture is a group of like minded individuals who feel neglected by societal standards and who develop a sense of identity which differs to the dominant on to which they belong. Ken Gelder lists 6 ways in which a subculture can be recognised: 1) Often have negative relationship to work 2) Negative or ambivalent relationship to class 3) Through their associations with territory ( The street, the hood, the club) rather than property 4) Through their stylistic ties to excess 5) Through their movement out of home into non-domestic forms of belonging (social groups as opposed to family) 6) Through their refusal to engage with they might see as the ‘banalities’ of life. Other ways of recognising a subculture might be symbolism attached to clothes, music, visual affectations like tattoos etc. Subcultural values often associated with being ‘cool’.

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