How far does the representation of a particular social group change over time?

·         Rebel Without A Cause

·         Kidulthood

“A focus on identity requires us to pay closer attention to the ways in which media and technologies are used in everyday life and their consequences for social groups” – David Buckingham. As a society, we have constructed the idea that people’s identities are the person we are inside. We believe this is defined by factors such as gender, age, class, sexuality and social group we are in. This is what we believe identity to be and represented, though how has this changed over the years, specifically in reference to youth being represented in the media?

 Let’s take a look at two media texts which show a representation on how youths have changed considerably over time.

Rebel without cause is a film which shows the life of a rebellious young man living in a middle class system. The character in the story seems to show that he has led a bad life in the past, but comes to a new town where new emotionally confused suburban middle class teenagers await him. In the film James dean play a 17 year old character called Jim stark who is a rebellious teenager who arrives at a new school, meets a girl, disobey his parents and causes contentions between himself and the school bullies. This therefore creates an ideology in rebel without a cause we see that the film focuses on youths being either in the ‘in’ group or ‘out’ group and the struggle they face in finding which they belong to. Henri Tajfel talked about this in fact, he argued that there is a distinct ‘in’ group which is favouritism and the then there is the ‘out’ group which is then discrimination. The individual self esteem is maintained by being part of a group. 

Kidulthood on the other hand is a British film, based in the recent Y2K era. The film focuses on the lives of a group of 15 year olds from a mixed social class living in the inner area of west London. The story follows mainly the life of Trevor and his girlfriend Alisa who is pregnant by him. This immediately creates an ideology of women belong to men due to the fact that she is pregnant but the character herself seems to subvert the view by standing up for herself in situations where a man should have been needed to protect her.

If we compare this small ideology to “Rebel Without A Cause” we would see that the change in social group already is quite a lot. Back in the 1950s teenage pregnancy would have been un-heard off therefore this would have not been seen in films such as Rebel without a cause as the teenagers back then were not facing any problems regarding that but jump 50 years later and we see the change in problems for social groups facing teenage pregnancy.

In both films however we see that both social groups back in the 1950s and also in the Y2K era faced violence. However in scenes involving violence in rebel without a cause we see that there is not as much close up shots to depict where they got hurt etc, but once again in Kidulthood things have changed. The violence in films has heightened whereas in the 1950’s such things will be censored and be put at rating such as an 18 and not 15.

However though both films have been able to share a similarity which is the fact that the youths in each film have been able to demonstrate juxtaposition between their actually family lives in general when in comparison to their own, as we see that youths in both setting have families that live a rather balanced lifestyle whereas the children would rather prefer to live a completely separate lifestyle. In Kidulthood we see that girls in the film seem to live in a middle class environment but want to get drugs and would willing perform sex in order to get it therefore also creating a binary opposition, through the Mise-en-scene we see that they actually live in a nice area , although this maybe exaggerated for a group of girls at the age of 15 to act, the principle behind still remains that children in general carry a juxtaposition

Over the years we have seen through the use of these two films that even race and language has changed over the years. In rebel without a cause we that the film has a cast which is primarily white and adopted a slang which is slightly different to today’s, using words such as ‘g-wiz’ to express that a certain thing is cool. Whereas in the film Kidulthood we see that primarily the cast are all from multicultural background, but the use of colloquialism has changed considerably as now there is more swearing and foul language used in the movie, therefore in comparison to rebel without a cause, the colloquialism found in Kidulthood would have never been used in film or television back then. However today society is is now considered the norm.

The theorist David Buckingham was correct, over the years the media has affected the way in which social class act now than they did before when in the 1950’s. We have seen that youths have grown worse over the years creating for them a stereotypical identity based on their actions, although it was the same a few years back, youths back then were considered to be more calm and light-hearted  rather than cold and rude like the youth we see today.