Representations Essay

Throughout the first episode of Stranger Things a number of key representations are shown of the characters creating ideas and concepts of whats to come, along with stereotypes of specific characters.

In the sequence, I looked at a series of scenes of; the woods, the boys house, Nancy's room and Benny's diner were shown where we meet a number of characters who fit into specific categories of being either typically stereotypical or going against our initial opinion of the characters.

In the scene in the woods the main characters that we are introduced to are Officer Hopper and the boy's teacher. The teacher is represented as being helpful and caring, meaning he is worried for Wills safety and wants to go the extra millet help find him. However, he is more of a minor character in this part of the show as he doesn't affect the narrative massively, but he helps to give context and change the representation of Hopper by querying him out his daughter. Our initial representation of him being a careless unorganised character is changed as soon as we find out that he had a daughter who died a few years ago. We are first fed the idea that Hopper has a family at the beginning of the episode when we see a tracking out shot of a drawing of what we find out is a mum, dad and child which was drawn by Hopper's daughter, this shot then leads round into a shot of Hoppers caravan which is a mess with beer bottles, cigarettes, clothing, etc all scattered around the place. This almost masks the drawing that we have just seen and creates the representation of Hopper being careless and unorganised. Then in the sequence I looked at our representation of him is flipped on its head as we instantly feel bad for him and look at him much more sympathetically as his daughter died.

The boy's are represented as being very mature for their age as they all act in a very grown up way as they want to help to find their friend showing them as loyal and compassionate characters. However, they are all using radios to communicate with one another creating the sense of youth and immaturity as we see sharp shots from each of the boys communicating with one another through them in their own "secret" speech which may not be understood by their parents and other adults. We see this prior to this when the boys get called into the head teachers office where they all use unstandardised specialised speech which only they understand because they play the game that the vocabulary has come from. This make the story a lot more realistic because it is something that would have been much more common to see in the 80s when this TV drama was set.

In the next scene we see Nancy get the chance to break the stereotypical studious girl representation when Steve climbs through her window. Even through she lets him in she is still very aware that she needs to prepare for her test and won't let him distract her. Steve is the stereotypical bad boy heart throb and is represented as being a bad influence on Nancy at this point. Nancy is still shown as being nervous and conscious of what she is doing as she is very doubtful of letting Steve in and at the end of this scene she slams the window shut creating a very abrupt, sudden effect which could be a reflection of how she is feeling.