Qudrophenia (1979) is about a British, working-class youth, Jimmy who is a part of the ‘Mods’ subculture cruises around at night with his friends on their scooters, but in the day works in the mailing rooms. Jimmy and his friends go away for the bank holiday to Brighton to enjoy their little holiday but then run into their rival group the Rockers resulting in Jimmy getting arrested. From there Jimmy’s life goes downhill.
This movie relates to my critical investigation as it both based on delinquent youths in Britain but just set in different periods. The movie is actually based in 1965 and the research in my critical investigation is contemporary, in the last 5 years. The youth culture has definitely changed over the years but still contain some similarities. Like for example dealing drugs but it’s a little different to the ones in Quadrophenia, instead of drugs that we know today like crack, cocaine and heroin they’re overdosing on pills that are meant to be for medicinal purposes (e.g. anti-depressants). So the movie has a scene where the protagonist and his friends break into a chemist to steal a great deal of pills. Another similarity is a typical teenage party with drinking, smoking, loud music, sexual behaviour and being disruptive. The music however has changes over a period of time, the music used in this example is from The Who, an English rock band from the 1960’s, nowadays young teens would be listening to rap or RnB mostly from originating from America, also showing how globalisation has been taken into effect where that barrier of music has been broken down. In the media it’s not only the teens that are negatively represented but it’s also the parents in both the past and present the parents are seen as a mirror of their teenagers and not having much interaction with them, affecting the way they turn out and what they grow up to be, delinquents. Gang/territory conflict is also what we see in the movie and also in the media now, Quadrophenia’s conflict are between the ‘mods’ and ‘rockers’ and its often physical fights that occurs. We also see that today in the mass media or even with our own eyes, gangs or ‘subcultures’ conflicting with each other so that’s another point that hasn’t changed much.
One major difference that can be seen is the ethnicity difference and their dialect. Today’s stereotype of a deviant is a working-class, young, black male. According to the movie, delinquents in the 1960’s were all, if not mostly white with a cockney accent with very different use of words (slang and cockney) and the only black characters that were shown for a couple seconds had a very strong Jamaican accent, showing how much times have changed that instead of the white being deviant it’s now black youths. Also the clothing has changed completely, in the 1960’s the costume used in the movie were mostly casual clothes like a normal t shirt tucked into some jeans also wearing leather biker jackets that we wouldn’t see gangs wearing today. They also sometimes wore suits but this could just because they had jobs which were low-skilled but also showed that they weren’t always badly behaved and that they’re trying to look after themselves. The youth’s today typical attire would be a hoodie, baggy shirt, saggy jeans and a baseball cap; it’s a lot lazier.
No comments:
Post a Comment