Both Kidulthood (written by Noel Clarke) and Fish Tank (written by Andrea Arnold) are films involving and portraying the life youth live. Whether or not the representations they create are realistic is arguable.
The Media often creates a representation of youths as being violent, promiscuous, unintelligent and brutal. While these representations are both created and reflected, for the most part they are created for the purpose of creating a "Moral Panic" which helps newspapers like The Sun sell more copies and helps the media control the public. It could be argued that Moral Panic helps towards creating a Marxist society (Karl Marx), as they could potentially control our thoughts, opinions and actions. For the most part, these two films seem to back up these representations.
David Buckingham says, “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”. Youths fully embrace the power of technology and can use it not only to socialise but to plan and organise things. A good example of this is the London Riots, where yotuhs used social networking such as BlackBerry Messenger, Facebook and Twitter to co-ordinate attacks throughout the city. This relates to Kidulthood, where mobile devices are used to talk, organise meet-ups and threaten others. On the other hand, in Fish Tank there seems to be a lack of technology. The main character is only seen with a mobile phone once and the only pieces of technology she seems to own are the speakers she uses to dance to and the video camera which she receives as a gift. This could be a representation of the lower class being in the "out" group of society as they are not able to embrace something which the rest of society takes for granted.
Stuart Hall propses that idealogocial things shown in the media have become naturalised. This can be shown as in "Rebel without a cause" the things which seem to be frowned upon (smoking, popping collars and occasionally fighting) are accepted as being normal in today's society. It could be argued that youths have changed over time which could be shown by the fact that in Kidulthood, there is a lot of sex, drug use, violence and excessive swearing. We have also become used to this and therefore have become decentralsied. Because of this it could be said that Kidulthood and Fish Tank do create a realistic representation of youth.
In conclusion, the representation of youths over the years have become progressively worse to the point where they are now essentially exiled from the rest of society and shown no respect, even though the majority of youths would disagree with the representations given to them. Often the derogatory words applied to the youth are heavily exxagerated, and films like Kidulthood and Fish Tank carry over this exxageration. While it may be true that teenagers are violent and promiscuous, these films have greatly exxagerated it.
