Wednesday, 2 July 2014

Essay

Mariah Carey- Touch my Body


This video shows the dominant female. At the beginning of the music video, there is an establishing shot which makes the audience aware of where the car is going that was in the previous shot. This shot allows the audience to be aware that where the car is going, is to an upper class persons house therefore the person pulling up in a car with a sign saying ‘Compute NERD’ is going to have a lower status compared to the person that lives in the house. The car then pulls up on the drive and you can see the contrast between the cars that is pulling up with the car that is already parked on the drive. The car that is already parked appears to be either a Rolls Royce or a Bentley, which is a very expensive car and someone with a lot of money will only be able to afford this.

For sound, when the door opens, the man ringing the doorbell gasps. The diegetic sound has been enhanced so that the audience can be aware the girl on the other side of the door is attractive. This has been done by the director Brett Ratner to make the audience aware that Mariah Carey is to be known as a sex object in this video, and that she will be looked at as superior over anyone else. You hear this gasp before you actually see Mariah herself, therefore it gives you a previous instinct that the girl is going to be attractive and sexy. For the dialogue, when the door opens Mariah states ‘okay, I gotta go somewhere. So can we make this quick?’ This suggests that she is much more superior over him as she is giving him instructions and making sure he does his job quickly because she has to go out. She also says ‘this way’ which is also giving him instructions, as he will not know where to go in her house so she is telling him what to do which tells the audience she is at a much higher status than him.

For mise-en-scene, the costumers worn are appropriate and signify the power levels for each character. Mariah is wearing her underwear and stockings, which shows that she is more important as she obviously feels a lot more comfortable around the man that has come to her house to sort out her computer. In contrast to him wearing a work uniform showing that the only way he would be in contact with she is through him working. This was done so that you can compare the two jobs on each person and make a judgement on who is more successful. Mariah Carey is well known for her figure and ‘sexy’ music videos, so her wearing next to nothing against a man who is in his work clothes shows the audience their careers and their power. She changes her outfits regularly throughout the music video, and each costume is very revealing and this makes Mariah look like a sexual object and this music video contains a lot of voyeurism. A prop that is used in this video is a unicorn, and this shows that the boy in the video looks at Mariah like she is so perfect that she could be from a fantasy land, just like the unicorn is known to only be real in fairy tale stories. So this shows that the boy is looking at his experience like a fairy tale as he would never has expect this to happen when he first turned up at the job because she is a dream girl.

At 1:03, she sits him down at the computer that she wants fixing, and there is a two-shot included. He is sitting down, but she is standing up. You would think that this is done because he has to sit at the computer desk to fix the computer, but it is actually done to show the status of the two. It shows that Mariah is a much high class and status to him as she is looking down on him and he is looking up on her. Near the end of the video there is a close up of the boy sitting at the computer desk which shows to the audience that the whole thing he just witnessed was actually a dream and none of this actually happened. This makes us feel sorry for him as you can see his emotions and tell that he was very disappointed to find out that none of it happened.

The pace of the shots are all quite long, to show that the boy in the video does not want this to ever end so he wants to drag it out as far as he can so he can feel this way forever. He knows he will never get this opportunity again therefore he wants it to go as slow as possible.

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