Historical Case study Write up

On a bank holiday weekend in Clacton a fight broke out on the beach, the beach huts were damaged along with many other things in the area also someone fired a starting pistol. The media reported it as a riot but it was hardly a riot. Stanley Cohen read the reports and thought it would be an ideal case study for the new evolving labelling theory. When researching for his book ‘Folk Devils and Moral Panics’ 1972, he searches through newspaper reports and seaside resorts, visiting social control agencies in suit and tie and changing to do participant observation research on the beaches in the clubs. Cohen illustrates the distorted media reporting of the mods and rockers, the ensuring panic and how this amplified.

A moral panic is the intensity of feeling expressed in a population about an issue that appears to threaten the social order. According to Stanley Cohen a moral panic occurs when an episode, person or group of people emerges to become defined as a threat to societal values and interests. Deviance amplification is defined by media critics as a cycle of increasing numbers of reports on the category of antisocial behaviour or event leading to a moral panic.

A Clockwork Orange was made in 1971; it was written, directed and produced by Stanley Kubrick. It shows disturbing, violent images, facilitating its social commentary on psychiatry, youth gangs and other social, political and economic subjects in a dystopian, future Britain. The press are looking at the film in a negative way because people are copying scenes from the film for an example from the Mail Online “Girls kicked gay man to death in a attack like scene from A Clockwork Orange” the newspaper explains what the two women did to the victim. A witness mention that the level of violence to a scene from A Clockwork Orange which caused outrage on release over its depiction of a gang of teenager carrying out violence.

Stan Cohen’s theory would be related to this film with deviance amplification because the numbers of gang violence is rising and the press are reporting it to be related to the film.

Quadrophenia was made in 1979, British film, loosely based around the 1973 rock opera of the same name by The Who. The film stars Phil Daniels as a mod named Jimmy. It was directed by Franc Roddam. The representation of Jimmy is that he wants to be part of a gang, identity is very important to Jimmy. Jimmy wanted to be different but he was just the same as any other normal mod. At one point in the film Jimmy’s identity was compromised when his friend Kevin was beaten up. The representation of Steph had sexual freedom because the contraceptive pill came out about that time; she was quite feminine compared to the androgynous mods. Finally Steph has no loyalty because she was with Jimmy then after he was at the courts she was with his best friend. The ideologies for Steph and Jimmy were to live here and now which basically means live life to the full also them Vs us which was the mods Vs society.

Mise en scene that reinforces the idea of youth culture was locations; they had house parties with loud music, alcohol and drugs were involved. Drugs were mainly taken by the younger generation in the film because the adults know what they were like, most pubs/clubs were just full of teenagers drinking.

Vehicles, most of the teenagers were in a gang either the mods or the rockers, both gangs had certain vehicles. The mods had a lambrella scooters and the rockers had motor bikes, all the adults would drive cars. Clothing, the mods wore parkers (coat) with denim jeans and fred perry tshirts, the rockers wore full leathers for their bikes the older generation wore shirts and ties.