Stereotype? by Ong Yui Huan 1081102072

According to wikipedia, stereotype is a popular belief about specific social groups or types of individuals. Stereotype in media is unavoidable, especially in movies. For example in Hollywood, some like terrorist in movies are mostly Mid East people, strong, violent or hip hop rapper are black guys, strong, brave and heroic normally are white guys. When we watch a movie, we will automatically categorize each characters according to their races. But how could this happen? This is because due to some events in the past, such stereotype categorization will happen. Let me show some of the examples.

Firstly, let's talk about Russian Invasion. People would thought of the only power that can oppose America is Russia, since these 2 big powers always compete different ways, such as economy, nuclear race and etc. If look more backward, these 2 superpowers had been compete in Cold War. And since Hollywood is in America, it's normal that their movies always have Russian Invasion of America. Movies like Red Dawn, Invasion U.S.A, X-men First Class take this as main story. In Transformers 3, a little explosion make the characters think that it's Russian Invasion. And some of the America video games, like Call of Duty, also use Russian Invasion as their story. So every stereotype happened due to incidents in the real world.

Let's talk about terrorist now. We know that in 11 September of year 2001, 3 planes crash on the World Trade Center and later claimed that it's terrorist's attack. And the terrorist are famous al-Qaeda from Arab. Since then, Arabians in movies automatically be categorized as terrorist. And some of the terrorists movies even use Arabians as main antagonist such as Flight 93, Body of Lies and Traitor.

And for myself, I also got much stereotype mind when watching movies. I watched many kinds of older age heroes movies or history book, most of the time the male would be heroes and a weak girl would be protected by the hero. Whenever I seen an incident or a movie which the male is physically weaker than the female and need the female protection, but in fact the guy is intelligently wise, I will feel that the male is useless.

So, what I think is stereotype media are all due to the incidents in the real world. It's really unavoidable, and need to make it very nicely if want to make some different situation. Some film maker also use the stereotype way to make their film to avoid the confusion of their film. Once again, I intend to say stereotype media are all happen due to incidents in real world.