Challenging Conventions and Representation

The typical conventions used when dealing with people who have a type of mental illness is done in various ways. From my viewpoint, they can be split into two sections being a normal and impaired representation.

The normal representation is when you have the character who is dealing with an illness and the viewer is basically unaware that there is anything wrong until a later point in the story. This can be seen in Mr. Robot and Fight Club. Both of these pieces have a main character who is telling a story but it doesn't become clear until later that what the audience was watching was entirely warped towards that character's illness and it completely changes the meaning of the entire piece. This only works for longer and more drawn out pieces which is why Jonathan and I did not go for this approach.

On the other hand, there is the impaired representation and this is when you have the character and it is clear what they are doing is wrong or different from a typical action. Along with this the characters around them are affected and it is obvious to the audience that something is wrong with the impaired character. This can be seen in pieces such as BoJack Horseman and Jessica Jones where each respective character deals with depression and PTSD. This is the approach that we took in our opening.

The social group that our opening revolves around are people who suffer from mental illness and it is similar to the conventions that I just spoke about. The way that we chose to represent our mentally ill character is by having them do actions that they wouldn't regularly do but then realize immediately after that he has done something wrong. In order to move our opening and the story of our supposed film along we started it off by clearly illustrating this character who is a little disoriented and then exposing the big event that has lead them to be acting in such a way.

The event where he harms and possibly kills a person he has never seen before due to events that he couldn't even entirely control is the story we are going for. We are going for this impaired representation where the character is more than aware that what happened is wrong but he has already gone through with it. The story that follows after this opening is him calling the police because he regrets his actions but he then leaves immediately after due to his fear in himself for what he could do again.