DOTD (1979) Film Image Analyses

Here we see a mid-shot of two characters. Stephen is standing in the background and Rodger is at the forefront of the shot.  Stephen should stereo typically be the male hero as he is an attractive, white male who has a respectable job. However his problems with being the male hero are that, he is not supportive of his girlfriend Fran and is also surprisingly wimpy and useless with a gun. As we can see Rodger pushes Stephen aside with his phallic symbol to connote his power and strength to protect Stephen. This devalues Stephens masculinity allowing the audience to lose respect for him. He also lacks sincerity and becomes greedy. A suggestion of this may come from the auteur style of George Romero who flips character types in order to catch the audience’s attention and does this in a way where you expect the male hero to be a certain way when in fact they are very different.  This can also be seen again in the film when Fran tries to protect Rodger with a gun showing that she is not the stereotypical final girl, she is quite tough and is an example of an early final girl.