prep folder #1

Setting Up The Research Topic:

When you have no structure, no guidence, and complete creative freedom, the road to a project is so unpredictable.

To find a research topic, I took many different directions and often felt deep frustration. I first began with a tech-related topic, the emergence of the Metaverse. At the time I began finding sources to learn more about this virtual universe, it was August to September. At this time, the idea of a Metaverse was very premature. There was no information being let out on this new phenomenon. Later, I thought maybe I could find an expert/trend predictor to offer some insight. However, I also realized that this information was incredibly wanted and that an expert with profit to gain would not release this valuable information to any teenager. That said, I do still hope to learn more about the emergence of a technological/virtual universe. The talk of NFTs and Facebook’s new name of “Meta”, continues to intrigue me. However, it wasn’t a topic I wished to pursue my research.

On the other hand, my passion for film persisted and I became interested in the ways that women were portrayed in Hollywood. This started after I was re-watching some episodes from the Fresh Prince of Belair, I started to grow more and more conscious of the ways Carlton and Will were scripted to treat women. A female character could just be walking, yet the male characters would automatically hyper-sexualize them. Second, at the time of my second wave of brainstorming, a new Tiktok trend oddly sparked my interest. “Written by a man or woman”, hinting at how teens were growing more aware of the “Male and Female Gaze”. I decided to mesh both of these ideas to study the Male and Female gaze in Films.

The next daunting question was how I would find a smaller focus. To do this I decided to limit geographical, time, and genre factors. For this I decided to stay within American film, work between the 80s, 90s, 00s, and 10s decades, and lastly stay within the coming-of-age genre I found that this genre was important since these are films that impact youth the most as they form their thinking and identity at this time. From there the consisting and evolution of my research continued. Within the four said decades, I decided to pick three movies from the coming-of-age genre to study continuity and changes. The movies chosen were:

• The 1980s: Sixteen Candles and Pretty in Pink and The Outsiders (HBO MAX)

• The 1990s: Clueless(HBO) and 10 Things I Hate About You (Disney + and Amazon) and She’s all that (HBO)

• The 2000s: Mean Girls and Princess Diaries(1 and 2) (Disney +)

• The 2010s: Call Me By Your Name and Lady Bird (Netflix) and Edge of 17(Netflix)