Representations of age, focusing on Tony and his dad in skins

Representations of age, focusing on Tony and his dad in skins

At the start of the extract we see a close up of tony’s face and it zooms out and we see his duvet cover of a naked female and male. This depicts a representation of age as these days young teenagers are more associated with things related to the bed cover more than any other generation, such as sex. By this use of mise – en - scene we can clearly get an idea how age is represented in this extract. The next thing we see is tony get out of his bed wearing just boxers. Again older people wear proper night wear, on the other hand teenage boys usually wear only boxers, hence another representation of age. Secondly, tony gets up and we observe a medium shots of him doing bench press ups, clearly he wants to get in shape as we see him looking at himself in the mirror, moreover, it is again typical of a teenage boy within ages from 15-19 who workout and desire a so called ‘beach body.’

Additionally, when see tony’s dad come into the scene, he is shouting, half naked, swearing and angry. It looks like that tony’s dad was in the bathroom doing something and came out because he heard the loud music. We can see buy his appearance that he is old because he has a lot of chest hair and also has quite a bit of hair loss on his head. In relation, he has a short temper which is typical of parents in their mid 50’s. Also tony is being rebellious and ignorant as he refuses his dads order to turn the volume down. This shows a representation of age because he is immature and doesn’t listen to his parents.  We then see another rebellious act as tony locks the bathroom door and escapes through the window knowing that his dad is waiting to go in. The repeated uses of rebellious acts clearly depict the idea of age in this extract.

Advancing, we see tony and his sister both at the table eating breakfast, tony’s sister is in school uniform and tony is in non uniform which could indicate that he is attending college/sixth form and hence the age of 16-19. We then see a medium shot from the side of tony’s face with the father in the background in the kitchen. Tony doesn’t even look at his dad again showing rellion typical of a teenager. The we see the eye line of the father who is higher in the frame looking down, this shows his status in the household as dominant therefore showing he is the oldest in the family. When the father goes into the cupboard under the sink, we see a close up of his bottom, and we see something stereotypically known as a ‘ builder bum.’ This shows that he doesn’t care about how he looks and is not concerned of what other might think, this is showing binary oppositions and we have two complete opposites, tony the teenager is concerned about the way he looks and the older father not caring about how he looks. When the father looks for the drill and says he cant find it, tony gives a smirk, this again shows that he is rebellious and wants to keep annoying his father, again its stereotypically teenagers between the ages of 16-19 who always get on their parents nerves and this is clearly seen through out the first four and a half minutes of this extract.