Textual analysis

                                               Textual Analysis

The film I’m going to analyze is ghost rider, the film was released in February 2012 in America. The director of Ghost Rider is Mark Steven Johnson. The genre of the film is fantasy thriller. The stars of the film are Nicolas Cage, Eva Mendes, and Sam Elliot. The movie is based on the comic books, written by Gary friedrich, Roy Thomas, Mike Ploog.

The equilibrium is when Johnny Blaze has a usual, ordinary life with his dad, both are motorcyclists and work in a carnival together. Which we could understand from the first 10 minutes of the film. The disruption is where he sells his soul to the devil so that the devil cures his fathers cancer; even though he does cure the cancer, the devil still kills the father so his out the way and doesn’t stop his son with what’s going to happen next. The recognition of the disruption is when Johnny is in a fight against the other devils so he gets his soul back; he attempts to repair the damage of the disruption is where he kills the other devils one by one. The new equilibrium is when the devils are all gone and he goes back to his normal, ordinary life with the girl he loves. Levi’s-Strauss theory of binary oppositions is shown by Johnny being the good guy and the devil being the bad one (the evil). Also, the film is in chronological order, everything starts with earliest and follows the order which they occurred.  The film is brought to a conclusion as the Ghost Rider is shown to be happy with his partner. The narrative is omniscient as no information is withheld from the audience.

The scene i’m going to analize is where Johnny goes out to beat the the devil and his son. Mephisto’s and Blackheart’s costume is typical of the genre, for example both the devils suit, everything in black, long black coat, connotes that they are the bad guys. Also, the metal stick the devil holds that has a skull on top of it shows that it doesn’t belong to a good person, the reason for this is the skull represents the bad, horror, dead. Whereas Johnny, the good guy, wears casual clothes, which shows he’s unaware of the situation and his just a normal decent guy. But he changes his costume when he agrees to fight against the Blackheart and starts to wear Black, which suggests that he is there to cause harm, but the difference is he is doing it to get rid of the devil and the bad. Their body language and facial expressions show the binary opposites in thriller films. The devil has a more of a still look to him, the way he stares and moves slowly adds to his mysteriousness, which suggests he’s the dangerous one. Also when the devil at the start is walking next to Johnny in the shadow you can see him as a humpback person, which would scare the audience and suggest he’s the antagonist which is typical of it’s genre. Also Johnny’s love, that helps him during the struggle that he was going through because of the physical change and the task he got from the devil, is typical because there’s usually a girl or a boy that protagonist loves and has next to him or her. Furthermore the devils son has red eyes and white skin and black makeup under his eyes, this suggests and makes us think he’s back from the dead or like a vampire which is typical in fantasy films.

The film is typical of it’s genre because of the effects and edits they use such as the devil randomly appearing in the scene, Johnny having a skull head that’s on fire, the effects they have on their eye like the flames, the way Johnny killed the bad guys and them turning blue to being a skull and the way Johnny does his big jumps on his motorbike is all typical of the fantasy/thriller and the audience would have expected this therefore it goes well with the story.

In the scene where Johnny is fighting with the bad guys, when the fire explodes you can hear diegetic and non diegetic noises, diegetic is the sound of fire itself and the non-diegetic is the background noise to build tension, they filmed this by using fade for us to think about what could happen next. And then when the character Johnny is shown on screen, over the shoulder is used to show what the character is up to and make the audience feel like their in the film themselves.  Extreme close up has been used on the characters face to show their anger and fear which builds up tension. Also, when Johnny got away from the fire easily it fitted in with the genre because it’s fantasy so we would expect the impossible. Furthermore, black makeup used underneath the devils eye to suggest he’s the bad one, and long coats used to show they’re bad because that’s the kind of things they wore e.g. Mafia. Also, when the camera showed an innocent man you can see his facial expressions by the shot reverse shot. When the devil says ‘that’s what they keep telling me’ you can sense something bad is going to happen because of his facial expressions such, for example, when he stayed still looking at another man, it’s like we knew something bad was going to happen.