Youth Culture are demonised by the media as they are all associated with the same collective identity and there is no clear differentiation between a good youth or a bad youth. The term "youth" itself has become a pejoration over time, with many negative connotations related with being unruly, reckless and lacking any education and responsibility. According to Stuart Hall, within his book entitled Encoding and Decoding of the Television Discourse 1973, there are three different readings from media texts. The oppositional reading, the neutral reading and the dominant reading. If the dominant reading becomes so strong, it seems to be common sense, this is an example of a hegemonic ideology.
Gramsci defined this as the way in which those in power maintain their control, hegemony has been created within many films involving youth culture, for example Attack The Block.
Folk Devil was a term first used in 1972 by Stanley Cohen, as he described folk devils as 'a condition, episode, person or groups of person who's become defined as a threat to societal values and interests'. This can be argued true within attack the block, as the middle class residents of the block label them as 'animals' and this is very reflective through their pack like mentality. Through the mise-en-scene, all of the youths, are introduced from a long shot, all wearing black, with hoods up, in a defensive way. This collective identity they create themselves is almost a sense of homo-erotisism, in which the gang wish to feel accepted by one another, encouraging each other to take part in reckless acts. The fast movements from the youths as they approach the middle class women portray them as animalistic, and along with the weapon, the knife, this is a moral panic. This moral panic stigmatises the percentage of youths who carry weapons, and make this appear as
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