My Doctor Who Gender Essay

Gender Portrayal in the 2009 OCR Doctor Who Clip

In this extract from Doctor Who, the primary protagonists of the Doctor, the Master, and Martha are used to portray perceptions of gender in the media. The extract can be broken down into five sections, the opening shots of the clip, when Martha is told to kneel, “any last words”, “the resistance knew”, and Countdown finale. In each of these key parts of the scene I will be analysing the camera angles, editing, sound, and the general mise en scene.

The clip starts with Martha being forced to walk up to the bottom of some stairs, which the master is standing on top of. This use the dolly shot follows Martha around. Making the audience feel empathy for Martha as it puts them in her shoes. Because Martha is at the bottom of the stairs she has to look up to see the Master, and he looks down on her. This is before she even has to kneel. This demonstrates how he looks down on her while  she is forced to physically look up at him. In terms of editing, there are a lot of eye line matches and cut away shots to Martha’s loved ones. In amongst this the Doctor has the most screen time, telling the audience that he is the most important and dominate character in the scene. Throughout the clip Martha defies the convention that all women present themselves as girly and feminine in that she is wearing a black body suit and her hair is pinned up off her shoulders. The ambience music in the beginning is a choir singing, giving off the feeling of lost hope. It also foreshadows later in the scene where people around the world echo the word “Doctor”, in order to free him.

When the Master tells Martha to kneel there are a mixture of close up shots and wide shots. The wide shots are to help establish the scene since it still is quite early in. The wide shots help the audience see emotion, which is a stereotype of women that they are very emotional beings. The sound is important in this part of the scene, in terms of gender. The machines that are obeying the master’s command have a female voice, because they are seen as the evolutionary weaker sex. The Master also uses a deeper voice when addressing Martha, trying to impress and scare her. Having a deeper voice is thought of as a male trait.

At the next significant point in the scene, continuing on with the importance of sound, the Master continues to talk down to Martha. To which she continues to say nothing back to, until she snaps and laughs at him. This is a very unconventional thing for her to do, even forgetting gender stereotypes, defying and mocking the person who has threatened her life and made her kneel in front of them. Before this though when he asks her if she has any last words his sonic screwdriver makes the noise of a sword slicing through the air. This again is a very masculine noise, as executioners in the past would only have been men. This reinforces the idea that as the man, he has the power.

Later on after Martha laughs at him, she explains how she got where she is, using flashbacks. These flashbacks have a slight echo on them, they are colourised to be bluer, and have vinaigrette around the edges, to make it clear to the audience that they are flashbacks. During these flashbacks Martha talks about how she crossed continents “all on my own”, therefore emphasising her individual bravery to travel by herself, without the companionship of anyone,  which is more commonly done by men than it is by women in their mid-twenties. This relatively masculine approach changes when she explains the reason why she did it. “Because I love him” (talking about the doctor), confessions of love are seen as a more feminine thing to do, which contrasts with her masculine side. This also gives Martha more screen time, affirming to the audience that she is a very important character. While she is saying this, in the flashback, she is sitting on some stairs, half way up. While this would not normally seem significant, however, stairs have many added connotations in this scene, providing powerful symbolism to the power struggle between genders. So in this flashback, while Martha is in her own comfortable environment, it may seem strange that she isn’t sitting at the top of the stairs (where the power is). However the director is simply making a point that in today’s society women can’t sit at the top, because of their gender.

After this, the Master moves half way down the stairs, this indicates that he is aware that he is losing power, and therefore his movement are replicating the power struggle between himself and Martha. Martha, also sending this shift in power, stands up. As she stands her face moves into a white light connoting her as being pure, innocent, and in the right. When it cuts back to the Master’s face, you see that he has a red sort of shadow cast across his face, eluding to his dark evil side.  When the Doctor is freed he has a white glow surrounding his whole body, this not only presents him as good and pure, but also a god like, as he starts to levitate. This again relates back to the power struggle in the scene as he rises above the Master and forces him down the stairs.

To conclude, the character Martha breaks many gender conventions and stereotypes in the scene, yet also complies with others. The characters of Master and Doctor, however, both completely fit with typical male gender conventions.