lighting, camera angles, shot selection, music, montage) can help to determine a viewer's response to the ideas, people and issues presented in a film." Discuss this statement with reference to at least ONE feature film you have studied this year. Although portrayed in a humorous light, serious ideas and issues are brought to light by director Gil Junger, in the Shakespearian-based film 10 Things I Hate About You, with issues such as trust, honesty, peer pressure, discrimination, single parenting, gender roles and the value of individuality featuring strongly throughout the film. Presenting these ideas through the values and attitudes of Bianca, Cameron, Patrick and Katerina, the main protagonists, and to a lesser degree, Mr Stratford, Joey and Mr Morgan, Junger makes clever and effective use of filmic language in positioning the viewer's response to the film.
Setting is clearly and quickly established by the director within the first few seconds of the film, as the camera takes a long shot, panning slowly over the location. Large, well-trimmed houses and gardens symbolise an upper-class suburban setting, and it becomes obvious from the moment the characters begin to speak, that the city is American. Katerina Stratford, "the muling, rampalian wretch herself," is "a firm believer in doing things for her own reasons and not someone else's," and her value of own individuality is almost excessively emphatic. The opinion of her younger sister, Bianca, is the exact opposite throughout most of the film, and it is through the juxtaposition of these two characters that Junger presents the themes of individuality and peer pressure in the film.
From the first scene, Bianca's supremacy in the ranks of popularity at Padua High School is unquestionable, as is the unwelcoming attitude towards the presence of her sister in even the most lowly of social circles, with Kat's group of friends being limited to Mandela, another social outcast.