Harry Brown Key Theories

Harry Brown was produced by Matthew Vaughn a well known British actor, and was produced for a fairly small audience. The movie was made by a white middle class middle aged man, and distributed to an audience of white middle class people. Althusser's theory shows that the ISA is using superstructure like the media to distract us from our exploitation .The character Harry Brown goes against the dominant ideology as he is seen as the Hero, and in doing so belittles the police as they seem almost useless throughout the film. The teenagers however represents the out of control monsters that need to stopped, Using stereotypes such as the  teenagers in the film wearing Hoodie's, smoking, taking drugs and stabbing people, reinforces the representation on teenagers as a collective group as we are only shown a very simple representation of teenagers as throughout the whole movie we see it from Harry's point of view. The film showed that the teenagers couldn't be stopped by the police and should be avoided at all costs, this is shown when harry walks past the underpass multiple times during the film when it was faster to walk through it, even when his wife was dying. Even as an old man Harry is shown as the dominant ideology, somewhat mocking the police as an old age pensioner cleaned up the streets when they had failed to do so, in the end of the film during the press conference the police claimed to have done all of Harry's as the audience knows this isn't true this goes against the ideology of the ruling class that the police are good.

In the very beginning of the film the producers made a sense of moral panic as the teenagers were driving around on the first floor of the estate block, then they decided to drive around a women with a baby and fire at her 3 times shooting her in the head and proceed to get run over straight away by a lorry. This is very extreme but shows Stanley Cohen's theory about moral panic and folk devils. In the opening sequence teenagers are as a group rising up against the social structure, rebelling against the police and doing illegal activities, the film then pits every single teenager together during the film even the ones that are outside of the circle of teenagers at the underpass are shown to be doing drugs. By doing this they have created a folk devil in the teenagers that have repress the  police shown during the riot scene when they were throwing bricks and bombs at them. Harry Brown then comes to the rescue and kills the main antagonist, saves the princess and order returns to the social system soon after.