1. At the beginning of the Katy Perry’s Roar music video, it starts
with a cartoon painting of a Jungle, seconds later the word
“Roar” appears met with the line “a motion theory adventure
filmed in junglescope,” which looks like an old film, for
example Tarzan or The
Jungle Book.
The cartoon later burns away to reveal real life; this connotes
that the fantasy of an old film, that always had a happy ending
and the “male character” was also the hero burns away to
reveal reality, because later on the main male character in
“Roar,” dies and Katy Perry becomes strong willed and
independant, which is extremely different from the thropes
represented in films like Tarzan, where the man is the hero and
the female is the
damsel in distress.
The scene opens with an establishing shot of a plane
crash surrounded by trees, in a jungle; Katy Perry and a
male character are seen standing outside the destruction
alive. Katy looks scared and shell-shocked by the
experience of the crash and being stuck in the middle on
nowhere, juxtaposed to this, the man is relaxed and does
not seem to scared, even a little bit. This displays that at
the start, Katy is appears as weak and vulnerable; the
male character is presented as careless. This is a negative
representation of both characters and gender, because
Katy is presented as a helpless female and her boyfriend
is presented with vanity issues. When Katy’s boyfriend
is seen taking a selfie, the shot is a point of view shot,
which shows that he, at this moment, is being shown as
the main focus, until the camera moves to focus on Katy,
in a shallow focus; keeping her boyfriend in the
background taking the pictures, contrasting strongly with
Katy’s terrified body language.
2. The first line of the song, “I used to bite my tongue and hold
my breath,” Katy turns to the camera and it follow her
movements, the lyrics are about who she used to be; which is
the person she is being presented here, she seems to be the
vocal important
part of the video
at this moment,
however, her boyfriend runs into the shot,
grabbing her and stops singing, showing his
dominance over Katy as he is very controlling
over her. He takes a selfie with her, then places
his bag on her arm, this whole bit was acted over
the lines, “Scared to rock the boat and make a
mess So I sat quietly, agreed politely,” amplifying
that she listens to what her boyfriend says.
In the next shot, Katy is positioned behind her boyfriend and he
takes centre stage, indicating that he is more important than her;
she is only ever seen singing the words to the song when her
boyfriend is not watching. The man is then attacked and killed
by a tiger, leaving Katy’s character scared and alone; he dies and
the camera follows Katy running away. The song stopped after
he was killed and didn’t started again until Katy was
safe, this is where the lyrics change from being about
Katy not being strong, to her being strong, for
example, “You held me down, but I got up (hey!)
Already brushing off the dust. You hear my voice, your
hear that sound
3. Like thunder, gonna shake your ground.” Implying that without the man was weighing Katy’s
self-esteem down and with him gone, she is strong on her own. As she sings, she settles into the
dark becoming more comfortable around the place and
less scared to walk around; she is at one with the
jungle, she kneels down, onto all fours as if she is
becoming animalistic and letting go of who she was
before, her reflection in the lake is a tiger, showing that
is strong on the inside. Their is a middle shot of her on
all fours and she roars out the lyrics, this indicates her
change from being weak-minded to an empowered
individual.
However, throughout the music video, the more confident
and strong Katy becomes, the more and more clothing she
loses; this implies that, even though the video is about
empowerment to women, it it showed, through the loss of
her clothing, that women are only powerful if they are
hardly wearing anything. This links to the theory of the
“male gaze,” that the camera is a hextroexual man
viewing a woman, which makes sense to the fact that Katy starts to wear less and less the more
powerful she becomes, therefore the video us still
sexuality objecting her.
Throughout the video, they’re many cuts made to Katy
stood on top of the waterfall and stringing from vines;
which are shown in low angle shots, which shows how
she is the “Queen of the jungle,” and that she is open,
narratively speaking shows that she longer needs her
boyfriend in her life to control her life, she is better on
her own. When she traps and bows in front of the tiger;
she is being extremely brave and confident enough,
special effects and CGI are used to digitally edit her
opposite the animal and create an aura of a tiger around
Katy to show that she is now the highest authority within
the jungle.
One of the final scenes is a wide shot of Katy with all the animals of
the jungle sat around her; her being in the centre of the frame
showing that she is now in charge. The next scene, she is asleep on
the plane, for a few seconds we are made to think it was all a dream,
4. but she stands up walking out into the forest surrounded by all the animals; the frame freezes and
the picture changes back to the cartoon style it was at the start, the text, “the end,” comes up and
this is called a closed narrative, it started and ended in the same place, making it feel like the end
of a story book or old fashioned film.
