Textual Analysis - Hoodies Can Be Goodies

‘Hoodies can be Goodies’ is an interactive documentary which looks at the ways in which the teenager in today’s society is being represented as bad. This documentary looks into campaigning against the media making a bad name for teenagers and how it is only a minority of teenagers creating trouble and a bad name for the rest of the teenage society. The narrator and presenter of the documentary campaigning is Gavin Mitchell who was brought up in north London. In the documentary he visits the area in which he used to live in and it is known to people as ‘Shank Town’, which is slang for (stabbing/knife town) because of the large number of knife crime in that particular area of London.
In the documentary we see lots of different representations of teenager’s right from the beginning to the end where we are left at an un-closed decision of teenagers today. The representations of teenagers we see are of lower class teenagers running the streets of London specifically creating crimes. The presenter, Gavin, speaks to the teenagers who live in rough areas of London about how they feel. The teenagers respond saying ‘there isn’t anywhere for us to go, they turned our football area into a car park’. This therefore has created problems and it is seen that teenagers then turn to crime. This creates a negative representation of teenagers.
The main representation though which is portrayed is the idea of the hoody and how people see the hoody as a symbol of danger/trouble. Gavin Mitchell travels to L.A in America to find out about how much worse it is about the gun and knife crime of youths and how there is 100,000 members of the worlds largest group ‘MS XIII (13)’. He meets with a group of young teenagers who have been affected by gang culture who have joined street dancing that has helped to change their own lives and the representation of some American teenagers. Gavin Mitchell then gets the idea to create his own gang of hooded youth, ‘the goody hoodies’, who are teenagers, he acts as the ‘good father’ in the act to make a better name for teenagers who wear hoodies. Altogether this act of creating a positive representation for teenagers in the UK builds up the idea of youth of today being good and that only the minority bring down the teenage name for everyone.
Gavin Mitchell says, that ‘if you get rid of the hood for good there won’t be any more crimes, there won’t be any more stabbings, there won’t be any more deaths… Ban the hood for good and all of these things will disappear’. He clearly mocks the idea of the fashionable hoody being a negative representation of teenagers. The decision he comes to is that hoodies aren’t bad. I know that not all people who wear a hoody are bad, but elderly people see people in hoodies and feel ‘vulnerable’ and ‘scared’. This is what creates a rather negative view of teenagers.