BasketBall Diaries Poster Analysis

In the poster for The Basketball Diaries, the genre is communicated through the use of mise-en-scene for example: Jim (main character-played by Leonardo DiCaprio) has gelled hair and is wearing a tie, shirt and blazer (costume) which shows that he is a schoolboy. He is leaning against a wall and his facial expression looks very angry which makes him look quite rude, intimidating and unwelcoming. He is looking at the camera which makes it look as if he is looking at us, the viewer. All of this tells me that this is of the drama genre as a convention of film dramas includes adolescent characters at hard crucial points in their lives and the frown on his face (mise en scene) tells us that something negative is happening in his life.

The title “The Basketball Diaries” may appeal to a male audience as basketball is a male dominated sport. The word “Diaries” connotes that this character has a lot of secrets and is hiding things from people. This, along with his facial expression and body language could show a negative representation of teenagers and represent them as troublesome liars.

The tagline also adds to this negative representation as it says “the death of innocence” which could imply that he has either lost his virginity, done drugs, drank alcohol or committed other “sins”. The tagline includes the binary oppositions of “death” and “birth”- Anthropologist Claude Levi Strauss suggested that the production of meaning depended on the concept of binary oppositions. The “death of innocence” tells us that the character will go through a drastic struggle in their life and the “birth of an artist” tells us that he will overcome this struggle and come out changed (for the better.) This is similar to the Christian belief that we have to go through some sort of struggle to become “closer to God” or a better person and religion plays a part in the film as Jim goes to a Catholic school.

The written fonts are in yellow and white with the yellow font looking like handwriting for example “Leonardo” and “Basketball”. The white font is very bold and plain. I think the hand written like font is used because Jim writes his diaries and also maybe because he goes to school.

The Unique Selling Point (USP) of the poster is obviously the actor (and now producer) Leonardo DiCaprio. The poster is a shallow focus medium shot of him in the foreground (mise-en-scene-positioning of character) with the background out of focus and plain. His name is also written in yellow and white and almost as big and bold as the title.  You can not look at this poster without noticing him or his name as he is the only thing on the poster other than writing. Due to DiCaprio being the USP this will appeal to a mass mainstream audience and more specifically the core audience of the 16-24 demographic (and also people above this age) This may also appeal to this demographic as the character he plays belongs to this age group.