Baby Driver. Christina

Christina Retson

Terryl Atkins

VISA-1500-02

25 November 2021

Assignment 4, Part A

The movie Baby Driver, directed by Edgar Wright, stars Ansel Elgort who plays Baby, a music-loving orphan who is the getaway driver for heist mastermind Doc. Baby Driver was Wright’s highest-grossing film to date and made USD $107.8 million in North America and a total of USD $226.9 million worldwide (Box office Mojo).

Baby Driver has a soundtrack throughout the movie and relies heavily on music cuts to introduce each new scene. “Musical moments may complement the visual information in a film; other times, they flout the affect conveyed in film’s other modalities (e.g.—visual, linguistic)” (Ma et al. 1). Before each operation Baby carefully picks out a song that sets the tone for the next action scene. Not only do you see the action, but you get to hear the action. Music has an influence on a viewer’s experience in consuming a movie (Ma et al. 1). In this scene, Baby, pictured above, is making a getaway from the police because he crashed his car. The soundtrack before everything went south was an upbeat circus-like beat, and then cut to a heavy rock song with no lyrics as he was escaping on foot. The handheld shot was used to show just how fast he was running to get away. His head and feet are often cut out and the camera moves with him that creates a raw, shaky feeling, as if you are present in the chase. Baby is seen running and dodging people and cars. Film blocking is used to focus on the trees as he is quickly dodging in and out.

“Of the top 172 non-foreign feature films released to theaters in 2011, racial/ethnic minorities only accounted for 10.5 percent of lead roles…” (qtd. in Hunt et al. 4). There were a few stereotypical minority groups this film portrayed. Jamie Foxx played a gangster character who beat up an elderly deaf man. There were three women roles in the movie, two being white women who were morally “good.” The third main character was Eiza González, who is Mexican and plays a standard stereotypical Hispanic woman who is into crime and uses her sex appeal to ignite violence among men.

Works Cited

“Baby Driver.” Box Office Mojo, https://www.boxofficemojo.com/release/rl1165854209/.

Erigha, Maryann. “Race, Gender, Hollywood: Representation in Cultural Production and Digital Media’s Potential for Change.” Wiley Online Library, John Wiley & Sons, Ltd, 9 Jan. 2015, https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/soc4.12237.

Monteflores, Carmen de, and Stephen J. Schultz. “SPSSI Journals.” Society for the Psychological Study of Social Issues, John Wiley & Sons, Ltd, 14 Apr. 2010, https://spssi.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/j.1540-4560.1978.tb02614.x.