A director is successful when they take the audience away from comfort and security. In the film American Beauty, director Sam Mendes effectively achieves this. Creating a sense of discomfort and insecurity throughout the film allows the viewer to have a more in depth knowledge of the underlying themes within the film. Mendes strips viewers away from a sense of comfort and security through the portrayal of a dysfunctional family and the use of aggressive verbal slurs.
The dysfunctional American family of Carolyn, Lester and Jane Burnham a the key characters within American Beauty, and allows viewers to distinguish the idea of how not everything within is how it appears to be without. The Burnham’s appear to have the ‘ideal’ American lifestyle
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Colonel Fitts, a strict, military man is acutely homophobic, which we see a glimpse of at various points within the film when Fitts makes such statements as “What is this? The f***ing gay pride parade?”, consistently refers to gay people as ‘faggots’ and directly tells his son: “I'd rather you were dead than be a f*ckin' faggot.” Towards the end of the film, it is revealed that Fitts himself is homosexual who has never come out about his sexuality, having instead suppressed it under the facade of his marriage with his wife Barbara Fitts - whom we understand is not mentally well, a likely result of their debilitated marriage. When hearing these verbal slurs we understand how deeply rooted Fitts’ hate for homosexual people is, the phrases letting us delve deeper into his satirical opinions and personal beliefs. Upon the reveal of Fitts’ homosexuality, one could assume he has simply become a product of his environment. It could be suggested that he is so verbally brutal because those thoughts were ingrained into him when he was younger, authority figures causing him to believe this about himself, ultimately forcing him to believe he should hate himself as well as other gay people for their sexuality. Verbal slurs can be unpleasant and discomforting to hear, and the brutal, stinging force of Colonel Fitts’ barbarous words are instantaneously able to diminish one’s sense of comfort and security. Thoug harsh to hear, the use of verbal slurs in American Beauty is successful on the director’s part as we now have a more in depth perception of how deeply, psychologically damaging Fitts’ forcefully homophobic beliefs have been on him, and how this extreme homophobia can cause such an intense hate for people against others, reflecting the underlying hate they may hold against themselves. While it is unjustifiable to use such harsh
The media is a powerful tool and has the ability to influence and change one’s overall perspective of the world and the position they play in it. Although Television shows such as Friday Night Lights are seen as entertainment by consumers, its storyline contributes to the social construction of reality about class in the United States.
Throughout time, women in movies and other similar texts are shown to be generally focused on men. This might make sense if every movie ever made was set in a time where women had absolutely no rights but of course, that is not the case. Older and more modern depictions of women in media, both show women whose lives revolve around men. Even movies that market their female characters as strong and powerful are still shown to be dependent on the male leads and puts them first. Also, since women in movies have more of a focus on men, female to female relationships suffer in the same films. There are very few exceptions to this unfortunate truth.
Each gender has its little tells and associations, the movie Victor Victoria depicts gender cues very accurately and well. Victor Victoria is a movie about a woman, who wants to have a successful singing career, but in order to do so she must pretend to be a man pretending to be a woman. This movie takes place in the 1930’s in Paris, France during the winter time. One gender cue I noticed was how women and men wore their coats differently. Men tended to wear their coats over their shoulders without putting their arms in the sleeves and women, wore their coats a help their coats together with their hand placed close to their chest, indicating they feel cold. Another gender cues I noticed was when Carole "Toddy" Todd, played by Robert Preston,
Durkheim's concepts of the sacred and the profane has dominated religious and social commentary for decades. While these two, inexorably linked, concepts are most often related with respect to religion, we can apply them to the almost-religion of the “American Dream” for the purpose of analyzing the lives of Lester and Carolyn Burnham, Buddy Kane, and Angela Hayes in the film “American Beauty.” In “American Beauty” the experiences of the characters illustrates the dichotomy between the sacred and profane, the morality associated with the sacred and profane, and the influences the sacred and profane have on the characters.
Society has set certain standards that women are supposed to follow. The most common image of women is that they are very passive and try to avoid conflict in any situation. More and more in society women are breaking down the social barriers that confine them to their specific roles. The movies The Graduate and The Last Picture Show reveal to viewers a side to females that is very nontraditional. These two movies help to show how women are rebelling against sexual social norms, and they are taking a more active and aggressive role when dealing with heterosexual relationships.
Directed in 1999 the movie “America Beauty” by Sam Mendes takes the viewer to an average suburb community. Here, we meet the protagonist Lester Burnham. Lester is married to his wife Carolyn, and he has a fifteen-year-old daughter named Jane. Lester is portrayed as ordinary and unmemorable especially at his job. Thr...
The role of females during much of the Twentieth Century is domestic. Two well-known authors during this time period have conflicting views of how women fulfill these roles. In F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby and John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath, the women portray two very different perspectives on the roles of women within families and the values they instill within their families. The value the women share about money is one of the most prominent perceptions the authors portray. Both pieces of Modern literature differ in the perception of a woman’s rightful role as well as the importance of family in relation to monetary wealth.
Worse, when women swallow the emptiness, loneliness, and naked violence that comes with their gender performance, their ability to develop self-awareness on matters such as academic, sexual, reproductive, safety, and health care rights no longer exists. When characters such as Ruth from Green Girls come to believe that womanhood means being on display and having to perform their roles as women in public spheres despite the feelings of wanting to shield oneself from strangers, they lose their freedom and become fettered to performative roles. Their performance of gender becomes, as Butler mentions, the result of both subtle and blatant coercions. These coercions offer a script of life that women must follow in order to remain the star of their
The American black comedy The Wolf of Wall Street directed by Martin Scorsese was released December 25, 2013 and stars the likes of Leonardo DiCaprio, Jonah Hill and Margot Robbie. While on face value The Wolf of Wall Street looks like a film about excessive cocaine binges, long evenings filled with men with cigarettes, large portions of alcoholic consumption, having many sexual escapades with various women and even dwarf tossing from time to time, the film is deeply rooted in perception gender within the genre of The Wolf of Wall Street. The word ‘genre’ is rooted into a similar category as
Think about your favorite movie. When watching that movie, was there anything about the style of the movie that makes it your favorite? Have you ever thought about why that movie is just so darn good? The answer is because of the the Auteur. An Auteur is the artists behind the movie. They have and individual style and control over all elements of production, which make their movies exclusively unique. If you could put a finger on who the director of a movie is without even seeing the whole film, then the person that made the movie is most likely an auteur director. They have a unique stamp on each of their movies. This essay will be covering Martin Scorsese, you will soon find out that he is one of the best auteur directors in the film industry. This paper will include, but is not limited to two of his movies, Good Fellas, and The Wolf of Wall Street. We will also cover the details on what makes Martin Scorsese's movies unique, such as the common themes, recurring motifs, and filming practices found in their work. Then on
Social factors have always encouraged the idea that men embody masculinity and women embody femininity and, thus, certain gender-norms are expected accordingly. In the past, such expectations were traditional and to go against them was frowned upon by the general public. Contemporarily speaking, there is more freedom to avail oneself of today than there was once upon a time. Jeanne-Marie LePrince de Beaumont’s fairytale adaptation of ‘Beauty and The Beast’ was published in 1740. During this time, men and women were compelled by the social conventions associated with their gender. When analyzing the literary work, the reader can grasp what gender roles are eminent in the characters identity and motives. By exploring the choice of language being
The human body is one of the most complex and yet beautiful things on the earth. We live in a time where our perception of the way we view the body is driven my social stereotypes. In todays world we are supposed to live by the standards of this unwritten code. All of this affects the quality of life we live in. It ranges from the workplace; our personal relationships to the way strangers perceive a person. At this very day in age we are categorized due to being born male or female and things that should be talked about are considered taboo to others.
The critically acclaimed film, American Beauty has been a topic of conversation since it debuted in theaters in 1999. The film currently sits at the 63rd spot for best movies on IMBD along with 8.4/10 stars and a 88% rating on Rotten Tomatoes. It was produced by Dreamwork Studios, written by Alan Ball, and directed by Sam Mendes. As if the title did not give it away; the film was made and filmed inside the United States and takes place in a residential neighborhood in California for the most part. The movie managed to win five Oscars on eight nominations; these include awards such as Best Picture, Best Actor in a Leading Role, Best Director, Best Writing Screenplay Written Directly for the Screen, and Best Cinematography
During a review by Vox, of the gender biases in Hollywood that were reported by the data visualization website Polygraph, over 2,000 movies underwent scrutiny in determining why men have more dialogue in movies, even in those that are supposed to be focused on the lead female characters. In what was stated to be one of the largest analyses of script reviews of all time, it was determined that the male characters within the study overrule women in over 78% of the analyzed films. This was concluded through a cross-analysis of character information such as name, gender, and age, with the information reported by the popular movie database, IMDB. The results of their study are astonishing. In the 2,005 screenplays across all movie genres that were reviewed by Polygraph, only two movies were delivered 100% by the lead female character. Conversely, the male dominated list has not only the largest number of results;
Movies are a big part of people’s lives; everyone has a favorite movie, or set of movies. They have impacted people’s lives since they were first made, and continue to do so today. In recent years, movies have cast women to play the roles of heroes. Although women have been playing heroic roles recently, they have always been role models in movies, which have set examples for future generations, empowered women, and have shed light on the feminist movement in the U.S.