Contagion Analysis Paper

Remember the Titans directed by Boaz Yakin in 2000. In Alexandria, Virginia in the year of 1971 for the first time three high schools are forced to integrate their students and faculties, two all white schools and one all black school to join together at TC Williams High School. The head football coach, Bill Yoast, at TC Williams is asked to step down from his long-term position and give the head coach title to Herman Boone, the first black faculty member the school has ever had. Herman Boone coaches an interracial team and is faced with the challenge of uniting the whole team, including the other coaches, despite what their views of either race are. Through many struggles along the way the team unites and just by a few seconds wins the state championships.

The gained unity the team accomplished brought a new attitude of race for the rest of TC Williams as well as the community of Alexandria. The community of Alexandria began to integrate with each other with race not being a problem anymore. In the film Remember the Titans, through Yakin’s uses of setting, dialogue, and characterization, he takes the problem of race and intolerance to bring out tolerance, unity, and friendships.

The setting where this film took place sets the tone for how the audience will first perceive race. Yakin chose to base his film off a true story that took place in the south, Alexandria, Virginia, to be exact, in the year of 1971. The south was still having a difficult time with racial segregation, even though it had been a few years after the civil rights movement. In the first few minutes of this film there are scenes of blacks and whites on separate sides protesting against each other with police officers in between them holding each side back. Th...

... middle of paper ...

...ertier says to the nurse, “Alice, are you blind? Don’t you see the family resemblance? That’s my brother.” Bertier and Campbell’s friendship grew so much that they were as close as brothers would be. They both went from completely hating each other to completely loving each other as if they were family.

From Coach Boone having an influence on his players and then in return his players having an influence on their community, tolerance, unity, and friendships became important and valuable aspects the community of Alexandria obtained from their intolerance and racial segregation. Yakin does a satisfactory job portraying that through his use of setting, dialogues, and characterizations in his film. Just as intolerance was an issue in Remember the Titans the same thing can be said about an issue of intolerance of class systems in Elizabeth Gaskell’s novel Mary Barton.