Gran Torino Sociology

Gran Torino Gran Torino by Clint Eastwood is a story of a gang and those that coexsist by that gang that has inner dilemmas dealing with the reality of gang violence, and living in a low class neighborhood. Many of the residents of the neighborhood deal with their own hardships of living in a day to day in a run down area and inner family problems. All of these problems create tension between the different people of the neighborhood. Most are afraid of gangs that take over the neighborhood, others are subjected by gender roles that are expected from their family to be upheld. Judgement of those who live in the neighborhood is also an issue that comes not only from those outside of the area, but also within. In one of the first scenes of

Gangs constantly revival between non gang members for who has the most status, Thao is criticized for how he will become the man of the house, and the dialect between characters is racist which leads to hatred toward each ethnic group. These factors lead toward a heated standoff in which Walt is killed defending the honor of the Lor’s and sending the Hmong gang to jail and freeing the neighborhood of their deviant

Many of the characters use derogatory terms towards each other and think poorly of one another. Walt is often seen using these terms for everyday language. He directs the slurs towards ethnic people in a hateful way, but also uses it as a greeting to a friend. When Thao is first introduced, he goes to Walt’s door to ask to borrow jumper cables and gets called a “gook” and the door slammed in his face. This demonstrates the hatred towards one racial group to another, but Walt also uses terms like such to greet dear friends and to start conversations. When he goes to his barber he greets him by calling him a “crazy Italian pr***” and the barber responding by saying “Great, a Pollock and a Chink”. Conversations like these demonstrate the racial tension between each race and how normalized this everyday speech is in this part of the neighborhood. Tensions grow higher when derogatory terms are used toward one another. For example, when the hispanic gang follows Thao and shouts slurs such as calling him a “slope” and asking whether or not he was a boy or girl puts a strain on the gang revival between the Hmongs. The racial slurs used create a hostile environment between the hispanics, Hmongs (the group of people migrated from Asia and the gang in the neighborhood), and between Walt, a Polish