In my sociology analysis essay I will be discussing Menace II Society. There are five concepts that I will define and use to show a broader vision of scenes from the movie which are: master status, differential association, self-conflict, stereotyping, and street crimes. Also, there will be two theories I will be discussing about the movie which are symbolic interaction theory and social conflict theory.
At the outset, during one cloudless afternoon in South Central, Los Angeles, a five-year-old juvenile by the forename of Anthony, cycles his training wheel down the pavement of the road while he unwearyingly waits for his mother Ronnie and her boyfriend Caine to finish transporting their properties to the van for their perpetual relocation to the metropolitan city of Atlanta, Georgia. As the adolescent voyages further on down the pathway, a green Pontiac LeMans Sedan comprised of four men with black masks obscuring their discrete identities, deliberately cruise alongside the curb contiguous to the last house on the street. As the four men approach the residence of Anthony and his mother Ronnie, one of the vehicle’s passengers bellows out the phrase, “Yo, what’s up now partner,” and immediately begins to discharge massive gunfire from his Beretta 92F (MIIS). An immense array of blasts erupts at the residence.
After completing this assignment, I am amazed on how much of a better understanding I have on these concepts. Not only am I able to connect them with situations in daily life, but even to the extent at which I can relate them to circumstances in a movie. The two topics that I chose to explore further and relate to the movie and each other were conflict and politeness theory. Not only did I realize my ability to connect such topics to fulfill this assignment, but I somehow feel that my future experiences watching movies or paying attention to others daily behaviors will be more analytical after completing this assignment.
In sociology symbolic interactionism explains the individual in a society and their interactions with others and through that it can explain social order and change. This theory was compiled from the teachings of George Herbert Mead in the early 20th century. Mead believed that the development of the individual was a social process. People are subjected to change based on their interactions with other people, objects or events and they assign meaning to things in order to decide how to act. This perspective depends on the symbolic meaning that people depend on in the process of social interaction. This paper will examine the movie “The Blind Side” through the symbolic interaction perspective.
This Analysis Paper is an analysis of social problems an issues presented in the film. The film under analysis in this paper is "What 's Eating Gilbert Grape" (1993). The topics used as a lens for analysis are family, social roles, deviance, and social groups. This paper will present numerous examples of these social issue topics as they are displayed in the film.
It is commonplace within films to replicate aspects of society like the formation of cliques, and/or groups that are subsets of the whole population. In these kinds of movies filmmakers indulge in the attributes of these subsection as well as the social orders, which facilitates them. Sociologists, like Norbert Elias, have theorized the creations and replication of social strata within Western society since before the 19th century. Norbert Elias’s infamous works theorized the creation of a unified social control within a civilization and the extrinsic influences of that control on the individuals themselves. An example of his key ideas are inherent in the movie “Divergent” where the presence of an embedded subset group “threatens” the social order and thus becomes a target for eradication.
Menace II Society, a film about a young Black man who has lived the “hustler” lifestyle and is struggling to leave it, is a perfect example of deviance as the main character, Caine Lawson, and the characters around him violate many of society’s norms. Throughout the film, the characters swear incessantly, carry around guns and drugs as most people would carry around cell phones, commit street crimes, especially burglary and mugging, on a regular basis, and beat and kill people unscrupulously. The following quote captures just how deviant Caine and the other characters in this film were, “[Caine] went into the store just to get a beer. Came out an accessory to murder and armed robbery. It's funny like that in the hood sometimes. You never knew what was gonna happen, or when” (Albert Hughes). Why would Caine consider these crimes “funny”, or rather, so insignificant? What caused Caine to become so deviant? The answers to such questions were woven into the plot of the film and will be discussed in the following paragraphs.
For this particular assignment I have chosen the movie Django Unchained, which is a fantastic movie and I recommend it to anyone who has not yet seen it. I chose the movie Django Unchained because I believe that it exhibits the sociological theories we have covered in many different ways; and I believe that every person would apply these specific sociological theories in their own ways. The two sociological theories that I plan to apply to the movie Djano Unchained are, social conflict theory and symbolic interaction theory.
Although there were many concepts that were present within the movie, I choose to focus on two that I thought to be most important. The first is the realistic conflict theory. Our textbook defines this as, “the view that prejudice...
Every film can be related back to socially significant issues that occurred during the time it was released. It’s a snapshot of the issues during that time period. Film is not created in a vacuum. As described in our textbook, film “Conveys “the temper of an age of a nation” as well as that of the artists who produces it” (Belton 22). Films tend to reflect current society, country ideals or beliefs in order for the audience to relate. Some of those techniques used include, the American dream, family, corruption, divorce, and crime. If a director decides not include current social issues than it becomes harder for an audience to relate to the film because they will not be able to connect to the characters and get into their shoes. One film that encompasses all of these current social issues is American Hustle (David O. Russell, 2013). This film is a melodrama because of the context and social issues this film deals with. American Hustle has a social significance to today’s current culture, society, beliefs and social issues through the use of the American dream, corruption, divorce, crime and family.
There are three main types of sociological perspectives in which you can perceive different sociological issues and concepts; structural-functional, symbolic-interaction, and social conflict. Structural-functional looks at society as a whole and how it works together. Symbolic-interaction is how different symbols spark particular thoughts and emotions by examining the meanings that people impose on objects, events and behaviors. Social conflict studies how power and coercion affect social order. Based off these types of perspectives, an analysis on teen depression and suicide can be evaluated from a sociological standpoint.
“Issues have to do with matters that transcend these local environments of the individual and the range of his inner life.” (Mills 5). The sociological perspective is a way of looking at human behaviors that links individuals to the society as a whole. C. Wright Mills wrote an essay on the subject of the social perspective called “The Promise.” In his essay, he described the sociological perspective as having four main components: traps, morals that are challenged, public issues, and the whole picture. These four aspects cover a range of influences for human behavior and can be observed in everyday life. These can also be observed in movies. In fact, sometimes it is easier to observe these conditions in movies because the plot is usually exaggerated
The film that I have chosen to analyze is “The Purge”. “The Purge” is a 2013 American horror film directed by James DeMonaco. It was released on June 7, 2013, to mixed reviews. I will be analyzing “The Purge” by looking at conflict theory, class division, the importance of the ethnicity of each individual character, and the government’s overall political and economic agenda. In brief, I believe that Purge night takes place because of Conflict theory, due to political and economic agendas.
In society it is one hundred percent possible that we could study people our entire lives and still not understand them if we didn’t understand that basic social instiutions. I have watched three different videos over the course of the past week and I have been able to identify the use of three of our major social institutions, theorys and perspectives. I saw social interactionism, the conflict theory and functionalism all at work. Knowing each of these is extremely important to understanding why people act and react to each situation on confrontation that they may encounter.
The Social Action Theory and Symbolic Interactionism Max Weber believed that individuals were the key to society. He developed social action theory, the purpose of which was to find out why individuals function in certain ways. He thought that every social action performed by an individual had a meaning attached to it. Social actions are the result of conscious thought processes that take into consideration the reactions of other individuals. Weber identified four types of social action which include, reason (an instrumentally rational or calculated action), value or rational action (determined by belief), emotion or effectual action (dependent upon the feelings of the individual), and traditional action (determined by habit).
George Herbert Mead begins his discussion of symbolic interactionism (talking with others) by defining three core principles that deal with meaning, language, and thought. The theory states that meaning is the construction of social reality. Humans act toward people or things on the basis of the meanings they assign to those people or things.