Oversimplification In The Movie The Road

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Folke Tersman claimed that" In any narrative, the advocacy of a certain point of view is usually accompanied by a degree of oversimplification.” (Ethics', in Routledge Companion to Philosophy and Film, 2009, p. 119). The key word of this sentence would be the word oversimplification. “Over” refers to something used too much in most of the cases, which is a negative meaning usually. In other words, Tersman suggested that if people are going to make a statement on a moral issue, P, by using narrative, there would be a risk of making P too simple to justify its complexity. Before the discussion, it is necessary for us to define this statement first. To begin with, what is narrative defined by? According to the Oxford English Dictionary, narrative, …show more content…

In the movie, The Road (2009), we could understand the gangsters are written as bad guys in the story against the main characters just when they came out. But, in reality, people could not be identify such easily in most of the cases. Also, when the audiences heard that the gangster would eat people, they would immediately feel digusted and have an image that they are absolutely terrible guys who are dangerous. Yet there might be many external factors we do not know of this action, just like people would be eaten because of special culture or famine in reality. Also, the story would be arranged “coincidentally” to highlight the major conflict and expression of idea. In The Road, the gangster just returned to their base after the father and his son escaped form the basement, and the people came out from the basement to disturb the gangsters just before the father wanted to kill his son. So, it is obvious that the time of different events in the film are arragned cleverly, which in order to show the characters’ wants and actions. But, in reality, things do not happen such coincidentally in many cases. We might have to spend more time to figure out the same information by more effort with more details. That is, compared to reality, narrative are much more simple and direct for us to receive the information from the elements arranged by the creators for the purpose of advocating their point of view, including simpfiying characters’ orientation, culture background setting, and story. So, narrative is a condensed version of our reality to show the idea of their creators, and the process

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