The Hollywood Sign Film Summary

In the article, “The Hollywood Sign: The Culture of American Film,” from the book, Signs of Life in the USA, by Sonia Maasik and Jack Solomon, the authors talk about the styles and symbols of American film industry from multiple age era perspectives.
During the early 1900s to mid 1900s, content in films were mostly based off of realistic aspects people in that era were facing at the time, whereas most of the content from films in the 2000s and modern day are based off of fantasy worlds. However, some recent films use older films as a basis for advertising as shown in Batman: The Dark Knight as the authors state, “One of the posters used to advertise Batman: The Dark Knight featured the familiar figure of Batman, in full regalia, standing in

Qualities like violence were extremely limited back then in the 1950s, but it is more widely accepted in today’s society in gruesome amounts. I remember reading about this one movie that had been banned because the audience believed that the horrific acts in it were realistic and that the actors were hurt or killed off in the making of the film, but it was just accurate representation of what would occur had the violent act had been done in real life. Another quality that caught the interests of the audience was indistinctive or abnormal characters. Characters like Heath Ledger’s Joker who have joy of torturing others for the sake of fun deviates from the typical person and is surprising that these type of people do exist in our world in silence. Interestingly enough, these characters catch our eye the most often because we wonder why they think differently from “normal” humans. I was reading threads on Reddit the other day about multiple serial killer cases and I always questioned myself, “Why would someone do this? Are they even human?” It is fascinating when these characters are presented in movies since we get to understand their backgrounds sometimes, but in the real world, not so much. Movies that include these type of qualities help us try to sympathise and understand the complications going on behind an