World's Greatest Dad Analysis

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Schemas and the Self Presentation in World’s Greatest Dad

The 2009 Robin Williams movie, World’s Greatest Dad, provides an interesting outlook on schemas, as well as self presentation. Our main protagonist is Lance Clayton, a high school English teacher and failed author. His son, Kyle, was a student at the same high school, and he accidentally kills himself in a humiliating way. To avoid embarrassment, Lance writes a fake suicide note and hangs his son in the closet to cover it up. After a few weeks, the fake suicide note is released to the public, and everybody is amazed as to how well written it is. Lance, surprised by the response, goes on to write more fake journal entries as the persona of his son. He publishes them in a book, which …show more content…

Trying to think on his feet, Lance grabs a Bruce Hornsby CD he had sitting in his car, and gives it to her (earlier in the film, it is noted that Kyle hates Bruce Hornsby). The student is confused and disgusted at first, until Lance says “That [CD] was his favorite”. The student all of a sudden changes her attitude, and acts very grateful and emotional. Her initial reaction to the CD shows that she thinks Bruce Hornsby is an odd choice, but once she receives further information, she acts as if he is the best singer ever. She seemingly forgot about her previous reaction because it fits the schema surrounding Kyle’s note. Later in the film, two girls are fighting over the Bruce Hornsby CD, with one saying, “You didn’t even like Kyle!”. This implies that the student did like Kyle when he was alive. In reality, nobody liked Kyle. These students are forgetting just how terrible of a person Kyle was because it does not fit their schemas. Every student wants to be relevant, so they pretend to have been best friends with Kyle. The previous hatred for him is best summarized with Lance’s speech at the end: “You guys didn 't like Kyle. But that 's okay, I didn 't either. I loved him. He was my son, But he was also a douche …show more content…

His son hated him, none of his books got published, and his class at the high school was so unpopular that it might have been cut. He did have a girlfriend, although they kept it a secret from everybody else. There was another English teacher at the school, Mike, with whom Lance often did a social comparison with. Mike was a young, fit, teacher with a very popular class that was always full, and he was also stealing Lance’s girlfriend. Lance was understandably jealous of him. When Mike got an article published in the New Yorker, Lance tried to to make a downward comparison by saying, “It 's not a national [magazine]”. (Also, as a side note, in this scene, Mike was being very modest about his

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