Correlating What's Eating Gilbert Grape with My Media Project

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What's eating Gilbert Grape was the movie that I chose to correlate with my media project. The movie was enjoyable and had a very unique perspective to the family system. It wasn't the average Caucasian family that most media outlets portray but instead a highly dysfunctional family. I wanted to do a different approach to the media project and break it down by family members(characters) and then combine the family aspects. Every member of the family has a unique personality and feeds into every aspect of the family system. I will first discuss the movie premise before going into the details of each family member. Then towards the end I will look at the family as a whole unit with various parts. The movie, “Whats eating Gilbert Grape” is about a family that goes through hardships in a small town of Endora, Iowa. The town is super small and everyone knows each other business. Gilbert's family consist of his mother and siblings who live in the same broken down house. The movie starts with Gilbert as the narrator and just in the first few minutes of the opening it is learned that Gilbert's dad committed suicide and his brother Larry left to pursuit higher education. Larry was the only one to break the poverty line and never to communicate with his family members again. Gilbert described Larry as the one who got away, in the opening of the movie. Bonnie Grape has 5 kids but only 4 of the 5 lives with her in their shack. The kids are mentioned from oldest to youngest: Larry, Amy, Gilbert, Arnie and Ellen. Bonnie Grape is extremely obese and suffers from depression ever since her husband(Albert Grape) committed suicide in the basement. Albert Grape was described in a brief mention of the movie as an alcohol who hang himself in the base... ... middle of paper ... ... the roles in the children lives. The Grape family wasn't the perfect nuclear family by any means of the word. But they did stand together through hardships and tribulations that the family faced. It wasn't easy for Gilbert to be the primary provider at a young age for his family and not able to explore life. Even Amy gave up a lot of her social life to take over the mother role. The family made it through all the problems that they faced by sticking together and forming a greater bond. Even with the death of Bonnie on Arnie 18th birthday and the burning down of their only house, they still stuck together. The death of their mother open up a door of freedom, even if this does sound wrong in context. But the children where free to navigate their lives and build stronger bonds. The love was their throughout the family and that's what truly matters at the end.

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