Sequence Analysis Of Dead Poets Society And Mona Lisa Smile

Sequence Analysis: Dead Poets Society and Mona Lisa Smile

The Behaviour of the Students: In both movies, we see a lot of how the students interact amongst themselves. In Dead Poets Society, we see the boys running around and being playful and friendly with one another. We also see them building a radio, having their “study sessions,” and, eventually, resurrect the Dead Poets club and attend the meetings that follow. The boys are friendly with each other overall, with little to no feuds in most of the movies duration. They also show more openness to Mr.Keating and what he has to teach the students. In contrast, throughout Mona Lisa Smile, we learn a lot less about what the girls might be interested in doing with their free time. We see them

So in this case, when we see the girls participating in activities mostly surrounding their futures with their husbands and fitting into the ‘trophy wife’ depiction, we side with Watson in thinking the girls should want more out of their lives because society is less inclined to the idea that a woman’s job is strictly to take care of her husband and children. Because Watson defies these ideas in the movie and is presented as if she came out of our own time and because the girls only look to amount to what is expected of them, we see them as unambitious to our standards of what living is, and because of their behaviour towards each other and their teacher, we see them as rude and snobby and thus become attached to Ms.Watson as someone more relatable to the audience. Although Dead Poets Society is set in the late 1950s (released in 1989), these times don 't seem to matter as much about why the characters do what they do. Although there are expectations put on the boys, they are less clear and specific and have more to do with successfulness in work later in life. The movie focuses more on their interests in activities and we see the boys rebelling in small ways against their expectations and authority. A scene where two of the boys

Dead Poet Society’s Welton Academy being an all boys school and Mona Lisa Smile’s Wellesley College, an all girls school. You could almost tie many of the differences in the plot of these films into the difference in gender; especially with the time periods these movies are set in. Because they focus on singular genders you do not see the issue of conflicting feminist views in Dead Poets Society but instead the boys artistic wants, and in Mona Lisa Smile you that is what the main focus is. Mona Lisa Smile’s attention is on the societal ideas of what a woman’s life will pan out to be and how Katherine Watson encourages the girls she teaches to want more out of life than just to take care of a husband and raise a few children. This movie expresses a lot of the conflict leading into feminist movements at the time. Even though we see a lot of young men throughout the movie in relation to the girls, we mostly see how unaffected they are by Ms. Watson’s views and how they expect that these girls, who they plan to marry, will do just as they, and everyone else expect them to. This is significant because it shows just how powerful societal norms and influenced wants are and how breaking things of tradition seems like a foreign concept. Tradition is something that is seen as never changing. Obviously, to society in 2003, we feel that they are the absurd ones. To the audience it looks as though