Trainspotting presents an ostensible image of fractured society. The 1996 film opens, famously, with a series of postulated choicesvariables, essentially, in the delineation of identity and opposition. Significant here is the tone in which these options are deliveredit might be considered the rhetorical voice of society, a playful exposition of the pressure placed on individuals to make the "correct" choices, to conform to expectation.
As such, the introduction might be read as contributing to the formation of two narrative constructs: that of "normality"or at least that considered "normality" by prevailing ideologyand that of "subnormality," the remainder. In its uncompromising rejection of the former, the commentary of Ewan McGregor's Renton roots him thoroughly in the latter.
We see this division alluded to on a number of occasions. In the nightclub, for example, Renton quickly notices how the "successful" separate themselves from the "unsuccessful"the former group embracing their newly-found partners and the latter nodding their heads sheepishly. "Success" is, however, more often linked with boredom and absurditywith the easy life, with game-shows and bingo; "failure," despite its inherent misery and hardship, is shown to be exhilarating: a knife-edge. The tension inherent in this opposition is offered, arguably, as a reason for the behavioural patterns depicted; "what people forget is the sheer pleasure of it," as Renton confesses.
We might describe the group of friends, united by failure, as classic anti-heroes; as characters with whom we sympathise despite the horrors they commit. It is a reading underpinned by nihilism, and one can't help but recall the Zarathustrian "Table of Values" expounded by Nietzsche....
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...e present and, as such, shapes the future. How free is the individual, if we concede to behavioural determinism? And, if choices on the high-street can be predicted according to, for example, class, gender, education, and origin, can they really qualify as free choices? The characters are perhaps shown as being "unfree," as they are being forced to make a choice"a job," a "career," a "big television"; to act otherwise is to choose death. Heroin represents this misnomerit is the unmade choice, the solidification of a philosophical abstraction. Significantly, heroin never actually kills any of the charactersonly its accompanying consequences.
To summarise, then, Trainspotting examines the tension caused by segregation and the demands of citizenship, and as such explains social problems as the denial of this tension. Denial is shown only to exacerbate the problems.
Besides an initial voiceover narration introducing Ray Kinsella (Kevin Cosner), his beloved wife Annie (Amy Madigan), and their young daughter Karin, this is the first scene in Field of Dreams, released in 1989 and directed by Phil Alden. The voice-over establishes the expectation of the film as being a sensible story about a loving couple trying to run a family farm in Iowa, and the subsequent scene (pictured above) quickly deconstructs that expectation. While working in his field one night, Ray hears a voice whispering “If you build it, he will come.” From then on, there are no more misconceptions about Field of Dreams being anything but an unapologetic fantasy in which an Iowa farmer mows down his fields to build a baseball diamond where
self is quite evident in this film. China is going through a massive industrial revolution, similar to the American industrial revolution of the early 19th century. After three years of following the Zhang family, first time director Lixin Fan released The Last Train Home, attempting to raise awareness to the down side of China’s powefull economy. While the film The Last Train Home seems to just depict the lives of factory workers, it is actually making a political statement about how western capitalism exploits factory workers to produce cheap goods. The film makes this exploitation evident by depicting the fracturing of the Zhang family and the harsh working conditions they must endure.
The first social issue portrayed through the film is racial inequality. The audience witnesses the inequality in the film when justice is not properly served to the police officer who executed Oscar Grant. As shown through the film, the ind...
Have you ever seen Edward Scissorhands, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, or Sleepy Hollows? If you have seen those, you should know, Tim Burton loves to keep his audience on their feet. Tim Burton has an impressive list of dark-themed and mysterious movies that are fans’ favorite. He uses many cinematic techniques to keep his audience thrilled with bone-chilling vibes. The creative use of his cinematic techniques are shown in movies such us Charlie and the Chocolate Factory and Edward Scissorhands.
Appearing in the 1903, The Souls of Black folk had emerged, a collection of 14 proses, written by one of the single most intellectual blacks in America, W. E.B. DuBois (Oxford Companion). This dynamic collection of essays reflect on African American history, sociology, religion, politics, and music. DuBois begins saying “The problem of the 20th century is the color line (5). This quote pronounces DuBois bases for his collection, that is being different form the others (Whites) makes you feel like you are being shut out from their world by a vast veil; hence the color line(8). On the other had we have Birth of a Nation, which comes out later in 1915 (TCM). Ironically it becomes the top selling film in White America during that time, but degrades everything that DuBois and another activist stood for. While DuBois hopes to educate White and Black America on their boundaries, the color line, the film’s director, D.W. Griffith, undermines these ideas. Defiling images of African Americans by distorting the perception of Blacks using stereotypical examples such as the mammies, mulattos, and bucks, Griffith tries to justify that blacks were inferior to Whites. In spite of the many controversies that are expressed in the film, it had become a known as the most innovative, American Epics and was a top seller during its time because of Griffith’s technical breakthrough and format. While comparing and contrasting these two pieces I hope to reveal to you this why this ‘double consciousness’ exist, even todays society as a result of these stereotypes displayed in “The Birth of a Nation.”
District 9 is a film that takes us into a realm of a different world from the one that we know now. It combines extraterrestrial life with immense science fiction to illustrate a story we could only imagine to ever actually occur. Although it was created for entertainment purposes, the motion picture can be compared to many different types of individuals and situations. District 9 displays many underlying concepts throughout the movie about racism, prejudice and discrimination. While studying and analyzing the plot and characters, these concepts became more translucent to me, the viewer. This paper will discuss the treatment of District 9 residents and equate their treatment to people with disabilities.
The imagined community at the front of the train has little knowledge of the conditions that the less fortunate passengers of the train are subjected to. The existence of the imagined community that is comprised of ticketed passengers is integral to the sustenance of the train. Nixon writes, “the modern nation-state is sustained by producing imagined communities” (Nixon 167). While the train is by no means a modern nation-state, the privileged passengers are vital. Unlike the unimagined community in the back of the train who are decidedly rebellious, they seem to have largely submitted to the authority of Wilford. Without this submission the train would not be the microstate, it is. Rather, the train would be little more than a shelter from the icy wasteland earth has become. This reliance on an imagined communities is paralleled in all nations today. Without a submissive faction that realises and legitimises their government, the state holds no actual
Many boundaries present themselves in everyday life. Perhaps one of the largest boundaries that lead to conflict is race. The mere color of a person’s skin can isolate an individual from the rest of the world. In the 20th century contemporary novel, Cry the Beloved Country, Alan Paton uses parallelism to show how the boundaries of racism present themselves in the lives of the South Africans and how the differences in people make for a split society.
The film observes and analyzes the origins and consequences of more than one-hundred years of bigotry upon the ex-slaved society in the U.S. Even though so many years have passed since the end of slavery, emancipation, reconstruction and the civil rights movement, some of the choice terms prejudiced still engraved in the U.S society. When I see such images on the movie screen, it is still hard, even f...
Released in 2012, Ruby Sparks is romantic comedy directed by the award winning directors, Jonathan Daytona & Valerie Faris. After the success of Little Miss Sunshine, the two never did any film for 6 years until actress/writer of the story, Zoe Kazan, approached them. The film went on to get nominated in several awards across Europe. The story tells a fantastical tale of love between a novelist and his imaginary story character who comes to live.
Often when we think about the Titanic the first thought that comes to the mind is the film “Titanic” which was produced in 1997, 85 years after the disaster struck. It starred Kate Winslett (Rose DeWitt Bukater), Leonardo DiCaprio (Jack Dawson) And Billy Zane (Cal Hokley) as the main characters. The film is about a love triangle between the three main characters. This movie was produced by James Cameron who put enormous amount of research about the shipwreck of the titanic in order to depict the turn of events in his film. Amongst the purposes of his research he wanted to accurately depict the ship wreck itself from the very instant the ship hit the iceberg to the very last part of the ship that was subdued into the water. Another very significant part of Cameron’s research was to understand the socio-economic status of the passengers which will be discussed in detail later. Although historians have criticized certain aspects Cameron’s film the accuracy in which he depicts certain aspects such as the socio-economics of the passengers can’t be ignored.
"Fed Up (Soechtig, 2014)." narrated by Katie Couric, focuses on the growing link between sugar consumption and the obesity epidemic. The film aggressively attacks the food industry, advertising, and the government who, it claims, all contribute to the U.S. sugar-dependent, obesity problem. The film sets out to prove the government, and food industry is knowingly causing an increase in the amount of obese children. It reserves its most critical comments for government advisory panels who make and enforce food and health policy, and its failure to properly regulate the food industry. They claim lobbyists for the sugar board have been instrumental in the removal of negative statistics from research papers worldwide. Instead
Rosenberg J.C. Parallels: The Morality Play Everyman And Selected Tales. UMI DISSERTATION PUBLISHING. 2011. Print.
The film Pulp Fiction was an immediate box office success when it was released in 1994 and it was also well received by the critics, and celebrated for the way it appeared to capture exactly a certain pre-millennial angst and dislocation in Western capitalist societies. The term post-modernist, often used to refer to art and architecture, was applied to this film. The pulp fiction refers to popular novels which are bought in large numbers by less well educated people and enjoyed for their entertainment value. The implication is that the film concerns topics of interest to this low culture, but as this essay will show, in fact, the title is ironic and the film is a very intellectual presentation of issues at the heart of contemporary western culture and philosophy.
Are we human if we don’t have a choice to choose between acting good or acting evil? A Clockwork Orange directed by Stanley Kubrick is a brutal film that entails many sociological meanings. Alex DeLarge and his “droogs” (gang) live in a derange society of “ultra-violence” and rape. Alex and his gang cause havoc around the town that leads to the “droogs” turning on Alex during a mischievous act on an innocent women and Alex getting arrested. While in prison he is chosen for “treatment” that is suppose to purify Alex and turn him into the “perfect citizen”. We’ve gone over many sociological concepts in class, but the three that I believe apply the most to this film are socialization, deviance, and resocialization.