The Celluloid Closet Film Analysis

708 Words2 Pages
bulb-icon

Recommended: Portrayal of gays in media

In class we watched The Celluloid Closet (1995) and discussed some current representation of the LGBT community in the media and pop-culture. As someone who grew up in India and identifies her sexuality as fluid or questioning depending how exact my answer needs to be, I was curious to analyze representation of LGBT or queer community in Indian popular culture and media. Through this paper I will try to compare the representation of the “other” in western and Indian media. While I am an avid critic and a skeptic of the Indian “Hindi” film industry, it is hard for me to ignore the cultural significance that Bollywood holds. While pop-culture is a representation of the society, films also hold the responsibility of perpetuating, and in some cases exaggerating, long held beliefs. Much like the film industry in the …show more content…

Fire shows the budding of protagonists’ love for each other though mundane tasks that were shown in an erotic fashion. Dasgupta explains, “By explicitly crossing the divide between female bonding and sexuality it opened up a new way of looking at things”. By not mentioning the word “lesbian” Fire tries to touch queer territory but fails when the preoccupation of the movie shifts from the lives of the women to their explicit sexual lives and need for a label. One significant way in which western media has differed from Indian films is through the representation of trans* and intersex people. Hijras are a recognized community of trans* and intersex people in India. While this community has been stigmatized and ostracized, primarily due to the Christian British colonizers, historically and religiously hijras hold sacred value. The portrayal of the hijra community is still categorized according to the three qualifiers existing in the western media for the LGBT community. Majority of TV shows and films represent hijras as sassy and

Show More
Related

  • Communication Behavior in Boomerang and Quayamat Se Quayamat Tak

    3060 Words  | 7 Pages

    In this paper I will attempt to discover how cultural differences affect communication in two movies of differing cultures. I will keep the names of the characters formal for both movies and for the Indian movie I will translate their lines to English directly. The first movie is of the Indian culture entitled Quayamat Se Quayamat Tak, which roughly translates to “From Armageddon Till Armageddon.” This has a classic Romeo and Juliet theme. I will focus on what I consider are the three main relationships in this movie: 1) Raj, the main male character, and Reshmi, the main female character, 2) Raj and his family, and 3) Reshmi and her family. The second movie is of the African American culture entitled Boomerang. This is in essence about a lady’s man who is in search for a perfect woman. Along the way to finding Miss Right he romances other women and as soon as he finds who he believes is the right one, she romances him. I’ve chosen three main relationships from this movie as well: 1) Marcus, the main male character, and Angela, the women he ends up falling in love with, 2) Marcus and Jacqueline, the female he believes is the perfect women, and 3) Marcus and his friends Gerard and Tyler. This essay will discuss how the friends of each movie communicate with each other, what good and bad communication behaviors they have, compare and contrast the relationships depicted in the movies, talk about how the theories of friendship in the course text apply to the friendships in the movies, converse about how each film portrays the culture of the characters, and lastly discuss what each film says about the communication habits of their respective cultures.

    Read More

  • Social Media And Social Identity

    1435 Words  | 3 Pages

    As Singh points out, “The facility of modern technology to amalgamate the colossal variety of elements from different times and places has led to the involute cultural identities...New media is engulfing the culture at a very fast rate. It has left human relationships behind. Media today has taken the role of parents, relations, and friends.”(Singh 87-88). This supersession of relationships can cause a myriad of quandaries when withal developing one’s identity, and cause one to lose the “self” among the identity portrayed in convivial media. The result in a cultural shift of what one’s “identity” means, constructing, as Gilpin suggests, not only the identity of individuals but the identity of cultural groups such as public relations

    Read More

  • Nair's Techniques in film Monsoon Wedding

    2119 Words  | 5 Pages

    fragmented by the interruptions of song and dance, lending a sense of unreality. I believe Mira Nair successfully achieved her aim to make a Bollywood film on her own terms. As a director, she effectively combined the techniques of sound, editing, costume, colour and location to produce a fairly unique Bollywood film. Her message of the continuing modernisation of India, and her criticisms of both the societies she illustrates in the film comes across clearly, as do the more controversial points she brings up that Bollywood, as a film industry, does not typically address. Its appeal and effectiveness can be measured by the huge range of global audiences it has attracted, both Western and Eastern, which indicates that she accomplished her goal of making a realistic movie, breaking the traditional Bollywood mould.

    Read More

  • Mad Men & The Representation of "US"

    1907 Words  | 4 Pages

    Since its inception, American mass media and entertainment has had an indelible impression on how our culture develops our collective identity. Mass media’s grip on cultural perspective has unprecedented power in molding how society communicates, why we communicate and what the communication ultimately means in our everyday lives. Say what you will about television, but what has been made excruciatingly clear over the past few decades is that the small screen is a teacher and what it teaches us more than anything is our roles in civility. Representation is key in this respect. Generally, much of television is concerns heterosexual, white males and their constituents, most of which are too white, heterosexual and male. In the age of being able to access television shows with a few clicks of one’s phone or computer, media’s presence continues to envelope the lives and perspectives of everyone. Young people who are growing up with new technologies that beam copious amounts of mass media influencers by the second are especially affected--their identities become cookie-cut before they even enter kindergarten. The AMC drama series, Mad Men is a marvel that has won four consecutive Emmy-awards for Best Drama Series and continues to receive glowing reviews every season. The wildly popular and critically-acclaimed television drama series expresses every concerning aspect of media’s representation of “US”, our history, our ideals and beliefs. What is perhaps most interesting about this award-winning show is how it always generates a dialogue about the state of our current cultural identity, saying so much about the nature of gender roles, sexuality, race and more. It is a reminder that whilst we are being entertained, we are also having our...

    Read More

  • Anthropological Communication In Film, Ax Fight, Asch And

    1584 Words  | 4 Pages

    The evolution of film technology, has given anthropologists the ability to employ films to present ethnographic data. Although this privilege has contributed immensely to the collection of anthropological knowledge we have today, it has increased the issues with regards to misinterpretation. Both films expose the fact that it is common for an untrained individual to misinterpret the epistemological assumptions made by the films’ authors and that, frequently, a sense of cultural superiority can form. In many cases, anthropological films may authorize uncertainties with regards to the other. Additionally, they may, unintentionally, confirm negative stereotypes or expectations that other media has implanted into the minds of the untrained student. Because of the presence of an incongruity between the filmmaker and the audience, studying the factors that contribute to the contradictions would be advantageous.

    Read More

  • Racialized Women Analysis

    1521 Words  | 4 Pages

    One of the factors that heavily influence the continuing propagation of these ideas associated with the sexuality of racialized women is the production and dissemination of media images, symbols and narratives (Brooks & Hébert, 2006, p. 297). As a society who is constantly consuming media culture through various media outlets, television uses a combination of methods in imagery, symbolization, and narration to represent our social realities. Notions of what beauty means are further dictated by fashion and reality television shows, which includes shows that discuss trends, makeovers, modeling, and more. In turn, these television programs often targeted at young women themselves, continue to shape how society views women of color, particularly how women of color are superfi...

    Read More

  • Fire by Deepa Mehta: the Visual Layer

    1217 Words  | 3 Pages

    Desai, Jigna. 2004. “Homo on the Range: Queering Postcoloniality and Globalization in Deepa Mehta’s Fire,” inBeyond Bollywood. New York, NY: Routledge, pp. 160.

    Read More

  • Media Portrayal of Transgender Characters

    980 Words  | 2 Pages

    Works Cited Kane, Matt. “Transgender characters that changed film and television”. Entertainment Media at GLAAD. 12 November 2013. Web.

    Read More

  • Gender Stereotypes Essay

    763 Words  | 2 Pages

    In conclusion, media produces certain stereotypes both in behaviour and in style; it isolates audience from the true reality, the problem needs attention.

    Read More

  • We Are Not What Media Says

    1888 Words  | 4 Pages

    Nowadays, it has been difficult to notice the harm media is doing to society. It has become too normal that we are already used to deny the reality. I have read several readings that have opened my eyes to the reality of media; A Crash Course on Hollywood’s Latino Imagery by Charles Ramirez Berg, (Re)presenting: Muslims on North American television by Amir Hussain, True Diary of a Part Time Indian by Sherman Alexie and The Paper Menagerie by Ken Liu. These readings include an important message about minority races, which I believe society should be aware of. All of the readings that I previously mentioned have something in common, they all examine the way race is portrayed in media. Moreover, they also include how media can potentially shape our perceptions of who we are and who others are. Our young community are the ones that are being most affected by media. Children receive messages in T.V shows, cartoons, movies and books of how different races supposedly are, and they immediately start assuming that those messages are true and continue growing up with that ideology.

    Read More

  • Importance of the Eunuchs in Elizabeth Inchbald’s The Mogul Tale

    1858 Words  | 4 Pages

    Hijras include such minorities as eunuchs, hermaphrodites, transvestites, transsexuals, and homosexuals and “literally means neither male nor female”2. Most hijras undergo a secretive castration operation as part of their religious rites. Because of this secrecy it is unknown as to the exact number of hijras in India. They are described, and describe themselves, as the “ ‘third sex’ – somewhere inbetween and beyond male or female”3. They see themselves as existing inside and above society. Even so, theirs is a day-to-day existence.

    Read More

  • Asian American Masculinity And Femininity

    127 Words  | 1 Pages

    This class has brought excellent discussions about Asian American masculinity/femininity. I as an Asian American, want to archive and explore more about the dichotomy of what it means to be masculine and feminine in the United States. As the West views Asians as “submissive” figures, it also makes me think about how that is portrayed through media, such as music videos, advertisements, and the news. Through this, I had the internal conversation of androgyny, and what that means; if a person is androgynous are they masculine or feminine? Or are they both? This is evident in the pop culture today with Korean and Japanese pop bands. My focus for this project is to explore, research, and archive specifically on how identity is portrayed for the

    Read More

  • Treatment of Female Sexuality in Last Tango in Paris

    1701 Words  | 4 Pages

    ...in their actions towards each other and towards sexual behaviour. Both their actions can be attributed toward the treatment of female sexuality in cinema and the media. They both portray different aspects of each other, in harmony and in difference.

    Read More

  • The Third Sex in Eastern Civilization

    1341 Words  | 3 Pages

    In a book called Culture and Human Sexuality: A Reader, written by David Suggs and Andrew Miracle. The book had a detailed and informative chapter solely about the hijras of India. The hijra’s are neither male nor female, but contain elements of both. They are believed to have sacred powers that have come from their...

    Read More

  • LGBT Community and Discrimination.

    1284 Words  | 3 Pages

    middle of paper ... ... Works Cited Adam Sharpiro, Megan Schultz, Christina Roush, Cassandra Schofar, Emily Shilling, Tawnia Simpson, Natalie Sampiller. Portrayal of Homosexuality in Media. 26 March 2014 http://www.bgsu.edu/departments/tcom103fall2004/gp16.pdf>. Huegel, Kelly.

    Read More

More about The Celluloid Closet Film Analysis

Open Document