Martin Scorsese’s film GoodFellas (1990) not only provides an unparalleled glimpse into the gangster lifestyle of New York’s Italian mafia. Scorsese separates his classic gangster film from other works by following the character progression from teenagers to middle-aged men. The film constantly reinforces the image of masculinity from domestic affairs down the each character’s clothing. Each aspect of the gangsters’ lives centers around asserting their masculinity. Scorsese helps GoodFellas secure its place as a classic film without romanticizing the violence, but by using masculinity as the driving force behind each main character.…
WARNING SPOILER ALERT. The Narrator in “Fight Club” by Chuck Palahniuk lives a single serving life filled with insomnia causing him to have multiple issues with his identity. He is a man having a mid-life crises as life became reparative and the need to search for excitement, danger, and something different becomes apparent. Whether it is feeling other people’s pain in a support groups as a way to find his released from the boring life or creating Tyler as the perfect vision of himself, his personality dramatically evolves. Dissociative Identity Disorder (DID) can be linked to the changes happening as it forms the “two faces” the narrator wears in the story. Insomnia is what drove the Narrator towards the support groups to find what he needed…
The first scene of the film opens up inside the mind of protagonist, Jack/the Narrator. The camera slowly moves along pathways of Jack’s mind and then emerges out of his head. There, we see Jack seated with a gun in his mouth. On the other side, holding the gun is Tyler Durden. The two of them are placed on what looks like the upper floor of an office building. You hear Jack in voice-over claim that his current situation had something to do with Marla Singer. The next scene takes place in a support group containing men who are recovering from testicular cancer. Jack apparently has been attending various support groups. However, Jack is completely disease-free. Jack attends these meetings to allow him to cry and accept the pain and misery of…
Many films have come and gone without audiences remembering even the title of the film. However, Ang Lee's film Brokeback Mountain (2005) (BKM, exp. 1) is a controversial film that stuck different emotions among viewers such as, “'Gay cowboy movie' shatters stereotypes” (Clinton, sec. 2) with two handsome young cowboys Ennis Del Mar (Heath Ledger) and Jack Twist (Jake Gyllenhaal) who fall in love, which is not viewer’s typical western genre expectation. While Ang Lee's, Brokeback Mountain, will remain an important piece of cinema now and one hundred years in the future because, the genre of the film makes it memorable to audiences, stimulating cinematography and sound, the incredible use of mise-en-scene, and the film not conforming to America's ideology.…
For fans of courtroom dramas and crime television, these court case movies all revolve around the courtroom. Unlike the orderly process of a real courtroom, the stories are filled with drama, intrigue and corruption. Getting to the truth is seldom as straightforward as it appears within these hit movies.…
Fight Club “Its only after we’ve lost everything are we free to do anything”, Tyler Durden as (Brad Pitt) states, among many other lines of contemplation. In Fight Club, a nameless narrator, a typical “everyman,” played as (Edward Norton) is trapped in the world of large corporations, condominium living, and all the money he needs to spend on all the useless stuff he doesn’t need. As Tyler Durden says “The things you own end up owning you.” Fight Club is an edgy film that takes on such topics as consumerism, the feminization of society, manipulation, cultism, Marxist ideology, social norms, dominant culture, and the psychiatric approach of the human id, ego, and super ego. “It is a film that surrealistically describes the status of the American…
The crisis of masculinity in the 1950s led to a series of ingénues, or non-threatening, innocent, young women, appearing in popular culture. As the men felt less important and felt their masculinity dwindling, the lesser women became because in society men are always held above women.“This alteration reflected the social values of postwar society, with its emphasis on marriage and he home as the defining components of a happy American life,” (Nash, pg. 169) After all, concerns about men’s loss of authority to women who were in the nation’s workforce while the men were at war in the late 1940s led to the crisis of masculinity. During this time, popular entertainment took on the masculinity crisis by taking teen film stars out of the spot light…
Exploring the construction of hegemonic masculinity, we go through a contradicting state of the definition of manhood. Although contradictions appear, it is socially adapted and able to reside without conflict. Take manhood as this, “We think of manhood as a transcendent tangible property that each man must manifest in the world” (Kimmel, 1994). Meaning that manhood is merely an idea which is drilled into a man’s head by society, “Gender, we said, was an achieved status” (West and Zimmerman, 2015) in other terms, manhood is a socially agreed upon idealization of how men should act or who they should be. In West and Zimmerman’s “Doing Gender”, Hegemonic masculinity is accomplished by the unavoidable categories of sex and gender and ways we act upon them; collaborating together in a socially constructed standard of how to be.…
In the group, Jack is forced to cry and that helped him to sleep again. He essentially sought harmony by being a woman. He later in the film meets Tyler and no longer needs the rehabilitation group. He then finds comfort in indulging in fights and it turns him to becoming a man; not feminine and feeble. He is not pressured by the expectancies of the society he lives in and begins to living his life without any guidelines. Again, sexism induces women to evaluate themselves negatively. Wolford K. (2010) states, “sex segregation in sports does not simply reflect biology, but actively constructs and reinforces social ideas of female inferiority”. Mental impairment can be an outcome of sexism and this harm is not supposed to be ensued. Sexism could lower the survival rate of men but typically women. The result is that it ends human civilization since the world is sullied and so the gender in power(men) who wants to allow sexism are narrow-minded for thinking in that…
In Ernest Hemingway’s novel The Sun Also Rises, Jake Barnes is the main protagonist that lives in Paris after World War I. He works as a newspaperman in Paris (Shanman 1071). He is one the many American and British expatriates who overran the city shortly after the war. He is a Midwestern, middle-class, and a lapsed Catholic. He falls in love with a nurse Lady Brett Ashley with leads to part of his downfall (Bloom 122). Jake Barnes is troubled about his injury from World War I that leaves him impotent; but throughout the novel, he learns that his masculinity does not come from his physical abilities but through his emotional state, and he learns to accept his impotence.…
In Denying Rape but Endorsing Forceful Intercourse: Exploring Differences Among Responders, researchers found that when college men were asked if they would “rape a woman” without consequences and no one would know, 13.6% replied yes. That percentage jumped to 31.7% when they were asked if they would “force a woman into sexual intercourse.” Behind closed doors, men often feel like they’re entitled to women and their bodies. This sense of entitlement does not stop there. The hegemonic, or toxic, masculinity that is engrained into young men from as early as infancy can give them a sense that they are owed the affection of women, and allowed to take anything they want as a way to assert themselves as a man. Violence on college campuses has a…
Alex Libby is a teen activist against bullying. He participated in a documentary called “Bully” with a few other kids and families. They were trying to spread the message that bullying is a bad thing that is going on across the country that needs to be stopped. They are also trying to show what is happening to some victims. The assistant principal recognized the wrongdoing of the bully. Unfortunately, she wouldn’t help. Kids are mainly trained/expected to tell an adult when anything is wrong, but in this case the adult didn’t help.…
Out of the 12 jurors, juror number 10,4, and 3 displayed some form of prejudice. Juror number 10 was the man that displayed his prejudice openly stating that “they” shouldn’t be trusted. He already had a view of the Turks from the time he "lived among them”. Another Juror that displayed prejudice is juror number 4. Juror number 4 was the stock broker. His prejudice was displayed when the group briefly talked about the slums and the people that come out of them. During this discussion he shows his feelings toward the kids in the slum in the statement “We're not here to go into the reasons why slums are breeding grounds for criminals... The children who come out of slum backgrounds are potential menaces to society. A third juror that displayed his prejudice is juror number 3. Juror number 3 is the man that sees the cases as simple, the accused is guilty. He is prejudice more or less towards the kids that are growing up in this society. Before telling his story about his son he says “You’re right. It's the kids. The way they are—you know? They don't listen.”. During this he reveals how he sees kids as stubborn and delinquents.…
Growing up in our society and transforming into various norms, values and beliefs, is revolutionary amongst young men and ladies, and today I will specifically focus on young men. My little brother is 12 years old, he is already expected to “act like a man” or “man up”, and He will be told to show no weakness. This kind of advice will hinder my brother from becoming a “true man”. According to tough guys 2 by Jackson, Katz 86% of armed robberies are committed by men, 77% of aggravated assaults are committed by men, 87% of stalkers are men, 86% of domestic violence incidents resulting in physical injury are perpetrated by men, 99% of rapes are committed by men, Men commit approximately 90% of murder, and over the past 30 years, 61 of the last 62 mass…
Twelve angry men is a 1957 American Film that originated from a play of Reginald Rose and has been directed to a film by Sidney Lumet. The movie is not just about the outcome of the trial of a Puerto Rican youth who has been accused of murdering his father, but also shows how the beliefs and attitudes of the twelve jurors lead to his acquittal. Aside from that, this movie also shows Leadership traits that can help every individual on developing their leadership capabilities. The story started when the twelve jurors were put together in a sweltering deliberation room somewhere in America where they have been asked for their verdicts whether to put the child on chair or not. Eleven of them unanimously voted that the youth is guilty and must be…