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The Power of The Pictures

The Power of The Pictures

Engelsktentamen 2012, andre termin ved VG1.

You might say that movies are made entirely for entertainment purposes, but if you did you would be gravely mistaken. It's true that the majority of the movies shown on the silver screen are compilations of big explosions, plastic women and ludicrous plots and even more hilarious plot holes. But every once in a while, a movie might show up, that, unlike these Hollywood mass productions, have a message to deliver and that might promote equality for everyone regardless of race, gender, religion and preferences in clothing.

You might for instance take a look at the movie "Crash", a movie we've seen in class, which in 2006 won an Academy Award for best picture. The film depicts underlying racism in our everyday life. It portrays a world where a Persian will be mistaken for an Arab, where no one thinks an Asian can drive a car as good as a westerner and where someone with darker skin can't wear tattoos without being associated with criminal gangs. It isn't a spitting image of the reality I find myself in, but I do recognize negative attitudes, especially the one where Persians are seen as synonymous with Arabs and I've seen and heard a lot of prejudices towards Asians revolving around them not being able to drive cars very well seeing as they are either too short, or that they must have poorer eyesight because of their narrow eyes.

The fact that such attitudes still exists in the modern, multicultural society we live in today is frightening. Even if we'll never be able to get rid of racism altogether, one would think that at least such primitive statements would be vanquished by now. It might be hard though, putting down a line to what actions is racist and what's not. We might for instance take a look at my father. He's not a racist, far from it, but as he grew up in the post-war period, his children's books were filled with dubious values. He's shown me one of the books, "Little Black Sambo", which is completely out of touch with reality: the book paints a picture of black people a lot more primitive than white ones, and the author think that tigers live in Africa, which really helps lowering its credibility. My father's childhood with books like this and the lack of colored people in immediate circumference didn't make him racist, but he's got a bit of an outdated and politically improper terminology regarding colored in the modern world. Still, I wouldn't call him a racist, as he doesn't believe in any superiority between races and he is extremely positive to immigrants and any colored friends me or my siblings might have.

Another movie we've seen in class the preceding year is "Mississippi Burning". It's based on a real story in the U.S. in the 1960's. It tells the story of two federal agents fighting racial crime in remote district Mississippi, which isn't an easy task at all. It shows us how incredibly unfair the world have been, not just in distant past, but in a past time so close to own time. Segregation principals and racial discrimination has been printed with bold letters onto people's minds, and as the children inherit the views of their parents, a new generation of bigots is bred. And that's the hardest part of the agents' job. How can they fight tradition?

What movies like "Mississippi Burning" and "Crash" do is raising awareness of a problem, either past or present. By doing this they make us more conscious of the problem in everyday life, so that maybe we'll think before we say something bad or so that we'll think for a shorter time before we speak up to the racist statements. They want to deliver the facts so that we easier can fight back against the untruths and deceits of the discriminators.

Native American politics is, sadly, not such a hot topic today, but even though it seems some Americans want to forget this shameful part of their past, it's important that they do not. A movie working the topic, "Dances with Wolves", is based on a book with the same name. It portrays the European settlers in their will pursuit to push the frontier westwards in the years following the American Civil War. This dream of going westwards didn't work out too well for the Sioux Indians in the South Dakotan area. As a result they were attacked by armed U.S. forces, with superior firepower, and eventually driven off their ground. The movie follows a U.S. soldier that defects to the Native Americans and falls in love with one of their people. It shows how important it is to remember even the not so glorious past of one's history, because what one has forgotten, one may repeat.

It's important though, to remember that inequality is more than just racism. In "David Copperfield", this one too based on a book, you can clearly see the contrasts of rich and poor in the nineteenth century. David, the main character, goes from riches to rags, and then back to riches again. As a kid he works at a glue factory with horrible working conditions, while the upper class Britons are enjoying the glory of the Victorian era. Even though modern day Britain don't operate with child labor, we must remember that there still are countries that do, and that they don't have much better working conditions than what little David had in the eighteen hundreds.

As there was inequality in the U.S. 60s of "Mississippi Burning", the movie "In the Name of Our Father" occurs in the same decade, but in Britain. It presents a topic almost as unfair as that in "Mississippi Burning", namely the miscarriage of justice. This too is based on a true story, about a group of Irish youth that are convicted and imprisoned for a terrorist bombing they had nothing to do with. The prosecution hid evidence from the defense, convicted the wrong persons and when court later convicted the right one, they kept silent about their mistake so that they wouldn't lose face. This is a despicable misuse of power, and it makes one worry about the competence of the system that is so well rooted in modern society. It is an extremely vulnerable system, and if someone is wrongly accused, their whole lives will most certainly be ruined.

I think that movies have incredible power and as they can show living pictures as well as sound, they can have amazingly strong impact, at least when they depict a real event. They can influence us into thinking in new ways and they can raise awareness of problems with society or educate us of past mistakes, so that we won't have to do them again. I wouldn't say that movies have the power to

change the world, but they do have the power to change the humans that can change the world, and that isn't all bad either.

HQ