Friday, September 22, 2006
REPRESENTATION•In this film, we are immediately introduced to women. The main character, Kimberly comes across as a monstrous girl who is both amoral and immoral, willing to use her body and brain to accomplish as quickly as possible her main goal: fame. The means to achieve celebrity and ethical considerations, sexual orientation, or friendship, become irrelevant.
•There are only 3 grown women in the film:
Ø a lesbian reporter who will be stripped of her ability to express her own viewpoint by the film’s end
Ø an unhappy wife who helps transform her own birthday into a forum for her husband’s sexual fantasies
Ø a trophy step mum whose sole narrative purpose seems to be being the butt of jokes
•The mother appears to be absent in the film which would mean that the father has a more dominant role, but here we see the father as being rude and racist which is inherited by his daughter. He only seems to care about his reputation.
•The other males in this film all seem to have a more dominant role: teacher, lawyer and judge
•Pretty Persuasions is situated in the upper-middle class, though it makes finer distinctions between the nouveau rich, old-time money, and riches amongst foreign students in the
U.S., in this case a Muslim girl, who is Kimberly's classmate and becomes her accomplice.
•The muslim girl gets picked on for being from Palestine as at one point in the film, a boy asks her to point out where Palestine is on the map and she left speechless
•Jews are at the centre of the racism jokes in this film with the father screaming racist abuse which is repeated by Kimberly to her fellow Jewish school friend
•Seiga states that “this film is an exploration of those public and private morals that exist in todays society”
Sherish at 11:19 AM