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Sociology at the Movies

Presentation

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Movies as Sociological Data

Sociologists collect data by conducting surveys, observational studies, and experiments.

Why not hunt for sociological data in movies?

Movies are as much a human product as, say, newspapers are.

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Movies as Sociological Data

Made by and about people in particular social and historical contexts, movies can tell us a lot about:

Typical patterns of inequality Form of deviance Ways of raising children

Because movies are easily accessible and often a lot of fun; they are in many ways an ideal sociological data resource.

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Movies from a Sociological Perspective

One may assess a movie from sociological, literary, historical, dramatic, technical, philosophical, and artistic or other points of view.

The reviewer applies different evaluative criteria drawn from different disciplinary perspectives.

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How does the movie reflect the social theories? What can we learn about social conditions in a particular

time and place from the movie?

For example, James Bond movies from the 1960s and 1970s have much to say about the conflict theory through:

the Cold War,

the rise of the United States and the USSR as superpowers,

the decline of the UK in world affairs.

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After the early 1990s, social and political change influenced the way these themes were depicted.

It would make a fascinating sociological project to review old and recent James Bond movies with the aim of identifying these changes and their reasons.

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How does the movie distort social reality?

Although movies are mirrors to society, they are far from perfect reflections

Often they systematically distort social realities.

Movies can therefore teach us a lot about the prejudices, ideologies, and misconceptions of particular times and places.

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Consider Miss Congeniality, starring Sandra Bullock.

It is a Cinderella story the heroine’s true self emerges

BUT it denies the sociological fact that one’s identity is always in flux.

One’s self remains true only until social conditions require the invention of a new self.

Sociology

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However, some movies are madein order to defend some true social facts such as independent

women and feminism.

Feminism has given birth to free and independent women as shown in the 2008 movie "Sex and the City"

4 women have taken the right to talk, the power, and the « man » as a disposable accessory to individual desires.

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To what degree does the movie shed light on common or universal social and human problems?

Terminator and Matrix series raise an issue popularized during the industrial revolution and that has become widespread:

Human inventions sometimes threaten their creators.

We can also illustrate through the 1982 movie Blade Runner , the theory of structural functionalism, in a future where replicants, droids used by men, revolt.

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By claiming the right to be human and feel emotions, they question the system, which is the basis of the whole society and can therefore only be eliminated.

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The 1998 movie “The Thin Red Line” of Stanley Kubrick, symbolic interactionism is revealed by :

the soldiers behavior, whose survival depends on a synchronization between their courage and unlimited obedience to their leader.

The movie humanizes the soldiers who are no longer machines.

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To what degree does the movie provide evidence for or against sociological theory and research?

The 2004 movie, Kinsey, starring Liam Neeson, tells the story of the revolutionary American student of sexual behavior, Alfred Kinsey.

Some of Kinsey’s methods were primitive by modern standards.

From a sociological review, we can see that as an opportunity to highlight advances in sociological theorizing and research.

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To what degree does the movie connect biography, social structure, and history?

C. Wright Mills famously argued that sociology at its best connects biography, social structure, and history.

The novel Fight Club, released as a motion picture starring Brad Pitt and Edward Norton in October of 1999.

Both the novel and motion picture proved to be very successful in their release to the public.

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One simple reason: a reflection of the suffering experienced by

the Generation X' male.�

Trapped in a world where there is no great cause for the average North American male to fight for.

the average Generation X' male of modern �society can relate to and understand Fight Club.

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The novel and motion picture = an important proclamation regarding the state of our modern culture.

Generation X' male also feels this way and �has difficulty coping in a society where people are too busy to listen.

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