Racism in Movies Popular Culture

Racism in Movies

Popular culture rarely contributes anything to progressive thinking. As is necessary, popular culture, namely movies and television, remains behind in terms of representation and perception. Movies, to appeal to a larger audience, must not question life, but instead present it in as accessible way as possible.

Unfortunately, such a leveling of entertainment often leads to more than simple inanity. It often transcends simple inanity and moves towards stereotyping and debasement of race, gender and any other defining characteristic of human life. As such, we must look to a specific example of such debasement and analyze its effort.

We need look no further than the recent movie Knocked Up to find perverted depictions of gender. Knocked Up involves an accidental pregnancy and a couple's effort to cope with it. Admittedly, this is a comedy, and should not be given too much merit, either as an example of real life, or as an example of its own genre. For our purposes, we will investigate how the movie portrays the commercial utility of the female body when sexually appealing, and conversely, the inutility of the female body when pregnant.

Basically, Alison, a young woman with a promising future as an on-air talent for Entertainment News finds herself pregnant after a one-night stand with someone she meets at a nightclub. The opening scenes of the movie disclose much in terms of gender norms. Alison is portrayed as very domestic. She lives at her sister's house and helps take care of her sister's children. She is immediately placed in a parental light, driving her nieces to school and dealing with their squabbles and questions.

Conversely, the man who eventually impregnates her, Ben, lives in a house with a bevy of male friends. We first find him making sexist jokes and smoking marijuana. His life, his "natural" life, involves nothing more than irresponsible loafing. He and his friends discuss women in terms of their bodies and nothing else. They are even beginning to construct a website where they list the times in movies where specific actresses appear nude.

The implications of much of the movie will be left unfathomed, as the scope of this paper necessitates it. Suffice it to say that the opening scenes of the movie work to establish what are considered norms for each gender. In each, the female body emblematizes something other than itself. In one it is the object of maternal assurance and affection. In the other it is purely an object of male pleasure. This trope continues when Alison first finds out she has been given an on-air job at Entertainment News. Her work for a television company that markets sex is another issue altogether, but we need to examine the interview scene.

In her interview, she is obliquely asked to lose weight. Her body, as we will see shortly, is ever the object of external appraisal. To work on-air, she must look a certain way. Her bosses imply that she needs to tighten up. This tightening is contested later by the expansion of pregnancy. When she goes out with her sister to celebrate the new job, they are let into the club before others based on looks. Inside the club, they worry about whether or not men are thinking about "fucking them." They also refer to other women as "skanky bitches." All of this evidences a certain emphasis on looks, an emphasis that transcends civility. A woman's commerce in the move is based on use for others.

It is at the same club that the woman character meets Ben. They meet and eventually return to Alison's sister's place where the have drunken sex. This of course results in a pregnancy. Interestingly, before she finds out she is pregnant, she admits her one-night stand was a mistake. The next morning Ben revolts her. He is a loser to her. They have nothing in common.

We can stop here with the expository elements. For the scope of this paper, we have enough ideas to work with to analyze the misogynistic nature of the film. At the center of the entire movie's gender conceptions is the female body. The female body is the source of commerce for a woman, good or bad. When pregnant, a job is at stake. When pregnant, the earlier determinants of beauty and self-esteem are compromised. The pregnancy is seen as the woman's burden. The woman must bear both the trouble of pregnancy and also the shame of no longer being a sexual person.