| Chapter 2: | Reel Truth |
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- • How is poverty portrayed?
- • What is the audience member’s responsibility for interpreting a film?
- • How are the film’s women portrayed?
- • What about stereotyping, bias, prejudice, racism?
- • How is the dominant culture portrayed?
- • Does the film represent an East or West sensibility about life?
This is in no way a comprehensive set of questions. But, they do reflect some very useful perspectives that are worth considering in thinking about many, if not most, films.
The pages that follow will go into some explanation of each of these questions and then I include a short essay using these questions to discuss the Lethal Weapon series.
How was my overall view of truth impacted? How much artistic license was used?
This section of the book emphasizes the issues of “truth.” If there is a tendency for scientists to emphasize “truth” and artists “meaning,” the artistic vision of a film still tends to communicate information that might otherwise be taken as the truth.
The Oscar winning film for best picture, Braveheart, is an instructive example. Some critics complained that virtually the only true facts the movie stuck to were the actual names of the primary historical characters. Others argued that the facts didn’t really matter very much, that the film had captured the feeling of the legend. That disagreement is fundamentally a conflict between truth (associated with science) and meaning (associated with art). I don’t expect to help you resolve that conflict. I do think you will be smarter for having it well in mind.
There’s tremendous debate even among historians on how history can best be recorded and discussed.