Analysis Of The Movie ' Benito Cereno '

The film Pelo Malo takes place in the city of Caracas, Venezuela and is about a young boy and obsession with straightening his hair. In the movie, the main characters Junior his single mother Marta and baby brother live with in an apartment complex with in the city of Caracas. This movie takes place in 2011, during the time that Hugo Chavez came down with cancer. The film’s primary themes were homophobia, and racism. The movie detailed a young boys struggle for acceptance and love from his mother and his struggle to obtain his desire of straight hair. Throughout the movie, the young child is seen living in an apartment complex that is located within a lower socioeconomic status area. When Marta, was not able to find a baby sitter to watch over her children when she worked she was forced to take the children with her on the bus through the city to her work. One of the places that she was shown to work was in a gated residence where she worked as a security guard for the area. The primary conflict in the movie revolved around the mothers fear that her son was “gay” due to his obsession with straightening his hair and his singing. Due to many of the things that the young boy does in the movie, the mother Marta fears that her child is homosexual and during one particular scene is worried that she was the cause of it. Since during the scene where she is speaking with a doctor about her son, she discussed how it was her fault because she did not ‘touch his thing’ and that she

The film La Bamba showcases one of the most important historical moments in not only music history but also Latino music history. The star Lou Diamond, portrays Ritchie Valens originally Valenzuela. Ritchie was a boy who did not grow up in a normal childhood. In the film Valens played by Lou diamond is shown working hard alongside his mother Connie trying to make an honest living. His older brother Bob finds his way to his mother and young brother convincing them both to leave the fruit fields where they were working. While Ritchie should have been at school he was working. Once they moved to Los Angeles, Ritchie started attending high school like a normal teen should. His love for music grew strong as he became fond of a young girl named Donna. Donna was from a middle class white family, while Ritchie was from a poor Latino American family. Donna’s parents wanted to keep the two apart from each other as her father did not approve of the romance because Ritchie had nothing to offer his daughter. Ritchie had nothing to offer Donna but his music and hope of someday making a name for himself. One-day Ritchie and his band mates are having a show and a man by the name of Bob Keane stops by to see the performance, while there Keane shows a great interest in Ritchie and reaches out to him. Keane soon convinces Valens that he didn’t need his band mates, that Ritchie was all the talent. Bob Keane not only manages to get Ritchie to drop his band, but he also convinces him to change

In Wolfgang Staudte’s (1951) film, Der Untertan, the main character named Diederich Hessling develops from being a meek and cowardly boy to become a manipulative and self-involved man. The film uses many instances of imagery and subtle moments of foreshadowing to convey the ideals of the people of that time which lead up to the World Wars. Diederich is a typical Prussian citizen who blindly follows, supports the true “German values”, and bows to his superiors while stepping on his subordinates. The film illustrates Diederich’s character development, his shift in personality, and political confrontations through carefully crafted camera techniques that also highlight the time period that the film was set in as well as produced in.

In Benito Cereno, Captain Delano’s attention is brought upon by the many clues and events that take place on the San Dominick shortly after he steps aboard. The first clue he comes upon while approaching the ship is that majority of the people on the boat are black. While also boarding the ship Delano sees that there is not much order since the black slave’s kind of do as they please. The black slaves are also witnessed by Delano demanding the whites around. Cereno, who Delano thinks is the captain of the ship, is kind of demanded around by two black slaves, one named Babo and the other named Atufal. While on the ship Delano witnesses many things that just don’t seem right, including another incident where a black person is assaulting a white

Captain Amasa Delano is an interesting embodiment of white complacency about slavery and it's perpetuation. Delano is a human metaphor for white sentiment of the time. His deepest sensibilities of order and hierarchy make it impossible for him to see the realities of slavery. Delano's blindness to the mutiny is a metaphor for his blindness to the moral depravity of slavery. The examination of Captain Delano's views of nature, beauty, and humanity, allow us to see his often confusing system of hierarchical order which cripples his ability to see the mutiny and the injustice of slavery.

As this book reveals, Delano alternates between his images of the Africans as an innocent faithful slaves, he completely misinterprets the slave revolt and totally neglects the blacks' inner motivations. While revealing how Delano adapts these ideological images of the black man to fit his own understanding. This confidence from his own American upbringing and staying in his own paradigm of slaves being kind in nature, and are submissive servants make Captain Delano a benign racist. He does not express hate for the black people; he likes them. But his fondness of them shows in a characteristic of overconfidence or arrogance, in which that he is confident in his own knowledge that the slaves are obedient creatures, incapable of harm and completely demeaning the black slaves. He considers Babo, for instance, to be a childish slave of limited intelligence. In Delano's understanding, the faithful blacks are closer to animal nature than the white man is. Delano's dialogue continuously dehumanizes the slaves by attaching animal imagery to them. First, as the narrator mentions, "Delano took to negroes, not philanthropically, but

Benito Cereno by Herman Melville, the reader is left with a crucial question : was the ruthless murder of the crew of the San Dominick justified? There are many factors leading into the conclusion a reader may make. Were the slaves poorly treated? Was Babo merely a cold blooded killer? I believe that although the murder of the crew was particularly brutal, the uprising was justified as the slaves merely wanted to go home.

A major example of the grayness in this story is in this excerpt: "The morning was one peculiar to that coast. Everything was mute and calm; everything gray. The sea, though undulated into long roods of swells, seemed fixed, and was sleeked at the surface like waved lead that has cooled and set in the smelter 's mould. The sky seemed a gray surtout. Flights of troubled gray fowl, kith and kin with flights of troubled gray vapors among which they were mixed, skimmed low and fitfully over the waters, as swallows over meadows before storms (Melville)." Captain Delano believed that blacks were kind-hearted and humble people and may have had good intentions, but he still found nothing wrong with the slaves aboard the San Dominick. He even thought Babo as an ideal servant for Captain Cereno, saying he was submissive, yet happy (Richards). Delano may have good thoughts about the slaves he still believes nothing is wrong with the idea of them and that kind of thinking settles more on the bad side of things. While Benito Cereno and Babo on the other hand are what really create the gray in the story. Benito Cereno was a captain of a slave ship, so there was no question that he was in favor of slavery also considering that he had a personal slave servant. Babo was a slave on this ship, he was enslaved, like all the other slaves, for no reason other than that the whites thought they

The ignorance of Captain Delano in Benito Cereno can be accredited to his racist convictions that guide his perception of the ship’s perilous situation. However, is Delano at fault for his racism? When rethinking the racism in Benito Cereno under the context of Althusser’s theories on ideology, racism is an ideology forcibly implemented on the subject through the social institution of slavery. Delano’s actions and thoughts throughout Benito Cereno prove that his racism is a result of a socially imposed ideology and challenge the modern ideals of racism that place the blame for racist attitudes entirely on the racist subject. Delano is the subject of a racist ideology and has been forced into that ideology through the social apparatus of slavery

As this book reveals, Delano alternates between his images of the Africans as an innocent faithful slaves, he completely misinterprets the slave revolt and totally neglects the blacks' inner motivations. While revealing how Delano adapts these ideological images of the black man to fit his own understanding. This confidence from his own American upbringing and staying in his own paradigm of slaves being kind in nature, and are submissive servants make Captain Delano a benign racist. He does not express hate for the black people; he likes them. But his fondness of them shows in a characteristic of overconfidence or arrogance, in which that he is confident in his own knowledge that the slaves are obedient creatures, incapable of harm and completely demeaning the black slaves. He considers Babo, for instance, to be a childish slave of limited intelligence. In Delano's understanding, the faithful blacks are closer to animal nature than the white man is. Delano's dialogue continuously dehumanizes the slaves by attaching animal imagery to them. First, as the narrator mentions, "Delano took to negroes, not philanthropically, but genially, just as other

The skill of imitation can be used in the most perilous events in order to gain an upper hand or destroy our position completely; as we have seen from the various works we have been studying up until this point. Melville’s short story “Benito Cereno” is another example of a situation where people who we expect to behave in a certain way did so; who had events work out in their favor for the most part; until the façade faded away and they were no longer in a position to play their parts. We are able to, by extension of the narrator through our protagonist Delano, see different conflicting views about race. It is also apparent how one 's preconceived notions about people can change their initial concerns and thoughts about them and their

"Benito Cereno" tells the story of a slave revolt on a ship at sea. Schiffman, Adler, and Kaplan argue that Melville wrote the story as a comment on slavery. Schiffman and Adler contend that Melville's novella is a clear indictment of slavery. Kaplan takes the

Most readers would come to the conclusion that Babo is plotting to kill Cereno because of how scared terrified Cereno is of his own blood. However, Delano interrupts the situation as Cereno just being scared of his own blood. Deleno perspective is limited because he is ignorant to what is happening on the ship. In addition, the reader never experiences Babo’s perspective of the story. ‘Benito Cereno’ tells the story of the horrors of a slavery revolt. However, if the story was written in Babo’s perspective, the story could be interpreted as slaves breaking free from an oppressor.

In her article entitled “Black Masks: Melville’s Benito Cereno”, Jean Fagan Yellin says that “when Benito Cereno, Herman Melville’s tale of slave revolt, appeared in 1855, it made use of Negro stereotypes already standard in American fiction” (Yellin 678). Captain Amasa Delano is characterized as the typical Yankee man. Yellin elaborates on this by analyzing his self-important, authoritarian persona, observing that he is “investigating the strange ship, self-righteously expounding the doctrine of work, officiously planning to manage affairs on the San Dominick, proudly resentful of any implied social slight, and in no way averse, after helping the distressed Spaniard, to totting up the price he expects to be paired for his trouble. He smugly believes himself the peculiarly favored child of Providence” (Yellin 682). When we view him in contrast with Cereno, an aristocratic European, Delano can now be assessed as representation of the idealistic “New World Man” or the typical American white man, meaning he is seen as “democratic, compassionate, generous, capable of decisive action, although blind to evil and unable to learn from his experience” (Yellin 682). This is best exemplified in his views of the black slaves on the San Dominick. His assumptive thinking is prevalent in the story because throughout his initial exploration of the San Dominick, he buys into the illusion that what is happening upon the ship is not deviating from reality. The presentation of black slaves as

During the mid-19th century, racial tensions were on the rise as questions over the morality of slavery began to take hold in the United States. To capture this clash, Melville utilizes Captain Delano as a catalyst to spark the discussion of racism as the country was on the verge of Civil War. Throughout the entire course of the novella, Delano uses subtle derogatory terminology and an abundance of racial metaphors. However, on occasion Delano is seen utilizing verbalism that conspicuously illustrates the