Archetypes In Films

Along with chiaroscuro, lighting a dark weather, the femme fatale is one of the main traits of film noir. It is the femme fatale that excites and draws in the audience.

Movies and films are important parts of not only our education, but also our life. Some teach us historical information or life lessons, and some just make us laugh. When we watch movies, we realize that many characters are just like us. As Linda Seger says, “Whatever our culture, there are universal stories that form the basis fall all our particular stories.” (Seger 386-387). One character that always seems to steal the audience’s heart is the one that doesn’t always fit in or that is different than the others. This character is known as the outcast archetype. Outcast archetypes are usually isolated from others for a certain reason whether it be gender, race, social class, or sexual preference. These characters

This likely spurred a bit of fear and resentment in men as these women played a much bigger role in society than ever before. Film noir reflected this by elevating the female character from a passive supporting figure to the femme fatale. Suddenly, women were cast as seductive, autonomous, and deceptive predators who use men for their own means (Barsam and Monahan 95). The Maltese Falcon was no different. In the film, Brigid O’Shaughnessy (who previously went by the fake name Ruth Wonderly) plays the femme fatale. We watch as she rejects the traditional roles of wife and mother as she uses Floyd Thursby and continually tries to use Sam Spade with the intention of discarding them when they finish serving her purpose. She uses her sexuality as her main weapon as she lies and manipulates her way through life. O’Shaughnessy’s strong, sexual, and dominant character is only one way in which women’s role in society is portrayed in this movie. Spade’s treatment of O’Shaughnessy illustrates what American society valued and trusted during the time period. In current times, his treatment of women would lead to outrage but he is more or less the poster boy for American society at that time. Generally speaking, our society was distrustful of the empowerment and enfranchisement of women and

In Hollywood film women 's roles have varied quiet considerably between genres, geographical placement, and period settings. These factors contribute to the different representations of women 's roles in the film they are present in. The roles are diverse going from the traditional maternal role to that of manipulative murderer. Women 's roles in movies can be almost equal to the male roles, and the co-stars are not given the majority of the acclaims just because they are male. Society has set certain standards that women are supposed to follow. The most common image of women is that they are very passive and try to avoid conflict in any situation. More and more in society women are breaking down the social barriers that confine them to their specific roles. The films Rear Window and Resident Evil show women in roles that are untraditional for our society. These two movies help to show how women are rebelling against social norms and that they are taking more active and aggressive roles. In film noir’s we can see women represented as the femme fatale, a woman whose mysterious and seductive charms leads men into compromising or dangerous situations. In action movies we see the heroine who is strong both physically and mentally, and has the ability to use weapons. Women seem to be more trapped than men because they are supposed to live up to society’s standards dealing with beauty and size, which are more physical characteristics. These specific guidelines have been set by

Among the common peculiarities of film noir, the distinct division between the male characters and the different representations of women reinforce notions of masculinity and gender roles. Furthermore, in the 1940’s film noir was Hollywood’s way to illustrate a world in where pessimism and suspicion dictated people’s lives. Mostly presented as detectives or a lone wolf, the men are portrayed as cold-hearted, disconnected, and cynical to show their hopelessness and disillusionment of the society they lived in. Along this depiction, multiple women are placed into different roles, to either play the seductress and/or a menace to the male protagonist. In the The Maltese Falcon film noir, the male protagonist is characterized as a typical male

This genre is typically modern, perky and upbeat, but the common narrative in all of them is that it features a woman who is strong and she overcomes adversity to reach her goals. There is also a message of empowerment that also struggles with a romantic predicament and using comedy to poke fun at the male characters. Industries are still producing soppy romantic comedies for the female audience but the divide between the standard chick flick and romantic comedy is slowly disappearing. Similarly to the beginning of this essay it is evident that institutions are moving in the direction of women’s place in culture in relation to this film genre; women are usually shown as the super power since they are made to appeal to the female audience. However

The classic femme fatale in forced to resort to murder to free herself from an unbearable relationship with a man who would try to possess and control her, as if she were a piece of property or a pet. According to Sylvia Harvey, author of Women's place: The absent family, the women of film noir are "presented as prizes, desirable objects" for the leading men of these films. The femme fatale's unique power is her brazen willingness and ability to express herself in sexual terms. By this the femme fatale threatens the status quo, and the hero, because she controls her own sexuality outside of marriage. She uses sex for pleasure and as a weapon or a tool to control men, not merely in the culturally acceptable capacity of procreation within marriage. Her sexual emancipation commands the gaze of the hero, the audience, and the camera in a way that cannot be erased by her final punishment. Attempts to neutralise the power and blatant sexuality of the femme fatale by destroying her at the end are usually unsuccessful, because her power extends beyond death. Noir films immediately convey the intense sexual presence of the femme fatale by introducing her as a fully established object of the hero's obsession. Since the camera often represents the hero's subjective memory, revealed

The “killer women” genre or “female buddy films” destabilize the masculine/feminine dichotomy. Through the examples of Khouri's well known film, Thelma and Louise there is recognizable symbolism that apply to the genre's threat towards dichotomy. The incident of killing Harlan Puckett after his attempt of raping Thelma follows the two protagonists and places them into an appalling situation. Along the way, the characters have compelling development regarding their masculine and feminine roles.

The films Vertigo and His Girl Friday, directed by Alfred Hitchcock and Howard Hawks respectively, are good representations of classical cinema. A stigma associated with classical cinema is the film’s portrayal of women. Feminist film theorists believe that the male protagonist play a more prominent role while women are only something to be looked at and acted upon. Both films possess a male and a female protagonist. His Girl Friday casts Cary Grant as a cunning newspaper editor named Walter Burns, as well as Rosalind Russell as former reporter and former wife of Walter, Hildy Johnson. Vertigo stars James Stewart as a former detective named Scottie Ferguson, and Kim Novak as Madeleine Ester, a woman Scottie is hired to investigate. Both films challenge the feminist’s hypothesis with powerful and intelligent women who have some control over men in the film. Yet in both films the male protagonist ultimately has control over the female even though the stigma is tested throughout the entirety of both films.

Archetype Essay Iron Man 2 If you are a movie lover, and know what a archetype is you would come to realize that there are many of them in movies today. If you are someone who watches movies, but doesn’t exactly know what a archetype is; an archetype is a situation that happens over and over again in literature. Archetypes aren’t only in old myths, but they’re also in mostly all movies today. Now I can show you the different archetypes in the movie I have chosen, Iron Man 2.

Since the 1940’s, movies have predominately portrayed women as sex symbols. Beginning in the 1940’s and continuing though the 1980’s, women did not have major roles in movies. When they did have a leading role the women was either pretreated as unintelligent and beautiful, or as conniving and beautiful: But she was always beautiful. Before the 1990’s, men alone, wrote and directed all the movies, and the movies were written for men. In comparison, movies of the 90’s are not only written and directed by women, but leading roles are also held by older and unattractive women. In this paper I will show the variations and growth of women’s roles in movies from the 1940’s though the 1990’s.

The “femme fatale” was a common theme in the 1940’s it is a female lead who uses sensuality and mystery to seduce and manipulate the male character of the film. No American detective novel written in the thirties would be complete without the figure of the "femme fatale," a French term meaning deadly woman. A femme fatale is an irresistibly beautiful woman who uses her sexuality to seduce men and lure them into dangerous situations to serve her own selfish interests. There is a fair few of these in The Big Sleep, but none of them is quite the dynamo that Vivian turns out to be. I also believe that Carmen Sternwood could be considered a femme fatale as well.

The male gaze puts his fantasy onto the female figure, which is styled, in a unique sort of way. In this traditional exhibitionist, role women are continuously being looked at and their appearance is delivered to the male gaze in such a way as a strong visual and erotic impact and provides male desire. The presence of a woman in a normal narrative film is the key of the movie. However, the key of the narrative film works against the development of the story-line and stops the action due to the erotic gaze. Butt Boetticher said: “What counts is what the heroine provokes, or rather what she represents. She is the one, or rather the love or fear she inspires in the hero, or else the concern he feels for her, who makes him act the way he does. In herself the woman has not the slightest importance”.

Critically analyse and discuss Tarantino’s women characters as featured in selected films from his body of work. Consider the ways in which female protagonists have become more central in certain films and the aesthetic and moral implications of their participation in violent events in movies such as Inglourious Basterds, Death Proof and/or the Kill Bill films. Point #1 By deconstructing gendered dialect, Tarantino is effectively changing the ideas of prohibitive sexual orientation roles by having feminine yet regarded and dangerous courageous women. For instance, as a general rule, a woman will need to yield her womanliness in different movies with a specific end goal to do an assignment, or her gentility will be a shortcoming to her work

The presentation of women on screen is another highlighted issue in many of the gathered sources. Because men were ultimately in control of what went on the screen much of what the audience perceived were women from the male imagination or fantasy. Bernard Beck elaborates in his article Where the Boys Are: The Contender and other Movies about Women in a Man’s World that, “…women have been used to dress up a male story or motivate a male character” (Beck 15). Women were often insignificant and trivial characters. Although, Kathe Davis disagrees to a point. In her article, Davis offers a dissonant opinion to the fore-mentioned insignificance of the female character. She instead describes many female characters as “predators,” and analyzes the roles of lead women in three prominent films of the nineteenth century. In each film, she finds parallels and similarities of cases of “female emasculation” and instances where “women are turned into objects of male desire” (Davis 47-48). Davis does not perceive female characters as being insignificant, just stripped of their power and misrepresented. She discusses how females of power are often portrayed as crazy