Lars and the Real Girls Essay

Craig Gillespie’s Lars and the Real Girl is a comedic drama that follows Lars, a sweet, yet socially inept young man, whose childhood has deeply affected his personality and ability to engage in social relationships. In an attempt to feel belonging and experience loving relationships, he purchases Bianca, a life-sized doll online. Lars journeys through dependence on Bianca for a sense of belonging and warm relationships, to engaging in ‘real-life’ relationships. The film illustrates Lars’ personality using Abraham Maslow’s humanistic conception of personality and Hans Eysenck’s trait conception.

Throughout the film Lars is seen with a blanket attached to him whether he is holding of wearing it. This is made evident in the opening scene where Lars is observing a family through his window holding the blanket around his neck as if it were a scarf. Through a close up Lars eyes seems focused on the family but progressing his eyes begin to become teary and more aggressively clenching his blanket. This can be interpreted as him wanting to be involved and join the family but an imaginary leash is holding him back. Adding on, the additional symbolism of the window supports his isolation as they look like prison bars, a barrier which is preventing him of reaching the outside world. Following, Lars pushes up against the wall as Karin approaches the door. As she knocks, Lars grasps his blanket tighter and closes his eyes as if the blanket is a mean of protection. The camera focuses to the front wall of the house where the lighting is darker from lars position and is gradually getting lighter as the wall approaches the door symbolising the isolation through the contrast of lighting. Gillespie can only make the viewer feel sympathetic at this point as he forces himself away from the outside world though being given many opportunities to socialise characterising Lars as someone who doesn’t like to interact with other

One of the main ideas in the movie centers around Erik Erikson’s first stage of psychosocial development

The film that I chose to write about is a Paramount Pictures presentation titled Mean Girls, starring Lindsay Lohan and also featuring a handful of Saturday Night Live cast members, including Tina Fey the author of this picture. The reason behind choosing this film is because it has a unique style of introducing characters, transitioning between scenes, and various tools to help spice up the film. Being one of my personal favorites, Mean Girls is a comedy about a home schooled teenage girl who enters high school for the first time. She tries to figure herself out by where she can fit in and who she needs to become friends with.

The ice helps the reader to be able to connect with the inner feelings of the narrator’s inner conflict with himself.

The book Girl, Interrupted is about a teenage girl Susanna Kaysen. At the age of 18 she voluntarily sent herself to the McLean hospital. In the beginning of the book the Susanna was talking to a psychiatrist she has been seeing for awhile, she has had a couple of suicide attempts so she started seeing that doctor. The doctor had recommended Susanna to go to McLean to help her be anti-depressive and help cure her borderline personality. Susanna ended up being in the hospital for 2 years.

The purpose of this essay is to watch a movie and try to view the main character from three personality theorists perspectives. In the movie The Little Mermaid, Ariel is a mermaid princess who makes a deal with an evil sea-witch to meet a human prince who lives on land (Clements/Musker, 1989). In this essay, I will analyze the movie The Little Mermaid through Sigmund Freud’s psychoanalytic theory, Carl Jung’s theory of Archetypes, and Erik Erikson’s Stages of Development. While these theorists have much in common in terms of self-concept, their views on the main issues at hand vary accordingly.

The heterosexual imaginary is immensely ingrained in our everyday experience that most people, including feminist sociologists, has become inclined to conceptualize and theorize based around the heteronormative. The heterosexual imaginary acts as an invisible framework at play that structures our thinking processes and in which constructs our social identity. For instance, the inquiry of a survey taker’s marital status in most social science surveys come to show that our recognized and appropriate social identity is formed around heterosexuality. That is, any deviation from this heterosexual norm would be considered abnormal and be marginalized. To a minimal extent, this focus has served the interests of women because of the lack of activism

Lars Lindstrom is a 27 year old Caucasian male. He has short brown hair, a brown mustache and brown eyes. Lars is a Christian, and is often see at his local church or reading the bible. Although he owns half of his parent’s house, he lives in the garage, which he has made into a studio apartment. His education level is not mentioned, although he has a job that supports him, so he must be educated to some extent. At the beginning of the film Lars is single, though throughout the movie he enters into two different relationships (Kimmel & Gillespie 2007).

As a result from having Bianca and the support from his family and friends, Lars is able to fully grow into a mature adult man. The gap between illusion and reality has been bridged, as Lars realizes his true wants and needs after he creates and ultimately destroys Bianca. Lars is now able to have intimate moments with people and be able to touch them without feeling pain. This is most evident in the bowling scene with Margo. Margo invites him to go bowling with her, and Lars comments that Bianca is unable to come because of a meeting. Usually, Lars would reject any social gathering, especially without the accompaniment of Bianca, though this time he accepts. Lars becomes a participant rather than just an observer. He realizes that he enjoyed his time with Margo, however he tells her that he could never cheat on Bianca. Lars is still holding on to Bianca’s existence, but he feels that he may be ready to let go and have a relationship with someone real. This scene is also where Lars allows himself to shed one of his layers and shake Margo’s hand — a huge leap in his development. There is, however, a false thaw when it begins to snow again, symbolizing that Lars is still not fully out of his shell, as long as Bianca exists. This shows the main conflict between illusion and reality that Lars must be able to reconcile. In order to have a relationship with someone real, he must let go of Bianca. The reading in the church in the next scene is significant in Lars’s development. The reading says, “When I was a child, I spoke as a

     A Doll’s House, a play by Henrik Ibsen, tells the story of Nora, the wife of Torvald Helmer, who is an adult living as a child, kept as a doll by her husband. She is expected to be content and happy living in the world Torvald has created for her. By studying the play and comparing and contrasting the versions presented in the video and the live performance, one can analyze the different aspects of it.

Method acting is often misinterpreted as an acting exercise where the actor “becomes” the character, and keeps the persona of that character until they have completed their work. This misguided thinking has been promoted by pop culture and even sometimes by actors themselves. The Lee Strasberg Film & Theatre Institute defines the Method as when “actors use their imagination, sense and emotion to conceive characters with unique and original behavior, creating performances grounded in the human truth of the moment.” This definition focuses more on the relationship between the actor and their character, rather than both being one and the same. Method acting is not a new idea. It is thought to have been considered an acting exercise for

Imagery plays a big part in describing the character’s appearance and actions in order to show what a character is like and how they respond to differing situations. It can also shape the story and reveal to the reader the background of a person, place, or thing. In Krapp’s Last Tape, the only character is given much detail and description in order to start the play at a point where the reader already knows some information about this elderly man. The literary convention of imagery provides insight into the character that will lead the play.

Girls & Sex by Peggy Orenstein portrays teenage sexuality as anything but light-hearted. While the title would lead a person to believe that the book is all about girls’ sexuality, it is not. Sexuality among todays teen seems to be more focused on boys than girls. Today’s teenage culture is what is known as a “hook-up” culture. This hook-up culture seems to be driving teenagers into impersonal relationships consisting of various sexual acts. This book is a must read for educators, mothers, fathers, Aunts, Uncles, and so on, but be forewarned, the information that girls have shared with the author as she interviewed more than seventy young women between the ages of fifteen and twenty (Orenstein, P., 2016), can be alarming to anyone who is not yet aware of this culture.

Caitlin   Cameron   Assignment   2   SCK2604   Student   number  :   50491466     Table  of  contents  :     1. Front  page  :  Page  1     2. Contents  page  :  Page     3. Questions  answered  :  Pages  3  to  10     4. Bibliography  page  :  11                                                                                Questions  for  Lars  and  the  real  girl  :       1.