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Similarities Between Poaqqatsi And To Kill A Mockingbird

Decent Essays

Separate but equal has been a saying in the United States and all over the world for many years, but through history people have learned that this doesn’t really work; one group will always get more than the other; it will be unequal. The choice on how one treat people who are different from them is put on oneself. When surrounded by people who believe in and practice racial inequality, it is possible to be someone who doesn't treat people unequally due to the color of their skin. In both the film Powaqqatsi and the book To Kill a Mockingbird, one can see characters struggling with inequality and ultimately overcoming it. Characters in both the movie and the book unknowingly show jungian archetypes which are elements of the collective unconcsious. …show more content…

Scout, from the book To Kill a Mockingbird, is a young girl confronted with the issue of racial inequality. Scout’s father, Atticus, is a lawyer who takes a case of an African-American man who is accused of raping a white woman causing the town to erupt in an uproar over a white man defending a black man. To Scout, this is just another case that Atticus has taken and she can’t see why this is such a controversial issue because of her innocence of being a young, unbiased child. Scout’s childhood innocence is reflected in the film Powaqqatsi in which a young boy running through the water completely naked. To him, there is nothing wrong with this because he lives in a Third World country where this is a normal thing to do. The boy doesn’t see anything wrong with this, but if he were to live in an Western nation,this would be something that would cause a disruption. Scout and this young boy both show innocence in their lives. The people around them who watch and judge their actions are the ones who see something wrong with them. The citizens of Maycomb County are the ones who criticize Atticus’s choice to represent Tom Robinson and the Western audiences are the ones who see the naked boy as wrong. If no one was to tell Scout or the boy that these actions are wrong, they would not know any better. The are both innocent because they do these things not in a rebellious way, but because they …show more content…

Scout, in the book To Kill a Mockingbird, was raised by Atticus in a small county in Alabama. Her father taught her to treat everyone equally no matter who they are or who they are said to be; the town was less accepting than that. Most of Maycomb County looked at Boo Radley as someone to be avoided because he was thought to be different and was considered to be a forbidding man who never left his home. The way the town looked at Boo gave Scout that impression she has at the beginning of the story, and it’s the reason Scout is scared of him. Atticus, on the other hand, thought it ridiculous that Scout was so frightened of a man just because of the rumors she had heard about him. By the end of the book, and because of her upbringing, Scout is able to make up her own mind about Boo and care for him in her own way no matter what others thought. Like Scout, the pink tree in Powaqqatsi is individual in that it’s surrounded by all the green trees. The pink tree was supposed to grow up and be green like all the trees around it; however, because of the particular land and type of seed, it grew to be a pink tree instead. The pink tree and Scout both managed to mature to be different than their surroundings; they both managed to individual and move off the status quo based on what they grew up on. The pink tree was different because of the type of seed it grew from, as it was unlike the other

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