The City Of Brotherly Love

996 Words4 Pages
Philadelphia, the “City of Brotherly Love”, becomes the setting for a high-profile discrimination case in the movie Philadelphia. A successful lawyer named Andrew “Andy” Beckett (played by Tom Hanks) is fired from his prestigious law firm, because while being given the documents for his next big case, a senior partner at the law firm notices lesions that are a tell-tale sign of the AID’s virus on his face. It becomes up to Andy to defend his title as a successful lawyer against untrue accusations of his ‘incompetence” (or rather, his AID’s virus) and prove that he was unfairly fired. Andy, being the skilled lawyer that he is, manages to successfully make his case with the help of homophobic lawyer Joe Miller. Philadelphia challenges misconceptions about the gay community and the transmittance of AID’s, homophobia and the idea that the gay community and especially the AID’s community need to be kept oppressed, without equal rights and protections, as their straight counterparts. Philadelphia shows how difficult it can sometimes be for two separate cultures to mesh together. In this case, the two cultures are not racial or ethnic but social. The main character, as explained in the synopsis above, is gay (micro culture) and the secondary character is slightly homophobic and most definitely straight (macro culture). Andy Beckett (our main character) is in a relationship with a man named Miguel and while it is unclear if the HIV he has contracted is directly related to this

More about The City Of Brotherly Love

Get Access