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The Longest Yard

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Kwami McLeod
Rhetoric 101

The Longest Yard
(Stereotypes and all)

What our society has become truly amazes me every day. The things we watch and enjoy as a culture are sometimes highly offense. I choose to look at the movie The Longest Yard for an in depth look at stereotypes in our society. After watching and studying this movie I can only ask myself one question: What have we become? The Longest Yard is a movie about a former NFL MVP quarterback (played by Adam Sandler) jailed for joyriding his girlfriend’s car. Crewe (Sandler) is forced by the jail’s warden to create a football team to play the very guards that lord over them. Yes, The Longest Yard movie was very funny and entertaining to many audiences, but it featured many …show more content…

Yet the movie depicts the guard’s team as thus. They are all of Caucasian descent and act like the stereotypical white male athlete. They curse, take steroids, and readily look for reasons to attack the inmates. There is, yet again, another hidden stereotype. Do all Caucasian athletes act that way? Not at all, for everyone is different and nobody is the same person. The guards in The Longest Yard are also aggressively racist. They look to attack the black males of the prison at all times and act in any way to evoke a response from them. Yet this movie still can make anyone laugh. The overly aggressive nature of the guards is so unrealistic that many audiences found it hysterical. Maybe this is why the inmates of the movie were even funnier to watch.

The inmates in the prison are very comical to watch and study. They are portrayed heavily as uneducated idiots. One side character in the movie sees a sign for football try outs and says, “What are football tree outs?” this brings a great laughter from the audience as it is a funny portrayal of prison stupidity. This truth is that no prison’s inmates are that uneducated for they have libraries and education materials in almost all prisons. The inmates, not unlikely the guards, show very aggressive and vengeful attitudes and play with much anger during the game. You can see this in Crewe’s intro in the prison. He is stared at intensively by everyone in the prison and treated harshly. The most comical type of

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