Top Gun, Directed By Tony Scott

When discussing American culture, the influence and interplay of film cannot be understated. We are a nation consumed with the media. Today, the movie business is one of the highest grossing businesses there is. We hold movie stars up as though they are super human. We closely watch their style, their dating lives, their party habits, and even their favorite restaurants, among many other things. We rely on movies to lift us up, teach us about other cultures and time periods, and even to teach us about our own culture. Often, movies reflect the time period they are filmed in and directly reflect the social tensions of that time and the film noir genre is no different. One of the most famous film noir movies out there, The Maltese Falcon,

The Thematic Paradigm, written by Robert Ray, shows that throughout America’s history, people are often attracted to heroes whose traits reflect those of the society at the time. Ray writes about how many American heroes are valued for their strong leadership and sense of community, but there are other heroes who are celebrated for their individuality and their ability to form their own moral laws. In The Thematic Paradigm, Robert Ray shows that the American people are drawn to those who embody traits of both good and bad values. By comparing common values and laws, showing a strong sense of individualism, and contradicting opposite views on America’s historical heroes, Ray is able to give a strong argument as to why Americans are drawn to certain characters in cinema and history.

I have since heard the book and its message described as fascistic, provocative, irresponsible, unpalatable. This it may well be. Yet I found reading his book to be an amazingly sobering and dispiriting affair. One can really drink up the spirit of a man in reading his prose, and I fear Heinlein to be not someone with whom I want to share a beer or be friends. I read later that he was a career military officer who developed tuberculosis and was invalided out of the fleet to a literary career. There hangs about this book a severe and cynical air of wounded world-weariness, as if life is a dreary and dangerous affair requiring toughness and discipline to survive. He nearly models Sparta in his apotheosis of rigorous military training as

The classic movie 12 Angry Men opens with clips of a courthouse, ultimately panning to a specific court room where an 18-year-old boy is on trial for killing his father. Despite the case being the central point which the story revolves around, the movie isn’t about the boy or even his father. The movie is about the 12 jurors who are in charge of the boy’s fate. If they decide he is guilty, he is sentenced to the death penalty, which meant death by the electric chair.

In the summer of 1776, the colonies were forever changed with the signing of the Declaration of Independence. It made war with the British Empire official, pulling other colonies that had not begun to fight into the battle. The war brought much change for everyone associated with the colonies, leaving no one unaffected. The movie The Patriot, directed by Roland Emmerich, tells the story of one family, the Martins, in South Carolina and their role in the American Revolution and how they were affected throughout it. The film portrays the American Revolution primarily from the bias of the Pro-Revolutionists, illustrating the horrors of living through the war, while giving a more simplistic view of certain aspects of life in the colonies during that time period.

American Sniper by Chris Kyle, is one of the most accurate depictions of the life in special

The 1997 comedy film, ‘The Castle’, directed by Rob Sitch, is a classic Australian film which pits the underdog individual against a large corporation. The low-budget film follows the fight of tight-knit working class family, the Kerrigans, who face the forced acquisition of their modest home by a government organisation. It can be clearly seen that the director has positioned audiences to see the Kerrigans as praiseworthy characters. This is shown through the narrative elements, stylistic features, and constructedness of the plot.

The movie “12 Angry Men” covers different negotiation and conflict resolutions. The communication is set in a jury room where people with different worldview are bargaining over the judgment of a murder case. Juror 8 is willing to stand alone with his vote “not guilty”. Trying to avoid the winner’s course, he demanded a conversation about the case despite the clear 11-1 vote on the guilt of the defendant. Juror 8 discredits his opponents’ arguments and uncovers their constraint thinking, he uncovering doubtful evidence, alienating hardliners and engaging in conversations. In the conversation it becomes obvious that not every juror bases his decision on the same facts, and

The Novum presented in Starship Troopers is the rule of the Veterans and the resulting primacy of the military. This Novum sets the novel up as a utopic pandering to a readership demographic that the author himself is a member of. This is a normative sci-fi construction. Starship Troopers deviates in that the true target readership is the young man who has not yet been given a chance to join up. He is meant to gain a favorable understanding of the military man by sharing in his dream. The dream then - the world created – is the persuasive device.

“The Conspirator”directed by Robert Redford is a new historical drama.The basic ethical and political problems are the murder of the president and the simultaneous coordinated attempts on the lives of Vice President Andrew Johnson and Secretary of State William H. Seward which throw Washington into panic. After John Wilkes Booth is killed in a shootout with soldiers, his fellow plotters are arrested and tried, not by a jury of their peers but by a committee of officers.

Twelve Angry Men is about a jury who must decide the fate of an 18 year old boy who allegedly killed his father. The jury must determine a verdict of guilty beyond any reasonable doubt and not guilty. A guilty verdict would mean that the accused would receive the death penalty. After a day of deliberation and many votes, they came up with the verdict of not guilty. I believe they achieved their overall goal of coming up with a verdict they were all able to agree with. It seems there were some individual personal short term goals that were not met. One being that the one juror was not able to go to the baseball game. Another was that a juror was not able to take out the anger he had towards his son on the son accused of killing his

Hollywood is a phenomenon that truly works to express the society of the United States. Through the study of film, one can see the many ways that Hollywood works to not only echo the sentiments of the culture but shape the ideas and mindsets of those who watch the films. After 1940, Hollywood has appeared to reflect American society far more than it has shaped it. The films that appear during times of war and political strife seem to hit a different note after the United States joined the Second World War. Suddenly, the messages within the movies were less about how important it was to support the war cause and more about the ideologies of the war – frequently finding new and amusing ways to show the bad guy.

His mind was cuffed onto the desperation of consumerism. A man in David Fincher 's film, Fight Club, has fallen into the world of materials and perfection. As he became a slave of common franchises around him, the narrator strived to get it all. However, no matter how many things he bought, never had he achieved the definition of satisfaction. People rely on profit and possessions to be happy, but does it really help? Fight Club carries philosophical messages about money and materialism to the capitalist society in order to wake up and realize that those objects are not the key to happiness.

Throughout American history, film and filmmakers have turned to society for insight to new ideas on films. Huge movements and monumental points in history, such as The Great Depression, race movements, women’s rights and other points in time are often portrayed through creative films and cinematography. The gangster film was deeply embraced at a time in history where capitalism appeared to be failing, and the traditional concept of the “American Dream” appeared to be far out of reach. Throughout the great depression era, the gangster film genre was heavily relied upon by studios in the 1930’s, as profits slid and it became increasingly difficult to convince moviegoers to spend their hard-earned nickels on a trip to the theater ( ). The fact that the movie industry intended to rely upon increased sex and violence in its features is a striking example of just how perverted the “American Dream” had become.

Genre is a reflection of society. Film noir is a genre that has a distinctive relationship with the American society from 1941 - 1958 because it reflects America’s fears and concerns from when they experienced major upheaval after The Great Depression and during World War I. In particular, the unstable atmosphere from the aftermath of World War 1 as Bruce Crowther, author of the book ‘Film Noir: Reflections in a Dark Mirror’, elaborates on how Film Noir films produce “a dark quality that derived as much from the character's depiction as from the cinematographer’s art.” These dark moods are transparent through the key features of the femme fatale, the film techniques and the impact of the Hay’s code on American film and American society.