What Role Do Audience Play
Rosa Rivarola
Rasmussen College
Author notes The essay is being presented on March 3rd. 2013 to Marek McKenna for G380/AMH3304 Section 01 Visions of America Since 1945
What role do audiences play in creating popular culture? Explain how Hollywood both manipulated and reflected the popular culture of the 1950's and 60's.
The role of the audience is to infuse the fire in the popular culture movement. It appears that Hollywood was caught between the wall and the blade in the 1950’s, on one side you had the dominant culture flexing their muscle to have Hollywood endorse this family ideal and help the containment effort and for no reason ignite any friction that would agitate the already
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An article in the New York Times claims that all those feminist messages were lost to the audience that was just too consumed with the actress beauty to get the message. None the less Liz Taylor’s film kept pushing the envelope of socially acceptable topics and in movie Suddenly, Last Summer, the major taboo was ripped wide open on homosexuality and possibly delinquent/criminal behavior because most likely the male escorts were minor poor young boys. This movie portraits how far will the established social norm will go to keep containment , the clear message that a men was better off dead than be homosexual was not lost in this very turbulent movie.
During this research I learned that many of Ms. Taylor films of the 50’s 60’s were clearly trying to send out a message of how the popular mass was eager to hear and in the 60’s people were ready to act in order to bring about change. The new baby boomers were ready to set the world on light speed and change our society at ultra accelerated speed.
References
Suddenly Last summer (1959) Colombia Pictures http://popculture2.abcclio.com.ezproxy.rasmussen.edu/Search/Display/1461632?terms=suddenly+last+summer http://popculture2.abcclio.com.ezproxy.rasmussen.edu/Search/Display/1360263?terms=suddenly%20last%20summer
The Accidental Feminist: How Elizabeth Taylor Raised Our Consciousness and We Were Too Distracted By Her Beauty to Notice M. G. Lord 2012
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Following the ideas of the poststructuralist feminists, the aim of Carter is demonstrate that, as Luce Irigaray says in this quote: “’femininity’ is a role, an image, a value, imposed upon women by male systems of representation. In this masquerade of
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In the late nineteenth century, the New Woman time period emerged after World War I. Women began to cast away the domestic stereotypes and they became “independent [women] who [sought] achievement and self-fulfillment beyond the realm of marriage and family” (Miller 1). Straying away from the typical image of women staying and maintaining the home, women started attending universities, receiving professional jobs, and becoming involved in politics (1). The transition of women from the domestic sphere to the public sphere is a notion Zora Neale Hurston uses in Their Eyes Were Watching God. Hurston’s use of dominant characters in society reveals her theme that experiences and relationships are the roots of finding independence and identity despite the obscurity caused by sexism.
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