Essay Sample on Politics in Film

Introduction

Mass media has become an essential feature in the modern society, occupying most of the time. Media products provide various questions that the society overlooks. It has impacted multiple parts of our lives convening culture, social relations, and politics. It is essential that the analysis of the ideologies in the mass media be conducted within the context of a specific context due to its complexity that would otherwise give generalized meaning to principles of mass media products (Christensen et al., 76). Movies are part of the mass media that has contributed to various aspects of human life, and concentrating on its analysis will help understand the meaning and reality better.

Is your time best spent reading someone else’s essay? Get a 100% original essay FROM A CERTIFIED WRITER!

Save 25%

Films as one of the types of media products work as a useful media text because the difference it defines is represented live, hence can help in the transpiration of the audience through space and time using its moving images. It challenges the viewers to meditate on the actions they would if a situation that took place at a particular time through image representation. According to Street et al., (pg. 12), these films can be categorized according to different techniques they employ to narrate a story such as silent film and documentary as well as the message the film is supposed to transmit such as a political message. Many directors and politicians prefer to use movies as the narrative to propagate and convey their political aims because they involve stories that the audiences can get absorbed into by following its plot and hence engaging the audience in evolving film's content.

The movie A Face in the Crowd was directed by Elia Kazan, and it has received various mixed reviews due to the way it portrayed the mass media and the televisions in showcasing their corrupt power on the public. It is a classic example of a movie that ripened over time, although it was considered a flop when it aired in 1957. The film was based on a short story by Schulberg called "Your Arkansas Traveller," that tells the story of a charismatic hillbilly called Lonesome Rhodes, and his rise and fall in power (Kazana). Marcia Jeffries was the reporter who discovered Rhodes, on her radio show called "A Face in the Crowd."

Rhodes, by using his guitar, songs, folksy manner, and ways within a song prove irresistible to red state America and Marcia. He successfully hid the wolf inside him using his populist clothing. He quickly rose to fame by being the spokesperson of the voiceless, since many of the majority of the citizens felt the same way as him (Kazana). According to Kazana, the quickly moved from radio to Television and in no time became a rising star, creating enemies for himself. He knew that those in power are responsible for keeping him down. He, however, let is ego prevent his self-analysis, to ensure that his dumb-luck momentum is not curtailed, and finally, his man-of-the-people masquerade was revealed.

Throughout the movie, Rhodes show that one person's demagoguery is another's populism. In his character, Rodhe used to dare say the private thought of the regular people, without any or fewer filters and gets away with rogue behaviors because his charming and eventually successful. He was known for erratic behaviors such as going through women like they are cheap snacks (Kazana). He also called the minorities in the society names and made huge promises that he denied having ever made them when asked. He blatantly says everything as it is as well as taking on those in power calling them phony and dumb.

One aspect that defines this movie is how it brings together various threads concerning the American culture, show how the advertising, media, politics, and big businesses are connected and indicates how they are united in seducing the public to misunderstand its situations and acting against its interests, creating a false consciousness. The movie gives the viewer what goes on behind the scenes, instead of seeing the reality through televisions that turn the loving world into the shadows on a screen (Kazana). As the audience analyses the film, they realize the interconnection of political arrangement and business behind the image factor, with its agenda of conformity in service to ever-accelerating consumption.

In the film one essential element of such as system is the pseudo-celebrity, who creates a false intimacy into order to lure the audience, and eventually creating a group identity that is built around a charismatic personality. The producers of the film understood from the start that commercials in the television are used to create a brand of celebrities with the aim of articulating both the old and former worldviews and the culture. The television is a selling culture in the film they showed that it is the end of critical, intelligent force in the American life and the rise of the mass man that is humored by pseudo-populist demagogues in thrall to the vested interests (Kazana).

Due to the painful psychological contradiction between theoretical equality and actual, experienced powerlessness, the system needs a mediating figure like Lonesome Rhodes, who, while siding with the elite, rhetorically and symbolically represents the ordinary people. By muddling issues of power and class, and emotionalizing and oversimplifying complex issues, the demagogue offers cheap reassurance, thus defusing tension and anxiety (Kazana).

We see this process at work when Lonesome tutors the right-wing, upper-crust Senator Fuller, a presidential candidate who is failing to gain traction with voters because his stiff, formal style makes for bad television. When the new and improved Senator Fuller sits on a rustic cracker barrel in a Manhattan television studio and attacks Social Security and the New Deal in a folksy manner, complete with references to Daniel Boone, he's leading viewers out of contemporary reality and into the mythologized world of 1950s TV westerns (Kazana). It's reactionary thinking with a common touch, aiming at the creation of false unity, based on cultural cliches, between those who work for a living and those who profit from their labors.

In the end, though, the movie is not optimistic. Its two creators, having abandoned their hopes for revolutionary transformation from below, seem to have developed a less than sanguine view of average gal and guy. Other than the liberally educated Marcia and her writer-friend Mel, the American public as seen as consisting mainly of middle-class opportunists and working-class chumps. Lonesome may crash and burn, but as the movies end and the camera focuses on a gigantic neon Coca-Cola sign flashing away in the distance, we realize that some other demagogue will take his place and the media mill will grind on (Kazana).

The Game Change's most searing prosecution is an emblematic one: It assaults our shared failure to communicate (Roach). How on Earth, in a country so innovatively skilled and age so flush with moment information, would we be able to remain so woefully ignorant, wilfully offensive and terrible at knowing each other? How could everybody in a presidential campaign figure out how to trust that another person had screened Alaska governor for the GOP presidential ticket? How might somebody seek to be a moment far from the Oval Office without a firm handle of significant historical and current occasions? How did mystical reasoning turn into our default setting? Quite a bit of what goes ahead in "Game Change" may, in reality, resound your working environment, where reminders go new and messages unresponded to; where the flashiest talkers get advanced too early. Where nobody understands, however, everybody is occupied with operatic levels of self-protection while continually checking their BlackBerrys.

Game Change starts and closes with a snippet from an hour meeting, with Roach joining together inquiries postured by the real Anderson Cooper and answers offered by Steve Schmidt who is the campaign strategist (Roach). The two hours in the middle of these semi-re-authorizations in this way play somewhat like Schmidt's horrible flashback. We are not constrained to his point of view, but instead, he fills in like a feeling of remorse and guide. The film gets steam as his crusade is losing its own. "We urgently require an amusement evolving pick" for the Veep space, says Schmidt.

In any occasion, for a game-changing pick, the campaign chooses to pander to ladies, and this record has it that finding Palin resembled a significant discovery. Right off the bat, as Palin gets called up to the bigs, hurried through reviewing and hustled onto the trail, Moore conveys a sincerity that is contacting and excitement to satisfy that influences you to feel thoughtful toward Palin-even and mainly when that enthusiasm is faintly pitiable. Somewhere else, embracing Down's syndrome kids on a rope line and dandling her own particular on her lap, Palin is out and out motivational, and Moore intensifies the senator's sexual charm (Roach). She prevails upon anybody.

The scenes that will secure Moore's Emmy are in the second demonstration. As it ends up evident to McCain's group, utilizing instructions sessions, that she is a know-nothing, they prepare her on hot-catch outside strategy issues-advising her that we battled Germany in two world wars, for example. Here, Moore's Palin takes notes with a steadiness that without a moment's delay advances the sham and extends the catastrophe (Roach). After it ends up evident to the world, using Charlie Gibson and Katie Couric, which she is a know-nothing, the camera fixes all over at inclined edges amid ensuing fits of rage, and we comprehend her disdain and suspicion(Roach). However, she wins the debate against Joe Biden; thus she changes gear and changes into a political creature, and even needed to give the concession after Obama won the race, to which Schmidt can't.

Postmodernism and poststructuralism and crosswise over pop and political issues and besides in scholarly hypothesizing started dominating in the 1990s. According to Conway (Pg. 21), during this period the third wave feminists reinterpreted Madonna's 'blonde desire' pop as a political demonstration; and when 'confused' courageous women in movies could orient everything from television infomercials towards great writing. Reasoning as well, to some degree, was ingested and repurposed by pop postmodernism. Popular culture habitually caricatured sincere pseudo-scholarly composes by, for instance, depicting them perusing Nietzsche. Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900) is extraordinary compared to other known and most generally abused of nineteenth-century rationalists. An all the more astounding turn in 90s culture was the third wave women's activist reception of Nietzsche in political estimating.

At first look, Nietzsche appears a far-fetched women activist. Regarding his mentality to ladies, he is well recognized for his infamous joke from Thus Spoke Zarathustra (1885): "Would you say you are visiting ladies? Keep in mind the whip!" (Conway, 59) However, Nietzsche's eccentric after popular death ups in both popular culture and legislative issues delineate a portion of the fascinating complexities and inconsistencies of our postmodern age. One scene specifically in the faction great teenager satire Clueless (1995) unites the delightful wreckage that was Nietzsche, gentility and woman's rights in the 1990s.

Clueless, an American movie composed and directed by Amy Heckerling constructed vaguely in light of Jane Austen's Emma. Its comic appeal gets from the logical inconsistency that notwithstanding the way, which the movie's main character, Cherilyn 'Cher' Horowitz, is stupid, poorly educated, shallow, fixated on appearances, and characteristically ladylike, she is the most fortunate and agreeable person in the film (Heckerling). Rather than her ex-stepbrother love intrigue Josh (Paul Rudd), who think...