Planning Poodle: Week 4: Planning for week beginning Monday 26th January 2009

Monday 26th January 2009

Tuesday 27th January 2009

Period 1/2 - Free Periods

Periods 3/4: Hollywood Film Comparative Study

"I see all this potential, and I see squandering. God damn it, an entire generation pumping gas, waiting tables—slaves with white collars. Advertising has us chasing cars and clothes, working jobs we hate so we can buy shit we don't need. We're the middle children of history, man. No purpose or place. We have no Great War. No Great Depression. Our Great War's a spiritual war . . . our Great Depression is our lives. We've all been raised on television to believe that one day we'd all be millionaires and movie gods and rock stars. But we won't. And we're slowly learning that fact. And we're very, very pissed off."
Tyler Durden - Fight Club

Unit Purpose
This is a comparative study of Hollywood films that have sought to depict 'The American Dream' either by constructing or deconstructing it. It will endeavour to provide students with opportunities to interpret and analyse the images, discourses, stories and practices related to pursuing the American Dream as they are represented in the powerful cultural medium of film.

Detailed Course Description:

They live by it. We seek it. But ...what is it? How has this ideal shaped American culture? How has it evolved over the years? What has Hollywood done with it? This half term we will focus on a on two films that can be understood as reflecting on the evolution of the "American Dream". We will focus our attention on the evolution of this guiding myth of American culture by critically watching and discussing two films that offer us a glimpse into America's changing self-conception. Along the way, we will explore the cinema as a powerful cultural medium that both reflects and re-shapes our collective imagination and the trajectory of America's shared cultural history. And we will strive to increase our collective cinematic literacy.

Course Objectives/Student Learning Outcomes. You will:
Develop a greater degree of cinematic literacy by studying the art, language and criticism of film;
Employ, in conversation and in writing, an extensive vocabulary of terms related to the study of film;
Develop ways to critically view, interpret, analyse, and write about the intersections between film and the American Dream;

Demonstrate a richer understanding of various writings and theoretical frameworks connected to these intersections.

The films to be studied will be:

American Beauty, Land of the Dead, Fight Club, Pursuit of Happiness

With clips beinf shown from a variety of films.

There will be some critical examination of films that promote the dream before we deconstruct those that serve to challenge and subvert it and represent the 'alienation' caused by this guiding ideological framework.

Pursuit of Happiness American Dream Link
http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=vO0BJMv58fc

What is the American Dream?

The term was first used by James Truslow Adams in his book The Epic of America which was written in 1931. He states: "The American Dream is "that dream of a land in which life should be better and richer and fuller for everyone, with opportunity for each according to ability or achievement. It is a difficult dream for the European upper classes to interpret adequately, and too many of us ourselves have grown weary and mistrustful of it. It is not a dream of motor cars and high wages merely, but a dream of social order in which each man and each woman shall be able to attain to the fullest stature of which they are innately capable, and be recognized by others for what they are, regardless of the fortuitous circumstances of birth or position."

In the United States’ Declaration of Independence, the founding fathers: "…held certain truths to be self-evident, that all Men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness." Could this sentiment be considered the foundation of the American Dream?

Were the immigrants who came to the United States looking for their bit of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, their Dream? And what did the desire of the veteran of World War II - to settle down, to have a home, a car and a family - tell us about this evolving Dream? Is the American Dream attainable by all Americans? Would Martin Luther King feel his Dream was attained? Did Malcolm X realize his Dream?

Some say, that the American Dream has become the pursuit of material prosperity - that people work more hours to get bigger cars, fancier homes, the fruits of prosperity for their families - but have less time to enjoy their prosperity. Others say that the American Dream is beyond the grasp of the working poor who must work two jobs to insure their family’s survival. Yet others look toward a new American Dream with less focus on financial gain and more emphasis on living a simple, fulfilling life.

Thomas Wolfe said, "…to every man, regardless of his birth, his shining, golden opportunity ….the right to live, to work, to be himself, and to become whatever thing his manhood and his vision can combine to make him."

http://www.renewamerica.us/columns/stone/021121