Fifth Blog Post

My source is called “Disney’s modern heroine Pocahontas: revealing age-old gender stereotypes and role discontinuity under a facade of liberation”. This article was written by Lauren Dundes, in the Social Science Journal. This article is focused on one specific Disney Princess Pocahontas. In the article Lauren Dundes disputes the idea that Pocahontas was the start of a new generation of Disney princess.  That Pocahontas would break the race barrier, and gender stereotypes concerning Disney princess.  While Pocahontas does do these things, by being an independent princess. She makes a lot of her own decisions herself, but at the same time is still restricted by the same gender issues as the previous Disney princesses. Pocahontas is seen as Native American “savage” that needs to be “saved” and brought to the cultured world by John Smith. The article concludes that while Pocahontas does not act like the typical Disney Princess, and is more liberated than her predecessors she still is not a free woman. She still adheres to some of the previous Disney Princess bonds.  I feel like this source is very useful to my essay. This is because the essay directly, contributes to my essay question of if Disney princess movies are contributing to or harming their young viewers’ self-esteems, and self-views. This source helped me with the structure of my essay immensely. This is because it helped me figure out what I wanted to write my essay on. Before reading this article, I just had the broad topic of Disney princesses and the gender stereotypes that the princess movies contain.

Fourth Blogpost

My source is called “Gender Role Portrayal and the Disney Princesses”. This title may seem a little off, because my Research paper is supposed to be focused on James Cameron’s melodramatic film “Titanic”. However, while doing my research I came across this article, “Gender Role Portrayal and the Disney Princesses”, and decided to focus my paper on how female characters are portrayed in Disney movies. The main argument of this article is how male and female characters are portrayed in the various Disney princess films. The article uses various experiments, and outside information to compare and contrast the different Disney princesses, with their male counterparts. The “male” and “female” traits are categorized, and then the prince and princesses are each matched with whatever traits they exhibit in the films. This experiment helps support how Disney makes all of its’ princesses have “womanly” traits, and do things that a typical woman, according to Disney, would.  It also explains how the movies are also biased towards females. For example, according to the article Disney princess films are racist and sexualize the princesses with most of them appearing with, “extremely pale skin tones, small waists, delicate limbs, and full breasts”. A study was done the counted the number of female and male characteristics that males and females of each movie had. The male characters 495 female characteristics, while the females had more than twice that number with 1068. This source was very helpful to me, because it gave me a lot of information on how females are portrayed unfairly in Disney films.

Third Blogpost

I plan to write my research paper on the extremely melodramatic movie Titanic. I will be choosing this topic for a variety of reasons, the most important being it’s my favorite movie of all time. I saw the film for the first time when I was about 10 years old with my mother, and have seen it more times than I can even think about counting. Titanic is also a great topic for this research paper because it is the definition of melodramatic. It has “star-crossed” lovers who are from opposite backgrounds. The woman already has the person that she is supposed to be with, who just so happens to abuse her adding to the drama. Music is added throughout the film, to intensify emotions that are already intense. Then to add to all of the tension that is present already, it’s all set on the RMS Titanic which everyone knows is going to be a disastrous voyage.  

Second Blog Post

Peter Brooks in the Melodramatic Imagination talks about something he calls the "moral occult". On page 5 of the book Brooks says "We might say that the center of interest and the scene of underlying drama reside within the 'moral occult'." Brooks states that the whole point of a melodrama is finding this "moral occult". What makes the melodrama interesting is that we know things that others in the book, movie, play etc. don't know. So we are waiting in anticipation in seeing what the other characters reactions are to this "secret" that we the audience are aware of. This unknown is what is in the moral occult. An example of a secret in a melodramatic piece is in the 1945 film Leave Her to Heaven. In this movie Ellen Berent, who is mentally unstable, falls for writer Richard Harland because he reminds of her father; who she had an obsession with. The two get married and Ellen slowly makes sure that his attention and love can only be focused on her. She does this by first killing his brother. Then later on she goes so far as to kill their unborn child when she pushes herself down the stairs. What makes the movie interesting besides the fact that Ellen is a nutcase, is the anticipation of seeing how Richard and the others will react when they uncover the things that Ellen has done. These actions being something already known by the audience. This is how the moral occult works and is evident in a melodramatic piece.

All that Heaven Allows

All that Heaven Allows was an okay movie in my opinion. I would give it 3 out of 5 stars. The movies was melodramatic in the way that the music was used. In the sweet happy scenes with Ron and Carrie together nice, romantic music played. While in other scenes like when Carrie rejected him sad, dramatic movies played. It also included the dramatic shift of emotions typical to a melodrama. For example after the aforementioned scene where Carrier rejected Ron, it was happy again once Ron consoled her when she was said, happy music also accompanied this. What, I didn't really like about the movie was nothing really happened. It wasn't a particularly interesting film until the "sad or scary" moments. There were only two of these interesting bits in my opinion. One was when it seemed like Howard was going to take advantage of Carrie at Sarah Warren's party. Another moment was when it seemed like Ron died in an accident, and that Carrie who had finally came to the conclusion that she was going to be with Ron, was not going to be able to tell him that she loved him. I really only ended up liking the movie because of the way that it ended. I like happy or "happy-ish" endings and All that Heaven Allows finished on sort of happy a note. Carrie ended up getting Ron, albeit a bit injured, but she got him nonetheless. So I was happy with that ending.

Melodrama Examples

Example 1

Source:tvropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/Melodrama

Quentin Tarantino talking about Douglas Sirk melodramas ,"They (young actors) see TV movies. They see Lifetime movies. They think that's melodrama. They don't know the true fun of ever-escalating emotions building up to a volcanic pitch. 

Example 2

Source:criterion.com/explore/154-melodrama

Says that melodrama is used to invoke intense feelings. It uses themes such as betrayal; "puts its readers through emotional wringer."