The pieces of popular culture that I chose to write about today are a 2018 film called Love, Simon and a 2013 film called The Help. On page 57 in The Essential Guide to Intercultural Communication, Jennifer Willis-Rivera uses a definition for the term “popular culture,” stating it as, “the range of media products, art forms, and artifacts disseminated broadly in American Society” (Laforse & Drake, 1981).
Love, Simon is a 2018 drama/ romance movie about a senior in high school that struggles with his sexual identity. This movie not only shows the struggles of being a closeted gay student in high school, but the overall challenges that he has to face in a modern-day high school setting. The intended audience for this movie is teenagers/ high
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I will be focusing on the perspective of Aibileen, and the other caretakers in the movie. The target audience for this movie is older people, especially women. It is apparent to me that this movie is not intended for the social identities that I hold because it focuses on the prejudice of black women during the civil rights movement. On page 33 in The Essential Guide to Intercultural Communication, Jennifer Willis-Rivera defines the term “prejudices” as, “beliefs or attitudes about a group of people, based on little or no evidence.” (Rivera, 33). During this era, women weren’t always granted the privilege of having the education they deserved, so most women didn’t go to school, and were caretakers for White families, as shown in the movie. The identities that intend to consume this movie are, age, specifically older generations, both people of color, as well as White people, and mostly women, as far as gender identities go. This movie represents low-medium culture, solely based around the fact that it takes place during the Civil Rights movement, and as the audience, you need a slight knowledge on what happened during that era to understand why black women were treated differently, and didn’t get equal opportunity as everyone else. The potential impacts of the messages on individuals and their identities is to feel a sense of empowerment among black women who see Aibileen standing up for herself in the movie, as she is being mistreated by the family she takes care of. Although I was young when I watched this movie, it still had an impact on me, regardless if it was meant for my social identities or not. I was still able to sympathize for Ailbileen due to the discrimination she had to face in the workplace. Consuming this popular culture broadened my knowledge of what happened during the Civil Rights