Research Paper On Dallas Buyers Club

Amanda Page

Final Movie Research

Summary

Dallas Buyers Club is an Oscar-winning movie released in 2013 that touches on several sensitive subjects across the globe. Dallas Buyers Club is about Ron Woodroof, an electrician/cowboy that is diagnosed with AIDS in 1985. Ron establishes the Dallas Buyers Club to smuggle unapproved pharmaceutical drugs into Texas. Having been denied AZT treatment, he supplies other drugs that seem more effective in alleviating his symptoms to fellow AIDS sufferers. Ron finds himself fighting the FDA in a long and patient battle. It is a biographical movie that highlights the struggle of AIDS treatment in the US back in the 1980’s. There are a variety of social issues that this movie touches on, like racism, prostitution,

Throughout history, people have used various substances to cause changes in the human body, to alleviate various sorts of pain. 60% of US adults worry about drug use and consider drug addiction a serious social problem in the United States (Pg 237). Pharmaceutical drug abuse aside, alcohol and cocaine are two drugs seen throughout the movie.

Alcohol is one of the most widely used drugs in the world. In the movie, Ron is drinking in nearly every scene. He takes his AZT trial pills (who he paid a hospital janitor to retrieve for him until they began locking the medicine away) with swigs of alcohol. He is seen drinking in the rodeo stand where he hallucinates a rodeo clown staring him down. Alcohol is seen throughout the entirety of the movie, albeit less towards the end. Many people today admit to drinking alcohol within the last 30 days. Alcohol can have short-term benefits, but can cause more harm than good when it’s benefits are abused. Today, teens and young adults involve themselves with alcohol. This is often due to peer pressure. Alcohol is easy to abuse and is not seen as a drug like heroin or

Movies are no longer made purely for entertainment. Filmmakers are becoming more and more drastic in trying to get their view across. Dallas Buyers Club had the audience hating Ron’s friends, and gave very little chance for any character but Ron or Rayon to have emotion. Some filmmakers use hidden messages to get their point across instead. This is often easier to take in as an audience and gets the individual thinking, instead of having a certain view forced upon them. The Lorax includes a hidden message geared more towards the parents of the children that view the movie. It hints on capitalism and critiques environmentalism. Prometheus, an adventure between scientists and android, has more going on than what meets the eye, hinting to Christianity and it’s beliefs. The majority of people watch movies to just as entertainment, but often times leave the theatre thinking about what exactly it was they were watching. I find that nowadays, filmmakers are taking bigger risks than in the past. They’re becoming bolder, and impressing a group’s beliefs onto their audiences. While more extreme cases are often semi-biographical, they are typical more violent. Dallas Buyers Club is an example of that. Fictional stories are also prone to violence and radical acts of social issues and violence, for example,