Social Stereotypes In The Film, October Sky

The movie October Sky does an outstanding job of conveying what life was like in the year 1957 and in doing this the audience gets a fairly clear insight into the ins and outs of the society back in that time period. The movie begins in October of 1957 just shortly after Soviet satellite, Sputnik I, was put into orbit. Seeing Sputnik zip across the sky of his home town Coalwood, main character Homer Hickam is inspired to build a model rocket. Homer brings together a group of friends, both old and new who join him on his quest to build a successful model rocket. Throughout the movie a multitude of societal standards are displayed, things such as the roles of males and females, social hierarchy as well as hiding poor conditions are all well displayed

In the town of Coalwood there were fairly obvious roles for males and females that were fairly well set in stone. For males their most likely role would be to work, whether it be in one of the shops of the town or in the coal mine like Homer’s father, with the latter of the two being the most common option as it paid better. As for the females, their role was primarily to stay at home taking care of the housework as well as taking care of children as Homer’s mother did in the movie. When the roles of the genders in the 1950’s are compared to those of today’s world, it is clear just how much things have changed in this regard, in some cases in this day and age men are the ones staying at home taking care of housework and children and women are the primary breadwinners of a household, whereas back in the time period that October Sky takes place in this would have been a practical impossibility. While the definitions of male and female roles in October Sky are quite clear for adults they were not limited to the adults at all, in fact these roles also exist for the children. As far as gender specific roles being displayed in children, boys are by far the best example. Boys in the time period of the movie are primarily expected to play a sport or at the very least be somewhat hard-working in a physical sense, so when a boy does not follow this

The system of social hierarchy is something that has existed for about as long as civilized society itself has, and in this time the factors that play into this system have also changed drastically. In the time period that the movie portrays the different levels include the highly popular who are primarily comprised mostly of those that society finds to be the best (ex: sports stars), but with this status these people also the ones who are most likely to tear people in the lower levels apart. The next level below the highly popular is the rather average people who are as most would expect, not too horrible at anything while also not excelling at much of anything which often leaves these people on a middle ground as far as social hierarchy goes, and a prime example in the movie of one of these fairly average people would be the main character Homer. Last and also least there are the nerds, the introverted outcasts of society who pride themselves primarily on intellect, and the lengths to which they go to achieve this intellect tends to make them seem strange to outsiders (like Quentin does in the movie), but in reality they are quite similar to those in the middle class of social hierarchy as far as communication goes. A scene that best displays these divides created by social hierarchy is one where Homer approaches Quentin, a nerd, to ask about rockets, when Homer sits down by Quentin the