Stereotypes In The Boy In The Striped Pajamas

Stereotypes in Film

Phoebe Kaplan

Ms. Prince

American Expeiernce

May 19, 2023

For the average person, watching a movie is usually something done for leisure and does not require as much concentration as other forms of consuming media, such as reading a book, for example. This accessibility of movies allows them to influence more people, regardless of whether they realize it. In all forms of media, there have been stereotypes of different people for centuries, which is why some stereotypes can be difficult to notice due to how engrained they are. One way that people can think more critically about the movies they watch is by working on the skill of media literacy. The term media literacy simply means being

Movies will often try to show the tragedies and horrors of real-world events. One such movie, The Boy in the Striped Pajamas, is about the Holocaust. Many schools use it to teach about the Holocaust; however, much of its content is inaccurate. The Boy in the Striped Pajamas is full of historical inaccuracies. Bruno, the nine-year-old German boy protagonist, has a dad who is a Nazi official yet is unaware of what Jewish people are and who Adolf Hitler is. There is a Jewish boy that Bruno meets, Shmuel, whom he sees behind a barbed wire fence in a concentration camp. In real life, it would have been required by law that Bruno be a member of the Hitler Youth and be taught anti-Semitic propaganda. Bruno’s character makes it seem as if the German civilians were just oblivious to the horrific events occurring around them, which is entirely false. There would have been nearly zero Germans who did not uphold Nazi ideals because the Nazi authorities got rid of any resistance. There is way less attention on Shmuel than Bruno, which inadvertently causes the audience watching to sympathize more with Bruno when really this should be a story about the actual victims here, Jewish people. Another historical inaccuracy is that Shmuel would could never form this friendship with Bruno since he was a child and would have likely been sent to a gas chamber. This film’s problematic depiction of the Holocaust reduces the horrors of concentration camps. A stereotype that is commonly portrayed in film is the Jewish villain who is often greedy. Mother Gothel from Tangled who has curly black hair and a hooked nose which is the stereotype of how Jewish people look, and is often used in caricatures of them and in The Bonfire of the Vanities the Jewish character Abraham Weissis power hungry. The stereotype surrounding Jewish people being