Thomas Carter's Save The Last Dance

In Thomas Carter’s film Save the Last Dance, it serves as a modern adaption to William Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet. The main focus of the film revolved around the difference in race between the two star-crossed lovers, Sara and Derek. Sara came from a town that had a high white population while her new city was highly populated with African Americans. Throughout the film, the two lovers learned to intertwine their differing backgrounds, whether it was their race or their style of dance, to find harmony among the two. By the use of technical and symbolic codes, the film conveyed the message that people’s background does not determine who they are or who they can surround themselves with. The film opened up with Sara on the train and through a montage of her past, the audience learned she was on the train to go stay with her father because her mother died. The use of that montage was a technical code that the director purposefully included that way the film was able to start out ambiguous and not without a long winded introduction to Sara. As for Sara’s character, this montage shows how she had become closed off about this part of her life which became evident later in the film. Therefore, this montage served to show how Sara’s background lead how she became distant

Through the use of different colored clothing, the director showed the opposition of race in the high school. As well as the many technical codes that drew attention towards the scenes when the characters were realizing they could intermingle with differing races. Thomas Carter was able to depict the message that whether you are white or black or dance to hip hop or ballet, that you can all come together as one. After watching this film, one thing is for certain: you do not have to fall slave to the subjectivity around