Rhi's Response Essay Number Three

This is a VERY rough draft.
Black Swan is a film by  Darren Aronofsky. Released in late 2010, it is a beautiful and dark movie about a young ballerina and her struggle with a demanding career, haunting mental illness and  ghastly relationships. The target audience appears to be women of every age, though the content of the film would probably be enjoyed by a younger audience.
Beliefs : This film puts a lot of emphasis on Nina ( main character) needing to "loosen up", this reflects the writer/director's similar belief in not letting one's career take over their lives, that scenario being illustrated to an extreme in this movie
Values: This film reflects the societal value on beauty and fame, most easily identified by Natalie Portman and Winona Ryder's character's relationship in this movie. Winona's character was the star ballerina at Nina's dance studio before her, and along with Nina's vivid and violent hallucinations about Winona's character, the characters also fight in person, Winona attacking Natalie's beauty and status, explaining how it is fleeting, and that she too will be 'washed up' like her one day.
Attitudes: This girl Nina is technically very successful. She is a prima ballerina at a well established dance school in new york. This film, is mostly about how that "success" has (literally and not) torn her apart. This is a somewhat unique attitude, in that in most films, the success of the main character is the goal, not the problem.
This film clearly challenges the status quo. If it weren't, drugs, sex and beauty would be depicted very differently. This film promotes positive values because it takes traits commonly thought of as positive (like beauty and excellence), and rips down the smoke and mirrors around those ideas to reveal not so positive inner workings of owning those nearly unattainable labels. This film tells me that my culture is quite dynamic, and that as one ideal comes into place, ideas that oppose it follow and are some are as popular as the original.

"The Rise of Popular Culture: A Historiographical Sketch" by LeRoy Ashby is a very informative article. I found it to be a little dense, but it had a lot of useful information about many different intellectuals who studied popular culture. A large portion of the information that is presented in the article expresses how popular culture is a power structure and that there is a balance between people choosing to consume and people choosing what to consume. The past few weeks in this class has made me more aware of that power structure, particularly the more positive aspects of it. Despite being manipulated into consuming, we can manipulate what we consume. This means that we can be taught ideologies by pop culture, then unlearn those same ideologies from those same sources they originated from. Everyone in a culture is affected by it's pop culture, the more we understand, expose and decipher it, the more prominent the positive aspects will be.