Individual in Society
4-53-02
Film: The Mirror Reflection of Society
�When people told themselves their past with stories, explained their present with stories, foretold the future with stories, the best place by the fire was kept for the storyteller.� - John Hurt, Jim Henson�s The Storyteller
I can remember sitting around the campfire at my old Boy Scout camp and listening to the stories that my father would tell my troop and I. These where the stories that his father told him and now I am telling the stories to my troop. We all have memories of hearing ghost stories or urban legends at one time or another. What these stories bring to us, as a society is a brief image of who and what we are as a people and as a community. As we grow older we dismiss these urban legends and ghost stories as fiction, and don�t think of them often again unless we are telling the stories to another generation of listeners.
Every time the story is told it changes at the decision or faulty memory of the teller to change the story to fit the terms of that time and society. One example of this is with the children�s nursery rhyme �Ring Around the Rosie�. I was raised to believe that this poem was an incantation used to ward off the effects of the Bubonic Plague that struck Europe in the 14th and then again in the 17th centuries. �Ring around the rosie� was a description of the symptoms: Rose colored sores would form around the cheeks, soon followed with rings around the rose sores. �Pockets full of posies� described the Posies carried by the infected as a potential cure of the disease and it would also cover the smell of the dead. �Ashes Ashes� indicated the biblical works Ashes to ashes dust to dust, while �We all fall down� meant Death.
If we change the form of the story to meet one of today�s most popular forms of story telling we will find that the evolutionary process that ties lore and society together stays the same. The cinema is today�s campfire, the theater it�s benches, and the film is the storyteller.
The focus of this paper is primarily on the art and social results of the story telling form of the cinema. Film is, in the timeline of history a new invention, but its evolution has moved faster than any other form of media with the exceptions of music and television. Let�s take for example the old classic film The Land Before Time. This animated film by Don Bluth and produced by George Lucas and Steven Spielberg, was produced in the year 1988. The story moves with the character of Littlefoot who is a brachiosaur born to a loving family and is content until the climates change and food becomes scarce. Soon after a massive earthquake Littlefoot is trying to find the �Great Valley� in hopes of finding his grand parents. In the adventure Littlefoot looses his mother to death, and meets new friends with whom he could not survive with out. This is a coming of age story with friendship in hopes of a better place while being hunted by a ferocious tyrannosaurus rex.
In the year 2000 Disney produced the film Dinosaur. This film follows the adventures of an iguanodon named Aladar who is raised by a family of lemurs. They formed a happy family until a comet collided with the earth and destroyed the island that Aladar and his family called home. Now in a new world with no food and no water Aladar and his family join a herd of mixed dinosaurs where they befriend a brachiosaur, triceratops, along with other species of dinosaurs. Once they become separated from the herd they must learn to depend on each other to survive. Dangers jump at them at every intersection of possible opportunities. With the cave-ins, tyrannosaurs and hunger threatening their lives they move on in hopes of finding the land of lush food and plenty full water.
Both of these films have much in common. First and most obvious they are about English speaking dinosaurs. Second in both stories there is a reoccurring theme of friendship. Thirdly the plots are similar in the fact that the mail characters where happy in their world and family until a cataclysmic event threatened their lives. Most time in both movies is spent with the characters looking for their version of Eden. This is where most of the similarities end.
Another difference in the films is in the family structural forms. In The Land Before Time, Littlefoots parental figures where the same species as he is, while in Dinosaur Aladar is raised by a much different and smaller species. Even though these families are different, they both seem happy in the world of the film. These differences in film represent the difference of the time periods the films where created in. In the year 2000 recognition that there was no ideal family was already widely accepted. Adoption of mixed race family and cultures was and still is increasing, where as only 11 years earlier this adoption was still new in being adopted. This is a classic example of socialization. Our culture (United States of America) is still a large melting pot even though many racial differences still hold true, and in many forms, anti racism campaigns have instead become competitions for the ultimate minority. (I am not bitter.) Mixed families are inevitable.
One might never think that two films about dinosaurs can be taken in a political sense, however both of these films can be viewed as propaganda. Race is called into question from two different perspectives. Littlefoot is a child and does not know the difference between the races. Aladar is old enough to know the differences and even calls his own race into question. In The Land Before Time there is a greater stress on the power of friendship than on the unity of the races. In Dinosaur there is a greater stress on the unity of the races by each character playing an important role in making their way to the Promised Land and learning to live with each other. Another statement comes from the defeat of the tyrannosaur in both of the movies. The races gather together in order to destroy the thing that hunts and tries to kill them. With the destruction of tyranny in their small worlds the races go into the peaceful land to live happily ever after. These themes are present in American culture and popular dogma. �All men are created equal�, �One nation under God�, and � United we stand� are just a few examples.