Slumdog Millionaire and Ethnicity

The British Drama "Slumdog Millionaire" follows a young man as he competes on India's version of "Who Wants to be a Millionaire". Jamal (Dev Patel) is arrested and tortured by police when they suspect him of cheating during the show, this prompts Jamal to go through the journey of his life in flashbacks to show how he comes to know all of the answers.

The movie was filmed and set in India. This means the film needed to have certain things that captured the Indian culture and the ethnicity of the characters.
Before we move on to the analysis of the movie, lets first get a better understanding of the word ethnicity.
Ethnicity is a group of people of the same descent with a common and distinctive culture that share a heritage.
Within the movie there are signs of the Indian culture and the ethnic background of the characters.
The video below shows some of the flashback scenes from the movie:

These scenes show what life was like for Jamal and his brother, it shows some of their culture and in turn their ethnic background.
The implications of this movie is that it gives insight to people what a real Indian culture can look like. This movie was based off a book written about a true story, the movie was based in India, filmed in India, starred Indian actors, etc. This means that it wasn't a Western European adaptation of an Indian story, it was the real deal. This allows viewers to see the real insights of the culture and ethnicity of the characters. It also allows those of this ethnic decent to see themselves in the mainstream media.

Cinderella and Class Representation

Cinderella is a tale as old as time, and the 2015 reboot was even nominated for an Oscar for best costume design (lets be real, that dress was amazing). However, something that many people don't discuss when discussing Cinderella is the issue of class representation. While we have all heard of how the young 'peasant' caught the eye of the prince and left her life to become royal, not many of us have discovered the implications of the way race is presented in this movie.

In Cinderella, Cinderella is a beautiful orphaned girl under the care of her terrible step-mother and step sisters. She is forced to clean the home and live life as a peasant. This is until the night of the ball when she catches the eye of the prince and ends up leaving her life to become a princess.

This story and others like it leave young girls to believe that royals, or the rich can get them out of situations where they are poor. This may be where terms such as "gold digger" can come into play. Little girls can grow up believing that they need a rich man to get them out of their situations instead of believing in themselves to get out of their situations. This can become detrimental to young girls everywhere.

Argo and Media Frames

The Academy Award winning movie Argo captured the fight to bring home six Americans that were being held captive in Iran during the Iran Hostage Crisis (1979-1981). The movie is based off of Tony Mendez's book The Master of Disguise and the Wired article by Joshuah Bearman, "The Great Escape: How the CIA Used a Face Sci-Fi Click to Rescue Americans from Tehran". The movie was praised after it's 2012 release and was honored with seven Academy Award nominations, including a win for best picture.

While this movie was fantastic and covered historical events in a cinematic-ally interesting movie, it wasn't all accurate and included some framing in the way the movie was perceived.

Before we delve further into the implications of the framing in this movie, let us first discover what framing really is and how it is evident within this movie.

Framing is the selection of some aspects of a perceived reality and making them more salient in a communicating text. This means that a media context might make one piece of information more noticeable, meaningful, or memorable to an audience, otherwise known as salience.

In the movie Argo, the Canadian Embassy becomes a sort of safe house for escapees, but the movie downplayed the real amount that Canada played in helping the rescue of the Americans. The movies sets the framing to show that America was on it's own in getting them home. While this may seem insignificant in the entirety of the story, it plays a major part in how we will remember the history of this event and the way other countries were involved.

This clip shows the Canadian Embassy as a safe house.

The film also shows the escapees being turned away from the British and New Zealand Embassies.

This causes those that watch the film to have false recollections of this historical event, and may cause some to have harsher feelings towards the embassies that turned the escapees away, even though this wasn't historically accurate.


All extra information on the movie and historical events found at Wikipedia Argo Film.