The Magic In Fantasy Lives On
Written by Matheus Clorado.
The fantasy genre has established itself in the miscellany of genres that have endured for decades of Film History. Grown-ups and children from all over the world will likely be able to name at least one feature film that has touched their imagination and changed them forever. Considering the genre has such a large lifespan, it’s remarkable how more recent movies still share ideologies with their predecessors of the previous century. For instance, despite the sixty-two years between the release dates of Fleming’s The Wizard of Oz and Columbus’ Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone, it’s clear they both transcend the genre’s iconography to inspire life out of the status quo, at the same time they reflect their time’s hopes and fears.
Friedman argues in his book An Introduction to Film Genres that “more evolved fantasy films stretch the ordinary understanding of reality for a higher, more serious purpose: to encourage an expanded sense of the possibilities that are necessary if we are to avoid a clichéd and limited, ultimately hopeless attitude toward our lives”. (161) He also presents
Get Out: A Deconstruction of Hegemony in American Society
Paper by Amelia Morgan.
Many Americans believe that racism is an issue of the past. With the abolition of slavery, the Civil Rights Movement, and the more recent Black Lives Matter Movement, it is a common misconception that racism has been solved. Despite all of these highly impactful movements, racism is ingrained into society at a fundamental level. Something that has perpetuated institutionalized racism is hegemony. Hegemony is defined in America On Film as “the ongoing struggle to maintain the consent of the people to a system that governs them (and which may or may not oppress them in some ways)” (9). Hegemony is an aspect of institutionalized racism that is often overlooked due to the vague and sometimes undetectable nature of it. For the dominating group, white people, it often goes unsolved due to their inability to fully empathize with the struggles that people of color face in their day to day lives. Hegemony is embedded into America’s culture and institutions, and it needs to be deconstructed. In the 2017 film Get Out, Jordan Peele highlights the sinister impacts of hegemony through the story of a black man named
