Post by Boz on Nov 13, 2006 15:26:00 GMT
In the film Our Song, directed by Jim McKay, we see a somewhat typical coming of age story set against a modern urban backdrop, putting a new spin on some age old techniques of the genre and providing insight into a world that is unseen to many. The film tells the story of three teenage girls, Lanisha, Joyce, and Maria, all minorities, in their first year of high school in New York City. Their lives are surrounded by relative poverty, each living in modest apartments with their economically hampered families, sometimes including the absence of a parent.
The pressures of the difficult situations the girls face are exemplified in one specific scene in which the character Maria goes to a pregnancy clinic and has a talk with a female doctor. This scene and the dialogue contained within it serve to explain the main theme of the entire film by having the doctor question Maria about the conflicts between her thoughts of her own life, and her thoughts of another's life, in this case, her prospective child. Maria feels no clear calling to any specific profession or any definite goals, something that is present at least to some degree in all of the girls. This lack of initiative makes the girls eager to find purpose and meaning in their life through the birth of a child, something that two of our three main characters find themselves dealing with. This possession of a baby somehow seems to give their life purpose and direction in their minds, despite the fact that opposite is most likely true. We are introduced to one character, a friend of the girls, who already has a baby and we see that she is struggling financially even more than the girls themselves, and is frustrated with her situation. Despite these facts, the girls still seem to look up to her and idolize her to some extent, talking about how cute they think her baby is. They seem to think little of the long term repercussions of having a child at such a young age.
In the scene directly before Maria's conversation with the doctor, we see Lanisha talk with her mother about a previous time that she became pregnant and apparently had an abortion. This scene provides for a direct verbalization of the aforementioned feelings of admiration for girls who already have babies, as Lanisha expresses her feelings that if she were to hypothetically become pregnant again, she might want to keep the child. A key thing to understand about the characters and their environment in this film is the idea of negative examples. The girls' own parents, despite the fact that they've instilled an increased sense of the importance of education in their children, seem to be without education themselves. This trend of leading by negative example, wherein one generation teaches the other by hypothetically saying "don't do what I did," shows the somewhat false pretenses on which most of these girls' positive aspirations are based.
There is another interesting scene in which the three girls lay in a bedroom at night and talk amongst themselves, describing strange thoughts and feelings that they sometimes have. Maria talks about hearing a car's brakes screeching when she is laying in bed at night, and how she waits to hear either silence or a crash of some sort. She then goes on to wonder aloud if this crash might even bring about the destruction of her building. These statements provide some sort of metaphor for not only Maria, but all of the girls' sense of confusion and perhaps boredom with their lives. This also goes back to the idea that having a baby is somewhat attractive to them, as it brings about something new and temporarily exciting to them, but again, they are thinking little of the repercussions.
Lanisha then goes on to describe a strange thought of her own, where she is walking through the mall and she is suddenly killed by a random gunman. She actually describes such an event as something that would give her a sense of relief and happiness, as long as she was in a good mood on the day that she died. This example serves to describe Lanisha's feelings of foreboding towards the future, her fear at the uncertainty of it all, and how a sudden release from all of these burdens might please her.
The pressures of the difficult situations the girls face are exemplified in one specific scene in which the character Maria goes to a pregnancy clinic and has a talk with a female doctor. This scene and the dialogue contained within it serve to explain the main theme of the entire film by having the doctor question Maria about the conflicts between her thoughts of her own life, and her thoughts of another's life, in this case, her prospective child. Maria feels no clear calling to any specific profession or any definite goals, something that is present at least to some degree in all of the girls. This lack of initiative makes the girls eager to find purpose and meaning in their life through the birth of a child, something that two of our three main characters find themselves dealing with. This possession of a baby somehow seems to give their life purpose and direction in their minds, despite the fact that opposite is most likely true. We are introduced to one character, a friend of the girls, who already has a baby and we see that she is struggling financially even more than the girls themselves, and is frustrated with her situation. Despite these facts, the girls still seem to look up to her and idolize her to some extent, talking about how cute they think her baby is. They seem to think little of the long term repercussions of having a child at such a young age.
In the scene directly before Maria's conversation with the doctor, we see Lanisha talk with her mother about a previous time that she became pregnant and apparently had an abortion. This scene provides for a direct verbalization of the aforementioned feelings of admiration for girls who already have babies, as Lanisha expresses her feelings that if she were to hypothetically become pregnant again, she might want to keep the child. A key thing to understand about the characters and their environment in this film is the idea of negative examples. The girls' own parents, despite the fact that they've instilled an increased sense of the importance of education in their children, seem to be without education themselves. This trend of leading by negative example, wherein one generation teaches the other by hypothetically saying "don't do what I did," shows the somewhat false pretenses on which most of these girls' positive aspirations are based.
There is another interesting scene in which the three girls lay in a bedroom at night and talk amongst themselves, describing strange thoughts and feelings that they sometimes have. Maria talks about hearing a car's brakes screeching when she is laying in bed at night, and how she waits to hear either silence or a crash of some sort. She then goes on to wonder aloud if this crash might even bring about the destruction of her building. These statements provide some sort of metaphor for not only Maria, but all of the girls' sense of confusion and perhaps boredom with their lives. This also goes back to the idea that having a baby is somewhat attractive to them, as it brings about something new and temporarily exciting to them, but again, they are thinking little of the repercussions.
Lanisha then goes on to describe a strange thought of her own, where she is walking through the mall and she is suddenly killed by a random gunman. She actually describes such an event as something that would give her a sense of relief and happiness, as long as she was in a good mood on the day that she died. This example serves to describe Lanisha's feelings of foreboding towards the future, her fear at the uncertainty of it all, and how a sudden release from all of these burdens might please her.