Youth in College

Today in class we watched a silent film called The Freshman. It's about a young boy who is about to leave from college and he wants to be popular. He wants to have friends swarming him at all times. He wants to feel important. Harold has the desire to fit in and be popular just like Cady from Mean Girls. He desires the affections of his peers but doesn’t really know how to get there. Also, when he is at college, he thinks everyone likes him which shows false consensus. He might think that everyone really likes him and what he does but as a matter of fact, he’s really the clown that everyone laughs at. He gets his ideas of popularity from a movie that he has just seen. As Adorno says, “film [is the] central sector of the culture industry” (33). Movies influence people’s perception of how things will be. For instance, the film Harold sees makes him think that if he is on the football team and acts like the main character, he will be instantly popular. However, that’s not really how things work. On a different note, I noticed the youthful clothing is a lot different than what we see nowadays. In The Freshman the girls are more proper—long dresses, stockings, and little make-up. Our culture has clearly changed. In Mean Girls the popular girls wear short skirts, high heels, and more makeup. But where did these ideas come from? How did it change? 
In the two articles from today, both autobiographies acknowledge that movies have affected them, it’s just the way in which they are affect differs. In “My Movie Autobiography” the speaker states that she “wanted to be like Peter Pan” just because of the movie she watched. The speaker feels like she is a part of the shows she sees. For instance, when she is out on a Friday night, she sees a show about “beautiful women” and feels like them until she gets home and looks in the mirror and reality stares right back at her (“My Movie Autobiography”). In the other article, the speaker feels the same in a sense, but the shows give him more of a thrill after a gruesome scene with a machine gun (“The Effects the Movies Have Had on Me”). I find it interesting that the two speakers seem to vary in how they are affected. One lives in a false world until confronted by reality, while the other can hold onto images for a long as he needs (“The Effects the Movies Have Had on Me”). One thing that I found really interesting is when the speaker in “The Effects the Movies Have Had on Me” talks about how criminals can get their ideas from movies. Honestly it totally makes sense. That’s why some people say that young children shouldn’t play video games that take place in a war or watch movies with strippers or crime in them. Because of their youth, they can be swayed to think some things are good while others are not. If that is what they grow up on, it becomes their culture, it becomes what they revolve around.