Popular Entertainment Venues Family Obligations Are Often

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Family obligations are often at the heart of individual drive and guilt. They can drive a person to succeed and they can drive a person to do things that go against their very nature. In the film Alice Adams, the play Buried Child and the television series Everybody Loves Raymond the concepts of family obligation are the underlying motive to plot and action. The thing that is the same about these three programs on the thought of family obligation is that all of the characters do things for each other in the name of family obligation that they really don't believe to be the best thing for the individual they are trying to help.

In Alice Adams, Alice's not so glamorous family must make attempts to put on a show for her when she tries to improve her social status, not because they think there is a real need for her to become more than she is or because they understand her desire to but because Alice believes it will make her happy and her family wants her to be happy. The challenge of upward mobility is especially great in the classes that are being discussed here because the risk of personal degradation and humiliation is great, yet out of obligation to their daughter Alice's parents still make attempts to help their daughter win her place in the upper middle class of their small town.

In Buried Child the difficulty of family obligations result in the downward evolution of the entire family group. Each individual is in some way destroyed by the difficult secret they hide about the secret birth and death of a child born to Halie by a man other than her husband. When Dodge (Halie's Husband) drowns the child and buries it in the back yard, the whole family is left with the burden of hiding the secret of the family, even though they watch their own demise as a result. The land and their individual sanity climb steadily down from this point all because they individually chose to allow their family obligations to dictate their choices.

In Everybody Loves Raymond and Debra's relationship and marriage is often threatened by the relationship that Raymond has with his family. This is especially true of his relationship with his mother, a woman who's expectations are often much different than reality. In everybody loves Raymond Debra must find countless ways to keep herself and her marriage protected from the meddling of Raymond's mother, Maria. Raymond on the other hand is often left wondering what is so bad about the situation as he grovels back favor from Maria. Raymond knows that if he just didn't listen to his family half of the time his marriage with Debra would be stronger but he seems unable to control it and is often shrugging as if he has no control over the situation.

Alice Adams, Buried Child and Everybody Loves Raymond are examples of the theme of drama on the one case and humor in the other that exists in families and family interaction. Family obligations are often a theme of entertainment because both they are inherent and because everyone can commiserate with the reality of the difficulty people face when they try to meet the obligations of their family ties.

Social interactions often seem to be the defining addition to character of any kind. The more or the less of the ability to interact with people or situations that you have never encountered is often a factor that makes someone seem strong or weak. Being flexible and allowing unknowns to make you as better person is crucial to personal development. In the film Matewan, the play Angels in America and the television series The Wonder Years the changes that occur with the characters are largely positive and due to growth by social exposure.

In Matewan the intercultural conglomerations between the Immigrant Italians, the local whites and the immigrant blacks from the Deep South makes social conditions challenging. When they have to learn to work together to get their demands met there are many tensions related to racial differences and simply lack of personal exposure to any sort of multicultural understanding. Each individual is changed by their personal exposure to the different groups and almost across the board each one learns to see more similarities and builds stronger personal respect for the others.

In Angels in America the extreme social situations that engulf a group of individuals surrounding terminal illness can be seen as the main theme for change. Through the play many people face the differences of their own personal lives vs. The lives of people who are both losing loved ones through the AIDS epidemic and losing themselves. Probably the most startling change would be the Mormon women Hannah who intervenes in her daughters marriage, to try to help her put it back together and yet faces a whole set of social circumstances otherwise foreign to her. The change in her is apparent when she realizes that her opinions about AIDS are only partly true and that all of the trappings of terminal illness are universal regardless of the reality by which a person gets the disease.

In The Wonder Years the whole point of the plot is the ways that strange or different social situations alter the main character, Kevin and make him into a mature adult. Though it often seems that the person who needs the most social shock is his father. Kevin's maturity is based on the unending set of social challenges he faces through his relatively small social circle. Everything from dating for the first time to facing the realities of how the Vietnam War changes the landscape of the country are used as tools of exposure, and therefore change and maturity for Kevin and his group of friends.

Matewan, Angels in America and The Wonder Years are all examples of different takes on the theme of personal development. In each very different situation the main characters must face social situations that are new and foreign in an attempt to gain more personal control and understand their world better. Concerns and problems that face us all can be seen reflected in these three media.

Often what a person chooses as leisure activity can reveal who they are and who they wish to be in their world. When some one feels like they want to become a part of another world they go see a movie or simply go out onto the sidewalk and watch other people's lives pass by. In the silent film City Lights, the television series Seinfeld and the television series Sex in the City this is true of all the characters, they all want to be a bigger part of the whole and they all want more fulfilling personal lives.

In City Lights, Chaplin already feels like an outsider and at the same time he wishes to be a part of the world that he has been rejected from, so his leisure is spent wandering, seemingly aimlessly about the city looking for interactions that he can have with people more accepted in the main stream. He looks in shop windows and pretends to be important, he wishes for the real love of the blind girl even though he knows she thinks he is someone else entirely. All of these things are done with Chaplin's signature nonchalance, the quick dancing step as he wanders around on the fringes of real life both realizing he is on the outside and pretending he is not.

In Seinfeld the characters of often spend time going to movies and interacting with each other as if they are the characters of those movies. They dissect situations in their lives as if they are of the utmost importance even though in the end they are not. Leisure activity in Seinfeld often consists of simply sitting around talking about things that have happened in their lives independent of one another. They all seem to want to find universal answers about life through each other's daily experiences, even though they never seem to acknowledge that just sitting around talking about it will probably never change anything.

In Sex and the City, the characters also spend a lot of time wandering around looking at the world and hoping it becomes something different. The characters can often be found sitting with each other in a restaurant and talking about the things in their lives they both like and regret. The regret of their longing to be different either like each other or like someone else they admire is the theme almost everyday. They are all single and it seems that their greatest wishes revolve around the leisure activities that must be involved in changing that very fact, clubbing and restaurant going are all mainstays in their task, yet it seems they spend more time meeting people away from each other because when they are together they are inside their own little world.

How people spend their leisure time is something akin to how the inside of their medicine cabinet looks, it can be a tell tale way to understand who they really are. In these three works, City Lights, Seinfeld and Sex and the City the characters spend their leisure time trying to feel that they belong to a position that they aspire to. In City Lights Chaplin wishes to be a man worthy of the love of the blind girl. In Seinfeld the characters all sit around lamenting on very simple questions of life that make life a mystery, hoping they will find the hard and true answers. In Sex and the City they all sit around wishing they were not single and hoping their actions will bring them to their dreams of family and happiness.

Understanding yourself does not always come easy and often times it is even less likely that the people around you will understand you either. Sometimes the only way to stay true to one's self is through decisions that do not meet other's expectations. The principal characters in the three works, the film The Best Man, the film Breaking Away and the film Getting Out all must make critical decisions that are seen as against the grain in an attempt to stay true to themselves.

In The Best Man the title becomes a play on words when Russell chooses no to participate in the deceptive game that he would need to win in order to receive an endorsement for his campaign to run for president. He stands by his own beliefs and does not win the game. In making that decision, though he does prove himself to be the better man he still loses his shot at putting his personal integrity to work as the president. This decision goes against the accepted style that has become the way to get ahead in Washington, in any race.

Breaking Away is not just another coming of age story. Dave challenges his blue-collar upbringing by living a fantasy, daily. He spends the most of his first year out of high school challenging what other people think he should be doing. His father thinks he should be trying to get a sensible blue-collar job and settling down into what he thinks will be the fate of his life. He on the other hand knows what he is good at and wants to keep it up even if it is futile. The expression of his personality with the pseudo Italian accent, he aspires to street race his bicycle and admires the Italian racing team. The challenge of racing the snobby upper class college kids gives him the affirmation he needs to stay happy, either as a racer or not.

In Getting Out Arlie is challenged by early poor decisions and associations with the wrong sorts of people. When she makes it through her sentence and has to search for her son, who she delivered in prison and was put in foster care by her mother without her consent, she is challenged to both not meet their low expectations and to stay straight, despite the challenges. In doing this she also has to try to stay away from another poorly chosen relationship even if that relationship could help her keep afloat and have a better chance at providing a stable home for her son when she finds him. It seems that her mother above all does not believe that she is capable of hold her own the way she does and those are the standards she meets.

Each principal character in these three films The Best Man, Breaking Away and Getting Out is trying to live out a dream of who they think the should be and in the process are trying to roughly disregard what is expected of them. Each tries to progress their plans more or less in denial of what everyone else seems to think is their reality.

Some of the funniest and most endearing comedies have social and political undercurrents that the main characters are not even aware exist. The joke is often in the fact that they are clueless about the impact they have on the world around them. Three works where this is the case are the film State of the Union, the animated television series The Simpsons, and the animated television series Southpark. While the characters are running around facing their own personal and selfish cares they are impacting their world with either a complete lack of action or with a complete unknowledgeable action that negatively impacts their world.