In my opinion, motivated representation is how films are stereotyping roles such as gender, ethnicity, religion, wealth, and age. In her videos she uses lots of evidence to help support her argument, bell hooks especially uses evidence from older movies, for example movies making fun of feminist and showing white supremacy. She showed one clip of a woman just openly selling herself to a man, which makes women look bad and that they are just an object. This can not only harm women's own beliefs about themselves, but as well as what men think about women. It also, damages the work women have done during that time period, trying to break these awful stereotypes. Another movie clip that grabbed my attention was in part 1 of her speech, which was called Thieves and featured a two main characters, one that was white and another that was African American. However, in the film the black actor played as the thief and when bell hooks tried to ask the director why he choose to make the character black, when in the original script it showed no evidence that the thief had to be a certain ethnicity. The director could not give her answer, not because he had no answer, but because he didn't want to say the true reason behind the character choice.
As our society continues to grow and make changes, I feel like production companies are also trying to make changes as well. As an older sister, I have spent many summers and snow days baby sitting and the best distraction was a movie, so as you could imagine I have watched plenty of kids movies. One that stood out to me the most when choosing a movie to critique was the movie Wonder which was originally based on a book. It is about a boy name Auggie who has Treacher Collins syndrome which is a condition that causes facial deformities. This causes Auggie to not want to go to public school for fear that kids will make fun of him and he won't have any friends. Now in the movie there is of course the typical mean bully, who picks on Auggie and make him feel bad about his condition and not want to go back to school. As well as popular girls and other stereotypes. However, this movie in my opinion teaches children a very good lesson about how they should view children who may look different then them. Not only that, it also helps kids who have deformities and make them feel like they are not alone.
Adiche's story is very similar to what bell hooks discuses in her video, they both deal with stereotypes and how after seeing the same image or environment multiple times, you start to believe it. Which is why bell hook stress how these "motivated representations" are harmful to its viewers. We need to break away from constantly showing people the same stereotypes in movies or shows, because its starting to shape people and children into thinking that this is normal and that it is okay. Production companies instead should be challenging gender, race, religion, and wealth stereotypes in order to stop their audience from believing that it is true.
Adiche's story is very similar to what bell hooks discuses in her video, they both deal with stereotypes and how after seeing the same image or environment multiple times, you start to believe it. Which is why bell hook stress how these "motivated representations" are harmful to its viewers. We need to break away from constantly showing people the same stereotypes in movies or shows, because its starting to shape people and children into thinking that this is normal and that it is okay. Production companies instead should be challenging gender, race, religion, and wealth stereotypes in order to stop their audience from believing that it is true.
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