Movie: Brown Sugar

Writing Assignment: Intimacy in Fictional Relationships

The purpose of this assignment is to evaluate intimate couple relationships in your film of choice.  You will write on the film “Brown Sugar”.   You will be required to apply concepts, theories, and terminology from the textbook Intimate Relationships to conduct your evaluation.

Throughout this course, we will be thinking about the dynamics of intimate relationships, and learning what scientific research on intimate relationships has to teach us.  But science is not the only way to learn truths about relationships.  Although the science of relationships is relatively new, intimacy has been a theme in fiction for centuries.  The pioneering marital researcher Neil Jacobson suggested that scientific research has yet to catch up to the wisdom about relationships contained in the best fiction.

For this writing assignment, I am asking you to put Jacobson’s claim to the test.  The goal of the assignment is to apply what we have been learning in this course toward understanding a specific relationship as described in one of the films shown in class.   All of these films are great, and I encourage you to enjoy the entire collection. 

Each of these films describes an intimate relationship, sometimes more than one.  Your assignment is to show what you have learned so far by applying the material of this course toward understanding a relationship in one of these films.  Once you have chosen one of these films to write about, you should include the title of the movie at the top of the first page of your paper, under your name and student ID number.  Then please use the exact four headings given below as the headings in your paper in the order they are given.

I.  Description:  [Provide the names of the two people in the relationship you will be writing about].  In one or two paragraphs, show that you have read the story by describing the relationship you are going to be writing about.  Do not describe the plot of the story!  Instead, use details of the story to tell us about the relationship at the heart of it.  You might want to mention the type of relationship (Married?  Dating), the level of commitment, whether the partners are satisfied or not, the qualities of the partners and their interactions.  Use details from the film, but do not plagiarize:  if you take words from the movie, put quotes around them. 

II. What Brings or Keeps This Couple Together?  In this section of the paper, you are being asked to draw from theories we have studied in this course to identify and discuss the forces that bring or keep this couple together or bring the partners closer.  In even the worst relationships, there must be some attractive forces, or else the relationship would not exist.  What are those forces for this couple?  Identify as many as you can, referring to details in the story and keeping in mind the specific theoretical perspectives described in Chapter 3 of the textbook. You will be graded on:  1) how well you have integrated the material from the textbook and the story into your answer, 2) how completely and thoroughly you have answered the question. 

III. What Pushes These Two People Apart?  This section is the flip side of the previous section.  Here you are being asked to analyze the forces that might make intimacy difficult for the couple and act to push the two partners apart.  Again, the goal is to show what you know from the course, so you should use details from the story and theories from the textbook to identify as many forces as you can.  The grading criteria are the same here as for the previous section.  

IV. Predicting The Future.  Given what you know about relationships and about the couple described in the story, what do you think the future might hold for this couple?  What would have to happen for the relationship to improve or succeed?  Make a prediction, and justify it with details from the story and from the textbook.  

This is not a typical APA paper, in that you will not be required to include an APA References page or in-text citations.  However, you will be required to submit your paper in APA format. This essay will be 5 full pages in length- no more, no less, or points will be deducted.

APA required formatting for the entire document, including Title Page:

· One APA Title Page, (stapled to the top of evaluation).

· 12 point font

· Double-spaced

· Times New Roman

· 1 inch margins on all four sides

**Keep in mind NOT to plagiarize any other work.  If your paper has been plagiarized, you will receive a zero on the assignment. If you are in doubt or are uncertain what plagiarism might be, be click on this link for a review:  http://www.plagiarism.org/plagiarism-101/prevention/