• Prompt: Write roughly one paragraph in response to the following questions.
  • What Arab/Muslim stereotypes are invoked? List them specifically. Are they repeated or resisted, or both? Cite specific scenes.
  • Is the show Orientalist? Is it not? Both? Explain how.
  • How does the show present Islamophobia as a bad thing, criticize it?
  • How does the show repeat Islamophobia?
  • How does the show offer a “simplified complex representation?” Or is it one?
    • Fake countries, vilifying Islamophobic characters, Arab/Muslim character working in US law enforcement, flipping the enemy
  • How would you characterize the cultural specificity expressed through Nas? How is he humanized?

Screening #8: Trading Places (Landis, 1983)

• Prompt: Write roughly one paragraph in response to the following questions.
  • Do any characters display “class consciousness?” If so, whom and how?
  • Is gaining money or capital or buying things the solution to problems in the narrative? For whom and in what situations in the film?
  • How is the upper class represented? How are these characters: satirized, mocked?
  • How are under- and working-class characters represented? In what ways do they fall into or break out of the cliches?
  • How is having upper-class-level wealth GLORIFIED?
  • How does the film address and resolve financial corruption?
  • Overall, what is the film’s primary message or statement about class?
  • How does the film handle race? Racism is certainly mocked, but is the film ever actually racist?

Screening 9: Sunset Boulevard (Wilder, 1950)

• Prompt: Write roughly one paragraph in response to the following questions.
  • How is the representation/construction of gender fundamentally different from contemporary expectations?
  • Hays Code: In what ways does the film defy the Code? How does it follow it?
  • “Men as Agents:” How are male characters “doers” or “agents” in a way that is different from female characters?
  • Female stereotypes: Which, if any, stereotypes from the classical era did the film repeat? Did it defy any?
    • How does Norma chip away at Joe’s masculinity, his role as the major force in the narrative, ultimately undoing him?
    • How does Norma’s power in the film undo the standard pattern Classical Hollywood Film follows?
  • Women’s Film: Does the film contain elements of the era’s “women’s films?”
  • Changing Roles: This era is prior to the 2nd wave of feminism but the roles were changing already. Does the film reflect these changes? (Femmes fatale, women and work, unhappy/happy in suburbs?)

Screening 10: Hell or High Water (Mackenzie, 2016)

• Respond to the prompts below:
  • In what ways does the film contain hypermasculinity? Is it intact or broken, both? Is the male body fetishized, subject to “gave” formal techniques?
  • How do the white male characters compare to other patriarchal white males from our films this semester? (The Searchers, Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner, Get Out, Devious Maids, Trading Places, Sunset Boulevard)
  • Does the film call attention to whiteness? Is it presented as a ”default ideal?” Or, is it explored?
  • How is the Western’s racism different in this film? How is racism tied up with white male identity? (“The Other”)
  • Classic Westerns presented Native American characters as the “savage” enemy. Who is the uncontrollable, “savage” villain in this film?
  • In what ways does the film incorporate Buddy Film masculinity?
  • How is this film a reflection upon contemporary masculinity? How does the old version of masculinity seem hollow in a newer but familiarly Western context?

Screening 11: Booksmart (Wilde, 2019)

• Respond to the prompts below:
  • How is feminism evident in the film? Are there references to the 2nd, 3rd, or 4th waves (metaphorically)?
  • In what ways does the film fall into old patterns of representing women?
  • Does the film recast previously male centered genres?
  • Is there an oppositional, female gaze?
  • Does the film mostly default to cisgender identities? Are the characters unconventional in gendered ways?
  • How is masculinity constructed in the film? Is it shown to be multi-faceted and emotive, or perhaps more conventionally depicted?
  • Does the film overtly address identity categories other than gender and sex? If so, are the depictions Ideological, resistant? A little bit of both?

Screening 12: Gentlemen Prefer Blondes (Hawks, 1953)

• Respond to the prompts below:Does the film contain any of the CHF rep patterns discussed today? (Gender inversion, villains, killers, queerness as mental illness, no queer sexuality)?
  • Does the film mock gender norms? How? In what scenes?
  • Camp:
    • In what ways are we encouraged to think about the surface of things, shallowness, literally and symbolically?
    • What scenes connote gender or sex related hyperbole? (Hint: Marilyn Monroe IS hyperbolic femininity… but how?)
    • Are any dramatic or potentially serious topics raised with humor? (gym scene, mayhaps?)
    • In what ways is conventional heterosexuality, masculinity, femininity EXAGGERATED?
    • What scenes would you qualify as “deliberative camp” and why?

Screening #13: Pariah (Rees, 20

• Respond to the following prompts:
  • Does the film repeat any contemporary or classical trends? How does it DEPART from both contemporary and classical trends?
  • Is it an intersectional queer movie? If so, how?
  • What scenes delivered LGBTQ cultural specificity? In what way?
  • Is the film ”queer” in the sense of destabilizing identity categories?
  • Does the film have an open attitude toward non-normative gender presentation?
  • Does the film address discrimination, civil liberties, equal rights, hate crimes, systemic homophobia? If so, how and does the treatment depart from older patterns?
  • Does the film hint toward or address the social context around religion, black masculinity, and racism?