Thursday, September 12, 2013
Grapes of Wrath
I really liked watching Grapes of Wrath. At first I thought that I didn't much like the black and white but when I got further into the film, I could see how it added so much to the story and it's setting. I am a little bias because I read the book first and thought the movie didn't do it much justice. But putting that aside, I thought the way that it was filmed was very smart and realistic. The costumes added a lot to the movie and the feel of the file and it's time period. I was captivated by the characters and their developments in the film. My favorite character is Mama. What a strong individual. All in all, I thought this film was really well done, considering when it was filmed. I like that it has an "old" feeling to it. It adds to the story it is telling.
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This movie exhibits the devastating effect of capitalist exploitation. The tragedy for the farmers is their displacement from the thing that lends them individual and social value. They are intimately attached to what they labor to produce, to the land that produces it. What they produce has a mutual relationship with their social value, the labor expenditure is affirmed within the commodity, meaning a person's labor appears to them as a product that is symbolic and proportionate to their social character. So when they're forced to migrate to California they are assigned a labor value by the exploitative companies which is disproportionate to the value of the commodity. They are detached, then, socially. Economic force moves unseen over them: between the Californian production and the East coast demand and consumption.
ReplyDeleteThis also functions to disillusion the "Western Mystique", which is always characterized as a wild, free place loaded with opportunities, where a man/woman can build something for himself. Of course the film shows otherwise. It's already developed. This all seems very unalterable, if economic control comes from the top and everyone below is starving for work, what can change? It's not until Tom and Mama make their closing realizations in the film: power comes from below, in the Foucault sense, that the people will beat on.