Question

You will analyze a three- to five-minute segment of a movie or a television episode depicting cultural diversity and gender issues. After watching the movie segment, create a report on your analysis. In your report: Mention the name of the movie. Describe the setting and overall storyline of the movie. Describe the main characters in the observed movie section. Describe the situation that you analyzed and interpret the action of the characters depicting cultural diversity and gender issues. Draw conclusions based on social psychological concepts and theories. PLEASE NO WAR MOVIES PERIOD

Answer 1

Note: This response is in UK English, please paste the response to MS Word and you should be able to spot discrepancies easily. You may elaborate the answer based on personal views or your classwork if necessary.

(Answer) Television Show – NBC’s: The Office

Episode – Diversity Day – Season 1: Episode 2

Segments – Three segments with 2 commercial breaks of a 25 (approx) minute episode.

Plot – Michael Scott (Steve Carell) is the Regional Manager of the Dunder Mifflin – Scranton branch which is a paper company. A diversity trainer has been called to train the employees how to have a hostile free workplace. The egotistical manager dislikes that the diversity trainer has assumed the authority of training and attempts to out-do this trainer. However, it is Michael’s past comments that resulted in complaints which caused the need for diversity training in the first place.

Michael dismisses the trainer and conducts his own training exercises. These exercises entail the employees wearing a cue card on their forehead with the name of a minority that they cannot read as it hasn’t been disclosed to them. They are to guess the race on their own cue card by mere conversations with other people in the room. This results in an offensive atmosphere and causes another complaint and issue with the corporate office of the company.

Conclusions – This show and episode is more of a comedy satire. In other words, the writers have used situations of extreme offensiveness in order to highlight the offensiveness of the current social climate of the world.

When the character “Pam” is forced to use stereotypes to describe the card on an employee with the “Asian” card, she says that she does not agree with the stereotype of “bad driver” that the “Asians” are associated with. Furthermore, the employee with the “Asian” card assumes that he has a card that says “woman” because he associates women with being bad drivers.

Since it isn’t particularly true that women or Asians are not bad drivers and the employees are forced to use stereotypes to guess their own cue card, they generally follow the cues of popular opinions or common stereotypes to guess their own card. This is where the employees indulge in popular opinions or group perceptions about the stereotypes of different races.