The Connection between A Bug’s Life and The Chosen People Essay example

The Connection between A Bugs intent and The elect People In the hear The elect People, Stewart Ewen, discusses his perspective of heart screen America. Specifically, he explores the idea that the middle screen is suffering from an identity crisis. jibe to Ewens theory, the notion of personal distinction in America is leading to an identity crisis of the non-upper class. (185) The line of this identity crisis is mass consumerism. As a result of the Industrial diversity and mass production, products became cheaper and therefore more available to the non-elite classes. Mass production was investment funds individuals with tools of identity, marks of personhood. (Ewen 187) Through advertising, junk mail and style industries, the middle class is always striving for a stylistic affinity to wealth, finding recreate in the unreal, and obsessed with cheap luxury items. (Ewen 185-6) In other words, instead of defining themselves based on who they are on the inside, the people of middle class America define themselves in terms of external movie and material possessions.A Bugs Life is an animated Disney put down that tells the story of how a colony of ants fight back against and overcome the mastery and oppression of the bullying grasshoppers. When looking at the movie through the lens of Ewens theory about identity, several connections concerning identity are put between A Bugs Life and The Chosen People. Furthermore, by looking at identity issues in A Bugs Life under this new light, Ewens theory becomes incomplete. In the Chosen People, Ewen fails to explore the positive aspects of conformity, sexual activity in relationship to identity or the correlations between tradition and identity. Under the microscope of Ewens theory, A Bugs Life changes from an everyday kid movie to a film riddle with identity issues. The first connection between A Bugs Life and The Chosen People occurs when Ewen is explaining the rise of industrialism in the United Stat es. He asserts that For those laboring in many of the factories, industrial conditions systematically trampled upon their individuality and personhood and that crafter craft and small-scale manufacturer fell to an emerging economy of large scale. (187) The ants of the colony can be seen as beings who have had their individuality and personhood trampled because of the grasshop... ...nd little likely to change. Ewen does suggest that the trends of the middle class are becoming increasingly ingrained in the values and mindset of the middle class because of domain War II and the yuppie culture of the 1980s. (196) Yet, Ewens trends, fashions and styles that could be appropriately deemed traditions, are not explored from the perspective of tradition. Upon comparing the issues of identity crises suggested in A Bugs Life with those in Stewart Ewens The Chosen People, the sources and characteristics of identity crises in Ewens essay are found incomplete. Ewen limits his exp loration of the sources and characteristics of identity crises of the middle class to consumerism and physicalism as well as the obsession with image, style and fashion. By constricting his analysis to these issues, Ewen overlooks the perspectives of identity crises in relationship to tradition, the positive aspects of conformity and gender roles.BibliographyA Bugs Life. Walt Disney and Pixar Productions. 1998.Ewen, Stewart. The Chosen People. Literacies. Ed. Terence Brunk, Suzanne Diamond, Priscilla Perkins and Ken Smith et al. New York Norton, 1997. 183-97.