Movies, television, and other forms of media are often seen as primarily entertainment with little relation to real-life situations, but I have always found these media to reflect and analysis of important problems. The story of a working-class protagonist entering an elite prep school on a scholarship and confronting the attitudes of upper-class students is common in Hollywood films. School Ties and Finding Forrester both tell these stories from the perspective of the working-class student who earned his place through hard work and dedication to academic excellence. David Greene and Jamal Wallace are both likeable characters who face opposition in their prep school environments. They are also both minority characters in a predominantly white Christian culture: David is Jewish and Jamal is black. David and Jamal represent the ideal heroes of a meritocracy. Their positions are acquired through their own individual abilities, not through being born into wealth and privilege. They both must overcome adversity, in the form of antagonists who disrespect them due to their working-class minority status. These stories reinforce a narrative that anyone can rise to the upper class through hard work and dedication, and thus promotes meritocracy. The Three Miles podcast, however, presents a counter-narrative that challenges Hollywood's portrayal of the working-class student at an elite school and examines the reality these types of students face. Melanie and Jonathan, both teenagers from the Bronx, participate in an exchange program allowing students from a poor public school to visit an elite private school just three miles away. Both teens face challenges when confronted with the stark differences between their lives and those of private school students. Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on “Why Violent Video Games Should Not Be Banned”? Get the original essay In Finding Forrester, Jamal Wallace is a black teenager who is invited to attend a prestigious prep school based on his athletic and academic abilities. Jamal faces adversity in the form of Crawford, a teacher who doubts his abilities and assumes he is plagiarizing his homework. Crawford's stereotypes of Jamal as unworthy and unwilling to adhere to the rules of academia are consistent with common racist stereotypes of black men as "criminals" and of inferior intelligence. Finding Forrester is an example of Hollywood's attempt to provide a counter-narrative telling the story of a black teenager overcoming adversity and succeeding on his own merits. In School Ties, David Greene is a popular football player during his senior year at St. Matthew's. . He's there on a scholarship because of his athletic ability and he comes from a working-class Jewish family. His classmates are extremely anti-Semitic and he goes from being universally liked to being an outcast and a social bully. Students who are there because of their family's wealth have a collective negative reaction to David's religious background, which reinforces the narrative that wealthy people often do not morally deserve their opportunities and can be cruel and have prejudices. However, David perseveres despite their prejudices and succeeds academically while his main tormentor, Charlie, is defeated and exposed as a cheater at the end of the film. In “Hollywood Goes toHigh School", Robert Bulman argues that through this narrative, "Hollywood expresses another middle-class fantasy: that deserving individuals can rise to the upper class and that the undeserving rich will suffer the consequences of their unethical behavior. ethics. » (Bulman, 2015, p. 121). Bulman is clear in his statement calling this Hollywood narrative a “fantasy,” and this fantasy is marketed to middle-class people who still have hope of upward mobility. This hope is what entices middle-class audiences to consume media such as School Ties, where the hero is approachable and the villains are rich and privileged, people they would normally be jealous of. However, this narrative is also problematic because it still glorifies elite, upper-class success as the ultimate level of achievement and as being available to anyone who is intelligent, morally upright, and hard-working. This elitist definition of success is of course not the only way to achieve success and is often inaccessible to working class workers who, despite their hard work, do not have the opportunities or resources to achieve this level of upward mobility . The meritocracy narrative indirectly leads students to believe that if they have not reached elite levels of success, such as getting into a top university, they have no hope of success and are doomed to minimum wage work and a working-class lifestyle throughout their lives. the rest of their lives. This is evident in Melanie, the Bronx woman featured in Three Miles who ran away from high school after failing to receive a coveted full scholarship to Middlebury College. Mélanie was an exceptional student who did well in school; for this reason, she and the teachers and advisors around her believed in a meritocratic system that would give her the full scholarship to a top university, because she deserved it. However, when she did not receive the scholarship, Melanie was so deeply disappointed that she completely abandoned the idea of ​​going to university and the belief that she could one day escape her life in the Bronx. Melanie's story resonated with me because of the obvious influence of Hollywood's meritocratic narrative on her expectations of the stock market. She thought Middlebury, an elite university, was her only hope of escape; later, when interviewed for Three Miles, she reflects and acknowledges that if she had reached out, things might have turned out differently. She didn't reach out because she was disillusioned and believed nothing would change. This feeling of helplessness is addressed in “Why the Myth of Meritocracy Hurts Children of Color,” where Melinda Anderson examines the effect a cultural belief in meritocracy will have on children who experience systemic discrimination. Anderson argues that “for those who are marginalized by the system – economically, racially, and ethnically – believing that the system is fair puts them in conflict with themselves and can have negative consequences” (Anderson, 2017). Just as members of the privileged classes cling to meritocracy to believe that they have achieved their position through hard work, disadvantaged members of society are forced to believe that their position is due to their innate inferiority. People will use stereotypes to portray children from urban working-class neighborhoods as criminals, which then leads them to engage in criminal activity because they believe that the same system that perpetuates these stereotypes is also "fair" and meritocratic. Keep in mind: This is just a sample. Get an item now, 38(3), 1040-1074.