Ideology Examples

Ideology Example- The American Dream

For those of you who missed the Ideology Lesson for various reasons last week, 
Ideology is an important concept for media students to understand as it underpins many of the other aspects of media such as representation.

A brief introduction is available here: 

Ideology introduction

Media texts such as films always reflect certain values or ideologies though sometimes we may not be aware of this as the ideologies may be IMPLICIT (implied) rather than EXPLICIT (obvious).When studying a media text you may look for the dominant ideology present and question whose world view is represented and which groups have not been represented. 

Here are the two examples we looked at to aid our understanding of this difficult concept:

The Pursuit of Happyness Trailer

This reinforces the dominant ideology of the American Dream - the set of ideals that perpetuates the idea that freedom and hard work gives everyone the opportunity for success. If you work hard, you will succeed. This is exemplified in the film where Will Smith's character is a protagonist who is able to reach his own American Dream. He is a homeless salesman, struggling to financially provide for his young son who takes an unpaid internship with a broker company in order to become a successful broker. His hard work and self-sacrifice enables him to impress company bosses and start his own multi-million dollar brokership.

American Beauty trailer

This challenges the dominant ideology of the American Dream. Everything seems to endorse the American Dream - there is a middle class family made up of parents with successful careers, the husband as an advertising executive and his wife as a realtor (American estate agent). Underneath the semblance of perfection, the husband is having a mid-life crisis, including an inappropriate crush on his daughter's teenage best friend and his wife is having an affair. Their lives unravel as this film satirises and blows apart the ideals of the American dream.