Femininity in American Cinema Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 500 words

Femininity in American Cinema - Essay Example Most Hollywood pictures were based on scripts which had a plainly obvious adherence to the tried and tested formula of the attraction between the sexes, where the feminine element played centre stage. The female was largely seen to be responsible for the occurrence of the various events in the plot, which were unfailingly the result of the male-female chemistry prevalent in the perception of society. A classic example of the feminine element in American cinema would be the 1998 romantic comedy â€Å"You’ve Got Mail†. Meg Ryan portrays Kathleen Kelly who is involved with Frank Navasky (Greg Kinnear), while maintaining the fact that the two were otherwise acquainted in business. While Frank, as a newspaper writer for the New York Observer, is devoted to the typewriter, Kathleen prefers her laptop and logging into her AOL e-mail account [1]. This maybe interpreted as a portrayal of the sense of adaptation of the modern female as opposed to the modern male who maybe seen as sticking to the traditional path of existence. A further shade of thought may lie in the storyline where the hero runs a considerably large bookstore with commercial values taking the forefront, while the heroine runs a small corner shop book store. This may be a subtle allusion to the subordination supposedly meted out from one gender to the other, in the backdrop of a long online courtship without either party being aware of the other’s identity. Yet another 1998 film, â€Å"Savior†, portrays a different shade of the feminine element. The film portrays a Serbian woman and her newborn child being escorted by an American soldier to a safe house during the Bosnian War. This may well be an allusion to the primitive idea of the protection warranted by the fairer sex. The portrayal of the feminine element here, as with most of the citable examples, is largely an instrument to emphasize the different shades of the masculine form.