The Perfect Game Ideology Essay

Giannetti defines ideology as, “a body of ideas reflecting the social needs and aspirations of an individual, group, class, or culture” (448). A film’s purpose is often reflected through the ideology it possesses and in this case, the ideology expresses the treatment of minorities in baseball culture. A League of their Own, The Perfect Game, and 42 all contain an explicit sense of ideology with a thematic orientation towards teaching people about treatment of minorities in baseball culture. A League of their Own is a film about the solution to keep baseball alive during WWII and that is to start a women’s baseball league. The Perfect Game is about a group of young boys from Monterrey, Mexico who aspire to be on a baseball team and when given …show more content…
All three of the movies provide a hierarchal perspective when it comes to their ideology. The hierarchal perspective emphasizes the differences among people and this is done so in all three movies by ostracizing the minority groups: women, Mexicans, and African Americans. The women in A League of their Own are excluded from an entire sport until the men have to report to service; communicating that women are different and not as good as men so they can only play in the male absence. The young Mexican boys in The Perfect Game experience the same emphasis on the difference between individuals, purely because of race. This is primarily exhibited when the boys go to America and face racial slight, but also at home in Mexico when interacting with the Mexico City little league team. The Perfect Game introduces another important aspect of hierarchy which is social institutions guided by strong leaders. The Rockford Peaches were guided by Dugan, a raging alcoholic, which is very different from Cesar and Padre in The Perfect Game. Although at first Cesar had no interest in coaching the young boys, he was able to gain motivation and lead them on the path to success. Padre was another strong leader for the young boys; he taught them important lessons and provided them with the faith and inspiration to achieve greatness. 42 also embodies the extreme rightist perspective in the sense that the film …show more content…
In A League of their Own, we can see that even though having an environmental view is not what the Rockford Peaches want, but it is what they must conform to in order to play on the team. The women’s behavior is changed by environmental incentives because if not, their dreams of playing ball will be taken away from them. Most et al. explains, “The film not only portrays women as good, professional baseball players, it also ridicules some of the absurdities these players were forced to endure, such as attending charm schools and wearing short skirts while playing, in order to assure the American culture that, even though they were playing baseball, they were still ‘ladies’” (168). The women had to conform their behavior to what their male counterparts wanted of them in order to stay a part of the team. The Perfect Game and 42 represents the opposite of an environmental institution. In terms of racism against minorities, the characters in these films show characters that adopt mentalities from familial relations. The people in these films have a largely racist mentality, simply because that it all they know. Their behavior spawns from the fact that this is all they have ever known and now the introduction of diversity in an all American sport is flooring them. Racist people have a difficult time deviating from their norms; change is hard to push on people