Grapes Of Wrath Film Analysis

Milk is a 2008 biographical film that narrates the life of Harvey Milk, an openly-gay politician from California. Throughout the film, Milk struggles with his personal life, and his life as a gay man struggling to find acceptance for himself, and other gay people, in both the general community and the political world. In the end, Milk is assassinated by a fellow member on the San Francisco Board of Supervisors, Dan White. Still, his actions as a politician and social rights activists have a lasting impact on his generation and the generations to come. The story of the gay community in Milk is also similar to the story of the migrants in The Grapes of Wrath. Both the migrants and the gay community are struggling against the government and the …show more content…
However, because of the position and circumstances of the two groups of protagonists, there are differences in how they deal with their need to survive, mostly because of how able they are to fight back. In Milk, it is shown as being in Harvey's nature to rise up when he sees that there is a problem and to fight for what is right. He has lived his whole life as an outsider, and he is used to feelings of exclusion and emotional pain, so he is extremely confident and fearless when he begins to speak up against his oppressors. When he receives the previously mentioned hateful note, he takes it out of Scott's hands and pins it to the fridge, saying that, "if [they were to] put it away, [if they] put it in a drawer, [it would] just get bigger and scarier". This scene shows that he and the people he represents are confident that what they are fighting for is something that is truly important to them, something that has been the basis of their entire lives, and that they are not afraid to face their fears. In The Grapes of Wrath, the migrants are more timid and afraid of hatred and discrimination because it is something new to them. They have always felt included in their tightly-knit communities, so when they are excluded and shut out by the Californians, they are frightened by their oppressors. Nonetheless, they still band together and support each other in a somewhat weak, but still effective, …show more content…
Each provides a somewhat different perspective on how we as humans support and/or exclude each other in times of hardship. While both stories explore similarly archetypes of problems and antagonists, they each capture how a person's position in life and their past experiences can affect how they deal with the problems they face during their