Sliding Doors Movie Analysis

Sliding Doors (1998) explores the two distinct outcomes of the life of a woman who misses her train. Helen (Gwyneth Paltrow), the woman in question, is fired from her PR job for trivial reasons and goes to take the train back home. In one outcome, after missing her train, she walks back to the street, calls a cab, and goes home after a couple delays, to her boyfriend Gerry (John Lynch) who comforts her after her tough day. In the other, she catches her train, meets James (John Hannah) then arrives home only to find her boyfriend in bed with another woman. As the movie progresses, the storylines diverge even more as the Helen that had missed her train never meets and talk to James, and keeps working hard as a waitress to support her boyfriend who is allegedly writing a book. Also, Gerry’s affair with Lydia (Jeanne Tripplehorn) goes unnoticed until the very end, although she suspects it. In contrast, the Helen that caches her train gets a new haircut, starts her own company and finds a new boyfriend in James. By the end of the movie, both versions of Helen get pregnant but lose their child in an accident. The first version of Helen that had caught the train dies, while the other survives, breaks up with Gerry and meets James on her way out at …show more content…
It is founded on the concept that one gender is superior to the other and, because of the mentioned stereotypes as well as many others regarding women and men’s gender roles, it grows in endorsement every time people around us, movies, and people in the media normalize it, and solidifies itself in today’s societies. Studies today however, have a slightly different approach to defining sexism; they explore the concept of ambivalent sexism. Ambivalent sexism offers a slightly new facet to traditional sexism. In fact, it divides it into 2 categories, both of which are still legitimizing ideologies as explained in An Ambivalent Alliance (P.Glick, S.Fiske,