Conflict And Social Perspective In The Movie Sweet Home Alabama

I decided to watch and analyze the movie Sweet Home Alabama. The movie is focused on the life of one particular character, Melanie Carmichael (actually Melanie Smooter). Melanie grew up in a small town in Alabama; her family was like many of the other families there: country and part of the working, middle to lower class. She married a man when she was younger, but after they split, she moved to New York where she made a new life for herself and met her now fiancé, Andrew. The major conflict in the plot is that Jake, Melanie’s ex, never signed their divorce papers, making them still married. Overall, the story explains how she wanted a better life than she had back in Alabama; so she pretended to come from a wealthy background, built her own fashion line, made a name for herself, got engaged to a very wealthy and famous man. However, all of that falls apart when she comes back home to Alabama. The major issues of this movie are social stratification and social mobility. Social stratification is the system by which society characterizes and ranks people into strata, …show more content…
This is an obvious issue in the movie, but it can be observed and analyzed by using two different perspectives—conflict and structural-functionalism. The one that I believe to be the most accurate in this particular film is the conflict perspective. The conflict model, or perspective, states that society is made up of an unequal distribution of limited, desired resources; some individuals get more of the resources than the others, and this ultimately causes the conflict. It is an on-going system because the ones who have the desired resources always try to keep those resources, while the ones that do not have the resources are constantly trying to think of news ways to get those resources. Ultimately, the belief of the conflict model is that social stratification benefits one class at the expense of the