Our Sunshine

Madeline Barbier Video Essay PSY 340- Adolescences Adolescences Through the Eyes of Little Miss Sunshine In the years of adolescences, adolescents often times are experiencing a crisis of identity. They are trying to understand what roles they fall into and a lot of times their families and their self-esteem influences this “self-understanding”. In Little Miss Sunshine, many key concepts to adolescence are seen in the 7-year old character, Olive Hoover. She is going through the fifth…

Little Miss Sunshine starts off with the Ms. America beauty pageant. A young child name Olive Hoover, is watching the pageant on the television, fascinated with the events taking place. This film starts to address the idea of if there is only winners and losers, and how to be a winner. The point gets strongly put across as the father believes that you have to think you will win, and that is how you become a winner. The film becomes an eye opener for the viewers because it shows the amount of…

The dominant culture's influences on the Hoovers is that they are dysfunctional with a lot of issues individually and as a family. The predominant influence is that the drama surrounding the family and Olive, who wants to compete in the beauty pageant. In the film, for example, the family eating habits are unhealthy to say the least. The Hoover family typically eat fast food, for instance, fried chicken and Grandpa Edwin gets fed up with eating out regularly and not having home cooked meals as…

had their memories erased, but when I would try to think about how our memory works, I always felt as if I was in the dark about it. It is all a bunch of neurologically connected pieces of protein, in less than a cube foot of space. The movies I watched were science fiction, but erasing memory is actually possible now. When I started to ponder on all this it left me wondering if erasing memories is indeed ethical. Even if our memory is just a bunch of neurological connections of proteins,…

goal is for Olive to get her moment of competing in the Little Miss Sunshine beauty pageant. Olive’s father Richard becomes nervous for her as he watches from the audience, knowing that she will not fit in with the other pageant girls. The Hoover family are skeptical about the competition and for Olive's concern try to call off the performance. Sheryl reassures saying that they have to, “let Olive be Olive” (Little Miss Sunshine Quotes., n.d.). Dressed in a costume and top hat, Olive dedicates…

Is there eternal sunshine in the spotless mind? This is the question posed by writers Charlie Kaufman, Michel Gondry and Pierre Bismuth in their movie Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. This movie, directed by Gondry, explores the idea that feelings and emotions are more powerful than memories, and that if we erased all of our memories, we would still possess the feelings and emotions that were created by those memories. The movie was inspired by a male friend of Bismuth who said that he…

the trials and tribulations of life even while many of us would rather forget and desire to start a new chapter, a clean slate. Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, directed by Michael Gondry, exemplifies these traits and addresses the idea of what a person, such as Joel and Clementine, might endure in the process of having their memory erased. In Eternal Sunshine…

Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind “How happy is the blameless vestal’s lot! The world forgetting, by the world forgot. Eternal sunshine of the spotless mind! Each pray’r accepted, and each wish resign’d” -Alexander Pope Just think, eternal sunshine of the spotless mind; isn’t that a lovely thought, to have a spotless mind? Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind is one of my favorite films and it is also the source from which I first heard the aforementioned quote. The film focuses around…

When I was a child, Disney Princesses like Belle and Cinderella were my idols. There was some kind of independence and strength found within the characters. However, in retrospect I cannot help but notice a male gaze that is ominous over both of these films. The female characters are presented in a way that fits the mold of stereotypes and in turn objectifies them as prizes to be won. Cinderella and Belle became no more than beautiful damsels in distress. Then instead of saving themselves, a…

your mind. Our society imagines the possibility of memory erasure in seemingly logical, simplistic ways; most people imagine a world where memories can be erased simply by taking a pill or undergoing a procedure. The concept is shrouded by society’s futuristic, sci-fi expectations of advanced technology that could allow for memory erasure to become a reality, and the media plays up this belief in film. One film that contributes to the stereotypical image of memory erasure is Eternal Sunshine of…