Seinfeld's use of Language

The main concept I drew from the Seinfeld text was the use of language. Seinfeld uses language as its primary tool, given its settings and visual appeal are rather dull. The entertainment aspect rest on the characters use of language, for the most part. In once clip that was show in the presentation, Elaine was talking about her sexual experience using an analogy of baseball. She uses the term “other team”… although it was never directly stated, it is clear from our contextual understanding of this it is referencing someone who is gay. Elaine’s analogy is an example of a language-game. The word meaning is relational to the context. Language is used in this manner for a purpose. In Seinfeld’s case, like many other movies and shows, language is carefully constructed around delicate subjects in mass media. Therefore, language can serve this purpose to either mock, criticize, and address, etc. topics that would not normally be discussed using plain language because of the sensitivity factor.

American Psycho

American Psycho is a perfect mockery of our material driven lives. Taken to the extreme, it exemplifies the tendencies of using commodities that carry socioeconomic status to be differentiated. Connecting these ideas to our theories, as a postmodern position Baudrillard has argued that commodities confer prestige and signify social values, status and power in the context of cultural meanings that derive from the wider ‘social order’… These signs are embedded in the growth of commodity culture, niche marketing and the creation of ‘lifestyles’ (Barker 152). In the movie showed how commodities are used as signs to establish status and even identity.
It also exemplifies how shallow our ideology is. Patrick Bateman has an obsession with appearance. He admits to being empty, there is no Patrick Bateman. Yet, he still has an aesthetic self consciousness and need desire for high social stature.

Knocked Up

Radical?
Considering the Radical romance theme, I would say Knocked up is somewhat in between the lines of traditional and radical for a couple of reasons. As far as the plot of the movie, it follows the narrative pattern of the romantic comedy sequence: boy meets girl, boy loses girl, boy regains girl. Yet, the circumstances in which this plot took place provided some different aspects. For example, it was almost as though these two were not meant for each other, yet they were just stuck together… I suppose this was the comedy aspect. Typically, it seems like romantic comedies have characters that are in some way meant for each other (not a perfect relationship of course), more so than being stuck together because of a baby.

The movie did touch of a several different topics, some of which it could be argued that the film seems to take a position on by how they portrayed the topic… Examples:
Abortion – ambiguity in their language, failing to even say the word show awareness to the subject’s sensitivity. It was hardly a debated decision by Katherine Heigl’s character. The opinions which supported the idea of an abortion had a negative bias (from the characters who gave the suggestion).
Single parent pregnancy – By telling the children that they have to be in love in order to have a baby, by the sister saying we have to help her (as if she could not do it on her own), and by the mom suggesting there was a right way to have a baby, by the couple ending up together in the end… all signs of a position against single parent pregnancies
Economic status- showed different views and lifestyles of classes… particularly on where their values stood in regards to work ethics, societal concerns, and to some degree family planning.