Desperately Seeking Susan

Desperately Seeking Susan



Question

The suburbs are often represented as a 'dream' version of the city, and often fantasized as a glamorized, magical 'wonderland.' This view of the city as a place to 'escape' to has appealed to many different artists, filmmakers and musicians, and has relevance to questions of gender and ethnicity.

Choose 4- 5 scenes from either the film “Desperately Seeking Susan” or “My Beautiful Laundrette”. DO NOT re-tell the story of the film in your essay, but instead consider aspects of the chosen film's design and how it interacts with the narrative to set up a series of oppositions and contrasts between the city and the suburbs. Consider:

The types of domestic spaces represented in the film, in both the city and the

suburb

The bodies and manner of dress of the characters, and how this changes when moving from suburb to city

Other spaces in the film, which the characters frequent, and how these spaces convey city-ness and suburban-ness, and the differences between them.

Introduction The document portrays the way in which life in suburbs influences certain aspects of lifestyle for example dressing sense, manners etc. The content of the document is designed to explore this suburban theme under the umbrella of movie Desperately Seeking Susan. The movie has some basic underlining themes that are correlated with Suburban happenings. It depicts some very important dimensions of suburban life that includes glamorized wonder land, social mobility, and the darker side of this glamour. Furthermore some sideline themes are also manifested throughout the picture that well portrays the suburb-ness for example the industrialization, capitalization, modernization, acceptance of gay-ism, struggle to achieve something, realism & representation of working class, ethnicity and impasse of being an Asian British.

Discussion

Story Plot:

Roberta (Rosanna Arquette) is a dissatisfied suburban housewife residing in Fort Lee, New Jersey who happens to be intrigued with a lady she merely has heard of by reading through messages to and from her in the personals area of a New York City tabloid. This allure gets to a peak once one such ad with the title "Desperately Seeking Susan" endorses a rendezvous in Battery Park with the guy who frequently looks for her. Roberta visits Battery Park too, obtains an insight of the lady (Madonna) and in a string of situations connected with misguided identity, amnesia, as well as other farcical components Roberta goes from voyeur to participator in an Alice in Wonderland-style storyline, ostensibly encouraged by the hunt for a pair of thieved Egyptian ear rings.

Movie Analysis

In my opinion there exists a number of ways in which one might analyze the entire movie under light of suburban fashion sense it offered to the vieweres By and large I were convinced the movie was quite a gloomy movie in terms of what i wanted to portray in its core theme, however my document will not analyze the theme butthe relation of the theme with visual elements like designs and spaces it offered, which grabbed and harnessed what the east coast was like in ...