What a Simple Chick Flick can Reveal about Life

The best way to learn a different culture is through immersion, but what about a different time in history? You can’t really throw yourself into the 1950s and learn what it’s like to be a woman cornered into being a housewife by laws and societal expectations. But there’s a shortcut: movies. Spoilers below!

I recently had a movie night, flipping through a couple corny but not outrageously stupid chick flicks, when I watched the movie Chasing Amy. It’s an intriguing 90s movie that really surprised me by how much culture change it showed me! For example, there’s a scene in a cafe where everybody’s puffing on their cigarettes like it’s their only source of oxygen. Yeah, inside a public building. What!

Then you have Banky, who’s a horribly misogynistic, sexist jerk who believes that all lesbians hate men, because how can a girl not want to have sex with boys? That’s the standard right? All through the movie, he’s throwing out all these derogatory terms that, twenty years later, would make anybody shiver and glare at him in disgust. On the other hand, it’s interesting to think that a) that was the general thought process regarding homosexuality in a time when people still didn’t really know what to think of it, and b) there are actually people who still think this way, and this might be a huge force behind homophobia and laws created to stamp out homosexuals’ rights.

Of course, you can’t forget about Alyssa, the self-labeled lesbian who falls in love with a man and doesn’t really know what to do about it. At first, she falls in the age-old mistake of deflection, telling Holden it’s all his fault, what about her, yada yada yada. Again, in a time when people hadn’t really figured out how to accept homosexuality, and had all these questions they were afraid to ask, it makes total sense that Alyssa couldn’t really be completely secure about her sexuality outside of being proud of her homosexuality. What do you mean, she had feelings for a man? But, she’s gay? How is that possible?

It’s safe to say that I’m definitely going to start investigating some other time-centric movies. Have you seen Chasing Amy? Do you have any other suggestions? What movies have you watched that show you what life was like in a different time?