Sub-cultural groups that depend on a historical account to validate their thoughts and practices may need to revise and repair those accounts as changing circumstances present new issues affecting them. The year 2013 gave us three movies that dealt with racism, mobility, and political action: Lee Daniels' "The Butler," "12…

The movie "Lee Daniels' The Butler" is an example of a work that is meant not only to entertain but to convey an important attitude and offer important viewpoints. The movie deals with a deep issue in the history of movies and the history of the country: racial inequality. Three issues are discussed in this article: (a) African…

The movie "42" shows memorable events that have faded from our view in recent years. The events are important to the evolution of a multicultural society in America because of the importance of baseball to the common national culture that all the American people have created. Jackie Robinson's significance as a cultural hero is…

When groups using different cultural systems encounter one another in diverse societies, their previous cultures are transformed into a merged, complex cultural picture. Some culture areas are preserved while others are adjusted, exchanged, and merged. In our society, introducing groups to the cooking of other groups is a form of contact which…

In this article Abraham Lincoln is considered as an alternative to the usual type of patriot's hero. He reminds us of our great historical failings. He remains a figure of controversy, a national hero in only some corners of society. He is the heroic President who serves as the first compassionate defender of the downtrodden, and he is a hero…

Odd people have always been identified and often treated differently in human societies. In modern times, they have been described as being afflicted with a psychological condition to be treated by specialists and assigned to a "crazy" category by general society. Movies about such odd people have a long history. A recent movie,…

Popular culture, especially movie culture, is the arena where the struggles of the diverse cultures belonging to age groups are carried out. "Moonrise Kingdom" is an unusual movie, different from the usual summer or coming of age movies. In such movies, different theories of youth are displayed, providing tools for constructing the…

Movies that treat the imagined future and that deal with issues of adolescence coming to adulthood are represented by "The Hunger Games." The role of movies that present a dystopic view of the future in our actual attempts to deal with contemporary adolescence is discussed in this article. The use of images of the future as…

The decline of the soap opera as a major form of popular culture highlights the importance of that form in creating and maintaining a shared subculture for women. Soap operas are contrasted with recent television and film works that present the struggles of women in a different way, highlighting the distinctive features of soap operas as women's…

School teachers have been used as heroic characters in movies for a long time. Their heroism compensates for the failures of social life in our society by treating problems in the classroom, not the real world, and by acting as the mediators between diverse sub-cultures and the larger society. They are the agents of rationality, scholarship, and…

Two recent popular entertainments, "Margin Call" (Barnum, Dodson, Jenckes, Moosa, Quinto & Chandor, 2011) and "Boss" (Safinia, 2011), depict powerful and successful groups of bosses confronting sudden, extreme threats. They are forced to react quickly and sacrifice important values to achieve survival of their organizations. In these emergencies,…

"Red Tails," a recent movie about the Tuskegee Airmen in battle, is the latest in a line of movies that seem to petition for admission to the fellowship of the mainstream American society by showing stories of groups overcoming discrimination and proving their strength and their patriotism. As the most excluded and longest-lasting pariah group,…

The movie "Fair Game" (Butterworth et al., 2010) is a fact-based political thriller that calls attention to a process of turning respectable members of established institutions, who are performing their roles properly, into excluded deviants. The result of this transformation may be the creation of a new group initiating its own subculture. The…

Two recent movies, "Invictus" and "The Infidel," concern finding ways to negotiate coexistence between intensely opposed subcultures and are used to expand the meaning of multiculturalism. New, emergent cultures that are universalistic, practical, and accommodative are among the many cultures that are given place amid the diversity of modern…

Cultural diversity is often attributed to groups in a society from a variety of cultural backgrounds. Assimilation then blends subcultures into a mainstream culture. However, history and circumstance give rise to new groups whose experiences and activities produce new diversity. Big events and big changes give rise to important differences between…