Paper #2 summer english 1A-- At the Movies

At the Movies

For this paper you are asked to select one or two movies and investigate the violence in them. (If you pick two movies, which I recommend, they don't have to be completely similar.) As you might expect, you are required to generate a thesis for this paper. It wont work to simply "talk about" the movies. You will want to develop at thesis, a POV that takes a stand. The large question here is: What is the Theory of Violence that these movies present?
But you will want to approach this larger question by coming up with some smaller analytic questions. Below is a list of possible questions to consider. (You may not need to do all 3 theories--you may get enough to talk about in only doing 1 or 2 of them... we will see when you start writing...)

How well do Gilligan's theories apply to the events and characters in your movies?

How well do Ray's theories about Outlaw/Official Hero apply?

How well does Our theory of Before/During/After apply?

What kind of violence do your movies present?

What message about violence are your movies sending out?

One potential problem in a paper of this kind is that the student devotes a great deal of time to retell the plot of the movie. Instead, think of the movies as your evidence--you only share the piece of the share the piece of the movie needed to support the point you are making in the paragraph.


You will need to pull quotes from our book, the Ray article, the movies, to support your points in the body paragraphs.

Also, it is perfectly fine to make references to other movies that you are not specifically investigating in order to make your points.

One way to ensure that you do not end up just talking about the plot of the movie, is to avoid saying any names of the movie characters in the topic sentences.

The paper is due on July 12.

Draft day is on July 10.