The film little miss sunshine directed by Jonathan Dayton was no only a highly entertaining and funny movie, but also a film that had recurring themes that can be related to the curriculum we are learning. The first recurring theme that I feel is most represented throughout the movie is one dealing with behaviorism. This can be tied to personality and why we are the way we are. In the movie Olive a 7 years old girl from Albuquerque has one dream and one goal. She wants to be In the little miss sunshine beauty pageant in California. She watched a girl win Miss USA and saw how beautiful she was and how much attention she got from being crowned. She then also wanted to be in a beauty pageant because she liked the idea of the reward she would gain. She would have social acceptance to start. Also self confidence with all the compliments and power with the fame. She puts in hard work with her grandfather near every night on a dance routine she has to preform. When dealing with punishments, she knows that by adding ice cream to her diet she may gain weight, so she tries to sacrifice the extra fat so she can be rewarded. Also, her father Richard, brings many behaviorist ideas and examples to the film. He is extremely highly motivated and persistent. Over and over he makes large efforts to make his 9 step process make it big. Even rides a dirt bike to a different city to try and get a hold of a business partner. He knows he can't give up because he will not be rewarded with money and a happy wife. Here, olive and Richard show personality traits that would agree with a behaviorist concept of personality. behaviorist believe that we are the way we are, act the way we act, and think the things we think, because of our desire to gain rewards and avoid punishments. This movie and by those examples shows that the movie does in fact have a recurring theme of this.
The next theme is Depression. Frank, introduced to us early in the movie in a hospital is the uncle of Olive. We soon find out in the movie Frank was terribly depressed and tried to kill himself. Being depressed is a major risk factor for suicide. Our book tells us that the worthless feelings, problems thinking, fatigue, and diminished interest or pleasure cause individuals to feel majorly depressed. Thoughts of death or suicide are a serious symptom of depression. After Frank was fired and did not win the award he wanted the only thing he could think of was kill himself. This related to class because Frank has psychological disorder, and even described as a mental illness. We learned in class that stressful events precede depression and with all the things Frank was going through those were signs. When I was studying in the book I saw an entire section on depression leading to suicide. I read, the risk of committing suicide are at least 5 times greater for those who are depressed. Also the genes of depression run in the family, so when Dwayne, Olives brother and Franks nephew, shows many signs of depression, it wasn't a shock. He "Hated everyone" including his parents he said. Now the movie as him breaking through it and has a happy ending but still the facts remain that it wasn't uncommon for him to be depressed because what we learned in class.
The last concept is one hardly mentioned. However, we did learn a lot about it in class. Dwayne mentioned earlier, late in the movie finds out he is color blind. All he wants to do is become a Air force Pilate but finds out his changed are slim to none because he is color blind. In class we learned that color blindness is a problem most likely in the cones in the eye. The cons see color, and operate under normal daylight. There are 6 million of them in your eye. We don't learn in the movie what type of color blindness Dwayne suffers, but there are different theories we learned about. Trichromatic theory, where you see red blue and green. The other we talked about was opponent process, where colors are seen as complementary pairs. So if we knew what colors Dwayne couldn't see we could make opinions to what theory of color we believe he has.