Film's Essential Role in Communicating the Society’s Values and Culture

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Films, movies and other forms of literature play an essential role in communicating the society’s values and culture. Consequently, people are likely to associate a certain code of conduct to a specific society based on the information they have seen in a specific film. This trend is common in many western films, where the producers paints a certain image to a specific cultural group with an aim of either castigating the said society or glorifying their own. Sadly, the same case applies even in the media reporting, where the western media has a tendency of reporting what they want the public to believe about other cultures, rather than reporting the truth. It is worth noting that this glorification can be achieved without hurting the sentiments of other people’s customs.
Contrary to what some people believe, it is still possible to glorify one’s culture without hurting the sentiments of other people’s customs. Many of those societies that have been castigated as being bad eventually earn their respect when truth comes out. Representing the truth in both film and national TV allows people to accurately gauge the nature of a given culture. While Anna and the King succeeds in glorifying the role that the Anna, as the British woman, played in enlightening other women regarding their freedom, feminism, and monogamy, it does this at the expense of Anna’s real character. Distortion of history in a national TV is often perceived as patriotic because it all depends on the audience for which the said film is intended. The distortion on national TV appeases the audience whose culture is being glorified. On the contrary, distortion in film exposes the hypocrisy to a wide audience, who can see the distortions more clearly. Therefore, distortion on nationalistic TV is more acceptable before the eyes of the audience, who then glorify the characters, rendering the film as patriotic.
Hollywood is famous for distortion of cultures as a way of glorifying the western culture at the expense of others. In several of its films, there are cases where the western characters have been inserted in conflicts of different countries and resolving them with an aim of showing superiority against societies where the actual incidents happened and those communities were unable to resolve them. For example, a majority of the Hollywood films show the westerns as the main drivers of modernization. Borsa (2000, p. 151) posits that literature on modernization of ...