Movie Choices and Our Identities

In this week's chapter, we read about how we choose the media what we partake in, one of the ways is through selective exposure. The first thing that popped into my mind was my movie knowledge. Often, I am picked on by my friends or someone I am dating for not having seen any good movies. This was true, partly. Until this year, most of the movies I saw in theaters were kids movies, mainly Disney ones. So, when my friends would ask me if I had seen Zoolander, Anchorman, or some other popular movie, the answer was typically no. However, if they named any of the recent children's movies that had come out, I could easily give them my opinion.

It actually took me a while to realize the pattern of movie watching that I fell into. I would only pay the high theater prices for things that I really wanted to see and that tended to be a kids movie. I would tell myself that I wold watch the other movies when they came out on DVD, but typically they were forgotten. I also realized that there was a reason to this after a recent guy that I had dated dragged me to see movies that he was interested in to. A lot of the violence in movies went against my personal identity. I wanted to see happy movies that had happy endings, I didn't want to leave the theater having endured an emotional roller coaster or have violent images haunt me in the moments before I fell asleep. I just assumed that any movie that wasn't a kid's one would do those things to me. In turn, I missed a lot of awesome movies.

I love going to the movie theater to see a movie. Nothing is better to me than having the big screen, surround sound, and popcorn to much on during the movie. It has been my mission to break out over the past year and expose myself to some movies that I wouldn't have typically seen. I was mostly pleasantly surprised with the ones I have seen. I feel that this was due to a change in my personal identity that I have made in the past year as well though and was not something that I would have done otherwise. While my personal identity may be going through a shift, I do still find myself favoring the magical happy endings that can be found in things such as the recent Cinderella movie.