EXHIBITS
Finding Forrester: How Finding Forrester presents life in the Bronx
How Finding Forrester Presents Life in the Bronx
Finding Forrester takes place in the middle of the Bronx, where Jamal leads a less than ideal life. He lives in public housing with only his mother and his older brother who occasionally visits. The movie shows Jamal writing in his room and there isn’t a lot of stuff. He has a small bed and a small nightstand. The walls are blank white and have nothing to adorn them. In the beginning of the film, he attends a school where they even admit that their school is not good enough for him. Later in the movie, Jamal asks one of his friends if he’s ever met anyone famous, and he replies, “Nobody like that comes around here”. At one point in the movie, it shows Jamal walking through a dark street with a car on fire and police sirens wailing in the background. There’s no doubt that Finding Forrester shows a less than ideal living situation for Jamal and the other residents of the Bronx, but it still seems to have an idealized view of it.
The film doesn’t show a lot of the hard realities the Bronx had at that time. At both schools Jamal attends, there is no show of drugs or sex or crime. Scull and Peltier agree that the education in Finding Forrester is idealized (Scull, Peltier 15). Jamal’s class is pretty well behaved and he has a principle that knows him personally. Jamal doesn’t have a father, but his brother, Terrell, fills that roll. Terrell eats with his family occasionally, holds a steady job selling parking to the Yankees Stadium, and he even argues on Jamal’s behalf to Forrester. There’s almost no show of crime in the entire movie and all the streets of the Bronx are very clean and show no signs of the burning buildings and violence that films often portray the Bronx as having.
Though Finding Forrester shows an idealized version of the Bronx, that doesn’t mean that its interpretation of the Bronx is bad. In her article, Kathrine Simpson argues about film and media and how they have a powerful impact on how people view a city. I agree with her when she argues that the way people view a city has a powerful impact on how the city behaves, so film and media can affect how people treat a city (Simpson 102). Simpson then talks about an experiment that involved the experimenters putting a car with broken windows and a car with intact windows on the same street (Simpson 102). The car with no windows was vandalized while the car with intact windows remained perfectly fine. This seems to indicate that the view of something can affect the way people treat it. This idea could be put toward the Bronx and the way media shows how it is. Most media and films showed the Bronx as a place with buildings on fire and prostitutes on the corners and a place of violence and hate. When the whole country viewed the Bronx as a horrible violent place, the occupants treated it as such. Finding Forrester rejects this way of portraying the Bronx. Instead it chooses to still show a place that is in bad shape and needs help, but it doesn’t make it seem worse than it actually is, and it doesn’t glamorize it in any way. Finding Forrester even takes it a step farther as it shows how much Jamal, a young black poverty stricken teen, is able to help Forrester, the rich old white man, further helping establish the Bronx as a place full of strong individuals who are not only capable of helping themselves, but others as well.
Scull, W Reed, and Peltier, Gary L.. “Star Power and the Schools: Studying Popular Films' Portrayal of Educators.” The Clearing House, vol. 81, no. 1, 2007, pp. 13–18. Accessed 27 April 2017.
Simpson, Katherine. “Media Images of the Urban Landscape: The South Bronx in Film.” Centro Journal, vol. 14, no. 2, Fall 2002, p. 98-109. EBSCOhost, dist.lib.usu.edu/login?url=http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=aph&AN=8713273&site=ehost-live. Accessed 27 April 2017.