Blog 4

Nicholas Zwobot

Dr. Ellis

EN*101

23 October 2017

Step and its Impact

            When watching the movie Step, you really get a sense of the struggle that many people go through as well as how good people have it in life. There are many people that take every aspect of their life for granted and pass many days and opportunities like it is nothing. Step truly put into focus the amount that people really have. When you do not know if you will have electricity or food that day is a task many people have, but those who do not, take it all for granted.  It is not the easiest task to link works like Frankenstein to a movie like Step, but after some deeper reading of the actual meaning of the story, you can begin to piece together some beautiful connections.

            When looking at the two poems, Tableau was a perfect reading for this movie, because one of the main points of this movie were the struggle that African American teens are having, especially with the racial divide and conflicts with police. A specific conflict mentioned was in the case of Freddie Grey, where he was killed in a confrontation with police officers in West Baltimore. The poem simulates an answer to the issues that were talked about in the movie and these issues that are still continuing today. In the poem, which is meant to focus more in the Civil Rights era it says, “Locked arm in arm they cross the way/The black boy and the white.” It mentions how people of both color look upon them, but they are not phased. That exact joining is what this country needs in order to successfully move past this terrible racial divide, the poem strengthens this by saying “Should blaze the path of thunder.” In the movie, these young women linked hands and hearts when they competed, especially during a competition where there step routine was focuses on Freddie Grey, “hands up don’t shoot” and “Black Lives Matter.”

            The poem Theology is a very simple poem, but it has a very simple point. In the poem, the author mentions heaven as where his soul is “longing to go” and then the presence of hell as “where would my neighbor’s go”. This is more complicated to associate with a movie like Step, but you could analyze the path that many of these girls can choose to go down. For many of them they can choose the path of heaven, or the path that Paul Lawrence Dunbar has assigned to himself. The alternate route that could be chosen is the one that in Dunbar’s poem, seems to be associated with most other people, with the use of the term “my neighbor’s.” This route although associated with hell, could alternately mean choosing a path of dropping out of school, choosing a life of violence, or even worse death. The association between Dunbar’s poem and Step is not as prominent, but the meaning is much deeper.  

            Finally, when it comes to Step and Frankenstein I thought the many deaths and turbulent times that Victor went through. This aligns well with Step because many of the kids go through so many difficult and heart wrenching times. Similar to Victor in the book they lose many people in their families, many of which are a sibling and/or a parent. It is extremely upsetting how these children go through these awful times, but similar to Victor and his beautiful mind. There are success stories, one of the girls in the movie was accepted on to John Hopkins University on a full academic scholarship. In both stories, I believe that a strong message that you can get is that no matter the situation, you can choose the outcome. Even though this is hard to see in Frankenstein, it can be see at the loss of his mother Justine, and his brother. Instead of giving up Victor continues with his life and does not quit.

  Another connection that I made was in the movie one of the girls had written a story about Frankenstein’s monster, but instead the basis of the story was about how her mother and father would fight, not just verbally, but physically. Although sad, this was a very intelligent connection because many people see him as a very degusting and ugly monster, he even sees himself as very ugly. The monster states that when he sees himself in a reflection. This was very interesting, in the story everyone sees the monster as ugly and horrifying, but he is truly nice. In the girl’s story Frankenstein is used to show the ugly side of her parents, who otherwise love her. Sadly, the beautiful side of her mother and father are not shown, like it is in the actual story.

            It amazes me as to how much similarity there is in many different forms of art. Even though all of these works were written in different time periods, the overall themes stay the same, but link to sub-themes that the author then expands on.  In the end, Step was a very well written and produced movie. It showed all aspects of the situation many of these young women were in. Not only did it associate all of these aspects, but it showed how much they relied on their step team in order to get them through the turbulent time that they were going through whether personally and/or culturally.