Media Stereotype

From my own experience, almost all American movie contain many typical stereotype that show how great is their people. For instant, their movies must have a good looking hero, skillful, great, and can save the world. They never fail their mission and in the end will fall in love with the beautiful girl who always help and stand by their side. However, they never used their own people as their 'bad guy'. In fact, the bad guy were often representative of the countries that were in conflict with the United States. This can be see when they put Arabian as terrorist and their face must typically like Osama bin Laden, a beard guy with robe and have full of bomb with them. Other than that, the black people always characterized in movie to be drug seller, joining gangsterism and have a bad attitude. The France people always been see as high class people but joining mafia and do illegal thing. In fact, when they want to show something about Asian, they always went to China or Hong Kong. All this stereotype are very popular in American movies nowadays.

War theme movie are usually used all this kind of stereotype. For example, Pearl Harbor and Behind Enemy Lines.

But what is attracting me is the movie True Lies by James Cameron. I found this movie was interesting and i really enjoyed watching it. However, when it comes to antagonist, they make the Palestinian as the villain. There is part where Palestinian terrorist faction, Crimson Jihad, led by Aziz (Malik) plan to detonate one of four nuclear warheads to cover their tracks while they flee with the other three and make their demands to United Stated government. This show the stereotype for Arabian in their movie. This kind of stereotype might change people perspective towards Islam's people and they also might think that all Muslim are terrorist.

Media stereotype is really dangerous especially for propaganda and political reason.Therefore, if they won't change their stereotype, it's difficult to change people perception and thought about other race and religious.