Boogie Nights essays

Boogie Nights essays The film, Boogie Nights, is film about the pornography business in the late 1970s and early 1980s. Through this industry we meet many different characters going through varying problems. This paper will show that although most of the film follows the career of a young man embarking on a career as a porn actor, this serves as a vehicle for a story about the importance and complications of family. While blood is of no importance in this family setting, the bonds that these characters make with each other rivals any family. This combined with the identity crisis of the time period is the basis for this very well made film. The setting is of particular importance at the beginning of the film. Dirk Diggler, or Eddie, as he was referred to at the beginning of the film, lived at home with his two parents in a suburb south of Los Angeles, Torrance, California. Living in the suburbs would be of no importance if one did not know the referential meaning of typical suburban life. Suburban families are usually thought of as being ideal, loving, nuclear families where the mom stays home to take care of the house and family while the father goes to work to make money. This concept is played upon in the first scene that the family is shown together. Just as the stereotype permits, his family is first shown together at breakfast. It looks at first like this is a typical suburban family with the mom cooking at the stove, son eating at the table, and the dad coming into the kitchen in his suit for work and kissing his wife on the cheek. For this film, however, this image is created only to immediately destro y these preconceived notions of suburban life. It was the perfect suburban family down to the kiss, on the surface. While kissing your wife on the cheek in the morning while she cooks breakfast for her family would fit the perfect picture, instead, she snaps at him and scolds him saying that he should not do that if he hasn...