Journal Entry #4

Something I have been thinking about outside of class recently is Dancing with the Stars, which I have been watching a lot recently. Technically, it is a dance competition, but the more I watch it, the more I realize that a huge part of who gets to stay comes down to who people like. That got me thinking about our conversations about con men in movies and how easily our perception of someone can be shaped by the way they are presented to us.

What I find especially interesting is that as a viewer, I can start feeling like I actually know these celebrities even though everything I know about them is coming through a TV show. We see their rehearsals, struggles, relationships with their partners, emotional moments, and reactions to criticism. Obviously, those things are real to some extent, but they are also being selected and edited into a story. I might decide that someone is genuine or hardworking based on a few minutes of footage chosen from an entire week. Then, when it comes time to vote, I am not necessarily voting for the best dancer. I am voting for the person I have grown attached to.

It reminded me of what I wrote about Dirty Rotten Scoundrels and how the movie gets us to root for Lawrence and Freddy despite the fact that they are conning people. Similarly for the characters in Paper Moon as well. In both cases, presentation changes how we judge someone. The difference is that with Dancing with the Stars, I am actually participating in that judgment by voting. I think what I am realizing is that likeability is not just something a person naturally has. It can also be created or at least amplified by what we are shown about them. We tend to think we like someone because we have figured out what kind of person they are, when really we might just like the version of them that we have been given. That makes me wonder how often the same thing happens outside of entertainment, where we trust or support people based on a carefully presented version of who they are rather than actually knowing them.

Comments

  1. williams.dan76October 6, 2026 at 6:58 AM

    Thanks for this. I enjoyed your comparisons between Dancing with the Stars and our class. I have not ever watched the show, but your comments are persuasive. I did not know viewers could vote.

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

JOURNAL ENTRY #1

 One thing I was excited about when looking at the syllabus for this class was the number of films we would be watching and discussing. A personal goal of mine is to work through a list of 50 classic movies. I feel like there is a simplicity to older movies, even when they are exploring complex themes. I had never heard of "Paper Moon" before this class, so I went into it knowing absolutely nothing. It has now become one of my favorites. Although we have not yet gotten deeply into discussing the film, learning some of the basic facts surrounding it already led me down an interesting rabbit hole. We were asked to think about the title of the movie. While there is an obvious visual reference to the paper moon during the photograph scene, I wondered whether “paper moon” was also a common saying that I was missing. Being from Mexico, I occasionally miss the meaning behind common English expressions. So after looking into it, I found that the film was originally based on a book w...
Read more

Journal Entry #5

I watched Primetime (film about early 2000s reality show - To Catch A Predator) recently, and I had so many thoughts after watching, and even more after seeing reviews online. What interested me most was how uncomfortable the movie was willing to let its subject become without necessarily telling me how I was supposed to feel about it. The premise behind To Catch a Predator seems morally straightforward at first. They are "catching" adults who are attempting to meet minors, and I do not really have an ethical problem with exposing that behavior. What became more complicated for me was thinking about the fact that the show was also entertainment. The people producing it were making money because predators existed, and, even more uncomfortably, a more shocking or bizarre predator made for better television. I do not think that automatically makes the show or the people behind it bad. If anything, that is what I liked about the movie. It allowed two things to be true at once. T...
Read more

Journal Entry #3

One thing that stood out to me this week was discussing Dirty Rotten Scoundrels on Tuesday and talking about how con men get portrayed in film and media in general. It's interesting because the movie clearly wants you to root for Lawrence and Freddy even though they spend the entire runtime lying to people and taking their money. The writing does a lot of work to make that feel okay: the marks are usually wealthy, a little oblivious, or somehow deserving of getting fooled, and the cons themselves are framed as clever rather than cruel. It made me think about how differently we'd probably react if the same tactics were used on someone sympathetic instead of someone rich and gullible. The movie is really just using the same psychological tricks we've been discussing all along, authority, charm, confidence, but it dresses them up as entertainment instead of manipulation. That distinction between a "con man" and a "scammer" in pop culture seems to come down ...
Read more