As I have
been reading recently, I have been working on looking closely at the text and
recognizing choices that the author made in order to leave a certain impact on
the readers or viewers. I am currently watching a television show called The
Fosters on ABC Family, and I decided to try some of this close reading
(viewing) work while watching the show. The Fosters is about Lena and Stef,
life partners who have five kids, four whom are adopted and one who is from
another marriage. The show shows the different lives of each of the kids and
allows you to feel like you are in their world, making decisions alongside
them. As I tried this close watching work with this show, I focused on
recognizing power and resistance between characters.
The
main characters in The Fosters are all teenagers and this brings up greater,
more mature issues. One example of this is when use of drugs and alcohol came
up between the characters. It seemed as though the writer wanted readers to see
how these young adults make choices and to see how bad decisions end up hurting
many more than just themselves. The episode also showed how the adults needed
to figure out a mature way to solve the issue once they looked at the reality
of the fact that they are dealing with teenagers and issues like these will be
coming up. Not just in the episode, but in life, everyone has expectations that
they are expected to live up to. It could either be to have some great
achievement or to act a certain way and to always do the right thing. Sometimes
reaching that expectation is something that you look forward to and sometimes
it is a huge challenge. Being surrounded by the right people will help you to
do the right thing and reach these goals that either you have set or others have
set for you. This is one example of a time where power and resistance were
shown in The Fosters.
Another
example of power and resistance in this episode was when Callie, one of the
newly adopted kids is at a party with her boyfriend Wyatt. Wyatt is hosting
this party at his house that has just been bought by the bank because his
mother missed her payments. Wyatt is allowing everybody to destroy his home by
smashing the walls and spraying the walls with paint. Wyatt suddenly begins to
freak out when he realizes what is happening and starts to cry on the floor.
Callie helps him and explains to him that it is only a house. This showed how
such simple things had such a greater meaning to him and his home was so
powerful with all the memories and stories hidden inside of it. He let his
anger over losing his home take over his mind and he thought that destroying it
would make things better and would solve all of his issues. It was as if he was
in a dissociated state and wasn’t fully aware of the damage he was doing on
tangible items and on his mind. In reality, there can be times where you get
overpowered with the less important things in life you don’t know what to do. You
end up making bad choices that affect yourself and others around you. This is
another time where power and resistance was shown in The Fosters.
As
I watched the television show The Fosters, I viewed it closely for times where
characters were either overwhelmed with power or had to deal with power in
another way. I found that characters either took the route of making bad
decisions that they thought would make things better but simply made things
much worse and created many more problems. In real life, making bad decisions doesn’t
help solve problems. It is better to find relaxing activities or find someone
that you can talk to. This shows how people, memories, and places can hold
power over you even if a long time has passed. To resist and deal with this strength
that it has over you, there are better ways to deal with it than to make bad
decisions. Overall, the show The Fosters has many points in which characters
struggled with power and how to deal with it.
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