Jake Schott
4/24/2021
While reading through this assignment I began to contemplate which text/film I was going to review. After thinking about it for a while I gave up trying to come up with ideas and went upstairs where I found my roommates had just turned on the movie Freaky Friday with Lindsay Lohan. I had never seen this movie before and initially thought it was rather corny. However, after watching it for 20 min I became invested and had to see it through! It actually turned out to be quite funny and I really enjoyed it. Afterwards, I thought it would make the perfect film to review for this assignment!
If you are like me and have never seen the movie before it is about a mother and daughter that switch bodies for a short time. It happens as part of a curse and they only way to reverse it is to fully understand what it is like to live in the other person’s shoes. This is particularly difficult for them as the mother and daughter apart from their age difference have very opposite tastes and styles. For this reason, they are very judgmental of each other and how they live their respective lives. This judgement makes them very bitter towards each other because they do not understand the rational behind their life choices. As the duration of the switch goes longer both characters feel the sense of othering, as they realize they cannot fit in or belong in the new life they have been given. This creates a turning point for both characters as they being to breakdown and begin to accept each other for who they are. This eventually leads to both characters sympathizing with each other’s problems and changing their views towards each other entirely. Upon reaching this new understanding and respect for the other person the curse is lifted and they return back to their original bodies.
I feel like Freaky Friday is a good representation of the central message that we have learned in this class and that is to embrace the diversity and differences that we share as a society. There are also many underlying subthemes in this film that align with topics we have studied in this class. The two obvious ones that come to mind are single stories and the othering concept. I mentioned how othering came into play in the movie, but “single stories” are also a major part of the plot. Each character forms a shallow opinion of each other based on their style, without taking anything else into consideration. The movie then goes one to show how their interpretations were inaccurate thus expressing the dangers of single stories. Overall, the movie is humorous, but contains a lot of good underlying messages when you begin to examine it through a different lens.
