Color Adjustment: False Image of American Dream Essay

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Color Adjustment is a 1992 documentary film about a false image of the American dream. The documentary was written and directed by an African-American, Marlon Riggs. The main subject of this video is discrimination against black people and suppression of color issues in the U.S. The documentary tells the story of white, well-dressed people advertising the American dream, completely ignoring that the U.S. is not only a country of the white race. The most striking part of this video for me was when the documentary shows a story of a T.V. series starring a black actor, which had to be canceled due to lack of financial resources. Indeed, television that white Americans dominated was hesitant to sponsor serious movie projects with people of color as main characters. White people did not adequately study black culture; thus, it was considered foreign and possibly inappropriate for the American dream. This video is a perfect illustration of the enormous gap between American society’s realities in the past and the illusion of successful citizens broadcasted on television at that time.

A false representation of life in the media, which ultimately consumed American society, was the leading cause for the discrepancy between the actual situation and the one on the screen. As Stuart Hall (476) said, “there is no escape from the politics of representation,” which is closely related to the problem discussed in the documentary film. He also discusses that black culture was complex and challenging to understand for white people; therefore, it probably rarely appeared on television (Hall 473). Indeed, the American dream was false because internal racial and ethnic relationships within the country were “ambivalent” (Hall 469). African Americans were excluded from that dream about a perfect life in the past, which could only mean that television was making ambiguous color adjustments to fit that time’s political representation.

Works Cited

Hall, Stuart. “What is this ‘black’ in black popular culture?” Critical Dialogues in Cultural Studies, edited by David Morley and Kuang-Hsing Chen. Routledge, 2005, pp. 468-478.

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IvyPanda. 2022. "Color Adjustment: False Image of American Dream." August 20, 2022. https://ivypanda.com/essays/color-adjustment-false-image-of-american-dream/.

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