September 3, 2013

Park Avenue and Miss Representation

I spent part of my Labor Day weekend recovering from a week's worth of orientations and watching lots of Netflix.  I saw plenty of Batman Beyond and Trailer Park Boys, but  I also took the time to watch two documentaries that had been on my list for awhile: Miss Representation and Park Avenue.

Miss Representation is a 2011 film by Jennifer Siebel Newsom, an actress and film maker, who sets up this documentary as an internal dialogue about the upcoming birth of her daughter and how she is worried about the way media portrays women and diminishes their intelligence and power.  She interviews young high school students (male and female) along with congress women and men, authors, college professors, journalists and well known activists.  It is a very smart and engaging documentary.  There is a companion website www.missrepresentation.org that provides educational materials and continues the discussion of women's representation in media.





The second documentary I watched was Park Avenue: Money, Power, & the American DreamAlex Gibney (ENRON: The Smartest Guys in the Room) directs this look at the extreme gap in wealth and education that represented on Park Avenue as it is the home to the most billionaires in America in Manhattan and extends to the South Bronx, one of the poorest congressional districts in the United States.

Gibney does a good job of demonstrating the massive wealth and powerful influence on politics that the residents of 740 Park Avenue, Manhattan have.  I felt it lacked a real comparison to life in South Bronx.  It's presented as a comparison, but except for a few statistics, there was no face of the South Bronx.  There's no specific address or person that Gibney explores; he feels it's just enough to say, "and over here...they are poor."  That's not to say that the film is not effective.  It certainly is eye opening to think about how much of an impact these few men have on all of our lives through governmental policies.





I think both are worth looking at and certainly bring up some interesting frames for how we talk about gender and economic equality.