Dr. Luke Vasileiou
English 103
November 13, 2010
Breakfast at Tiffany’s & The Real New York City during early 1960‘s.
Movies are screenplays that take us away from what is really going on in the real world. That’s one of the mayor main reasons why we like to watch them, they have nothing to do with reality and we like anything that makes us forget any problems or disasters that are happening at the present time like the bad economy or natural disasters. Movies make us dream of possibilities, they make us imagine something fictional, they make us believe that we’re part of them and they make us want to be one of the actors. We wouldn’t appreciate or enjoy a movie that makes us confront what’s really going on in the real world, because we are going through it physically and mentally and it would be worst for us to have to deal with it while watching a movie. Movies make us dream and believe of utopian and dystopian places they do this in a way that they make the viewers want to be part of this places or stories. We go to the movies to relax and have a good time not to face reality but to get away from it, at least for 2 hours the minimum. We want to see things we have never seen before in our lives and sometimes we want to live a life that isn’t ours. Many times we watch movies to look into the future and have an idea of what it’s going to be like and many movies help us to deal with some personal problems. Movies are just a great way to escape and dream that you’re somebody else and living a different life than the one you’re living right now. They’re never real unless it’s a biography or an event that made history. Movies make us look ahead and imagine great things and make us feel great a lot of them don’t show what is really going on in the present time. ‘Breakfast at Tiffany’s’- 1961 directed by Blake Edwards it’s a great example when it comes to movies making their viewers escape from reality into an Idealism world.
“Breakfast at Tiffany’s” it’s a movie that takes place in New York City during the early 1960’s. More specific it takes place in the island of Manhattan known as the big Apple and the city that never sleeps. This movie is about a young writer named Paul “Fred” Varjak who falls in love with a socialite from Manhattan Holly Golightly who loves fashion and rich guys (Breakfast). In this movie New York City is portrait as this place where being a socialite and living the good life is everything New York City is all about. They focus more in the perspective or point of view of the life of a socialite around the early 1960’s. Holly is always making parties in her house invited the most popular people from Manhattan, trying to keep a good image, stay popular and get married to a rich socialite gentleman. For this rich people who didn’t have anything to worry about it seems like they’re lives are not complicated because somehow they’re rich, popular and well know in the City. None of the characters from the movie ever mention being worried about anything and this shows how blinded and selfish they are which makes us the viewer believe that socialites in New York City are really like this. What this movie really did was to idealize NYC, I believe it idealize The City because throughout the whole screening they don’t really show anything else outside the point of view of a rich socialite around the early 1960’s. They don’t show the real problems that people in New York City were going through in the early 1960’s instead they just show a bunch of rich people partying and trying to find love and just living the good life. “Breakfast at Tiffany’s” is more like a fictional version of Manhattan because probably many people out there in the world believe that this is how the life of a socialite in NYC really is, or probably by watching this movie they can think that NYC is a wonderful city free of poverty, stress and problems which is not New York City is never a wonder land it’s a big city and millions of people live in it and this means it’s always facing some problems.
Works Cited
1- (Breakfast at Tiffany’s. Dir. Blake Edwards. Perfs. Audrey Hepburn, George Peppard. Jurow-Shepherd Productions, 1961)
