A Bronx Tale

While watching the movie, A Bronx Tale, not only is it such a good movie, but it is also helping me to understand Sociology a lot more. It is unbelievable to me the huge affect social construction and "groups" have on people. Throughout the movie, there is a huge emphasis on the different, cultured neighborhoods. Of course, the movie mostly takes place in the Italian neighborhood, but in the part we watched in class today, it showed a couple of interactions that really stuck with me. The first was the interaction between Sonny and the biker gang. The groups in that society were so "cliquey" that they were willing to do anything to prove their "rank" in their group. In this scene, Sonny created a huge fight in his bar after the bikers were disrespectful. Even though there were only a couple main guys that were disrespectful, the entire group was severely beat up by Sonny and his friends. What's interesting though, is that if there was someone else in there from another group, Sonny and his friends would most likely not have gone near them. Another scene that really stuck with me, was the scene where C's friends beat up the group of African American boys that were riding bikes, causing absolutely no harm, through their Italian neighborhood. C recently met Jane, who is African American, and had no bad feelings toward these boys or anyone else from their neighborhood. When C sees his friends going after the boys, he repeatedly yelled at them to stop, but of course no one listened. C felt like he had to go out there and look like he was doing something because his friends were doing it, even though he was totally against beating up these African American boys. The social construction really shows in this movie. All of these kids just hear that they should do something or think a certain way, like hate the other neighborhoods. If they had the chance to make their own opinions of them, like C, maybe they would see that there really was no difference between them besides skin color. I really hope that people can watch this movie and see that if they just give people a chance and make their own opinions for themselves, like C did with Jane, and not "judge a book by its cover", like C's friends did, they might think differently about people and many other things in life. I think it's important for people to find themselves on their own and learn for themselves, rather than just live off of what other people tell them.