Journal Article Analysis

            The article I chose for this semester is called Buying Me Love: 1980s Class-Clash Teen Romances published by Timothy Shary. When two people from different classes feel in love people could never believe that what they had was true love, but that the poorer one was always after what the other one had either individually or through their family history. During this time period love would become the force that overcame class, dis-empowering it within the narrative conflict, and distracting young audiences from seeing that the poorer member of a teen couple always benefited from his or her association with the richer. (Shary, 2011) Class differences in these films are normally pretty easy to point out through the way they appear in these types of movies.

            Played throughout these movies it shows that in every relationship the wealthier teens use their status to reject the lower-class and it truly shows their character as being snobbish while the poorer teens are thankful for the things they do have and appreciate the small things. The history of how these relationships were formed during these time periods is where the heart of the article is at as the details of each movie relationship starts to run together with the others. Each movie discussed in this article does show a small variation of different occurrences why the teen relationships were tested either by the parents or peers at school.

The targeted audience of this film was originally for teen moviegoers, the majority of whom were statistically middle class, and likely believing fantasies of class ascension not through hard work but through romantic fulfillment. (Shary, 2011)  Most of the time young teen couples go to watch these movies on their date night but then get an eye opening experience of how the class differences really can affect relationships.

                The way I view this article is with sincere appreciation because I was one of those teenagers that grew up in the lower-class. Without my grandfather to help us out when needed my family would have struggled more so and experienced even less through our childhood. While this article wouldn’t be my top recommendation to read, there are a lot of really good points about the differences in the social classes and how everyone was treated differently due to the difference between one another. That particular part of the article I enjoyed most was in the beginning as it discusses the economic times and how these types of stereotypes and barriers were formed. In the meantime, as you read further on it starts singling out individual films and basically just summarizing the teen relationships formed which I thought was unnecessary to include so many with such detail.

The moral in many of these films was that wealthy people could be reformed through the diligent devotion and pride of the poor, although they would not need to surrender their financial security to do so. (Shary, 2011) In my opinion, true love cannot be hand-picked for people just because one may want a wealthier lifestyle than they currently have. True love just happens and that sometimes happens to people who are from completely opposite worlds and are brought together to better one another with the experiences each person has gone through to make them who they are presently. I feel sometimes that opposite classes can work well because the side doesn’t want somebody who is looking to become rich and overly-obsessive with materialistic objects while the other one just wants the simplicity of having the basic securities of life.

References

Shary, T. (2011). Buying me love: 1980s class-clash teen romances. (Vol. 44, pp. 563-582). Norman, OK: Blackwell Publishing, Inc. Retrieved from http://0-journals.ohiolink.edu.olinkserver.franklin.edu/ejc/article.cgi?issn=00223840&issue=v44i0003&article=563_bml1ctr