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What Is The Meaning Of It Should Happen To You

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It Should Happen to You is a comedy released in 1950s America, showing the road of an anonymous girl, Gladys, being famous in a bourgeois society through the power of myth. As the executor of the myth, Gladys collaborates with Adam III’s idea of ‘average American girl’ achieving her dream of being well known to the public by making various commercial advertisements in the movie. The individuals of the bourgeoisie identify themselves with the image of Gladys in advertisements as loyal consumers of the myth. Gladys, on the other hand, starts to liberate herself from the constructed mythologies after engaging actively. At the moment of Gladys dissatisfying with the constructed notion of ‘average American girl,’ she becomes the mythologist, disclosing …show more content…

Before putting the idea into practice with her advertisements, Gladys Glover is famous in the society because her name has appeared in the city repeatedly, but nobody knows further about her. When she no longer remains hidden from the billboards and participates in public activities, the bourgeois realizes that she is no different from the ordinary people. For instance, Gladys reveals an entirely different image of a famous person in a talk show about at what age a girl should get …show more content…

As Gladys starts to take different kinds of commercial advertisements, she has significant numbers of ads appear on billboards, newspapers, and magazines regularly. At the same time, as Barthes mentions in Mythologies, “[m]yths are nothing but this ceaseless, untiring solicitation, this insidious and inflexible demand that all men recognize themselves in this image, eternal yet bearing a date, which was built of them one day as if for all time. (155)” Therefore, Gladys and her corresponding notion of ‘average American girl’ penetrate deeply into the people’s mind because of the power of media. The mass media transmits and reinforces the message again and again until the public is used to its existence and finally accept it. The bourgeoisie who identify themselves with the image of Gladys as an ordinary individual in the society inevitably desires to purchase the things Gladys endorsed. Since the loyal consumers believe in the myth of Gladys, those things mentioned in the advertisement, for them, turns out to be the essential types of the bourgeois culture with no

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