Social Mobility in the Film King Ralph (1991)

Introduction

According to new rules of social standing in American popular culture, class is no longer defined by wealth, birth, or education. Instead, today's notion of class reflects a socially constructed and regulated series of performed acts and gestures rooted in the cult of celebrity.

However many people are in poverty, as long as social mobility based on merit is guaranteed, those who deserve should be able to move up the social ladder. Those born to the middle class have about an equal chance of moving up or down the income ladder, according to the Economic Mobility Project. (Steven : 105)

Those born to black middle-class families are much more likely than their white counterparts to fall in rank. The children of the rich and poor, meanwhile, are less mobile than the middle classes. More than 40% of those Americans born in the bottom quintile remain stuck there as adults. (Bodnar 14-18)

In examining the quest for class mobility, Foster deftly traces class passing through the landscape of popular films, reality television shows, advertisements, the Internet, and video games. She deconstructs the politics of celebrity, fashion, and conspicuous consumerism and analyzes class passing as it relates to the American Dream, gender, and marriage.

The protagonist is stuck in the lower class positions/ he does not deserve although s/he is talented and has values that matches middle class or above. The sociology of film can be clearly seen within the spanning genres of film since the creation of film. The sociology of a film is created off of people and their situations that comes to a screen writer who then decides to make the film into a motion picture with the use of those actors and actresses that become the famous socialites of the film. (Chudacoff 78-85)

Analysis of Social Mobility in the Film

King Ralph, in daring and original fashion, maps and elaborates on contradictions in performing social class via the media and popular culture. This film is commendable for the range of examples that illustrate continuities and changes in representations of social class as well as their relation to treatments of race and gender. (Barton 78-79)

Social mobility is usually defined as the movement of an individual or group of people from one social position to another. Such movement may involve mobility within a horizontal plane, as when an individual shifts from one religious group to another, marries or divorces, or changes place of employment but keep the same occupational status. Horizontal social mobility is distinct from geographical mobility, which involves movement across physical space but not necessarily a shift in social position, though social mobility may accompany geographical mobility. Vertical mobility occurs when an individual or group rises or declines from one social stratum to another. This type of movement may be reckoned by changes in social position within an individual's lifetime (a process of career mobility), by comparing changes in attainment across generations (intergenerational mobility), or by relating some measure of social attainment by an age, ethnic, ...