Remember the Titans

Many of us have seen the movie Remember the Titans. To a child it just appears as a football movie, but it has a clear defined message that shines through. In this film segregation and intergration were topics at hand. The movie demonstrated the challenges people went through just day to day.

Remember the Titans was set in 1971. T.C Williams was a brand new high school that was to be opened in the fall but it was unlike many others, it was going to have white students as well as black students, one of the first of it's kind in Virginia. To have this new intergrated school open, one high school that accomadated only white students close and another that only had black students closed and it created this new high school where the two would come together.

While this may seem like a small issue that is easy to overcome for us in this day and time, this was a major issue. To demonstrate how big of a deal it was the creators of the movie illustrated on the screen how people of each race treated each other. In one scene, a player on the football team told one of his new black teammates to wait his turn while getting water and this caused a fight. In another scene, the football players of the white high school were having a meeting with their coach and when they all learned that their new coach was going to be black the said they were going to boycott the season unless their coach was reinstated as the new high school's head football coach. Lastly in another scene of this nature, one of the white players wanted to go out to eat after a victory and two of his teammates he was with said they could not enter the resturant because of the color of their skin and later in the scene got kicked out of the resturant and got upset with their teammate. In these scenes, the director and other creators were really trying to illustrate how brutal people were to each other in this time. With hopes that each scene would resonate with the viewers and one might grab their attention and make them think "Wow, thats really what it was like".

As the movie continues, it slowly transforms to what the directors big picture lesson is. The boys on the team start to become much closer and grow together as a family. While people at school do not accept these actions, as well as their parents, they keep helping each other. In one scene, one of the boys gets into a fight at school, and boys of each race help him out of the jam he gets himself into. In other scenes, they hang out with each other outside of school, like going out after a game and even playing basketball with each other. This starts to become "normal" to them while everyone else looks down upon it. By doing this the director transitions the movie and the big picture of, it really doesn't matter what somebody looks like, not matter the skin color, we all are equal and can all be together. This sets the tone for the rest of the movie because this makes the whole community come together and everyone supports one another.

By the end of the film, the whole community supports each other and the football team is to thank for it. They brought together everyone because they were the first to accept each other and they worked together and got a phenomenal outcome. They sent the message to their families who passed it along to everyone else who wasn't touched by it yet.

Most times in movies directors use this sort of build up to get the message across in the very end in a big way and in Remember the Titans, the message is that all are equal, we all just have to work together and interact to actually see that and make it happen. The build up, and visions of actual things that happened in this time made it so much more believable for the viewer and easier to see the directors vision and point he really wanted to make.