Is "Chitty Chitty Bang Bang" the product of a Misogynistic and Classist Society?

Hell0. My name is Larry Coulter and I am a student at California State University Northridge. In this blog, which has been set up for Dr. Steven Wexler's graduate class in Critical Theory, I will be discussing classroom and assignment-related topics. On our first night of class, we watched a film clip from the movie-musical "Chitty Chitty Bang Bang" and came up with a variety of critical approaches that could be used to analyze and read the clip as a "text."

I would like to use this blogspot right now to add further discussion related to Monday night's primary classroom focus. I believe that the scene from "Chitty Chitty Bang Bang" can be approached in relation to our readings of Plato's concept of "mimesis." For example, the mechanical female doll and the male doll, portrayed in the film by human actors, can be read as mimetic representations of an ideal, Platonic "doll." However, the fact that our class can offer negative gender and class-related interpretations of the "Chitty Chitty Bang Bang" dolls that point to societal inequalities reveals specific ways that these dolls have become corrupted through repeated mimetic representation. For example, while these "dolls" were being removed from their "ideal," they became more and more corrupted in transit. In this case, the dolls took on sexist and classist qualities found within our culture, which have been analyzed in our classroom. The "Chitty Chitty Bang Bang" dolls do not seem to offer their audience an Aristotelian form of "catharsis," or restoration of health, but instead seem to reinforce our own societal ills, namely misogynism and class-based discrimination.

Another issue at stake in our readings is the censoring of art. I believe that it is wrong to censor or ban artistic means of self-expression, as Plato believed his own society should do. However, in an effort to minimize societal ills while safeguarding the rights of artists, an audience needs to be educated and capable of reading the obscured meanings behind texts such as "Chitty Chitty Bang Bang." In this way, artists can be permitted to create and audiences can prevent themselves from being subliminally swayed by sexist and classist artistic representations such as those seen in the film clip.