AS AM 100FF Lecture Notes - Lecture 12: Spelling Bee, Rati Pandey, Tabula Rasa
16 Nov 2017
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What narratives/ arguments about the bee does the filmmaker present in the. Angela: mexican, has a father who doesn"t speak english, represents the achieved american dream for her family. Ted: intellect, doesn"t fit into the school. Neil: typical indian spelling bee speller; wealth, hard-working. His father: in america it is impossible to fail if one works hard enough. The national spelling bee seemed like a kind of blank slate that each speller, each family, would project personal meaning onto, he says. For some, it felt like a more purely personal quest. For others success in the bee suggested more directly a bigger kind of cultural success, a mastery of an american way of life. From the start, the idea that america itself would be represented by kids trying to conquer the unconquerable seemed pretty compelling. It"s such a pure distillation of one strand of our culture. Perfect demonstration that hard work lead to success.
