The Lorax

This week we viewed the film, The Lorax. It was quite a complex movie for its' childish nature. This is especially seen in just the opening seen, where they sing the song about not having any trees and it being fantastic. You begin to get this sense, that Thneedville's social construction of reality is that the only good things are manufactured products, and nothing natural is ever good. In order to be more mindful, and see the world from the point of view of the animals or Ted, they must see the situation with a beginner's mind, which means that they must forget all their bias, and view the situation as a completely new one. This will help them see the dysfunction, and they can correct it. Also in this scene,  you see Ted become more sociologically mindful of the trees. Before he talked to Audrey, he just viewed the trees as all the other citizens, however, thanks to him hearing Audrey out, he was more mindful of the real harm being done by the lack of trees, and made it his mission to fix it.

This scene at the start can also represent structural functionalism and symbolic interactionism. The main question that many structural functionalists ask is "How does this create security and stability?"; well, this scene depicts how Thneedville manufactures everything they need, and any problem can be instantly fixed due to the sheer amount of technology.  It creates security and stability in the sense that everybody works together, and everybody benefits. The bottles of air are symbolism for greed and industry. It is a criticism of how almost anything nowadays, even things as simple as air, can be manufactured so one party can make money of it. It tries to show the nature behind big business today, and it does, in many ways, relate back to our economy today.