In a nutshell, Don Jon is about Joseph Gordon- Levitt’s character, Jon, and his few passions in life: his body, his pad, his cars, his family, his church, his girls, and his porn. Joseph Gordon- Levitt makes his writing and directing debut with this film. And on the whole, the film is brilliant. He addresses how in society we objectify women, and he makes the viewers while watching the film feel guilty as they begin to objectify Scarlett Johansson. He says in and interview (TIME):
“I wanted the movie itself to be guilty of some of these same things and lure the audience down the same road, especially the second act of the movie where the conventional romance is moving right along. It uses all those same devices, the beautiful dolly shots and the sweeping string section, the gorgeous lighting and all that stuff. I like it when movies sort of are, I guess, self-culpable. Godard does this a lot. That’s actually one of the references I brought up to Scarlett early on: Brigitte Bardot in ‘Contempt.’ The movie is constantly seducing you with her beauty and her sex appeal and then suddenly slapping you across the face and saying ‘look at what you’re doing, look at how you’re relating to this woman on the screen.’”
So why does the film center around pornography so much? While thinking about the films meaning on a whole, pornography fully objectifies the woman. And that is exactly what Joseph- Gordon Levitt wanted to get across. “You’re taking a person—in our culture it’s usually a woman—and reducing her to a thing, to an object for your consumption. I think plenty of mainstream media is equally guilty of that as pornography. That’s why I wanted to put pornography at the center of this movie, to compare the rest of our media to pornography.” (TIME).
Without ruining the movie, the film discusses how our concept of love is based on lust. We are a society that rushes into relationships without even getting to know the other person. Whether we just want a significant other, or we want to brag that we have a significant other. Men tend to get into a relationship based on looks while woman want that Hollywood love story. It’s unhealthy, and it is not real. And until we realize it, and get past the lust or the idea we will never truly experience what love is.
So what are you going to do this weekend? Watch Don Jon?
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