Sociological Experience The sociological movie I chose to watch was, “A Bug’s Life”. I found several sociological concepts while watching the film. The movie is focused on a colony of ants that are being oppressed by a gang of grasshoppers who come every season demanding food from the ants. The grasshoppers use their size to dominate over the ants. One day in the spring, when the offering’s preparation has just been finished, an ant named Flik causes the whole offering of seeds to fall over into a river. The grasshoppers come and harass the ants and decide to give them one more chance to gather seeds. They expect the ants to do all of the work so the grasshoppers can just sit and play. The ants represent the working poor no matter how much work they do they cannot get ahead, while the grasshoppers hardly work and stay on top.
Flik tries to recruit warrior bugs to fight off the grass hopers. Flik’s so called warriors turn out to be a group of circus bugs. When the colony discovers this they desperately try to pull together enough food for a new offering to the grasshoppers. After failing to gather enough food they try to scare them away with a fake bird. It nearly works, but Hopper the leader of the grasshoppers realizes that it was an imposter. As he is about to kill Flik the ants realize that they outnumber the grasshoppers 100-to-1 so they fight them off. This part of the movie demonstrates the effects of size in a group. They no longer have to live in fear of the grasshoppers.
This movie shows several examples of culture. Some of the norms this culture shares are shown with the gathering and picking of food. They all follow a set known order and march in a single file line. When Flik makes an invention to speed up the collection of seeds his idea is shut down. One of the older ants says, “We’ve harvested the same way since I was a pupa.” They are not excepting of change they do things the same way every single year and they all know, it is a shared knowledge. The colony has set roles for all of the ants so they can survive; each ant does their part to help out the colony. One thing I noticed while watching the movie is that the ant colony doesn’t really have anything to work for. Throughout the movie you can’t really judge or classify the ants besides the Queen’s family and her helpers they all seem to be relatively equal to each other. This is probably due to their lack of freedom; the ants spend nearly all their time helping out the colony they don’t have time to worry about material goods or classification. I did however notice that they still had friends and certain people they would talk with. This is so much different than the way we live our lives in America I don’t think there are many people in this world without at least some material goods.
The ants are a good example of a group. Here is an example for each of the six things that happen when a group is formed. They formed a hierarchy with the Queen as the leader. Their main goal is to collect food and survive. They demonstrate division of labor; each ant has a specific job that they are required to do. Some of the rules they had where to always listen to the Queen. One of the punishments for misbehavior was being required to dig in the tunnels. An example of Argot is how the ants are so afraid of leaving the island.