Consuming Murder:Pleasure In The Film Chicago

As a classical genre of movie in Hollywood,musical movie is welcomed by people all the time,especially Chicago which had won the Academy Award for Best Pictures that year.It is not common for a musical movie to get this award.Therefore,the profound meaning behind this movie deserves our thinking.However,there are not many studies about it now.This thesis will mainly apply id,ego,superego of Freud's psychoanalysis combine with the consumptive social background to analyze the development of pleasure in this movie.In consumer society,the richness of material life gives people more choices.People will not be satisfied with their basic material need easily,they start to have more unnecessary desire.As Baudrillard says,people are not consuming products in consumer society but signs,and the sign values.People begin to get pleasure from signs and even pleasure itself becomes products that can be consumed.Meanwhile,information and media also becomes consumable which lead to great changes of people's life.Media tries to provide attractive news without considering truth and social morals.In the movie Chicago,people can even consume murdering and murderers.People are completely dominated by pleasure.Therefore,this thesis aims at exploring three questions,the first question is: what is pleasure principle and how does it develop in consumer society;next question is about :how do people consume pleasure as products in the movie Chicago? The last question goes to whatreflections can we get from analyzing this movie for the modern society?This thesis intends to study pleasure in consumer society because this is a more and more prominent social problems now.As a movie set in Jazz Age and published in the new century,it is obvious the most suitable text for studying this.With the development of the society,people's life can't avoid the influence of consumption.Pleasure is also what people are born to seek.As a result,how can people get pleasure in a proper way in consumer society should attract people's attention and analysis of this movie can give people some reflections.