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Back to Subjects - Sociology

Riding in Cars with Boys

Riding in Cars with Boys Beverly, the main character of “Riding in Cars With Boys” fell into the categories of heterosexual, female. Beverly’s family of orientation consisted of her mother and father. The movie begins with Beverly participating in a craze with the most popular guy in school, who is a member of a voluntary, closed group of jocks. Beverly decides to use her innate ability for writing to express her non-material culture in the form of a love poem. She gives the jock this piece of material culture, and asks him to read it in private. The charismatic jock takes the poem, laughs in her face, and cruelly reads the poem aloud to his cohorts. Beverly experiences manic-depressive reaction after this abuse and runs into the bathroom, where she meets her future significant other Ray, who promises retributiveness. The jock experiences a severe sanction for his emotional abuse of Beverly in the form of a punch in the face by Ray. After this social interaction Ray and Beverly leave with their peers Fay and Bobby. They drive to the waterfalls where Beverly and Ray have sex in the front seat of the car, while Faye and Bobby get intimate in the back seat. This leads to Beverly’s pregnancy at the chronological age of 15. Her social structure status was in secession due to the fact that she was pregnant. She could no longer function in society because her role as an innocent 15 year old was questioned upon. Her father’s prestige was wounded and he, being a well respected police officer and having legal rational authority in their town, forces them to get married. Beverly goes through resocialization process when she gets married in church. The people who attended the wedding were a horizontal, closed group of her father’s friends that made her feel normal depression and alienation because she was pregnant. This is when her friend, Faye, under the influence of alcohol, decides that she has seen enough discrimination against Beverly. In the show of organic solidarity she announces to the primary and secondary groups of people that she is pregnant also. With the help of Beverly’s father, Ray and Beverly got a house together and started their own nuclear family. When they moved in, the public stared in awe. When their son, Jason, was born Beverly displays neuroses because Faye and her had an agreement that both of them would have their girls together. When gender of infant turns out to be male she panicked and didn’t even want to se him, but later on she learned how to love him. Ray started hanging out with drug dealers and other members of that sub culture. This led him to criminal behavior such as doing drugs and drinking, so when Beverly needed help around the house or with Jason, he was not there for her most of the time. He would show up drunk and tell her that he forgot all about what he had to do. When Beverly was a senior in high school she had a meeting with her counselor in which he reactively researched her about a scholarship that would help to continue her schooling. She wanted the achieved status of a writer and for this she needed further education. Ray was supposed to take care of Jason while she was doing that, but Ray never showed up, so she had to take Jason along. Because of Jason’s presence, she did not get a scholarship. The counselor instantly labeled her, and placed her into an involuntary group of young mothers. He believed that she could not fully focus on her schoolwork with a child to take care of. She blamed Jason for it for the longest time. When she got home after the meeting, she found Ray getting drunk with his deviant cohorts. She flipped out on him causing a scene, which was watched by a big audience of neighbors. Shortly after this incident, she found out that Ray had an addiction to heroin. She could not let Ray be around her son anymore. As a mother she was scared that Ray might be a bad influence on Jason. She tried to keep her family of procreation together, but when Ray went back to doing drugs she realized that it is impossible to do, and it’s time to let go. As a result of multiple causation, she told him that he had to leave. This created a dysfunction in her family and lead to a broken nuclear family. Ever since, Jason and Beverly did not get along. Jason didn’t like the fact that his father left. He blamed it all on his mother. Due to Jason’s chronological age he thought it was her fault that daddy left, he was too young to realize what was going on. Beverly, being a single mother, becomes an innovator and starts dealing drugs with Faye, because Faye’s husband left too. One day, Beverly and Faye were engaged in a criminal behavior consisting of drying marihuana in the oven. They were doing it at Beverly’s house when the authorities came. The authority figure happened to be Beverly’s father. He had decided to pay her a visit out of the norm. The family of procreation, consisting of Amelia and Jason, were outside playing. Jason told his grandfather what his mother was doing. Because of the empirical and rational evidence, Beverly was arrested for a felony of drug possession. She had to serve a sanction of one night in jail. During arrest of his daughter, Beverly’s father experienced role conflict and role strain. Beverly had no idea how her father found out she was doing something illegal. Faye’s brother bailed her out of jail, but she had to pay him back by leaving the town and moving in with him. He did not favor his sister’s fads with drug selling. He also believed that Beverly was a bad influence on her and her daughter. Before Faye migrated she bailed Beverly out of jail using the money that Beverly had saved. On the way back from saying good-byes, Jason told Beverly that he was the one who told on her. Beverly was then filled with disastrous rage and yelled at Jason. Because of Jason’s discrimination against his mom, Beverly experienced severe sanctions such as: loosing all of the money she had saved for the journey to California, her best friend had to move away, she was put in jail, and her dad no longer recognized her. Jason grew up being blamed for Beverly’s strain for consistency. He could never say no to his mother. When he graduated high school Beverly insisted that Jason should go to college in New York. She wanted him to go to school that she never got the chance to go to. He went there for a year, but then he and his significant other, Amelia, decided that it would be best for them to go to the same college. He wanted it just as much as she did but he had no idea how to bring it up to Beverly, because he knew that she would loose control. He waited and waited to ask if he could go. One day, Beverly asked him to drive her to Ray’s house. The manifest function of this was to get some important papers signed, but the latent function of that was to show Ray how well she was doing. During the past couple of years Beverly had been writing a book about her life and values. The book included Ray’s name in it and it also talked about his addiction. She needed a signed permission to use that kind of information. When they arrived at Ray’s house Jason felt uncomfortable because he hasn’t seen him in a very long time. The house was socially disorganized. Ray did not change much except he had a new wife, who, by the looks of it, was as doped up as he was. When Beverly told Ray about the papers he was ready to sign them, he didn’t care, but his new wife, Shirley, socially interacts with Beverly telling her that if she was publishing a book, she was obviously getting money and Shirley wanted Beverly to pay Ray for signing those papers. Beverly said that she does not have the kind of money Shirley is asking for. Beverly lost control and ran out of the house. Jason had left too to go find his mother. As he was walking around outside trying to see where she went he saw Ray doing the mean of taking out the garbage. Ray called him over and told him that he had the papers signed. He couldn’t let Shirley see that he was giving them to Jason, so when he was giving Jason a good-bye hug he slipped it in his pocket. When Jason found his mother she was expressing her aggression toward him. She was going on and on about how her life got messed up and how she could have gotten somewhere if she did not have him. That’s when Jason, for the first time in his life, actually showed her his inner personality. Jason told her that him and Amelia were together and that he wanted to go to college with her. After listening to her son, and getting the papers she realized that she did not follow her norms. She also realized that she was not that great of a mother, because instead of thinking about her kid’s life and what he wanted to do, she always concentrated on her life and what it could have been. In the closing scene, Beverly tells Jason to leave her at the bus stop and migrate to Amelia’s college because of the empiricism that was gained through the social interaction between Beverly and her son. From the bus stop she could only think of returning to her family of orientation, so she called her father to come pick her up. At first, on the way home, they did not talk much but after a while of getting used to being around each other again, they sang a song that they used to sing when she was a little girl. The song was called “Dream”, and it reminded Beverly of the life she had when she was a young girl and didn’t disgrace the family’s name yet. Bibliography: Bibliography Landis, Judson R. Sociology: Concepts And Characteristics. 2001. Eleventh edition. Wadsworth Publishing Company. Belmont, California. Lauer, Robert 2. Modern Social Problems and the Quality of Life. 1998. Seventh edition. McGraw-Hill Publishing Company. New York.

Word Count: 1724