Growing from Gratitude and Knowledge

The portion of class in week 13 I wanted to look into was the whole idea of talking about letters used in movies and television, for example we watched MASH. After this class, since we were on the topic of gratitude, I was thinking of how thankful I am to get to learn about the topic of letter writing in such a universal and relatable format. I found this class so exciting, especially because I was looking into this idea for my final project, but I pulled away from it since I thought many others would be interested in that as well. Growing up I watched a lot of shows and films like “Dear Dumb Diary”, “Dear John”, “Mama Mia”, and “13 Reasons Why” which all had some sort of reference to letters, diaries, or journal writing that helped with the plot. For example, in Mamma Mia, young Sophie finds her mother’s journal and reads the letters she writes to it to discover that there are several men that may be her dad, beginning her hunt to find the man who will walk her down the aisle. This movie was a huge part of my childhood and I didn’t even realize the use of writing in letter format in this film until after class that day. I thought it was cool that the journal entry was even written like a letter beginning with “Dear Diary” to make sure it followed the clear letter format. To be completely honest, even when we were watching MASH in class, I was looking up other movies and shows with letters in them that I might not have thought of, and there were so many! This included those listed above and several historical films, since letters were much more prominent then. It is so cool how the written word is used in visual media to provide a piece of evidence to move along a plot that the audience can physically see. All in all I found the way letters have snuck into the things I see from day to day without me even noticing it!!!