Consumption Representation in Iranian Movies of War (Sacred Defense) Era

Document Type : Research Paper

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Abstract

Movies reflect our ideas about fundamental social, economic, and political issues. This paper studies how Iranian movies made during Iraq imposed war on Iran called sacred defense era in Iran, represent consumption of goods. The main question is how Iranian movies represent consumption and how consumption relates to identities of personalities in Iranian films. The research method is semiotic analysis and five movies made in the mentioned period have been analyzed by this method. The movies include: Senator, Chrysanthemums, Tenants, Canary   Yellow and Wedding of Nice People. The findings show that because of revolutionary discourse dominance in this era, all of studied movies reject or marginalized conspicuous consumption. In these movies, conspicuous consumption is related to negative personality and plain consumption is related to positive personality. Findings also challenge current sociological theories on consumption and media. This paper tests one of these theories..

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