Mississippi Burning Analysis

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Mississippi Burning In a little society imbued by racism, two widely different FBI-investigators struggle with unravelling what seems to be a case of missing persons, but later shows to be much more sinister. Will their diametrical opposite working procedures work in their favour, or will it destroy their chances solve the mystery and oppose the embedded racism against African Americans in the little dusty and petty bourgeois town? That is surely one of the significant questions that Alan Parker sets up in Mississippi Burning, which was released in 1988. In the very first scene of the movie, we see the two different races drinking from two different taps, which is a physical manifestation of the segregation going on in the society in that age, which also serves to set up an exiting atmosphere. We meet two feds, Rupert Anderson and Alan Ward, who tries to solve the mystery, and already when they move into the town, they meet hostility from the old men who scowl at them from the shadows. Shortly after, they step into a diner, and Ward decides to take a seat in the coloured area, which fills the, before vivacious and joyful, diner with total silence. Later, in the barbershop, the mayor proclaims that there are two different cultures: “a white culture, and a coloured culture”. This is in evidence with the communities too, where the Jim Crow laws were still going strong, which meant that the racial segregation was still going on at its finest. All this gives us a picture of a segregated community, where the blacks have no rights, no speech and no respect. It doesn’t take much time before we realize that the two main characters have huge differences regarding their approaches to the investigation. Agent Parker stands as the law-abiding and dewy young agent who follows the Hoover book slavishly. Agent Anderson is the exact opposite; a well-experienced old dog
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