Analysis of Grey Matter free essay sample

‘Grey Matter’ is a short movie script by Jeanette D. Farr which concerns itself primarily with race relations and stereotyping. A young African-American male confronts an old white woman in a police station with regard to her apparent racial profiling. As it turns out, he is there to return the very same wallet that she is about to report as lost. The dyadic conversation between confrontation and conclusion is initiated by the nonverbal cue of her moving her handbag away from him. Through language and interactive listening, the conflict plays itself out in perceptions of self and other. Ultimately, the interpersonal relationship between the two characters is deepened. The many facets of communication, which include the nonverbal, self perception, stereotypes, language, listening and personal relations, do not occur separately but manifest throughout the text. A discussion of these elements is necessary to illustrate the degree to which they initiate and/ or resolve action. We will write a custom essay sample on Analysis of Grey Matter or any similar topic specifically for you Do Not WasteYour Time HIRE WRITER Only 13.90 / page Non-verbal cues punctuate the entirety of this short piece. They expose the true nature of the communication passed from one individual to another. These cues are therefore relational in nature. Russell, the African-American male, is twenty-one years old and wears baggy clothes and a baseball cap. Despite her verbal protestations to the contrary, Russell is able to show that, on first impression, by relocating her handbag, Marge, the old white woman, has already assumed the worst about him based on stereotypical assumptions about his race and attire. She completely ignores his conventional nonverbal behavior of signing-in and instead hurts his feeling just as he is about to initiate the very conversation to accompany his good deed. This is an illustration of why nonverbal communication is listed as ambiguous in nature. Russell’s hurt feelings, though, are not played out in anger but in jest. When Marge says that she was merely searching her bag for gum as an excuse for moving it while she performs the very action, this is an example of the nonverbal technique of repeating. When she goes back to her â€Å"project†, without saying anything, this signals an end to the conversation. She is substituting the action for the verbal instruction. Equally, when Russell moves from chair to chair, closer and closer, he moves from a social distance to a personal distance, innervating Marge nonverbally through inappropriate proximity. When he threatens to sit on her lap, this indicates an intimate distance unbearable to the old woman and she goes for the bell. Later on, her ruse of a false name is exposed by her unresponsive silence when he calls her. Russell illustrates the fallacy of her stereotyping to her, and his resistance to it, with the repetition of his white open palm and his black closed fist while saying the words â€Å"black and white. † All’s well that ends well, though, when Marge shows that she accepts him by showing rather than simply telling him about her granddaughter. The piece even ends by revealing Marge’s forgetful nature in a nonverbal fashion. Much can be made about the truth revealed by nonverbal cues, but what Russell accomplishes through his clever manipulation of Marge’s perception using his intuited understanding of her perception of him, is quite significant. Without giving the game away, he carefully cajoles her into understanding how he feels. He plays out the model of the self-fulfilling prophesy with her by first appearing to fit the stereotype of a young black criminal type, then destroys the illusion by introducing markers that he knows she will find acceptable, such as him having a car and a job. He understands her conservative nature, and her high context introverted ways. He, alternatively, is low context. Russell even gets Marge to admit that her gut instinct was false and shows her how it feels to be misunderstood (He is fully aware that her reticence is, in part, induced by her recent loss). He can do this because he empathizes with her even though he does not sympathize with her. (He knows her purse is safe and sound). It must be noted, however, that none of this action would be possible without both subjects’ willingness to speak and to listen to each other. In the end, self-disclosure in this sequence occurred slowly and cathartically. This is because Russell’s initial language was powerful while Marge was full of hedges and hesitations. His listening style was of the ambushing type, forcing Marge to be defensive listener. He was fraught with many counterfeit questions which she guiltily tried to explain or evade. Both characters, though, were similar, in the sense that they gave each other the space to respond. By following this convention, Russell was able to explain how he felt to be profiled and Marge was able to draw insight into how her self-concept skewed her perception, while still maintaining a modicum of self validation. Her language then moved out of the arena of excuses, equivocation and euphemism and her listening, from extremely insulated to a bit more content oriented. Eventually, the interpersonal relationship between the two improved to the point of mutual acceptance, and this was before the wallet was returned.