The Brother From Different Planet Analysis

The themes of poverty, racial inequality, extraterrestrial runaway slave, and immigrants are the central to the narrative of the 1984 film The Brother from Different Planet. Throughout the film, the audiences can see many subtle of racial differences and class divides being used. This list of racial differences and class divide includes the use of subway and races are seen in many scenes and emphasize the racial dissimilarity.

The poverty is portrayed in one of scenes where we can see blue collar workers in their hoodies and steel-toe boots next to the polished-dress people reading The Wall Street Journal. The second scenes of poverty we can see how the residents dressed in Manhattan and Harlem. The opening credit is the panning across the
In one of the scenes, we can see the protagonist riding the subway for the first time. In the beginning of the ride to the end of the ride, we can see a large demographic change. The New Yorkers was spotted in the beginning of the ride but disappeared as the subway arrived to Harlem. A young man shows an elaborate card trick to the protagonist and offered the truth about the line of segregation between the white commuters and immigrants commuters. My favorite quote from him was “for my next trick, I will make the whites disappear.” This seemed to be true since whites are portrayed rarity in Harlem. We can see how Immigrants assimilate into American society by working in Manhattan.

All throughout the film, we see constant use of extraterrestrial themes and different shape of slavery form to mirror the society we live in. Aliens runaway slave impact the audience to analyze their racism subconscious and reflect the class differences between the residents in Manhattan and Harlem. All these themes added up together have a very strong effect, clearly emphasizing all throughout the pieces of poverty racial inequality, feeling outsiders as extraterrestrial runaway slave, and