Texts to use: Macbeth, Gattaca, The Little Mermaid and Legally Blonde

Ambition. Everybody contains ambition. It is in every person in this classroom, at this school, in New Zealand and throughout the whole world. It’s the drive you have to win that race or to achieve with excellence on that essay that you have to write in English. Either positive or negative. Ambition is not only portrayed in people but is also shown through different texts and films, usually in the main characters to create development in the story and to show the effects that their ambition has on them. In movies, for example, Gattaca and Legally Blonde, the character’s ambition see them grow as people and strive to be the best that they can be. But on the other hand, in texts such as Macbeth, the characters ambition pushes them to go against their values, leaving them with serious consequences. In the movie, The Little Mermaid, you’re able to see the character have both a negative and positive ambition throughout the film, resulting in both good and bad outcomes. Today I will be comparing the ambition that the characters hold in the different films and texts that I stated before, talking about how it influences their decisions and the end outcomes of their stories.

Let’s begin with the movie Legally Blonde. The main character Elle Woods has her life pretty much put together. She enjoys days filled with shopping, friends and manicures. That is until her boyfriend Warner breaks up with her due to the fact he is going to Harvard Law School and states that he wants to be with a much smarter girl than the “dumb blonde” that Elle tends to be. Elle is devastated by this and decides she wants to prove to Warner she is more than just a “dumb blonde” leading her to enrol to Harvard. Funnily enough, she gets accepted. This is the ambition that Elle holds, an ambition that sees her strive to be the best she can be and to prove to others to not judge a book by its cover. Throughout the film, Elle ends up excelling at Harvard, graduating at the top of her class, also cracking the court case that nobody thought she could. When she stands to say a speech at her graduation, she voices, “You must always have faith in people. And most importantly, you must always have faith in yourself.” These strong words just show how far she has come. She proved not only to the people around her but also to herself that through all of her perseverance and determination she could break through her title of the “dumb blonde” and do anything that she puts her mind too.

Elle had the ambitious drive to overcome her stereotype, same goes for the main character of the film Gattaca, directed by Andrew Niccol, a man named Vincent who was born genetically inferior and strove to create his dream of going to space into a reality. This did happen, but he did it in a very different way to Elle. In the film, Vincent is pictured to be very different from everybody else. All genetically engineered people who have the perfect genes are shown in formal clothes, their hair is always near flawless and they portray themselves in a way which makes them better than everybody else. In Vincent’s case, as his genetics were not tampered with, he ended up having many disabilities and problems. He is shown with messy hair, crooked glasses and dirty clothes. This is to distinguish his differences from the other characters in the film, such as his brother Anton who always dresses cleanly and transcends in most of what he does. Vincent’s ambition starts to show when he went to the lengths of turning himself into Jerome, who was also another genetically perfect human being, built to be the world’s best swimmer. Vincent changes his hairstyle, wore contacts to adjust his eye colour to the colour of Jerome’s, dressed in a proper suit and even went through painful surgery to make himself taller. The desire to go to space drove him to do this. At the start of the movie, before Vincent changes himself into Jerome, his father tells him one night at dinner, “listen for God’s sake, you’ve got to understand something, the only way you will see the inside of a space ship is if you are cleaning it”. His father is right. With his imperfect genes and health disabilities, he would never go to space. But Vincent being Vincent put his mind towards what he wanted and didn’t stop until he got it, even though it meant doing what seemed near impossible. At the end of the movie, you are able to see Vincent sitting inside of a spaceship flying out to space. His dream finally became a reality. Vincent, but now known as Jerome, went from a nobody to a somebody and his ambition got him to this point.

For Vincent, his ambition influenced him in a positive way but what if your ambition influenced your choices negatively and you became a person that nobody ever thought you could? What if your ambition was way too much for you to handle? Have you ever experienced that? In the play Macbeth, written by William Shakespeare, Macbeth was a very ambitious man but grew to think too much about greed and what he wanted which then left him both mentally and physically damaged for good. In the 3rd scene of Act 1, the Third Witch says “All hail, Macbeth, thou shalt be king hereafter!”, by this, she is meaning that Macbeth will be King. Macbeth is of course shocked by this news but it also creates some anxiety for him as he does not know when or where he will become the King of Scotland. This feeling of empowerment turned Macbeth to thinking about the possibilities of how he could become King. After telling his wife, Lady Macbeth who was a deceitful and despicable woman, she decided for the both of them that it would be best if Macbeth killed King Duncan and blame it on his guards to secure himself a place on the throne. Much to Macbeth’s unknowing that when he did kill Duncan his life would be filled of endless paranoia, grief and worry. It would make him lose his mind and cause sadness and heartbreak for the people around him. Macbeth’s ambition caused him to turn against everybody that he loved and lose his sanity. It negatively influenced him which at the end of his story, he dies. It was too much for him to handle, pushing him to the edge and the selfishness that he possessed to be the top of them all got so strong that at the end of the day, he didn’t have anybody to rely on if he needed them.

What I have just discussed is that, for the characters in the films and texts, their ambition was one-sided, positive or negative. But that is not always the case. In the Disney movie The Little Mermaid, we find that Ariel has both a positive and negative ambition. “I consider myself a reasonable merman, I set certain rules and I expect those rules to be obeyed!” King Triton, the King of the seas, yells at his daughter Ariel. After forbidding her to go to the surface of the seas, she proceeds to do so. A curious teenager who doesn’t want to listen to anybody. After her father breaks her heart by destroying all of what she loves, Ariel turns to the wicked witch, Ursula, to turn her tail into legs, allowing her to find the handsome prince that she saved from drowning. But getting legs did come with a cost. Ariel would have to give Ursula her voice in order to get what she wanted. Her ambitious tendencies caused her to make the trade with this Witch, negatively influencing her to which she would regret it in the future. That future included Ursula using Ariel’s voice to trick the Prince into wanting to marry her, but Ariel being the stubborn girl she is, knew she had to put a stop to it. Her along with some of her sea creature friends attacked Ursula and broke the shell that contained Ariel’s voice. Ariel’s ambition changed from negative to positive as she figured out what was right and took action to what needed to be done.

Overall, we can see that everyone’s ambition influences them in many different ways. It may drive you to be the best you can be and make your dreams a reality like in Legally Blonde and Gattaca or it may turn you into a crazy person just like Macbeth. But it is really up to you how you let your ambition take you along the course of the many years to come but let’s hope it’s a positive ambition.