Noi (Noi Albinoi)

For this culture blog entry I watched a movie called Noi (Noi Albinoi).



A brief description of the movie: "Noi is a girfted 17-year-old boy from Northern Iceland who dreams of fleeing his dreary small-town surroundings -- even after the arrival of Iris, who's new in town and has brightened up Noi's lackluster existence. Soon, Noi plans a getaway for him and his new friend, as the townsfolk continue to view Noi's lack of conformity ro rural life as simply his being a lazy, dim-witted failure" (Netflix).

How the movie was similar and different from my own culture:

It seemed as though Icelandic culture (in the movie at least) is a lot more simple than American culture. For instance, the main character who was a teenage boy got a view-master for his birthday and it was one of his most favorite things ever. In my culture, I remember having a view-master when I was a little kid, but if I were to get one now it would not be a very big deal. A lot of things from the movie were very different from my own culture; at one point, Noi’s mother wakes him up by shooting a gun out his bedroom window—if you were to do that in my culture, there would definitely be consequences (social and possibly legal) unless you lived in the middle of nowhere.

There were also some similarities in my culture and Icelandic culture from the movie. Noi wanted to run away with his girlfriend to have a better life; he had these big dreams of what the future held for him. This “anything is possible” mindset is the basis of the American Dream, so it is very prevalent in my culture. American teenagers have all of these outrageous expectations for their future and a lot of them also want to get out of the environment they grew up in, in order to experience something different and better.

From watching the movie, I learned that Icelandic culture is similar to that of small town life. Everything was slow-paced and simple; there were a lot of issues similar to those that Americans deal with, just on different levels. An example would be the issue of competitive education: in America, we worry about taking honors classes and doing extracurricular activities to get into the best schools possible, whether it be undergraduate or graduate; in Iceland, there were no honors classes and I never heard Noi or his family mention anything about college but he did get kicked out of his school because of his attendance. It was like going to high school was a privilege and if you did not take it seriously they would not have you.

I didn’t really have any preconceived notions or stereotypes about Icelandic culture. My only other experience with Icelandic culture is listening to music by an Icelandic band called Sigur Ros but I wouldn’t say that I had any preconceived notions based on that.

My anthropological observation for this culture blog entry is based on ethnology because I am comparing the Icelandic culture to my own, but I did not immerse myself in Icelandic culture. I am also comparing the two cultures from an etic perspective.