race, gender, sex

What is the significance of roles given in the movie?

In the movie Far from Heaven we get a dose of different kind of issues. Usually are main character is a male. In this film are main character is female. She assumes the male role of the film and we follow her as she discovers herself and other along the way. This goes against the concepts that everyone has a role they play in society. Cathy is displays a role change by being the strong one where her husband Frank comes off as being weak and feeble. He inherits then the role of the female. The same can be said about Raymond. These men become what women are usually in film.... just something pretty to look at. This also makes sense considering that the director Todd Haynes is gay. So you can see why these concepts would be a strong suit for him as a story teller.

What is the significance of race in the movie?

The black-white issue is prominent in the film because it is supposed to show a difference in the times. Raymond is an educated well-spoken black man. He is good looking, charming, and nothing like the stereotypes that were placed on blacks at the time. He becomes the most stand-up person in the whole film. He himself is ahead of time living in an era where racism is a hot issue. When Cathy begins to fall for Raymond, She deals with outside influences reestablishing generalizations made against black during that time. When He takes Cathy to a all black jazz club he too is also met by hostile advances from black women who don't take kindly to interaccial relationships. When she goes to Raymond, he leaves and takes his daughter with him to avoid any further attacks.

So basically it is the society built around these characters that imprisons them and doesn't allow them to be who they truly are.

existenz and our world as is

Cronenberg is always known for using film to make social commentaries on the world as it is today. Existenz is no different in this particular case. Now-a-days there aren't a lot of things we do now that doesn't involve a high level of technology. Video Games get increasingly more and more real. This in return has people becoming more and more dependent on technology to get through live without going crazy along the way. The movie focuses on a virtual reality game and its designer. She is targeted by assassins that want the new game and they will do anything to get their hands on it. This means even killing her and whoever she is with. Cronenberg is showing the audience his take on how society treats envancements in technology. They become dependent on it and when it is unvailable to them (internet, videogames, DVR, ipods, cell phones) something in them feel like it is missing and they will go to any lengths to retreive it back. Cronenberg and Hayles believe that the furthering of technology will only takes us as humans farther away from our own humanity.... to the point where we aren't even human anymore. We are posthuman.... to cronenberg we won't know what's real and whats virtual reality and things will dissolve from there where as Hayles believes that cyborgs will come into existence and eventually wipe us out for good.

The Thing and its originality

I think that every Halloween everyone should have a copy of The Thing handy. I say this for a few reasons. The first is that there are few actually good horror film directors out there these days. Some of them include: Neil Marshall, Eli Roth, Alexandre Aja, James Wan, and Rob Zombie. Now these directors are a part of a group called the "Splat Pack." Horror has taken a different turn in the past fifteen years. Gore has been the main focus which some people appreciate and others have now been turned off to the genre. I believe that there is nothing wrong with a sub-genre in horror films being that of "torture porn. " Neil Marshall's The Descent, Eli Roth's Hostel, Aja's High Tension, Zombie's Devil's Rejects, and Wan's SAW series have all cemented themselves into the horror film canon. However they have gone a different route then the forefathers (Carpenter, Craven, Romero, Cronenberg, Hooper, and Hitchcock) have in the past.

In the movie, The Thing, Carpenter flips the script on everyone. At the time the formula for a good scary movie was a monster/slasher in a mask/or ghost threatens and takes the lives of a group of people men and women (mostly women). A prime example is his classic Halloween. In that movie Michael Myers stalks and kills babysitters. It is a man going after a group of women. In the Thing, A shape-shipping creature whose original form looks something like a vagina with teeth is stalking and killing a group of men in an isolated area. So in a way Carpenter is taking the formula he perfected and flipping it around. Now the men are the victims instead of the women. This is why The Thing is an amazing horror film. It's an original take on a movie that was made in the 50's, and it focuses on two elements that everyone can relate to. Claustrophobia and not being able to trust anyone. These men are stuck in a research station with a shape-shifting alien who wants nothing more than to kill them all. If they leave they will certainly die in the blizzard and so they are stuck inside not knowing who is the monster and who isn't. These is fundamental elements of horror that a lot of directors now miss. Instead of gore and guts, nothing scares people more than not being able to trust one another. It creates suspense for an audience and in that suspense you can scare the daylights out of them.

Dancer in the Dark and Marx

How is Marx's theory of alienation displayed in the film Dancer in the Dark?

Alienation is the name of the game in Dancer. Our main character Selma takes on more hours and tougher tasks at her work as she secretly raises money to help her child not suffer the same fate as her. With being born with a optical disease that makes her go blind Selma works overtime at the factory she works in. As the days pass her eyesight lessens. She begins alienating herself from others around her as she obsesses over her daunting task at hand. Her relationships suffer and she becomes alienated from reality. She begins drifting off into surrealistic fantasies where everyone dances and sings. She has now lost herself in her labor by detaching herself from reality.

Why is Selma's alienation important to the central plot and the progression of the story?

When Selma sets herself apart from her family and friends and reality in general, she begins to set off the events that will ultimately lead her to her demise. If we follow the rules to any tragedy, our tragic hero (Selma) must have a tragic flaw. This character flaw will lead our character down a slippery slope that will result in her dying. The tragic hero doesn't know about her untimely demise and she doesn't know that she will be the one who causes her death. In Selma's case because she growing increasingly more blind she gets taken advantage of by Bill. He steals her savings and this causes the fight that sends Selma to jail and eventually death row.

Rear Window and Freud

What is the significance of the fact that Hitchcock places our protagonist in a leg cast?

Hitchcock was a master of his craft at creating amazingly suspenseful movies out of every day situations. When we find that our main character is going to be stationary for the entire film in one room, anyone who hasn't seen the movie might get an idea that they are in for a boring ninety minutes. Hitchcock plays into Freud's theory that that the male's development for fetishes stems back to the realization that his mother and any other females don't have a penis like males do. Hitchcock takes mobility away from a otherwise mobile person and places him in front of a window looking out into the other apartments in his building. This is where the fetish begins to appear for Jefferies. He begins obsessing over the lives of the people he watches through his camera. He begins making up scenarios and names for these people. He becomes so enthralled by their lives that he has a hard times keeping up with his own. This fetish he creates to make up for his lack of a second penis then leads him to believe his neighbor has murdered his wife which we later on find out is true.

What is the significance of the camera? and how does that apply to Freud's Theory?

This is a very easy question to answer. The camera is significant to the plot because this is what allows the main character to see out into other people's worlds. We are allowed inside with him every time Hitchcock switches to a camera view shot. Without it, Jefferies and Lisa are unable to become obsessed with their neighbor's lives. This applies to Freud's theory because since it helps develop the fetish and further the plot it also happens to be in the shape of a penis. It isn't necessarily a perfect shape but his elongated lens creates the penis effect. Now if he had a telescope the effect would still be the same. It is simply a man's desire to look for the second penis and Jefferies finds his through the lens of a camera.

Persepolis and White

What is the significance in the way Persepolis is told as opposed to the way Maus is told.?

Both are autobiographies so they both share tons of similarities. They also both tell stories of regimes reigning terror upon a battered and bullied nation and how the main characters are affected living through it. The major difference between the two stories however is the way they are told. They both follow White's Relativity of Narrative. There is a lot of reality in telling a story about WWII and the Iran-Iraq War from our authors. Speigelman tells the story of how his father survived as a Jew in Europe. There is a definite bias layed down as a groundwork for the telling of events. We are shown only one side of a large history and the author picked and chose what to leave in the final project. Persepolis tells the story through the innocence of a child. This allows a non-biased opinion to be put on the reader and allows us to experience the story as we read and tak from it what we will.

What makes for a better way to tell an autobiography and why?

I feel that the best way to tell a story is to give a non-biased recollection of all the events that happened in the individual's life. It's better to throw all the facts on the table, let us see the life as a third party bystander and let us make of what we want from the story then to be told. I think White would agree with me suggesting that facts are the main component to a story especially in telling a true story. Let people think what they want to.


JONATHON GOODRO

Jimmy Corrigan is not a hipster or an anti-hero

Jimmy Corrigan might be one the most boring comics I have ever read. Everything was so drab, disappointing, and depressing. I do have to say that I enjoy the artwork on how everything was so precise and uniform.

What is the significance of the old school artwork and the precise illustrations in Jimmy Corrigan?

I think it's important to the comic because it gives the reader a feeling of a Pleasantville. A picture perfect world where nothing goes wrong and everything is happy. Then once we get into the content we realize this world we are involved with isn't a happy one. Whether it we are watching Jimmy's overbearing mother or watching him try to escape his limited social life with his fantasies, we are shown a lot of irony.

Why is Jimmy Corrigan not an anti-hero?

He isn't an anti-hero because even though he lacks the attributes of most heroes, he isn't a bad person. Most anti-heroes are bad people who end up saving the day somehow. Jimmy never saves anyone or anything. A good example of an anti-hero is Travis Bickle from the movie Taxidriver. We sympathize with him at first but then later on we start to realize he's not working with a full deck. He shows the audience non-heroic traits but it's not until he saves a child prostitute from the mob that he shows us that a bad guy like him can still save the day. Jimmy is no Travis Bickle. he is a sad sorry character that doesn't do anything interesting ever. V from V for Vendetta is more of an anti-hero. He would be considered a terrorist by nine out of ten people but what most doesn't see is that through every bombing, V is showing us heroic traits that make him someone worth rooting for.