Mulholland Drive!

I had never seen a David Lynch movie before, and although I found Mulholland Drive a little frustrating to try to 'get', I really enjoyed it. I have a lot of fun trying to make sense of the plot while at the same time accepting the fact that none of it makes sense. It really makes the interpretations and 'meanings' of the film endless.

Probably the biggest thing I noticed throughout the movie when trying to piece things together was how much it truly did reference other genres. This was especially noticeable when scenes were set up with so much suspense as if something terrifying were about to happen, but then nothing did (most of the time, at least). This happened several times when a character would be walking down a hallway slowly, in silence or else will low, creepy music in the background (I loved the music in this, by the way!) Mulholland Drive definitely plays around with the expectations we have as an audience; things never seemed to end the way we expected them to, or even end or begin at all. I loved the comparison of the plot to a Mobius loop-- twisting and almost making sense but going in a different direction when it starts to get close.

Of course one of the biggest ways the audience is thrown off is through the two main characters becoming completely different characters 1/3 of the way through. I felt like this was a harsh reminder that what we are watching is a film, it's constructed, and it's not reality. We are seeing actors, not true people, and these actors can be placed and changed into different parts. To be honest, I never really viewed Betty and Diane or Rita and Camilla as the same people like it seems like some in our class did. I thought they were definitely parallels of each other-- one, an aspect of naivety and creativity in its young stage, and the other a jaded misery showing the death of creativity.

I enjoyed the article this week, but I felt Nochimson too was trying to make a concrete plot out of the film even though she acknowledged it can't truly be done. My favorite thing is that she talked about Mulholland Drive as a film dealing with the "human condition". She discusses what happens to the characters in the film and compares this to what happens within all of us as human beings: "At the deepest level of our beings, we know that this transformation has taken place for all of us in subconscious darkness, more or less desperately varying with our circumstances." I think this is so true... we have all lost something or watched a dream within us die, and in some way Mulholland Drive really does speak to its audience. Although there is definitely no clear 'meaning' or 'point', I thought the film was really full of emotion and beauty. I'm excited to see some more from Lynch :)

My teen angst bullshit has a body count...

So postmodernism is a topic that seems to be coming up in a few of my classes this semester, all at about the same time. While postmodernism interests me, I'm still having a hard time grasping exactly what it is or how to define it. If I'm slightly off-base with anything I say within this blog post, feel free to point it out to me and correct me! I appreciate it!

This was my second time seeing Heathers and I think I enjoyed it even more this time. I was glad to hear other people in the class seemed to disagree with Nick Burns' 'Scent of Dominance' essay and it wasn't just me. One of the things I did think was interesting that Burns brought up but didn't focus on was the feminist reading of the movie. He says that Veronica is oppressed by JD and that her father is 'clearly useless'; while I agree with both of these things, I want to point out that Veronica is also oppressed by the Heathers-- Veronica lets other people control her and doesn't stand up for herself in general-- and not just her father, but every adult in the movie, is 'clearly useless'.


We talked about JD a LOT in class, and I just want to bring him up again very briefly. Throughout the whole movie I found myself really wanting to like him, and searching for reasons to be able to although he just kept getting crazier and skeezier. Then in class we talked about how we are so used to having a charming, heroic male character that the female protagonist falls in love with, but we fall in love with too. And in a way, I felt JD had just a tiny bit of charm in some way. It's very much like Jack Nicholson's charm, or Heath Ledger's charm as joker-- we don't like them, they're very creepy, yet we're drawn to them and glad when they're on screen. When I think about it, there was only one truly sweet moment (to me) between JD and Veronica in the film-- when he saves her from her cow-tipping double date, and she's covered in cow poo and trying to avoid being pretty much raped by a jock. Maybe just that one moment where he took her away from all of that kind of softened me to him just the littlest bit.

One thing that really bothered me about Burns' article was that I felt like he was pretty much saying Heathers had no point, offered nothing to the audience, other than form and style. Like Dr. Strangelove, I thought Heathers was a satirical and dark social commentary, making us look critically at ourselves, our youth, our society. At the same time, it satirized the very idealized teen movies of the time that seemed to be offering teens answers to their problems, but these answers didn't work in real life. In a way I agree that the film gives no answers to teenage problems-- but I think the fact that it makes us look at society differently and see the ridiculousness of social hierarchy even within high schools, the extent of 'peer pressure' and how far kids will go to 'fit in', and the disconnection between older generations and youth is enough of a 'point' or 'answer'. Maybe there isn't a concrete answer to these problems, but by beginning to recognize them and see ourselves in a truer light is just a beginning for change. It seems like Heathers was one of the first films of its kind, and it was a preface to movies like Mean Girls-- which is a very similar story but more contemporary.



I suppose ending my blog by talking about the end of the film would be appropriate. I myself wasn't sure how to take the ending. Has nothing changed within the high school or has it changed slightly because Veronica is now in charge and people will be nicer and happier but overall the hierarchy remains? I'm not sure-- we can't really know what will happen the next day or the next year within the school. We talked about the red scrunchy being an 'empty signifier'; we know it represents power to these girls, but the object itself really doesn't stand for anything. I thought that maybe Veronica knew this herself. I read her putting the scrunchy on as a kind of, "Things are going to be the way I want them to be now, not the Heather way." Does this mean she's going to wear it to school every day now and everyone will fear but also worship her? I doubt it. But does it mean that the hierarchy and stereotyped groups within the school will now disappear? I doubt that too. Maybe just little things like Martha Dunnstock now having a friend should be comfort enough to viewers. That's how I took it.

Shaft!

I had a very hard time "dissecting" Shaft this week beyond thinking it was a funny and entertaining movie about this bad-ass black man. I feel like the reading and class discussion helped me out a little, though, so here goes nothing...

One of the most interesting things to me in both watching the film and reading the article was the idea of the 'power of masculinity' within the movie. The article said that since Shaft is black and not white, therefore 'inferior', he must use his dominance of masculinity over femininity instead to prove his power. Shaft's relationships with the women in the movie really pissed me off, but it also makes so much sense to me in the context of the time and woman's "role" in culture at the time.

When we first see Shaft with his "girlfriend" (Ellie, I think her name was?), I almost thought that maybe Shaft had this ultra sweet and sensitive side and was in this committed, loving relationship. Thinking that he could be this hard, bad-ass cop by day and sweet, sensitive boyfriend by night made me really love him. I saw the pictures of Shaft and Ellie sitting on the coffee table beside them while they had the foreplay on the couch and I thought they only confirmed my belief that they were in a steady, loving relationship. But nope, turns out Shaft is a promiscuous womanizer who is letting this woman put obsessive pictures of him in her apartment and tell him she loves him, and he's just getting laid behind her back. Although this made me like his character less, like I said before, it really made sense that Shaft took advantage of his dominance over women in a time and society where he couldn't take his full "power as a man" because he wasn't white.

The other thing that intrigued me that was touched upon in both the article and class on Thursday was the argument over whether Shaft as a character was a "role model for the black community" or just a "product of the white studio imagination and merely a 'black-skinned replica' of a white action hero". I don't think I'm really entitled to answer that question, not having seen enough white action films or black action films to form an opinion, but what I think is really fascinating about the situation is the time period the film was made in and how much that effects the representation of the character. Filmed in the early 70s, Shaft came into being right after the Civil Rights movement-- racial tensions were still so high. I feel like the character was an extremely risky one for Richard Roundtree to portray-- he took the chance of offending white audiences with a character that is "too black" and the chance of offending black audiences for a black character who misrepresented the race. I wish I could know what the actor himself thought of the character. What do you guys think about this question?

I wish I could do a little more comparison of Shaft vs. typical action heroes of our movies today as we did in class, but I feel like I'm completely under-qualified to do so. Actions movies really aren't my thing. I'm interested to see what the rest of the group might have to say on that though. I suppose this is all for now!

(By the way, do not image search "shaft women" or "shaft ellie" when looking for pictures for this blog...)

Hey guys--

Just wanted to say this will be my second skipped blog. Also, I just realized I never commented on blogs last week-- going home for the weekend made it TOTALLY slip my mind I guess. I apologize for that and will go back to leave comments this weekend, even if I get points off for being so behind.

Dr. Strangelove

Dr. Strangelove really reminded me of Joseph Heller's Catch-22, a novel I had to read, write about, and present on in my senior year of high school. I really used my ideas on the novel to help form my perceptions of this movies, so I hope none of you mind if I take some time to draw some comparisons.

Like Dr. Strangelove, Catch-22 is satirical and full of dark humor-- Heller wrote it in a style that would emphasize the absurdity of mankind and war. The 'catch-22' within the novel is that the main character, Yossarian, a WWII bombardier, wants permission to end his duties flying in the war. He is constantly told that the only people who are allowed to stop flying are 'crazy' people, and the only ones considered 'crazy' are those who truly want to keep flying. There are an overwhelming amount of characters within the novel, something meant to emphasize the absurdity and confusion of war by making the reader feel truly confused themselves. Like Kubrick's characters, Heller's are given comical and bizarre names-- like General Scheisskopf (translates to shithead in German), Major Major Major Major, and Milo Minderbinder, just to name a few.

Drawing comparisons between Heller's novel and Kubrick's film makes me really think about WHY dark humor and satire work so well in this kind of anti-war pieces. I really liked the portion of our article in class that discusses how Kubrick began writing and forming Dr. Strangelove as a serious script, but it sort of naturally began to shift toward dark humor. In a way, I feel like this is the only way media and art can effectively critique mankind and war-- to reveal absurdity through more absurdity, in comedy and satire. How else can we truthfully represent a war in which two countries built enough bombs to destroy the world, but still acted as if it was not too dangerous or risky?

Heller's work focused on the ridiculousness of WWII, Dr. Strangelove on the Cold War, and in class we were asked to think about how a writer or filmmaker might portray the current war in the Middle East similarly. This made me think of an episode of Scrubs where the characters get into a debate over being either Democrats or Republicans. Dr. Cox points out the several reasons given by American politicians to justify the war-- sometimes it's oil, sometimes terrorism, sometimes it's because of nuclear weaponry. I think this would be a good place to start on an anti-war-in-the-Middle-East satirical work-- highlighting that there was no one concrete reason for this war, but a plethora of uncertainties that politicians chose to focus on at different times in order to try to justify the crisis.

I thought Dr. Strangelove was a success as a film because it did two things really well- it made me laugh, and it also made me reflect on our country's history, the Cold War, and war in general. I think it's interesting that there is a way for media to present ideas about war that entertains but also informs, and that's why dark humor is so fitting for anti-war themes.