Thursday 25 November 2010
Sunday 7 November 2010
The Good, the Bad and the Grey
According to Fiske, "Structuralism's enterprise is to discover how people make sense of the world, not what the world is." Which to me say that structuralism is how human's rationalise the world as we know, which is open to interpretation.
We love to categorise everything good and evil, life and death, young and old, light and dark, male and female, land and sea, right and wrong.
This simplifies everything in to manageable chunks allowing us to function. After all with no clear cut understanding of the difference between good and evil right and wrong a police service couldn't exist. The difference between land and sea/sky helps us understand and evaluate our surroundings.
But then things get complicated. You consider these definitions on their own and they make perfect sense but there's always overlap. The death penalty could be one example of this. Is the death of one man justification enough for his execution? What he did by our society's laws is clearly wrong but if we hold his crime of murder to be wrong isn't killing him in turn for it wrong as well?
Structuralism draws rigid lines of binary opposition for which their can be no crossing. According to Ivan and Derrida this creates a grey area, an anomalous zone where the politics of the ideal binary division can be challenged
Ghosts, zombies, minotaurs, centaurs, Frankenstein's monster, pantomime dames and drag acts all exist in this bleak expanse of human philosophy. Physically zombies suffer from necrosis; the cells in their body are dead and cannot function. However they zombies themselves still exhibit some signs of life, the move and walk, they eat (albeit cannibalistically) and to some extent they talk albeit in a very Neanderthal way. We can recognise some of the signs of life in them yet we know they are not alive. Semiotically they almost like babies, moving and eating but not yet distinctly human until they begin talking and forming some semblance of identity and personal thought. Zombies lack any real personality which further puts them into the grey area of indeterminacy. They can't think creatively for themselves, their only thought is to eat, a baser survival instinct present in all forms of life that still doesn't which furthers the idea of them not being human yet also enhances the thought that they are not entirely dead either.
The idea of binary opposition is relative because the idea is based on a political positional viewpoint. Your own ideologies reflect your comprehension of right and wrong which might clash with someone else's viewpoint. This also raises questions about morality and ethics. A person's morality can be un-changing but the way in which they use those morals, the ethics, can be dependent on other sources.
I think the TV show Fringe shows a great example of this grey area crossover (spoiler alert for those who haven't seen season 3). In the series, the barrier between our reality and another reality has been breached by Dr Walter Bishop, in order for him to save the life of the other reality's version of his son peter from an unacknowledged disease. In doing so he begins a war between our reality and the other side. Neither side exhibits typical indicators of a distinctly evil nature like in the Original Star Trek's alternate reality. Here we see the main characters of Spock, Bones, Kirk etc. go from being essentially good characters to being dark abstracts of themselves.
In fringe we see both sides of the story in season three. We get episodes entirely focused on Walternate and the other unreal characters. Here we see they are much like their counterparts, having much the same ideological views of right and wrong. It's political distinction that sets them at odds with each other. Each side sees the other as being the villain and themselves as the hero. As Einstein might say their perception of morality is entirely relative. They are a paradox. Both realities are right, and both are wrong at the same time, a contradiction paradox.
This statement is false. Is it?
The Statement below is false
The Statement above is true.
We love to categorise everything good and evil, life and death, young and old, light and dark, male and female, land and sea, right and wrong.
This simplifies everything in to manageable chunks allowing us to function. After all with no clear cut understanding of the difference between good and evil right and wrong a police service couldn't exist. The difference between land and sea/sky helps us understand and evaluate our surroundings.
But then things get complicated. You consider these definitions on their own and they make perfect sense but there's always overlap. The death penalty could be one example of this. Is the death of one man justification enough for his execution? What he did by our society's laws is clearly wrong but if we hold his crime of murder to be wrong isn't killing him in turn for it wrong as well?
Structuralism draws rigid lines of binary opposition for which their can be no crossing. According to Ivan and Derrida this creates a grey area, an anomalous zone where the politics of the ideal binary division can be challenged
Ghosts, zombies, minotaurs, centaurs, Frankenstein's monster, pantomime dames and drag acts all exist in this bleak expanse of human philosophy. Physically zombies suffer from necrosis; the cells in their body are dead and cannot function. However they zombies themselves still exhibit some signs of life, the move and walk, they eat (albeit cannibalistically) and to some extent they talk albeit in a very Neanderthal way. We can recognise some of the signs of life in them yet we know they are not alive. Semiotically they almost like babies, moving and eating but not yet distinctly human until they begin talking and forming some semblance of identity and personal thought. Zombies lack any real personality which further puts them into the grey area of indeterminacy. They can't think creatively for themselves, their only thought is to eat, a baser survival instinct present in all forms of life that still doesn't which furthers the idea of them not being human yet also enhances the thought that they are not entirely dead either.
The idea of binary opposition is relative because the idea is based on a political positional viewpoint. Your own ideologies reflect your comprehension of right and wrong which might clash with someone else's viewpoint. This also raises questions about morality and ethics. A person's morality can be un-changing but the way in which they use those morals, the ethics, can be dependent on other sources.
I think the TV show Fringe shows a great example of this grey area crossover (spoiler alert for those who haven't seen season 3). In the series, the barrier between our reality and another reality has been breached by Dr Walter Bishop, in order for him to save the life of the other reality's version of his son peter from an unacknowledged disease. In doing so he begins a war between our reality and the other side. Neither side exhibits typical indicators of a distinctly evil nature like in the Original Star Trek's alternate reality. Here we see the main characters of Spock, Bones, Kirk etc. go from being essentially good characters to being dark abstracts of themselves.
In fringe we see both sides of the story in season three. We get episodes entirely focused on Walternate and the other unreal characters. Here we see they are much like their counterparts, having much the same ideological views of right and wrong. It's political distinction that sets them at odds with each other. Each side sees the other as being the villain and themselves as the hero. As Einstein might say their perception of morality is entirely relative. They are a paradox. Both realities are right, and both are wrong at the same time, a contradiction paradox.
This statement is false. Is it?
The Statement below is false
The Statement above is true.
Tuesday 2 November 2010
The Black Freighter and other Tales From Under the Hood
In adapting any existing story/idea for the big screen, there's always stuff that's going to be left out, rewritten or re-imagined.
Watchmen is a great example of this. The novel had a lot of keen fans and following the announcement of a film adaptation, it's understandable that there would be high expectations. Suffice it to say, without going into a lot of detail, there is far more depth to the pallet of watchmen's story featured in the graphic novel than could be squeezed into a commercially viable film. Studios just don't believe that everyone wants to watch an exact 5 hour recreation of the source material. For the most part Snyder tried to fit as much as he could without encountering Lord of the Rings style length and division of story.
What he could fit in was great but in a very coi move he managed to squeeze some of the remainder into two relatively short films, "Tales from the Black Freighter" and "Under the Hood". Having never read the book, I found these to be intriguing and assumed to some degree they would add significantly to the story arc.
"tales from the Black Freighter" is an animation piece and makes me think of the anime short films that were a part of the Matrix/Matrix Revisited DVD release. It's story further focuses on some of the issues that the film arises, Do the ends justify the means? Does killing 1,000,000 to save 10,000,000,000,000 right?? However it doesn't really add any detail to the narrative of the film. You don't need to see the black freighter in order to understand Watchmen.
But "under the Hood" is different, for one it's live action. It's a biographical documentry about the first Nite-Owl, Hollis Mason, and the after effects of the publication of his autobiography from which we get the title of the film, "Under the Hood". Again whilst it doesn't reallly add anything extra to the overall story of the film version, it does deepen some of the minor character's, such as Carla Gugino's original silk Spectre, but unless you've read the books and crave more than what the film gives you, it's a little unnessecary.
It's very much like the intertextual links found in Spaced. Unless you understand that the scene in which Tim burns his Star Wars memorabilia is a recreation of one of the final scenes in Return of the Jedi where Luke finally lays his father to rest, then the scene doesn't really mean anything.
You can see these two short films in different ways depending on your experience. Either they're an attempt at reconciling the novel with the film adding extra layers to ideas and narratives or they're a passable novelty that's really not meant for your benefit. Both are well made and interesting to watch but there true worth is in the eye of the beholder.
Watchmen is a great example of this. The novel had a lot of keen fans and following the announcement of a film adaptation, it's understandable that there would be high expectations. Suffice it to say, without going into a lot of detail, there is far more depth to the pallet of watchmen's story featured in the graphic novel than could be squeezed into a commercially viable film. Studios just don't believe that everyone wants to watch an exact 5 hour recreation of the source material. For the most part Snyder tried to fit as much as he could without encountering Lord of the Rings style length and division of story.
What he could fit in was great but in a very coi move he managed to squeeze some of the remainder into two relatively short films, "Tales from the Black Freighter" and "Under the Hood". Having never read the book, I found these to be intriguing and assumed to some degree they would add significantly to the story arc.
"tales from the Black Freighter" is an animation piece and makes me think of the anime short films that were a part of the Matrix/Matrix Revisited DVD release. It's story further focuses on some of the issues that the film arises, Do the ends justify the means? Does killing 1,000,000 to save 10,000,000,000,000 right?? However it doesn't really add any detail to the narrative of the film. You don't need to see the black freighter in order to understand Watchmen.
But "under the Hood" is different, for one it's live action. It's a biographical documentry about the first Nite-Owl, Hollis Mason, and the after effects of the publication of his autobiography from which we get the title of the film, "Under the Hood". Again whilst it doesn't reallly add anything extra to the overall story of the film version, it does deepen some of the minor character's, such as Carla Gugino's original silk Spectre, but unless you've read the books and crave more than what the film gives you, it's a little unnessecary.
It's very much like the intertextual links found in Spaced. Unless you understand that the scene in which Tim burns his Star Wars memorabilia is a recreation of one of the final scenes in Return of the Jedi where Luke finally lays his father to rest, then the scene doesn't really mean anything.
You can see these two short films in different ways depending on your experience. Either they're an attempt at reconciling the novel with the film adding extra layers to ideas and narratives or they're a passable novelty that's really not meant for your benefit. Both are well made and interesting to watch but there true worth is in the eye of the beholder.
Monday 1 November 2010
Intertextuality Is The Highest Form Of Flattery
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| Even the cover of the Collector's Edition DVD box set has intertextual links, is designed in the style of Drew Struzan's Star wars Posters. |
For film fanatics it's easy to spot the references back to culturally significant films, from the scene with Daisy's return at the start of the second season episode "Back", where she comes back to an empty flat to find a machine pistol in the kitchen as Mike comes out of the toilet is a pretty close recreation of the scene from Pulp Fiction, Daisy in Bruce Willis' place and Mike in Travolta's. The makers of the series even acknowledge this in the special edition DVD where you have a setting that will pop up with the intertextual/cultural references in the series as they happen, as we saw in our seminar this week.
Quentin Tarantino does much the same but with more obscure references to spaghetti westerns and old kung-fu movies. He is clearly influenced by these and he doesn't spoof them but rather re-imagines them for a modern era.
Another good example of this of re-imaging a genre for the 21st century, I think, would be Brick (2005) by Rian Johnson and starring Joseph Gordon-Levitt. Here we have a film set in the 21st century about high school aged kids but with a distinctly detective noir leaning. It centres around Levitt's character Brenden Frye investigating the death of his girlfriend. You get a very noir feel with the whole set-up of the film from the cinematography to the writing and characterization. Levitt's character feels like a teenage Sam Spade or Holly Martins. His character fits the private eye conventions but with the limitations of being a high school student. Instead of the police detective that obscures the P.I.'s investigation you have the Vice-Principal of the school whose job description apparently now includes law-enforcement?!? It's great to watch having seen a lot of old noir films like the Maltese Falcon and Third Man, but it's a film that has clearly been limited by the high school setting.
Today it seems that you can find intertextual links in anything created from film and television to art and writing. Which leads me to one question: Is any idea truly original? As much as there are an infinite combinations of words, numbers and elements that can merge together to form an idea, it seems there will always be some hint of intertextuality to the constructs. What we like and enjoy drives what we create.
For Tarantino it's old spaghetti westerns and kung-fu movies and other niche genre films. For Edgar Wright it's the films he loved growing up, most notably the original Star Wars Trilogy.
Personally I love this. I love watching spaced again and again noting the references. I love watching the fence scene in Hot Fuzz whilst thinking about the scene in Point Break which it is parodying.
The Social Network: Or How Fincher Learned to Stop Worrying About Accuracy And Love The Over-Embellishment Of The Truth
I mean based on the film, Mark Zuckerberg's character gives some credibility to the idea that, rather than drawing people closer together social networking sites and the internet in general, are further detaching us from reality.
I for example have friended several people on Facebook that I may only have met once or twice and fleetingly at that. And yes some I have had great discussions with on-line via Facebook's chat function and we talk about this we're both equally interested in, things that a lot of my family member like my Mum, Dad and sisters don't get. Like how great Firefly was as a TV series, how scary and intriguing it is that Brad Bird of all people is directing the new Mission Impossible instalment. Or exchanging views on artists we like, as I am right now with a girl called Amy. I telling how I discovered this guy James Chance who does awesome quirky, very inter-textual prints (Note reference to future intertextuality lecture.) crossing star wars characters with the main protagonists of Beatrix Potter's Winnie the Pooh stories, and how she should check them out and give me her opinion of them.
Despite all this interaction the person on the other end of the chat is still no closer to me than say my lecturers. I think it needs to be made clear that there is a real difference between a friendship and a relationship. A relationship only implies a connection, an association however minor that may be: lecturer to student, friend of a friend or familial links like cousins. A friendship is something else entirely, it's more than an association, it's an attachment to someone by feelings, by personal regard. I think this is something that gets lost in Facebook. As demonstrated in the film, there's a huge difference between knowing someone and being there friend.
The characters in the film despite being based on real people seem like caricatures. Exaggerated for the sake of making a script more interesting and engaging than the reality of the people involved in the creation of Facebook. Out of all the characters the only person that was actually involved with the book, the script and the creation of the film was Eduardo Saverin, which I find interesting as the film is far more focussed on the "genius" of Mark Zuckerberg in the creation of the website. And the film is heavily weighted towards this character's view of the story.
It is scripted to over-dramatise the events and after effects surrounding the creation of Facebook, merely to avoid creating a film about a bunch of uni students sat on their computers typing in code and eating pizza which, according to Zuckerberg and Saverin, is basically how it happened. It reminds me in some ways of a few other films about computer geeks such as 1995's Hackers or 2001's Swordfish, in that the film tries to find ways to glam up what should be a very boring task to see on screen.
It's interesting as this is the second film Fincher has directed based on real events, the first being 2007's Zodiac which was about the serial killings in Northern California in the late 1960's perpetrated by a figure identified to the press as the Zodiac Killer or simply Zodiac. Like The Social Network, there is a lot of myth surrounding the events of the Zodiac serial killings a lot of which can be dispelled by the limited amount of first-hand information today you can gather about the events. Unlike the events in the Social Network which are very recent, but due to the nature of the relationships obscured by prejudice and personal opinion. In making Zodiac Fincher obviously felt close to given that he grew up in San Anselmo, Marin County during the first Zodiac murders. This is reflected in it's indirect portrayal of the murders. Sometimes you see them first-hand through following the victims but a lot of the time they are merely discussed.
Much like The Social Network with Zodiac, Fincher apparently wasn't after a factual truth but rather an emotional one. According to his producer Bradley J. Fischer "David is beyond Zodiac being a reconstruction. He is interested in the progression of events that he can capture on film." This is what he did in Zodiac and in The Social Network, he didn't recreate the events in their exactitude because he isn't making a documentary reconstruction. He had to confine the truth of the story with the reality of constructing a film narrative that would make sense to the audience. And whilst there is truth to some of the conflicts used in the narrative of the Social Network, arguments over who gets profits for what etc. Fincher seems to add some honour and binary definition to what is essentially two parties, both of whom are all-ready rich, squabbling over money.
The Most Iconic Superhero Will Be Back!
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| Both Reeve's (left) and Routh's (right) Supermen were iconic entirely in keeping with the perceived notion of what Superman should be. |
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| Tim Burton's Superman was entirely arbitrary, something new that would have to be learned by the audience and accepted. |
Who is Superman?
Brandon Routh was great Superman, you could clearly see the inter-textual links between his performance and Christopher Reeve's. He was an unknown, just like Reeve was at the time. He was just stuck with a bad script about an emo Superman who likes hanging around voyeuristically spying on Lois. Is he gonna be Zack Snyder's Superman? I don't know probably not.
I mean originally actor's like Robert Redford and other big stars were considered for the role. But superman is so iconic you cant really have someone who's already known playing him because you'll perceive the actor as much as you'll perceive the character of superman, which is why I think an unknown was a great way to go and it's the route Snyder should take.
After all we were saved from Tim Burton's idea of superman which terrified me not only because he wanted to redesign the superman outfit as this sort of black pvc bondage suit, where the "S" is made up of a set of knives which he uses as weapons, but also because he wanted Nic Cage to play Superman!?!?!?!?!? Nic Cage is a good actor but the thought of him as the Man of Steel is frankly terrifying. It would be like casting Graham Norton as Batman and giving him a burnt sienna batsuit to wear, just wrong! You can't have an icon playing an icon. They cancel each other out. We already have this idea of who Nic Cage is, so all we see is Nic Cage. When it comes to superman all you should see is the character. Christopher Reeve achieved this. When he was playing superman, he was superman. The same goes for his portrayal of Clark Kent. This was true even after he became famous. An known actor playing superman becomes arbitrary, the relationship has to be learnt because both the actor and the role are so iconic they cancel each other out.
Brandon Routh could be great a great Superman if he's given the chance but i think its going to be Timothy Dalton/Bond all over again. I.e. by the time the studios have gotten their act together and started doing a new Superman film they'll want someone new in the role which is a real shame! He fitted the idea of casting an unknown perfectly, before this his biggest role was a small part of the sitcom Will & Grace. Therefore the audience in general knew him only as Superman/Clark Kent.
Equally however this iconic status has it's cons. The Superman curse. Actor's associated with the role have become so much a part of the idea of Superman it becomes hard for them to be associated with anything but the Man of Steel. George Reeves is the most prominent victim of the iconic status. However others have accepted the idea and even capitalised on it. Christopher Reeve wholly embraced his status as the last son of Krypton, even after his crippling accident.
What about Lex Luthor?
I never really liked Gene Hackman as Luthor. According to the producers of the original he was chosen because the studios decided you could only have an unknown as Superman if you had someone well known to star against him. Hence gene Hackman's casting. But is Lex Luthor going to be the villain in the new film or are we goign to see a wider scope of the villainry? Say Doomsday or Brainiac?
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