Fantasy films and Political Thrillers

In my last post, I mentioned "another difference" between films like Divergent and other political thrillers, and I've been trying to come up with a good way of explaining it.  Thanks to a classmate who is working on a different film (one of the Harry Potters), I have a good quotation from a source she found,  a book called Fellowship in a Ring:  A Guide for Science Fiction and Fantasy Book Groups, by librarian Neil Hollands, who says that "Some of the best political fiction written is speculative fiction.  By devising political and sociological systems in alternate worlds or by hypothesizing alternative events in our own world, authors can create a fictional laboratory in which to explore any political question" (233).  Yeah, what he said.
When I was trying to think of how to put this, I kept coming back to how Divergent and other stories like it work is by setting up a kind of closed system.  It almost makes Hollands seem to be referring to Divergent, which is, after all, about a social experiment gone bad.

It's a Conspiracy!

As a result of a lot of family issues, I've been letting this go for a couple of weeks (my aunt is better, maybe, and my uncle is not-- they decided his heart wasn't in good enough shape for spinal surgery), but I've been keeping up with the work otherwise.  My annotated bibliography looked good to me; I just hope that it looks good when it's graded.  I finished revising my review of scholarly literature on the political thriller genre (just in time:  it's due today), so here I am to talk about what I've found.

It seems that the crucial element that defines the genre is the presence of a conspiracy.  This is what puts Divergent into the same category as The Manchurian Candidate and Enemy of the State.  What makes it less obvious to a casual viewer is the presence of kids.  In those films, a single innocent person somehow stumbles upon a conspiracy to overthrow an elected leadership and has to survive numerous attacks while trying to take the whole thing apart.  It's probably needless to point out that this innocent person is usually an adult (and male).  

And, I just thought of another difference, but I'll save that for my next post.

How Scary is Scary Enough?

A very scary Angela Lansbury in
  The Manchurian Candidate

My entire family has been pushing me to post ever since my last post.  The fact is, well, it's been a rough couple of weeks.  My uncle is having spine surgery this coming week, and from what his doctors are saying, his whole life is going to change, and not in a good way.  At the same time, my oldest aunt got a bad mammogram last week, and she's having surgery on Tuesday to remove a lump and some nodes (I'm not sure what those are, and I'm afraid to ask).  

The strange thing is that they all have been asking me about my research project, and not just the usual "hows-school-going" kind of questions everyone asks when they see me.  Rebbie says that they're trying to think about something besides what's going on, so if it helps, I'm up for it.  Obviously, it's going to help me, anyway, and I can't think of anything else I can do to help them.

My aunt actually led me to a question I should have been asking. She sees Divergent as a horror film, not a political thriller.  And her question is:  "aren't political thrillers a subgenre of horror?"  She made a good case, using The Manchurian Candidate and V for Vendetta for examples.  After seeing The Manchurian Candidate, I can see why she said this.  It is totally creepy, especially considering it was made right before JFK was assassinated.  And the Kate Winslett character is a lot like the one Angela Lansbury played in TMC, so maybe the horror connection is not too farfetched.  

I need to think more about this, and I need to use this in my research into genres.  

Well, It's Not a Musical . . .But What Is It?

Regarding my last post-- I decided to give up on the hair idea, even though I'm sure that in Tris's position, I would cut my hair immediately.  Not cutting it makes her seem vain, to me at least.  I looked at it again, and that didn't really take me anywhere.

So, I've decided to do my project using genre criticism.  Once I started thinking that way, I realized that Divergent (and a whole bunch of similar films) doesn't quite fit into any of the established genres, except broadly.  You could call it an action film, or a political thriller, I guess, but neither of these is a comfortable fit.  
I'm thinking it's a subgenre of political thrillers at this point; there's not enough action (it's not a "non-stop thrill ride," which seems to be mandatory lately for action films), and it's more about political ideas than anything else.

As I understand genre criticism, I need to identify the characteristics of political thrillers and then figure out how Divergent sets up a set of additional characteristics that amount to a subgenre.  The most obvious other member of this category is The Hunger Games, and I'll be doing some thinking about what other films fit, too.  For now, I have enough to start my research into the overall genre, and I've got a good (I think) draft of a proposal.  

What's wrong with long hair?

This is not funny

A couple of nights ago, Rebbie loaned me her DVD of Divergent, which I'm going to use for my research project.  I saw it in the theater when it was first released, but I didn't pay much attention to details outside of how it "diverged" from the book.  Anyway, I watched it again, and I think I've got an idea to get me going.  The first fight Tris has is with another initiate, Molly (I think that's her name), a really tough-looking woman about her age, and she (Tris) gets beaten up.  What I noticed this time was their hair.  Molly's is about chin length, but Tris's is pretty long, and it's usually in a ponytail just below the crown.  It suddenly struck me that this said something strange about her.  
A couple of years ago, when Rebbie was starting college, our folks signed us up for a basic self-defense class that was taught by a couple of police officers, one male, the other female.  After their lecture about how to avoid trouble in the first place, they did a quick demonstration of an attack with one of the other students.  I mention this because it turned out that they picked her for her long hair (in a ponytail).  The female officer grabbed her arm and used her other hand to grab the ponytail and pull her head back.  They pointed out that not only is having a ponytail giving an advantage to a mugger (or worse), you can be injured, possibly badly, depending on how hard the attacker pulls.  She suggested that we might want to think about changing our hairstyles.
I just thought of something else about this.  I'll be back in a bit once I've given it some more thought.   

Rackin' up the Nerd Points! or, How I Spent the Last Week of my Summer Vacation

Paul McGann as the nearly forgotten
 8th Doctor.  Q:  Who played the Master?

This blog is for my English 102 class.  I saw the assignment in the course syllabus on Blackboard, so I thought I'd try to get it set up.  I'm not sure what we will be writing about here, but at the moment I'm still processing the last week.  My older sister, Rebbie (short for Rebecca.  Don't call her Becky!), and I have been spending a lot more time together since our mom died a few months ago, and she has been taking/dragging me to many places I never thought of going before:  a renaissance fair, her cosplay group (I will never tell what they did to me, so don't ask), a comic book swap-meet (MiniMiniConMadness--I bought a couple of old She-Hulks for my dad; he used to be a fan, he says, but he still is), just to name a few that will probably make you think that Reb is a nerd princess (we went other places, too).  She isn't, but even if she were, there's nothing wrong with that!  She has a couple of friends who are heavily into it.  Her main sf/fantasy interest after Dracula is -- wait for it!---Dr. Who.  I confess, I like Dr. Who, too, but I'm pretty much on the fringes of the fan culture. I don't really have a main interest in this area. 

Tonight we're going with her Whovian pals (yes, I speak some Who) to see the season premiere of Dr. Who (which we already watched on tv last night) at a theater in Woodridge.  BBCAmerica was running old episodes non-stop all this last week, and we saw most of them.  Rebbie says she is going to give me a test later.  I'm ready-- the answer to the question under the picture above is Eric Roberts.        

To my First Year Comp Colleagues: The Ongoing Pedagogy Project

(note:  Rhonda will be back later today)

Those of you who have been following this blog are already aware that my goal here is both to provide a sample for my 101 and 102 students and to present a method for creating a realistic research paper assignment, i.e. one that is representative of actual assignments in college courses.  If you haven't read the initial material, there are links above.
Since my department is shifting to new textbooks this term (Ruszkiewicz, John J. and Jay T. Dolmage.  How to Write Anything:  A Guide and a Reference with Readings.  2^nd ed.  Boston:  Bedford/St. Martins, 2012, and  Ruszkiewicz, John J.  A Reader’s Guide to College Writing.  Boston:  Bedford/St. Martins, 2014), this seems like a good time for a brief progress report.  Over the past few years, the most obvious result has been a decrease in students dropping the course, which has been my greatest encouragement.  In addition, the problems I've seen students having are the same ones we all see every semester:  writing issues, difficulty with time management, critical thinking skills that aren't yet up to the material, etc (here in Illinois, high schools apparently focus primarily on 5-paragraph essays, with the result that many students can't immediately grasp the reality that those won't work at the college level:  for some, it's a kind of security blanket, and they resist the change).  All of these are college-readiness issues that should have been addressed before they enter our classrooms, but that doesn't seem likely to happen anytime soon.  So, as far as the things I can control go, this project is producing a quantifiable benefit.
New versions of the assignments and critical model packet will be available shortly (links will be on the left).

Finally, my thanks to those who sent condolences after my mother's death.  I am very hopeful that the gaps in posts that have marked this year to date will not be necessary again.

And now, Rhonda is up next.  She is taking 102 this term, so if you need a 101 example,  use the Fall 2011 or 2012 entries.  
   

A Haunting Memory

Note to new readers:  this begins Rhonda's 101 journal for Summer 2014.  You can read earlier 101 blogs in the fall 2011 and 2012 postings (start with August).

Finally got my blog set up, and since I haven’t done a reading yet, I’m going to talk about my topic for Project 2, the memoir.  The story I’m going to use is actually my first memory (or so I think).  I remember sleeping on the sofa in my grandmother’s living room in Joliet.  I was about four years old and the windows were open, which they never were at our house.  You could tell it was going to be a hot day, but the breeze was just cool enough for me.  My grandmother came in to wake me, and the next thing I remember is her helping me put my socks on.

Don't Wait Until Mother's Day

My mom, Joyce Wiertelak,
about age 3

I've gotten some messages from readers who were wondering what happened to Rhonda.  Unfortunately, she had to take a "bereavement withdrawal," I guess you'd call it, for the semester.  She'll be back next month, taking English 101 over the summer.  Her withdrawal from the course may be a fictional event, but it springs from something that happened to me (her creator) in real life.

On April 8, my mother died.  Not long after Rhonda's last post (on 3/10/14), Mom went into the hospital because of an infection, and over the next 3 weeks, she had innumerable tests, scans, x-rays, etc., of every part of her body as they tried to figure out what was causing the pain she had been experiencing.  The upshot of all this was that while she was finally getting medication for the pain (and the infection, which did clear up), they discovered that she had cancer of the spine.  The prognosis was as bad as possible:  4 weeks (or 6 months, if she were to continue her kidney dialysis).  She chose to forgo the dialysis-- she hated it -- and so she was put under hospice care and we brought her home. 

I cannot say enough good things about the hospice and the help they gave us, so I won't try, but looking back on it now, a month later, I find that I am very glad that we went that route.  You might think that doing all the things that have to be done for a person in that situation would be . . . well, pick your adjective-- disgusting, gross, whatever, but when it's someone you love, that aspect of it doesn't even come into play.  You're just happy you can do something to make her more comfortable.  Really, it was a privilege to take care of her and help her during this time; we're all agreed on that.  From the moment of the diagnosis, our primary concern was that Mom would get whatever she wanted (obviously, she would also get whatever she needed, too), and my four siblings and I did everything to make that happen.  Unfortunately, her condition worsened so rapidly that there wasn't time to do all the things she wanted to do.

So, on Mother's Day this year, the family will gather the way we always did.  In the hospital, she told me she wanted the chilled cucumber soup I make every summer.  When she came home, I bought the cucumbers, but the next day she wasn't up to eating much, and it just went downhill from there.  We'll be having the soup on Sunday, along with some of her other favorites, and I know I'm still going to feel guilty that I didn't make it while she could enjoy it, but I also know that she would tell me it was not my fault and that I shouldn't feel badly about it.

What I want to say right now is this:  don't wait to make the cucumber soup.  Don't wait for Mother's Day.  Do it now.

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The Things you Can Learn in a Book Review

Such a shame 2 (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Well, I guess my instincts about the Fox book (see my last post) were pretty good.  We have to have at least two book reviews on our bibliography, so after I finished writing about Class Fictions, I went searching for a review.  I was kind of surprised at how many there were, because I only found a couple for my other books.  

It seems that Pamela Fox got a lot of people going besides me, although the others are mostly concerned with the book overall rather than her take on shame theory.  I read a review by Neil Nehring that was in Studies in the Novel in 1998.  Nehring is a cultural studies scholar, not a shame guy, and he found a lot of things in Fox's book to disagree with other than her use of shame.  What I got out of reading his review and my examination of the book is that Fox seems to be just generalizing about shame and assuming that her working-class writers feel it as sort of an ongoing embarrassment about lacking middle- or upper-class advantages.  My final take on it is that she hasn't got enough to go on in terms of a shame approach, so whatever she comes up with from the books she is analyzing is bound to be kind of superficial.  Of course, I don't know that much about it myself -- yet-- but that's my impression.

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A Different Shame Model

Shame (Photo credit: Joe Gatling)

I'm supposed to be describing one of the sources I am using for my bibliography and for my literature review, and I think I'm going to do this as a kind of draft for this book's section of the lit review, just to save some time.  Please bear with me:  I will be taking out most references to myself when I revise it.  And, I apologize for not being able to figure out how to do a hanging indentation.

Fox, Pamela.  Class Fictions:  Shame and Resistance in the British Working-Class Novel, 1890-1945.  Durham:  Duke UP, 1994.

I was immediately surprised by this book:  I looked in the index for "script theory" or some variation thereof, but there was nothing about it at all.  There was an entry for shame theory, so I went to that and discovered the reason for the earlier omission, which is that Pamela Fox a. is only interested in people in large numbers (like the working class, for example), and b. does not think that script theory has anything to offer in such cases or does not know it exists, which seems unlikely, as she writes, "[shame theory] has offered little to contemporary scholars searching for nuanced, respectful approaches to class cultural forms.  And in its traditional guises, it has little to offer me here" (10).  Yes, that's right.  She's written a book about shame in literature based entirely on a model that ignores a fairly large body of theory, dismissing it as "notoriously out of favor" (10), a status that has changed dramatically since the time that she published her book.  However, her model (definitely anti-psychoanalytic, sort of pro-anthropological) is not quite specific enough to stand in for all the ideas she has rejected, and it shows when she gets down to analyzing novels of the period in question.

In the years since 1994, a number of important examinations of shame in literature have been published, adding to the body of theory and opening new possiblities of shame theory as a critical approach to literature.  None of these follow Fox's model; nor will I, as her approach does not add anything useful to the model I am constructing.

I guess this shows you how I write a first draft-- lots of repetition and rethinking in the middle, so I have to edit a lot.  On the other hand, I think I've gotten out a lot of what I want to say about her book, so I'll consider it useful. 

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What can you say about a Research Schedule?

Time Management
 (Photo credit: Intersection Consulting)

And the answer is:  not much.  I've been spending a couple of hours a week thinking about this project and making notes about the film, but I'm not sure if I can actually pin down how much time I need for everything involved.  I need to have my bibliography and the final revision of my Review of Scholarly Literature done on March 12, which is not that far off now, so it's time to step it up. 

I'm now (as of this minute) planning on giving at least an hour a day, every day, until the two projects are done, and if I do more than an hour, I will NOT deduct that time from the next hour.  I will also probably have to adjust that daily hour upwards in order to get it all done, but I think an hour is a good starting point.  Here's my to-do list, in chronological order:

• Find at least six articles that use shame theory to analyze something comparable to a film.
• Find two more books on the theory (I already have one) AND reviews of the books from scholarly journals.
• Create the MLA citations.
• Start reading the articles (at least two a week), writing the annotations as I go.
• Decide on which articles to use for the lit review, then write summaries (remember, they have to define the terms I'll be using).
• Examine the books to see what I can get from them, prepare annotations (and summaries as above for the two I'm using for my lit review).

That's what I absolutely have to do, but I'd also like to do a starter analysis of the three scenes I want to use in the research paper, since that's my primary research and I won't know for sure how much and what kind of stuff I need from my secondary sources until the analysis is done.

And, I just decided that I'm not counting the time it takes to write my blog posts as part of my scheduled hour.  Now all I have to do is stick to the plan

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A Secret Humiliation

Don't Look at Me!

I meant to post this last week, but it kind of got away from me. 
The prompt asks me what I have found in a scene from my film using the critical model, and I just didn't have time to re-watch the film then.  Things are better now, so here goes.
Looking at The Four Feathers from a shame point of view is amazing -- and I'm not exaggerating.  I can't believe how much stuff in it connects to shame theory, and a lot of it doesn't even involve dialogue.  I already know that I'm going to use the moment when the men get their orders.  In this scene, Harry's reaction is radically different from the others.  They are all excited and eager to go, and they get pretty loud about it.  While they're whooping it up, he goes absolutely blank-- no facial expression, no speaking-- he kind of closes in on himself (you can see it in the picture above).  None of the other men seem to notice that something is wrong with him, but the camera is on him, so the audience is very aware that his reaction is not what it should be, but they probably can't tell what's wrong.
Well, I can.  What he is doing is the withdrawal script.  He is feeling shame (or one of the shame emotions, like guilt or embarrassment), and this withdrawal is the method he habitually uses to restore his pride.  What's really interesting is that he is the only one who knows he's ashamed and why at this point.  Since my notes on shame say that it usually involves exposure, meaning that somebody witnesses the shame in action, this is pretty unusual.
And, now that I've given some thought to it, what's causing his shame can't be that he knows he is not going to go to war.  He decides that later, and it's a shame event all by itself.  I think the most likely cause is that he is just realizing that he doesn't want to go, that he's afraid to go, and he is ashamed of himself.  A couple more thoughts:  is he also afraid that the other men can see this in him?  Could be.  Is he ashamed because he's bought into all the gung ho attitude that the others feel?  Maybe, and if that's the case, what does that tell me?  Not sure yet, but I'll work on it.  
 

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It's a Shame about . . .

SHAME (Photo credit: BlueRobot)

I got a phone call from a machine yesterday telling me that all our campuses would be closed today because of the weather (-45 wind chills!), which seemed great at the time, but now I'm kind of sorry I'm at home.  And I'm kind of embarrassed about that.  Snow days are supposed to be fun, aren't they?  Somehow, when you've been stuck at home a lot because of the weather, it loses its appeal. 

Anyway, this week I'm supposed to be writing about my "critical approach," shame theory, and I've actually read the notes on it that the prof put up on Blackboard (we were going to get hard copies today, but that will have to wait for Wednesday, assuming the weather improves).  So far, the most interesting thing about shame, to me, at least, is how shame works as a kind of social control.  If the people around you think that something is shameful (like wanting to be at school, for example), then you try to avoid doing it (in this case, by not expressing your preference for being at school).  It seems like a good explanation for how peer pressure works, and it also covers the entire plot of my film, The Four Feathers.

Now, I'm thinking about how random my example is-- I mean, why should that be shameful?  Is that something the film is saying, too?  Do the characters around Harry Faversham think that what he does is shameful for no good reason?  Does he agree with them?  I guess I've got a lot of questions.  I just hope that means I'll have a lot of material when it comes time to write the research paper. 

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Getting a jump on the new semester

Cover via Amazon

For me, spring semester starts tomorrow, but I just checked and my English 102 class is already set up on Blackboard.  I read the syllabus and the first assignment, which is to set up a blog and do 20 posts by the end of term.  The first post has to be about the topic for my research project, which has to be a film.  I looked at the list of films, and the one that jumped out at me was The Four Feathers (all the rest are newer movies), probably because Rebbie (Rebecca, my older sister, who had a big Heath Ledger crush) made me watch it with her when she first got the DVD.  It was pretty intense for me, since I must have been about eight or nine years old at the time.  I've seen it since then -- and I have a better understanding of what's going on in it than I did as a kid -- so I think I'm going to go with it.

I also have to have a "critical approach," which I'm not quite sure I understand yet, and the one it was listed under is something called shame theory.  This makes sense to me.  If you haven't seen the film, it might not make sense to you.  The feathers in the title are symbols of cowardice that people give to men who have acted cowardly in some major way.  The hero of the story is a British army officer who resigns when his unit (or whatever it's called) is ordered into action.  He does this because he is afraid, and then he spends the rest of the film doing incredibly brave things in order to give the feathers back and redeem himself.  Basically, now that I think about it, it's all about shame.

I'm not sure how this is going to work, but I guess I'll find out more tomorrow morning (assuming we don't have a blizzard or get frozen by a polar vortex again).

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