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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