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| A screenshot from Dracula Italiano: Uno screenshot del film Horror Express (Photo credit: Wikipedia) |
Showing posts with label Cowboys and Aliens. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Cowboys and Aliens. Show all posts
Sunday, April 29, 2012
Dracula Girl Goes Western
Thursday, April 26, 2012
Evaluating my Research Paper
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| Anger (Photo credit: ZORIN DENU) |
My introduction was solid, at least I think it was. I opened with a description of Doc and his wife, where he is kind of taking out his frustration on her. The funny thing is that after I switched to looking at anger, Doc suddenly became a lot more important to the project. One of the scenes I analyzed was after his wife was taken by the aliens -- he has a sort of transformation because of this, and his anger gets channeled into his determination to get her back. My second scene (which came first in the analysis section of the paper) was Lonergan bringing home the gold and the argument that ends with them being captured. I decided that it was significant that both of them were interacting with women when they showed their anger, and I think I pulled enough in from my sources to cover it.
The last scene I analyzed was Dolarhyde torturing the guy who got left behind when the aliens killed all the cattle. I picked this one because he is so businesslike about what he is doing. The guy doesn't seem to recognize how angry he is, but it seemed obvious to me that when he is truly enraged, he suddenly turns cold and stops his usual irritated behavior. Here I am sure that I supported my interpretation with evidence from the "text" and my source material.
All in all, I'm happy with the paper. I could have done more with the lit survey on anger, I guess, but I didn't want to run out of room for the analysis, and you can tell that I don't exactly excel at . . . well, call it terseness for lack of a better word.
Thursday, April 5, 2012
I Discover that Angry Men Are Weak -- in Westerns
My dad is a big fan of westerns, and he had a lot to say about anger in westerns and about Cowboys & Aliens. According to him, heroes in westerns (at least in the ones he thinks are good) tend not to get angry very often, and when they do, it usually leads to the climax of the film. Then he made my mother laugh when he said that in C&A, Harrison Ford seems to be channeling John Wayne at times; he's always irritated by something, but it's clear that he has power. Dad said I should watch El Dorado (and maybe I will).
My mom came up with an example of Daniel Craig being like John Wayne, and this one I had seen, because it's in The Quiet Man, which she watches every St. Patrick's Day. She reminded me about how John Wayne gets angry with Maureen O'Hara, but doesn't show real anger in front of men until near the end of the film. This seems like the scene in Cowboys & Aliens that I mentioned in my last post, now that I think about it.
So, what I got out of this discussion is that, for men in westerns at least, showing anger in front of men makes you look weak unless it's a rare occurrence. And that's helpful. I wasn't happy with how I wrote about Doc, but from this new viewpoint I think I can do a better job. Doc does come off as weak, because he is angry all of the time, but he can't do anything about it. He's powerless, and it's not until he's gone through the experience of going after the aliens to get his wife back that he becomes strong enough to have some self-respect.
Time to start revising.
Thursday, March 29, 2012
It's the Flu!
¿INFLUENZA?, AJA Y QUE MÁS....JAJAJ (Photo credit: Immer_Lebend)I am sick. My mom can't stop reminding me that I should have gotten a shot. I had already figured that out on my own.
Anyway, as long as I'm home, I'm trying to get through my draft for next week. I already have one draft, but it's crummy. My thesis doesn't work. Maybe it's got the flu, too.
I can't concentrate very well, thanks to the fever, so I'm not getting very far.
Right now, I'm thinking about anger and violence, and anger and power. And, how it all connects up with the masculine ideal. It seems as though this comes out in the Lonergan character. He only gets visibly angry once in the entire film, and that is when no other men are present. When there are, you can't tell if he's angry, or even irritated, for that matter. This seems to be part of a cultural image of strong men. So, it's obvious that I need to think a lot more.
Friday, March 23, 2012
The Anger Games
Angry Talk (Comic Style) (Photo credit: Wikipedia)We're back from spring break this week, and I've turned in my annotated bibliography, but there's something funny about that: I'm not going to be able to use too many of the sources I listed. I have to change my focus. There just wasn't enough material on the fathering angle, at least not the things I wanted to talk about. And then it hit me that there is something else interesting going on, which is how each of the men in the film deal with anger. For one thing, anger seems to be Dolarhyde's default setting -- it's like he's permanently pissed off. Lonergan is a good contrast to him: he only rarely gets angry, and he doesn't automatically react to new threats with anger; he's more interested in dealing with the problem. Doc gets angry out of frustration, mainly because he has no power to change anything, given the situation. Nat, despite his attachment to Dolarhyde, doesn't use him as a role model. He's actually more like Lonergan.
So. I spent spring break doing fresh research, and I came up with some good articles. I'm going to mix the material on anger with the basic men's studies material, and I'm pretty sure it's going to work this time. It better-- the draft is due in a couple of weeks.
Sunday, March 4, 2012
Bad Dad
Image via WikipediaI've been thinking a lot about the father-son thing. It looks to me as if Dolarhyde is responsible for all of his problems with Percy -- he's created a monster there (yeah, I know, DUH!). I think it all boils down to him being clueless about fatherhood, and that shows up best when he's interacting with Nat and the kid.It seems that he told Percy a bunch of stories about his military experiences (Percy uses these to threaten people, talking about how his father knows how to kill people "real slow"). When Nat, with a smile, says that he remembers hearing him tell them, Dolarhyde gets angry, and says, "they were for my son!" meaning, not for Nat. Anyway, when Dolarhyde is talking to the kid, he tells him a story that no responsible adult would tell a child, and it's impossible to tell what his point is in telling the story. He seems frustrated that the kid doesn't get what he's trying to communicate, and this is probably what happened with Percy while he was growing up. What Percy got out of the stories was that his father is a badass, that he will never be as tough as his father, and that the world is a very scary place. And that's how you make a bully.
Saturday, February 25, 2012
My Hypothesis
Image via WikipediaThis week, I'm supposed to be doing a QHQ (Question-Hypothesis-Question) about my research project. Here goes.Q: What's the deal with Dolarhyde, his son, and the other young males in Cowboys & Aliens? (yeah, it's not too elegant a question, but it's really my starting point)
H: Dolarhyde is looking for a more satisfying father-son relationship than he has with his son Percy. Percy is a bully, and it's pretty obvious that Dolarhyde has made him that way: he uses his clout to get Percy out of trouble, and Percy makes a lot of trouble. He does whatever he feels like doing, no matter how obnoxious or dangerous it is. In the scene where Percy (accidentally) shoots the deputy, he has already threatened everyone in town with his father's wrath, and there doesn't seem to be any doubt that his father will back him up. But when Dolarhyde shows up to get Percy out of jail, it's also clear that he doesn't think much of his son. He tells him to shut up, and ignores him while he tries to intimidate the sheriff into letting him go.
What I'd really like to know is how they got to this point, but the film doesn't offer any hints about that. So, my next question is . . .
Q: With all of Dolarhyde's more-or-less paternal interactions with the other men and the boy, what do we learn about his parenting style?
I sort of have a (or is it "an") hypothesis for that one, too, but I'll stop here for now.
Monday, February 13, 2012
Thinking Takes Time
Image via WikipediaI haven't had much time to begin my real searching for articles and books yet, but I've been thinking a lot about the movie, sorry, the film, and I think I'm going to focus on fathers and sons. For a working thesis, I'm going with Colonel Dollarhyde's unsatisfying relationship with his son appears to lead him to looking for more worthwhile son material in other males. That would explain the way he treats the little boy and Lonergan, as well as the Native American guy who is his son's companion. This leaves me with four or five scenes to choose my two or three for analysis.
Now, to get to researching fathers and sons
Saturday, January 21, 2012
Men & Cowboys & Aliens, oh my!
Image via WikipediaI thought some more about this last night. One thing that occurred to me is that two of the actors are what you might call iconic-- Harrison Ford and Daniel Craig (although he's a newbie at the screen icon game, compared to Ford). The characters that they are best known for are different kinds of "manly men." Indiana Jones, for example, is an adventurer, a problem-solver, and is sort of goofy when it comes to women. He's like Han Solo with a stronger character. Looking at James Bond, you can see more of an ideal man -- he defines the term "cool," he's another problem-solver (usually with extreme prejudice), and unlike the Ford characters, he has some weird kind of magnetism when he interacts with women. Bond has a lot in common with Jake Lonergan (sp?), while Ford's role in Cowboys & Aliens is not much like Indiana Jones or Han Solo, and when you think of it from that point of view, the differences are interesting. There is a lot of stuff about the father-son relationship here, all centering around him. I may go after that. 
Friday, January 20, 2012
Back again for spring semester in English 102
Cowboys and Aliens (Image via RottenTomatoes.com)Note to readers: Rhonda's been through a rough time lately (which somewhat explains her failure to post last term), but she swears to me that she is going to be more conscientious this semester.
Dr. Toffee
So I'm supposed to be making my topic choices for my semester-long research project now (in the first week!). I have to decide on a film and a "critical approach." The list of films is pretty long, and I've seen a lot of them, but I haven't got a clue about the approach part of the assignment. We're going to get some guidance on that, I'm told, and I hope it's not too hard. Nothing is jumping out at me so far from the films. There's only six approaches on the assignment sheet: myth criticism, cultural studies, shame theory, disability studies, genre criticism, and gender studies (we can do that, or one of the subcategories of women's studies, men's studies, or queer theory, so I guess there's actually nine approaches). These all look sort of interesting, but I think I need to spend a bit more time thinking about this.
I saw Cowboys & Aliens over the summer with my boyfriend-- it's on the list under men's studies. That might work, and my brother has the DVD.
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