I've Got a Thesis!

Regions of the brain affected by PTSD and stress. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Yes!  I'm still playing around with exactly how to word it-- probably will be doing that right up until I turn it in-- but the idea is pretty clear to me, and I can see the development of the pattern in the films from Iron Man right through to Avengers:  Age of Ultron.  I was having trouble narrowing it down for the longest time.  It basically has to do with what happens when one person (Iron Man) is not adhering to the same code as the rest of the unit.  The actions he takes set him apart from the rest of the team, cause the threat he was trying to prevent, and create resentment.  Of course, there are other factors as well:  it's evident from the character's appearance in other films that he is having significant difficulties that constitute an almost textbook case of post-traumatic stress disorder, for one thing.  For another, his self-image is not that of a warrior; he isn't part of the culture.  He has a line in the first Avengers film, "we are not soldiers," that bears that out.  He's a loner in many ways and is used to working on his own, with his own rules and no oversight. 
The irony here is that the most important long-term benefit of a warrior code is that it helps prevent the worst effects of PTSD--if he would accept the same values that the others do, he would be able to find support in being part of the group and probably suffer a lot less.

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More on Guardians of the Galaxy: I Was on the Right Track

Star-Lord (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

According to an item on FlickeringMyth.com today, James Gunn, the director of GotG, said "There’s a lot of stuff I’m excited about in the new movie. Listen, I’m still excited about Star-Lord’s character and where he goes. At its heart, Guardians is a story about families, and if the first film was about him and his mother, this is a story about fathers."  The post goes on to point out that this does not necessarily mean Star Lord's father, but I think that's the most likely, what with all the material I found for my paper.

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Aliens, or Angels? Who Knows?

English: "The Snake in the Grass or
Satan Transform'd to an Angel
 of Light." At the sides are a
 Puritan and a Covenanter above an
author writing. Courtesy of the
 British Museum.
 (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Yeah, I'm playing catch up again.  I really intended to post every day while I was off school, but after working so hard on my critical analysis draft, I was feeling pretty self-indulgent.  Anyway, this morning I realized it was Thursday, and now I'm kicking myself (also again).
I think my draft was okay, although my thesis was not.  I went with:  The information revealed about Quill's father in Guardians of the Galaxy adds up to him being an angel rather than just another nonhuman.  I don't think I really made that point.

I had to make a list of everything that is said about him in the film, and in the draft I basically used the list, except for the material that was in my scene.  The point of this was to include the info without saying too much about all of the other scenes, because I didn't want to give the impression that I was analyzing those scenes (something forbidden in the instructions).  I'll find out if this is a problem at my conference with the prof next Monday, when I also hope to get some help with my thesis.

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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.  

Film Analysis Isn't Just for Scholars: Catching Fire with Katniss

Catching Fire Edit.jpeg (Photo credit: 1:00 AM)

I still don't wanna work on my projects, but I got a few things done yesterday, which is good.  What's bad is that I keep coming across things that seem a lot more interesting, and they're distracting me (of course, if I were doing what needs to be done in the first place, I'd never know about them).  So, as part of my work-stalling routine, today I checked in at FlickeringMyth.com, and there was an article about The Hunger Games:  Catching Fire.  Not too surprising so far, but bear with me.  I was kind of stunned to realize that the author is doing the sort of thing I've spent the last ten weeks doing:  analyzing a film and arguing a point in a "scholarly" way.  He only quotes one outside source (Caroline Williams, who is presumably a feminist critic), so it's like a research paper without much secondary research, just the primary stuff, the film.  Dr. Toffee told us that people were writing this kind of thing and publishing it, but I don't think I believed her until now.  And it's really interesting. 

The point that the author, Paul Risker, is making is that the character of Katniss "is meticulously constructed to be an idealised role model," and he argues this with a lot of support from the text.  The "meticulous construction" is the thing that strikes me as the key to why The Hunger Games works as a whole, and here I've got to refer to the last big thing, the Twilight saga.  I never got into that, mainly because the heroine is so . . . well, boring doesn't begin to capture what she is.  She's self-absorbed and selfish, she uses people who care about her, and she's pretty much unlikeable, as far as I'm concerned.  My point here is that she is no kind of a role model for anybody who has anything resembling self-respect.  Now, I'm not looking for a role model myself, but I can see that Risker is right about what the films do with Katniss.  However, he also seems to feel that she's a bit too perfect, and I have to disagree on that score.  She's not flawless.

Anyway, I'm thankful (ahead of time) that he gave me something to write about so that I'm getting close to hitting my goal of 20 posts for the semester.  

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What about the fantasy-adventure genre?

Strange Fantasy 01
 (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

The critical approach that I'm taking for my research project is genre criticism, and the film I'm analyzing is Percy Jackson & the Olympians:  The Lightning Thief.  My understanding of this approach is that it looks at how a film fits into an established genre, or doesn't.  Science fiction and fantasy is one of those genres, as is Action/Adventure, and it seems that my film fits into both, but it's not really science fiction or action:  it's fantasy-adventure.  Beyond that, it is also part of a subgenre that features kids as the heroes. 

And there's the problem for me as well as the benefit.  It seems to me that I'm going to be trying to identify and define a new(ish) category, so there might not be a lot of material available on this genre (bad) while I will have to do a lot to explain my model (good, in terms of meeting the length requirement).  Not only that but I have to include a lot of different films if I stick to what I have so far.  The characteristic that all of them share is that the adults are not involved in the stories except as villains or advisors (and their advice is frequently ignored by the kids).  However, I think that I have to exclude all of the teen-dystopia films (like The Hunger Games), because some of them are almost horror films, going all the way back to the first Halloween, which actually is a horror film.  And that's just the start! 

This is going to take a lot of thinking.  I'm hoping to get started on my library research in the next week.

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My topic choice



Avatar (2009 film) (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

(I wrote my first few entries in my geology notebook, and I haven't had time to post them until now, so this one is from last Monday)

After staring at the list of films for the research project for the last hour, I finally settled on Avatar, and I'm going to use disability studies as my approach.  On the list, Avatar is in the myth criticism category, not disability, but it says it's okay to use a different approach for any of the movies, and besides, what I read on the myth sheet in our packet made me think of disability.  I mean, the hero of the film uses a wheelchair, and some of the people that he meets treat him differently than they would treat a person without a disability, so this looks like a good choice.

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