I Made my Choices- Where do I go from here?

An Amazing Film!

I've picked my critical approach (shame theory) and my film (Black Panther), but I'm not sure how to get going with this.  
From what the Critical Model Packet says about shame theory, it seems that it could work pretty good.  In the movie, once T'challa learns what happened to his uncle, he feels shame because of what his father did to him.  Also, it looks like Killmonger is totally motivated by shame from many sources (father's death, history of slavery, Wakanda's failure to help end racism), but his anger makes him want to rule the world.  I can see already that this is going to take a lot of thought, once I know what to do next.

A few relevant articles:

‘Black Panther’ is on the hunt for a best picture Oscar, no matter what happens with the ‘popular film’ prize

https://www.postbulletin.com/entertainment/black-panther-is-on-the-hunt-for-a-best-picture/article_e607bdfc-543f-5eb7-8348-df1de330877f.html

Black Men: Stigma, Status and Expectations   https://www.nytimes.com/roomfordebate/2012/03/12/young-black-and-male-in-america/black-men-stigma-status-and-expectations

Slaves of History

https://aeon.co/essays/how-descendants-of-african-slaves-are-stigmatised-for-life

  

More Research? Say it ain't so!

Star wars me (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

I've been trying to get my research paper draft going, but right away I ran into a snag-- I need support for my very first point, and I can't find it in any of the sources I have.  Yup.  Back to the library.  At least I know exactly what I'm looking for this time, so it shouldn't take long.  I'll start searching as soon as I finish this post.  
I shouldn't complain.  I already wasted an hour today looking at my Facebook notifications.  Some of the Star Wars fans are objecting to my argument that Kylo Ren is immature, but I had two comments that called those fans immature.  What can you do?

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People who never grow up should never have lethal weapons

Secrets of the Jedi (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
Lotsa new secrets coming soon!

When I first saw Star Wars:  The Force Awakens (and from now on, I'm calling it SW:TFA), there was a moment that stayed with me, mostly because I thought it was disgusting.  It's the scene where Kylo Ren returns to the interrogation room and finds that Rey is gone.  He throws a major-league, no-holds-barred tantrum, even using his lightsaber to bust up the joint.  Saturday afternoon, my sister Rebbie came into the room and started watching with me just as the scene where Rey tries out using the Force on her guard.  It works, and she escapes.  So, when the Kylo Ren scene started, I was watching Rebs and the screen at the same time (well, actually I kept looking at one then the other).  Here's the fun thing:  when he started to erupt, she winced and made the universal disgust face (which you can see on the Tomkins Institute website).  I had to laugh, and she wanted to know what was so funny.  "You should have seen your face," I told her.  She said, "well, I forgot that was going to happen right then.  Just like that brat I babysat that time, except this guy has a deadly weapon when he goes off."

to be continued . . .  

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An Embarrassed Baby

This baby is totally outraged.

One more thing about The Tomkins Institute:  they have videos of babies experiencing different emotions.  The one for shame is of a baby having a bath, and it's amazing:  you can tell that the baby is feeling shame.  The video starts with the baby looking sad, and either the mother or the other woman in the room says he looks depressed.  They laugh about that, and then the baby hunches over and looks down.  He stays this way for the rest of the video.  It is kind of funny, but I wished they would stop laughing, because I think the baby thought they were laughing at him and he kept hunching over more as they went on laughing, so much that at one point one of the women becomes a bit concerned that the little boy is going to put his head in the bathwater.  
The baby is rescued by his father, who doesn't laugh.  He talks to the baby in a very sympathetic tone.
This baby has already started using the withdrawal script to deal with shame events.  I'll talk more about what I've found on script theory in another post as soon as possible. 

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Looking for articles, I found a gold mine

Got my proposal back yesterday.  B+.  Since I never wrote a proposal before, I think I did really well.  Now I have to get cracking on the research; the definitions essay and the annotated bibliography are coming up fast.  I did some searching after class and found a few things that the prof mentioned during the shame theory lecture.  I started with Silvan Tomkins (she called him "the father of affect theory"), and it turns out that there is a Tomkins Institute.  From the website, it's kind of obvious that he really was a big deal.  The entry page has what I guess is a mission statement, and I have to quote it:
"Silvan Tomkins’s theory of innate, biologically-based affects describes the internal reward system that powers human motivation and explains the systematic, incremental development of emotion, learning, personality and ideology. We at the Tomkins Institute are devoted to testing, advancing, and applying this powerful Human Being Theory."

Maybe it's me, but that seems pretty intimidating.  I read a few things from the "What Tomkins Said" section of the site; my favorite is "The self lives in the face.”  Anyway, this site is a gold mine-- there's lots of people talking about shame in a way that's a bit easier to understand than Tomkins himself.

About the articles below:  I gave Zemanta the keyword "embarrassment," and most of the articles they suggested had something to do with Donald Trump.  I certainly didn't go looking for stuff about him. 

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What was I thinking?!!

Kylo Ren

Well, I guess I'm still a bit out of it.  I completely forgot that I had to do this, so now I have to catch up.  I can't believe it.  I managed to get my proposal (both the draft and the revision) completed, and I think it turned out pretty well.  I'll find out on Friday.
Anyway, the film I picked for my research project is Star Wars:  The Force Awakens, and my approach is shame theory.  When I first saw the movie, I was shocked when Kylo Ren threw a temper tantrum.  I think everyone in the theater was with me on that.  My first thought was "and that's why we don't let toddlers play with lethal weapons."  Which was silly.  After I read the page on shame theory in our packet, I realized that it explained why he did that. 
I've started on my research, and I'll have more on that later (today, if possible).

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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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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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