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Snow Crash Essay - Critical Essays

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Snow Crash takes on a common cyberpunk theme, that of the implications of the information explosion caused by new technologies such as a global fiber-optic network. One way in which the novel differs from cyberpunk works such as William Gibson’s Neuromancer (1984) and Pat Cadigan’s Synners (1991) is the way Stephenson situates his discussion in ancient history. By drawing a sweeping link between religion and viruses, he plays with the self-replicating tendencies of both. All information is viral in nature, Stephenson suggests, but some has more violent effects.

The book traces a virulent metavirus from the childhood of humanity that has been spread through religious cults and that manifests itself in the twenty-first century as Pentecostalism. Large sections of the novel trace ancient religious struggles, which Stephenson interprets as primarily concerning battles over information. The Deuteronomists’ effort to codify Judaism, for example, is read as “informational hygiene,” an effort to regulate which aspects of the religion were replicated. In this way, Stephenson reminds readers that the generation and preservation of all information—whether recipes for bread or religious practices—is always an evolutionary process whereby some knowledge will be lost and some preserved. That global networks can be manipulated by power-hungry individuals such as L. Bob Rife accentuates the tension between representation’s fragility and persistence.

Snow Crash also differs from most cyberpunk in its technical particulars. Stephenson is a computer programmer, and his detailed descriptions of how the Metaverse works and how people, through simulations called avatars, can enter it provide a more solid basis for his fiction than do the typical mysticisms about limitless cyberspace. This level of realism does not detract from the novel’s fun, however; the charm of Snow Crash is in its wry wit and liberally scattered puns. With a zest that recalls Douglas Adams, Stephenson presents a hero named Hiro, a pizza Deliverator for the Mafia who drives a “car with enough potential energy packed into its batteries to fire a pound of bacon into the Asteroid Belt” and who lives in a U-Stor-It with a Russian named Vitaly Chernobyl (2) who wants to be a rock star. The pace is frenetic, the characters larger than life, and the plot fascinating.

Bauhaus

The Bauhaus, one of the most prestigious colleges of fine arts, was founded in 1919 by the architect Walter Gropius.

Although it is closed in the last century, its influence is still manifested in design industries now and will continue to

spread its principles to designers and artists. Even, it has a profound influence upon subsequent developments in art,

architecture, graphic design, interior design, fashion design and design education. Up until now, Bauhaus ideal has al-

ways been a controversial focus that plays a crucial role in the field of design. Not only emphasizing function but also

reflecting the human-oriented idea could be the greatest progress on modern design and manufacturing. Even more,

harmonizing the relationship between nature and human is the ultimate goal for all the designers to create their artworks.

To interweave arts and technology is not the only princi-

ple of Bauhaus. The meaning of the word “Bauhaus” is

clear evidence. In Germany, “bau” refers to building and

“haus” means house, symbolising that art and technology

should be composed together in design field. In 1923, the

director Walter Gropius introduced reconciliation be-

tween “creative artists and the industrial world” [2],

which changed the focus of design theories from aesthet-

ics to practicality. When the industrial revolution began,

traditional skilled craftsmen were gradually replaced by

machines while reducing cost through mass-production

eroded aesthetic standards [3]. Thus, William Morris

thought it dishonest for machine-made goods to pretend

to be hand-made, while John Ruskin went further in his

belief that the machine itself was a source of evil and

social ills. Due to the fact that design was separated from

manufacturing, it enhanced the independence of design.

“The traditional craftsman who both conceived and ma-

nufactured his products had to be replaced by someone

who conceived and described what would be produced

by others with the aid of the machine: a designer” [4]. It

reflected that artists did not concentrate on commodity

design during that period, which made the contradiction

between art and technology obvious. The stereotyped in-

dustrial products without a design sense and handicrafts

cannot meet the social needs.

The Moral Majority: Self-Censorship and Pop Culture

When people talk about the "more innocent" Hollywood of years gone by, they're referring to an era when the movie industry policed itself. But that early Hollywood wasn't always so innocent.For decades, it's true, the major film studios were governed by a production code requiring that their pictures be "wholesome" and "moral" and encourage what the studios called "correct thinking."

But that code, which was officially abandoned more than 40 years ago, was the result of a nationwide backlash — an outraged reaction to a Hollywood that by 1922 had come to seem like a moral quagmire, even by the bathtub-gin-and-speakeasy standards of the Roaring '20s.Silent-film comic Fatty Arbuckle charged with manslaughter in the death of an actress; a bisexual director found murdered; movie stars dying of drug overdoses — small wonder the nation's religious leaders were forming local censorship boards and chopping up movies every which way to suit the standards of their communities.

And at first, when Hollywood studios banded together under former Postmaster General Will Hays to come up with a list of 36 self-imposed "Don'ts and Be Carefuls," it's no wonder no one believed them. There were no penalties, no laws, no enforcement.Moralists were so outraged, meanwhile — by Mae West's casual slatternliness in I'm No Angel, by Barbara Stanwyck's promiscuousness in Baby Face, by Cecil B. DeMille's racy biblical epic Sign of the Cross — that calls for official government censorship became overwhelming.

Of course, they were calls that Hays himself, working behind the scenes, had helped to make overwhelming — and he used the pressure to force filmmakers to toe his line and obey the new Production Code he eventually promulgated."The code sets up high standards of performance for motion-picture producers," Hays proclaimed when the new code was unveiled. "It states the considerations which good taste and community value make necessary in this universal form of entertainment."

Among those considerations: that no picture should ever "lower the moral standards of those who see it" and that "the sympathy of the audience shall never be thrown to the side of crime, wrongdoing, evil or sin."  There was an updated, much-expanded list of "don'ts" and "be carefuls," with bans on nudity, suggestive dancing and lustful kissing.  The mocking of religion and the depiction of illegal drug use were prohibited, as were interracial romance, revenge plots and the showing of a crime method clearly enough that it might be imitated.

Of course, you couldn't really do most of Shakespeare under those strictures. But you could hang a blanket across a motel room in It Happened One Night, and let Clark Gable embarrass Claudette Colbert into sleeping on the other side — with a mock tutorial on "how a man undresses."  Colbert fled — she got an Oscar for fleeing, in fact — and propriety was upheld.

Now, the Production Code was voluntary for film companies, who figured it was a nifty way to avoid government censorship. But it was mandatory for filmmakers, if they wanted their films to play in American theaters.  And filmmakers didn't much care who was doing the censoring if   their scripts were getting watered down. Howard Hughes threw a well-publicized fit when his western The Outlaw was kept out of theaters — not for its content alone but because the film's advertising focused attention on Jane Russell's cleavage.

Even cartoon characters had to “beee-have”: Betty Boop stopped being a flapper and started wearing a longer skirt. (This from the temptress who once teased audiences with the musical double-entendre of "Don't take my boop-boop-a-doop away.")

But the thing about community standards is that they change — and codes either don't change, or they change slowly.  And after World War II, with competition from TV on the family front, and from foreign films with nudity on the racy front, movie companies were less inclined to rein in filmmakers who couldn't wait for the rules to catch up.

The Catholic Legion of Decency notwithstanding, films about banned topics like drug addiction often made for intriguing, well-received movies: When Otto Preminger made The Man With the Golden Arm, featuring Frank Sinatra as an addict, he didn't get a seal of approval — but he did get good reviews, and enough theater bookings to make plenty of money.  When Sinatra received an Oscar nomination in 1955 — from the same Hollywood establishment that had refused to give the film he was in its seal of approval — it was clear that something was amiss. And attempts to make the code flexible? They just made it meaningless.

By 1959, the man charged with enforcing the rules conceded that if a "moral conflict" provided "the proper frame of reference," a Code-approved film could deal with pretty much any topic but homosexuality.  Famous last words. What came up that year? Some Like It Hot, with Jack Lemmon and Tony Curtis, in drag, fending off male suitors. The film's plot was a veritable catalog of once-forbidden topics — gambling and racketeering to get the plot going, a booze-swilling Marilyn Monroe to keep it going.

When Monroe's Sugar Kane Kowalczyk climbed into a train berth with Jack Lemmon's "Daphne," there was no longer a hanging blanket to separate them — and when Sugar's breathless, dingbat recollections of bedtime games with her sister inspired a strangled, hormonal snort from Lemmon — the code was dead, whether Hollywood admitted it or not. And judging from attendance at the nation's theaters, it was not much missed.  A year after Some Like It Hot was released, the head of the MPA began suggesting that some sort of classification system might work better than a censorship system that no one was paying attention to. In 1968, his organization finally shifted from restricting filmmakers to alerting audiences, using the film-ratings system we know today.

How's that approach been working out? It took all of one year for an X-rated movie to win an Oscar for Best Picture — Midnight Cowboy, which violated more "don'ts" and "be-carefuls" than it observed.  And it took just two years after that for Midnight Cowboy to be re-rated from X to R, without a single frame being altered. Community standards had changed — as they invariably do.

Last Friday, Archie Comics Publications, Inc. announced that it would no longer feature the Comics Code Authority's Seal of Approval on the covers of its comics. Just a day before that, DC Comics made a similar announcement. So much for The Comics Magazine Association of America, which for over 50 years served as the comics industry's self-regulating (read: self-censoring) arm.

It's the end of an era that began back in 1954, when various comics publishers came together and created the CCMA in an attempt to preempt a government crackdown on their product.  Comics were everywhere, at that time. They were sold in five and dimes, department stores, grocery stores, train stations, bookstores, everywhere. And American kids bought them by the tens of millions; they reached more homes than The Saturday Evening Post.

The point is, when it came to comic books, two conditions coexisted: 1. They were omnipresent and 2. Kids loved them. This, in the eyes of adults, made them Highly! Suspect!  See also (in chronological order): television, rap, videogames, the internet.

Anyway: Parents groups protested, as they do. Scientists and academics ran over each other as they stampeded for the nearest soapbox to intone dire threats about Our Childrens' Future, as they do. In 1954, the guy who ran fastest and intoned loudest was psychiatrist Dr. Fredric Wertham.

He was by all accounts sincerely motivated by a desire to keep kids from psychological harm, and he did a lot of good in his life. But in comics circles, he will be forever remembered for his 1954 book Seduction of the Innocent, which placed the blame for the nation's juvenile delinquency squarely on funnybooks.

One can quibble with his reasoning, here: In his book, Wertham interviewed juvenile delinquents and asked them if they read comic books; most said yes.

"AHA!" he said. "Batman, j'accuse!"

But, remember: Most every kid read comics back then, whether or not they smoked Lucky Strikes behind the boys' gym. It'd be like asking everyone who has experienced suicidal thoughts if they had ever watched The Phantom Menace. To be fair, the guy had a point about the violence. The heyday of the superhero was fading by then, and in their place came Western comics, war comics, and — especially — crime and horror comics. Which could be gruesome, in a gleefully unapologetic way.

By 1954 things were coming to a head. There were congressional hearings on the scourge of juvenile delinquency and comics. Church groups were holding mass comic book burnings. Consumer groups urged parents to complain to their local grocers about the comics they stocked, in a bid to make those grocers conclude that the lousy pennies' worth of profit they were making off of a comic wasn't worth the headache.

So the publishers decided they'd rather self-police their wares than let the government tell them what was what. They created a Comics Code (technically, they added much stricter regulations to a loose set of guidelines they'd created a few years earlier).

The new code was to comics what the Hays Code was to movies — an attempt to ensure that the content was wholesome and morally upright. Crime would not pay, and iniquity and turpitude would be punished.  For years after that, publishers would submit their comics to the CCMA prior to publication and the CCMA would make recommendations for changes. The CCMA had no legal authority, but it could decide not to put its seal of approval on a book — and many distributors and stores would not stock a comic book without that seal, for fear of the Helen Lovejoys and Fred Werthams of the world.

Did that shut Wertham up?

No, not particularly. He saw the Code as a cynical half-measure; he wanted comic books gone. Turns out it wasn't just the subject matter he objected to — he maintained that the form itself was harmful to Our Nation's Youth.

He asserted that the line-breaks necessary to fit comic-book dialogue into word balloons would wreak havoc on a child's ability to read long, unbroken passages of prose. Likewise, he didn't like the fact that comic books used only capital letters.

Exactly. And remember, he was an academic. "Publish or perish," and all that. So he kept publishing, and kept not-perishing.Until 1981. When "perish" won out.

A publisher that produced comics expressly for kids — Dell, which published Disney comics in the 1950s — didn't particularly need to bother with the CCMA, as it had its own internal editorial guidelines, which were plenty strict. The folks at Classics Illustrated never followed the Code guidelines, as they were adapting (non-Code-approved) classic fiction.And of course the underground comics movement of the 60s and 70s rejected everything the CCMA stood for; that was practically its organizing principle.

Marvel and DC were dealing with a comics audience that was growing steadily older. Their writers were now looking to tell grittier stories in the pursuit of "relevance" — and starting chafing under the (self-imposed) yoke. Technically, for example, the Code didn't look kindly on any depiction of drug use, even when said drug use led to a (dun dun DUN) tragic end.This eventually prompted the CCMA to start making some periodic revisions to the code, but the group, and the code, never had much of a public face — and the one that it did have was inscrutable. Which is notably odd, because the CCMA was ostensibly a comics trade organization with a mission of outreach, such as programs to get comics into more outlets.

A generation of parents came of age only dimly aware of what the Comics Code Seal on the cover of their kids' comics was, much less what it stood for.  And still the bulk of the comic book audience grew older and began to abandon the grocery store spinner-rack for the comic book shop. Eventually, publishers began creating separate lines of comics intended for mature audiences, and these lines didn't bear the seal. In 2001, Marvel decided it could create an MPAA-like ratings system — and stop paying for the privilege of having its comics reviewed by a panel of scolds.

With DC and Archie — the last two publishers out the door — saying a big "Thanks, but no thanks, we're good?" The era of the Code is at an end.

Which is just as it should be. The code was an absurd relic of the Dragnet era, when no episode could end until Jack Webb's Sgt. Joe Friday upbraided the ne'er-do-wells he arrested in a condescending monotone — and supplied viewers at home with a reassuring weekly dose of normative morality. For years, the Code has been an appendix, a vestigial tail, a holdover from a time when comics were written for children.

Strangelove Part 2: Electric Boogaloo

Dr Strangelove is one of Stanley Kubrick’s many masterpieces, one of the greatest films about the Cold War and one of the greatest comedies ever made. Isolating particular standout moments is near impossible, although President Muffley’s awkward phone conversation with his unseen Russian counterpart never fails to amuse. The early use of ironic music is also a delight, with a lush orchestral version of ‘Try A Little Tenderness’ playing over the opening titles depicting the sexualised imagery of a plane refuelling and Vera Lynn’s World War II hit ‘We’ll Meet Again’ playing over the film’s final images. Dr Strangelove was adapted from a serious novel titled Fail-Safe, which was more faithfully translated onto the screen by Sidney Lumet, also in 1964. While Lumet’s Fail-Safe is an excellent film, making Dr Strangelove as a comedy was a stroke of genius for Kubrick, who realised that the themes would carry even more weight if the film was funny. Major Kong riding a nuclear bomb like a rodeo horse is still one of the most hilarious and chilling images ever committed to film.Then there is Peter Sellers, who plays Group Captain Lionel Mandrake, the American president Merkin Muffley and the sinister German scientist Dr. Strangelove. Sellers, who had also appeared in Kubrick’s previous filmLolita (1962), is phenomenal in all three parts making Dr Strangelove possibly the only Kubrick film that arguably feels like it belongs more to its leading actor rather than its uncompromising auteur director. With the possible exception of Being There (Hal Ashby, 1979), Dr Strangelove is Sellers greatest performance(s). He’s delightfully proper as Mandrake, endearingly wet as Muffley and completely deranged as Strangelove. The final Strangelove scene, which is largely improvised, is so ridiculous, so over-the-top and so outrageous that if you look closely you can see actor Peter Bull, who plays Russian Ambassador Alexi de Sadesky, desperately trying not to laugh in the background.

Paper 2- A Confederacy of Dunces

A Confederacy of Dunces starts off with its main character, Ignatius J Reilly, awaiting his mother outside of a department store, studying the crowds for any clothing “new..and expensive enough to be...considered offenses against taste and decency.   He has a vested hatred for anything new or modern, preferring the simple philosophies present during the Middle Ages.  Amusingly enough, Reilly’s hatred of pop culture leads to an obsession with it, watching TV and movies with an almost religious fervor, so that he can properly denounce the subject matter in one of the many Big Chief writing tablets he has scattered about his room, where he is forever revising his “masterpiece”.  

The novel’s plot pays homage to the picaresque story, as the plot is really more a series of loosely connected vignettes that flow from one to another.  I found the stories to be hilarious, with such standouts as “Ignatius’ first day at the pants factory”, “Ignatius refuses to sell hot dogs”, and the moment that had me convinced I was going to enjoy this book “Ignatius orgasms while thinking about his dead dog.”  As you can see from the descriptive titles, Ignatius’ behavior flirts with the norms of society, driving his widowed mother to despair.  Eventually she has him committed to an insane asylum, but Ignatius instead leaves the city of New Orleans to be with his equally offbeat, but opposite-thinking love, Myrna Minkoff in New York.

The novel has many interesting links to the time it was written/set, seeing as the plot takes place in the South in 1963.  Seeing as it’s a post-WWII novel, a few hilarious moments occur from characters being labeled as a “comuniss” and the ensuing outrage/debacles that occur.  The mood of Cold War America means that calling anyone a Communist is a sure ticket to end a fight, since no good American would want to be seen supporting a supposed Communist.  Additionally, Myrna Minkoff is a beatnik with left leaning tendencies, at a time in our history when the political counterculture was just beginning to take shape.Amusingly, she is just as deluded about how her ideologies come off to those around her as Ignatius, as seen in this excerpt from a letter she writes, about an African-American friend of hers: “She is such a real,vital person that i have made her my very closest friend. I discuss her racial problems with her constantly, drawing her out even when she doesn’t feel like discussing them...I can tell how fervently she appreciates these dialogues…” In a novel set during a time when racial tensions are coming to a head, Myrna comes off as condescending.  Socially speaking, people still go to the cinema, at a time when the “variety” screenings still occur, with a newsreel, cartoon, and feature.  Ignatius screams invectives at the kids on American Bandstand, yet another cultural touchstone.

The book is still popular today for several reasons: Firstly, the writing is incredibly funny. I have never laughed this hard at a book. The characters and situations are so outlandish that they can’t help but inspire hilarity.  Secondly, the novel provides an excellent snapshot of a culture at work in a particular time and place.  The Creole slang, social mores of SOuthern culture, and racial politics of the story give a unique flavor that lingers in the mind long after reading.  Dunces is a book that is well worth the time, and unlike anything else in the canon of Modern American Classics.

Doctor Strangelove

More than fifty years after it’s original 1964 release, Stanley Kubrick’s black comedy masterpiece is still as terrifying, insightful and hilarious as ever. In one regard, Dr Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb functions as a time capsule in the way it so brilliantly encapsulates the very real Cold War fears of nuclear attack from the Soviet Union and the more paranoid fears of Communist infiltration in America. However, while some of the players have changed, the threat of nuclear warfare is still a disturbing reality and something that can only really be faced via large servings of comedy. And the overall point of Dr Strangelove still remains: if something were to go wrong with the nuclear bomb, it would likely be due to human error. Furthermore, that error would very possibly be made by an over zealous nut in a position of power.

One of the defining aspects of the USA and USSR nuclear arms race was the mutual assured destruction (MAD) doctrine. The basic idea behind MAD was that if both sides built up enough weapons, then everybody would be too afraid to ever launch the first strike since the guaranteed retaliation would be too devesting. It’s a theoretically sound concept providing that both sides keep up with each other and no renegade element intervenes in the increasingly deadly standoff. In Dr Strangelove the MAD doctrine is represented by the American Plan R retaliation orders and the Russian Doomsday machine. Both are designed to set a counter nuclear attack in motion, be impossible to stop and therefore function as the ultimate deterrent. Enter Brigadier General Jack Ripper (Sterling Hayden), the renegade element.

After Ripper’s office at the air force base and the War Room, the final main setting for Dr Strangelove is on board one of the America B-52 planes that has been sent to drop its deadly payload on Russia. Kubrick shoots many of these scenes in a similar fashion to how he would later film the scenes aboard the Discovery One in 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968). Initially, there’s a sense of mundane boredom and routine to the lives of the crew. Even when they spring into action the focus is on the processes and protocols that they follow. Similar to 2001 the idea is to show how automated the characters are and how their lives are dictated by technology. What makes the B-52 scenes in Dr Strangelove so entertaining is that in this almost sterile world of technology and military procedure, is the heavily Texan accented captain Major ‘King’ Kong (Slim Pickens) who puts on a cowboy hat as soon as the attack orders are confirmed. There’s something so sweet and naive about the way Pickens plays the part, which he does sincerely, and this further adds to the film’s maddening charm.Classic Hollywood cowboy and tough guy actor, Sterling Hayden is perfect as Ripper, playing the role completely straight. Scenes where he justifies launching a nuclear attack, criticises the government for not being equipped to cope with war and rants about ‘the international Communist conspiracy to sap and impurify all of our precious bodily fluids’ could have come straight from the microphones of any number of contemporary talk back radio stations. A counterpoint to Hayden’s straight down the line performance is George C. Scott as General ‘Buck’ Turgidson. Scott, another tough guy actor, plays his role in the larger than life manner that Kubrick often demanded from performers such as Malcolm McDowell in A Clockwork Orange (1971) and Jack Nicholson in The Shining (1980). What results is Scott coming across as part high school bully, part hyperactive little boy and part fanatical patriot. He blusters through every scene set in the Pentagon War Room, only falling quiet during the occasional moment when hit by a frightening realisation or when feeling admonished.

Duck and Cover!

After nuclear weapons were developed (the first having been developed during the Manhattan Project during World War II), it was realized what kind of danger they posed. The United States held a nuclear monopoly from the end of World War II until 1949, when the Soviets detonated their first nuclear device.

This signaled the beginning of the nuclear stage of the Cold War, and as a result, strategies for survival were thought out. Fallout shelters, both private and public, were built, but the government still viewed it as necessary to explain to citizens both the danger of the atomic (and later, hydrogen) bombs, and to give them some sort of training so that they would be prepared to act in the event of a nuclear strike.

The solution was the duck and cover campaign, of which Duck and Cover was an integral part. Shelters were built, drills were held in towns and schools, and the film was shown to schoolchildren. According to the United States Library of Congress (which declared the film "historically significant" and inducted it for preservation into the National Film Registry in 2004), it "was seen by millions of schoolchildren in the 1950s."

The REAL War to End all Wars

Paper 1-Film-Breakfast Club

The Breakfast Club , the prototypical 80’s high school film, opens with a scene depicting the 5 main characters arriving at Shermer High School for their Saturday detention, while also give the audience a glimpse into their home lives.  In the background, the strains of “Don’t You (Forget About Me)” can heard.  As the plot progresses, this song will seem especially relevant to the events and characters of the film. Breakfast Club deals with such diverse themes as: identity, rebellion, and the fear of adulthood.   John Hughes directed the film, and the leads are: Molly Ringwald, Judd Nelson, Emilio Estevez, Ally Sheedy, and Anthony Michael Hall.

The film’s plot is simple, but fairly deep considering the subject matter.  5 students are serving an all-day detention due to committing various offenses during the previous week.  Each student has been pigeonholed into a clique by the people in their lives: The Jock, The Brain, The Princess, etc.  The students cannot see beyond these divisions, and so start off the film mildly antagonistic towards each other.  After being assigned an essay on ‘Who they are’ by the principal, who mocks the students and brags about his authority, the kids blow off the essay, and instead spend the day talking, arguing, dancing, and getting to know each other.  As a result, they find that they have a lot more in common than they thought, developing friendships and romances, but with the knowledge that come Monday, they’ll have to act as society expects towards each other.  The movie concludes with a group essay being read over shots of the kids leaving detention, in which the kids conclude that “what we found out is that each of us is a brain, and an athlete, and a basket case, and a criminal. Does that answer your question?”

I love this movie, there’s no two ways about it. The fact that pretty much any teen high school movie has elements of  Breakfast Club in it makes this movie the film equivalent of Mitochondrial Eve.  Teens being better/smarter than the adults they deal with in their everyday lives, the shared experience of high school, and the way society sorts people into groups are themes that occur in pretty much any film set in a high school these days.  The fact that this film is set in the 1980’s is the cherry on top, since this was a point in history where being a Teen was becoming an entrenched part of popular culture unlike any time before, with the additional caveat that the advancing technology helped to establish a shared teen culture, as well as designate those who were ‘cool’ and uncool. Being able to watch MTV? Cool as all get out.  Knowing COBOL by heart? Get in the locker, Poindexter.  It helps that I first saw Breakfast Club while I was in high school, because it really made the film resonate for me.  The film’s timelessness and clever discussion of its themes really cement its status as THE teen movie.  Sitting down to watch will remind you just how much high school rocked/sucked, may make you want to break curfew again just for the hell of it. The Breakfast Club definitely earns its place as a classic film, since it bleeds 80’s from every single pore.

Who would have thought that the John Hughes classic The Breakfast Club would still be Hollywood’s best attempt at understanding and then destroying stereotypes? Most of Hollywood’s forays into this realm are nauseatingly patronizing and unrealistic. However, a teen movie out of the alleged “Decade of Greed” successfully shows us what it is like to be different and, at the same time, how we are the same.

The Breakfast Club is a collection of high school students who attend a Saturday detention for each of their indiscretions. The movie introduces us to the characters as the stereotypes that each student considers the other: the Nerd (Hall), the Beauty (Ringwald), the Jock (Estevez), the Rebel (Nelson), and the recluse (Sheedy). Also, we are introduced to another stereotype; the mean overbearing teacher. Paul Gleason (the KING of all character actors) is Mr. Vernon, the teacher in charge of Saturday detention.

While in detention, Mr. Vernon gives them a simple assignment. They must write an essay about “who you think you are.” Each person has a good idea of what the other is. Yet, through several discussions and arguments, they learn that they have more similarities than at first sight. The Rebel, John Bender, initially focuses his anger at Andrew the Jock and Claire the Beauty. His outward hatred towards their “good life” masks his hurt about his own life. In reality, Claire just wishes her parents gave a damn about her, and Andrew wishes he had the guts to stand up to his overbearing father. All three seem to think Brian the Nerd is the “perfect son” and doesn’t have the same problems. My only character complaint is that Allison the Recluse is not developed nearly as well as the other cast members. Her problems are more self-created in order try to get attention but at the same time, keep people away.

Each has his or her own problems and as insignificant as they might appear, to a teenager, they are everything. This is what this movie captures the best. If anything, the teenage years are a time of self-consciousness and angst. When we look back at it, it seems a little ridiculous. Yet, at that point in our lives, it is important. Parents don’t get it and teachers don’t get it.

The movie does an outstanding job of deconstructing the stereotypes of the kids. However, The Breakfast Club misses a chance to do the same with stereotypes about adults. Mr. Vernon is almost comical in how mean-spirited he is. The typical mean teacher who is more put off by kids than anything. During a scene with Mr. Vernon and the custodian, Carl (Kapelos), Hughes begins to get inside the character of the teacher. When he bemoans that the students have changed, Carl tells him “No, you’ve changed”. Hughes stopped there but he could have introduced humanity into Mr. Vernon several times by having him at least show a facial expression of regret for his actions. Actually, there is one brief scene. After a verbal tête-à-tête with Bender early in the movie, you see Mr. Vernon pause just for a second as he leaves the detention hall. Yet, the movie does not expound on this. I suspect that Hughes planned to develop this subplot but dropped it when he realized his target audience had zero interest in a non-stereotypical teacher.

Some critique the ending of the movie for being a little too contrived. Those people weren’t paying attention during the middle of the film. In a normal Hollywood movie, they would have all become best buddies. This movie, on the other hand, admits that come Monday, they probably won’t be friends. The biggest truth about high school is missed here. Most kids, while saying they want to be seen as more than a stereotype, will never take that risk. Come Monday, they will each return to their comfort zone rather than risk the ridicule of their “friends”. So while the ending leaves us with the idea that the Jock hooks up with the Recluse, the Rebel has found his Princess, and the Nerd, er…might have a couple of friends, we could also leave with the opposite idea. Come Monday, the Jock and the Beauty might be back with their kind, the Rebel might go back to hating everybody, and the Nerd and Recluse might still be ignored in the hallway. Yet, Hughes leaves that to us. How you feel about the ending might be due to which stereotype you most represent yourself with.

Things Fall Apart

"Babel"ing On and On: Thought on Jorge Luis Borges' The Library of Babel

The setting of “The Library of Babel” is not only the story’s most important characteristic, it is, in a way, everything. Much of the narrative consists of descriptions of an imaginary library that is so large that no one has seen the top, bottom, or end of it. It is so old that the recorded history of its librarians stretches back for many centuries and still one cannot account for the library itself or for its architects. It houses so many books that the most accepted explanation for its collection is that it contains all possible books; that is, it contains all the infinite variations on every book whose pages could be generated by random strings of letters, words, or phrases without duplication. The narrator of the story asserts that, “like all men of the Library,” he traveled in his youth, journeying from cubicle to cubicle searching for a book or “a catalogue of catalogues” that might explain where he was and why he was there. He anticipates dying without finding that knowledge, only “a few leagues from” the bookshelves by “which I was born.” “Once dead there will not lack pious hands to hurl me over the central banister of the vast building,” he claims; “my sepulchre shall be the unfathomable air. . . . My body will sink lengthily and will corrupt and dissolve in the wind engendered by the fall, which is infinite.”

The story turns on the narrator’s and the librarians’ attempts to make sense of the infinite building in which they find themselves, a building that has been neatly divided into hexagonal rooms...

Pablo Neruda and the Romance of Language

Pablo Neruda stated in a prologue to one of four editions of Caballo verde, a literary review he had founded in 1935 with Manuel Altalaguirre, that the poetry he was seeking would contain the confused impurities that people leave on their tools as they wear them down with the sweat of their hands. He would make poems like buildings, permeated with smoke and garlic and flooded inside and out with the air of men and women who seem always present. Neruda advocated an impure poetry whose subject might be hatred, love, ugliness, or beauty. He sought to bring verse back from the exclusive conclave of select minorities to the turmoil from which words draw their vitality.

Crepusculario

Neruda’s work is divided into three discernible periods, the turning points being the Spanish Civil War and his return to Chile in 1952 after three years of forced exile. During the first phase of his work, from 1923 to 1936, Neruda published six rather experimental collections of verse in which he achieved the poetic strength that carried him through four more decades and more than twenty books. He published Crepusculario himself in 1923 while a student at the University of Santiago. Crepusculario is a cautious collection of poems reflecting his reading of French poetry. Like the Latin American Modernistas who preceded him, he consciously adhered to classical forms and sought the ephemeral effects of musicality and color. The poem that perhaps best captures the message indicated by the title of the book is very brief: “My soul is an empty carousel in the evening light.” All the poems in Crepusculario express Neruda’s ennui and reveal his experimentation with the secondary qualities of language, its potential for the effects of music, painting, and sculpture.

There are several interesting indications of Neruda’s future development inCrepusculario that distinguish it from similar derivative works. Neruda eventually came to see poetry as work, a profession no less than carpentry, brick masonry, or politics; this conception of poetry is anticipated in the poem “Inicial,” in which he writes: “I have gone under Helios who watches me bleeding/ laboring in silence in my absent gardens.” Further, in Crepusculario, Neruda occasionally breaks logical barriers in a manner that anticipates much of his later Surrealistic verse: “I close and close my lips but in trembling roses/ my voice comes untied, like water in the fountain.” Nevertheless, Crepusculario is also characterized by a respect for tradition and a humorous familiarity with the sacred that Neruda later abandoned, only to rediscover them again in the third phase of his career, after 1952: “And the ’Our Father’ gets lost in the middle of the night/ runs naked across his green lands/ and trembling with pleasure dives into the sea.” Linked with this respect for his own traditions is an adulation of European culture, which he also abandoned in his second phase; Neruda did not, however, regain a regard for Western European culture in his mature years, rejecting it in favor of his own American authenticity: “When you are old, my darling (Ronsard has already told you)/ you will recall the verses I spoke to you.”

In Crepusculario, the first stirrings of Neruda’s particular contribution to Spanish poetry are evident—themes that in the early twentieth century were considered unpoetic, such as the ugliness of industrialized cities and the drudgery of bureaucracies. These intrusions of objective reality were the seeds from which his strongest poetry would grow; they reveal Neruda’s capacity to empathize with the material world and give it a voice.

All Quiet on the Western Front

The overriding theme of All Quiet on the Western Front is the terrible brutality of war, which informs every scene in the novel. Whereas war novels before All Quiet on the Western Fronttended to romanticize what war was like, emphasizing ideas such as glory, honor, patriotic duty, and adventure, All Quiet on the Western Front sets out to portray war as it was actually experienced, replacing the romantic picture of glory and heroism with a decidedly unromantic vision of fear, meaninglessness, and butchery. In many ways, World War I demanded this depiction more than any war before it—it completely altered mankind’s conception of military conflict with its catastrophic levels of carnage and violence, its battles that lasted for months, and its gruesome new technological advancements (e.g., machine guns, poison gas, trenches) that made killing easier and more impersonal than ever before. Remarque’s novel dramatizes these aspects of World War I and portrays the mind-numbing terror and savagery of war with a relentless focus on the physical and psychological damage that it occasions. At the end of the novel, almost every major character is dead, epitomizing the war’s devastating effect on the generation of young men who were forced to fight it.

Because All Quiet on the Western Front is set among soldiers fighting on the front, one of its main focuses is the ruinous effect that war has on the soldiers who fight it. These men are subject to constant physical danger, as they could literally be blown to pieces at any moment. This intense physical threat also serves as an unceasing attack on the nerves, forcing soldiers to cope with primal, instinctive fear during every waking moment. Additionally, the soldiers are forced to live in appalling conditions—in filthy, waterlogged ditches full of rats and decaying corpses and infested with lice. They frequently go without food and sleep, adequate clothing, or sufficient medical care. They are forced, moreover, to deal with the frequent, sudden deaths of their close friends and comrades, often in close proximity and in extremely violent fashion. Remarque portrays the overall effect of these conditions as a crippling overload of panic and despair. The only way for soldiers to survive is to disconnect themselves from their feelings, suppressing their emotions and accepting the conditions of their lives.

In Remarque’s view, this emotional disconnection has a hugely destructive impact on a soldier’s humanity; Paul, for instance, becomes unable to imagine a future without the war and unable to remember how he felt in the past. He also loses his ability to speak to his family. Soldiers no longer pause to mourn fallen friends and comrades; when Kemmerich is on his deathbed, at the beginning of the novel, the most pressing question among his friends is who will inherit his boots. Among the living soldiers, however, Remarque portrays intense bonds of loyalty and friendship that spring up as a result of the shared experience of war. These feelings are the only romanticized element of the novel and are virtually the only emotions that preserve the soldiers’ fundamental humanity.

The War to End All Wars

Potemkin

The revolutionary film, Battleship Potemkin, is a silent film from 1925 by director Sergei Einstein whose story is loosely based on the real life mutiny which occured on the Russian Battleship Potemkin and the events which followed. Though the film is silent, Einstein creates a powerful political message by utilizing a dramatic score, a cast with emotionally-driven performances and a montage style of editing (a practice not put to use by many of the time), in order to induce a feeling of empathy and siding with the people of Odessa and the rebels of the battleship. Einstein effectively uses these elements throughout the film to weave a strong narrative that is considered by many to be one of the most influential propaganda films of all time.

The narrative of the film is segmented into five parts, with the first titled “Men and Maggots”, in which the men on board the battleship refuse to eat soup that was made with rotten meat. This segment of the film introduces the tension between the crew of the ship and their ruthless commanding officers, who are shown taking out their anger on the crew by whipping them with small whips in their sleep. When the crew is made to eat the rotten soup, their disgust at the maggots crawling on the meat can be seen distinctly, and as the score of the film begins to intensify, tensions being to rise to a breaking point and disgust turns to anger, leading to the next segment of the film.

The elements that make the first segment of the film successful are used continually in the following segments to further strengthen the film, but where the effectiveness of these elements really shines is in the famous and extremely emotional climax of the film, “The Odessa Staircase.” The segment starts softly with shots of the people of Odessa waving goodbye to the sailors as they set out for battle, but things quickly take a turn for the worse when a shot suddenly rings out and the massacre begins. The score of the segment takes the turn along with the picture, which starts out upbeat and adventurous, but becomes frantic and terrifying as the scene plays out. This segment is also where the montage style of editing which Einstein employs really stands out. Many quick cuts are made between wide shots of the Odessan people running down the staircase, close-up shots of people screaming, crying and dying, and shots of the soldiers’ boots as they uniformly walk down the steps as they conduct the massacre. This scene itself is one that could single-handedly make the film the powerful propaganda film that it is. The juxtaposition of shots between the horrified and murdered Odessans, and the oppressive image of the soldiers’ boots as they march down the steps is effective in creating a scene that stays with the viewer and elicits a strong emotional response. In fact, the scene is so believable, that to this day, many refer to it as having actually happened when it actually did not. Einstein was innovative in the techniques used in making the film and effectively used them to make a haunting film with great support toward it’s political bias.

Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?

A Tale of Two 'Vermin'

So, I’ve got a special treat for you all today.  While I was clearing out some junk from the garage yesterday, I found a children's book I used to love titled Beetle Boy, a children’s adaptation of Kafka’s Metamorphosis. Leafing through it, I found that it had its own type of horror regarding a sudden and dramatic transformation, that can be very interestingly compared to the original work.  Because it turns out, a kid’s book can be crammed full of high-octane nightmare fuel!   I guess kids really can handle more than we thought they could.

The two stories start off the same, with our main characters awakening one morning to find themselves transformed, but in the kid’s version, Gregory (ha) is explicitly a beetle, whereas Gregor is just some vaguely defined ‘vermin’.   Both our protagonists are disturbed by what has happened to them, but our two narratives begin to diverge at this point, and begin to make their statements regarding fear and ‘otherness’.   When Gregor is called to begin his day, his family immediately notices this change, and uniformly reacts with fear, anger and revulsion.  Gregor’s change is incredibly noticeable, and the world reacts with anger and violence, which is Kafka’s statement about fear and otherness in a nutshell. Gregory, on the other hand, scuttles downstairs to find his family totally unaware of his sudden change.   All his protestations and pleas for attention are met with bland platitudes and brushoffs, exposing that primal childhood fear and/or worry of being totally ignored.  No matter how much Gregory tries to prove something has changed, he is totally ignored by all the authority figures that are nominally meant to pay attention to him and his troubles.   

Beetle Boy creates a world driven by blind ignorance and inertia, in which things keep going on as usual because they have always gone on as usual, no matter the circumstances. It doesn’t matter that your child now has a coffee colored carapace and 50% more limbs than they had when you tucked them in the night before, all that matters is that he likes his sandwiches cut into triangles, and his little sister likes them cut into rectangles, and God help you if you mess them up again, and the world can continue spinning like it always has.  Gregory spends the entire story trying to get people to notice his new look, and using the surprising new advantages that being a child-sized beetle comes with.   The final scene of the story begins with Gregory’s family at last discovering what has happened to their son, but instead of flinging fruit at him and shouting, as what happens in Metamorphosis, the children’s book ends with the kid-friendly moral that ‘your parents will love you, no matter what’ and the story ends with our protagonist happily drifting off to sleep, secure in the love of his family.   The last image in the book is of a boy standing on his bed, excitedly greeting the new day, and the future it represents, which is weirdly evocative of the end of Kafka’s original work, only this version doesn’t have our protagonist dying alone and unloved, so it’s overall a much happier read.