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.