Dangerous Knowledge Will Eat You Alive.

Hannibal Lecter is by far, the most fascinating of all horror film villians (at least in my books). He's the representation of "dangerous knowledge". "Dangerous knowledge" can be anything. With Hanibbal Lecter, its the "I know what went on in Dante's mind when he wrote the Inferno" and "I can tell how deranged your soul is by the way you look at me" type of knowledge. He represents the kind of knowledge that people labor and sacrifice their life to attain. Those who try to capture him, to contain him, or to kill him end up being "eaten alive".

Edward Scissorhands: Society's Much Needed Change.

I just finished watching Tim Burton's "Edward Scissorhands" and it is by far one of the best movies I have ever seen. Truth be told, I hardly watch films and rely on friends to guide me when it comes to film choosing. This film beautifully and colorfully portrays the feelings of being Othered in a society that is so perfectly constructed and so stainlessly white that a single disturbance causes the entire neighborhood to fall into crumbles. It conveys humanity's fear in CHANGE (I have taken into consideration that a lot of films have monsters just to scare the souls out of people but monsters such as the creature in "Frankenstein" perfectly exemplifies this change that I'm talking about). Back in the 1950s and the 1960s, the biggest trend was conformity. This was in style back then:

So in this picture, we have the husbands/fathers/breadwinners in their cars driving off to work. In the different colored yet similarly structured homes, we have the wives eagerly waiting for the latest gossip because there's nothing else to do at home but flirt with plummers and sing Christian hymns. The children are at school learning about things that they're "supposed" to know about their reality and dogs are doing what dogs do best on the lawn. Perfect neighborhood, right?
Then in comes the CHANGE or the "shit disturber":

His Being was made with good intentions (born with a "cookie heart") and his creativity is inspiring. But why are people still afraid of Eddie?


I find it funny how the encounter with the Other is portrayed as sexually arousing in this film. I'm talking about the scene when the cougar had her first hair cut by him. There's no doubt that she was truly enjoying herself. However, their encounters went sour when Edward (the Other) appeared to be more in control (ie. when he ran away from her after she took off her clothes in the back of the salon). It was then that the he was seen as a violent threat to the society's 'purity'.

So, I guess what I'm trying to say is this: imagine if we allowed a bunch 'Scissorhands' to live in our neighborhoods. We'd have incredibly good looking lawns and not only that, we'd be sporting wicked hairdos and our dogs wouldn't be so boring to look at.

Terrorists In Films.

Last summer, for Garry Leonard's 'Imperial Imaginary in Cinema' class, we watched a film called "Safe". It's about this woman named Carol White (notice the last name), and she undergoes these spells of hallucinations as the environment around her changes. The entire semester consisted of analyzing first world and third world films and how they depict so called "heroes" and "terrorists". In this particular film, the terrorists are invisible and resides in the air. The cause of her illness was due to the increasing progression of her society, a.k.a. modernity (insert scary music here). Her frantic ill episodes were also the cause of her purity or "whiteness" being stained. In this YouTube clip, we see her reacting to the "whiteness" of her social circle and she begins an angry convulsion that freaks out her friends. The stain on her "whiteness" becomes more visible to her and her friends:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FwNsS2XIKvk

The 'terrorist' in this film (the chemicals in the air) reminds me so much of the creature in "Frankenstein". Although he is a visible threat to society, he embodies 'modernity' by being a creation of modern technology (electricity and science). He also terrorizes a predominately white and pure community. In the film, he drowns a "flower picking white virginal girl" in the water and in the novel, he kills William, Victor's innocent younger brother. He causes everyone anguish yet Victor Frankenstein knows that he is the creation of humankind. In the end of "Safe", we see Carol White in front of the mirror saying "I love you, I love you, I love you ..." and the movie ends there. It is assumed that she committed suicide but the film doesn't show proof of this assumption. In monster films, the monster never dies. It will forever lurk in our existence. It seems that death itself is the end all of all problems. By not showing Carol White's death, Todd Haynes ("Safe"'s filmmaker) suggests that the terror of the invisible galls in our environment will forever haunt us and that there is always something to stain our "paradise".

Alfred Hitchcock's "Shower Scene"

Here is a clip of Alfred Hitchcock's infamous shower scene in his film "Psycho" which was released in 1960:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AbH0wp_2vPQ

During the past couple of classes, we've been talking a lot about sex. More specifically, we've been talking about the inexplicit suggestion of sexual violence in films such as 1931's "Frankenstein" and 1979's "Alien". Being the last survivor of a ship that unfortunately lands on a distant planet inhabited by strange creatures, "Alien"'s Ripley is left vulnerable and alone. The camera angles reinforce her vulnerability as the view focuses on her rear as she reaches over a control panel. To cut the story short, the creature leaps out of nowhere, sees her half naked, tries to capture her, but is shot out of a gaping hole and is thrown out of the ship. The creature itself is a male phallic symbol. It wants to inseminate the ship in hopes of creating more monstrous offsprings.


It even 'looks' like a phallus.




Now, in "Frankenstein", the gap between Elizabeth's encounter with the monster in her bedroom and her screams suggest that the film maker's censorship insinuates that Elizabeth had been raped in between the gap. Her tossled hair and limp body on the bed further reinforces this idea.

I would like to now focus on Hitchcock's "Psycho". The female character in the shower cannot be any more vulnerable ... being naked and all. Then someone comes out of nowhere with a knife. It is characteristic of "monsters" to come out of nowhere, like from creepy corners, from dark rooms, and eerie garbage bins in dark alleys. In this film, the "monster" comes from behind a shower curtain. Now the stabbing incident is the most interesting part of the shower scene. The knife, according to many cultural critics (especially feminist critics) is symbollic of the male phallus. What caught my attention is this one shot of her lower abdomen being stabbed:






Most of the shots taken during the shower scene are close-ups of the female victim's face but the only shots to show 'penetration' happens to be of her lower abdomen. Once again, we as viewers are inexplicately shown the female characters being raped by the 'monsters' in the film. With closer examination, we see a conventional image of the defenseless female unable to save herself let alone save humanity altogether. To sum up, it seems like the female victims of horror films are left to suffer the same fate.

Adaptation: A Postmodernist Approach.

I once was a fan of Postmodernism. Its ideas of nonconformity intrigued me. Seeing reality as a massive product of metaphors forced a poetic obsession out of me. However, I soon found myself maniacly skeptical about EVERYTHING. If everything we've ever come to know as the Truth was created and governed by men of power (the rich white men), then have we been making gods out of THEM? Does this mean that God never existed from the beginning since "God" is a "theory" created by man? After helping Jacques Derrida and his friends destroy language, what do we do after? Do we piece it back together or do we have a wine and cheese party amidst the big mess? What is "it" anyways? Should I believe YOUR definition of "it"? Ahh! Now we're back at the beginning again!

(This was my mind only a couple of months ago ...)

I decided to pack my suitcase and leave Postmodernism behind but no matter how hard I try to walk away, he keeps calling me back.

Professor Petit once asked the class to discuss why novels are deemed better than films (a popular consensus from readers and watchers). Many said that the act of reading is subjective hence our own minds are better tools in projecting colorful, honest, and free flowing images in comparison to the controlled images projected on the big screen. However, many said that films bring out visual symbolisms that invoke further reflection of the film maker's intentions. Some said that novels are better than films and a few others said that they prefer films over novels.

Now going back to Postmodernism:

After much thought, I decided to take a Postmodernist approach to analyzing novels and films. This theory states that language, or any form of discourse, does not have an intrinsic value and reality itself is a giant metaphor. If we decide to look at novels and films from this perspective, it becomes more difficult to suppose that one is better than the other. Both are metaphorical representatives of the author and film maker's reality. To state that the novel is better than the film is to state that the author's reality is better than the film maker's. Then it leaves you questioning which of the two creators are better story-tellers of the Truth. But what is the Truth?

Think about it ...