Simulation Proliferation and the City
Mr. Hand wears all black, is tall, thin, and pale. He floats around a dark city and ends far too many lines with a creepy self-affirming “yesss.” In Dark City (Alex Proyas 1998) we see over and over again indications of the tropes and repetitions that make up the urban/filmic imagination. Not quite vampires, not quite grey aliens, not quite business men, not quite religious, not quite serial murderers, Mr. Hand and the other Strangers seem to be archetypal characters of the city. Is the imagination a domesticating function, territorializing wild occurrence and happenstance into termed rearrangements of what has come before? Or is it an explosive and infinite fountain of creativity? Modern metropolises and imagination present themselves together in such films as mutually helpful tools for inspecting one another – but my effort is to use the city to discuss several imaginations. As is only obvious enough from one city dweller talking to another, imagination (moreso than representation or memory) is home to the ever changing city. Conversely, however, the city enables a specific citified imagination, with its own structure and economy. To begin, though, I want to interrogate, as a point of departure, the philosophy of fantasy in a highly commercial, idyllic, anti-city movie.
Those lucky children of the 80’s witnessed the depiction and eventual summarization of the relation between fantasy, imagination, fiction, story, and control in the politico-creative manifesto, The Neverending Story (Wolfgang Peterson 1984). In the movie, Sebastian (a somewhat troubled young boy) reads a book (whose unfolding is the main content of the screen) and is then implicated in the collapse of a fantas...
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...gination can be spoken of as a discourse that is ultimately just about itself: it is only by imagination that one imagination is to discover anything about the next – yet this ethereality is not only not troubling for the stability of simulation, but itself stabilized by the overproduction of simulacra such that its processing is pressured into sheer reactive creativity. The strikingly bizarre and symptomatically fascinating point, though, is why imagination might have almost anything at all to do with simulation, but this is just the predominant strength of an imagination over its inscription, by representation, into broader circulating winds of reality: its apparent nihilism.
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[1] Žižek, Slavoj. “Passion in the Era of Decaffeinated Belief.” Thy Symptom Issue 5,
Winter 2004.
This chapter is composed of concepts that try to differentiate between reality and what is actually happening in your mind, and are we living in a matrix? The Vats and Demons idea creates a vivid
Film Noir, as Paul Schrader integrates in his essay ‘Notes on Film Noir,’ reflects a marked phase in the history of films denoting a peculiar style observed during that period. More specifically, Film Noir is defined by intricate qualities like tone and mood, rather than generic compositions, settings and presentation. Just as ‘genre’ categorizes films on the basis of common occurrences of iconographic elements in a certain way, ‘style’ acts as the paradox that exemplifies the generality and singularity at the same time, in Film Noir, through the notion of morality. In other words, Film Noir is a genre that exquisitely entwines theme and style, and henceforth sheds light on individual difference in perception of a common phenomenon. Pertaining
Vogler, Christopher. The Writer’s Journey: Mythic Structure for Writers. 3rd Ed. Studio City: Michael Wiese Productions, 2007.
The story of The Fantasticks, written by Tom Jones and Harvey Schmidt and also based upon Edmond Rostand's play Les Romanesques, concerns itself with the pairing of two young lovers, appropriately enough, the Boy and the Girl. As their story begins to unfold, as told to us by the Narrator (El Gallo), we quickly come to recognize both the Boy and Girl as specific characters with specific concerns, but at the same time we see them as every boy and girl that have ever fallen in love. We see the Boy's unwavering devotion and the Girl's romantic idealism and even though their fathers have built a wall between them, the zealous young lovers will let nothing stand in the way of their passion. Just as the story might b...
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Not a single individual is able to watch a Burton film without noticing the lighting effects and how it significantly contributes to the tone and mood of the entire film. In the movie Edward Scissorhands, one might be overwhelmed with the burst of extravagant colors in the scenery. Indeed this cinematic technique, high key, wholly influences the viewers perception and impression of the town. One can conclude that even though flamboyancy pervades the town, iniquity lurks in all directions and hypocrisy governs the minds of its inhabitants. Irony is harnessed in this film. How can an effulgent town harbor wickedness and Edward with a chilling and gothic complexion radiate innocence and righteousness? Burton uses these opposing conceptions brought about by the contrast of lighting to convey the message that materialism has been ingrained in the mentality of society (at least in the neighborhood in which Burton lived in the past), thus yearning for th...
The only real way to truly understand a story is to understand all aspects of a story and their meanings. The same goes for movies, as they are all just stories being acted out. In Thomas Foster's book, “How to Read Literature Like a Professor”, Foster explains in detail the numerous ingredients of a story. He discusses almost everything that can be found in any given piece of literature. The devices discussed in Foster's book can be found in most movies as well, including in Quentin Tarantino’s cult classic, “Pulp Fiction”. This movie is a complicated tale that follows numerous characters involved in intertwining stories. Tarantino utilizes many devices to make “Pulp Fiction” into an excellent film. In this essay, I will demonstrate how several literary devices described in Foster's book are put to use in Tarantino’s film, “Pulp Fiction”, including quests, archetypes, food, and violence.
Rudolfo Anaya’s, Bless Me, Ultima and Guillermo del Toro’s, Pan’s Labyrinth are two coming-of-age stories. Both the novel and the movie are full of events that contribute to the disillusionment of the main character’s childhood idealism and the realization of the real world they live in. Both protagonists absorb themselves in a mythical world full of fantasy and each receives exposure to religious theology and trauma by the violence of men. Despite the fact that Antonio and Ofelia have different familial role models and travel along different paths, their childlike innocence, disillusionment, and initiation into adulthood comes about through similar themes: myth, religion, and violence.
Stewart, Jacqueline Najuma. Migrating to the Movies: Cinema and Black Urban Modernity. Berkeley: U of California, 2005. Print.
When analysing the narrative structure of a film in order to determine how it may serve to articulate a discourse in the relationship between reality and fantasy it can be extremely useful to consider the aspects of the narrative which may make it “complex.” “Complex” narratives often explore ontological issues and epistemology as key story themes, taking from the other title of this type of narrative the “mind-game” film. Whilst this name refers to how these films use their narrative in order to play with the viewer’s perceptions of the film they are watching, many of these mind game films take this idea further, also making the story of the narrative about the mind by considering how the ideas of fantasy and reality may be affected by how
The characters of a modernist narrative reflected a new way of thinking. A summery no longer highlighted meaning, it was ambiguous. The ambiguity portrayed unmanageable futures. The Modernis...
In the words of Michael O’Shaughnessy, ‘narratives, or stories, are a basic way of making sense of our experience’ (1999: 266). As a society and a culture, we use stories to comprehend and share our experiences, typically by constructing them with a beginning, middle and an end. In fact, the order that a narrative is structured will directly impact the way it is understood, particularly across cultures. This idea originated through Claude Lévi-Strauss’s concept of structuralism in anthropology which ‘is concerned with uncovering the common structural principles underlying specific and historically variable cultures and myth’ in pre-industrial societies (Strinati 2003: 85). In terms of media studies, structuralism’s inherent objective is to dig beneath the surface of a media text to identify how the structure of a narrative contributes to it’s meaning. Structuralism encompasses a large range of analytical tools, however, this essay will examine Joseph Campbell’s monomyth and Claude Lévi-Strauss’s theory of binary oppositions. Through analysis of Victor Fleming’s film, The Wizard of Oz (1939), it will be shown that although the monomyth and binary oppositions are useful tools with which to unveil how meaning is generated in this text, structuralism can undermine the audience’s ability to engage with their own interpretations of the film.
The elements at play in the novel and film are quite remarkable for their traditionally universal appeal.3 The fates of two adolescents, one jailed the other unwilling jailer, intersect and are soon bound together in a struggle for survival at the hands of unsuspecting enemies. The filmmaker's aim was to adopt a child's unadulterated point of view in referential opposition to the surrounding adult world. Given the suspenseful plot and the exploration of the young protagonists' fears at coping with a habitat they must disavow, such an aim and narrative scheme were expected to gather much attention.4 The pre-teens Michele, the novel's principal hero, and Filippo the kidnapped child are ultimately elevated from a pit of dirt and fear, the antechamber of death, chiefly by their own heroic praxis. Yet the problematic lack of any meaningful degree of depth in the novel and film seems to lie precisely with its overly schematic construction, tailored to safely weather the otherwise unpredictable market.
The Higgs Boson particle was hypothesized by a British physicist named Peter Higgs more than 50 years ago because of the undetermined origin of mass to known particles made the assignment of mass extremely difficult and made mathematical equations inconsistent (Exploratorium, 2012). The Higgs Boson particle was supposed to complete the standard model of particle physics and break the electroweak symmetry during the initial moments of the Big Bang (Cho, 2012). The Higgs boson particle was one of the main research experiments of the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), a particle accelerator with a circumference of 27 kilometers (CERN, 2008). However, after hitting mainstream, the discovery of the Higgs Boson particle reveals its significance not only as the particle nicknamed as the god particle but also as the particle that was named as the breakthrough of 2012 through its significance in the field of Physics. This paper aims to describe the significance of the Higgs Boson particle to the standard model, the Higgs field, and the electroweak symmetry breaking.
“Inferno” by Dante Alighieri, written in the fourteenth century, is the first part of Dante’s epic poem, “Divine Comedy.” “Purgatorio” and “Paradiso” followed it. “Inferno” was an allegorical account of Dante as he descends through the nine levels of Hell with his guide, Roman poet Virgil. As Dante travels through the levels, or concentric rings of Hell, he begins to have a new understanding of religion and begins also to question his own morals and ethics. In the first few rings, Dante feels a large amount of pity for the tortured souls he sees. However, as he reaches the inner rings, he is less inclined to feel pity for the sinner souls, and eventually realizes that to feel pity for those in Hell is to demonstrate a lack of understanding. This is because divine justice is infinitely perfect and sinners receive punishment in proportion to their sins. The Sullen choke on mud, the Wrathful attack each other, the Gluttonous are forced to eat excrement, and so on. Dante refused to believe that every sinner is destined to suffer in the same Hell regardless of the severity of their sins. This highlights one of the major themes of “Inferno”: the idea that God’s justice is perfect. As harsh as it may seem, this punishment is completely deserved by the sinners.