To Kill a Mockingbird

To Kill a Mockingbird

The Nightmare Before Christmas

The Nightmare Before Christmas tells the tale of Jack Skellington, the leader of the residents of Halloween Town, who comes in contact with a similar yet completely foreign city: Christmas Town.  In attempting to understand their foreign culture and customs, Jack decides that the citizens of Halloween Town should bring the joys of Christmas to everyone in the world instead, leading to disastrous results.  By analyzing the film’s appeal to nostalgia in both content and form, the film’s themes of the dangers of cultural appropriation and

The film becomes a metaphor for cultural appropriation, and the dangers of appropriating elements of another culture without properly contextualizing it or fully understanding its role or purpose within the foreign culture.  When Jack and his Halloween friends attempt to recreate Christmas through their distorted, creepy lens, it leads to disaster.  All of the

     

      The film’s stop-motion animation is also a callback to a more nostalgic era of animation history.  Films such as the Rankin/Bass Christmas Specials such as Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer and Santa Claus is Coming to Town.  By the 1990s, stop-motion films had all but been abandoned in Hollywood.  Jack attempts to analyze several iconic Christmas elements and ions.  He dissects a teddy bear, dissolves a Christmas ornament in chemicals, cuts a paper snowflake in the shape of a spider, crushes mistletoe under a microscope while attempting to study it, and draws complicated Christmas equations on his chalkboard.  He attempts to understand the emotional with the logical and analytical, and this is where his

Whale Rider

Whale Rider is an interesting film.  It's beautifully shot, well acted (especially by its star, Keisha Castle-Hughes, who was nominated for an Oscar) and a wonderful story about change, tradition, and community.

The most obvious example of deconstruction and de-centering in the film is the binary gender roles that are central to the film's conflict.  Paikea, having been born a female, cannot inherit the role of chief, even though it is her right as one of the original Paikea's descendants.  This conflict allows us to think about the role that gender plays in our own lives.  Does it make sense for opportunities and advancements to be denied to someone because of their gender? Is it okay to go against obvious signs of destiny and tradition simply because it goes against your idea of what a leader should be? The film argues no, and even shows that Paikea has a connection to her ancestors and even whales, which the original Paikea famously rode on (hence the, uh, title).

Nobly pictured here.

Paikea does everything that tradition says she shouldn't do.  She fights with a taiaha.  She rides whales.  She gives amazing speeches.  Her every step contradicts and fights against the patriarchal standard, and by the end of the film, her actions are finally recognized by her grandfather Koro.  By isolating the role of gender in terms of leadership, the film is able to boldly state that gender should not be an issue when it comes to who gets to rule, and challenges the traditional patriarchal construct of not only her culture, but all cultures as well.

It's interesting to note that while the film in many ways subverts tradition and fights against the patriarchal society presented in the film, in many ways, it also upholds these same ideals.  Having Paikea fight to be the leader of the tribe is seen as progressive (and in terms of the culture and story being presented, it is), but traditional concepts such as "right to rule" and leadership through birthright are not questioned.  Paikea's ability to rule the tribe is never brought up on issues of age, credentials, or experience, only on her gender being the only obstacle.  The film never truly challenges the concepts of destiny or predestination (and honestly, that's not the film's purpose, but I digress) True, the chief does train and teach the other boys of the tribe to see who will become the next chief, but the conclusion of the movie suggests that he was doing this in spite of all the evidence that Paikea should be the chief.  He was, in actuality, fighting against tradition and his ancestors by not having the firstborn descendant of their first chief, Paikea, become the chief of the tribe, even if she is a female. So the film does a really good job of analyzing and evaluating gender biases that are present in culture and society, but other biases and traditional ideas are upheld.  This suggests to me that traditions are not changed all at once in a radical revolution, but slowly over time.  Progress does not happen in a day.  In reality, it is by both looking into the past for strength and inspiration that we can truly change the future, one steep at a time.

I'm just gonna leave this here. Try not to cry too hard.

Play

Last week, I had the opportunity to revisit many childhood games and apply principles on the importance of play in a child's development.  After playing through several games, these are my extremely scientific findings:

Game 1: Operation

Poor man; having surgery without anesthetic.

Operation terrified me as a child.  It was like I was defusing a bomb rather than playing a game.  I was completely underwhelmed when I revisited it.  Maybe it's just that my fine motor skills have improved since childhood, but the game was super easy.  Too easy.  Ray and I never even came close to hitting the edge.  In fact, my current theory is that the game publishers have made the game easier, widening the holes and making the pieces easier to grab.  When I was younger, many of the holes were in the shape of the piece you were trying to remove, and they were much smaller.  The chance of you striking the metal edge with the clamp was much greater, and therefore the risk of losing was higher.  This led me to think: what are the benefits and risks of making games easier for children? The benefits seem obvious: if it's easier to play, then it's easier to win, which results in fewer tantrums and upset feelings.  However, by lowering the risk, you also lower the reward.  If it's easy to win and everyone can win, then there's no real satisfaction in winning at all.  I don't know which is better for a child, since these are more adult thoughts on winning and losing.  Young children probably don't think about this ramification, and they enjoy winning regardless of the difficulty of the task.  I don't know which is better; all I'm saying is that the game was much more memorable for me when the risk of accidentally killing your patient was much higher, increasing both my fear and my enjoyment.

In hindsight, it's a good thing I never went into medicine.

Game 2: Battleship

Aww, look how cute they are, annihilating each other's military fleets.

Battleship was fun, and still is.  I played with Ray, and we were neck and neck for most of the game, with me barely scraping a victory. Battleship was always one of my favorite games to play (next to Clue) because there was strategy involved rather than physical skill, and I was always better with strategy than I was with my physical prowess.  That's also why I liked chess.  Strategy can be learned and improved through study and practice (like most things, I realize, but I preferred studying to working out) and I always liked playing games where my odds of winning were higher (this will prove hypocritical when you read my next entry; maybe I only like games that I win. Huh).  What impressed me this time was how much of Battleship involves learning to read your opponent.  The rules are simple: you place your ships, you call out random coordinates, they tell you if you missed, hit, or sank a ship.  But I realized that seeing your opponent's reactions when you call coordinates is just as important as the coordinates you call.  After the game was over, Ray showed me how many of my guesses were really close to her ships.  I realized that most of the time when I called coordinates close to her ships, she would hesitate longer before responding.  If I had paid more attention to her in the game, I might have seen her accidentally giving away this information with her responses and body language.  Instead, I focused on a grid strategy that I half recalled from my childhood, attempting to shrink the field into more manageable squares.  In focusing solely on strategy, I forgot about other important factors in the gameplay.  These are important skills for a kid to learn.  When they play with others, they learn to read body language, tone of voice, and other nonverbal social cues.  They learn what is appropriate and what is not.  By interacting with others through playing games, kids learn skills that they can apply in social situations at school, church, on dates, etc.  So even though it seems frivolous, it's still vital that kids play games with each other so that they can learn to understand nonverbal communication and further develop into adults.

Game 3:Mario Kart

I couldn't think of a caption, but it felt wrong not to give it one. So here ya go.

While playing Mario Kart on the Wii, I was reminded of why I didn't like playing competitive video games as a child (or for that matter, sports in general).  I was never very good at operating the Wiimote, so I did very poorly in every race.  Every time I lost, I was mocked, insulted, and put down. Just the usual kid stuff, really.  It reminded me of why I hated playing these kinds of video games. I never (or rarely) won Smash Bros as a kid, or Halo, or Call of Duty, or anything similar.  I remember one particular day when my cousin and I played Halo, and I didn't win a single match, no matter what the weapons or setting were.  Part of the reason for this is that I didn't grow up with an Xbox or Playstation, so I never practiced and got better. I also didn't care for 1st person shooters as a kid.  But I think the main reason I didn't like playing these games was because almost without exception, I would be mocked every time I lost.  Every. Single. Time.  That's a slight exaggeration, but I'm not kidding when I say that I lost a lot and that I got mocked for losing a lot.  It wasn't enough for the winning player/team to win the game; it was more important for them to make sure the other side felt bad about losing.  Now, a lot of this commentary may seem bitter, and it's probably biased by my past experience and nostalgic lens, but I'm glad I had these experiences.  They influenced the way that I see the world now.  I still like to play games, and I still love to win, but it's not that big of a deal when I lose.  Why does it matter if one person is better than another in some dumb game?  And in a larger sense, in life.  Everyone is going to be talented in some areas and not others, and I personally think it's more important to praise the talent rather than to mock those without.  But I think it was also an important lesson to learn as a child.  Most of the world functions on ranking and judging people, trying to ascertain who is the best and who deserves the best.  There's job competition and romantic competition, and competition in almost every aspect of life, and there's no better way to learn this lesson as a kid than by playing games with other kids. Kids need to learn how to lose, how to win, and how to react to others who win and lose.

So in conclusion, kids play games to learn more about each other, more about themselves, and how to develop skills that they'll need in everyday life.  Plus, games are just fun, and one should never underestimate the importance of fun.





Final random note: my favorite toy to play with as a kid was string. Just regular shoelaces.

No, seriously.

I could play with those bad boys for hours.  This probably had more to do with my Tourette's syndrome than anything else (hard to explain; the string just felt right), but I would twitch that string around in my fingers and come up with all kinds of stories. So play is different for everyone.

I Am The Cheese

The cheese stands alone, 

The cheese stands alone,

Heigh-ho, the merry-o,

The cheese stands alone

            In Robert Cormier’s I Am The Cheese, teen protagonist Adam Farmer attempts to bike across state lines in order to give a present to his father, all while a doctor attempts to understand more about Adam’s troubling childhood.  The story mixes three different forms of documentation to tell its story: transcripts of interviews recorded on tape, third person omnipotent narration, and first person present tense narration.  Each one of these forms of documentation helps to illuminate a different aspect of documentation and how it affects how a story is told and interpreted, while also helping the novel portray its themes of personal identity, loneliness, and the relative nature of truth.   

The first form of documentation, the transcripts, help give the novel a framework that pushes the plot along while also providing commentary on the passionless nature of absolute truth.  The tape transcripts that appear sporadically throughout the novel (documenting conversations between “T” and “A”) are impersonal, only stating what is spoken and by whom, as well as marking the lengths of silence in between answers and responses.  As we learn by the end of the novel, Brint the interviewer is not a doctor, but an agent working for the Witness Reestablishment Project who is investigating the deaths of Adam’s parents and the possible guilt of a fellow agent known as Mr. Grey.  To Brint, Adam is nothing more than a means to an end, the only living witness who can prove whether Mr. Grey did in fact betray Adam’s family to the mob.  He cares little for Adam’s overall well-being, so long as he can extract the information that he needs.  The ending of the novel proves as much when the final transcript reveals the exact purpose of Brint’s interrogation, as well as his recommendation to terminate Adam, due to his failure to provide any new information for three years in a row.  While this form of documentation is technically the most truthful, since it describes with a hundred percent certainty what is said and what occurs, it lacks the heart and interesting detail of the other types of narration.  It’s also, ironically, the most dishonest, since Brint withholds his true identity as a government worker from Adam, as well as his true motivations behind the interrogation.  In his paranoia, Adam calls Brint out for this on several occasions, claiming that Brint is fishing for information or that he already knows everything that Adam is telling him.  This claim is validated by the end of the novel.  In summary, although the tape transcripts are technically the most accurate and objective means of describing what happens in the story, their clinical, cold nature conceals truth and does not, in fact, document the whole story in a fulfilling way.

In contrast to this, the more traditional third person narration helps to fill in the narrative gaps that the transcript leaves, and helps to portray Adam’s desires, inner thoughts, and eventual loneliness and despair. We learn more about Adam through this more conventional narrative documentation.  We learn of his love for Amy Hertz.  We learn of his desire to become a writer.  Most importantly, we learn that Adam Farmer is, in fact, Paul Demonte, and that due to his father’s position as a witness against organized crime, the family was relocated and renamed when Adam was very small.  It is in this element that the story’s theme of loneliness, loss of personal identity, and truth become the clearest.  Once Adam learns of his old life, he feels as if Paul Demonte is dead, which represents his feelings of his old life dying and being reborn in a new identity.  Adam begins to sympathize with his parents, especially his Mother, and he grows to understand their strange behavior and their fear of the unknown, or as Adam’s mother describes it, the “Never-knows.” Ironically, when Adam learns the truth of his past, it does not set him free, but causes him to becomes more guarded and sheltered.  In Adam’s case, ignorance truly was bliss, and learning the truth has created a new set of problems for him.  He can never reveal his true past to anyone, not even his girlfriend Amy, lest he bring his family to danger.  His only connection to his past life is his parents, and this leaves Adam feeling isolated from his friends and neighbors.  Once his parents are killed, his only connection to reality is shattered, leaving him truly alone in the world.  By utilizing a more traditional third person omnipotent perspective to tell this part of the story, Cormier effectively portrays Adam’s transition into loneliness, as well as the crippling and isolating effects of truth.

The most interesting of the three forms of documentation is the first-person present tense perspective.  During this narration, Adam describes his delusional bike trip from Monument, Massachusetts to Rutterburg, Vermont, where he encounters bullies, mean dogs, and helpful strangers.  In the final chapter of the novel, we learn the truth of this first-person perspective: that everything Adam described was a delusion inside his head as he rides his bike around the Mental Institution in Rutterburg.  Even though this narrative is the most objectively false, since none of the events described by Adam occur in the real world exactly as he says, there is a lot of truth that can be gleamed from it.  To Adam, it is the truth.  It has become his reality, his way of giving his life purpose and meaning after the deaths of his parents left him alone in the world.  His delusion becomes the only way that he has to cope with all of his anxieties, fears, and childhood traumas. He does encounter all of the people in the story, even if their true identities are those of other mental patients or doctors or nurses.  Through this, we learn a lot about who Adam is as a person, how he confronts problems and stressful situations, and how his past experiences have negatively affected him.  By experimenting with three different forms of documentation, some more objective and others more truthful, Cormier presents an intriguing narrative featuring an unstable, unreliable narrator and expounds on the nature of personal identity, loneliness, and the nature of truth.

The Spongebob Movie: Sponge Out of Water

          

           In The Spongebob Movie: Sponge Out of Water, the titular character must team up with his archenemy Plankton in order to discover who stole the Krabby Patty Secret Formula and bring order and peace back to the town of Bikini Bottom. By combining live-action elements with traditional 2D and 3D animation, playing with narrative conventions, and subverting audience expectations, the film is able to comment on its simple theme of the importance of teamwork, as well as convey more complex meanings such as questioning authority and authorship, and the traditional notion of good and evil in children’s media.

In order to understand the film in context, it is important to look at how Spongebob as a TV show and film series has dabbled in experimentation in the past.  The TV show, as well as the previous movie, have a tradition of experimenting with animation, as well as live-action narrative conventions.  In the episode “Frankendoodle”, an artist drawing in a boat drops his pencil into the ocean, where it is found by Spongebob and Patrick. They use the pencil to create their own doodles that unexpectedly come to life, acknowledging implicitly that their universe occurs within the confines and restrictions (or even freedoms) of an animated cartoon.  This is further acknowledged when one of Spongebob’s doodles uses the pencil to erase parts of the “real” world, including Spongebob himself.  Similarly, in the first Spongebob movie, the film combines animated and live-action elements in the third act when actor/lifeguard David Hasselhoff suddenly appears to take them back to their hometown of Bikini Bottom. To summarize, the show has never been shy about experimenting both with narrative conventions and animation techniques, both playing with the expectations of the audience and the medium of animation.

By combining 3D animation with live-action, the film crosses into new territory.  In the past, episodes of the show have utilized live action. In particular, the episode “Pressure” had the characters go on dry land, where they’re represented as silly puppets operated on poles.  However, the show has ultimately stayed away from utilizing 3D animation.  The film becomes experimental merely by combining live-action elements with 3D animation.  By experimenting with a combination of 3D animation and live-action, the film opens the door for further experimentation both on the show and future children’s media.

The film experiments with audience expectations by establishing patterns familiar to the show’s audience and using their familiarity with these patterns in order to trick them.  In the first film, the entire narrative is presented as a film that is being watched by pirates. On the show, certain episodes are introduced by “Patchy the Pirate”, a bumbling pirate host.  In essence, the target audience has been trained to see pirates as funny side characters that don’t influence the overall plot. Furthermore, most modern audience members are not trained to see a narrator as anything but an unbiased, impartial third party dictating the story. There are examples of media that experiments with this notion, such as Into the Woods, Dave the Barbarian, and George of the Jungle, where the narrator either takes a more active role in telling the story or interacts directly with the characters, who are aware that their story is being dictated by an invisible third party.  However, this film further plays with this narrative construct by having the narrator become the real antagonist of the story.  In context of the film’s previous history, where pirates are seen as wacky yet ultimately harmless narrators or mere observers of the story being told, this film subverts expectations by presenting the pirate Burger Beard as the traditional narrator, only to pull the rug from under the audience and have him abuse his position as the omnipotent narrator in order to steal the krabby patty formula and make a profit for himself at the expense of the characters.  Not only is he playing an active role in the film’s narrative, but he plays the antagonist role, a role normally reserved for series villain Plankton, who served as the first film’s primary antagonist.  By establishing familiar patterns and then subverting them, the film is able to provide an interesting antagonist that defies convention and helps the film to portray its overall message.

All of the experimentation with narrative conventions and 2D/3D animation help the film to portray its themes of the importance of teamwork, as well as the more complex ideas on authorship and good vs. evil narratives.  In order for Spongebob to save the town, he must team up with Plankton, a character who has a long history of working against the protagonist.  Indeed, by working with the go-to villain in order to save the town, the film is able to portray its moralistic message about the importance of teamwork and its power to overcome normal prejudices. This is especially true in the climax, where the heroes only prevail once Plankton joins the battle and works with Spongebob. This seems simple enough, but having the protagonist team up with a traditional villain is not a trope that the audience is accustomed to seeing, especially for children’s media.  Indeed, children’s media is often full of one dimensional villains with no redeeming quality, so it’s a breath of fresh air when a piece of media can portray a traditionally evil character as having redeeming qualities who is capable of working towards the greater good rather than simple self-interest.  Furthermore, by establishing the traditional narrator as the primary antagonist, the film sends a message to its audience to be suspicious (or at least skeptical) of who tells the story, and that it’s important not to take a story at face value without analyzing the source.  By experimenting with both traditional narrative conventions as well as with animation techniques, the film teaches messages both simple and complex about the importance of teamwork and the importance of questioning authorship and our own internal prejudices.