when we're done stealing your things, we'll be sure to write you a check
I just finished reading an essay on the Coen Brothers' first film Blood Simple in relation to neo-noir, and just can't shake the feeling that the analysist missed the point somewhere along the line, like he has some point he wanted to make, and this movie could be abducted for that purpose. I don't know why these analists bother me, but they do. I'll read their essays and find myself frequently thinking that they just said something right, but then go on to dwell on the immaterial part of the idea, like people who go at length about symbols of "patriarchal corruption" then carry on for another page about patriarchy as the problem, instead of the (oh no, that'd be too obvious, it can't be the problem) corruption. In those cases (I've read numerous papers that all use that train of thought) I find it funny because of the unspoken implication that non-patriarchy is inherently less corrupt. Perhapse it is my upbringing, but I don't find gender to be as big a deal as so many people make it out to be as I've seen just as much corruption, violence, domination, abuse, greed, selfishness, and horror from members of both sexes, and in equal measures a distribution of all the opposing virtues. Call me simple, but we're all in this together, so let's focus on the problem.
I'm perhaps a first-class jerk for this idea that I've got, but I'm thinking for this semester's term paper I'm going to find something that destroys the common mold of film analysis as much as possible. I frankly dislike my instructor's desire to eliminate all consideration of wether or not a film is "good" or "bad" as failure to incorporate that yeaids very dubious material. Blood simple may be a Coen Brothers film, but it's honestly just "okay". The acting is passable, the story is on the high side of decent, and the pacing (this one we argued about) is poor. With the pacing, later films of theirs, Fargo comes to mind quickly, also use a very slow, hollow pacing but Fargo shows a lot more deliberation and skill in using it. Also, Blood Simple is their first film, and it's become almost an axiom that first films suffer in their pacing. Every book I've read on advice for first-time directors, producers, or script writers heavily emphasizes that pacing is very very hard to get right, that what you think is a quick pace,a nd what you intend to be a quick pace, may actually be dragging unbearably. Add to this that the Coen Brothers have also showed a certain love affair with quick, sharp pacing (The Big Lebowski, O Brother, Where Art Thous) and the quick-moving developments of the last 20 minutes of Blood Simple, it's quite possible that the deliberation my essayist dwells on was really just inexperianced film making. With all that, for this terms essay I'm going to try as hard as possible to use a film such as Leprichaun in the Hood, Modern Vampires, or even Starship Troopers 2. I suspect that the essay will be based in some way around genre, so finding someting inept to maul into an essay should not be hard with the mass quantities of dreck availible.
1 Observations:
I suppose some clarification is in order: my teacher will give me a C regardless of what I write, and she has 0 concept of how film relates to itself in terms of it's construction, style, and meaning. She told me that "frustration is not an emotion" when she asked how the end of Chinatown made us feel. I'm not sure if you can fully apreciate the beauty of my abomination without having sat through one of these classes and watched real literary analysis turned into a perpetual exercise of second rate fad-intellectualism. When we were initially discussing Film Noir as a genre she acknowledged that there are those who will say it is not a genre. She talked about that for a moment or two, then was unsure about wether or not we would consider it a genre for the purpose of the class. She literally went "but for thins class I think, yeah, maybe, yeah, I think it is a genre, so well say it's a genre" while looking at the roof as if considering it for the first time. Excuse me? If you're going to pick Film Noir as you're focus for genre study, you'd better believe it's a genre.
And feminism is about how women are better than men based on this assault on patriarchy. Read the material, it's a fundamental assumption that men are inferior because of the perviewed patriarchal opression. Maybe I see it because I'm a man and you don't see it because you're a woman, but there's this definite air of "women wouldn't have done that". Yes, gender has been a problem because I've grown up in a post-feminist academic society where men are historic opressors.
As for commercial society seeing women as objects, the feminist revolution turned into the girl-power revolution which openly accepts the use of overt and extreme sexuality to achieve its ends, based on the idea that, in a post-mdern ironic sensibility way, CHOOSING to behave and dress like a crack whore = feminism because you're in control of who you are. What you are describing as feminism barely exists as an entity anymore because all the moderate feminists came to the conclusion that work wasn't that big a deal to begin with since the more pressing issue was, or should have been, raising the next generation to treat each other like human beings. In other words they realized that motherhood is far more important to the survival of humanity than a paycheck. Trust me, Dr. Sullivan went on at length about how these theorists were essentially failures because they failed to disrupt the patriarchal order.
As well, I would like you to deliver solid evidence, as in pay stubs, demonstrating that a gender-based disparity still exists in pay.
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