The Future

I honestly don't know where the future will take me. I am about to graduate and have completely lost hope in my major, film, and I don't know wither or not if I wasted four years of my life. I might either be depressed, or maybe even going through a story that I might tell one day through another character. Life sucks, but it gives us something to write about. 

Satire and Sci-Fi

This week I watched The Truman show for the first time. Good movie, but to be honest, I would have been so pissed if I was Truman Burbank. As an audience member, I felt catfished along with the main character. My subconscious concentrated on the obvious, and without realising, I'd missed a lot of the main points that would have helped my understanding of the film further. After studying it carefully I started to notice the smaller details and codes that had been added to film, that before I would never have even considered looking for. What was striking about the opening sequence of the film was, there were credits for the film itself, followed by another set of credits for the show Christof directed. It was a very confusing start to the film because naturally after the first set of credits an audience would expect the film to begin. The conventions used in this section of the film were; Invisible filming, when Truman was looking in the mirror there was a camera directly behind. It's a documentary and soap. The aptly-named Christof is a mysterious character with a God complex who uses his omnipresence to control Truman - both physically and mentally for the sake of ratings. Weir and Niccol bring viewers' attention to how far the media is willing to go to gain an audience. Weir has said that he was editing The Truman Show during Princess Diana's death, and while he certainly blames the paparazzi who drove her off the road, he asserts that the audience who consumed her public identity was just as complicit. Similarly, Truman's audiences are complicit in his entrapment, as Christof would be powerless without their attention.

Literary Speculation

This week I read He, She and It by Marge Piercy. This novel sort of reminded me of
Frankenstein in a way.  The concept of this story is based around science converting to
rebirth of life. The central theme of Piercy's novel is that science, though necessary and
intellectually stimulating, is not the savior of humanity. The status of the world in 2059 is
clearly due, in large part, to the scientific advances of humanity. The scientifically provoked
"cyber-riots" occurred throughout the world as a response of fear that technology would replace
humans. The sweeping environmental disasters could not be averted by scientifically informed
"eco-police." Not only could science not avert the Two Week War, but it actually had enabled
the terrorist act which started this "conflagration of biological, chemical and nuclear
weapons that had set the oil fields aflame and destroyed the entire region". A secondary,
and yet equally important theme of this novel is that the distinction of human personhood
is sufficiently plastic that it may soon disappear. Not only does the sixteenth century Maharal
struggle with this idea, but today the increasing blend of mechanical and biological
components in medicine threatens to demolish any distinctions based solely on physical metrics.
Not only does humanity no longer inhabit an exalted place in the Piercy's universe, but it
is finally defined out of existence.

Diverse Position Science Fiction

This week I read Octavia Butler's Lilith's Brood. This novel’s main story element was
based around freedom. This theme is first seen when the book opens and the only perspective
given to the reader is that of Lilith, who is being held captive. She has moments when she
appears to almost, or perhaps does, loose her sanity because of the cage she has been put in.
She has very little freedom while in the cage. The rest of Lilith's story focuses on the freedoms
that the people do not have now that they are being controlled by the Oankali. Lilith, and the
other Humans, do feel a great deal of pleasure when they are with the aliens but this pleasure
seemingly makes the Humans lose control and they do not like that feeling either. The Humans
feel that they are given no choice in the matter.

I found the alien concept interesting. The main character, Lilith Iyapo, awakens to find that
most of the Earth has been destroyed by nuclear war, and the surviving humans have been kept
in suspended animation by an alien race called the Oankali. The Oankali are driven to travel the
universe in search of other intelligent species to breed with in order to share their genetic code,
altering both species. This story also touches with real life situations such as Lilith dealing
with cancer after losing her family to the same situation.

Cyberpunk and Steampunk

This week I read Snow Crash by Neal Stephenson. Snow Crash contained many of the upper class American values such as religion, rules and order, and visions of America. Neal Stephenson shows us a version of America where issues that are currently corrupted and how it has impacted our society. There are sections that shows how Immigration goes rabid on the Raft and how racism becomes institutionalized in skin-color segregated Burbclaves. Sacrifice Zones are cordoned off as parts of the land that are too contaminated to ever be reclaimed for use. Not all of the characters in Snow Crash are religious as others, and the non-believer characters get to have a say in how to interpret and implement religious ideas, too. We see a range of religious believers and the underlying message is that religion is complex. Just like humanity. In the Snow Crash, having money or the right connections will get you pretty far, which is how our society works as well. Snow Crash digs deep into its impact, exploring notions of linguistic infrastructure, glossolalia (speaking in tongues), and neurolinguistic programming. The main point is that language is a tool: In the hands of the right people, it's constructive and lets folks communicate, while in the hands of the wrong people, it can be destructive beyond measure.

Blood Child

1. What was your reaction to what you just read?

I found Bloodchild interesting. I am obsessed with aliens and their infereiations with male pregnancies in different stories. In fact, my senior thesis is about a stoner who gets abducted and pregnant by aliens which is how I connected to this story. There is a strong connection between Gan and his mother's situation. In the story, the mother cannot bear children, but her son is carrying a child.

2. What connections did I get from the story?

Other than my thesis film Probaphobe, which relates to this story, I really connected with how weird the story was. I love reading unusual stories with weird concepts.

3. What changes would I make to this story? What media would you choose?

If I were to change this story, I would adapt it into am action comic book series. This is an interesting story with a strong concept. I feel like it would play well in comic books due to more illustration freeform creativity. It would be cool to see the different concept art for the aliens.

The Fiction of Ideas

This week, I read the female man which hit a lot of controversial points and
carried strong subtexts such as masculinity, gender/sexual orientation, and sexual identity.
This novel came out in the mid 70’s just right before we hit the big gay area where more people
were coming out of the closet.

The Female Man talks a lot about what proper girls and women are supposed to feel and
do. Topping the list are activities like being attractive, being pleasant, and being attentive.
Things that don't make the cut include being ambitious, wanting fulfillment outside of marriage
and motherhood, and being intellectually and/or sexually attracted to other women. Femininity
in this novel is a web of social expectations that make women easy prey for power-hungry men.
Only in Whileaway, where men no longer exist, can women experiment and explore without being
told that their actions aren't properly "womanly."

Masculinity in The Female Man goes hand-in-hand with patriarchal power. The most
conventionally masculine men in this novel are also the most dangerous, and the book suggests
that that's not a coincidence. As you encounter one no-good, dirty, rotten scoundrel after another,
it may seem as though The Female Man is all about hating on the mens. While Joanna Russ is certainly
free with her anger, sarcasm, and satire, it could be said that the real antagonists of the novel aren't men
themselves, but the social conventions that teach young males to be aggressive, domineering, and
violent toward women.

It can be difficult to separate questions concerning sexuality and sexuality identity from the act of sex itself in The Female Man, because so often the characters' sexual encounters are staged to tell us something about their societies more generally. For instance, Joanna and Laura have to overcome powerful anxieties before they accept that they want to be with women, and the novel suggests that those anxieties are products of the patriarchal world they're stuck in. Janet, who comes from a world where patriarchy no longer exists, has none of the same concerns. On Whileaway, no one thinks of herself as "lesbian"—women's sexual relationships with other women are so natural, there's no need to have a specific word for them.