Movable Type is a Media Studies journal that displays outstanding work, researched and recorded by the undergraduate students at the University of Virginia.
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Edition 2.2 Spring 2015
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Meet the Team
Dancing on Thresholds: Boundaries, Spaces, and Trauma in Django Unchained Travers Nisbet
The Dichotomy of Marriage as Portrayed in Hollywood Romances and Blue Valentine Jacqueline Justice
Celebrating Film: Festivals in Charlottesville, Virginia
24 32 38 44
Trauma as a Repetitive Revenge Charlotte Cruze
Documentary Film: Interview with O’Shea Woodhouse
Walter White and the Demise of the American Dream Zack Bartee
Resources
The entertainment value of the moving picture elevates its place in consumer culture and thus strengthens its power with audiences. Film and television both contain a number of paradoxes: they unify yet specify niche
markets, confront yet conform to a society’s demands, critique a nation and make citizens fall out of their
Lisa Myers Executive Editor Layout Designer
chairs laughing. Through sound, style, and narrative, film stares us square in the eye and says, “here’s
looking at you, kid.” Are you looking back?
The transformation of humor and comedy is an important contribution made by the development of visual media. Jack Benny, Gracie Allen, and other radio comedians of the 1930s & 40s brought clever wordplay and witty comebacks to American culture. But since the rise of television, humor now relies on visual cues, such as
Mirenda Gwin Outreach Coordinator
Will Ferrell’s character, Ron Burgundy, whose lines are made hilarious with his visual presence.
If a picture is worth a thousand words, how much can films and television say? From silent, monochrome images flickering through a projector, to Nickelodeons in immigrant neighborhoods, to special effects that
magnify and defy reality, we have always been fasci-
nated by film. And our captivation does not end when we leave the theater: these images have entered our homes
Eric Leimkuhler Associate Editor
through the television set, offering doors to worlds
that both reflect and distort social norms.
Film and television provide lenses through which we can try to understand society. I am fascinated by how film captures the feelings of people in its era: anxiety, depression, nationalism, conflict, need for escapism. Ultimately, film and television shine light on how people are interpreting and interacting with the world, and we gain invaluable insight about history and culture by critically studying these media.
Bethany Kattwinkel Associate Editor
meet the team Many people do not find film and television worth-
while studies to analyze because they are intended
Alex Fillip Social Media
for entertainment, but these studies help reveal
the underlying assumptions, power structures, and
constructs that exist in our society. As with anything embedded in our lives, we need to understand how cultural products like film affect us.
We tend to think of television as either that thing that sits in the living room, or a relic from the
Christopher Ali Associate Professor Faculty Advisor
past. To the contrary, television today is all
around us, more than it’s ever been. It is on our
computer screens, phones, tablets, our subway ride to work, and our taxi cab to the airport. Television embodies the very definition of convergence,
and its omnipresence makes it even more important to critically assess.
Katelyn Saks has acted on the Executive Team as
Peer Reviewers & Additional Staff
Student Reporter. All Executive Team members act
as peer-reviewers and are joined by Becky Seidel, Jacqueline Justice, and Will Andrewes, each of whom add immense value to the journal.
In this issue, we study the profound effect of the motion picture and the television broadcast, seeking to more thoroughly understand these technologies in their various manifestations: as channels of communication, as pieces of art, as a means to sell commodities, as distractions...the list goes on. We hope you’ll come to
f
find that these media are far more than just the “silver
screen” and the “boob tube.”
film & television
Through ical
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the phys-
and
figurative
spaces in the film, Django Unchained confronts issues of racial injustice by exposing the massive denial of it, which has assisted in the perpetuation of myths throughout the nation’s history.
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Dancing on Thresholds
Boundaries, Spaces, and Trauma in Django Unchained
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uentin Tarantino’s tour-de-force, Django Unchained, parodies the Spaghetti Western genre to address the complexities of the institution of slavery and the cultural trauma surrounding it. The 2012 film follows the eclectic, German bounty hunter, Doctor King Schultz, and former-slave, Django Freeman, as they navigate the tumultuous and morally depraved landscape of the antebellum south in search of Django’s slave wife, Broomhilda. Through the physical and figurative spaces in the film, Django Unchained confronts issues of racial injustice by exposing the massive denial of it, which has assisted in the perpetuation of myths throughout the nation’s history. In many ways, Django Unchained is a film assisted by, and built around, façades: physical, individual, and societal.1 In
By Travers Nisbet 2nd Year Commerce
this sense, the façades that are built around the characters and spaces in the film serve as a self-rationalizing veil to masquerade the ideals or intentions that these physical and figurative structures uphold. The film exposes the constant tension between conflicting sides, dancing on thresholds: the tension between perceived reality and actual reality, between the past and the present, between the sacred and the profane, all of which are sources of trauma–for the characters in the film and the audience itself. Tarantino too dances on the fringes of filmmaking, taking a controversial topic and approaching it in an unconventional, hyperbolic form. In many ways, this is what allows him to convey a powerful message effectively, and, in doing so, comments on the structures of society. Most prominently, the film is fueled by a collision of myths and the forces that seek to uproot or deconstruct them. The characters and the spaces they inhabit – or fail to inhabit – dramatize this collision. The most prominent perpetuator of myths illustrated through the film is the white revisionist: the racially motivated collective that sought to conveniently re-write history so as to disparage the perspective of the marginalized other. Through using the space – and thus, implicitly the negative space that exists around it – Django Unchained illuminates the motivations and intentions of the characters who serve as emblems for the white revisionist model. In many ways, the tendency of the film to reverse conventions or misconstrue binary oppositions suggests a moral disorientation and a collective ignorance to the traumas of slavery; this tendency is rooted in the perpetuation of myths and, ultimately, a lingering societal trauma from the dark corners of the past. The plantation of Calvin Candie, also known as Candie Land, is a physical embodiment of the white revisionist model that Candie subscribes to and an agent of its preservation. Calvin Candie, the
antagonist of the film, is the flamboyant, yet deceptively brutal slave owner who controls Broomhilda, Django’s wife. In many respects, the majority of the film is a pilgrimage to Candie Land. Perceived from the perspective of the white revisionist, Candie Land embodies the “sacred,” as Mircea Eliade defines it; the “sacred space” is “significant” in that it embodies order and “possesses existential value” for he who inhabits it.2 For Monsieur Candie, the plantation is his city of order, the “Center of the World,” as he understands it.3 By its very nature, what exists beyond the gates of Candie Land is that of the profane: the unstructured, “formless expanse surrounding it.”4 The break in homogeneous space enclosing it, illustrated through the gates of Candie Land, “allows the world”– Candie’s white man’s world of revisionism – “to be constituted,” which establishes a standard of judgment for “future orientation.”5 Candie Land as a sacred space is defined by the negative space that surrounds it; this world’s significance is defined by what it intentionally leaves out. Outside of the gates, the external world is that of the formless or unconscious; it is not part of the ‘reality’ that Candie has constructed. The drawn-out procession to Candie Land, essentially half of the film, underscores the “amorphous” profanities that exist in the darkness beyond, such as setting the dogs on slaves to devour them.6 The façade of the ‘Big House,’ gleaming with white veneer and reinforced by uniform columns, serves as a physical manifestation of order, in opposition to the “amorphous” darkness that exists beyond the gates of Candie Land. (Stepping outside of the revisionist view, however, the white façade or the ‘white cake’ that the guests are served inside of the ‘Big House,’ suggests a form of whitening out of reality: it calls attention to the desire to revise the history of oppression to one of opulence, ‘success,’ and ‘progress.’) The ‘sacred,’ white
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man needs a formal, physical structure in order to eternalize the white man’s revisionism and uphold ‘order’ in a society threatened by the chaos that exists outside of it. Having one’s own world is critical to advancing the mythic agenda as it suggests an orientation for reality and existential purpose. If a slave is as an emblem of white revisionism – a physical manifestation of racial disparity – then Django, a former slave, embodies that of the profane, a threat to the reality or the existentialism of the sacred. As Eliade contends, “any attack from without threatens to turn [the sacred cosmos] into chaos.”7,8 Candie an “innocent victim,” ignorant to Django’s intentions, views this breach of threshold merely as an act of business.9 Stephen, on the other hand, at the sight of imminent threat begins to question – without greeting his master – the possibility of Django’s breach: the ‘profane’ entering the space misperceived as a sacred figure. The breach of a threshold alludes to the notion that Candie is under a veil of massive denial to the traumas that exist around him; Django, in this sense, could serve as the spark or trigger for a return to the origin of the traumas of slavery. He is the personification of the “unknown.” As Cathy Caruth affirms in Unclaimed Experience, when “the outside” – or that of the
Candie, a child-like character who views life as a spectacle, thirsts to live in the dream so as not to be conscious of the fact that his ‘sacred world’ of white revisionism could be threatened.
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profane – “has gone inside” – to the sacred space – “without any mediation,” trauma can repeated.10 The psyche of Calvin Candie functions as an emblematic sacred space for the revisionist figure. In understanding the complexities of the characters and their relation to space, it is important to view Candie and his enigmatic house slave,
Stephen, as a single entity. Thus, to understand the space of Candie’s psyche, it is critical to see the relationship that Stephen plays in forming the psychic space. Freud suggests the desire to dream is bound to the “desire of consciousness as such not to wake up.”11 Candie, a child-like character who views life as a spectacle, thirsts to live in the dream so as not to be conscious of the fact that his ‘sacred world’ of white revisionism could be threatened. (Ironically, as Schultz mentions to Candie at the dinner table, “business never sleeps;” making a profit and continuing to build his empire serves as Candie’s façade to conceal his unconsciousness. Financial success suspends him in a waking sleep.) In this sense, Stephen, who writes Candie’s checks and calls attention to important matters, embodies that of the conscious mind, relatively speaking. The denial that Stephen and Candie exhibit illustrates that both of them are in fact asleep to the true realities of slavery. In one form or another, Stephen serves as the ‘axis mundi’ for Candie, the “central pillar” that grounds and orients Candie. 12 The bisected psyche of the Candie/Stephen entity is most prominently illustrated in a section of the dinner scene, when Stephen warns Candie of Schultz and Django’s intentions for recovering the captive Broomhilda. The two sides of the entity – one of the conscious, the other of the unconscious – sit together in a library, a physical manifestation of the entity’s psychic space. As this shot underscores, Stephen is not a servant to Candie but an associate, a critical portion of what the entity embodies and a manipulative force in shaping its identity. Illustrated through a two-shot with interlaced overthe-shoulder shots, the two sit at equal levels with a fire burning between them, alluding to the “fire altar” that Eliade notes as evidence of a “communication with the gods,” 13 perhaps those of mythic revisionism. Stephen ‘awakens’ Candie, to an extent, from allowing business interests
to supersede the advancement of their ultimate cause: the conservation of the white mythic model. As Freud suggests, however, it is not the quantity of stimulus but the timing of the stimulus, “the fact that the threat is recognized as such by the mind one moment too late,” that can be disabling. 14 Thus, the real trauma for Candie and Stephen, is, perhaps, that their awareness or awakening to this threat and to their denial, apparently seems to be too late: “the outside has gone inside without any mediation.” 15 Up until this point, Candie was living in the unconscious – allowing his business interests to supersede his role as a revisionist – until Stephen calls attention to the presence of an unmediated spark that would threaten their blissful denial to the trauma: a freed slave, seen at a nearly equal level as those around him, seeking to disrupt the ‘order’ and values that the white man has built over centuries. Django is an emblem of the inability to deny the traumas of slavery, and Candie does not wish to wake up to this reality – and, perhaps, never does. Candie’s death further exemplifies the notion of the Candie/Stephen entity, grounded through an axis mundi. Candie’s death is a drawn out affair, a falling of a God in some respects. As he collapses, he swipes the globe that symbolically stands in his library as a reminder of the “cosmos” he has built. With his death comes the elimination of relativity; the world that he has constructed begins to be consumed by chaos. The axis mundi that has provided this world with a framework for its identity and purpose has lost its orientation. It is important to note, however, that this world does not collapse, but rather is temporarily disoriented or impaired. Time is distorted as the beholder of this space falls (as illustrated through the extreme slow-motion shot). Without a central axis, the world is left without a standard; without relativity, it begins to collapse. In the pursuing scene, after
Candie falls, the profane, which has been lurking in the shadows of Candie Land, invades the space: a full shootout unfolds.) In Candie Land, every act constitutes a ritualistic process driven by decadence and ornament, each as a materialization of white dominance. As Eliade describes, “the house is sanctified by a cosmological symbolism or ritual,” 16 which expresses a “religious nostalgia” for the purity and order as it was in the “beginning.” 17 In this regard, the sanctification could be viewed as nostalgia for a time before the trauma existed when white privilege was not threatened. The film’s form calls attention to the ritualistic nature of the scene by devoting ample time to the preparation of the table. The setting of the table before the dinner scene emphasizes the ritualistic nature of the dinner space: the house servants move methodically, each move choreographed and in accordance with the other. The candles are meticulously lit in order to indicate the sanctification of the sacred space for ritual. Ritual is crucial to the establishment of sacred space as “it is the universe that man constructs for himself by imitating the paradigmatic creation of the gods.” 18 The dining room is Candie Land’s chapel, with Calvin Candie himself as the preacher, and the white revisionist model as its Bible. On the altar behind him, a white, statue reminiscent of the Greek Olympic wrestling serves as his altar’s centerpiece, his divine cross. Inside this sacred space, wrestling is an act of beauty: the games of the ordered society expressing the strength and power that has fueled the white advancement and dominance for generations. The seemingly identical act of Mandingo Fighting, performed outside of this space by ‘savage’ slaves, is instead viewed as entertainment; it is in the sphere of the profane. As the deal to acquire one of Candie’s best Mandingo fighters represents, this form of fighting is simply a subsidiary to capitalist ideology: entertainment as busi-
ness. At a central point in the film–an axis mundi providing orientation for the rest of the film–Candie delivers an in-depth sermon on the inferiority of the black man, rooted, from his perspective, in the factual realities of science. Using the skull as a space for intellectual value, Candie preaches that based on the “science of phrenology,” the black man is biologically “submissive,” and thus, mentally incapable of challenging the white man’s revisionist model. Through this story of ‘Old Ben,’ Candie seeks to formulate and promulgate a pattern of myth being understood as biological fact. In doing so, the threshold of myth and fact becomes permeable, the hermeneutic agenda seeps into the realm of history, or what is understood as fact. 19 In this sense, the profanities that the revisionist model seeks to advance are veiled in a façade of the sacred, shrouded behind the whitewashed veneer of the ‘Big House.’ In the final episode of the film, Django returns to Candie Land, revisits an origin, so as to begin to re-write the myths of history and fulfill his act of revenge. As Mircea Eliade underscores “any destruction of a city is equivalent to a retrogression to chaos.” 20 As the Candie ‘family’ returns from Calvin’s funeral, Django, lurking in the dark corners of the house, begins an onslaught of the remaining white figures, which includes Stephen. Incapacitated after being shot in the knee, 21 Stephen screams that “you can’t destroy Candie Land; we’ve been here and will always be in Candie Land!” To Stephen, the structures, the external façade of Candie Land can perish just like Monsieur Candie himself, yet the internal values, the myths that they have perpetuated, will never cease to exist. Through this symbolic inferno – a holocaust seeking to blaze the myths and profanity that live within the space – Django, eagerly watching on the property’s border, hopes to eradicate the injustices that held him and his wife
captive. Nonetheless, as Eliade argues, the threshold of Candie Land that represents the boundary of the sacred and the profane is also the “paradoxical place where those worlds communicate, where passage from the profane to the sacred world becomes possible.” 22 In this regard, as Django stands on the property’s fringes, watching the structures of Candie Land collapse, he is enabling–or has the ability to enable–a dialogue between the profane and the sacred as well as between the past,
axis-mundi:
“In the habitation of the primitive peoples we find a central post that is assimilated to the axis mundi, ie. to the cosmic pillar or the world tree, which, as we saw, connect earth with heaven. In other words, cosmic symbolism is found in the very structure of habitation. This central pole or post has an important ritual role.” Mircea Eliade, The Sacred and the Profane: The Nature of Religion (1959)
present, and future. However, as Stephen argues, Candie Land will always survive, even if the space itself is destroyed. The remnants will continue to exist in society. Even if the “structures have vanished” – whether they be the physical, ‘sacred’ structures of Candie Land or the structural institution of slavery itself – “the values” attached to these structure “persist, in cheerful defiance of contrary evidence.” 23 According to Limerick, the “innocent victim” is the most powerful figure in advancing the misconstrued values laced in myth. The “innocent victim,” Calvin Candie, embodies the collective entity that will continue to advance the myths of white revisionism. The destruction of a space, thus, does not constitute the eradication of what the space embodies. In destroying one space considered to be sacred, Django fails to construct an alternative space: a new sacred
space that replaces the prior profanities. He simply leaves with his prize, dancing lightheartedly into the distance. In one form or another, instead of seizing the opportunity to be a pioneer for altering the conventions of the sacred and profane, he regresses to Candie’s immaturity, treating life as entertainment. In Susan Sontag’s words on “Camp,” Django leaves the film valuing “style at the expense of content.” 24 Ultimately, the film’s conclusion reflects a societal trauma, an inability to eradicate the temporal conflict: the myths of the past resisting advancement and disrupting the present. Issues of race will continually seek to invade the present, and society as a whole will continue to live in the unconscious present, in the dream-like world upheld by facades that give an illusory understanding of reality. Understanding Django Unchained through a binary perspective, such as the opposition of sacred and profane, assists in demystifying the complex motives that drive social injustice. As Eliade’s assessment of space reveals, the world is constructed on relativity: objects, characters, and spaces gain their shape in relationship to the other. This implies, however, that there must be a standard of judgment, an
origin, which assists in providing meaning to the seemingly ambiguous. Nonetheless, in doing so, we put ourselves at risk in understanding life through the reductionist squint: categorizing everything to what is, and, thus, what is not. By constructing a world forged through opposing spheres, we limit our perspective. While relativity and opposition help provide a framework for conceptual understanding, subscribing to this perspective excessively is a threat to the advancement of society. It offers a dangerous, yet enticing, view of the world in binary terms: defining what something is by examining what it is not, “all other space.”25 If we allow the boundaries, the thresholds of our society–our perceived ‘sacred’ and ‘profane’ spaces–to be too rigid, then we are unable to truly consider the meaning and understanding of reality. It limits our ability to deconstruct mythological theories. As Eliade rightfully contends, the threshold must be, paradoxically, the venue for communication between the sacred and the profane.26 An honest dialogue between what is in a space and what is not in the space is critical for constructing a reality, a world that avoids false assumptions and ultimately the perpetuation of myths that limit the capacity of culture.
The Dichotomy of Marriage as Portrayed in Hollywood Romances and Blue Valentine By Jacqueline Justice 3rd Year Media Studies; English
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riter-director Derek Cianfrance employs a sense of alarming realism uncharacteristic of the modern portrayal of romance in his 2010 film Blue Valentine. He brings up questions of what marriage has come to mean in this age, and what society now expects from a marriage. Refusing to make a bold moral statement either supporting or contradicting the norm of marriage, he rather presents a less-idealized portrayal of love, sex, and marriage, placing both spouses in equal roles of fault. His presentation allows the viewer to determine his or her own interpretation of modern romance and marriage, inviting the question of whether Hollywood’s representation of said concepts skews reality. The reality Cianfrance aims to portray is in harsh contrast to that of modern day Hollywood. Hollywood tends to focus on unmarried couples; as a research study of R-rated films of the 1980s discovered, sex between unmarried couples was depicted 32 times for every one time between married couples.1 However, the interactions between couples are not limited to sex;
Hollywood seems to eschew depictions of marriages altogether. Carnegie Mellon University Professor, David Shumway explains modern film trends, stating: “marriage is presented as difficult and likely to fail, yet happy marriage remains at the least the implicit goal of the characters depicted”.2 The concept of marriage is not shunned, but merely pushed into an idealistic corner that has no need to be displayed on film, since it presents little controversy. Viewers enjoy and thrive off of the tension between unmarried couples, and marriage is romanticized as an end goal after the couple has worked through any problems, which usually serve as the primary plot vehicles for the film. The kinds of relationship stories produced at any point in time, whether films, novels, or music, all have a tendency to reflect the relational norms of the given epoch. Film scholar Virginia Wright Wexman asserts that Hollywood films are “modeling appropriate courtship behaviors”.3 Although this statement is accurate in the sense that society takes many lesson taught by movies as guidance for life, this
system, by nature is flawed. Shumway explains, “The physical beauty and glamour of the stars reinforce the allure of the romance that their films typically portray… theatrical films are experienced apart from mundane reality, in this case literally apart in a special darkened space where both sight and sound are larger than life’.4 Cianfrance attempts to avoid this creation of a separate idealized sphere by allowing Blue Valentine to take place in a true-tolife environment and circumstance. The two main characters, Cindy and Dean, live in a realistic lower-middle class setting, meet in a non-cliche and over-romanticized way, and have major personality flaws. The characters are not portrayed as perfect or particularly beautiful or glamorous. In fact, both Cindy and Dean are both shown many times in an unfavorable light. Dean is featured smoking in nearly every scene where tension exists, placing him in a negative light by today’s standards. Although smoking has occurred almost consistently the same amount in movies as 50 years ago, typically only minor characters or those presented negatively are shown smoking.5 By allowing Dean to smoke throughout the movie, Cianfrance shows Dean’s struggles with addiction and creates him as an imperfect and flawed character. Furthermore Dean’s reliance on alcohol to get him through not only tough moments but also through the every day also presents him negatively. When Cindy questions his need to start drinking before work every morning, he replies, “No, I have a job that I can drink at 8 o’clock in the morning. What a luxury... you know?”.6 His dependency on alcohol displays not only a significant flaw, but also a divergence from the traditional Hollywood romance story. However, this departure from glamorized romance runs much deeper within the movie than just the flawed characters. The striking contrast between the clips of the couples meeting and dating, and the
clips of them in present day are evidence of this attempt to break with the tradition of idealization. Cianfrance intentionally created a sharp dissimilarity by filming the older scenes on film, as he explained, “The idea was about two people filling a frame, coming together as one, and when you’re rolling an 11-minute load of 16mm, you get the sense that the clock is ticking and you have to make something happen,” which worked to portray the giddy spontaneity of the couple falling in love.7 Conversely, he shot the present-day scenes on video enabling him to film scenes repeatedly until he conveyed the effect for which he was aiming. In the early scenes of the couple, Cianfrance focused on setting the actors up to act naturally and reflect authentic feelings, rather than forced and simulated ones. He encouraged improvisation rather than sticking to a script, which is shown in 1:09:10 when Dean tries to jump off of the Manhattan Bridge to coerce Cindy into telling him her secret. Cianfrance explains that he instructed Michelle Williams, the actress playing Cindy, to not tell her secret, no matter what Ryan Gosling, playing Dean, did, and instructed Ryan to do whatever he could to get the secret out of her. The scene contained real fear and distress, as Michelle did not expect Ryan to climb the fence, and because he had no kind of safety equipment on in the event that he fell.8 This allowed an element of genuine surprise and danger that combined makes for an enticing clip of the film that is both believable and unexpected. Furthermore, Cianfrance uses this technique to create a lighthearted and spontaneous expression of love, when Cindy and Dean are first meeting and getting to know each other. Gosling refers to the scenes when the pair first meets and wanders around the city saying, “Derek said, ‘I’m going to follow you around from sunup to sundown and watch you get to know each other.’ None of it was scripted,
it all happened originally”.9 In these moments, showcasing the process of Cindy and Dean falling in love, Cianfrance aims to capture the carefree spontaneity that reflects the indescribable notion of love itself. While the carefree improvisation encouraged a youthful portrayal of the young couple, the tactics Cianfrance uses to mold the actors into the tired, jaded, and brutally honest characters they portray in the latter half of their relationship necessitated a shift in direction strikingly different from the beginning scenes. Cianfrance had the couple live together for a month, after filming the early scenes, in the same house the fictional couple in the film inhabits. They were given a budget, estimated based on the salaries of both characters’ jobs and ended up having to live off of $200 for two weeks of groceries, including feeding their daughter in the movie, actress Faith Wladyka. Cianfrance aimed to have the couple really know each other and learn what it was like to become annoyed with one another, so that when they had to act frustrated with each other, they would have already experienced it. “By the time we started rolling cameras for the present they had a history. There’s nothing like having to do the dishes to erode a relationship,” Cianfrance shares.10 Although he trivializes the day-to-day life the actors faced while living together, Gosling shares the depth it created saying, “You can feel that we lived the life in that house. We weren’t pretending”.11 Williams explained the setup saying, “Our relationship sprung from finding the small behaviors that drive us crazy about each other”.12 Cianfrance’s vision of creating a real relationship between the actors gave the movie a huge sense of reality, particularly in the careful crafting of preexisting circumstances that allowed the actors to improvise emotions that they either had felt when living together, or knew they would feel if they were in the characters’’
circumstances. This distinction is the powerful force that separates this film from the typical Hollywood romance story. While much of the movie was unscripted and improvised, an equal amount was meticulously scripted and repeatedly filmed to perfection. For the most part, the earlier scenes of the couple falling in love are improvised, while the up to date scenes are scripted and painstakingly directed. The shower scene at 38:38 in the sex motel took two entire days to film. This occurs at a point in their relationship where Cindy and Dean feel both emotionally and physically distant and uninterested in one another, so Dean’s solution is reserving a room in this motel that is intended to spice up their sexual relationship. Cianfrance describes the process of filming the scene saying, “it was just kind of awkward and maybe a little cutesy and a little self conscious. But after being in that shower for two days it was not really fun anymore for them, and something else gave way”.13 Pushing the actors to the point of extreme discomfort and vulnerability set up a scene that displayed the misery that the characters are expressing in the film. However, this did not occur without taking a toll on the actors, as Williams explains, “Those are two days that I would like to forget. It meant finding the most unflattering parts of myself and exposing them. I had to will myself to go back to work on those days”.14 After living together for a month, Williams and Gosling had a deeper understanding for one another, so the intimate and awkward scenes were no longer just acting with strangers, but rather acting with someone they both knew well. This tension made the scenes more uncomfortable and difficult to bear for the actors, but added a heightened sense of feeling and uneasiness that perfectly depicted the emotion of the scene. In this aspect, it is apparent that Cianfrance, and the actors alike made difficult sacrifices for the authenticity of
the movie. Gosling sums up his sentiments saying, “At one point I said, ‘Can’t we just make a movie and call it “Valentine”? Do we really have to get into the messy stuff ?”.15 Without struggling through difficult scenes that created an authentic depiction of a failing marriage, the film would be yet another cliched Hollywood tale of a falsely romanticized relationship. There is a stark difference between the portrayals of sexual encounters in the early phases of the relationship and the end of the relationship.The earlier scenes represent the standard Hollywood representation of sex in an idealized romance film. At 1:05:48, the film shows Dean performing oral sex on Cindy in a romanticized fashion. The lighting is dim and their clothes remain on, so all physical imperfections are hidden. Furthermore, there are no awkward moments between the pair, as the whole sequence flows smoothly.16 Cindy shows signs of enjoyment and giggles throughout, making Dean begin laughing as well. This picturesque sequence represents the ideals of over-perfected romance blockbusters. Nonetheless, Cianfrance refuses to leave the viewer with this impression of sex, but instead includes lengthier scenes from the present-day which portray a more realistic, but also difficult to watch depiction of sex. In the shower scene that the cast explained as being difficult to film, Dean tries to perform oral sex on Cindy, but she harshly demands him to get up and continues to shower, ignoring him and his efforts to be romantic.17 Pairing these two representations of sex in one film, Cianfrance makes an incoherent hybrid of what sex looks like, and shows a foil to the idealized Hollywood version of it. This theme of foiling Hollywood’s unrealistic depictions of relationships occurs throughout the film and is done by including both scenes from the courting period and scenes from the marriage. Cianfrance’s need to show marriage as
flawed shows the bits of a relationship that Hollywood refuses to depict and the aspects of marriage that society overlooks. His commitment to creating authenticity and realism in his depiction of marriage is reflected throughout the film. His intentions for making the film were to help him understand his life and idea of romance and marriage, as he explains of his parents’ divorce when he was 20, “It was so confusing to me that I decided to confront it with a film and just started writing it”.18 Not only are Cianfrance’s parents divorced, but so are both Williams’ and Gosling’s, along with the two other co-writers of the film, so this issue of broken relationships held special importance to the writers and cast members alike. With this experience in mind, Cianfrance aimed to portray each character equally at fault since this is what he saw in his parents’ divorce. “With my own parents, there was no villain in their relationship, but there was a lot of pain. It’s hard when someone breaks up to not point blame at one or the other,” Cianfrance explained.19 In Blue Valentine, Cianfrance aimed to create each character as nonpartisan as possible, blaming neither for the failure of their marriage, as Gosling explains, “Derek tried very hard to make it even, not slanted one way or the other. I think however you feel about it says more about you than it does the character”.20 This set up allows the audience to determine whatever conclusion they want, and instead of speaking to each character’s flaws, it speaks to the flaws in the concept of marriage. The concept of marriage is not independent from its representation in films, as it has changed in ideology and purpose with every new generation, which is often accurately depicted in the literature or film of the time. The idea of monogamy did not become the common practice until the tenth century.21 Shumway explains the beginning of romance saying, “Romance emerged as a counterdiscourse repre-
“
senting at least a theoretical alternative to the repressive character of officially sanctioned marriages among the aristocracy”.22 However, in Capellanus’s 12th-century treatise, The Art of Courtly Love he dictated the love had no place between the husband and the wife.23 In the 17th century, the “companionate marriage” was valued as marriage “based mainly on temperamental compatibility with the aim of lasting companionship” that emphasized “friendship or affection rather than passion as its basis”.24 Romance was beginning to become a popular and enticing concept that was included in literature, but not one that was necessitated in marriage. The literature and films of the late 19th and 20th centuries unite romance and marriage in a more apparent way than the two concepts had ever been paired together before, as this concept became popular in society as well.25 As Shumway explains, “The new vision of romantic marriage engendered expectations that many marriages did not
Movies support the ideology that marriage should include romance - instead of representing marriage as sacrificial for the sake of the community, they show marriage geared towards one’s personal happiness.
”
fulfill, in part because romance offered no vision of how marriage might fulfill them”.26 This new concept of a marriage based upon romance ultimately values one’s own happiness over anything else, as the very idea of romance works only in fulfilling its beholder. Movies support the ideology that marriage should include romance - instead of representing marriage as sacrificial for the sake of the community, they show marriage geared towards one’s personal happiness. Shumway even explains several research studies that cite the “expectations engendered by romance” as the cause of failed marriages.27 This placement of value on oneself
paired with the lost necessity of marriage, once needed for economic reasons has caused a divorce crisis in the past century. Sociologist Francesca Cancian explains that even the early 19th century advocated the Victorian value of romance which means “the husband and wife were likely to share a more formal and wordless kind of love, based on duty, working together, mutual help, and sex.”28 Shifting from this ideology, the new idea of marriage, particularly in response to the fleetingness of its permanence evoked the discourse of intimacy, a new ideology defined by an emotional closeness based on verbal communication, rather than a relationship that assumes the role of formal and sexual encounters solely. The word intimacy has come to mean the classic connotation of romance, an unexplainable emotional closeness that may include, but isn’t confined to sexual relations, but is instead focused on the idea of love. The term “relationship” did not emerge until the 1960s, as prior to then, the existence of an intersexual friendship other than marriage was almost obsolete. Because of this transition to the existence of a relationship outside of marriage, film has followed the trend and as Shumway describes, “The new film genre ‘the relationship story,’ takes the non-marital relationship as its focus.”29 Hollywood focuses on this new relationship as the focus for their love stories, avoiding the representation of marriage altogether. Although Cianfrance shows the courtship scenes that Hollywood favors, he counters them with the realistic actualities of marriage that are rarely depicted. His inclusion of these actualities allows for the mundane and monotonous struggles of daily life to be exhibited and to be taxing on the couple’s marriage. By having the actors live together on a budget, Cianfrance forces them to deal with the trying moments that economic and day-to-day life problems put on marriages, from monetary struggles to determining who does
the dishes. This brings up the remnants of the pre-modern idea of marriage as solely supporting the family system from an economic standpoint. While the stresses of this idea still exist, new strains are put on marriage by necessitating romance as the determining factor in the formation of a marriage and the reason for holding it together. Cianfrance accurately depicts the struggles in both the romantic and economic realm, possibly realms that accentuate the severity of the other, furthering the crevices they form in the relationship. The failed romance seems to occur because of drastic differences between Dean and Cindy in their standards and goals for their lives. While Cindy aspires to go to medical school and works as a nurse, Dean is content working blue-collar work for his whole life. Dean’s explanation is seeing that his primary job is taking care of his family, as he explains, “Listen I didn’t wanna be somebody’s husband and I didn’t wanna be somebody’s dad. That wasn’t my goal in life. For some guys it is... Wasn’t mine. But somehow, I’ve found what I wanted. I didn’t know that and now it’s all I wanna do... I don’t want to do anything else, it’s what I want to do. I work so I can do that.”30 Furthermore, he sees their sexual relationship as a means to making a family as he says, “You wanna have another baby with me? You wanna make another baby with me? I wanna have another baby with you,” when he begins seducing her, emphasizing his idea of sex as means for procreation.31 But Cindy prioritizes her job, demonstrated at 1:16:33 when she leaves the sex motel to go into work, neglecting her sleeping husband. Ultimately, the contemporary notion of valuing oneself over any other concern is the decisive factor that causes the split in values and eventually the family.32 Dean prioritizes the family as that is where he derives his happiness, but Cindy’s prioritization of her career does not devalue her commitment to her family, but instead her
compatibility with Dean. Cianfrance uses the interactions between Cindy and Dean when they first meet to show the existence of love and the intense emotions it can encompass. However, he brings in the actualities of modern society by featuring the happenings and interactions of everyday life – like their dog, Megan being run over by a car, Cindy being called into work at 6am while on “vacation”, and being late and rushed in bringing their daughter Frankie to school. Furthermore, he shows the weight that the past holds on dictating each character’s life in the present. When Cindy inquires about relationships and what to do when feelings disappear to her grandma, her grandma replies, “I think the only way you can find out is to have the feeling. You’re a good person, Cindy, I think you have the right to say, ‘Yes I do trust…I trust myself.”33 While her grandmother is talking, clips of her parents fighting fill the screen, as Cindy’s dad yells at her mom and throws a fit because the dinner she made does not meet his standards. Seeing this kind of abusive relationship and the lack of love in her grandmother’s has set little precedent for her relationship. This is apparent when she tells the nurse at the abortion clinic that she was 13 when she first had sex and she has had approximately 25 sexual partners since then.34 Her immediate decision to keep the baby and stay with Dean reflects her need for protection, acceptance, and love - emotions that she sees her parents lacking. Additionally, Dean’s lack of parental roles explains his strong urge for a family and his contentment with working blue-collar jobs if it means he has time to spend with his family. Without the variable of everyday life, Cianfrance would have been unable to display the background and logistics that dictates both partners actions, allowing these seemingly mundane scenes to establish a strong understanding of the characters in the film.
The actualities of everyday life are what ultimately kill their marriage, not a hyperbolic Hollywood-ized dilemma like an affair or a marriage built on lies, as many Hollywood romantic films feature. Instead the disconnect between the couple in the scheme of career paths, how to parent their child, and what they foresaw as the rest of their life looking like are the factors that wear down the marriage. They turn to sex and alcohol to try to compensate, but instead of helping the spark of romance return, the alcohol makes them more candid and disappointed with each other. This is shown when Cindy tries to have sex with Dean to avoid discussing their problems, but when he senses her disinterest in it, he says, “Don’t give me this shit, this fuckin like you can have my body bullshit... I don’t want that shit... I want you... I’m not gonna do it like this. What, do you want me to rape you?.”35 Dean uses an impactful term - rape - to show the severity of her actions and the outcome they could create. This moment addresses Dean’s boundaries of respecting their marriage and his own concept of morality, while bringing up Cindy’s disregard for the sanctity of her body. Their relationship does not require only romance, and their failed attempts to create romance again through sexual acts instead exaggerates the extent of detachment they have towards each other. This dilemma is ultimately laid out verbally in the doctor’s office where Cindy works when Dean shows up and she yells at him, “I’m so out of love with you. I’ve got nothing left for
you, nothing, nothing. Nothing. There is nothing here for you. I don’t love you....”36 The immediate basis for their relationship was romance, and despite their attempts to recover their lost feelings, their economic and ideological differences intervene with the chance of a romance sparking. This dichotomy of marriage necessitating romance but also having crucial economic benefits and needs that cannot be ignored demonstrates the problems in modern society’s view of marriage. Cianfrance uses this film to showcase these issue, failing to offer a solution, but also revealing the issues with the Hollywood portrayal of marriage and the flawed conception of romance it depicts. The carefree, spontaneous scenes of the early love between Dean and Cindy are necessary in showcasing the drastic change from the first sparks of their relationship to the mundane marriage six years later. The earlier scenes are directed with little script and filmed on 16mm film to give the past a lighthearted and untroubled vibe, typical of Hollywood romance films. However, instead of an unrealistic plot twist or shocking moment in the film, the simple hardships of everyday life wear down on the couple to create the tension present in the end of their marriage, which Cianfrance carefully directs to create the impression of true discontent and misery. His contrast of these two times emphasizes the role Hollywood has played in idealizing marriage and the issues in placing romance as the decisive reason for marriage.
Celebrating Film Virginia Film Festival
Not only do film industry guests attend this
four-day fall festival, but world-renowned professors speak about the films as well. The VFF is a combination of cinematic experience and educational opportunity. Any student can intern or volunteer throughout the festival. Tickets are free for U.Va. students, giving them the rare chance to view the films and learn from the producers, directors, and teachers. Nina Lukow, VFF Fall 2014 Intern
French Film Festival From documentaries to heart-warming stories, students can attend screenings and hear from speakers during the course of this weekend-long spring festival. Last semester, students were able to view the Oscar-nominated film Monsieur Lazhar, and discuss themes such as immigration, geography, and Francophone culture. The festival hosts both students and Charlottesville community members interested in French film. Sarahbeth Vernon, FFF attendee
The classroom is not the only place to learn about the history and structure of film. Festivals and film series offer students and Charlottesville community members multiple arenas to ask questions and understand more about new and reflective grassroots, international, and student-produced visual art.
The Virginia Student Film Festival was founded by the Filmmakers Society at U.Va. and will celebrate its 20th anniversary next spring. The Competitive Shorts Program is the festival’s biggest event, but students can also get involved by attending Filmmakers Society meetings, submitting a short film, or attending the panel
Virginia Student Film Festival
discussions and workships at the festival.
Mary Davis, Filmmakers Society member
This year, the event showed three films that expressed the depth of LGBTQ filmmaking, including a documentary about a group of African American lesbians in New York, called Out in the Night. By telling stories of gender, sexual, and romantic diversities, the film series hopes to make a space for learning and reflecting at U.Va..
Kate Travis, 2014 Intern
Queer Film Series
a g n s e a v e a R m u e a v r i T t i t e p e R te arlot h C By e Cruz ar e ies; 4th Y can Stud ri Ame Studies ia Med r mino
M
ichael Corleone, of Francis Ford Coppola’s, The Godfather, is a figure traumatized by the loss of his ideal life. As a member of the Corleone family, one of the “five families” involved in New York’s mafia ring, and the son of Vito Corleone, the Don, or leader, of the family, Michael represents the struggle between legitimate and illegitimate means of achieving the American Dream. In his naiveté, Michael believes that he can escape the family business and separate himself from the
ge
y, famil e.” y m s ’ t m “Tha that’s not one , l y or e Ka ael C h c i -M
Corleones; an illusion that begins to rupture when Michael gets word of his father’s attempted assassination. The trauma caused by this rupture builds and metastasizes inside of Michael to ultimately present itself in the form of revenge. Michael’s trauma can, in part, be traced back to the loss of the life he had made and imagined for himself. This, according to Adam Phillips in his essay, “Just Rage,” is what can be called Michael’s ideal life: the one “in which everything works,”1 the one in which Michael is not involved in the mob, and the one in which his father is still alive. The film sets Michael up as a character on the outskirts of the family. He is not involved in the family business, he does not dress like them, and he dates a woman, Kay Adams, who is more of a WASP than a traditional Italian. Michael is a decorated war hero, as evidenced by the military uniform he wears at his sister’s wedding while the rest of his family dresses in tuxedos. Not only does his attire separate him from his family, but he sits outside with Kay while the rest of the Corleones work with Vito inside; drawing an obvious boundary between Michael and the his mafia ties. Furthermore, when Kay inquires about Michael’s family business, he is quick to tell
her, “That’s my family, Kay, that’s not me.” Following the wedding scenes, Michael and Kay are shown visiting movie theatres in Manhattan and going Christmas shopping. Both of these activities represent Michael as an average, law-abiding citizen who is not so different from most New Yorkers and American citizens. Taking all of this into account, it becomes obvious that Michael’s ideal life consists outside of the confines of the Corleone family business and within the bounds of normative American society. Phillips explains that a betrayal of the ideal life is what leads to revenge, but I want to add to his argument, using Cathy Caruth’s work, Unclaimed Experience, that there is a third component to Phillips explanation: trauma; a quiet wound that lies in between the betrayal and the action. It is a response to the loss and the motivation for each subsequent act of revenge. By first pinpointing the instances in which Michael suffers from trauma, it is clear that the trauma experienced by this character has resulted in revenge. Michael’s first site of trauma is the way in which he finds out that his father has been shot. He is walking down the street after leaving a movie with Kay, engaging in a light hearted and flirtatious dialogue, when Kay sees a newspaper headline describing Vito’s attempted assassination. Michael is forced to learn of the threat to his father’s life in a moment in which he least expects it. Caruth explains this aspect of trauma as something that has been “experienced too soon, too unexpectedly, to be fully known and is therefore not available to the consciousness until it imposes itself again.”2 It is the very aspect of not knowing that traumatizes Michael about this incident. He was, seemingly, the last to know and the news came to him out of nowhere and before he could prepare a reaction. Following this initial instance of trauma, Michael goes to the Corleone
home to spend time with his family and attempt to help. It is painfully obvious in this situation that he is, again, an outsider. He can do almost nothing in the way of helping his father. His brothers assign him to mundane tasks, such as standing by the phone, in order to give him a false sense of importance. Michael, frustrated by this treatment, decides to go visit his father at the hospital. There, he finds his unconscious father alone with no guards and susceptible to fatal attacks from the Corleone’s enemies. It is here that Michael jumps into action. He takes control of the situation, moves his father to a new, hidden room, and teaches Enzo, a baker, to stand guard at the hospital with him and to look as if they both have guns. Once the police see that Vito has guards by his side, they attempt to have Michael stand down in an interaction that results with Mark McCluskey, the police chief, punching Michael in the face and breaking his jaw. This is a critical moment not only in the film, but also in the story of Michael’s trauma. It is here, when his initial pain and confusion towards his father’s shooting, turns into full-blown trauma. Both Caruth and Phillips discuss a rupture to the shield against harmful stimuli that one has set up for oneself; a blow to the barrier that protects one’s ideal life. Caruth explains this shield: Unlike the body, however, the barrier of consciousness is a barrier of sensation and knowledge that protects the organism by placing stimulation within an ordered experience of time. What causes trauma, then, is a shock that appears to work very much like a bodily threat but is in fact a break in the mind’s experience of time.3 In this scene, Michael is the victim of a blunt, physical trauma that symbolically represents his psychological trauma. As mentioned before, Michael was a
member of the U.S. Army and he was a law-abiding citizen. However, here, Michael is faced with another man in uniform – the uniform of the country that Michael was charged with protecting – who punches Michael in the face. This results not only in a blow to his face, but to his ideal life as a man who is respected by, and does not get in scuffles with, the law. It is here where Michael’s true rupture takes place: in a moment of “fright” in which “the lack of preparedness to take in a stimulus that come too quickly”4 creates a wound that cannot be healed. This scene is prefaced by a humiliation felt by Michael. Leading up to Michael visiting the hospital, he is feeling humiliated at the Corleone home. He is unable to help the family due to his “good boy” status and is an outsider who had to find out about his own father’s near death experience through the newspaper. He is ignored, which, according to Phillips, is serious “cause for rage.”5 This scene suggests that Michael’s trauma is bound up with humiliation. Phillips explains that rage, and therefore revenge, are behaviors that betray one’s deepest hopes for their ideal life. “I am humiliated at that moment when I can no longer bear – that is, rationalize – the disparity between who I seem to be and who I want to be.”6 Michael had been leading his life under the impression that he was happy to separate himself from his family, and perhaps his father, but these instances have opened up a part of him that is humiliated by his lack of importance in these relationships. His rage and acts of revenge are due to the humiliation he has suffered by being thought of as an unimportant outsider to the Corleone business. However, before the blow administered to his face, Michael was unable to make meaning of both the trauma and the humiliation. According
Francis Ford Coppola
Director of The Godfather, 1972
“There had been a movie a year or so before The Godfather based on a novel called The Brotherhood, starring Kirk Douglas. It was a big studio production, sort of about the Mafia. It was not successful. When The Godfather proposition came out, a lot of people thought, ‘That won’t work.’ Hollywood is very quick to judge what can work and what can’t work. So, the idea didn’t really light a fire with anyone. The movie studio executives concluded, when Puzo’s book first came out, that they would make a movie very cheap and they would get a young guy who knew about the new cost-conscious techniques.” Marvin R. Shanken, cigar aficianado (2003)
to Phillips, “a wound is a pure gift of meaning,”7 and, as cited by Caruth, the word trauma is Greek for “wound.” This wound to Michael’s face then serves as the motivation for Michael’s future actions of revenge; it has given him purpose. Phillips explains, “The revenger is purpose incarnate…he knows both that something can be done and what to do. The average revenger, once he has been injured, knows what his life is for; he knows what interests him, for a wound is like…a vocation.”8 He goes
on to say that, once this purpose has been discovered, revenge has the power to turn “rupture into story.”9 The wound gives trauma a voice and is perhaps essential for its recognition. According to Caruth, “it is always the story of a wound that cries out, that addresses us in the attempt to tell us of a reality or truth that is not otherwise available.”10 The wound speaks for the trauma as it occurs at the point of rupture. For Michael, rupture and trauma occur in the same instant. Without this break in the narrative of Michael’s story, he may have continued to believe in the existence of his ideal life and have never been awakened to the trauma awaiting him inside the Corleone family business. This awakening prompts Michael to make sense of his trauma through revenge, which gives meaning to his broken, ideal life, and serves as a way to cope with the trauma of losing it. Before discussing Michael’s paths of revenge, it is important to note that the opening monologue of the film alludes to this concept. On the day of Connie Corleone’s wedding, an undertaker named Amerigo Bonasera comes to Vito and asks him to kill a group of boys that have maimed his daughter: When I went to the hospital her nose was broken, her jaw was shattered, held together by wire. She couldn’t even weep because of the pain, but I wept. Why did I weep? She was the light, the love of my life, beautiful girl, now she will never be beautiful again. I went to the police like a good American…the judge suspended the sentence…they went free that very day! I stood in the courtroom like a fool, and those two bastards, they smiled at me. And I said to my wife, for justice, we must go to Don Corleone. In the first three minutes of the film,
“
the viewers are primed to the idea that trauma will manifest in the form of revenge. Bonasera is deeply pained, humiliated, and traumatized by the loss of his daughter’s beauty and is struggling with “inarticulate theories of justice” which are “articulated, acted out, in revenge.”11 Vito denies Bonasera the death of these men, saying, “We’re not murderers, despite what this undertaker would think.” This assertion from Vito directly contrasts the way that Michael leads the family once he is made Don. It perhaps implies that it is not a precedent of murder that prompts Michael’s killing sprees, but it is truly an act spawned by his own trauma. Michael, armed with the gift of meaning that is his broken jaw, returns to the Corleones and voices his desire for revenge. Michael decides to kill McCluskey and Sollozzo at a restaurant meeting in a dramatic act of vengeance. For Michael, this killing is as close to justice as he will get for the attempted murder of his father, the blow administered to his face, and the loss of his ideal life. This scene is the final solidification of his trauma because if
In the first three minutes of the film, the viewers are primed to the idea that trauma will manifest itself in the form of revenge.
”
Michael goes through with these murders, there is no going back to his imagined life. The viewers find Michael in an Italian restaurant in the Bronx where his family members have planted a handgun in the bathroom. Michael is to sit at dinner with the two men, put them at ease, then ask to go to the bathroom. On his way back, he is to “come out firing.” This scene represents the solidification of Michael’s trauma, but also implies, through the gun found in the bathroom, that he still has time to escape the Corleone mafia and return to his previous life by flushing the gun away and washing his hands of the situation.
Instead, Michael goes to the bathroom, retrieves the gun, does not wash his hands, and heads back to the meeting. As he sits at the table, gun in pocket, his mind begins to slow down. The background sound of the train is amplified as if to drown out the surrounding stimulus. Time slows, which Caruth explains, in the language of trauma, as “a break in the mind’s experience of time.”12 Michael finally pulls the trigger, killing both McCluskey and Sollozzo, and gets up to leave the restaurant, but hesitates in dropping the gun, which he was instructed to do immediately upon firing. This is perhaps a symptom of his trauma. Trauma is often not “experienced in time” and “has not yet been fully known.”13 Michael’s hesitation to drop the gun very well may be evidence that he has not yet been fully able to comprehend the irreversible changes he has made to his life in such a small sliver of time. He has yet to accept that he has killed these men and therefore has trouble progressing to the next step. He is wounded by the contradiction of his knowing and not knowing: the revenge helping him to create meaning, yet the very trauma creating an inexplicable confusion. Michael’s three-tiered traumatic experience, beginning with the news of his father’s injury, pushed forward by the blow from McCluskey, and solidified with the murder of McCluskey and Sollozzo, can be seen as a type of awakening from Michael’s idyllic dream of life. In Caruth’s essay, she works to explain a Freudian dream had by a father about his dead son, and its subsequent awakening, to examine trauma: A father has been watching beside his child’s sickbed for days and nights on end. After the child had died, he went into the next room to lie down, but left the door open so
that he could see from his bedroom into the room in which his child’s body was laid out, with tall candles standing round it. An old man had been engaged to keep watch over it, and sat beside the body murmuring prayers. After a few hours’ sleep, the father had a dream that his child was standing beside his bed, caught him by the arm and whispered to him reproachfully: “Father, don’t you see I’m burning?”14 The father then wakes to see that the candles have knocked over onto the boy’s bed and have been burning his corpse. By waking up, the father, who in his dream inhabited a reality in which his son was still alive, is forced to return to the harsh world where his son is only a corpse. This dream theory relates to Michael and Vito. In a reversal of roles, Vito is a sleeping father who suffers no trauma and Michael is a son who suffers the trauma of the story’s father. For Michael and Vito, the victim of the trauma is the stark opposite to that of the story. It can be argued, then, that Michael’s ideal life, in which he rejects his identity as a Corleone, is something of a dream state. Much like the father, who “dreams rather than wake up…because he cannot face the knowledge of the child’s death while he is awake,”15 Michael creates an illusion that he is not a Corleone to save himself the trauma. The dream then works as wish fulfillment, a reality in which Michael is not the product of the environment, but the environment is a product of him. It is, however, the “burning” or injury of his father that knocks him out of his “dream.” His awakening to the reality that he is a Corleone comes when he fears the loss of his father. He cannot deny the fear and anguish he feels at the idea of losing him, much like the father in Freud’s story fears the loss of his
child, which knocks both out of their dreamlike illusions. When Michael pulls the trigger to kill Sollozzo and McCluskey, he is, once and for all, roused out of his sleep. He has irrevocably entered a reality in which his ideal life is dead, his father is sick, and he must flee the country and leave his American girlfriend, Kay. Michael’s trauma, then, can be placed in his awakening, in his very interpretation of the way his life will now be led. Caruth explains this “crisis of life” saying, Is the trauma the encounter with death, or the ongoing experience of having survived it? At the core of these stories, I would suggest, is thus a kind of double telling, the oscillation between a crisis of death and the correlative crisis of life: between the story of the unbearable nature of an event and the story of the unbearable nature of its survival.16 Looking at Michael’s trauma in this way, it is evident that his entire life, upon awakening to its new reality, is a crisis of how to make meaning of his survival. His life is suddenly far from where he anticipated, and therefore, must use these wounds, these “gifts of meanings,” as ways to move forward and combat the ambiguity of his very existence. It is easy to see, then, why Michael turns to such fantastic acts of revenge. Michael’s largest acts of revenge take place after his father’s death and once Michael is made Don. In an attempt for revenge against the other heads of the five families who had aimed to have Michael killed, Michael has each one of them assassinated during the baptism of his niece, where he is made Godfather. These acts of revenge present themselves in a way that is repetitive and
reminiscent of the trauma of Michael’s previous killings. As the murders are taking place, Michael is being washed of his sins, by a near-direct nod to the placement of the gun used to kill McCluskey and Sollozzo in the bathroom. Both killings have an aspect of cleansing to them, perhaps implying revenge that is justified in eliminating the contaminants; as a way to get rid of the filth and undesirable aspects of life by which Michael is surrounded. Additionally, the repetitive way in which the baptism murders are carried out serve as a testament to Michael’s trauma. Consciousness, once faced with the possibility of its death, can do nothing but repeat the destructive event over and over again. Indeed, these examples suggest that the shape of individual lives, the history of the traumatized individual, is nothing other than the determined repetition of the event of destruction.17 If Michael’s trauma was solidified through the murder of McCluskey and Sollozzo, then it makes sense that these events must repeat themselves in his life. The repetition of the revenge is key to assigning it meaning as a symptom of trauma and as a subconscious coping mechanism for Michael. “Repetition, in other words, is not simply the attempt to grasp that one has almost died but, more fundamentally and enigmatically, the very attempt to claim one’s own survival.”18 Michael was able to survive the death of his ideal life and the very repetition of that death helps to reassure him of his ultimate survival. He must repeat these actions in order to give his current life meaning and to assure himself that he truly is alive. Ultimately, Michael is a character inextricably bound with trauma. A man
once convinced his destiny was to lead a law-abiding life as an upstanding American citizen, Michael was forced to awaken from that dream and confront the reality of his identity as a Corleone. He is haunted by his trauma, “the way it was precisely not known in the first instant,” which has allowed it to “return to haunt [him] later on.”19 Michael’s behavior is evidence of a link between trauma and revenge. An often silent and
concealed reaction, trauma hid itself inside of Michael’s subconscious with its only sign of existence manifesting in his acts of revenge. Perhaps what is most traumatizing to Michael, then, is his own ignorance to the true desires of his mind, namely, his persistence in identifying himself apart from the Corleone family. Therefore, Michael’s ignorance of his own mind serves as his greatest source of trauma.
The Art of Building Bridges:
An Interview on Documentary Film Fourth Year O’Shea Woodhouse shares about the life he is headed toward and the legacy he is leaving behind.
3
Katelyn Saks: Can you give me a bit of background about your work in the documentary film class? O’Shea Woodhouse: I’m calling my documentary film “The Social Divide: Bridge Through Media.” During my second year at U.Va., I took a class called “The Wire” with Professor Bruce Williams, and that class inspired my interest in figuring out why the University of Virginia and the inner city of Charlottesville are so disconnected. We’re in the same space, and we’re within a two-minute walk from the inner city, yet most people who go to school here don’t even know that there is an inner city. That inspired my interest in making a documentary about that divide. I wanted to tell the University about that divide, but I also wanted to find a solution. You don’t just tell people the problem, you have to try to figure out a solution. For me, growing up in the inner city of Houston, Texas, one thing that kept me motivated and inspired, and helped me express myself, was artistic media—videography, photography. When I’m thinking about a solution for how to bridge the gap, I think that if you involve media, which helps us communicate with people that are similar to our age group, people that are in high school, you know, we can communicate with them, we can work on things together in a creative environment, and then that can help bridge the divide. Really, what I wanted to do was make a documentary on the inspiration behind an independent study I’m working on. KS: What is your vision for this independent study? OW: We’re going to call it “Workshop Media,” and it’s going to help at-risk students in Charlottesville high schools create their own projects—music,
photography, or videography. Instead of just being mentors that tutor, we’re going to be guides as the students create pieces for their portfolio that we will help them build. That’s going to be a way that we can actually interact with these at-risk students in the community to help bridge that divide. KS: What professor are you working with for this project? OW: Bruce [Williams]. I kept up with Bruce every year after “The Wire” class, and started doing an independent study in which we discussed, in detail, what this program would look like. It actually didn’t start with this—it took time to figure out what we really wanted to do. Since it’s my fourth year now, and I actually won’t be able to see this program come into complete form, it was more a question of what can I do to help inspire the people that are going to continue this; what can I do to build the foundation of what it is that we want to happen. I took an intermediate documentary production class, and it was the perfect opportunity for me to make a film that mattered to me, and that actually mattered to the community. With this film, I wanted to dig into that divide [between the University and the inner city.] Then I wanted to answer the question of why I am the person to help solve this social divide. KS: Why are you that person? OW: It’s interesting because I grew up in Charlottesville as well as Houston and I have family here. I’m just as much a part of that inner city. My little brother who was born and raised here. So I am the right person to communicate this because I have my feet on both sides of the fence. I’m at the University. I came form the inner city. I was raised partially
in the inner city. The film has all these elements, and we’re trying to make it come together. KS: What step are you on in the production process of your documentary? OW: Right now I have a rough cut of the film edit with all of the substance of the divide. I go into detail with a couple of interviews, some with people of the inner city, some with Bruce, some with students, some with myself. I’m the narrator. The next step is to show the bright side—what is the bridge through media. For that part of the edit, I want to show myself in the studio making music, people making videos, and people creating images. It’s a two-part project, and the documentary is split into the divide and bridging that divide. The beginning has a feel of the problem—it has a different tone to it. The second half is a lot brighter and has a lot more color. It’s been very time-consuming to get all the footage, but I love to create visuals, and I love to express myself through media. It feels more like an opportunity than an obligation. It’s something that I can put into my own portfolio, something that I can leave with the community that I care about, and it makes the institution a better place. KS: You’re really creating a great legacy to leave behind. Do you have any artists that have inspired you along the way? OW: I can tell you right away two people who have inspired me: someone who always inspires me and someone who has inspired me recently. Although people have a lot of negative things to say about Kanye West as a person, I believe he has a great mind, and
whether you agree with him or not, I feel like his ability to rap, produce music, create visuals through video, design clothes—he has his own fashion line and creates his own sneakers—I feel like he’s a Renaissance man. I’m growing in all these different things, and I want to be a Renaissance man. I want to have my own fashion line and create my own sneakers, and I want to have my own album on iTunes.
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It feels more like an opportunity than an obligation. It’s something that I can put into my own portfolio, something I can leave with the community that I care about, and it makes the instituion a better place.
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The second person that inspires me is Gordon Parks, one of the first African American photographers to really go mainstream. When he worked with LIFE magazine, it was unheard of because there weren’t many African American photographers that had power at the time. He was a Renaissance man as well because he didn’t just do photography, he was a director—he shot the movie Shaft, which is a really funny movie. He also composed music, and was a writer. I really want to be like those people that are masters of many things rather than a master of one because that’s part of culture—you have to influence from different angles.
KS: Have you ever tried your hand in writing? OW: I’m definitely a writer—I think that’s where it all started; just being in school and enjoying the papers I work on. And I’m a musician. I write my own songs and produce beats. Any song that I’m rapping in, I wrote, and, though I haven’t written for other people, I’d love to. KS: Are there any other classes in the Media Studies Department that have really inspired you? OW: “Digital Media and Publishing” with Jane Friedman helped me to create my own website. I appreciate classes that take me outside the regular class period—classes that actually mean something. Believe it or not, a lot of good classes don’t do that, but this class meant a lot to me, and I’m actually using a lot of the things I learned about WordPress and creating a portfolio. I’m in a class called “Breaking Bad” this semester with Professor [William]
Little. He’s so passionate about what he teaches, and that means a lot to me. I haven’t met anybody that loves what he’s talking about more than him, so that’s been an inspiring class for my fourth year. “Marketing and Promotions” has also had a big impact on me. If anybody has the opportunity to apply for that course, I would tell him to do it because it is the most impactful and beautiful class I’ve taken at the University. It’s one of those classes where you learn so much about yourself, and you learn what it means to be a business professional and how to mix that with the creative side. KS: What does your future look like right now? OW: My future is going to be amazing. I picture being self-employed. There’s nothing wrong with someone who wants to rise up the ranks in a company, but that’s not my future. I feel like my future is through becoming someone who can live out every one of their dreams and work with other people that are like-minded, make a lot of money,
and create a lot of art to enhance the culture. I just love the art world and I love how you can express yourself. I like to influence people that will influence people that will influence people. I love the hip-hop culture and everything that comes out of it. I want to shoot videos, I want to make music, I want to do photography, I want to do fashion. In the near future, I want to work somewhere where I can learn. I don’t want to just clock-in and clock-out. I want to learn as much as I can so I can take everything that I’m learning and implement it within my own business. KS: And where do you see this happening? OW: I want to go back to Houston. The thing with Houston is that it’s a city with a lot of culture. It’s big, but it’s not New York or Los Angeles, and I feel like if there’s a place where you can make your name and stand out, it’s a place that isn’t already huge on the map. I’m not closing any doors—whatever happens, however it comes to me, wherever I can get what I need to get I’ll do it, but I would love to be in Houston.
KS: Have you done any internships that have helped you in these fields? OW: I’m a busy person…so I’m interning with Mojo, a professional internet marketing company. It’s good experience with editing videos and doing basic marketing tasks. I’m also interning with Pando Creative, a video company owned by a young couple. They’re about 23 and they make a lot of money and beautiful work. They’re living their dream right now and it’s inspiring. I had a summer internship in Houston called Workshop Houston which helped to inspire workshop media, as well. We taught high school and middle school kids how to produce music and do fashion design. Not only did we teach the kids how to do that, but I learned too. Not only fashion, but I learned how to make my own beats. I’m still learning, but I’m getting pretty good. To me it’s about the culture of hip-hop— sampling and making something new again. I hear something I like, and I use it, I add to it, I reshape it. It’s like play-dough. Playdough is already play-dough, but you make the shape. I want to be an artist who creates.
Walter White and the Demise of the American Dream By Zack Bartee 4th Year Commerce; Economics
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“I dreamt I owned an antique bicycle repair shop. In Ireland. Weird.” –Walter White1
W
hile Walter White dismisses his dream as “weird” in the episode “Down,” the quote provides an interesting look into Walter’s psyche, whether conscious or subconscious. Walter is a man whose life has not lived up to his own expectations—a brilliant chemist who formerly worked at a prestigious Albuquerque laboratory and cofounded what eventually became a three billion dollar company, only to take a meager buyout before the company went public, we meet Walter when he is a disillusioned high school chemistry teacher working a second job as an unskilled laborer at a car wash to make ends meet for his working class family. Upon collapsing at the car wash and finding out he has lung cancer, Walter travels down a path that leads him to cook crystal meth with one of his former disinterested chemistry students, Jesse Pinkman, under the conviction—and possibly self-delusion—that he is doing so to provide a secure future for his family after he succumbs to the cancer. His public life appears unremarkable in virtually every way—notwithstanding his secret life as a meth cook—and I will make the argument that Walter’s dream is his own mind attributing his mediocre lot in life to the destruction of the American middle class, desiring instead
to return to a pre-industrial age where he could be recognized for intellect and leave a lasting legacy. When first examining Walter’s dream, I focus on the fact that he owned the hypothetical antique bicycle repair shop. The tired cliché of the American Dream holds that any man or woman can achieve success in life with hard work and some form of intellect or talent, regardless of the circumstances into which they are born. America held dear “the ground of hope… Knowing that, with a small turn of fortune’s wheel, they way exchange places, the master sees his former self in the servant, and the servant sees his future in the master.”2 Pre-modern American culture was one “in which the vagaries of hard work are celebrated as indicators of social worth”3 and for quite some time, this idea of American Dream held true. Many blue-collar workers were able to earn a middle-class living and provide for their families by performing relatively unskilled labor. However, as industrial-
American Dream: “[The American Dream] has always been a global dream...To be really American has always meant to see something beyond America.” Andrew Delbanco, Real American Dream: A Meditation on Hope (1998)
ization swept the United States and work processes became increasingly standardized or even mechanized,4 the value of the services performed by these laborers substantially fell and a bug infected the American Dream: social mobility had become a myth. Roland Jarvis, a meatpacker at Iowa Ham in Oelwein, Iowa, earned 18 dollars an hour with full union membership and benefits—compensation that afforded Jarvis, a high school dropout, a rather comfortable middle-class living.5 However, as the wheels of modernization continued
to churn, the company was purchased by Gillette, which promptly dismantled the union, eliminated benefits, and trimmed labor costs from 18 dollars to 6.20 dollars an hour.6 Jarvis, like many blue-collar workers, quickly fell out of the middle class as modern corporations, favoring speed and thinness, sought to “cut out the fat” (excess costs) for greater efficiency and profits.7 This story of modernization is the same bug that affects Walter White. His job as a public high school teacher has been largely standardized by textbooks and government benchmarks, resulting in a genius chemist teaching disinterested teenagers for a meager wage. Furthermore, Walter’s second job at the carwash is a portrait of standardization. Whereas cars were once washed by hand with care, they are now washed largely by machine, with Walter performing menial labor processes that could also likely be performed by machine as well. These jobs might have been enough for Walter to live comfortably in the middle class before modernization, but standardization has relegated Walter to eke out a living in the working class. In modern America, blue-collar, labor-intensive work has been eschewed for technology, homogenization, and the “scientific management” practices of industry.8 The American Dream of the unskilled laborer working their way out of the working class to success no longer holds true. Frederick Winslow Taylor, a pioneer of the movement to scientific management, “leaves no doubt about his disdain for workers.” On blue-collar pigiron handlers, Taylor says, “‘This work is so crude and elementary in its nature that the writer firmly believes that it would be possible to train an intelligent gorilla so as to become a more efficient pig-iron handler than any man can be.”9 Taking the place formerly occupied by blue-collar hard work in the myth of the American Dream, managers and particu-
larly entrepreneurs—the owners of the means of productions—are celebrated in modern American culture for their ability to achieve efficiency and success. This is where Walter White “owning” the antique bicycle repair shop in his dream becomes significant. Walter has little control over his legacy as it stands if he were to die. We frequently see Walter’s desire to leave some sort of greater legacy reflective of his intellect and talents, as well as his desire for a greater social standing, exemplified in his ruthless pursuit of dominance in the meth business. Walter eventually refuses to work for any boss other than himself, and memorably tells Jesse Pinkman that he is not truly in the meth or money business, but rather “the empire business.”10 Thus, Walter’s dream in “Down,” whether he realizes it or not, reflects his desire to break free from the bonds his unexceptional life and truly “own” something that will afford him some form of money, power—even if only over his own life—and legacy. Another important facet contributing to the significance of Walter owning the shop is that he once owned a third of Gray Matter Technologies with Gretchen and Elliott Schwartz. Walter later tells Jesse that he accepted a buyout of five thousand dollars for his third of the company, a company that is worth over two billion dollars throughout the series.11 Walter’s working class, socioeconomic standing is never more apparent than when he and Skyler attend Elliott’s birthday at the Schwartzs’ mansion, an event that reminds Walter of what he could have had if he had maintained ownership of Gray Matter.12 Walter also sees a framed copy of Scientific American with Elliott on the cover while at the party, resulting in a coughing fit brought on by both a pair of bugs: his cancer, as well as his realization that while Elliott’s elite socioeconomic status and scientific legacy has effectively been immortalized,
Walter owns virtually nothing. Lacking ownership of his old research—which he believes made Gretchen and Elliott rich— or any other valuable inputs to production, Walter’s prospects of climbing the socioeconomic ladder in modern America appear near possible. Walter may work hard at his two (legal) jobs, but hard work alone no longer determines success in modern America—ownership does. While ownership is certainly an important part of Walter’s dream, the type of shop that he owns is also highly significant in its resistance to industrialization and the modern American culture that values speed and efficiency. First, a bicycle is a mode of transportation that precedes motorized forms of transportation and is also not suitable for mass transportation, in contrast to later technological developments of industrialization. According to Mark C. Taylor, “with standardization, transportation as well as everything else speeds up.”13 A bicycle travels significantly slower than an automobile or locomotive, serving as a symbol of Walter’s desire to “break bad” against the speed and efficiency valued in modern America. Bicycles, while machines, still require a considerable deal of human energy to operate, in contrast to motorized forms of transportation where mechanical engines are substituted for manpower. Again, we can view Walter’s dream as a rejection of the bug of industrialization and modes of transportation that marginalize the need for considerable human effort. Walter clings to the idea of doing something unique—something he can do better than an industrial machine or lowly factory worker could. Thus it is significant that Walter wants to own a shop where he repairs machines that enable faster transportation by augmenting man’s own physical efforts, rather than replacing those efforts entirely with engines. That Walter White desires to repair antique bicycles is perhaps the most telling
aspect of the shop he owns in his dream. Industry does not typically repair goods, and industry certainly cannot produce antiques, a word that suggests a high value due to its status as a collectible object of a considerable age. Instead American industry rapidly mass-produces new items for consumption. Antiques are valuable in a sense because they are exclusive—limited in quantity and no longer produced. In this context, Walter’s dream to repair antique bicycles once again serves as a revolt against the modern American culture that emphasizes speed and efficiency in production. There is no “fast” or “efficient” way to produce an antique. Walter craves recognition of his individual talents and intellect, and repairing antique bicycles affords him the perfect avenue. His dream is his expression of his desire to do something that cannot be boiled down to a simple process and standardized, but requires knowledge and technical expertise. Walter’s job at as a teacher and car wash employee do not fulfill this desire. Even cooking meth arguably does not fulfill this desire to an extent because I believe Walter realizes he is still following a basic chemical formula, one which Jesse and even Gale Boetticher are eventually able to imitate very closely. However, Walter is a perfectionist in terms of the quality of his meth, first preventing Jesse from adding his “signature” ingredient, chili powder, to their meth in order to ensure its purity.14 Later, in the infamous “Say My Name” scene, Walter derides Declan for cooking a meth that is only 70 percent pure compared to his own 99.1 percent-pure meth.15 When Declan replies, “So?” we see a manifestation of modern American culture where “efficiency [is] measured less by ‘quality’ or ‘competency’ than by the speed with which an acceptable job was accomplished.”16 This rejection of quality in favor of a faster, merely acceptable job bugs Walter, who measures efficiency by purity of his
meth as well as the yield.17 His dream can then be interpreted as a reflection of his commitment to quality and competency, as antique bicycle owners needing repairs would not bring them to Walter for how quickly he could restore a bicycle, but for the care and competency with which he handled the necessary restorations. Finally, antiques often hold worth not only because of their exclusivity, but because there are certain memories associated with the object. Owning an antique is an incredibly personal experience compared to purchasing a brand new, mass-produced bicycle off a store shelf. Frederick Winslow Taylor advocates “substituting the impersonal for the personal… [giving] priority to the system over individual.”18 In regards to Walter’s dream, the antique quality of the bicycles he repairs illustrates his subconscious desire to break bad against modern American culture and replace the impersonality of new, mass-produced for consumption bicycles in favor of a more individual, personal experience of working with antique bicycles. By doing so, Walter could fulfill his desire to be recognized for his unique intellect and perhaps climb out of the working class in favor of a comfortable living in the seemingly mythological middle class. Walter’s dream occurring in Ireland is significant in both historical and social contexts. Mark C. Taylor asserts that movable type and the printing press enabled the spread of literacy and numeracy, which in turn enabled the rapid industrialization of the Western world and the development of modern capitalism.”19 Yet as the Catholic Church attempted to limit the spread of the Reformation, “Protestantism and literacy were so closely associated that the Catholic Church felt that to contain Protestantism, it had to restrict literacy.”20 Ireland, a predominantly Catholic nation, can then be viewed symbolically in the context of Walter’s dream as a place that
is resistant to the spread of literacy, and consequently industrialism and capitalism. Walter’s desire to flee to Ireland in his dream is again an expression of his desire to leave the modern American culture resultant from industrialization and the resultant principles of scientific management. But Ireland is also an important setting due to Walter’s social existence in America. As previously stated, Walter’s low socioeconomic standing is never more apparent than his and Skyler’s experience at the Schwartzs’ mansion, where both their dress and choice of present betray their social alienation from the other party guests.21 This juxtaposition of social standings, while not stated explicitly by other partygoers, is highly reminiscent of the social exclusion faced by Irish immigrants both before and during the American Industrial Revolution. The Irish “left a rural lifestyle in a nation lacking modern industry” due to rampant famine.22 Upon coming to America, many first-generation Irish immigrants took low-paying industrial jobs and were thus marginalized by other socioeconomic groups. The history of Irish immigrants draws almost uncanny parallels to the life of Walter White in modern America, who must take a second job as a low-wage blue-collar worker to support his family and is largely ostracized or ignored by the Albuquerque elite. Thus, even though Walter claims his dream is “weird,” it is not entirely surprising that he dreams of owning an antique bicycle repair shop, or that the shop is located in Ireland. Walter’s dream can be viewed as a commentary on the experience of a working class citizen in modern America, where a bug has infected the American Dream, turning hope into a resignation to melancholy and despair. However, that Walter ends his quote with the single word, “weird,” may also be telling. If we suppose Walter is aware of the meaning I have proposed of his dream
at a conscious or subconscious level, then terming the dream “weird” could suggest that Walter has either resigned himself to the reality that the American Dream has become merely a myth of social mobility, or, more likely, that he now recognizes the system he must work within to achieve a greater socioeconomic standing. Walter recounts his dream to Skyler after he manages to escape his desert captivity at the hands of Tuco, a low-level cartel member, and return home. In the next episode, Walter counts the money he has made from cooking after Skyler tells Walt his three-day stay in the hospital will cost them 13 thousand dollars, and comes to the realization that even after all of the cooking he’s done, he has barely made any money.23 Walter claiming his dream was “weird” may then be considered as an acknowledgment that he will never make enough money to achieve a higher socioeconomic standing and leave a legacy reflecting his genius if he continues to cook in his RV and sell to smaller-scale Albuquerque dealers such as Krazy-8 and Tuco. Walter White, like Henry Ford, realized that in modern America, “economies of scale made it necessary to extend control beyond the factory floor.”24 Though he may desire a return to the slower, fatter pre-industrial times, Walter knows that the modern industrialized world necessitates mass production and distribution capabilities in order to live above the working class, foreshadowing Saul Goodman tracking down Walter and arranging his partnership with Gus Fring, a well-respected Albuquerque businessman with deep roots in the criminal underworld.25 In true Breaking Bad fashion, Walter’s dream is then an assertion of his disdain for his own experience in modern American culture, as well as his reluctant acceptance that he will have to adopt this culture in order to achieve the money, power, and legacy he so desperately desires.
Dancing on Thresholds: Boundaries, Space, and Trauma in Django Unchained
1 As Tarantino notes in his interview with Henry Louis Gates Jr., the construction of an individual façade is clearly evident with Schultz’s character throughout the film. In order to pursue his conquest, he had to erect a façade “in dealing with this inhuman depravity that he’s witnessing,” which is challenged towards the end of the film. 2 Mircea Eliade, The Sacred and the Profane: The Nature of Religion (New York, NY: Harcourt Brace, 1959), 20-22. 3 Ibid., 37. 4 Ibid., 20. 5 Ibid., 20. 6 Ibid., 49. It is interesting to note that the continual flashbacks throughout the film to the dog scene in some respect illustrate a ‘formlessness’ of the medium of film itself; the flashbacks serve as the chaos that clutters and complicates the temporal order of the narrative of film. In a sense, they provoke the audience to slip into a “formless state of fluidity.” 7 Ibid., 48. Schultz claims that the name “Broomhilda,”–Django’s enslaved wife–comes from the German legend of a fire-breathing dragon guarding the captive victim (Broomhilda) in a circle of hellfire. An attack on the sacred world, is “equivalent to an act of revenge by mythical dragon” and the attempt to annihilate the sacred space or “retrogression to chaos.” 8 Ibid., 47. 9 Patricia N. Limerick, The Legacy of Conquest: The Unbroken Past of the American West (New York, NY: Norton, 1987). 10 Cathy Caruth, Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative, and History (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996) 59. 11 Ibid., 97. 12 Eliade, The Sacred and the Profane, 53. 13 Ibid., 30. 14 Caruth, Unclaimed Experience, 62. 15 Ibid., 59. 16 Eliade, The Sacred and the Profane, 56. 17 Ibid., 65. 18 Ibid., 56-57. 19 Limerick, The Legacy of Conquest, 35. There is an inherent irony in the use of the word ‘history’ here. As Limerick notes in The
Legacy of Conquest, history belonged to “the keepers of written records,” as opposed to anthropology, which was affiliated with “teller of tales.” The divergence of these two represented the difference between those that were literate and those that were not. For the white Americans in the West, “humans live[d] in a world in which mental reality [did] not submit to narrow tests of accuracy.” The ‘Old Ben’ story is an example of this form of ‘tale-telling’ perceived as history. 20 Ibid., 48. 21 Stephen’s appearance of being disabled throughout the film is another façade, another veil which Django seeks to dismantle. 22 Ibid., 25. 23 Limerick, The Legacy of Conquest, 35. 24 Susan Sontag, “Notes on ‘Camp’” in The Best American Essays of the Century by Joyce Oates and Robert Atwan (Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin, 200) 290. 25 Eliade, The Sacred and the Profane, 20. 26 Film, among other mediums, serves as a powerful venue for allowing a dialogue between opposing forces, such as the past and the present. Paradoxically, as the Western genre shows, they also can be instruments to further reinforce these thresholds: limiting a dialogue between oppositions while perpetuating myths.
The Dichotomy of Marraige as Portrayed in Hollywood Romances and Blue Valentine
Skip Dine Young. “The Search For Meaning - Psychological Interpretations in the Movies.” In Psychology at the Movies, 35-57. 1st ed. Chichester, West Sussex: Wiley-Blackwell, 2012. 3 David R. Shumway. “Modern Love Romance, Intimacy, and the Marriage Crisis.” pp.16-42 4 Ibid., 10 5 Young, 24 6 Blue Valentine. Distributed by Anchor Bay Entertainment, 2011. Film. 7 Filmmaker, Staff. “The Way We Were: Derek Cianfrance’s “Blue Valentine”” Filmmaker Magazine, February 24, 2011. 8 Filmmaker, Staff 9 Jenelle Riley. “Scenes From A Marriage.” Film & Television Literature Index 51, no. 49 (2010). 10 Filmmaker, Staff 11 Sara Vilkomerson. “Michelle and Ryan’s 1
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Blue Valentine.” Entertainment Weekly, November 19, 2010. 12 Rosamund Witcher. “Michelle Williams: Talking Heartache with the Star of Blue Valentine.” Empire, February 1, 2011. 13 Staff, Filmmaker 14 Witcher 15 Riley 16 Blue Valentine 17 Ibid., 40:19 18 Staff, Filmmaker 19 Ibid. 20 Riley 21 Shumway, 13 22 Ibid., 13 23 Ibid., 14 24 Ibid., 17 25 Ibid., 20 26 Ibid., 22 27 Ibid., 23 28 Ibid., 24 29 Ibid., 26 30 Blue Valentine, 56:17 31 Ibid., 56:23 32 Ibid. 33 Ibid., 29:24 34 Ibid., 1:11:22 35 Ibid., 1:02:00 36 Ibid., 1:28:01
Trauma as a Repetitive Revenge
Adam Philips. “Just Rage.” The Beast in the Nursery (1999): 121 2 Cathy Caruth. Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative, and History. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1996. Print: 4. 3 Ibid., 61. 4 Ibid., 62. 5 Philips, Just Rage, 128. 6 Ibid., 122. 7 Ibid., 126 8 Ibid., 126 9 Ibid., 126 10 Caruth, Unclaimed Experience, 4 11 Philips, Just Rage, 126 12 Caruth, Unclaimed Experience, 61 13 Ibid., 62 14 Ibid., 93 15 Ibid., 95 1
Ibid., 7 Ibid., 63 18 Ibid., 64 19 Ibid., 4 16 17
Walter White and the Demise of the American Dream “Down.” Breaking Bad. AMC. New York, NY: March 28, 2009. 2 Delbanco, Andrew. “Nation.” In The Real American Dream: A Meditation on Hope, 61. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999. 3 Reding, Nick. “The Most American Drug.” In Methland: The Death and Life of an American Small Town, 54. New York, NY: Bloomsbury, 2009. 4 Taylor, Mark C. “Time Counts.” In Speed Limits: Where Time Went and Why We Have So Little Left, 65. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2014. 5 Reding. Methland, 49. 6 Ibid., 51. 7 Taylor. Speed Limits, 86. 8 Ibid., 83. 9 Ibid., 74. 10 “Buyout.” Breaking Bad. AMC. New York, NY: August 19, 2012. 11 Ibid. 12 “Gray Matter.” Breaking Bad. AMC. New York, NY: February 24, 2008. 13 Taylor. Speed Limits, 70. 14 “Pilot.” Breaking Bad. AMC. New York, NY: January 20, 2008. 15 “Say My Name.” Breaking Bad. AMC. New York, NY: August 26, 2012. 16 Taylor. Speed Limits, 71. 17 “Say My Name.” 18 Taylor. Speed Limits, 74. 19 Ibid., 58. 20 Ibid., 61. 21 “Gray Matter.” 22 “Irish Immigration.” Library of Congress. Accessed February 11, 2015. www.loc.gov. 23 “Breakage.” Breaking Bad. AMC. New York, NY: April 5, 2009. 24 Taylor. Speed Limits, 78. 25 “Mandala.” Breaking Bad. AMC. New York, NY: May 17, 2009.
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