Shakespeare and Generation Y.

The young members of Generation Y are certainly the most cynical, world-weary and hard-bitten upcoming generation society has ever known. Having come of age during an era of media-related celebrity lawsuits, increased numbers of nuclear family break-ups, enormous humanitarian disasters and most of all, unspeakable acts of terror, they crave to be challenged but largely refuse to give the time of day to “the classics” – like every preceding generation since the 1950s, the majority of them look contemptuously at anything old that may be deemed archaic or even conservative. With the Shakespearean universe, scholars and teachers of Shakespeare’s works in recent years have increasingly turned to modern filmic renderings of the Bard’s work in order to get at least some members of Generation Y interested and even excited about Shakespeare’s work, to hopefully make them see the eternal thematic resonance in his plays that lies underneath the old-fashioned dialogue.

In this essay I shall analyze three of the more popular (albeit loose) modern cinematic adaptations of three of Shakespeare’s most important works: My Own Private Idaho (based on Henry IV, Part I), 10 Things I Hate About You (based on The Taming of the Shrew) and The Lion King (inspired by Hamlet). All three of these films are 1990s releases that remain very popular with Generation Y audiences.

In many of his darker and most mature works, among Shakespeare’s favourite themes were alienation, betrayal and unrequited love. These translate into the real world as feelings that affect each of us, but arguably none more so than youth.

The 1991 cult film My Own Private Idaho, a loose adaptation of Henry IV, Part I. It tracks the adventures of Mike, a gay narcoleptic hustler, and his best friend Scott (based on Prince Hal in Henry IV), a rich young man who is deliberately living his life in the slums until he is able to receive his inheritance and thus, detach himself from his father, who he detests. Together, they embark on a road trip from Portland, Oregon to Idaho in search of Mike’s long-lost mother, all the while remaining lost souls on the tattered fringe of society.

Outside the central plot, My Own Private Idaho is filled with allusions to Shakespeare; for example, early in the film, Mike, Scott and other members of a group of outcasts they frequently socialize give a performance in a park of a play with certain Shakespearean airs, and there is a dream sequence in which Mike and Scott appear on covers of gay pornographic magazines, one of which has the dubious name of King Leer. However, smuggled in amongst these references are two ingredients that occupy polar opposites in the film: psychological visions of the past, and a Shakespearean look at the transition from boyhood to manhood (Burt, et al, p. 201). The eerie presence of allusions to Henry IV is utilized to address the emptiness in the characters’ lives and what they desperately need to fill that emptiness: somebody or something to show them the way to adulthood. Although My Own Private Idaho is unmistakably an art-house film, it remains one of the truest filmic depictions of the experiences of troubled, disaffected youth, and its allusions to Henry IV are what enhances its accuracy on this issue. Furthermore, they help the film connect Shakespeare’s works to contemporary America – in fact, most of the contemporary Western world – and through this the viewer can see how the hardships that people of all ages and creeds face today are little different to those faced by people from Shakespeare’s time.

Rebellion and nonconformity are like job requirements for many a teenager. Disaffected and feeling angry at the world they live in, they often decide to go against the grain without a hint of self-consciousness or thinking things through. The film 10 Things I Hate About You takes Shakespeare’s The Taming of the Shrew and transplants the play’s scenario and character clichés into a teen film formula.

Bianca Stratford is the most popular girl in school, but as a result of a family rule implemented by her father, she cannot date until her antisocial, independent and feminist older sister Kat does. With the help of two male students – one whom is madly in love with her – Bianca is finally allowed to date when Kat is set up with Patrick, the token school bad-boy. Despite the fact that 10 Things I Hate About You’s humour and narrative is largely derived from the play, the ways in which these elements are constructed to form the plot of the movie are based teen comedy conventions, specifically from the films of John Hughes. But outside the central plot of Bianca being unable to date until her sister does, there are some parts of the play that do not translate so easily into the context of a teen film, mainly because of how much social customs have changed over time. By far the most obvious of these is the shrew-taming which collides with modern views on the proper treatment and consideration of women (Friedman, 2004).

To show how much of Shakespeare’s play has been updated in this film, we should compare it with one of the most renowned filmic adaptations of the work: Franco Zeffirelli’s 1967 purist adaptation of the The Taming of the Shrew, starring Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton. (Zeffirelli, 1967) Zeffirelli’s picture has little of the original Shakespearean dialogue, but the director has retained the 1590s Italian setting, even hiring noted Italian film composer Nino Rota to write the score for the film. Zeffirelli’s picture received a great deal of acclaim and criticism at the time of its release mainly with regards to his heavy use of sound, which was at that time uncommon in a filmic rendering of a stage play, notably during argument scenes (Elizabeth’s Kate shouts very loudly) (Kranz, 2008.) On the other hand, 10 Things I Hate About You is interestingly lacking in dramatic sound effects, with the arguments between Kat and Patrick almost being subdued in comparison to those between Kate and Petruchio in Zeffirelli’s film.

Whereas in Shakespeare’s play “the shrew” is a woman who shows her resistance to male dominance with her resentful tongue, Kat in 10 Things I Hate About You is a modern, free-thinking feminist, reminiscent of Germaine Greer. However, a true-to-life concern about popularity with each character is the other, newer central theme in the film. The majority of teenagers today care about everything from how they look to being accepted in high school society and most importantly, winning their parents’ approval. 10 Things I Hate About You is populated by young, middle-class, suburban, largely white kids preoccupied with fitting in and sensitive to the boundaries that separated many groups in society. The events in the first act of the film culminate in the characters all attending a large, unsupervised house party that Bianca wishes to attend with Joey Donner, a popular but sleazy senior student (serving as a stand-in for Shakespeare’s Grumio) who is also a male model, who she in the end learns from not to go for men who only want her for sex (Friedman, 2004). Moreover, Kat previously learnt this lesson from him when she dated him in secret. By the end, not only is Kat “tamed,” but each of the four lead characters discovers something about themselves and their world. Herein lies where 10 Things I Hate About You keeps to the conventions of traditional teen comedy films, but also enables its teenage audience to realize how they can relate to Shakespeare’s plays if they just give them a try.

The 1994 Disney classic The Lion King is an interesting case. With its colourful musical numbers and its setting in Africa, The Lion King’s Shakespearean connections are buried much more deeply than those in My Own Private Idaho and 10 Things I Hate About You, but when they are found they are too many and too clear to not stick out. The lead character is Simba, a lion cub (with parallels to Hamlet Jr.) whose mischievous and naïve attitude gets him into as much danger as safety. After his father King Mufasa is murdered by his envious and power-hungry uncle Scar, Simba delays his act of revenge for many years (mainly because he himself thinks he was to blame for the tragedy). After the deaths of their fathers, Prince Hamlet and Simba are respectively rendered deeply mournful, and without an important royal mentor and father figure during his formative years (McElveen, 1998).

There are also striking similarities between the characters of Hamlet and Mufasa. In life, they ruled their lands (respectively Denmark and the Pride Lands) in peace and prosperity, only showing worry for their sons and their royal responsibilities. After death, they become even more: spiritual inspirations for their sons, reminding of what they must do and how they can overcome the odds and achieve it (McElveen, 1998). Then we have the villains of each text: Hamlet’s Claudius and The Lion King’s Scar. Each are jealous brothers of kings who decide to usurp the king’s power by murdering him, then ruling their lands with a totalitarian regime, and both are alluded to have homosexual tendencies (McElveen, 1998). To top it all off, Timon and Pumbaa – the comic relief duo who Simba meets in desert whilst in exile – draw parallels with Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, the comic relief characters featured in Hamlet. Timon and Pumbaa help Simba escape from the hauntings of his past by introducing him to “Hakuna matata” (their motto for a carefree life), whereas Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, are used to reassure the audience that Prince Hamlet does have a refreshing social life away from his regal responsibilities (McElveen, 1998).

Perhaps the best Hamlet adaptation to compare The Lion King with would be Laurence Olivier’s Academy Award-winning 1948 version Hamlet. Olivier’s film is a shortened though still very faithful filmic rendering of Shakespeare’s immortal tragedy, shot in black and white, that does not update the play in any way (largely because it predates postmodernism, and because Olivier was a luminary of the West End stage). Certainly it is hardly as cheerful and exuberant as The Lion King, which, in true Disney fashion, features several musical numbers and a happy ending, however the themes in each adaptation of Shakespeare’s play are nearly identical – Claudius and Scar, each consumed by envy and ambition, kill their ruler brothers and become corrupt leaders while their brothers did not, Hamlet, Jr. and Simba each feel deep remorse and guilt over the murders of their fathers, and they seek redemption. Redemption borders on religious territory – another subject that is viewed with indifference by many members of Generation Y – so for it to incorporated into the framework of an animated film is to grab them hook, line and sinker and show them again how universally and timelessly relevant and resonant the themes written about the Bard truly remain.

Children and teenagers of the early years of the 21st century can be frustratingly stubborn and difficult to get through to. Once they latch onto a certain text or activity, they can be very unwilling to give something else a chance. Teenagers now are also, more than ever it can be argued, biased towards anything at all that was produced before they were born. Literary enthusiasts, filmmakers and teachers (who are the ones who have to try to make young people read Shakespeare) are well aware of this. As dated or even unpronounceable his words may or may not seem, Shakespeare’s body of work is as thematically resonant as ever. The trick is finding new draws of fans. This is the significance and the wisdom of contemporary cinematic adaptations of Shakespeare’s works being aimed squarely at both the children’s and youth markets. By editing or completely changing the Shakespearean dialogue, updating the setting and (in the case of The Lion King) throwing a few catchy musical numbers for good measure, all the while without removing any of the powerful themes, My Own Private Idaho, 10 Things I Hate About You and The Lion King all succeeded in taking the old and making it new – taking Shakespeare and making him seem hip.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

· Van Sant, G. 1991, My own private Idaho, Fine Line Features.
· Junger, G. 1999, 10 things I hate about you, Touchstone Pictures.
· Allers, R., Minkoff, R. 1994, The lion king, Walt Disney Pictures.
· Zeffirelli, F. 1967, The taming of the shrew, Columbia Pictures.
· Kranz, D. 2008, Tracking the sounds of Franco Zeffirelli’s The Taming of the Shrew, Literature-Film-Quarterly, Infotrac.
· Friedman, M. 2004, The feminist as shrew in 10 Things I Hate About You, Shakespeare Bulletin, Infotrac.
· McElveen, T. 1998, Hamlet and The Lion King: Shakespearean Influences on Modern Entertainment, http://www.lionking.org/text/Hamlet-TM.html.
· Wiseman, S. The family tree motel: subliming Shakespeare in My Own Private Idaho, Burt, R. (Boose, L. (eds.), 2003, Shakespeare: the movie II: popularizing the plays on film, TV and DVD, p. 201, Routledge.
· Olivier, L. 1948, Hamlet, Rank Film Distributors.

Science-Fiction Film Criticism: Blade Runner and Mad Max

The look and feel of a film is usually all to do with the production’s budget. Big-budget Hollywood blockbusters which have heavy reliance on visual effects are nonetheless more clearer-looking and audible that your average run-of-the-mill ultra-low-budget independent movie. This has less to do with blockbuster directors having more money and better resources at their disposal than independent filmmakers wanting nothing to do with the studio system. However, independent does not mean backward. Rather, filmmakers like George Lucas – whose Star Wars series have not only been wildly financially successful, but a breakthrough in computer-generated visual effects and digital filmmaking – have brought about some of the most influential (and, as some purists would say, hazardous) changes to the cinematic landscape, and have caught up by utilizing cheaper facilities, a bandwagon non-independent filmmakers have of course since jumped on. The films Blade Runner and Mad Max respectively represent each of these film “rivals,” and together they show how the two are not so different.

If Socrates lived today and made films, it is probable he would have made Blade Runner. Blade Runner is a maddeningly philosophical science-fiction film, also throwing in elements of cyberpunk and future neo-noir, with characters who are so enigmatic yet enjoyably deep whose secrets are known neither to them or to us. They are all traditional film-noir character stereotypes seemingly trapped in a futuristic science-fiction world divided by humans and illegal human replicants.

Blade Runner opens with a sky-view shot of the dystopia of 2019 Los Angeles in all its blinding decadence: fire-lights, flying cars and hundred-storey skyscrapers illustrating the corporate greed and corruption of the jungle Los Angeles has evolved into. Declared illegal on Earth after a violent mutiny, criminal human clones dubbed “replicants” infest the streets below, which are already awash with homeless people, thugs and sex workers. And as a result of global warming, it is always raining.

Director Ridley Scott manages such a breakneck pace with the film that it really seems to make us understand clearer the limited life-span Eldon Tyrell, the creator of the replicants, has given his creations. Although it is not technically set in real time, in the way protagonist Deckard, a cop assigned to execute fugitive replicants, completely and successfully goes about his task of apprehending five replicants throughout the film’s running time, it feels like it all happens over the course of just one night.

Blade Runner’s narrative structure is something of a pastiche of the film-noir and science-fiction genres. After a written prologue and the shot of future Los Angeles dystopia, it goes: 1) Deckard checking in to see what his chief wants of him; 2) Deckard interviewing suspected replicant and femme fatale Rachael; 3) a forbidden love growing between the two; 4) slimy replicant Roy Batty beginning to track down Deckard; 5) scantily-clad but butch replicant Pris searching the streets for accommodation; 6) Deckard hunting down another replicant in a brothel; 7) Deckard questioning whether he himself is a replicant; 8) Roy Batty killing his maker for failing to make him perfect; 9) Deckard facing off in an abandoned mansion against Roy and Pris; 10) Deckard and Rachael escaping to a peaceful and happy life together.

The underlying theme in Blade Runner of prejudice towards replicants is what complicates the sub-plot of the romance between Deckard and Rachael. Deckard is torn between carrying out his duty to his chief and showing unconditional love to Rachael. To make matters worse, Rachael of course has a lifespan which is rapidly running out, after which time Deckard will be on his own again.

Ever since Blade Runner’s release in 1982, fans and critics have been completely divided over the issue of whether or not Deckard himself is a replicant. Early in the story we are told all replicants have visions of unicorns and have to find out for themselves where they came from. In one scene, Deckard is confused by a dream of a unicorn from which he has just awoken, and later is intrigued by stick-figures of unicorns. And if he really is human, it could be arguable that he would not find himself physically and emotionally attracted to replicants like Rachael.

One thing almost every film ever produced has in common is a cause-effect framework – how one character’s actions, while either for good or evil, do as much harm as they do good. In Blade Runner, the creator of the replicants Eldon Tyrell, has set out to create perfection in a series of human clones and has failed. Given that the human characters in the film live longer than the replicants, the replicants are subsequently inferior. Roy Batty is aware of his inferiority to humans thanks to the mistakes with which Tyrell made him, and Roy murders his maker out of revenge. It is through this stark distinction between its human and replicant characters the film challenges us to define perfection, or even if there really is such a thing.

While most movies use narrative time simply to show characters going on a journey in just two hours, Blade Runner uses narrative time to show the shortness of life itself. Just as the lifespans of replicants have deadlines, so, too, do we all in our efforts to go about our business everyday. While an early scene involving replicant Leon’s execution of his human interrogator and Roy Batty’s killing of Tyrell illustrate this message of time running out everyday, perhaps the most subliminal depiction in the film of a character’s deadline is the ending (of the Director’s Cut version) with Deckard and Rachael leaving their apartment, possibly to escape to freedom and eternal bliss. This ending is ambiguous and anticlimactic and can be read both ways: that the two A) die soon, depending on whether or not Deckard is a replicant; or B) live happily ever after. Either way, we know the problematic aspect of their love affair has only just begun, and that they are about to find out just what the film itself suggests: that perfection is not exactly that, or it is nonexistent.

The 1979 science-fiction action classic Mad Max is remembered as one of the crucial films of the 1970s Australian film renaissance. Produced for under one million dollars and originally designed to make a loss, most experts cite George Miller’s film as the first major action movie produced in Australia, and its influence was even felt in Hollywood (albeit after the actors’ Australian accents were dubbed into American accents) – especially with star Mel Gibson’s meteoric rise to international superstardom.

Mad Max can perhaps be best described as a revenge movie worked around a post-Apocalyptic science-fiction action narrative. Max Rockatansky is a young cop patrolling a highway running through the sunburnt Australian Outback, sometime in the distant future. An upstanding citizen, Max does not shy away from giving speeding tickets to people who go over the speed limit, and then letting them go. However, after a sadistic road gang murders his wife and infant son, there’s no more Mr. Nice Guy. Now, as the tagline for the film goes, “When the gangs take over the highway…remember he’s on your side.”

The chase sequences in Mad Max highlight the effectiveness of fast editing and how it enables you to imagine yourself in the situation on-screen – basically, George Miller and his editor have helped you imagine what it’s like to be in a car chase just by watching the film, so you do not actually have to get involved in one. The crash sequences have the same impact, but are done to reassure us we are watching from a safe distance (there is a famous shot of a car ploughing into a caravan). This is especially the case in the climactic chase involving Max and the last surviving member of the antagonist Toecutter’s gang. Max does not catch him, but the gang member meets his maker when he crashes into a truck at top speed. For maximum intensity, Miller cuts back and forth between the gang member and the truck – with the gang member nearly jumping out of his skin when first he sees the truck – rather than focusing entirely on one or the other. This is done not to evoke sympathy for the gang member or even the truck driver, but simply to show how quickly a life can be cut short (and, of course, to ensure every loose end is tied up).

Mad Max’s depiction of the Australian Outback in its post-Apocalyptic state has the same effect as Blade Runner’s depiction of 2019 Los Angeles. It is so unmistakably stunning that it becomes another character, so much so that hints that the Outback really is like a futuristic world in its desolation and isolation. Of course, hopefully Mad Max will not have successfully predicted the future for humanity as a whole, but that is not the point. The point is that there will always be vigilantes who see injustice and fight it. The influence of Mad Max’s depiction of the Australian Outback as unforgiving beast is still felt today in contemporary films like 2005’s Wolf Creek.

In both films, environment is a key factor in their portrayal of the future, yet both are set in environments that could not be more strikingly different. Incorporating film-noir elements into its science-fiction narrative, Blade Runner takes place in 2019, which is very humid and always enjoying rainfall. This is a clear hint towards global warming – something that was only known of by weather experts at the time of the film’s release in 1982 – and also to the loss of memory and the past and the inhabitants of it, be they human or replicant, slipping further and further back into the annals of history. As Batty himself famously says immediately before he dies, “I’ve seen things you people wouldn’t believe. Attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion. I watched C-beams glitter in the dark near the Tannhauser gate. All those memories will be lost in time, like tears in rain. Time to die.”

Mad Max, on the contrary, uses the killer heat and desolation of the Australian Outback as an allegory for what the aftermath of the Apocalypse might be like. It is an almost Satanic entity which causes individuals stuck in it to slowly lose their minds, and leaving them open to the gangs who worship the Outback so much so that it is practically their creator. But Max is no Christ-figure either, He, too, has been corrupted to a certain extent by the Outback, however this has instructed him to right the wrongs of his world as much as he can, to erase some of the damage the Apocalypse has inflicted upon the world.

Whether or not it is too late to prevent the scary depictions of the future Blade Runner and Mad Max each put forth – or if they were always inevitable – is something that only time will tell. That said, neither of these films are cautionary tales. And they are more than just subversive pieces of genre-fusion. Ultimately, both films are postmodernist essays on the repercussions of current events and ideologies, irrespective of what cultures and religions they come from or whether they are political or environmental. And refreshingly, neither end on a conveniently celebratory ending, because in the cases of these two films that would diminish the impact of their negative views of the future.

Blade Runner and Mad Max, both having assumed cult classic status, are fondly remembered by critics today as two science-fiction films that helped to usher in the postmodern feel of the genre that is so present today. Ignoring the lure of the Star Wars template for science-fiction movie storytelling, Ridley Scott and George Miller each gave us, in their respective films, a downbeat, cynical and uncompromising view of the future. Respectively, Scott and Miller, in their films, made us attempt to decipher the difference between human and non-human and ponder whether or not they are one and the same, and provided us with an utterly disturbing depiction of just what the prophesized Apocalypse might be like. While we can only hope for all our sakes Scott and Miller wrongfully predicted the future, all good science-fiction tries to predict it, and only the best do get it right.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

· Scott, R. 1982, Blade runner, Warner Bros. Pictures
· Miller, G. 1979, Mad Max, Kennedy-Miller Productions
· Bordwell, D., Thompson, K. 2004, Film art: an introduction, pp. 415-418 (template only)

Electracy in Outer Space.

ELECTRACY IN OUTER SPACE

By Jarred Kennedy

FADE IN…

The first thing we see is a computer, with the monitor showing it is currently in use. On the screen, one can see the game World of Warcraft is currently being played.

INT. BASEMENT – VERY EARLY MORNING

This is a lifeless basement if ever one existed. Painted white, with shut brown curtains probably covering closed windows doing absolutely nothing but complimenting the boring white walls. The basement is also appallingly unkempt: old, dilapidated chairs and a table are spread out around the room, surrounded by food wrappers, softdrink cans, beer bottles, pornographic magazines, cups, plates, and cutlery. Directly in shot, seated on a sofa that’s in such bad condition it looks like it was purchased from a secondhand store twenty years ago, sits nineteen-year-old Frank Gore.

Frank sits slumped back on the sofa, his belly almost bulging out from underneath his shirt, his fingers banging away at his keyboard as he explores the virtual world of the game. Next to him lie three opened bags of corn chips and two opened two-litre bottles of Coca-Cola. He takes his hands momentarily away from the keyboard to take a handful of the corn chips, which he eats, and then a huge swig of the Coca-Cola, which he swallows, and then goes back to the game. He does this in a constant loop every single day.

A black bar swirls clockwise across the screen to show the passing of morning to night, completely skipping the afternoon.

INT. BASEMENT – LATE EVENING

Not one thing has changed in the basement. Frank is quite evidently a computer game addict, and he’s probably in total denial about it. Still slumped back in the sofa like Homer Simpson, still with corn chips and Coca-Cola for what he calls “nutrition.” Yawning now, Frank is leaning, now staring much more closely at the computer screen. He is growing frustrated with the game that has robbed him of so much, and it’s about to make him snap.

FRANK

Damn it! I’ve been stuck on this level all day!

Frank smacks the side of the monitor with the back of his right hand.

Unexpectedly, a MOBILE PHONE rings.
Frank leisurely rises from the sofa and waddles to the other side of the room to a bench, where his phone is. He picks it up and answers it.

FRANK

Hello?

CUT TO:

INT. BEDROOM – NIGHT

This particular room is equally as unkempt as Frank’s basement. In the distance we see an unmade bed in the right hand corner, and in the left can be seen a wardrobe. Posters of thrash metal bands like Sepultura, Nightwish, and Slayer coat the walls with a sense of anger, alienation and even hate.

In direct view, seated at a desk and likely staring at a computer, is BRUCE.

ON BRUCE: Nineteen, white, stocky build, PURPLE dyed hair and black fingernails. By the looks of him, Bruce is a devoted, unapologetic and proud fan of death metal music. He is wearing a black leather trench-coat, and is holding his phone up to his right ear whilst pressing the keys on his keyboard with his free hand.

BRUCE

Oi, Frank you pussy! Are you gonna make a move on that hot chick from Denmark who’s playing right now or what?

Frank’s entire position in front of his computer screen has not changed.

FRANK

Nah, chicks don’t go for guys who do that.

BRUCE

How would you know? I mean yeah, I’ve never had a girlfriend but neither have you.

FRANK

Good point, I guess. You double dare me?

On the right-hand side of the screen there is a long list of users who are playing the game currently. Next to each name is a green dot which operates as a CHAT option. Frank clicks on the green dot next to the user evenstarangel90. A pop-up for chatting appears. Frank types in the box: “Hey, how you doin’? I’m RPGassassin89.” Five seconds pass, and a reply message appears: “Sorry, but I don’t like stalkers.”

Frank fists the desk.

FRANK

See, man? I told you.

BRUCE
(chuckling)

You suck dude. You totally came on way too strong.

Frank takes the phone away from his ear and looks skyward in fury.

FRANK
(shouting)

You are a bully! To me and Bruce!

Completely unexpectedly, two large shafts of intense white light like spotlights come down over Bruce and Frank. They make unnaturally loud sounds, something like that of a massive garage door being opened. Both Frank and Bruce look up in shock – the shafts of light have no end in sight!

Now, the ground starts to shake around the both of them. This is an ominous sign suggesting danger, and the pair have both seen too many science-fiction films to know otherwise. Naturally, they’re both sweating.

Finally, they are slowly lifted off the ground, with the light shafts sucking them in like vortexes. Faster and faster, until they are being sucked through the sky, out of the Earth atmosphere entirely, through a BLACK HOLE, all the while screaming with piercing volume and the sound of the gravitational pull overwhelming, until the Moon and the base of an enormous space ship comes into view.

EXT. SPACESHIP – DARKNESS

This is no human spaceship. It is lime-green, with rivets, gun turrets and rocket launchers covering its every square metre, and shaped like two oversized boats on top of one another. It is an alien spaceship, and most certainly not carrying aliens like E.T.

A large dock roof opens at the vessel’s base. Frank and Bruce are still under control of the gravitational pull.

The dock door has opened by now.

INT. SPACESHIP – DARKNESS

If the exterior of the spaceship looked intimidating, the interior is terrifying. Beginning from the far left hand corner of the dock we pan to find light black walls, very little lighting, a row of storage racks filled with disused robots or robots in need of repair, and scariest of all, to the right of the dock door, a human head on a spit. Edvard Munch could not have painted something as worrying as this.

Frank and Bruce, now at the end of the shafts of white light, are floating above the still open door, but begin to fall. The door now closes at the speed of light, and they crash-land on it, falling on their stomachs.

Frank and Bruce finally rise and dust themselves off, checking for injuries. They are fine.

Frank and Bruce simultaneously look up and around their new surroundings. Initially both react anxiously, however that anxiety turns to extreme excitement when they realize what the dock reminds them of. Both look at each other with exuberance.

FRANK AND BRUCE
(together)

We’re in Starcraft! High-five, bro!

They high five each other.

The dock now goes from almost pitch black to blinding bright instantly. We now hear a bellowing and very authoritative voice, much like James Earl Jones. It is that of an alien.

ALIEN
(not seen; shouting)

Who said that?!

Frank and Bruce now realize this is no dream or game. They fall to the ground simultaneously, and hug each other in terror.

The two just lie on the ground still hugging each other in fear, almost frozen.

ALIEN
(not seen; even louder)

Who said that?!?!

Still shaking with terror, the boys finally find their feet and gradually are able to stand up.

BRUCE
W-w-we did!

Now the alien creature finally shows himself, teleporting into the shot.

ON ALIEN: this terrifying figure looks like the offspring of the Pale Man from Pan’s Labyrinth and the xenomorph from Alien. Seven foot tall, with wrinkled red skin, gills, no hair, a spiky tail, extended razor blades for fingernails and toenails, and bright yellow eyes. It oozes terror from every inch of its anatomy.

Frank and Bruce both scream at the very top of their lungs, and collapse to the ground in fear yet again.

This angers the creature.

ALIEN

Silence! Rise!

The boys do as they have been instructed. Standing completely straight and starting to sweat, Frank and Bruce are almost frozen solid as the creature begins to walk around them in a circle, inspecting them. It sneers continuously and makes a hissing sound as it examines Frank and Bruce’s clothing, appearances and builds.

ALIEN

Just… what the doctor prescribed. A fat slob, and a metal-head! Human scum at its most disposable! I imagine you are both wondering how you got here, and moreover, why you are here. Am I accurate in my presumptions?

Bruce is losing patience. He steps forward to face the creature in the eye.

BRUCE

What the heck do you think?

Frank pulls him back.

FRANK

Now’s not the time for that attitude, you idiot! This thing looks like it’s gonna roast us on a spit and have its followers dance around the fire at the same time!

ALIEN

Hush! I have no plans at all to kill you!

(laughs)

Rather, I want to play a game with you, one which involves no bloodshed of any kind. At least, not if you make no errors. My name is Xerzjik, and I have a challenge for you. Just correctly answer a series of questions about a topic known as “electracy.” That is all the challenge entails. However, should you refuse to accept it, you will never be able to return home. Fail, and you will never return home. Never! Ever! This is not a dream you are having! This is not any kind of joke or hoax that you humans so commonly and poorly pull! Do both of you oxygen thieves understand me?!

FRANK AND BRUCE
(together)

Yes, Xerzjik!

XERZJIK
(bellowing)

What?!

FRANK AND BRUCE
(together)

Yes, Xerzjik, Your Majesty!

XERZJIK

Spoken like true prodigies. Here are your sources you will be needing.

Instantly, two thirty-centimetre thick slabs of bound paper (one for each boy) fall into Frank and Bruce’s hands. Frank and Bruce fall to the ground because of the weight of the documents.

They sit up on the floor of the dock, as Xerzjik leans down and stares icily in their faces.

XERZJIK

I would get reading if I were you. You have two days. Get one answer wrong, and you will never see your stupid, superfluous, insubordinate Earthling friends and relatives ever again, and they will have to bury empty coffins! Mwahahahahahaha!

Xerzjik presses a red button on the glove he is wearing on his left wrist. The dock roof opens, and he zooms out into space, staring at Frank and Bruce frighteningly.

CUT TO:

INT. SPACESHIP DOCK

Frank and Bruce and laying on the floor of the dock with the texts in front of them, opened by about a quarter of the pages. The two of them are scanning the writing with their eyes back and forth, back and forth, trying to get through as quickly as they can but slowly enough to take in every ounce of information as well.

In fast-motion, we see Frank and Bruce flicking through the humongous slabs of paper.

TITLE CARD: ELEVEN HOURS LATER

CUT TO:

INT. SPACESHIP DOCK – ELEVEN HOURS LATER

Frank and Bruce are still laying on the floor of the dock with the texts in front of them, only now they are half-asleep and fighting drowsiness in their aim of getting through the huge texts as soon as they possibly can. Bruce turns over one page and then yawns, with Frank following suit five seconds later.

TITLE CARD: NINE HOURS LATER

We can hear a slight beeping sound. It is an alarm on Bruce’s mobile phone going off. Hearing it, Bruce awakes with a jump. He takes the phone out of his jeans pocket, switches the alarm off and checks the time. It’s now 8:30 Earth time.

BRUCE

Man, we need to get reading again. One more day left!

Bruce leans over and shakes Frank’s shoulder to wake him. Frank opens his eyes for the new day, rubs them, stretches his arms and finally sits up.

Ironically, in front of Frank and Bruce are now the texts and two bowls of porridge. The boys are amazed.

FRANK

Do you think perhaps Xerzjik knows humans can’t study on an empty stomach?

Bruce laughs and grins appreciatively. Both of them prop their heads skyward.

FRANK AND BRUCE
(together)

Thank you, Xerzjik, Your Majesty!

Frank and Bruce each dive for their respective bowl and tuck in.
After a few mouthfuls, the two look at each other in realization of much time they have left before the quiz.

FRANK

I really think we should try to read this again.

BRUCE

Agreed.

Simultaneously, Frank and Bruce finish their breakfasts and start to while away at their texts for the second time.

Fade to black.

TITLE CARD: THE NEXT DAY

Frank and Bruce are by this time fast asleep on the ground of the dock. All of a sudden, the dock door opens, the sound waking them with a jump. Xerzjik appears in front of them, and he means business.

XERZJIK

The day of reckoning is upon us. Eat your human breakfast with haste.

In fast-motion, Frank and Bruce carry out Xerzjik’s orders. When they are done with this, both of them stand up straight.

XERZJIK

Guards!

Two alien guards appear, each wheeling a strange machine probably used for strapping dangerous life-forms into bed, that looks like a combination of an airport trolley and a straightjacket. They stop when they reach Xerzjik, Frank and Bruce.

XERZJIK

Strap them in.

Frank and Bruce turn to look at each other with anxiety.

Each guard pulls each of the boys away and begins to strap them into the contraptions. Frank and Bruce’s bodies are forced into the contraptions, then two sets of very thick bars of metal coming from the side are pushed down over their torsos and feet, securing them.

XERZJIK

Let’s get down to business.

He begins to lead the guards and Frank and Bruce away somewhere.

CUT TO: XERZJIK’S PALACE MAIN HALL – DAY

This is truly a room to behold. Huge and luxurious in its every square centrimetre, it’s like something no Impressionist painter would not go weak at the knees for. The walls have been painted a blazing gold colour, the architecture being the most perfect marble, and red-painted floors to top it all off. There is also a table and later a queen-size bed in the centre of the room each measuring about five metres, the bed coming complete with a curtain around its entire area.

Frank and Bruce have been wheeled to the very front of the hall. Now the guards begin to clip electricity cables to their fingertips. They each look anxious but appear to be hiding it quite well given the circumstances.

XERZJIK

Well, my human scum, this is what it has been about. I will cut straight to the chase. I am going to ask each of you five questions about the notion of electracy. If you get them all right, I will return you to your little planet and you will have lived to see another day. But, get just one answer incorrect and… here’s a demonstration of what will happen.

Xerzjik turns to his right. An alien, most likely a criminal alien, is also strapped into the same contraption and has electricity cables leading to a generator clipped to his fingertips. Xerzjik waltzes over to the generator and pushes a large black button which reads “DO NOT PUSH.”

Bolts of electricity race through the criminal alien’s body, shaking the alien wildly. After three seconds of this, the alien IMPLODES, its blood spilling and its body parts flying everywhere.

Frank and Bruce now freeze with terror. Finally, they SCREAM.

XERZJIK

Do not put all your fear and anxiety to waste yet! I haven’t even asked the first question! Since I understand neither of you will be able to decide amongst yourselves which of you would like to go first, I will do that for you. It’s you Frank.

Frank is now going white as a sheet.

XERZJIK

Be that as it may, with each question I will back and forth between you until we reach the end. That is, if we do reach the end. They are all true-or-false questions, and the more questions we get through, the harder the next question will be. You may take as long as you need to answer. Let us get this over with. Frank. The theorist Gregory Ulmer became one of the most renowned experts of electracy as a result of his text entitled Halflives: A Mystory.

Frank appears momentarily confident.

FRANK

True, Xerzjik, Your Majesty.

Xerzjik now turns to Bruce.

XERZJIK

Bruce. Gregory Ulmer once wrote that mystorys “were designed to simulate the experience of invention, the crossing of discourses that has been shown to occur in the invention process.”

BRUCE

True, Xerzjik, Your Majesty.

Xerzjik turns his focus again to Frank.

XERZJIK

Ulmer never wonders how a being can manage inventing something that will restrict the concept of technology to the home.

FRANK

False, Xerzjik, Your Majesty.

Xerzjik turns his attention back to Bruce

XERZJIK

One of Ulmer’s main arguments is that if electracy is to be introduced into schools, it has the potential to overcome the hurdles faced by any person who aims to surpass Enlightenment reason.

This time, Bruce thinks just for a moment.

BRUCE

True, Xerzjik, Your Majesty.

Once again, Xerzjik switches his focus back to Frank.

XERZJIK

On the nature of subjectivities that could be produced by a large-scale switch from literacy to electracy, Ulmer argues: “In the same way that the practice of reading privately and silently contributed to the formation of “self”, so too will performing hyperrhetoric contribute to a new subjectivication in the electronic apparatus (in which one will have to find a new term of self-reference, neither “parrot” as in the clan identity of the oral apparatus nor “me” in the individualism of literacy.”

Frank rubs his face in thought.

FRANK

True, Xerzjik, Your Majesty.

Once again, Xerzjik switches his focus back to Bruce.

XERZJIK

The article Halflives, a Mystory: Writing Hypertext to Learn was authored by Gregory Ulmer himself.

BRUCE

False, Xerzjik, Your Majesty.

Once again, Xerzjik switches his focus back to Frank.

XERZJIK

Tofts writes that electracy and mystory aim to produce universal truths.

Frank now rubs his face for ten seconds. He appears stumped, but it soon comes to him.

FRANK

False, Xerzjik, Your Majesty.

Once again, Xerzjik switches his focus back to Bruce.

XERZJIK

History is the very first element of mystory.

Bruce breathes in deeply.

BRUCE

True, Xerzjik, Your Majesty.

For the last time, Xerzjik switches his focus back to Frank.

XERZJIK

This is your final question, Frank. The term “hyperlogic” was coined by Darren Tofts in his essay Hyperlogic, the Avant-Garde and Other Transitive Acts.

Frank is now quivering with anxiety. He breathes in even more deeply time, rubbing his face agin. After ten seconds he finally looks up at Xerzjik.

FRANK

True, Xerzjik, Your Majesty.

For the last time, Xerzjik switches his focus back to Bruce.

XERZJIK

Bruce, this is your final question. The other four elements of mystory are herstory, mystery, my story and envois.

Like Frank, Bruce is now almost controlled by his anxiety. He takes a very long deep breath.

BRUCE

True, Xerzjik, Your Majesty.

Xerzjik remains silent for a few moments. Frank and Bruce look at each other, each of them wondering what their fate will be.

XERZJIK
(in alien language; subtitled)

Guards! Release them.

The two alien guards begin to unclip the electrical wires from Frank and Bruce’s fingers, and then free the two boys from the unnamed contraption.

XERZJIK

My deepest congratulations, Frank and Bruce. You have both beaten the game.

Frank and Bruce both now fall to the ground with relief. After five seconds they are able to find their feet again. They are ecstatic.

XERZJIK

You have proven how very wrong I was about you and your species. However, before I send you back to your families and your lives, I want to stress something to you. To begin with, I must confess you two were selected for this as I had been watching the two of you from space for some time. Watching how you do nothing except wasting away your lives by playing computer games. That will get you absolutely nowhere. I felt I had to enforce that upon you both. Electracy is a tool for staying on top of life, and it will become the way of the future. I was only so merciless with you because otherwise, my message would not have gotten through to either of you. Now that you have been put through such a terrifying experience, I want both you to promise me here and now that when you return to Earth, you will get out and grab life by the horns. Do you promise to do that?

BRUCE

Oh, we certainly do!

FRANK

Yes! One hundred percent!

XERZJIK

Good. I bid you both farewell now.

CUT TO: INT. FRANK’S BEDROOM – DAY

Nothing has changed in Frank’s bedroom since he left it. The large shafts of white light that lifted Frank and Bruce appear again in the room, only this time Frank falls back into the room and onto the floor. He lifts himself up on the floor and, tired, walks over to the bed and falls asleep instantly.

SUBTITLE: Frank went back to school and finished this time. He now works for the Commonwealth Bank.

CUT TO:

EXT. BRUCE’S BEDROOM – DAY

The shaft of white light has also come back into Bruce’s bedroom, and he also falls straight onto the carpet. Tired also, he too, walks over to his bed, slides onto it and falls straight asleep.

SUBTITLE: Bruce went back to school as well, and to university. He now works for a law firm.

THE END

Representations of Women and Non-Caucasians in Science-Fiction Cinema.

Science-fiction, being a genre aimed at and enjoyed primarily by men, has over the centuries been filled with characters that are, for the most part, male and white. In early science-fiction texts, women were seldom ever represented as anything other than damsels in distress, which reinforced the prevailing ideology of the time which stated that women belong in the kitchen. Black characters were nowhere to be seen. That ship has sailed, but whilst those representations of women and the total absence of black characters in pre-postmodern-era science-fiction texts are impossible to read nowadays as anything but attempts at reinforcing the bigoted ideologies of the past, nonetheless those texts have shown contemporary science-fiction filmmakers and writers how to improve upon them and create science-fiction tales that ring true with contemporary audiences. In the past fifty years, science-fiction has evolved to include issues like the power of the individual, non-conformity, radically liberal ideologies as well as retaining political messages, and most importantly to show women and blacks as strong leaders and heroes.

Here I will examine the accuracy and effectiveness of new depictions of women and blacks in three culturally significant contemporary science-fiction films: Alien, its sequel Aliens and The Matrix.

Released in 1979, the seminal science-fiction horror classic Alien showed the great potential – both critically and commercially – for science-fiction texts involving a female protagonist. Lt. Ellen Ripley not only has a physique that pleasurable and reassuring on the eyes (Telotte, p. 51), but she is also a iron-willed and fiercely independent woman who still is not without her flaws (this is so as to not make the viewer read her as a lesbian or even to not reinforce lesbian stereotypes).

Ripley’s victory in her final battle against the extra-terrestrial creature is a reassurance that Ripley is only a protective mother figure, which makes her a successful effort by the filmmakers to erase the nightmarish image of the evil female dominatrix within science-fiction’s patriarchal discourses. Furthermore, critic Barbara Creed implies that if we extend the depiction of Ripley to all female characters in the pantheon of science-fiction texts, we could find new ways of understanding how male ideologies are sometimes used to deny the “difference” of woman in her depiction on the screen (Telotte, p. 51)

Having a strong female heroine in Ripley was not the only gender stereotype the film broke down. The crew’s spaceship Nostromo, whilst it also may be a model of lifeless and sexless rationality, is at the same time matriarchal in the womb-like imagery of Ripley and her crew sleeping in cryogenic pods at the beginning of the film. Less subtly, the Nostromo’s main computer is called Mother, who strangely in the end betrays her “children” by following the orders of the evil company who sent them on their mission (almost making Mother the female equivalent of HAL 9000 from the 1968 film 2001: A Space Odyssey) (Fulton 1995).

The alien spaceship as well is very feminine in design, showcasing an egg chamber and two very big vaginal walls to animate the female anatomy in a much more confronting way than the Nostromo. The design of the alien spaceship has an atmospheric Gothic feel that has total resemblance to its occupant: a boundary-crossing, shape-shifting being simultaneously male and female, organic and inorganic – a mixture of aroused phallus and castrating vagina (Fulton 1995).

Alien’s 1986 sequel Aliens not only showed Ripley as even tougher than before, it also showcases a female villain. Even more so than the Alien in the first film, the Alien Queen is a sadistic killing machine and the primal mother who has given birth – without a male – to endless and equally deadly offspring. Through her Aliens delivers a gruesome depiction of the reproductive organs of an unstoppable female monster. In this film, Ripley becomes a surrogate mother to Newt, a young girl left alone on the planet LV-426 after her parents and brother are themselves murdered by the inhabiting aliens. The final showdown between Ripley and the Alien Queen ensues after Ripley burns the Queen’s eggs to provoke her after the Queen has kidnapped Newt. Yet, it is not that Ripley is incapable of having children of her own and that she will reproduce because of culture and the Queen from instinct, but rather because the Queen represents Ripley’s other half – the lioness defending her cub. Both Ripley and the Alien Queen only transform into unsympathetic killing machines when their child – whether a biological or surrogate child – is threatened (Creed, p. 51).

The plot of the film The Matrix, and this aspect of the film is a trifle ironic given it seemingly incorporates so many elements that are usually synonymous with the fascination of men, is actually driven mainly by feminine narratives. It falls back on mythic structures centralized by female protagonists in texts such as Alice in Wonderland and Snow White and the Seven Dwarves, the former of which is, in fact, referenced in one scene by Morpheus. In its homages to those aforementioned texts among others, it is Trinity rather than Neo who can be read as the true hero of the story. Trinity has taken her name from a decidedly masculine God, and upon meeting her for the first time, Neo claims “I just thought…you were a guy,” to which she responds, “Most guys do.” (Williams 2003) On the other hand, many critics praised the Wachowskis for opening the film with an extended fight sequence featuring Trinity but noted how they later relegated her to simply being Neo’s love interest for most of the rest of the film (Schneider, p. 911), however when she revives Neo at the end by kissing him, she becomes his hero. This helps Trinity to reaffirm her crucial part in the saving of humanity (Ovnat, p. 4).

While it does not feature female characters as tough as those in Alien and Aliens, The Matrix equals those earlier films’ taboo-toppling gender depictions with its transgressive imagery of both females and males. Switch is a “gender blender” and Neo and Morpheus dress in long skirt-like leather coats. Neo and Trinity’s kiss at the end could be a straight kiss, a gay kiss or a kiss between two androgynous and unsubtle lesbians (because Trinity is wearing very masculine clothes and Neo’s head is shaven). Yet, the abundance of androgynous imagery in the film does not challenge sex or sexual roles. The Matrix is filled with images of gender bending, the leather scene (in all its militarism or sadomasochism), the questioning of who we are as individuals and androgynous aesthetic to reiterate the notion of the power of the individual and the minority (Ovnat, p. 8).

A great number of postmodern science-fiction authors and filmmakers have also unsubtly made race an integral concern in their texts. It should be unsurprising that science-fiction, being a genre awestruck by encounters with difference, must so frequently give us dramatizations of numerous significant racial historical events, starting with the American civil rights movement of the 1960s and the “blaxploitation” film and literary movement of the 1970s, which have collectively paved the way for the multiculturalism of the present day (Roberts p. 95).

In Alien, Ridley Scott presents us with a black-skinned monster, played (in the original film) by a black actor, which lurks at the bottom of a spaceship that is a metaphor for an industrial city, and kills through rape and violence with blistering efficiency. Thus, the crew’s (despite Parker also being black) fear of the Alien is essentially a metaphor for white middle-class individuals’ fear and distrust of an alienated urban black underclass. However, the character of Parker overrides the negative metaphor of the black man often being a homicidal killing machine, as Parker is an intelligent and tough African-American man who is the third last survivor after Ripley and her female colleague Lambert (Roberts p. 96).

Theories concerning The Matrix offer varying suggestions of rebel leader and Neo’s mentor Morpheus as being either John the Baptist or even the Almighty to Neo’s messiah, however the audience knows beyond a shadow of a doubt that this African-American character speaks like an orator with the most engaging wisdom and power – just like the Oracle, who is also African-American (Medved 2003).

Science-fiction writers and filmmakers’ early reluctance to work their texts around black characters was perhaps reminiscent of various space administrations’ refusal to employ black astronauts. Today, black astronauts are commonplace in reality. But while The Matrix was not the first science-fiction blockbuster to feature black heroes – preceding films like The Empire Strikes Back (1980), Independence Day (1996) and Men in Black (1997) deny it that title – it can justifiably be hailed as the first science-fiction film to feature black characters as not just freedom-fighting heroes, but gods and goddesses. Michael Medved proclaims The Matrix and films like it are proof that unification is not just a dream, it is a current reality, and they have helped popularize the notion that society can be aided by African-Americans in positions of authority (Medved 2003).

Blacks are not the only racial minority who science-fiction historically has ignored. Science-fiction writers and filmmakers have taken an even longer time to incorporate Hispanic characters into their texts, which has made Eduardo A. Valenzuela pose the question as to just why there is a lack of Hispanic characters in contemporary science-fiction. Do Hispanics or Latinos even belong in science-fiction, he wonders? Are they as sellable as characters of other ethnicities? (Valenzuela 1997) By breaking new ground by not just incorporating an Hispanic character but also making the Hispanic character in question a woman, Aliens can allay Valenzuela’s fears. Aliens’ Pvt. Vasquez is twice the independent woman Ripley is: a smart-mouthed, feisty woman who, when she is not battling the alien predators, is usually performing feats of strength in order to make her male colleagues impressed and even jealous. In one scene, Pvt. Hudson asks her, “Pvt. Vasquez, have you ever been mistaken for a man?” to which she quickly replies, “No. Have you?”

Science-fiction cinema, at its most transgressive, makes radical social statements not just to provide a breath of fresh air from the more child-oriented entries in the genre and to give us a real depiction of the current state of the world in which we live, but as well to give a voice to all oppressed minorities. Whilst there are still many social minorities for science-fiction to champion, women, blacks and Hispanics are now frowned upon less, thanks to the positive depictions of them in the three films analyzed here. Alien has been applauded for being one of the very first Hollywood films to have a plot worked around a strong and intelligent heroine, as well as a tough black male character; its sequel Aliens toughened Ripley even more and featured a no-nonsense female Hispanic fighter (who can easily be read also as a lesbian, although that reading of the character indeed reinforces lesbian stereotypes); and The Matrix glorifies blacks by showing its black characters as spiritual gods and soothsayers. The impact and legacy of the groundbreaking depictions of race and gender in all three films, both socially and within the film industry, proves unequivocally that science-fiction can be a vehicle for positive social change.
BIBLIOGRAPHY

· Scott, R. 1979, Alien, Twentieth Century Fox Pictures
· Cameron, J. 1986, Aliens, Twentieth Century Fox Pictures
· Wachowski, L., Wachowski, A. 1999, The Matrix, Village Roadshow Films, Warner Bros. Pictures
· Creed, B. 1993, The monstrous feminine: film, feminism, psychoanalysis, p. 51, Routledge
· Fulton, E.J. 1995, Manmade women: technology, femininity and the cinema, University of Alberta (find through ProQuest)
· Telotte, J.P. 2001, Science-fiction film, p. 51, Cambridge
· Williams, G.C. 2003, Mastering the real: Trinity as the “real” hero of The Matrix, Film Criticism, spring 2003 issue (find through ProQuest)
· Schneider, S.J. (ed.) 2002, 1001 movies you must see before you die, p. 911, ABC Books
· Ovnat, H. date not given, Visions of humanity in cyberculture: 1st international conference. Queering the hets: sex gender and sexuality in the Matrix and eXistenZ, pp. 4, 8, http://www.inter-disciplinary.net/ati/Visions/V1/ovnat%20paper.pdf, Hebrew University
· Roberts, A. 2006, Science fiction: the new critical idiom, pp. 95-96, Routledge
· Medved, M. 2003, Hollywood finally moves beyond racial oppression; Final edition, USA Today (find through ProQuest and ArticleLinker)
· Valenzuela, E.A. 1997, No se habla espanol in outer space?, Hispanic, April 1997 (find through ProQuest)

The Pleasures and Perils of Robotics.

If there is one entity on our planet that never stays the same, it must surely be technology, in all its forms. As it improves upon itself, our fascination with technology only grows. It is perhaps the easiest way for us as imperfect beings to conquer the world, if only through a puppet of our making. Technological enhancements are viewed as blessings from the sky in the eyes of each and every one of us, helping us enormously to get through the harshness of life and come out at the end smelling like roses. It doesn’t matter what invention it was or in what time and context it was unleashed upon the world, technology’s positive social impact has forever remained the same. But we have arrived at a point in time where the possibly hazardous implications of future advancements must be ignored no longer.

Recent proposals by scientific experts in using cyberspace routines of investigative design methods involve taking apart the human brain to emancipate oneself from the body. Historically, there several examples of scholars – most notably Descartes – who contended that, contrary to the widely accepted medical argument that was the complete opposite, the human mind and the human body are two commodities that work and act separately, and that as a result each can be studied in the absence of the other (Ferguson, 2001). A far more recent concept that provides a contemporary angle to the body-and-mind-separate-or-mutually-exclusive debate is artificial intelligence. In the current climate, the concept of the robot permeates our very existence, from people on hospital waiting lists to death row. Many critics assume the point of AI is to provide an answer for the question of what it means to be human. As machines are built by us, however, there is the possibility for the most advanced technologies to interact with us minus the destruction of the mind, and our enhanced ability to live almost anywhere has purified the modern world even more for human inhabitation. Essentially, there is a fine line between smart spaces and smart living spaces (Ferguson 2001).

Steven Spielberg’s 2001 film A.I. Artificial Intelligence told the story of a robot boy in the future who fully resembles a real boy minus his being machine inside, learning about existence at the same pace as every human he meets. Interestingly, this perception of a robot child could turn from a possibility to a likelihood within decades thanks to the work of scientists at Switzerland’s Federal Institute of Technology. Sylvain Calinon and his team have patented a sixty-centimetre-tall robot codenamed HOAP-3 which is run on groundbreaking software allowing them to program the robot to perform skills like playing chess just by helping it move its limbs the right way. This is similar to what parents do to educate their children during the early developmental stage of childhood. Calinon’s hope for his team’s breakthrough will enable consumers to teach domesticated robots in the ways of servitude (Barras, 2007).

Relating to this, last year in the United States a state-of-the-art robot was let loose in a class of toddlers for a period of five months (Tanaka et al, 2007). Initially their attitudes to it varied from session to session but in the last week as the robot finally performed its complete behavioural selection it became treated by the children as a peer instead of a toy. This is just one of a rising number of tests and case studies that indicate robot technology is extremely close to attaining all-out love from young human children, which in turn may make it of much use for schoolteachers (Tanaka et al, 2007).

Part of the cyborg theory and our perception of it revolves around their uses for making life easier – but not necessarily for themselves. Artificial intelligence researchers and engineers everywhere are working together today to create robots equipped with standard human agility to give us a helping hand with carrying out daily household chores (Ingebretsen, 2008). This technological proposition calls for all AI techniques, encompassing robotics, knowledge representation, psychology, and developmental learning, to unite for a common aim (Ingebretsen, 2008).

The uses for this robotic human aide potentially stretch further than the home, however. It has already begun in the health care system: Advocate Health Care in Illinois uses robots in two of their hospitals for dispensing pharmaceutical medications, having been programmed to read barcodes associated with literally every medication used in the specific ward (Ceniceros, 2008). These robot pharmacists are faster by a noticeable margin at filling prescriptions than their human counterparts, and much less prone to putting the wrong pill in the wrong bottle, errors like that damaging the reputation of hospital chemists in every country where hospitals can be found (Ceniceros, 2008). Yet, it must be noted that this prospect of a robotic aide in the workforce poses one ominous threat: as this hints at a possible second Industrial Revolution, the same thing that happened to working-class citizens immediately after the first could happen to future generations as a result.

But should this household and workplace robot slave become a reality and then commonplace in mass society, as they grow more highly advanced and subsequently more human, their unconditional loyalty to their owner/maker could be overridden by dangerous feelings of oppression and a lust for revenge, because humans ourselves never appreciate being confined to the life of a slave.

But how big a threat does this pose to our own stability and individual prosperity? Through interaction with communicative robots in our day-to-day lives, our attitudes and emotions with regards to the robots in question have an impact on our behavioural patterns (Nomura et al, 2008). Nomura, Kanda, Suzuki and Kato, drawing on human apprehension, passive-aggressiveness and what those can do for later robot designs and utilizing two self-developed psychological scales for negative reaction to robots (the NARS scale) and reciprocated robot anxiety (the RAS scale), through the results of their study ultimately prove there is indeed evidence within normal human behaviour of a common skepticism about the real power of our technological creations, as well as a connection – whether or not we have the willingness in us to confess it – between technology and to what degree we are in control of our demons and our emotions (Nomura et al, 2008).

As humans, it is the psychological norm for each us of to have a threshold for many negative traits we encounter in others. None of us possess an unlimited amount of patience. Robots, even whilst now they still have yet to be perfected, are conveniently oblivious to the bias we (sporadically) have to them. A recent laboratory test in Japan aimed to find just how quickly robots today respond to their owner’s orders, and to what degree of loyalty (Anonymous, 2008). Thirty-eight students were instructed to order a robot to take out the rubbish, with the cyborg taking between only one and five seconds to make a response. With a two second gap on average being the students’ limit, the robot would speak a word like “well” or “er” to assuage the student’s rapidly diminishing patience. However, when the robot used a small icebreaker to get extra time to form a response, the student did not notice how much time had passed. If the potentially cataclysmic future relations between mankind and robot-kind are to be prevented, we must program robots to have the same communicative levels we enjoy (Anonymous, 2008).

Robots potentially will form a new social minority in future decades. They will begin to outnumber us, and rise up against us if we are not extremely cautious. Fresh reports from the United Kingdom, taking into account new visions of robot status in 2056 by the UK government’s main scientist Sir David King, put forth the possibility that by then robots will be afforded the same basic social rights as every human (Glick, 2007). This will come as no surprise at all to science-fiction fanatics, since Isaac Asimov famously wrote of a future world showing just that: humans and their machine creations sharing the same basic rights everywhere they go. With his policy of the “three laws of robotics,” Asimov presented us with a picture a future utopia where robots and other machines are viewed by the hands that built them as dead objects useful only for scrap metal but should they become essential, they will demand equal rights and will get their way (Glick, 2007).

Borrowing Asimov’s philosophies of robotics in the not-too distant future and transplanting them into overwhelmingly dystopic future landscapes, several highly influential science-fiction film narratives – most notably Blade Runner, The Terminator and The Matrix – have been instrumental as technological cautionary tales with their dark predictions of the possible negative consequences of mankind’s attachment to technology (Kwan 2005). In-depth critiques of science-fiction offer a worthwhile chance for pondering the time-honored notions about the meaning of life and what boundaries there exist in life which none of us can get over. Who knows? Maybe gratitude for and knowledge of the capabilities of robotics and cyberspace could heighten trust between machines and humans, as well as presenting us with clues as what “human being” connotes in a universe dictated for the most part by technology (Kwan 2005).

Looking ahead, what can we do now to prevent Earth from turning into one very, very big rubbish can, to put it metaphorically, because of technology? Each of us needs to think about how much technology we use everyday and as well, the amount of credit we afford it. Nonetheless, or perhaps naturally many technological experts view the possibility of technology eventually causing the death of its creator as just another conspiracy theory dreamed up by science-fiction writers and their followers. Shigeo Horose of the Tokyo Institute of Technology explains, “Robot technology should not be used to interfere with natural human relations and deprive people of their pride and jobs, but should instead be the silent force behind the scenes to support the life of the people.” (Watts, 2008) In the end whoever the future will hold to be successful in their predictions – science-fiction authors/afficionados or their critics – is not the most important issue here at this point. We must work to ensure humans and robots a century from today will be unified in the same causes but able to work independently from each other.

We all have been taught at school about the most tragic mistakes made by humanity all throughout history. This begs the thought, What would psychic abilities on a global scale achieve? Should this, too, become a reality, we then will be granted a perfect opportunity to undo the mistakes of the future even before we make them. Our future is forged everyday by what we do in the present day. All we have to decide is what kind of future we would like, and to create it ourseleves.
BIBLIOGRAPHY

· Ferguson, C. L. 2001, Cyborg culture informing architecture: reinserting the human, Dalhousie University, ProQuest.
· Tanaka, F., Cicourel, A and Movellan, J. R. 2007, Socializtion between toddlers and robots at an early childhood educational centre, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States, Infotrac.
· Barras, C. 2007, The robot that learns like a child, New Scientist, Infotrac.
· Ingebretsen, M. 2008, AI helps researchers get a grip on robotic hands, IEEE Intelligent Systems, ProQuest.
· Ceniceros, R. 2008, Robots reduce errors in dispensing prescriptions, Business Insurance, ProQuest.
· Nomura, T., Kanda, T., Suzuki, T. and Kato, K. 2008, Prediction of human behaviour in human-robot interaction using psychological scales and negative attitudes towards robots, IEEE Transactions on Robotics, Infotrac.
· Anonymous, 2008, Why robots need the gilt of the gab, New Scientist, Infotrac.
· Glick, J. 2007, UK report says robots will have rights. “Always Interesting: AI in the news.” AI Magazine, Infotrac.
· Kwan, W. K. K. 2005, Experiments in subjectivity: a study of postmodern science-fiction, The University of Hong Kong, ProQuest.
· Watts, J. D. 2008, Great minds give a glimpse at possible futures, McClatchy – Tribune Business News, ProQuest.

Capital Punishment and the Media.

It is the job of a journalist to show the public either sanitised propaganda or confrontational statements of truth. The newspapers, radio stations and television networks employing them, however, dictate just what their journalists report about. Said organisations often have preferences or links with particular political parties. Presenting “safe” stories is not a journalist’s intention, but rather the intention of newspaper editors and radio and television news producers, whose greatest concern is that of selling newspapers and winning ratings – it’s a popularity contest. But it takes nothing more than their devotion to their work and concern for the awareness of their society for a journalist to take a stand and say, “Hang on, there is another more important side to this story which I must expose.”

For as long as it has been in existence, the death penalty has been a heated topic of much taboo. When it is raised in the media, it is often sanitised or purely just implied, with the criminals in question portrayed as heartless sadists instead of having their motives and reasoning highlighted. But what we ourselves think of the death penalty is irrelevant. What is relevant is why the media never seems to have a biased opinion towards it, and why some within the media are in support of it and some against.

Many reports of cases involving the death penalty have a religious historical angle. Bishop Christopher Saunders, Chairman of the Australian Catholic Social Justice Council, states, “The death penalty is an offence against the dignity and sanctity of all human life which must be respected, even in those who have done great evil. Nothing is gained through capital punishment. Indeed, use of the death penalty undermines respect for life and contributes to a culture of revenge. Such thoughts of revenge exist in contradistinction to our belief in life as a gift from God which is celebrated so vividly at this time of Christmas.” (Australia’s Leaders Should Renounce Death Penalty) Here, Bishop Saunders is making a pledge to the media to show the lighter sides of death row prisoners at a time of year which should remain synonymous with warmth and love, without implying that he thinks they have not sinned – the media tells us these convicts have sinned and shoves it down our throats.

The death penalty is clearly something of different importance for many different people. Some of us who, to begin with, are in full-fledged opposition to it may experience something which leads us to change our minds; others, vice versa. Reporters for the Sydney Morning Herald Margo Kingston and Antony Loewenstein showed then-Prime Minister John Howard as staunch opposition to capital punishment originally. When Indonesian terrorist Amrozi, one of the perpetrators of the 2002 Bali bombings, was sentenced to death, however, Loewenstein showed Prime Minister Howard as quote, “As usual, John Howard excels at having it both ways. He’s against the death penalty, but approves of it at the same time. I can’t stand the way he talks about “normal Australian” response to grief, as if there is such a thing. I think the talk of Australian values and un-Australian behaviour the most moronic expressions flung about. Next there’ll be an Australian way for buttering your toast!” (Kingston, Loewenstein, 2003).
Support for the death penalty in 2001 was surprisingly low in what would seem the most unlikely place – the United States. On June 11 that year one of the most infamous episodes in America’s recent history came to an end with the execution of 1995 Oklahoma City bomber Timothy McVeigh, however McVeigh’s execution actually found many Americans in a state of reconsideration for state killing. Of course, we all know what would tragically occur in New York City and Washington D.C. exactly two months after the day of McVeigh’s execution – the September 11 terrorist attacks on the World Trade Centre and the Pentagon. All these events encourage capital punishment supporters in their apparent message that execution is the only option for people who commit acts of mass murder. Interestingly, however, even shortly after the execution of Timothy McVeigh and the events of September 11, 2001, support in the U.S. for capital punishment was at a rate of 63, the lowest since the 1950s (Sarat 2001). This shows that despite the executions of mass murderers or acts of extreme terrorism, many still see capital punishment as a cruel and deliberate spilling of blood, and how maybe gives what the people in question might want – to be put out of their misery.

Of course, in much of the rest of the world, the U.S. is viewed, perhaps misguidedly, as a violent country, so what has happened for the majority of its population to turn against the death penalty? The main reason, according to many academics, is the introduction of DNA tests in cases since the 1990s – these are conducted to justifiably prove whether the person in question is guilty or innocent. There is also an underlying concern for the accidental execution of innocent people, and political disputes trying to sway ordinary citizens between two views (Sangillo 2007).

There is also to consider the power-plays between conservatism and liberalism. The media dehumanizes and marginalizes criminals, making an atmosphere that allows the criminal justice system to treat convicted felons harshly. This is especially the case for members of minority groups based on race and/or ethnicity. The public’s opinion on crime comes from several sources besides personal experience; fear of crime is driven by media treatments of crime rather than by statistics. The politicisation of crime has eliminated the definitions of criminals chiefly to African-American men and the poor, and death-row convicts to heartless monsters (Munro 1999).

One of the most widespread news stories of 2006 was the conviction and execution of fallen Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein. However, what was so debated, given how disliked Hussein was, was whether his execution was justified. Even Foreign Minister Alexander Downer had these words to say: “The execution of Saddam Hussein is a significant moment in Iraq’s history. He has been brought to justice, following a process of fair trial and appeal, something he denied to countless thousands of victims of his regime. Saddam and two of his former officials were found guilty and sentenced to death by the Iraqi Higher Tribunal on 5 November of crimes against humanity for the orchestration of the execution of 148 men and boys in the village of Dujail nearly 25 years ago. It is a credit to the people of Iraq that he was provided a fair trial, which lasted over a year, for this, and the gruesome other crimes for which he and his regime were responsible. No matter what one might think about the death penalty, and the Government of Iraq is aware of the Australian Government’s position on capital punishment, we must also respect the right of sovereign states to pass judgment relating to crimes committed against their people, within their jurisdictions.” (Downer, 2006) Members of Civil Liberties Australia both agreed and disagreed with Downer’s statement, with CLA Director Vic Adams claiming, “The death penalty overturns that most basic of all human rights - the right to life. This does not change if the person involved is Saddam Hussein or Scott Rush, one of Australia’s forgotten “Bali 9” on death row. In the case of Saddam, the state-sponsored killing can only be for revenge as it is hardly a deterrent. Countries which continue to practise the death penalty have no right to be called civilised. Where are Australia’s politicians protesting such barbarity?” (Adams 2006)

Everyone has their own views on the state’s shedding of blood, and everyone is entitled to his or her views on it. The death penalty is most definitely a very topical and touchy issue; however, whether we like it or not, it is one that will not go away. But individual views on it are irrelevant here. What is relevant is why and how the media talk down to us by, at the least, watering down capital punishment, or at the most, glorifying it. Why does the media think we are all like impressionable children? Why do the media feel that we should be inclined to see things from their point of view? Of course, capital punishment is indeed a very sensitive topic, but underneath all the unsentimental bloodshed it involves, it is a human rights issue. Those are the stories that matter the most.
BIBLIOGRAPHY

· Author/s not stated, 19/12/2003, Australia’s Leaders Should Renounce Death Penalty, http://www.socialjustice.catholic.org.au/CONTENT/media_releases/2003_12_19_1072095434.html
· Kingston, M. and Loewenstein, A. 2003, Capital punishment: honest John goes all postmodern, Sydney Morning Herald, 18/18/03, http://www.smh.com.au/articles/2003/08/18/1061059762662.html
· Sarat, A. 2001, When the state kills: capital punishment and the American condition, http://books.google.com/books?hl=en&lr=&id=YD0W6BYp5vAC&oi=fnd&pg=PR9&dq=capital+punishment+and+the+media&ots=XKdomne2fd&sig=uBp8la8-oJGOfhNQUzHz7QpH_yo#PPP1,M1
· Sangillo, G. 2007, Death and innocence, National Journal magazine, Vol. 39, Iss. 17, find through ProQuest
· Munro, V.T. 1999, Images of crime and criminals: How media creations drive public opinion and policy, University of Minnesota
· Downer, A. 2006, Execution of Saddam Hussein, 30 December 2006, http://www.foreignminister.gov.au/releases/2006/fa145_06.html
· McKenzie, M.H., Adams, V., Klugman, K. et al, Civil Liberties Australia – What you say 2006, Civil Liberties Australia, http://www.claact.org.au/pages/yoursay.php

From the moment art was first created, life has imitated it. Artists and storytellers have all through the ages devoted their lives to creating things that should provide depictions of reality that ring true with our own perfect wishes for our lives. Indeed, none of us lead perfectly joyous existences, but through such depictions of perfection we can imagine it. Then there is nostalgia. Revisiting our past through things we have held onto from our childhood and youth allows us to think of all the defining moments in our lives, and this helps us look on the bright side of our lives in the present day. Film is one medium which can provide nostalgic feelings. However, film in the postmodern era has increasingly swayed away from the connection between the past and the present, and instead attempts to show reflections on the past with fragmentation and humour, making those of us who experienced the era discussed in the film almost feel embarrassed, rather than nostalgic.

In this essay I shall highlight and deconstruct the depictions of fragmented and parodic nostalgia in the films Almost Famous, Forrest Gump and Little Miss Sunshine.

The 2000 film Almost Famous, a semi-autobiographical film of writer-director Cameron Crowe’s own youth experiences, fills in all the nooks and crannies of the American rock music scene of the 1970s. William Miller is a fifteen-year-old budding journalist who successfully lies about his age so he can become a reporter for Rolling Stone magazine and break away from his overbearing mother, who looks contemptuously at any form of popular culture. In the film, the rock stars are shown for laughs as bickering and raving lunatics who most of the time cannot get on with their bandmates and are too high to play a good show anyway.

The opening title sequence in Almost Famous is a suitably nostalgic opening for a film designed to carry nostalgic significance for the youth of a bygone era. It evokes the early seventies rock scene by panning slowly over a collection of vinyl album covers, concert souvenirs, and eight-track tapes. And, perhaps by no coincidence, the production company behind Almost Famous is called Vinylfilms (Auner 2000). It is the perfect opening titles sequence for this film because it tells us, if we have not heard anything about the film prior to watching, that we are going to be taking a journey back in time to the seventies.

Almost Famous exposes, for both those of us never experienced the seventies and those who didn’t see the darkest side of seventies counter-culture, the negative aspects of the lives of rock stars – addiction, pressure, and the frustrations of, as William puts it, “a mid-level band struggling with their own limitations in the harsh face of stardom.” And since rock and roll is something embedded in our collective consciousness as deeply as television, literature and cinema, this depiction of the grittiness of rock-star life is equally relevant today.

The 1994 film Forrest Gump takes us on a journey over four tumultuous decades in American history, the 1950s through the 1980s, through the eyes of the titular character of Forrest Gump. Forrest is a dimwit from Greenbow, Alabama who, among other things, has fought in Vietnam, become a national football and ping-pong star and has crossed paths with John Lennon, John F. Kennedy, Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon, while his true love Jenny eludes him. Now, while waiting at a bus stop for the bus that will take him to Jenny, Forrest tells his incredible story to anyone who will listen to him. As it turns out, Jenny’s life has taken a vastly different course, as we learn she has over the years protested the war and embraced alcohol, drugs and illicit sex.

As he guides us through the story, Forrest’s low IQ comes through the entire time in his misinterpretations of the events he is trying to describe, which does not make him a reliable narrator. For much of the film, Forrest’s impairments are exploited for laughs and he is oblivious to the prejudice others have towards him. Thus he only ever remains an onlooker and his narration places him right in the middle of the events of four decades of American history (Boyle 2001). However, his kind-hearted everyman qualities ultimately make him the spokesman for the Baby Boomers of America, who came of age during the era in which the whole of their country did.

The ways in which Forrest almost magically falls into one poignant historical event after another are the devices that make the film postmodern. Its treating history as a flexible story which welcomes Forrest’s appearances alongside so many influential historical figures is one of the film’s most distinctive elements, and it is, indeed, one of its points of postmodernism. If one theoretical use of postmodernism can be to show history as a narrative like any other, then a back-up point to a stronger one is that that narrative can always be messed with - people like Gump can be inserted into a story, and therefore they can be inserted into history, and others can just as easily be removed (Scott 2001, p. 3).

Agreeably it is hard to look past the fact that Forrest is the handicapped son of a single mother with an African-American man as his best friend, but while some misled critics have referred to Forrest Gump as conservative thanks to its supposed all-American themes, violence – however sanitized it may be – is an inevitable part of Forrest’s story. The film discusses interpersonal violence (notably bullying, homicide and, very subtly, child abuse) and struggle (Ku Klux Klan uprisings, antiwar protests, the Vietnam War), all of which are central to the film’s revisionist history as well as the coming-of-age aspect of the story (Boyle 2001).

During our upbringings, we all get poignant memories of our relationship with our family and the special gatherings we had with them, while such gatherings were still possible. The 2006 film Little Miss Sunshine rings true with our respective memories of those happy, sad, and sometimes plain tense times with our families.

Little Miss Sunshine follows the Hoovers, a normal working-class American family who embark on a cross-country trip to California so seven-year-old daughter Olive can compete in the Little Miss Sunshine child beauty pageant. There’s just one problem: other than Olive, they all have a few reservations with one other member of their family. Father Richard, a struggling motivational speaker, and mother Sheryl are almost broke and their marriage on the rocks. Sheryl’s brother Frank is a gay Proust scholar who has just unsuccessfully attempted suicide. Richard’s foul-mouthed and homophobic father Edwin has just been evicted from his nursing home for snorting cocaine, and Dwayne, Sheryl’s fifteen-year-old son from a previous marriage, is a depressed teen who has taken a vow of silence and hates everyone.

On the surface, Little Miss Sunshine does not seem like a movie that harks back to a bygone era, what with its setting in the present day. However, each Hoover family member, except for Olive, inwardly yearns for the more innocent and happy times in their past, something we all tend to do when our present odds seem insurmountable. Their cross-country trip elicits dormant emotions and re-opens old wounds for the Hoovers, and as we watch this dysfunctional family somewhat unknowingly forming a closer bond with each other by (reluctantly) baring their souls to each other, our own memories of the bonding car trips we have had with our families over the years come flooding back. Also, there is a semi-autobiographical side to the film, with it being based on screenwriter Michael Arndt’s own childhood family car trip experience.

Road movies are normally populated by characters whose ability to overcome their sociopathic ways eventually helps them to look on the bright side of life. Families are portrayed in this way less often. The yellow VW bus the Hoovers travel in is a good metaphor for their “dysfunctional family” status: the VW bus is reminiscent of vehicles of the 1960s and 1970s, a time when the conservative American ideal of perfection had not yet taken hold, and the vehicle is already in such a dilapidated state that it seems to be breaking apart just as quickly as its contents. This indicates a light-hearted parody of “conventional” family relationships, yet the moments of pathos in the movie gives the viewer a way to identify with one character or just to emotionally connect with each character, despite how they are all presented as a bunch of losers (Luzón 2006). We are meant to empathize with the Hoovers but also to laugh at them, rather than with them. Ultimately they show us how much worse our families could be, and to make us more thankful that our families are nothing like them.

While Little Miss Sunshine possibly only does this if the viewer can identify with it, Almost Famous and Forrest Gump both illustrate how certain icons and events of the past came to be so important and influential in the first place. In Almost Famous, Stillwater’s (the fictional band in the film) lead guitarist Russell Hammond, after falling out with the other band members and getting stoned at a party, boards their tour-bus to muted silence. Soon after, Elton John’s “Tiny Dancer” plays over the radio, with everyone singing along and remembering what brought them together to begin with –the music (Olsen 2000).

Forrest Gump does this in two ways. Firstly, it looks back on many historical events – some that united the world and others that divided the world – that have since between studied in school classrooms, all over the world, and attempts to pinpoint the reasons why memories of these events continue to get poignant, angry or sad reactions from the people who were alive at the time. It brings to the forefront the processes of re-construction, merging the past with the present, utilizing real-life footage and fiction, and this merger acknowledges how history and myth are stamped in the collective consciousness of a specific country (Cook 2004).
But what each of these three films have in common, with regards to their postmodern takes on nostalgia, is an underlying (and it is especially subtle in Little Miss Sunshine) and unflinching exposé on American subculture and how it is almost just as bad today as it was back then. Indeed, all three films feature a character who takes drugs, and these exposés – when spotted – actually make each film feel much less sentimental than they initially seem. Almost Famous and Forrest Gump, in their darker, more emotional moments, show the inescapable force of an American dystopia which sucks people in and destroys their lives, irrevocably shattering the American Dream.

Little Miss Sunshine shows this by depicting a nuclear family at war with each other, and the dangers stemming from American institutions like child beauty pageants – indeed, Olive’s naughty dance routine at the Little Miss Sunshine pageant is actually a statement against these breeding grounds for paedophiles. And as Jim Emerson writes, “Little Miss Sunshine shows us a world in which there’s a form, a brochure, a procedure, a job title, a diet, a step-by-step program, a career path, a prize, a retirement community, to quantify, sort, categorize and process every human emotion or desire. Nothing exists that cannot be compartmentalized or turned into a self-improvement mantra about “winners and losers.”” (Emerson 2006)

Almost Famous, at the time of its release in 2000, was in the middle of a slew of 1970s-set feature films. How these films recycled seventies pop culture is not only the latest example kitsch mish-mashes that have been present in cinema for decades. At the bottom of the dustbin of history there lies an unlimited goldmine of stories and images that are of relevance today. The most notable aspect of Almost Famous, however is the film’s rebellious sincerity, which strangely works well with its gritty texture of seventies subculture, because the film is essentially Cameron Crowe’s tribute to the people who helped him gather his fondest youth memories (Scott 2000).

In Forrest Gump, which is arguably the most groundbreaking of the three films under the spotlight here, we are guided by a man through his life story, in which he has often been thrust onto the sidelines of history unknowingly and by accident, when he is too simple to have completely understood any of it. This makes the film’s deconstruction of history warped, yet simultaneously it provides us with an historical viewpoint that is subversive in the way it alters and sometimes softens historical recollections for the innocent in us (which is really done simply for laughs), because Forrest’s mental condition has enabled him to retain his innocence. The film’s deconstruction and contemporizing of history most clear, however, in how star Tom Hanks was digitally placed into old footage of many of the historical events of which Forrest becomes a part.

Finally, Little Miss Sunshine is ultimately a fractured story of an even-more fractured family and how time heals their collective wounds, bringing them closer together (albeit in the face of tragedy) while it is still possible. While it vastly differs from Almost Famous and Forrest Gump in its time setting, Little Miss Sunshine ultimately becomes a twisted allegory and something of a cautionary tale for all families. We all recall long and uncomfortable car journeys with our families, and it does not matter if our relationship with them was anything like the relationships the Hoovers have with each other, because whether or not we want to admit, we all either grew up with someone who was, or once were ourselves, just like one of the Hoovers.

Cinema has always depicted and deliberately provoked feeling of nostalgia as a means to touch the hearts of even the most cynical audiences. But often throughout the decades, nostalgia cinema has become one of deliberate sentimentality. It is obvious the two go hand-in-hand, and since some of us dislike one or the other or perhaps even both, the challenging and often satirical exploits of postmodernism have to be thrown into the mix to give the film an edge of fragmented and parodic nostalgia. Almost Famous and Forrest Gump show the light and shade of the counterculture of the last four decades and never shy away from making those of us who experienced them almost feel ashamed to say that that is where they came from. Little Miss Sunshine, on the other hand, throws normal American family values out the window, giving us a story of a nuclear family who come to remind us of the people we grew up living with, reminding us that we must always move on from the past without forgetting it. Also, each of these films are only light on the surface. Collectively, these three films prove nostalgia that is fragmented and parodic is a refreshing and savage form of postmodern sentimentality we can all fall in love with.




BIBLIOGRAPHY

· Crowe, C. 2000, Almost famous, Columbia TriStar Pictures, Vinylfilms
· Zemeckis, R. 1994, Forrest Gump, Paramount Pictures
· Dayton, J. Faris, V. 2006, Little Miss Sunshine, Fox Searchlight Pictures
· Auner, J. 2000, Making old machines speak: images of technology in recent music, http://www.humnet.ucla.edu/echo/Volume2-Issue2/auner/auner.pdf, SUNY Stony Brook
· Boyle, K. 2001, New man, old brutalisms? Reconstructing a violent history in Forrest Gump, University of Wolverhampton, UK, http://www.scope.nottingham.ac.uk/article.php?issue=dec2001&id=280&section=article
· Scott, S. D. 2001, Like a box of chocolates: Forrest Gump and postmodernism, p. 3, Literature Film Quarterly, http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_qa3768/is_200101/ai_n8934162/pg_1
· Luzón, V. 2006, Little Miss Sunshine, Cinema, Culture and Society Portal, http://ccs.filmculture.net/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=71&Itemid=38
· Olsen, M. 2000, The uncool: Cameron Crowe discusses the making of “Almost Famous,” Film Comment magazine, September 2000 issue, http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m1069/is_5_36/ai_65643706/pg_2
· Cook, P. 2004, Screening the past: memory and nostalgia in cinema, find through Google Book Search
· Emerson, J. 2006, Little Miss Sunshine (review), http://rogerebert.suntimes.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20060803/REVIEWS/60724005/1023
· Scott, A. O. 2000, Ah the good old bad old 70’s, published in The New York Times, find through ProQuest