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A Sadistic Gaze: Sexual Assault in Into the Forest
The trope of the “strong female character” has become almost as tiring as the picture-perfect Mary Sue. For a time it seemed that in lieu of, say, strong writing and dynamic personhood female characters were defined by the level by which they achieved masculine strength. For a time, this type of writing was loosely considered “feminist” in mainstream thought. However, feminism reaches more deeply than just switching a woman’s personality from the traditionally genteel to the gruffness of the traditionally masculine.
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Sung, Not Seen: Dario Argento’s Suspiria (1977)
(Intro to Film, Spring 2023) Alex Noyer’s Sound of Violence (2021) asks a question: what if the first sound you ever heard was one of pain (Noyer)? The heroine, Alexis (Jasmine Savoy Brown), grew up deaf until her hearing returned during the murder of her family when she was ten. As a college student, she studies “experimental sounds,” but while the sound of screaming pigs at a slaughterhouse is beautiful to her—resonant of the first thing she ever heard—those around her are appalled at her choice of musical focus. While a somewhat roughly-crafted film, the question is one that has stuck with me. Does sound really affect us that much?…
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How Moral Panic Hijacks Individual Autonomy
[A] human being is endowed with free will. He can use this to choose between good and evil. If he can only perform good or only perform evil, then he is a clockwork orange—meaning that he has the appearance of an organism lovely with colour and juice, but is in fact only a clockwork toy to be wound up by God or the Devil or (since this is increasingly replacing both) the Almighty State. (Burgess)
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Resisting Passivity in Rebel Without a Cause
A snapshot of 1950s America looks different to different people. An idea floats among public discourse even today that the 1950s sitcom Leave It to Beaver accurately represented life in America, but the external polish of suburbia harshly conflicted with the slowly rotting foundation of “traditional” life. The Cold War took up the mantle of global tensions after World War II introduced the atomic bomb.
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How White Elitism Trash-Talks Hollywood Diversity
Once upon a time, I lived on the cusp of the film industry. My family resided a mere forty-five minutes outside of Hollywood. Weekend trips to Universal Studios weren’t unusual. My dad shared stories of a family friend’s exploits as lead cameraman for a famous director. When I left the state of California and moved to North Idaho, I learned that my childhood wasn’t a “normal” American experience. Like any discourse community—a term defined by Kevin Davis in his “Does Coming to College Mean Becoming Someone New?” essay as “groups of people who share patterns and strategies of communication” (Davis)—Hollywood movie-making culture carries its own definition of reality that’s not…
Eight guinea pigs and poor time management.
