The extreme always seems to make an impression

Watching Heathers in this day and age was a very uneasy experience. The topics that we hear over and over in the news today; bullying, suicide, teen shootings, were all brought up in such a light manner. Willa Paskin states how people should watch the film twice because on the first viewing you'll just be thinking "this movie could never be made now" and that was how I felt. I actually felt bad laughing at some of the jokes in the film but it was also sort of a relief to laugh at the same time, because in these times you just aren't really "allowed" to laugh at these types of things. They are all very sensitive manners.

I was about 9 when the Columbine school shooting happened and I just remember it being plastered over every news channel, even Nickelodeon had a show on about the shooting asking teenagers how they felt about it. I remember all the images of it so vividly. I feel like this was such a huge turning point in not only how people felt about bullying/teen shootings but how the media covered this type of news. The media tries to figure every little thing out about the shooters, about the family of the shooters, about why the shooters did this, etc. They almost glamorize it in ways. You can get on the news if you shoot up your school! Similarly, there are so many kids you hear about committing suicide today because of bullying and it's all over the news. Their friends (maybe not even their real friends like in the film) and family go on the news and talk about how they were such a great person. This is much like in Heathers. As Veronica states in the film, "suicide gave Heather depth, Kurt a soul, and Ram a brain." And then Martha, a girl who actually does get picked on tries to follow in on the suicides. I think that the "glamorization" of suicide in Heathers compared to how the media reacts to school shootings, teen suicides, and bullying and also glamorizes it now a days is interesting and there are actually a lot of similarities.    

Another aspect of the film that I found interesting was all that quotable dialogue. Although I'd never watched Heathers before I had definitely heard the quote "lick it up, baby lick it up" and many others. I really love how Paskin compares it to Clueless. I was definitely thinking about that film while watching Heathers ("as if!"). Another film that it reminds me of is Mean Girls. One of my favorite films that is also so quotable "That is so very" in Heathers reminded me of "that's so fetch" in Mean Girls. Both films also deal with cliques, evil girls that basically rule the school, and just the basic workings of high school. The BIG difference in these two films though, is that Mean Girls has a feel good ending. Heathers definitely does not. Heathers is a very cynical film with no moral to the story at the end. To me it was almost a direct parody of The Breakfast Club. J.D. being Bender and Veronica being Claire. It's like what happened after that one detention they shared together! 

There's always work at the post office!

The film, Hollywood Shuffle, was really interesting to me on many levels. For one, as Harriet Margolis brings up, it uses self directed stereotypes to make a point. The point being that there is a lack of substantial roles for African American actors in film and television and the characters that are there are stereotypical and misrepresented of actual African Americans. Through the use of satire, Robert Townsend uses these negative stereotypes put out by the mass media and turns them against Hollywood. The film is obviously a comedy but to a white audience I think the intent was supposed to make them think "should I really be laughing at this?"

The narrative is split up into two parts, the real life of Bobby Taylor, an aspiring actor who has a crappy job ("Winky. Dinky. Doooog!") and his fantasy sequences that represent the mental and external roadblocks he encounters being a black actor in Hollywood. The dream/fantasy sequences reminded me of the ones characters on my favorite television series, Six Feet Under have, which basically brings to light what the individual character is feeling internally. In Hollywood Shuffle these sequences, including "Black Acting School" and "Sneaking into the Movies", all deal with stereotypical characters from movies featuring black actors. I think the comedy and satirical nature of these sequences really bring out how ridiculous these stereotypes are and also how true it is that films and the media misrepresent African Americans. This is why the jokes make white people laugh uncomfortably. Again, the question is "should I really be laughing at this?" 

Hollywood Shuffle deals with racial and stereotypical issues in a very different way than those of other films such as Crash, which is not a parody at all. However, there is a scene in Crash that makes me think of  Hollywood Shuffle. Terrence Howard's character in Crash, a film director, gets told by a white producer of a film that a certain actor is "talking a lot less black lately" certainly inferring that the actor must act less intelligent to be in a black character's role. In Hollywood Shuffle, Bobby gets told to act "more black" by the white director and producer of the black exploitation film he gets cast in. It is interesting how these two films are completely different in genre but bring up the same points of how African Americans are represented in film.  

The war is over for me now, but it will always be there

War films aren't really my cup of tea. I've never really enjoyed them. Still, Platoon is one that I do find interesting. It is the first film about the Vietnam War that showed a realistic depiction of what the soldiers went through on a day to day basis. Lawrence W. Lichty and Raymond L. Carroll bring up how the first films that were made about the Vietnam War that came out before Platoon, such as John Wayne's The Green Berets and The Boys in Company C, tried to show the lighter side of the war rather than the hell it actually was. Although not realistic of the war and harshly reviewed by critics, The Green Berets was successful in ticket sales and "many in the audience cheered" when they first saw it. This showed that in 1968, people did want this type of war film and maybe that they were trying to get away from the actual horror of it through films and media.

The Green Berets (1968)

By 1986 this had changed. I think that the audience who grew up seeing images of the war on the news and in the papers and soldiers who were actually there wanted there to be, and for others to see a realistic depiction of the war and what they actually went through. This is where Platoon was quite successful. The film's director, Oliver Stone, served in Vietnam and the film is loosely based on his experiences, another reason it's so realistic. The scene where the platoon reaches a village, burns it down, and kills and rapes its inhabitants  is one of the rawest scenes in any film I've ever seen. It's extremely disturbing to watch. However, this film does not completely shy away from exaggerating events and making them more imaginative. For example, the image/scene that is depicted on many posters and ads, where Elias is shot multiple times is much more movie like than trying to show a reality of the war.

Poster for Platoon 

Another interesting point about Platoon is how much of the story and characters can be paralleled to David Lynch's Blue Velvet.  The main character in both films are college aged males who get themselves into a living hell. In Platoon, Chris Taylor drops out of college and volunteers for combat duty in Vietnam and ends up realizing he has made a huge mistake. Similarly, in Blue Velvet, Jeffrey Beaumont investigates a mysterious women's apartment after finding an ear in a field, also realizing it's a huge mistake when he comes into contact with the sadistic Frank Booth. Both of these characters are seemingly innocent and relatable when they are first introduced to the audience but this soon changes and the major theme of moral ambiguity is entered into both films. In Platoon, Taylor becomes frustrated and snaps at a young disabled man which leads to his bludgeoning. In Blue Velvet, Jeffrey becomes a bit similar to Frank Booth and hits Dorothy when she asks him to. These and other actions from the two characters lead the viewer to question if we're really supposed be rooting for them. 

Chris Taylor (Charlie Sheen) in Platoon

Jeffrey Beaumont (Kyle MacLachlan) in Blue Velvet (1986)

Get away from her, you bitch!

This is the first time I had ever seen a film from the Alien series and surprisingly I loved it. I had no idea that the main character was female. I had always thought that it was like Rambo in space, big macho guys shooting down aliens to protect people.. or something like that. However, Aliens wasn't like that at all. The main character, Ellen Ripley, is a badass lady! The first badass lady in a huge action/sci-fi film to be exact. This is much more normal to see in films of the 90's and today but in the 1980's, I'm sure it was a bit shocking. TIME magazine was clearly very perplexed by this, as they put Sigourney Weaver on the front cover with full make-up and her hair done, next to a picture of the "She-Monster."

Sigourney Weaver on the cover of TIME magazine

Sigourney Weaver in Aliens

Jeffrey Brown brings up the fact that many critics were also put off and confused by this new kind of female action heroine. He states that several of them felt that lead female characters in action films were actually male impersonators or "really only 'boys' in 'girls' clothing". This bothers me for many reasons. Firstly this reinstates the sexist notion of the stereotypical women in films who are always passive and actually do not help the story line of a film at all. They are the ones needing to be saved. All the female characters in Aliens challenge this idea including the background characters, such as Pvt. Vasquez, who in the end decides to commit suicide rather than being captured by the aliens. She takes matters into her own hands rather than waiting for anyone (especially a guy) to save her. She is also very masculine in her appearance and how she acts but when asked the question "have you ever been mistaken for a man?" she rebuffs it with "no, have you?"

Jenette Goldstein as Pvt. Vasquez

Another female character in Aliens, the main villain of the film, is the Xenomorph Queen. I feel like the film was clearly showing that she was a female alien. Which is interesting because this was another uncommon appearance in the 80s, women as villains. There is an extremely tense scene between the heroine and the female villain in the film and the viewer is made to think that they have some sort of motherly bond or connection but in actuality Ripley disregards the connection and lights the Queen's eggs on fire. This to me was showing Ripley as an even stronger hero, that she is the ultimate mother figure who protects her adopted daughter, Newt more than anything else.

Ripley and Newt

This scene also leads to the final showdown between Ripley and the Queen. The Queen comes back for vengeance and Ripley comes back fighting in a robotic machine body. Again, showing that the Queen is female, Ripley says "get away from her, you bitch!" Which is an awesome moment. There is also a moment in Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, when Molly Weasley says "not my daughter, you bitch!" that completely echoes this scene. I feel like J.K. Rowling was influenced by Ripley's motherly strength in Aliens while writing it. In fact it's another female hero vs. female villain type scene which is interesting.

Aliens

Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part 2

All in all, I thought Aliens was awesome. It portrayed women as strong individuals and the aliens were actually frightening. I'll definitely be watching the other films in the franchise very soon. 

Don't toast to my health, toast to my fuck!

After watching Blue Velvet, I was confused. I didn't quite know what to make of it. My thought from the beginning of the film to the end (especially the end actually) was "this is completely ridiculous". I didn't really understand that that was indeed the point David Lynch was trying to make until searching the net for interpretations, reading the article, and watching another Lynch film called Mulholland Drive. In Blue Velvet, Mulholland Drive, and Lynch's other work he uses not only odd but very cinematic images and sounds to always make sure that the viewer is uncomfortable and to keep them guessing if what they are watching is actually real or all just a dream. This is clear just from the opening sequence in Blue Velvet, which shows highly saturated bright colored flowers against a perfect blue sky and a white picket fence.  Irena Makarushka brings up the fact the color scheme is red, white, and blue furthering the fact that Lynch intended this to be the all American dream. The flowers fade into a man wearing a blue shirt waving very stiffly from a fire truck with a dalmation by his side (red, white, and blue again). All these images make the world Lynch is bringing us into more artificial than anything else. The sequence then dissolves from these artificial "American Dream" images to a man apparently having a heart attack and the camera zooming into the blades of grass juxtaposed with eerie sounds, something from a horror film, and then the festering of beetles beyond the ground. This alludes to the fact that below the artificial "American Dream" it isn't so perfect after all.  

The "American Dream"

Lynch not only confuses  his viewers with the images he shows but also the way he portrays his characters. Similarly how Madonna complicated the roles of women and Prince complicated gender roles in the 1980s, Lynch complicates the archetypes of his characters while also showing the ambiguity of good and evil. For example, we are first introduced with the character who we most likely assume will be the "hero" of the film, Jeffrey. We soon learn this is not the case. After finding an ear in a field of grass and putting it into a paper bag before handing it over to the police (which isn't gross at all or anything) he is increasingly intrigued by his findings. Sandy, the policeman's "All American" apparently innocent daughter emerges from the darkness with just the information he's looking for. This leads to Sandy's question of whether Jeffrey is a detective or a pervert. Is Jeffrey good or evil? He spies on Dorothy and ends up hitting her during sex. To me, Jeffrey thinks that by taking care of Dorothy it will make him good, a better person, to step away from being like the sadistic Frank Booth. In fact, Frank even says "you're like me" when they're on their "joy ride". Frank Booth is another complicated archetype of his own. He rapes Dorothy, beats up Jeffrey, and is an extremely cruel and frightening person in general but yet he starts crying not only during the "In Dreams" scene but also while Dorothy is singing "Blue Velvet". What is up with that? Is Frank just completely psychotic or does he have some sort of feelings for Dorothy? What happened to make Frank be this type of person? These questions are never answered. 

Frank moved by Dorothy's performance

Another interesting element to Lynch's work is his use of color symbolism. As stated above in Blue Velvet, he uses the highly saturated colors of red, white, blue to represent the artificial "American Dream". But how about how the inside of Sandy's house is white and Dorothy's apartment is a deep, blood red? Sandy is supposed to be the archetypal "virgin" or "good girl" (she also only wears pink and white throughout the whole film) while Dorothy is this more film noir-ish femme fatale type character, even though she isn't really completely that. She's a victim as well as being dangerous. Isabella Rossellini has described her as a broken doll who tries to cover up her pain and madness with makeup and a wig, which we see her taking off in only one scene.

Dorothy's Apartment

Sandy's House

The end of film is laughable but in a very uncomfortable way. It reiterates Sandy's dream about robin's representing love and happiness. However, the robin that's shown isn't real at all but extremely mechanical with bugs hanging out of its beak. The robin fades into those beautiful, colorful flowers and the fireman from the beginning sequence waving again so we can all assume that everything is perfect and great in that  artificial "All American" dream world again, can't we?

The fake robin of love

Screws fall out all the time, the world is an imperfect place.

Dear Mr. Vernon, we accept the fact that we had to sacrifice a whole Saturday in detention for whatever it was we did wrong. But we think you're crazy to make us write an essay telling you who we think we are. You see us as you want to see us - in the simplest terms, in the most convenient definitions. But what we found out is that each one of us is a brain...and an athlete ...and a basket case... a princess...and a criminal...

Does that answer your question? Sincerely yours, the Breakfast Club.

This voiceover, read in the beginning and the end of The Breakfast Club completely sums up the point of the film for me. It wasn't about whether these characters talked to each other after that Saturday or were even nice to each other. It was the fact that these characters had this experience as individuals. The tagline of the film also sums it up perfectly "they only met once. but it changed their lives forever." They all got to hear the perspectives of other kids in the school that they would probably never talk to if they weren't forced together in one room, but also they got some deep stuff out. The scene where they're all sitting on the floor, talking to each other is filmed as close-up shots when they get into the serious conversations. There isn't a wide shot until there's a lighter conversation. I think this is because internally some of the things they say need to come out for them as characters. It's a character driven film rather than a friendship driven film like I feel a lot of people expect it to be. 

However, since watching it multiple times since the first time watching the film while I was still in high school (and especially watching it recently) I do think the ending is especially problematic. Bender constantly picks on Claire the whole time but yet she ends up sneaking into the closet to kiss him. Brian writes the paper because Claire asks him to. Allison gets a makeover from Claire to get the guy. This is the biggest problem I have with the film since Allison is my favorite character. Labeled as "crazy" throughout the film when I thought she was just a strange outsider who wanted attention because her parents are extremely neglectful (shown in the opening scene). And then she is basically turned into an upper-class princess like Claire just with a makeover. In "Postfeminist Cliques? Class, Postfeminism, and the Molly Ringwald-John Hughes Films", Bleach writes "But Allison’s individualism is coded as “crazy” in the world of the film; her acquisitiveness, run rampant, is kleptomania. And, as her makeover demonstrates, in the Reagan era, her differences are erased (and conveniently forgotten) by the workings of the upper class." I think it was obvious why there was so much ambivalence towards Claire from the others. She represented this upper-class Reagan era type girl talked about in the article. No matter how much they picked on her, in the end she still has the power. She still gets the nerd to write the paper, she transforms the middle-class girl into an upper-class girl like her to get the guy, and she kisses the criminal to make her parents mad. I think in the 80's there probably was this ambivalence towards the upper-class from the working class (and there still is somewhat) and the film also shows how much advantage the upper-class have over the lower classes.

On a lighter note,  I feel like this film has some of the best moments and most quotable scenes ever. Another reason that makes it so iconic. When the principle does the devil horns or the "eat my shorts" scene.... and the dancing and teenage angst...ah it's so great. I don't know how the article can question why it's still popular after all these years.

Desperately Seeking Madonna?

Desperately Seeking Susan was not my cup of tea. I thought it was tiresome and not funny, with the exception of Gary who was idiotic and one dimensional (aka stereotypical) which was the reason he was so funny. All the men were not too smart actually (which wasn't a downer for the film just something I noticed). Jim was just a sucker for Susan and Dez (which all I could really focus on when he was on the screen was his really amazing blue eyes) was a sucker for Roberta in many ways and didn't even realize when she was telling the truth because he was in such a daze of being with her. "I never know what you're gonna say next..." (I kind of feel like they tried to reverse the typical roles of male and females in relationships here) The main character, Roberta  annoyed me throughout the whole film. Why are you stalking Madonna aka Susan? That's just creepy to begin with. I did enjoy the fact that through the whole experience Roberta becomes her own person and gets away from Gary, and also how Susan and Roberta team up in the end. The ending sort of paid off for the annoying story line.

Something else that helped out the film was Madonna. My expectations on the film were also confused like some others in the class. I thought that she would be the starring role but she wasn't. I feel like if the film had focused on developing her character more it would have been better, but I realize that really wasn't the point of it. Madonna already was a huge superstar before the film was made so it wouldn't do anything to boost her career like Purple Rain did for Prince.

However, something similar between the two artists is that they definitely knew how to sell themselves. Prince, Madonna, Michael Jackson, and others from the 80's knew how to create an image and get people talking about them. The created archetypes for themselves. Prince and Michael Jackson complicated the way people see gender roles. Madonna complicated the way people think of women. She complicated the stereotypical aspects of women that can be seen in films... the whore, the virgin, the dumb blonde, etc. She confused and excited people with her image and made money from it. In the article by Jane Miller, she states how Madonna tapped into America's obsession with Christian mythology as well. Madonna used and wore crosses as a fashion accessory, something that had never really been done before her. Or, how about the "Like A Prayer" music video? Not only is it deliberately filled with burning crosses and other religious imagery but it deals with racial issues. A black man getting arrested for a white man's crime and an African-American Jesus? I'm sure the Moral Majority was up in arms due to this one. But the mass of people were loving it. "Like A Prayer" was number one on the Billboard 200 list for over a month. Madonna was obviously cashing out on the way she used these images and images of herself to make people uncomfortable and to make them talk about her. I'd say that she was probably the queen of post-modernism, taking so many other images, people, and things and creating her own image (which is uncomfortable to watch in some ways) while selling it.

This leads to the question of  was Madonna (and other starts from the past and today) doing any good or are/were we just buying into this brand she was trying to sell to us? In my opinion, I think that it's both. Madonna was bringing up issues of religion, race, feminism back in the days when people weren't talking about these types of things. This is a lot like Lady Gaga now. She's selling you this image of herself but she's also bringing up issues dealing with gay equality. They both bring these subject matters up into the mainstream so even if we are buying into these ideas and images of what they are, they're still bringing up important issues that should be talked about. It's a double edged sword.