Webcomics!

In our last class, we discussed graphic fiction and comics. I was sort of pumped to talk about this, because I thought that I enjoyed reading comics, but it turned out that I wasn’t familiar with almost everything that we discussed. That was cool too, because I learned some “history” stuff on the genre, but it also made me wonder what comics I had been reading that were somehow different from the ones we discussed. Excuse me while I do a little bit of reminiscing:

When I was younger, my comic-knowledge was entirely Japanese; that is, I read lots of manga. I worked my way through the manga section of Barnes & Noble (I didn’t know of any comic book stores nearby), and only around high school did I start to venture into the other, smaller end of the comic book shelf (simply labeled “graphic novels”). I picked up a few books that stuck with me (the BONE series was particularly fantastic), but for the most part I had trouble finding stories that I liked here. At this point, though, it was becoming pretty uncool to read manga, so I started reading a new genre of graphic fiction: webcomics.

I think webcomics are a pretty fascinating subgenre. For starters, just the fact that there are artists creating and distributing comics totally for free is pretty strange. But, of course, that opens them up to countless possibilities. It’s basically the ultimate indie: not only does the artist not have to satisfy a publisher, they also don’t have to stick to deadlines or even worry about pleasing an audience. There’s quite a range of subjects (although in my experience it’s a lot of in video game joke comics, there’s also a weird range of most genres). Besides this freedom, a webcomic is also able to utilize its medium (the internet) in ways that a traditional book cannot. The “comic” Homestuck really pushes this: it tells a story using image, text, animation, music, interactive games, and even the webpage itself. Actually, I wish I’d brought up Homestuck in class, because I think it’s a super interesting evolution of the graphic narrative.

Homestuck!

What’s the difference between the comics I read and the comics we talked about in class? I think another awesome thing about webcomics is that, since uploading a comic to the internet is infinitely easier than publishing one, there are tons to choose from. So, it’s easy for me to find the comics that feel similar to the ones I read as a kid. So, regardless of what you read in middle school, on the internet you can probably find something pleasantly similar.

Stuart Hall and Raymond Williams

Over the week I was gone, I read the two required essays by Stuart Hall – “Encoding/Decoding” – and Raymond Williams – “Technology and Society”. As was promised last class, the essays were both rather dense and hard to understand, and I regret that I couldn’t make it to last week’s class so that I could listen to a discussion about the essays, and hopefully come to a better understanding. Still, after reading both essays as well as doing a bit of extra research, I think I have an idea of what Hall and Williams wrote about.

Hall’s “Encoding/Decoding” is about the way that information is given, or encoded, through media and then received and decoded by an audience. The message can be simple: one of the examples I read was of a person on television wearing a sweater. The sweater implies that it is fall or winter outside, and that the person is warm, or maybe implies an autumn walk in the woods, or even that the person is fashionable. The message that was encoded in the image of the sweater may not be the same as the one that was decoded, but it is unlikely that it would be drastically different (excluding cultural differences, which could lead to completely incorrect decoding). The decoder can interpret the code in the way that the encoder intended (in the case of the sweater) or could interpret it in the complete opposite way (a worker who misunderstands how a Bill will affect his wages, either unintentionally or intentionally).

Williams’ “Technology and Society” is about how the evolution of technology (television, in this case) affects society and how, rather than springing up from nowhere, technological progress is a part of society itself. He explains two views on this point: one that says if television had not been invented, society would be different, and another that says even if television had not been invented, some other means of distributing media would have been and society would be largely the same. Williams’ doesn’t quite seem to agree with either of these views; he says that technology is developed out of social needs at the time. In that way, it seems, the evolution of television was destined to occur, and it developed over time and over the course of many technological advances.

It’s entirely possible that I didn’t understand the text properly (I decoded it differently than the encoder intended!), because once I step back and think about what I’ve read, the theories of these two men seem somewhat small and inconsequential. Who cares why television developed, or what society would be like without it? I think I’m missing the bigger picture in these two essays. Hopefully it will come up in class, and I can try and learn what I didn’t get in my first read-through.

Akira Kurosawa

I chose to look at Akira Kurosawa’s films this week because I have already seen a few of them. Besides this meaning that I have a bit of a head-start, I also really enjoyed the films I’d seen, and was happy to watch more. I’ve now seen four of his films (Throne of Blood, Seven Samurai, Yojimbo, and Ran), which seemed like a lot until I looked up his biography and saw that he’s directed 30 films, and served as assistant director or screenwriter on a few more. All of the films I watched were historical stories, usually about samurai or war (also, two of them were based on Shakespeare’s plays).

Now that I’ve seen several of his movies, I’m trying to think of Kurosawa’s role as an author of his movies. For me, the word “author” implies someone with a lot of influence, or complete control, over how a piece of literature is created and presented. For film, I can see how “author” wouldn’t really apply to only a director, as the filmmaking process is such a collaborative effort: is the author of the film the director, the screenwriter, the director of photography? Maybe the sound designer or even the actors play a more important role in the outcome of the film? There are so many different elements that go into making a movie that it seems hard to credit the whole piece to one person. That said, Kurosawa served as director, screenwriter, editor, and sometimes producer on many of his films (at least, all of the films I watched). It becomes easier to imagine that he had a strong influence over the movie when he was directly responsible for so many aspects of it. I think that many directors could not be considered true authors of their films (at least, not the only one), but because of his involvement, maybe Kurosawa can be.

There are many themes that reoccur through most of his movies, such as the individual hero (as seen in Yojimbo), or the lust for power (Throne of Blood and Ran), and of course the interest in historical dramas, that unify Kurosawa’s films in a way that he must have been controlled. To be fair, I’ve only seen four of his movies, and I’ve been specifically interested in the historical ones (thanks to a few weeks of watching samurai movies obsessively as research for my thesis). So, my understanding of his work is relatively small, and my opinion might be biased. And I’m still not convinced that Kurosawa can be considered the sole author of his films (I think it’s very important to credit cinematographers who worked with him on the superbly-designed black and white films, or actors such as Toshiro Mifune who alone collaborated with Kurosawa on half of his films). But, I would believe that Kurosawa played a bigger role in his films that most directors can claim, and he can come pretty close to being considered an “author”.

Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind

For this class I read the screenplay for “Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind”. It was interesting to read a story in this format, because without visuals it’s really tough to figure out what the mood of the story is. At least, that’s how it for this story. At first the screenplay read as a relatively serious romantic story, aside from a few weird bits (for example, I had trouble picturing the old woman in the commuter tube over New York in any kind of serious way). However, once I got to the scenes where Joel was trying to hide Clementine in his childhood memories, I had a lot of trouble picturing that in a non-comical way.

My point is, I would prefer to push that comical, oddball mood in the film, rather than letting it get serious. Here's how I would achieve that:

- The entire movie is seen in a jumble of out-of-order memories, so the whole thing should feel a bit weird and disjointed. However, in the climax of the film (when Joel and Clementine are trying to escape the disappearing memories), I would like for these different scenes to literally be overlapping. For example, Joel talks to Carrie sitting in a car, then looks out the window and sees himself seated at a kitchen table in the middle of the road. He stands up from the table and walks off the road and onto a beach, where he walks past himself seated by the bonfire.

- Although the screenplay described the scenes with Joel remembering his early childhood with him being shrunken down to an appropriate child-size, I would rather see a full-sized Joel in these scenes. Adult Joel having a bath in the kitchen sink, adult Joel being beaten up by elementary school children, etc. I want to emphasize that he and Clementine are completely out of place in these memories.

- I imagine the use of color being extremely important in depicting a memory being erased. The memory itself will be highly saturated and bright. When it is erased, the color will be drained from it, and then it will become over-exposed so that all details (especially faces) will become blurred, and finally it will fade out to white. I love the image of a grey Joel in an empty, pure white space.

- I think it is important for this color to be apparent whether the scene is a happy or sad one. Whether the memory is good or bad, it should still be more appealing than the greyness of the erased memory. In fact, a high-saturation, high-contrast scene should enhance the anger/discomfort of a scene (for example, the argument in the zoo could feature bright lighting and harsh, contrasting colors, whereas a happier scene would be softly lit). The main emphasis here is that the memory has life to it, and when it is erased it becomes sterilized and dead.

I’m eager (and a bit nervous) to watch this movie, now that I’ve created a pretty clear image in my head of how I’d expect it to look. I did google the film, and was surprised to find that Jim Carrey plays Joel. This makes me suspect that the filmmakers wanted to take the movie in a semi-comical direction just like I did. 

Oh yeah, they totally emphasized the weirdness. Awesome!

The Media is the Massage

One passage from "The Media is the Massage" that really was memorable to me was discussing art in terms of changing media: how representations in art have followed the same rules since the Renaissance, focusing on the literal visuals and not on what the artist wants to actually show.

The other influence to my response has been the massive outrage over social media in the last two days over the bankrupt VFX company "Rhythm & Hues", as well as other struggling VFX companies. This is just the latest of many stories I've been seeing recently of companies in the entertainment industry closing, laying off huge amounts of people, or mistreating its employees.

These two things might not seem to have much in common, but here's how they've mixed in my mind: the idea of these preconceived prejudices as discussed in "The Media is the Massage"and the mistreatment of individual employees as I've been hearing about in recent news both are crushing to the individual. Lately, because of this, I've been feeling scared about my future, and depressed about my career path before I even have a real career. I tried to express this feeling in my response to the reading.

It's extremely possible that I completely misunderstood "The Media is the Massage" and that my response is not at all appropriate... I look forward to tomorrow's discussion to see if my ideas will change at all.

Crowd image: http://metalgeamonkey.deviantart.com/art/Crowd-319405950

Lolita Response

Lolita, for me, was clearly split into its two parts, with the first part being completely focused on Humbert’s lust for girls (mostly Lolita, but also covering his first love and, later, his observations of other children), and the second part being more outwardly focused, on landscapes and Lolita’s other friend and admirers. 

I finished the first half of the book for the previous class, and at the time I was pretty excited about it. It was very uncomfortable to read, but it was also exciting to watch as the narrator slowly moved in on Lolita. He wrote on and on about how beautiful she was, and would get aroused over the tiniest things. His extremely poetic writing even made me fall in love with Lolita, for a moment here and there, until I caught myself. He constantly drops in lengthy descriptions; “there my beauty lay down on her stomach, showing me, showing the thousand eyes wide open in my eyed blood, her slightly raised shoulder blades, and the bloom along the incurvation of her spine, and the swellings of her tense narrow nates clothed in black” and it’s not until I get to “and the seaside of her schoolgirl thighs” that I remember this should me making me feel uncomfortable. These little events and observations escalate, as do the narrator’s fantasies and plans about Lolita, until the book reaches a dramatic climax when he finally makes love to her.

After that, though, I feel like the tone of the novel completely changes. Although Humbert still drops in notes on how beautiful “his Lolita” is, the frenetic and borderline-orgasmic quality of his observations seems lost. I feel like it wasn’t until this point that I started to understand Lolita’s personality, as that barrier created by Humbert’s obsessive lust for her was lessened and I could see her more clearly.  At this point, actually, this loving poetry that he used to reserve for Lolita is now directed towards the landscapes they pass through on their road trips around the country. He goes on and on about this travels: “heart and sky- piercing snow-veined gray colossi of stone, relentless peaks appearing from nowhere at a turn of the highway; timbered enormities, with a system of neatly overlapping dark firs, interrupted in places by pale puffs of aspen; pink and lilac formations”.

I chose to focus on these two quotes (really, these two types of quotes), because they not only present themes for the book and characterize Humbert, but also they make up a big percentage of the actual text. A huge amount of the book was spent with the narrator lapsing into long, rambling (but very pleasant to read and almost musical) discussions of Lolita or landscape, and these passages were probably what made the book so enjoyable. Listening to the book being read, it really sounded musical at times. In another style of writing, this book would probably have been too uncomfortable or weird, but written as it was it really pulled me in and kept me reading (listening) for the entire story.

A Princess of Mars

Edit 2/12:
I finished the book over this last week, and although I really enjoyed it a lot, I have to report that "Love-Making on Mars" was extremely disappointing.

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This week I read “A Princess of Mars”. Actually, I admit that I only got a chance to read half of it, but I’m pretty eager to finish it (the chapter I left off on is called “Love-Making on Mars”, so of course I’m going to keep reading).

It was a science fiction novel with many of the genre markers of such. For one, obviously, it takes place on Mars. The story follows John Carter (of Virginia) on his adventures on Mars, where he interacts with (and talks about in great detail) the different extraterrestrial life forms he finds there. A huge portion of the story (at least in the first half that I read) is made up of Carter explaining the culture, language, customs, and history of the Martians he meets to the reader.

“A Princess of Mars” also is a story about an almost super-human alpha-male hero, who kills terrible Martian monsters and rescues beautiful Martian women (and wins plenty of ugly women to serve him as well). John Carter, thanks to the lesser gravity on Mars, finds that his strength and agility are greatly increased, so that he is able to fight with (and earn the respect of) the weaker Martians with ease. He is also extremely intelligent, able to learn the Martian language and warfare extremely quickly. I’m not sure if this kind of superhero is so much a genre marker of science fiction, but of adventure stories in general.

Actually, I can see how the super-heroic John Carter, with is amazing physical abilities, intelligence, and ability to win the hottest woman on all of Mars, would be extremely popular amongst on audience of (probably) nerdy boys. He is the type of character I could imagine readers would wish to be like (I wouldn’t mind being able to pick up hot Martian ladies, either). It’s an interesting contrast to the “cyberpunk female” that we’ve discussed in previous classes: a badass, alpha-female coupled with a weaker beta-male. Still, both archetypes serve the same purpose of fulfilling a reader’s fantasy, either in a character they’d like to be like or a character they’d like to be with.

Even though it’s pretty cheesy and silly, I’m really enjoying this book, and I’ll definitely keep reading it (at least to finish off “Love-Making on Mars”).