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Thesis

This blog will go into detail about the weekly movies and the readings that correspond to examine the themes and issues surrounding the movie. Especially within a historical context, it will explain why the film directors made specific decisions to write a theme into the movie or utilize specific tools to story tell. With the readings, it will highlight and examine the shortcomings of these movies. These blog posts will include my own thoughts coming from a Gen-Z, queer, woman of color perspective.

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Week 9

5/30

Reading Rosa Fregoso's Imagining Multiculturalism made me surprised to learn that 147 films on the border genre were made in the 1930s alone for American cinema. As well as, how horrifying the author's experience learning Alamo history in a white/western context and having to unlearn with education from her father. It seems as if Lone Star was able to confront the racial tensions of border issues between Texas and Mexico in 1996. Fregoso explains that race relations are portrayed in race and class power between Anglos, Mexicanos, Tejanos, and Texans. The film is able to rewrite the usual race paradigms in US race relations (ie. black and white) with the representation of Native Americans, Black Americans, Tejanos, and Anglos.

The author also argues that the film does not truly represent multiculturalism as Sayles must decenter whiteness and masculinity in Lone Star to achieve universal multiculturalism. Even quoted saying that "fathers and sons" are the best storytellers to explain the cultural history, I enjoyed reading this critical essay on how Lone Star was the first of its kind to somewhat explain the complex cultural tensions within postcolonial Texas. Though it was not the best in terms of representation, it was the first of its kind and there is always room for change as history and time goes on since cultural and social issues change as well.

universal multiculturalism: state of a society in which exists numerous distinct ethnic and cultural groups seen to be politically relevant

6/1

Wendy Somerson's Men and Masculinities analysis on Lone Star was super interesting to read, specifically on the anxieties in a transnational era in America where white men created media to reflect on the changing nuclear family. Reading that white male anxiety began in the 1970s due to the feminist, civil rights, lesbian, and gay rights movements, as well as the decline in income of WWII, was eye-opening. It is historical instances that lead to the creation of Lone Star and rewrote the liberal white man with historical masculinity. The American Era of transnationalism and Multiculturalism allowed the white man to be rewritten into a contemporary heroic white male character with its location on the border.

The affair between Bussy and Mercedes represents sexual crossings on the border but recycles racist and imperialist fantasies of interracial sexual relations. It normalizes white man access to brown women's bodies but rejects non-white men's and white women's relationships (white women hysteria?). Knowing that anti-miscegenation laws were aimed towards non-white men to "protect" white women, the hypocrisy in the film is present still to reflect the social culture of 1996.

It seems as if Lone Star was successful in its time for rewriting the white man in America to be the hero of the story, but it also is due to the cultural and racial aspects that made the story relevant for its time.

masculinity: attributes regarding the characteristics of men or boys

transnationalism: describes a social process where migrants operate in social settings that intersect geographically, politically, and culturally.

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Week 8

5/23

This week has been filled with learning for me. From the speaker's lecture on the queer punk Latinx nightlife to Lucía, on three different women's experiences with classism, I felt more engaged with these topics than with my business administration classes.

Fredric Jameson's Third-World Literature in the Era of Multinational Capitalism examines how different readers across the world tend to digest third-world novels differently. Such that, a national allegory is understood differently from a global view. That we would acknowledge and learn of an existence of a book that is unfamiliar and scary, which is why people tend to stray away from such. With Lucía, a Cuban political movie on revolutionary women in three different decades, Jameson examines the relationship to what is "third-world" and the United States's perspective of these "third-world" media. It is more prevalent to hide or dumb down lessons of other national stories with Western media because it is difficult to understand from a new perspective. Cuba's revolutions are hailed as a success in educating their people, something America should look at.

Jameson tries to prove that the American understanding of canon restricts our will to read anything other than our country's texts. Since first-world cultural intellectuals restrict the mindset of their life's work to narrow professionalism or bureaucratically, creates guilt.

National Allegory: the narrative that is essential to the nation-state it was made in, that all 3rd world texts are read as this to be more influential in understanding literacy production to the nation and politics

Canon: a general criterion of how something is determined

Ian Buchanan's response to Jameson's text is a reinforcement of his misunderstood text, which must be due to the fact that American readers do not like to be followers of other nations. As well, he understands that his "third-worlds" model is problematic in utilizing inner contradictions and representational inconsistencies with using the term "third-world". In terms of national allegory, Buchanan argues to try to bridge the gap between everyday information within a given nation-state and the tendency of monopolistic capitalism develops on a worldwide scale. With this, it must be examined the first-world mindset that impedes readers from America from understanding and learning from other national literacies that are not their own.

Hillenbrand's response to Jameson's text is something I relate to more heavily as I was very confused about why we were reading a text by a white man who did not understand the cultural nuances of different cultures. She also explains the Eurocentrism exhibited in explaining national allegories, which is what I was thinking of when reading his text. With Lucía, I hoped that the reception of the movie was well-received in the States instead of thinking of Jameson's faulty "third-world" model theory.

5/25

Something I have never ventured into learning about was Turkish-German cinema, and with Head-On, I have been able to see international issues and conflicts with countries that finally do not include America.

With the help of Germany's filmmaker initiative to bring migrant filmmakers overseas to create films and even create a social climate that exposes issues of ethnic differences, it was created the Turkish-German genre that explores the experiences of ethnic minorities.

In Rob Burns's analysis in Towards a Cinema of Cultural Hybridity: Turkish-German Filmmakers and the Representation of Alterity, he explains how Akin explores modernity and tradition, incarceration, and cultural hybridity with Head-On. The dynamic between conservative parents and Sibel is to be a message that examines the damage caused by stubborn, unnecessary discipline. With incarceration, it is both physical and mental, as is shown with liberation when Sibel expresses her love for him at the prison visit and shown physically when he is released with a makeover. The Turkish-German cultural hybridity is introduced whenever Sibel and Cahit speak to each other in German but in moments of vulnerability, choose to talk in Turkish.

Cultural Hybridity: exchange of ideas between cultures as a result of migration and globalization

Ana Elena Puga's Migrant melodrama and the political economy of Suffering examines the genre of migrant melodrama in depth with examples of migrant children and families. The use of utilizing Spanish and English in these films to show cultural hybridity allows Puga to make the point of how language is detrimental to the migrant genre. The struggle between a language barrier from the political climate of Mexican immigrants and the harsh American Immigration policies makes it difficult for characters in these settings to achieve their goals. With this, Head-On even shows Cahit trying to find a home in Istanbul but instead goes home to Mersin, the city he was born in to find it.

Nezih Erdogan in Star director as symptom: reflections on the reception of Fatih Akin in the Turkish media writes on how the director of Head-On was heavily examined in a German context rather than Turkish--a phenomenon that is common. Within a Turkish context. it was rare to find a well-known figure of Turkish descent in the media, therefore filling national pride within the Turkish. Giving media representation to underrepresented minorities at the time in the entertainment industry is something to note at the success of his films as well.

Migrant melodrama: contemporary cultural production that trains a melodramatic imagination on migrants, argues that suffering must occur to progress toward inclusion and belonging

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Week 7

5/16

This week's movie, Far From Heaven, is an interesting accumulation of everything we've been learning the last few weeks in class. I think learning about Douglas Sirk's impact on cinema to the point where multiple filmmakers from different countries want to pay tribute to his work, is phenomenal.

Far From Home is exactly that, with Todd Haynes explaining it is a celebration of Sirk's work. Everything from the film's costuming, gestures, and exact reproduction of the credit score--Haynes creates an homage to Douglas Sirk. It also takes on everything not examined in All That Heaven Allows, such as themes of sexuality and race. As Chris Wisniewski's review of Far from Heaven, they explain Todd Haynes's sexuality or "gayness" is detrimental to his own twist of his movie. He is able to communicate the gay panic theme from 1950s America and go further with same-sex romantic interactions, something that is able to push the limits of representation in media with his time.

Gay Panic: American definition for a mental disorder where same-sex attraction within individuals caused distress and uproar in the 1950s American social scene.

Gay panic on tik-tok=different from the historical definition

With Dana Luciano's Far From Heaven analysis, though it focuses on queer theory within the film, I want to highlight the commentary on the bourgeois stillness in life in an effort to permanently keep domestic relations as an important factor in social life. The film repeatedly shows advertisements of the nuclear American family, with objects and furniture around the Hartford house. As well as, Haynes' past work with flamboyant, queer films have a pattern with chronology and detachment from time. This is a factor in the storytelling of Far From Heaven, as the detachment from time allows events to play out in a "still" state while forming a natural sequence of events.

5/18

Talking about the definition of what a remake is in the film industry was super interesting because I did not know how to answer. It can vary from changing the theme of the original theme to focusing on contemporary issues. Or, it can copy shot for shot of the original such as Psycho. It can also do something the original film couldn't do, and actually comment on the past of the film. With Far From Heaven, it is a different kind of remake, as it is in the same place as All That Heaven Allows, but does not update anything such as adding characters. It does not examine the class issues as the original did and is instead about age differences.

Price of Heaven explains the different kinds of remakes, with Far from Heaven being a "true remake" but not entirely. The film instead of creating its own struggle against the time period, copies the 1950s to shine light on other themes not examined in the original. Such as, it examines issues of the 1950s to examine in the time period it was released in 2002. With the Civil Rights Act passed and same-sex marriage getting legalized across American states, the film is able to be timeless as it forces us to examine our historical issues of today (then cause it is 2023).

James Harvey's review of the movie analysis is on how utilizing aesthetics can amplify a new take on an original film. Explaining how the aesthetics of the upper-middle-class bourgeoisie home setting, the same as Sirk, is able to house new themes not otherwise explored in All That Heaven Allows. Such that Sirk was only able to identify class issues between a widow and a gardener, whereas Haynes makes the film about race and sexuality. How Haynes is able to also make the film anew is that Sirk is inexperienced in creating sentimentality, making his films feel like you would not want to live there. With Haynes, colors are bright, and the people and even objects are livelier, giving also a strong dichotomy of the themes that go about in the film.

True Remake: relies on a triangular relationship between the original text such as literary, updates the original story, and creates the effect to remove all markers of a historical period, timeless

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Week 6

5/9

Ali: Fear Eats The Soul was another cross-section societal piece made by Rainer Werner Fassbinder that also was a re-adaption of All That Heaven Allows, a Sirk film, to explain love with a age gap and oppression that comes with at (in true Sirk fashion). I can understand why we went through Week 5's content and I love it, as Chris Fujiwara explains the structure of the film correlating to the relationships and themes of the movie.

With a doorway in Emmi's kitchen as a frame to explain unhappiness in their relationship to wide shots to explain the emptiness of the couple, melodrama is at its peak with the cinematography. To learn that Fassbinder was inspired by Sirk's films but made it his own with cultural issues, ageism, and classism, the layers of contemporary themes truly marks the movie as a melodrama (including the stomach ulcer plot twist at the end).

Robert Reimer's Comparison of Douglas Sirk's All That Heaven Allows and R.W Fassbinder's Ali: Fear Eats the Soul compares the recent films we have analyzed in class, one discussion piques my interest. Fassbinder utilizes only one male character, Ali, while Sirk utilized many. Fassbinder uses his male character as a nurturing persona (as Kirby was a tree nurturer) and is an emotional weakness for Emmi. As well as, pointing out that Kirby was the stronger person in Sirk's film, and Emmi was the stronger person in Fassbinder's film, perhaps due to their age roles being switched.

When talking about Sirk's film where the widowed mother makes a sacrifice for her daughter for a happy ending, not necessary for the mother, implies shame not from herself but everyone else around her. Due to the class difference, age difference, and the older, richer woman not being aware that the younger, more attractive man could be gold-digging for her, society looks down on their relationship. This also coincides with the statement that women who are dominant will be the problem, in this case, women who hold the reins in the relationship rather than the man.

5/11

Learning about the history of the entertainment movie industry from the world wars affecting the countries that produced movies was an interesting context for Fear Eats the Soul. Such as Italy, France, and Germany wanted to regenerate the movie industry after the war and started to subsidize film writers. The phrase "Old cinema is dead! We believe in the new cinema" spanning from 1962-1982 produced a new wave of movies that exercised the artist. These countries were inspired by Hollywood films but wanted to avoid industry films because of realism, since realism back then didn't encourage you to look at realism. Meaning, these films didn't push the audience to examine issues with society. With Fear Eats the Soul, was inspired by German traditions, german expressionism, working alienation, and not being a traditional Hollywood story. With Emmi a little unrealistic in a social sense since she was a woman with more money rather than Ali having more money, these changes allowed for more room for discussion and discourse. As well as, the choice to make Ali suffer rather than the woman since women usually suffer in Hollywood, is another point of discourse that makes the film unique and memorable.

German expressionism: partly from German Romanticism, it examines the country's anxieties through distorted and nightmarish imagery.

working alienation: being ignored/marginalized in a workplace, discrimination and harassment

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Week 5

5/2

Though this week's lecture was online, I was able to learn a new perspective about melodrama. I never thought about how the author of these books or film adaptations play a significant part in how the story is told through their lens. With their influence, brings a new understanding with how the story is brought meaning, and with the context of melodrama and re-adaptations, All That Heaven Allows is an example that can be examined.

The movie is a film adaptation of the book of the same name by Edna L. and Harry Lee, where there are some scenes that differ between the book and the film. Michel Foucault's "What is an Author" explains the sociohistorical influences of an author its work to create 'the man and his work'. By explaining that the author remains still an outsider of the work they write, they still characterize and impact the story, characters, plot, and more with their own life experiences and wish to live through other means. As well as, breaking down what actually makes an author, as a contract can have an underwriter, but not an author. This means an author must utilize the existence and discussions of life and society in order to be considered an author.

In Roland Barthes's "The Death of The Author", he examines the other side of being an author or rather, the absence of it. Though the author is integrated into the work through influence, plot, and character, they can be seen as simply an analytic tool to explain the void of storytelling that is not from the characters. Barthes also explains how the author is unchanging as they are the structure of a novel while the reader is changing since the reader's relationship to the text will always change. This is due to the fact that the reader is more than one individual with different life experiences and text interpretations.

5/4

Laura Mulvey's "All That Heaven Allows" analysis essay is one that made me realize how Douglass Sirk is a genius. At first, Gary Simmons's "Far From Heaven" essay was one I thought was added to the syllabus by mistake as Far From Heaven was not on the list of movies we've watched. However, with the theme of "re-adaptations", I realize that Far From Heaven, directed by Todd Haynes, is a "re-adaptation" of Douglass Sirk's work such as All That Heaven Allows.

Tying this into what makes an author, Haynes is an author by understanding the circumstances of society and creating his film with it. The creative choices in color, clothing design, and lighting, all inspired by Sirk, are meticulous in detail to portray his homage to Sirk. Such as utilizing the same plot line of having a not-so-happy ending as well as the plot itself, the decision to incorporate the male protagonist's real-life sexuality into Haynes's own film where he is visiting gay bars. With the examination of racism, miscegenation, and homophobia, Haynes is an author by nature as he was able to examine and story tell issues about society in his work.

Laura Mulvey's "Notes on Sirk and Melodrama," examines a point where the woman's domestic sphere of a phallocentric patriarchal culture is interrupted due to sexual repression of same-sex attraction. The eruption of same-sex attraction in Sirk's films is proven to be similar to tragedies with the acting out of what the male role is supposed to be in the male-dominated democracy.

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Week 4

4/25

This week, Melodrama was found in a 1974 John Cassavetes film, Woman Under The Influence. It is a raw, vulnerable story of Mabel, the woman protagonist who is uncommon and contemporary, and violates the mother stereotype as an unfit mother. As a hysterical woman and working-class mother, the unrelatable and common trait women viewers at the time saw in Mabel was some realism that Melodrama usually does not hold. This is due to Cassavetes' filming style, which highlights the domestic sphere, how women are portrayed in the film, and breaking the fourth wall.

Mabel's husband, a blue-collar worker, who wants to preserve the picture-perfect nuclear family, is not introduced in the film in this way. Instead, he is introduced as a sexual assaulter whom Mabel could not recognize in her home or domestic sphere. This characterization from Mabel's perspective gives insight into how he also views her: a crazy wife. With the nuclear family being a byproduct of idolization from the Industrial Revolution's fall, Nick (the husband) would do anything to keep Mabel quiet rather than listen to her and emotionally support her (how surprising), leading him to institutionalize her.

With the common woman trope of female hysteria from last week's reading, Eric Hynes' film review adds to the definition of melodrama. Though not a formal definition, in comparison to male melodramas (action/western/gangster) movies, this can be considered a woman's picture due to its sound inaccuracies. The background of this film is that Cassavetes mortgaged his house and worked with a limited budget. This leads to a lack of detail in the overall production of the film, or even intentionally, "...with occasional script incontinuities, uncorrected sound inconsistencies and film equipment infiltration like the intrusion of a boom mic into an early scene..." (Hynes) Hynes argues that the inclusion of the set sounds only added realism, intimacy, and the vulnerability that comes from melodramas. I thought I was going crazy with the sound booms and I can see the power of a great melodrama, succeeding in its mission which was making a film about mental health. More specifically, a film about women who are treated as less than simply because they do not fit the model nuclear family stereotype.

As a woman viewer, I agree with the in-lecture about how the female viewer has a different pleasure drawn from watching since we have to bare the conflict and resolution of the narrative. Unlike male melodramas with male viewers, there is a circular narrative that I am watching and realizing that the protagonist is less than perfect.

male melodrama: melodramas with the themes of friendship, and good vs. evil, have a heroic male protagonist, and usually have genres of western, gangster, action, war

Nuclear Family: Industrial Revolution promoted in the western world, that men are the best for labor to work in the day, women stay home and tend the house and raise children, children no longer worked

4/27

Watching The Killer, a Hong Kong action film with hopes it would follow what we've been following through in class, that action movies are just male melodramas, fulfilled exactly what I was thinking.

As Phillp Gates put it, the melodrama of a film was "romantic, clichéd, steeped in sentiment, and hyper-bolic" (Gates). Especially with the enemies-to-friends trope at the peak point of the movie, the male melodrama follows the good vs. evil linear storyline that accomplishes what it was made for. The average male viewer idealizes the hero protagonist to be more ethical than the spectator. I can understand why Professor Harris said in the first lecture that the Avengers is a melodrama now.

What's interesting about what we haven't talked about in class yet is masculinity, which is addressed in Joy Fuqua's Male Melodrama and Feelings. They state, "Masculinity is not some prepackaged essence wrapped in the buffed, muscle-boy bodies of action adventurers such as Arnold Schwarzenegger...it also includes male melodramas with their maimed, diseased, and tearful protagonists of the late 1980s and early 1990s." (Fuqua).

To build on this in the context of The Killer, masculinity is portrayed as vulnerable when faced to make good vs. evil decisions. Such as, Ah Jong shot Sei to end his suffering after making up for the previous backstab Sei threw at Ah Jong, the protagonist. These moral exchanges that only male protagonists can decide in the realm of female vs male melodramas indicate a difference to the audiences they are made for. For The Killer, reconciliation between two fighting male characters is seen through a linear narrative. Ah Jong, is able to control what happens as he was able to take action to end his newfound friend's suffering. Where this all takes place as well as note, as male melodramas take place in public, Ah Jong is in a church when he takes his friend's life.

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Week 3

4/18

My wishes were heard! Today's discussion includes the dichotomy of drama/tragedy to melodrama or the man to the woman and their differences. It can also be applied to the majority vs the minority, and its conviction of grouping the majority to men and minority to women is something I'd like to explore.

Learning of the root of melodrama, or melose and drama, which is music that guides the emotion in a drama, allowed me to think about the correlation between melodrama and women. Emotions are tied to women and therefore are given the dramatic branch of melodrama!

We discussed that drama/tragedy is transcendental, schizophrenic, universal, and reflective. In contrast, melodrama is often topical, with paranoia, particular, and individual vs. the world. To connect gender to these words and topics is to allude to stereotypes of each genre and how they assign gender roles to their characters.

Kaplan's theories of melodrama introduce the idea that American cinema's Western and Gangster themes or the male genres are concerned with the universal truths, the good vs. evil that men are usually handed the command to decide. Women are usually never seen in these roles and are instead given roles that coincide with being the victim, the family, or sexuality.

Stella Dallas, the 1937 American film about a mother whose maternal instincts go full throttle to the point of fully removing herself from her daughter's life just so she can marry happily unlike her, backs up Kaplan's theory. Stella is in the home or the domestic sphere and she even craves it when she is removed from that setting. Stella is forced into the family or mother role, where she is fallen victim and is given a bad ending or forced to sacrifice herself for the sake of the family. here, her conflict of the narrative is leaving the domestic sphere in order to give the most to her daughter.

setting: place in which the plot is taking place

domestic sphere: or called the "proper sphere", the realm of domestic life, focused on childcare, housekeeping, and religion.

melodrama: an enhanced version of drama, focusing on emotion and utilizes music as a tool to guide emotion and characterize.

4/20

Lea Jacobs's article examines the timeline in which Stella Dallas was made and the attitudes towards "old-fashioned melodrama". Though the genre of melodrama was marketed as a women's picture at the time, it seems as if it went against the trend of holier-than-thou motherhood movies. Jacobs explains the "anti-mother plot" that Stella Dallas follows and the success of such a plot in cinema at the time. It is the "veiled hostility to children" that could be the factor of success to Stella Dallas and the movies that follow but also examines the idea of an embarrassing mother that is socially condemning to their child. What a change of pace in the motherhood trope!

maternal melodrama: representation of motherhood, the appeal of stories of maternal suffering and self-sacrifice for women spectators (Jacobs , p. 3)

anti-mother plot: not prominent in cinema in the 1920s, representation of mother as a coarse, almost grotesque character

Kaplan's theory that the female spectator does not have the same resolution to the film because she know the issue will be ongoing was something that stuck out to me with Stella Dallas. After watching it, I was only reminded by my mother who also misses social cues like Stella, and how Stella removes herself from her daughter's life, that I also had a different resolution from the film. That her daughter will continue to think of her mother and miss her, but due to the idea of maternal melodrama, Stella's self-sacrifice is "necessary". As talked about in the lecture, the female spectator sits through the torture of the female protagonist and becomes masochistic. I felt that by watching Stella make preposterous life decisions in good faith, she would be doing her family a favor, but instead is left without one.

When looking for a visual piece of media to attach to this post, I can't help but talk about how melodrama is seen as historical. From this comment in 2019, this spectator views the actions of the actress from a more powerful, positive perspective rather than one with pity. In this time period, it seems to viewers from the modern day, that it's good that women ignore social cues and be deceptive toward the man. I like this perspective a lot more.

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Week 2

4/11

From what I gathered in this week's lectures and readings, is that melodrama has been popular for its exaggeration, imitation of life, and sincerity in confronting emotions within its audience. As well as, how women are viewed and subjected to stereotypes that are harmful and untrue.

Ramona, a novel turned into a film in 1936, was discussed and watched this week to talk about the political and social climate of the filming of the movie. Since owning land was a huge issue with White Americans and Native Americans in the early 1900s, having themes of land ownership makes sense for the movie industry at the time. To explore the theme in conjunction with race, as the main character finds out as a plot twist that she herself is part-Indian (shock on her face), is to showcase what social climate Americans were living in.

Alongside Ramona the movie, melodrama as a collective appeal to the masses because of music. Since it is argued that music moves you, it is instrumental to the effects that watching melodrama brings. For example, the music crescendos at the moment Ramona finds out she is part-Indian, to emphasize the shock and turmoil Ramona herself feels. Music is similarly used in the genre of horror, where it is used to also crescendo at the right moment to feel what the director intends the audience to feel.

I do wonder what other American western or American melodrama films that were made in the same timeline of the 1930s and of Ramona. Did they have racist undertones or blackface? I am genuinely curious to this as I would not be surprised since the timeline of using blackface in Hollywood is in the same as Ramona. What this speaks about America's social and cultural climate is the normalization of cultural appropriation and mockery of people of color.

4/13

Mary Ann Doane's "The 'Woman's Film'" talks of medical discourse with how women in film are either sickly or are killed off without any thought. An example of this is Shock, where a woman sees a man murdering his wife and goes into a catatonic state. She is then treated by a psychiatrist who by surprise, is the murderer, and is made to forget the scene and cannot tell her story in the movie. By silencing a woman by writing her off as somatic, the woman in this film and in others are written off as hysteric and sickly women, who cannot be cured and cannot be trusted.

I do hope we discuss gender in film next week as this week's readings have helped me dive into the topic of media representation that I hope to study more of. In melodrama and horror with the films and readings discussed above, women are subjected to tragedy as their end. No matter what the context, I find an unfortunate pattern with how women are treated in film for the spectacle and manipulation of male directors and film writers.